Ryan McLean : Slightly Unconventional

A great question I’ve been asking myself lately (about business and life) is “What would this look like if it was easy”.

It’s an amazing question and thanks to Tim Ferris for suggesting it.

In business when I think about what it would look like if it was easy I think of:

No emails to attend to, a 5 hour work day where I sit down, create some content and then finish the day.

The money comes in as it does through advertising, affiliate fees etc but my business doesn’t create any immediate pressures and I am able to be free and creative with the content I create.

It also means no permanent office and no big computer, just a laptop or writing device. That one is a bit of a head spin for me who has loved having my own office for so long.

That is what easy looks like to me.

So I’m going to focus 2017 on creating a business that is easy.

That means focusing on things that will make less money now, but will create the business I want in the future.

See I think most people focus on how to make the most money now. They don’t look ahead and think “What business do I want and what actions do I need to take to have that business?”

That’s what (I think) makes me different from a lot of other business owners.

Recently I have become disillusioned with my business. Not because it isn’t going well but purely because there feels to be no challenge left in it.

I had a goal – to make enough money to support my family through my business. I have achieved that goal and achieved it in such a way that I could literally work 4 hours a week if I wanted to.

Now that’s not to say my current success or income level would be sustained long term working only 4 hours per week, but for the near future it likely would be.

I don’t have a desire to earn more money, thus the thought of simply working to grow my businesses beyond their current state doesn’t inspire me.

Recently I have turned to a competitive game I love to quench my satiating thirst for learning, a 2001 Gamecube game known as Super Smash Bros Melee.

This game is so easy to pick up and play, yet so technical and deep if you want to be good that it is a perfect outlet for me.

Obsession With Business

For year’s I have had an obsession with business, online business in particular.

I would spend countless hours listening to business podcasts, audiobooks and reading blog posts about different marketing strategies or approaches to innovation.

I remember not being able to turn my brain off as it churned through different product ideas and ways I could make my fledgling property website grow it’s traffic or make more money.

Yet over the last 6 months or so that passion for business learning has all but completely dried up.

The proof it in the hundreds of business podcast episodes piled up on my phone that would have previously been listened to as soon as they were released.

Or the fact that I haven’t bought a business book in months when I would usually churn through 1 or more a week.

A Passion For Melee

I first started playing Super Smash Bros Melee in April 2015 after my 3rd child was born. My first tournament was 3-4 Months later in July or August 2015.

What started as a random hobby to help me relive my childhood playing Super Smash Bros on Nintendo 64 soon turned into a passion.

Weekly meetups on Tuesday nights, weekend tournaments once a month and practicing every day from home.

It’s been the perfect outlet for my need to learn and improve, which I feel hasn’t been happening in business lately.

My First Glimpse Of My Next Project

I was driving in the car today listing the Start Up Podcast and an ad came on for Blue Apron. The ad described their service and a dish you could make (which didn’t sound up my alley).

But I remember having this strong sense of not wanting to create a product/service/company that requires crappy advertising to succeed.

Instead I want to create something so good that people can’t help but tell other people about it.

That is all I’m going off at the moment. A random sense that I want to create something really good and something that people want to talk about.

It’s a tiny breadcrumb and I have no idea where it leads of even where the next breadcrumb will be. But it’s the first food I’ve had in a long time so I am cherishing it and excited to see what’s next.

In The Meantime

In the meantime I am continuing to maintain my business and might even put in a little bit of work to grow them.

But most of my focus is on 2 things.

1. Getting better at Super Smash Bros Melee
2. Learning how to learn things faster and become an expert quicker

It’s really the 2nd thing that is driving me at the moment.

I know in the future I want to study neuroscience, I know that I want to somehow be involved and have an impact in the area of education…but I have no idea what those things look like.

Exploring ultimate performace and how people become the absolute best in their field is something that I feel will pay dividends down the line.

Melee makes me zero money and pursuing it costs me money. To be one of the best in a competitive computer game actually means very little to me when I look at my entire life.

But this. Pursuing something with the goal of being the best you can be at it, the immense focus and learning required to achieve that, and any shortcuts to making that happen…are so valuable to me.

I am interested to see how this pursuit of mine plays out in the future and what part my role to become better at Melee has on the project I choose to work on next.

Today I deleted websites that actually made me money. Why would I do that? Because I want to focus on the websites that make most of my money.

Hey guys. Ryan here from Instructions Not Included. Today, I had a horribly unproductive day. My mind was just not in it; it was all over the place. But I did make a big decision today about really focusing on the websites that I have.

What I did was I looked at – I had a couple of small sites one’s called InspiringAudioBooks.com another was called TiredAndSleepy.com. There was another one called YourEnergyDrinks.com and these were making probably collectively around about $1,000 a year, maybe, if you could count that much.

But I just felt like they were sucking up my energy and distracting me and there was always maintenance issues or they’d get hacked or something like that. It’s just a real pain in the butt to have these websites that I don’t actually want.

I’d always imagined that one day I would go and work on these websites and build them up or one day I would sell them for a few thousand dollars or something like that. But I was looking at it and combined they’re making maybe $100 per month.

Which means that they would sell for – actually, it wasn’t even $100 per month, I don’t think. Anyway, they would sell for like $2,000 all up, if I could be bothered to do that.

So, what I decided to do was just basically delete them. It sounds crazy to delete $100 per month from your life but they were just distracting me and causing me to lose focus and I’m making $5,000 a month from On Property, it varies from month to month.

When you’re making so much money from one site and other sites that are making combined $100 a month are taking away your focus. Then, it makes a lot of sense to really focus on just one website.

Another thing that I’m super excited about today is – tomorrow, I’m actually going to my first Super Smash Brothers Melee Tournament. Super Smash Brothers Melee is a GameCube game that was released in 2001. It’s a fighting game but it’s a very popular game and there’s a big scene behind this game.

People play competitively to win money and stuff like that. I’ve been really into this game for the last 4 months or so, ever since I found out that this was a competitive game.

I used to love Super Smash Brothers as a kid. When I was in High School, I used to play with one of my friends on 64 and bought myself a GameCube after I found out that Melee was actually the competitive version of this game. I’ve been playing that, loving that and then found out that there’s a tournament up in Brisbane, about an hour from my house. So, I’m heading out there, I’m going to be playing GameCube all day tomorrow.

So, I’m pretty excited about that. I play as Princess Peach, is my character. Random fact but, yeah.

So, I spent part of today trying to work out, how can I actually play this on my computer? Because there’s a Netplay version where you can play people from all over the world, like you’d play Call of Duty or any other game online. You can connect and you can play Melee against other players online. But, oh my freaking gosh! It’s just been so hard to try and work this out.

I think I’ve got a solution now but I’ve got to download this program called Xcode that’s 2.6 Gigabytes. So, that’s going to take ages to download, like, all night for me.

I’ve got the program but I can’t connect my controller to the computer even though I’ve got an adapter. It’s not programmed for the computer so you’ve got to hack it. No wonder there’s not a lot of people playing this online.

It’s really hard to work this out. I do actually own Melee.co. So, I’ve been thinking about starting up a channel or something like that to help people with the issues that I’ve been having and to help the scene to get it more competitive and easier to play and stuff like that.

So, that’s something that I’m pondering but, again, I don’t want to spread my focus. I think one of the good things about Instructions Not Included is I’m doing it, it’s a fun thing, I’m not trying to make money from it.

Whereas, with these other sites, I was. If I was to start any more sites like Melee.co or something like that, it would just be for fun with no intention to make money. If it grew an audience and made money, at the end of the day, then happy days. But I just need to consider it in my own mind that it is just for fun.

What else have I done today? I also am moving over PublicSpeakingPower.com. As you guys know, I changed the name to Teach Speaking and I talked about another domain, which I bought which is Outspoken.co. I’m actually going to change the brand name to Outspoken Co or Outspoken.co.

That’s kind of the update there. I’ve just been migrating that across today but I haven’t fully completed that. So, yeah, pretty useless day for me. But you can’t have a win every single day of your life. I do my best. I do my best, I do my best that’s a song that I could sing.

Alright guys. I’m just rambling. It’s Friday afternoon. As you can see, I have freaking lost my mind. I don’t know what is going on or what I’m doing. So, until next time. If you want instructions, go and buy some furniture.

In this episode of Instructions Not Included, I am going to settle once and for all exactly how I make money online and kind of give you guys a framework so if you ever want to do something sort of similar to what I do, you are actually going to understand the overarching framework of exactly what I do.

If you want to try and replicate that, you can go ahead and do that.
As you may know, if you listened to other episodes or if you do not, I make my money online through my websites.

What I do is I create content for those websites and then I sell information products. I sell things like eBooks. I sell access to a membership site.

I sell what is called affiliate products which are other people’s products which I sell and then get a commission for. So I am going to go into detail on exactly how I go about doing that.
Now, my main money site is called onproperty.com.au. It is a property website and I teach people general information about property. If you want to sell something online, the first thing that you need to do is get someone’s attention because you cannot sell something without someone’s attention.

So if you are an average Joe – like I am and you want to get someone’s attention, let us say, we are in the property space which is exactly where I am, no one knows who I am. Who is Ryan Mclean? I do not own any properties. How am I going to get someone’s attention to say, Look, I can help you, you need to buy my products. How am I going to get their attention?
The way that I get their attention is I create videos, I create podcasts and I write blog posts. And what I do in these blog posts – this is my specific strategy, is that I answer people’s questions. I am just going to go through some of the titles of my blog posts so you guys can see what I do. I am creating these blog posts on a very regular basis. I have hundreds and hundreds on my website. And this is how people find me.

So looking at December of 2014 and some of the things that I have done: Should I Self-Manage My Investment Property? is one title; Why Don’t People Invest in Positive Cash Flow Property? is another one; Does Depreciation Affect Capital Gains Tax?, Do You Pay Tax on Negatively Geared Properties?, Do You Pay Tax on Positive Cash Flow Properties?, How Do You Know If an Area Will Be a Good Investment?, Do Positive Cash Flow Properties Exist in Australia?.

As you can see these are all questions. These are all titles of a blog post. What I did is I post a question and I then go ahead and answer the question. I have another one Can You Get Positive Cash Flow and Capital Gains? which is something that I know people are asking. So let us just type that into Google, “Can you get positive cash flow and capital gains,” I have typed that in and for me the 2nd result is actually my website.

If someone was typing can you get positive cash flow and capital gains into Google then they are going to find my website. Or maybe they might type positive cash flow and capital gains, let us see if I come up there. Look, I come up for a different one that I wrote which is Positive Cash Flow Versus Capital Gains Shaped Down. So if they type positive cash flow and capital gains, I come up 2nd result again. If they type positive cash versus capital gains, we can see that my website comes up in the 3rd result. My YouTube video comes up as the 4th result.
 
So this is how I get people’s attention. I create blog posts, I create videos, I create podcasts answering people’s questions. And the reason that I rank so well, the reason I get so much traffic to my website is that I am willing to put in time to answer questions that big websites probably are not going to answer.

One of the questions that I recently did is Why Are Mortgage Brokers Free? Most magazines, most websites are not going to go to the bother and go to the effort to answer that question and to answer questions like 10 Smart Things To Do If You Can’t Save A House Deposit or How Much Of A Deposit Is Required For An Investment Property? When you type stuff into Google, you are asking Google a question and you are expecting an answer but someone has to create that answer, right? And so that is exactly what I do to get people’s attention. I create answers to questions so when they ask questions on Google, they find my website and they come to my website.
 
Next thing is once you capture someone’s attention you need to get them down the path towards understanding what products you have to offer and understanding how you can help them and how your products can help them.

You can make money online through advertising if they click on ads or that sort of stuff and I do make money when people click on ads on other sites but my main website On Property, I do not have any advertising on it, it is all my own stuff that is sell. And so in order to get people aware of my products, you can do that on your website, I do have a resources page which talks about my products and I do have Buy A House eBook that I link up to that from my pages so people can find that. But my biggest thing is what I do is I give things away for free in exchange for someone’s email address. So the moment I have 10 positive cash flow properties – the locations revealed and I have a button that says click here to reveal.
 
Let me just explain why this is valuable. When people are investing in property in Australia, there is a thing called positive cash flow property and this is property that generates a greater income than you paying expenses so it generates passive income for people over time.

So basically people want to invest in these certain properties but they do not know how to find it and that is what my membership site is and we will get into that in more detail in a minute. But what I am doing with this freebie is I am saying Look, I know you want to find positive cash flow properties because a lot of people do. If you want to see the locations of 10 real positive cash flow properties, just click here. And when they click there, there is a little box that pops up that says just enter your email and then you can click to reveal the properties. And so once someone enters their email then they go on my list.
 
And now we are going to go into how I direct people to my product. I do have links to my products as I said in the resources page and stuff like that. But what happens for most people is that they get on my email list and what that means is that I then have their email, I then have the permission to email them and let them know about my products, let them know about whatever I want, obviously related to property because that is what they signed up for. So they sign up for this freebie, I get their email address and then what I do is I send them emails with free video content.

So I have a mini-series where I teach them some techniques for finding positive cash flow properties and techniques for researching an area, some tools that they can use, some mistakes that they should avoid and basically I had all these value through these free videos.

Then after three free videos then I release a fourth video to them and that is my sales pitch and that is where I talk about my membership site which is On Property Plus and I let them know that here is what you get inside, you get in depth training tutorials on how to find positive cash flow properties and how to research an area. You get property listings so I go out and I find properties with a high rental yield, a good chance of being positive cash flow and you get access to all that so you can see hundreds of real positive cash flow properties. And I also have some tools in there as well that help them to analyze properties and to invest.

So I give my sales pitch and I say, Look, if you want to sign up, it is $49.95 per month or it is $297 per year. And as you can guess, most people go for the yearly one because it is over 50% off, that is about $300 per year.
So what I do is I create this content to get people’s attention. Once I get their attention I try and get their email address by giving them free stuff and then through the email address I market my products and I say, here are the products, would you like to buy them? Here is your opportunity to buy it, it is $300 per year or $50 per month. And a percentage of people will sign up for that and a large percentage of people will not sign up for that. But a large enough percentage of people will sign up for it that I can make a decent living online.
 
In the last 2 weeks as you may have heard – if you listened to the last episode, I actually have been back and forth to the hospital. I recently had a son. He had to stay in the hospital to get a feeding tube. He was a bit premature, a bit early so I have not been able to work much in the last 2 weeks but I have continued to generate a great income in the last 2 weeks. $1,500 in the first week and I think $1,800 this week and I have not been doing a lot of work.

And so this is one of the benefits of what I do with my online business. Yes, I work hard. I do 40-hour weeks. I do 50-hour weeks.

I work pretty hard on my business but what happens is everything that I do builds up because like we talked about, this positive cash flow versus capital gains article that I wrote, Positive Cash Flow Versus Capital Gains Shape Down. I wrote that in the 5th of June 2014. That is about 9 months ago. But that is still getting traffic because people are searching positive cash flow versus capital gains. They are seeing my article and for 9 months that has been generating traffic and for the next 9 months that will still generate traffic and attention and a percentage of those people will eventually convert into my products.
 
So that is in essence how I make money. I grab people’s attention by answering their questions as helpful as possible. Once I grab their attention I try and convert them into a freebie offer so I can get their email address and permission to follow up with them. I then send them more valuable content and I then present my offers and there they decide to sign up or not. That is how I make money online. If you want to do something similar, I am going to talk about that now.
 
So how do I do it? What is my exact set-up?
In order to do this, what you need first is a domain name. This is my www.onproperty.com.au. This costs about $10 per year to buy. You can buy it by going to ryanmclean.net/godaddy, which is my affiliate link or you can go to godaddy.com and you can buy domain from there.
 
The next thing you need is something called hosting. When you visit a website, what you are actually doing is downloading that website onto your computer from another computer or from a server. So hosting is where you put your website so people all over the world can download it because it does not just sit in the ether, out there in magic land, it actually sits in a computer or a server somewhere or in multiple servers all over the world.

So you need a server to have it on. So you need hosting and I recommend a hosting company called Arvixe. You can go to ryanmclean.net/arvixe, a-r-v-i-x-e if you want to use them and I signed up for 2 years and it was $4 a month otherwise it is $7 per month. You are paying $10 for the domain. You are paying $7 a month or $4 a month for hosting. And that is going to get you started.
 
What you then do – you can Google or you can YouTube all these stuff for their granular details, but what I then do is put what is called a WordPress blog on that site. WordPress is like this backend platform that allows you to create a website, create an awesome-looking website, put up blogposts, put up podcasts, put up videos, all of these sort of stuff and it is just simple on the backend. So I put WordPress on there and that is my website.
 
That is how I create my website. And you can then go from there and you can create blogs. And you can move on with that. If you want to create videos, I create videos. I simply upload them to YouTube. YouTube is actually the number 2 search engine – we would be talking about typing things into Google, people are going to do that. But people also type stuff into YouTube.

So if I go to youtube.com and I am going to search the same thing, positive cash flow versus capital gains, and let us see what comes up, mine is the 1st video. Mine is the 3rd video. Mine is the 4th video. I also have the 6th video. I have the 7th video. I have the 9th video and something like the 13th video or something like that. In the first page of 20 results, I have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. 7 videos out of 1, 2, 3, 4,… 7 out of 20 of those listings on the 1st page if you were to type that into YouTube are mine.

As you can see people search through YouTube and I can get traffic through YouTube as well. That is pretty exciting so I upload my videos to there. You guys can work out how to do that. Just go to YouTube and search How do I upload a video to YouTube?
 
And then for podcasting, that is a bit more complicated. But basically, you need to pay for someone to host your audio files and you then publish your audio files to your website. And look, this is getting complicated. It will cost you $15 per month if you use SoundCloud, which is who I recommend.

So this is an extra cost that you are going to have to incur if you want to do podcasts as well. If you want instructions on how to do this, just go to podcastfast.com and I have a 4 mini-series – that is 8 episodes on exactly how you can set up a podcast on your website.
 
I will show you from start to finish how to set up a SoundCloud account, how to set up a website, how to buy a domain, everything, all the granular details, all the tutorials. Actually you do not need to Google or YouTube, you can just go to podcastfast.com and I will show you how to set up all that sort of stuff over there.
 
So that is how I do it. I have a website that I run on WordPress. I host my audio files on SoundCloud then publish them to my WordPress blog which then goes out to iTunes. I also put my videos on YouTube and I then get a share link which is like an embed link from YouTube which I put on my website as well. That is how I gather all of my attention.
 
And then for selling my products, I actually use a product called Snappy Checkout. There are a lot out there. There is one called gumroad.com which is good. There is one called selzed.com, s-e-l-zed which I highly recommend. Snappy Checkout just ended up being the best for me, for recurring products and how exactly what I needed.

So you can check them out, snappycheckout.com as well. But that is how I accept money online and so I do not need to have anything fancy on my website. What happens is is when someone clicks on the checkout button or buy now button, they go over to Snappy Checkout secure server so all credit card information are secured by them. They pay then Snappy Checkout take a commission out of that just like a credit card processing fee out of that. So I do not have to worry about managing credit cards and stuff like that, it is all done by Snappy Checkout for me. That is how I sell my products.
 
And then, how do I deliver my products? Selzed.com delivers my eBook for me. I do not have to do that at all. But I also have a membership site so I have been talking about On Property Plus, so I have been talking about this membership site that I offer to people. I actually host that on a separate WordPress blog at plus.onproperty.com.au. I host that over there. So I use WordPress for that, just like what I do for my website.
 
I use something called Wish List Member to actually protect that content so only members can get access to that.
In essence, that is what I do. That is how I make money. That is my entire business model. And look in the last episode I was talking about giving away education for free, which is what I am talking about getting attention and then selling tools and then selling premium content is what I do and how I make money. I love it. I am passionate about it.

One of the things that I love is that I am getting thousands of visitors per day to my websites. And as I have said in the last 2 weeks I have done probably a few hours work at a maximum and I am still getting thousands of visitors a day. So getting people to sign up for my email list, I am still getting members to sign up for my membership site. And what happens is once they go through Snappy Checkout, they then hit the final registration page and they register and they get instant access.

So I do not actually have to do anything in order to get that money and set up their accounts. Obviously I have to keep that membership site updated, I have to keep finding those property listings. But I have a virtual assistant who helps me with that so it is not a massive task for me to do.
So it is possible to make money online. It is possible to make good money online. I have been doing this for 7 or 8 years and so it does take some time. Some people do it faster but for me, the way I always thought about it, was if this takes me 20 years – let us say like I started when I was 18, so this takes me 20 years.

I hear people succeeding in 12 months. But if this takes me 20 years, I am only going to be 38. And imagine if I can be running my own business and generating passive income and I am 38. Most people retire until 65 and have the lifestyle that they want. And I can get way ahead. 20 years, what will it be, almost 30 years ahead of the game. So even if it will be 20 years to work all these stuff out.

I have to work my ass off for 20 years, for me that will still be worth it. So for me, it took a lot longer than it did for the people out there who are talking about making money online. For me, I started in 2006 so I am really only starting to make good money online this year like money to fully support my family and it is 2015, it has been 9 years, 9 years guys. I have said if it takes me 20 years, it took me 9 years to work all these stuff out and I am 27.

I have worked 9 years doing this but I am only 27. So there are possibilities out there for you to generate the lifestyle that you want, to generate income online. I am not saying it is going to be easy because it is definitely not. It is a lot of hard work. And I have put money into it. I have put a lot of time into it, a lot of investment into it. But guys, I am 27. I have been working on this for 9 years, doing it part-time most of the time.

Probably about 2 or 3 years of that is full time. But I am 27 and I have my whole life ahead of me and I now have the freedom and flexibility to build awesome businesses, to help people, to impact people’s lives and to do the best that I can without needing to worry about paycheck or losing my job or working for someone else. I get to work for myself. I get to work for my customers. I get to work to help educate the world and that is something I am really passionate about.
 
And so I hope that me sharing with you granular details on exactly how I make money has really explained to you how I make money. If you want to check out the full transcription of this episode or if you want to see the links to download, I will put in the links to hosting and all to podcastfast and all that sort of stuff, just go to ryanmclean.net/15, 1-5.

I am also going to put this at ryanmclean.net/how, h-o-w. So if someone says to me how do you make money, I can go, dude, just go to ryanmclean.net/how, listen to the podcast and I will share with you on there exactly how I make money if you are interested. And I really hope that this inspires a few people, gets you pumped up about online marketing and the potential to change your life, to add value to other people’s lives and the fact that even if it takes you 9 years, it is still probably going to be worth it.
 
So thanks so much for listening to this episode of Instructions Not Included. And remember, if you want instructions, go and buy some furniture.

Hey guys! Ryan here from Instructions Not Included.

I am actually going to move this podcast over to my personal website at ryanmclean.net, that is r-y-a-n-m-c-l-e-a-n.net because truthfully I just cannot deal with having another brand at the moment and this is something that I want to do for personal reasons more than something that I want to do as actually a business.

So this is something I want to do to document my journey, to document my thought journey and hopefully help a couple of people along the way.
I am still going to call this podcast Instructions Not Included but the location of the podcast if you ever need extra links or any sign ups or any bonuses or anything like that, that is going to be over at ryanmclean.net.
But anyway, it has been ages since I have even touched this podcast. In fact the last time I think I released a podcast was on boxing day, December 26, it is now the 4th of April and a lot has happened in that time.

I am not actually going to spend a lot of time recapping what happened because then I would just never start this podcast because so much has happened in the last 4 months in terms of what I have been doing and what my goals are and how my businesses changed and how my life has changed. For instance, I just had a baby. I just had my 3rd baby. I had a son.

That is very exciting news. I am just driving now from the hospital to home actually. My mum is there taking care of my kids. Just driving home for breakfast because I have been up all night, I am on about 3 hours sleep. It was something like that. It is pretty tiring.
But basically, what I am thinking about at the moment is I am deep into On Property again. I have talked about the fact that I was getting sick of On Property but I am passionate about it again and I have Podcast Fast which is my podcasting website on the site as well so my main business is still On Property but then I have a little side business that I can tap into to get my energy up and to have some fun there. So I am still focusing on On Property, there is a lot of growth to be had there and a lot of fun to be had as well.

And I have transitioned away from having On Property Plus which is my premium membership website just opened to the public. I actually just closed that down to new registrations and I set up a launch funnel or an Evergreen launch funnel. So what happens is someone signs up for my list so they go to onproperty.com.au/plus, they get a notification that says On Property is actually closed at the moment but you can join the waitlist and here are 10 free property listings anyway for your troubles. And basically On Property Plus sells property listings. So this is kind of the gateway drive into On Property Plus so sign up for that.

They then go through a 3-part video series and they then get a timed offer for On Property Plus, the doors open for about 5 days or 6 days – I think it is 5 days, and then it closes for those people. So it is a real time sensitive offer, those people only have those 5 days to buy otherwise it closes for them. But each week there is a new cohort of people going through.
But anyway, I launched that at the start of last month, start of March, and it has done wonders for my business. I just looked last night, and usually I was doing maybe a thousand dollars in recurring sales for On Property Plus and maybe a thousand dollars in new sales, about $2,000 per month. Then last month in March I did $4,550 in new sales and I probably did about $800 to $1,000 in recurring sales. I would have to look into that. So significant increase in what I was making in the past so that is really exciting.
But now I am thinking about actually taking out one of those elements on On Property Plus. I have this tool called the advance property calculator and it helps people analyze their cash flow of a property instantly.

They just go in, type in the details of the property – purchase price, rental income, and it calculates that sort of stuff for them. And I am actually thinking of spinning this off as a new product which I am going to call property tools. I have the website propertytools.com.au which I can set up and doing a lower price for that. On Property Plus is $300 a year or $50 a month and I am thinking for Property Tools it is going to start at $5 per month or $50 per year, so it is going to be much lower priced products but my goal is that – what is my goal?
That is why I am recording this podcast to try and work this thing out. I love the idea. I am running an education company. I want to be in education. I want to teach people. But I love the idea of having an education business that is backed by revenue from Tools.

So you give away all the education for free making education free to the masses. I am so passionate about that and giving away good education absolutely free. And then if you have tools that you could sell then you give away all your education then you can just make money on the tools.

I really like that business model. My business model at the moment – I am giving away a lot of free education but then I have some education inside On Property Plus that is paid and then obviously I list the properties as well so it is kind of like a service-based and/or products business like a tool that people use to see positive cash flow property listings so I guess it is a tool.

I am just thinking there are a lot of people who do not want their property listings but would probably love to get access to the advance property calculator and I could build that up over time to become something more substantial even so rather than just be the property calculator you could potentially manage your portfolio in there or you could use it for other research purposes or other calculations. And rather than just having a cash flow calculator for someone who wants to buy and hold a property, you can look at having renovation calculators, you can look at a whole bunch of different things.
Yes, basically at the moment I am thinking I am still going to keep On Property Plus, I will still keep the advance property calculator inside On Property Plus. But I am going to spin off that calculator into its own product.

I am going to launch that at the low rate of $5 per month or $50 per year. Now at this rate I would need massive volume to make significant money. If we are doing $50 per year, I need a thousand members in order to make just $50,000. So it is not going to be a massive generator for me however I just did the research the other day and there are 1.7 million property investors in Australia.

So if you get a thousand of those or to get 1,700 of those or to get 17,000 of those, I need to work out the figure of how many of those people I would need to actually make this worthwhile. Because at the moment I can launch this product I do not have to do any extra work. Well, I have to set up the website – it is a couple of hours there, I have to create a sales video.

It is probably going to take me half a day because it is just going to be instructions of how to use the calculator and what you are going to get and what it does. Maybe one day’s work in this to launch it but everything is already there. I do not need to pay to get anything created. So basically any revenue that I make from it is going to be great. An extra $5,000 a year will not go astray. Who is not happy with an extra $5,000 a year if you have a hundred members or something like that?
But what I would like to do is eventually use propertytools.com.au as its own revenue source and reinvest the money that I get in order to grow that tool and to get better development and to build something that a lot of people would really want to use. Something that is super user friendly, super easy to do, super intuitive and use the skills that I have in understanding the way technology changes and the way people use technology.

I am not a UX designer but I feel I have some knowledge around that because I use the internet so much and I am using this tool so much as well.
Anyway, I am almost home. I just want to talk for the drive. I want to be creating content. I do not want to be just consuming content and I thought that this was a good way to do it.

I thought that a poignant moment at the moment where I have this website, I have this product that I am selling on On Property Plus that is making good money and I now have the freedom to explore other options. But then this is also in a way the product is like a setback, like it is a lower revenue which means lower margins because you are still going to have expenses I am sure with support and stuff like that. So it is actually a slight change in business model rather from the high end – or what I see is high end at $300 a year sales that I am getting, to a very low end of $5 per month or $50 per year.

But hopefully people who will stay on and use this product for long periods of time, get investors who are investing in property who want this product, it is so cheap they are happy to pay for it for years and years and years.

I do not know if this will be a transition of my business or if it will just be an addition to my business. It is not much work at the moment so that is a good thing. But that is where I am at with On Property.
With Podcast fast, just a quick update, I created the course that I wanted to create. My real goal for Podcast Fast was to get that course out. I was going to monetize that with product-type services but I decided against that truthfully because I felt like I was saying to me that is not what you want or what you want is to create products and to create a media empire that sells pretty passive products.

Not something like a product-type service where I would have to do a lot to manage the implementation of that product-type service. So that is not where I want to go.

I do not want to go into those services. I want to keep the in-products. So at the moment I do not actually have a way of monetizing that. Eventually my plan would be to sell education and to sell mini-courses in the podcasting space that are affordable but that could change.

If I could think of a tool that I could sell to podcasters then I would absolutely love to do that and just give all the information away free. Maybe that will be my business model in the future, just give all my education away for free and just build up websites, build up businesses that sell tools and give education away for free. And that helps me achieve my major goal which is to provide quality, affordable education to the entire world.

That is my big vision. That is my goal. Hopefully I am on the way to achieving that. Thank you for listening to this. If you want to check out my website, go to ryanmclean.net and you can see more episodes over there, more ranting and raving, everything from talking about church, to talking about a business to talking about babies.

It is all over there, ryanmclean.net.
Thank you guys for listening and I will be back soon for another update.

Got a feeling that my business, which is currently a one man show, won’t be that way forever.

Yes I do a good job as a solopreneur and it has great lifestyle benefits. But the dreams I have I can’t achieve alone. So sooner or later I am either going to need to find a way to contract or collaborate or I am going to need to bring on employees.

I like the idea of collaborating or contracting better because I think flexibility can release creativity. Just like getting people in to work on a movie and then they all go their separate ways.

But we will have to see how things pan out.

Today I received what came across as a very desperate and manipulative email from a church.

What unsettled me so intensely was the pastor’s use of scripture as a manipulation tool to guilt the recipient to donate to the church.

I was also unsettled by the complete lack of transparency in how the money will be spent or what would happen if “budget” was unable to be met. I checked the church website and could find no details of how money was being spent.

It reads more like an email from a used car salesman than the body of Christ. #sorrynotsorry

I think this email serves as a warning that the bloated financial structure that many churches currently operate under is not going to be viable for much longer.

I have spoken about this before here but I strongly believe that soon a new form of church will rise up under a new financial model. This will likely include:

1. Complete Transparency

First it will include complete transparency on how the money will be spent. General (or to the dollar) reports will be posted online for all to see exactly what the money is going towards.

Eg.

$1,500 – New lights

$4,000 – Pastor’s wage for the monthly

$15,000 – Venue mortgage

This transparency will all the general church population an opportunity to speak up about where money is spent.

2. Giving Goals and Ceilings

Churches will have goals for exactly what they need to raise to continue to run the church. Similar to crowdsourced goals.

If a goal is not achieved an event likely won’t happen…which is fine. If a goal is hit then either giving is halted or money is put aside in Escrow or in a trust for future events, missions or a 2nd tier goal is added.

If the church reaches the 2nd tier goal then the event would likely become more extravagant.

3. Lack of Ongoing Overheads

While it is hard to foresee a church without any ongoing overheads (though I think it is possible) I believe congregations of believers will rise up with a much looser corporate structure around it.

Rather than massive overheads for staff and buildings I foresee churches with little to no overheads who will simply be raising money for the next event or the latest missions trip.

Why Churches Won’t Adopt This Giving Model

I can’t see current churches adopting this giving model because it goes against the core of what they do. Provide a central place and organisation for people to gather to worship God.

No existing churches won’t adopt this model because it is fundamentally against what they do (plus they make more money doing what they are doing at the moment…but for how long?).

New churches will pop up adopting this business model from the start.

I Could Be Wrong

I could totally be wrong about this. My goal is not to be right. My goal is to open up discussion on how church could be in the hopes that just one person takes these ideas and builds something create upon them.

It is amazing how passion can just disappear over time. It can just fade. I did not know that my passion had disappeared until today when I actually saw a video of myself about 6 months ago.

It was an On Property video and I was sharing on the topic of Should You Buy an Investment Property Or Should you Pay Off the Mortgage On Your Own Home? And all of the advice out there that I had researched and found basically said that everyone should pay off their own home and I disagreed with it and I was looking to stand up and say I disagree with it and encourage people to think through their life and think what they want to do.

But the thing that I noticed in that video which is totally lacking from the current videos that I am making for On Property is just the passion and the excitement and the enthusiasm that I have. Where has the passion gone?

Hey and welcome to Instructions Not Included. To start the story about me and my journey as I try and grow a little online business into something that generates me significant income online and helps me live the life of my dreams.

So I saw that video and I was slightly depressed. I felt like this is a good video. I am excited in this video and that is what makes it a good video. The content was probably similar to what I would create now but back then I was excited.

How can I pay off my home loan faster and purchase an investment property at the same time? And believe it or not but asking that slightly different question puts your mind into overdrive and will help you to come up with solutions for that. One simple solution would be to purchase a positive cash flow property.

I have lost my passion and I need to find it again. And I feel like when I am recording Instructions Not Included, I have passion. When I am thinking about the podcast project that I am going to be working on next year, I have passion. But when I think about On Property, I kind of lost that passion.

So let us go back to a video that really inspired my overarching vision. My vision is to build a network of educational websites that allows anyone to learn for an affordable price. I was really inspired by this video that I am going to share which is actually a TedTalk by a guy called William. And if you want to find this talk, just go to YouTube and search for William Build a Windmill or William Windmill or something like that.

Add in the word Ted to make it easier to find and basically this is a kid who lived in a super poor country. Basically, he and his family were starving to death. He could not go to school because they were too poor and too hungry, dropped out of school but then used the local library to learn about physics, build a windmill that could be used for irrigation and for charging phones, and change his life and the lives of everyone in his town. It is so inspiring; it is my favorite TedTalk of all time.

Before I discovered the wonders of science I was just a simple farmer in a country of poor farmers. Like everyone else, we grew maize. One year our fortune turned very bad. In 2001 we experienced an awful famine. Within 5 months, all Malawians begin to starve to death. My family ate 1 meal per day at night. Only a few swallows of nsima for each one of us. The food passes through our bodies, we drop down to nothing.

In Malawi, second day of school we have to pay school fees. Because of the hunger I was forced to drop out of school. I looked at my father and looked those dry fields. It was the future I couldn’t accept. I felt very happy to be at the festival of second day of school. So I was determined to do anything possible to receive education. So I went into a library. I learned books, fast books especially physics. I couldn’t read English that well. I used diagrams and pictures to learn the words around them.

Another book put that knowledge in my hands. It said windmill could pump water and generate electricity. Pump water meant irrigation. It defends against hunger which we were experiencing by that time. So I decide I will build 1 windmill for myself. But I didn’t have materials to use. So I went to a scrap yard where I found my materials. Many people including my mother said I was crazy. I found a tractor fan, shock absorber, PVC pipes. Using a bicycle frame, an old bicycle dynamo I built my machine. It was 1 light at first and then 4 lights with switches and even a circuit breaker, modeled after an electric belt.

Another machine pumps water for irrigation. Queues of people started lining up at my house to charge their mobile phone. I could not get rid of them. And the reporters came too which led to bloggers and which led to a call from something called Ted. I had never seen an airplane before. I had never slept in a hotel. So on stage that day in Arusha, my English lost. I said something like, I tried and I made it.

So I’d like to say something to all the people out there like me, to the Africans, and the poor, who are struggling with your dreams, God bless. Maybe one day you watch this on the internet. I say to you, trust yourself and believe. Whatever happen, don’t give up. Thank you!

How awesome is that. How awesome is it that a kid can just go to a library, can learn something from a book and can change not only his life but his family’s life, his town’s life and the lives of many people around the world who have heard his story.

It was his story that really inspired me to go into some sort of educational stuff because I felt like what he did is what we are moving towards in this world. He went and he pursued his passion and he learned in a non-linear way. He did not go to school where they say learn this and this and this, physics and math and blah blah blah. He went and he was excited about science. He learned about science and he applied it to his life.

It is very much the way that I learn; I am excited about business so I go on YouTube or I go on podcast or I buy an audiobook to learn about those sorts of things. I am excited about church and Christianity so I talk to people about that sort of stuff and they share things with me and I read articles and I listen to podcast about that. I did not go to business school. I did not go to university and truthfully I would not actually want to.

Should you go to business school? Well, let us see what one of the founders of Y Combinator or one of the guys who run Y Combinator, which is a successful startup incubator – these guys helped Dropbox, helped incubate Dropbox and some other pretty big companies. Let us see what he had to say about whether you should go to business school or not.

Okay. The question is “Is there any value in business school if you’re interested in entrepreneurship? And if so, what?” So, basically no. It sounds undiplomatic but the point is what business school was designed for is to teach people management. Right? And management is a problem that you only have after startup, if you are sufficiently successful. So really, what you need to know early on to make a startup successful is developing products. You’d be better off going to design school if you want to go to some sort of school. Although frankly, the way to learn how to do it is just to do it.

One of the things I got wrong early on is that I advised people who are interested in starting a startup is to go work for someone at some company for a few years before starting their own. But honestly, the best way to learn how to start a startup is just to start on your own. You might not be successful but you’ll learn faster if you just do it. So not really.

Business schools are trying really hard to do this but honestly they were designed to train the officer core of large companies, right, which is what business seemed to be back when it was a choice of either the officer core of large companies or Joe’s shoe store. Then there was this new thing Apple, which started smaller than Joe’s shoe store then turned into this giant mega company. But they weren’t designed for that world. They’re good at what they’re good at, they just do that and screw this whole entrepreneurship thing, just because it’s cool.

So it is pretty clear. He does not think that the general education system is going to help people when it comes to business. What about Gary V who is a successful business guy. He built up his family’s wine business from a few million dollars up to $40 or $60 million business. And now he has one of the fastest growing media agencies, social media agencies in America. Let us see what he had to say about whether or not people should go to college and study business at college.

Professors aren’t relevant to a lot of their students today more than ever because the behaviors of how we act aren’t mapping meaning. So many people have emailed me literally because of the show, emailed me that, “Hey! I’m in class right now and what my professor’s talking about makes no sense compared to – I’m watching your power.. I’m listening to your podcast right now. My professor’s talking because he or she are so out…”

Literally professors in major universities that are putting kids in debt right now are telling them that there is no ROI in social media like Ludacris — saying dumb— like, “Hey kids! Hey students! We’re gonna connect through modern things like you know…” It can’t even come out of my mouth. I’m so disgusted with what’s going on in universities across this country. And so it’s relevance. There’s eye-rolling and checking the — going out in classrooms all across this country and it’s sad because of the romance of how professors’ think it should be versus the reality of what it’s like.

So I shared these things to show you that learning is changing. People are learning in different ways and that is really where my passion came from, from teaching people and helping them to learn the way that they want to learn. So that is where my passion is derived from, that sort of learning. But the content that I am creating at the moment with On Property, I am finding it dry. It is uninspiring and it is just not me.

They say that when you are building a product, when you are building a startup, that it is important to go after a small group of people who are going to absolutely love your product.

It’s really important to take care of that first. Step 1 is to build something that users love. At YC, we tell founders to work on their product, talk to users, exercise, eat and sleep, and very little else. All the other stuff I just mentioned: PR, conferences including  advisers doing partnerships, you should ignore all of that and just build a product and get it as good as possible by talking to users.

Your job is to build something that users love. Very few companies that go on to be super successful get there without first doing this. A lot of good-on-paper startups fail because they merely make something that people like. Making something that people want, that only a medium amount is a greater fail and not understand why you are failing. So these are the two jobs. Something that we say at YC a lot is that it’s better to build something that a small number of users love than a large number of users like.

So if I am creating dry and uninspiring videos is there is going to be a small group of people who will love that.

I am trying to go after the mass market by answering hundreds of questions and getting access to that in Google but if people see those videos or if they see those blog posts and they are not inspired by them and they do not want to go and look at my other videos because it is not inspiring, is it actually going to grow the way I want? So rather than just doing the shotgun approach that I had planned and I had talked about in, I think it is episode 2 or 3, that I was just going to do these videos and smash them all out, maybe I should actually do something different and create less videos but videos that people will gravitate towards and they will absolutely love.

So I have decided, well I think I have decided – you guys know me, I change my mind almost daily but definitely weekly. I have decided to stop daily content for onproperty.com.au.

This is the big, big decision for me because I feel like daily content was my plan all along. The more content I build the more people would come to my website and the more money that I would make because I would be able to convert those people. But now, I want to create great content.  I want to create inspiring content, not just lots of content.

So I am going stop the daily content for On Property. I am going to focus on tightening up onproperty.com.au so there are a lot of articles on there, whether the transcriptions are not very good or I have not edited it into a blog post or there is no text on those pages at all, just a podcast episode or just a video. So I am going to tighten up onproperty.com.au and focus on fixing some of those areas. I want to do weekly episodes maybe, I am not 100% sure whether I will do weekly episodes or whether I will just do episodes sporadically but I definitely want to still create some content for the site, just maybe not as much as I have been creating.

And I also want to make sure that my product at On Property and my sales and marketing around the products are absolutely excellent. At the moment it is pretty hodge-podge. It is riddled with errors. It is not very convincing. It is not very clear.

So I want to make the product awesome which I think I am not very far off making it awesome, making that solve that one problem of helping people find positive cash flow properties. But I also want to make that sales messaging and that funnel awesome as well. So then really, I can just focus on maintaining On Property, letting it sit there and really tightening it up and making it an awesome experience.

So moving forward, anything I do at On Property now, that is  not just fixing old sort of stuff, is stuff that I want to be inspiring and I want it to be great content. I am not as focused on lots of content but I am focused on creating good content and letting my passion shine through.

So if I am not passionate then I will not do a video. If I am not pumped then I will not record. Really this is a big step back for me to say, Okay well, daily content is not actually important anymore. But good content is important. So it might take me some time to find my way around that, to find my schedule and to see what I am going to do but that is where I stand at the moment.

When it comes to this podcast, Instructions Not Included, I have been doing it daily on weekdays so 5 days a week. I do not think I can continue to maintain that especially if I am going to start this new podcasting project and I am still trying to tighten up On Property. So I might move to weekly, I might move to twice a week, maybe 3 times a week but I am going to take a step back from doing one episode every weekday. So episodes will not be as frequent but they will be at least weekly and potentially even more than weekly.

If we move to weekly then my guess is that they are going to be longer episodes so they will be like half an hour to an hour or something like that because I will still want to record little bits here and there each and every day as I have insights or as I grow my business or as I change my mind which is something you guys – if you have been following me since episode 1 you know I change my mind often. It has only been a couple of weeks and I have changed my mind quite a few times. Before I go, here is a quick snippet from the next episode.

I am actually thinking of spinning this off as a new product which I am going to call property tools. I have the website propertytools.com.au which I can set up and doing a lower price sort of thing for that. So On Property Plus is $300 a year or it is $50 a month and I am thinking for Property Tools it is going to start at $5 per month or $50 per year.

If you want to make sure you do not miss that episode or you want to get access to the back catalog of episodes then go into iTunes if you are on an Apple device or go into Stitcher Radio if you are on an Android device and search for Instructions Not Included. Hit the subscribe button and listen to the episodes, it might be worth starting at number 1. And you can also go to instructionsnotincluded.tv to see all the episodes over there.

So I hope that you have enjoyed today’s episode. Go out there. Make a change. Grow your own business. And remember, if you want instructions, buy some furniture.

I shared in yesterday’s episode that I am starting a new project in 2015 called YouCast.fm

This is a trial project where I will attempt to teach people how to start their own podcast and monetise it through an ebook and productised services.

It might success or it might fail I’m not sure. But I want to share the journey with you. In today’s episode I flesh out the idea and give it some more structure and clarity.

In Today’s Episode

• Why your idea needs to sound bad in order for it to have a chance
• Why this will be a project NOT a business
• Why I am going after the podcasting market
• How I will use the free content I create to make money
• The exit plan
• Why it’s a good thing I’m not a guru

LIFE OF RYAN

The hardest part about coming up with great ideas is the best ideas are terrible at the beginning the thirteen search engine and with all the features of the and web portal most people thought that was pointless the search was done, and in any way it did not matter that much portals were where the value is at, the ten social net work and limited to only college students with no money also was terrible. My space had won and who want college as customers. Our webs strangers tackies (0:21) that just sounds terrible all around it did sound really bad but it turn out to be really good.

Hi and welcome to instructions not included a start up story about me Ryan McLean as I try and grow my small on line business into a large and successful on line business that generates significant revenue significant income and has a big impact on the world. In the last episode I talked about how I was creating a new project in 2015.

I had an idea to create a new project and I am calling that you cast and more specifically youcast.fm, the idea was to create a pod cast in a blog series teaching people how to start their own pod cast and then going into monitories that by creating their own EBook to sell and also by potentially creating project type services for example if we need a pod cast and we don’t know where to start or you don’t want to do the work you can pay me to set it up on your website for you. So since I recorded that episode I have been thinking more and more about what I am going to do with this or I am going to do it differently to things I have done in the past and again I am still really inspired by Seth Gordon and the whole project idea so rather than trying to create a business that is going to live on for the next ten years why not just see this a project work on this as a project and then exit that project and go and work on something else so that’s how and why it anyway so I need to work with that.  First let’s look at pod casting.

SETH: You want an idea about what you can say I know it sounds like a bad idea but here is specifically why it is a great one, you want to sound crazy but you actually want to be right and you want an idea that not many other people are working on and it is okay if it doesn’t sound big at first. Common mistake among founder’s especially first time founders is that they think the first version of their idea needs to sound very big but it doesn’t it needs to take over a small specific market and expand from there that’s almost how great company started. Unpopular but right is what you are going for, you want something the sound like a bad idea but a good idea.

RYAN: Well the fact that I have chosen was mainly because I am passionate about pod casting and because I believe that pod casting is going to grow significantly in the near future not niches specifically not 2015 but I see in the next three to five years that pod casting is going to continue to grow and will soon become something significant that everyone will want to be a part of.

SETH: You also really want to take the time to think about how the market is going to evolve media market is going to be big in ten years most investors are obsessed with the market size today and they don’t think at all how the market is going to evolved. In fact this is one of the biggest mistakes investors make they think about the growth at the start itself they don’t think about the growth of the market. I care much more about the growth rate of the market than its current size and I also care if there is any reason it is going to top up. You should think about this I prefer to invest in a company that is going after small but rather be growing market than a big but slow growing one. One of the big advantages of these sorts of markets small but rapidly growing markets is the customers are pretty desperate for a solution and they will put up with an imperfect but rapidly improving product.

RYAN: so I really do believe that I have identified the growing market, like they say one of the ways to identify a growing market is to be on the edge of that market and to know the future or to be living in the future I am an intense consumer of pod cast and thus I am kind of living in the future of what people will be doing in the future when it comes to pod cast. I know how I want to consume it I know how it is going to be better I know the type of content that people are going to be looking for and so this gives me a good opportunity to enter this market and to do something.

SETH: alright so the question is how do you identify markets that are growing quickly, the good news about this is one of the biggest edge students have you should just trust your instincts on this all the people have to basically guess about the technologies that are sort of the young people are using because young people they become older and they are the dominant market. But you can just watch what you friends doing and you will almost certainly have better instincts on fast growing markets than anybody older than you and so the answer to this is just trust your instincts.

Think about what you are using more think about you are using what you are seeing people your age begin to start using that will certainly be in the future.

RYAN: like I said previously I really believe that eventually pod casting technology is going to catch up voice recognition is going to catch up and pod casting will move towards a search engine style of business and so one of the things that is going to happen when that does take place is that business will want to be on pod casting they are going to want to be on this audio format because it is a great opportunity to reach customers at there is not that many business that is involved in pod casting obvious is like small business like myself but in the future there is going to be more and more people who will want to do that and therefore there is going to be more and more people who will want to set up their own pod cast. So now on to my ideas for the business the first thing is that I really want to keep this simple.

SETH:  another piece of advice to make users love start with something simple it is much, much easier to make a great product if you have something simple. Even if your eventual plans are complex and hopefully they are you can almost start with a problem what you think is the smallest and it is hard to build a great product so you want to start with the little surface area as possible.

Think about the really successful companies and what they started with, think about products that you really love they are genuinely and incredible and simple to use and especially again start using. The first version on face book was almost comically simple, the first version of Google was just an ugly website with a text box and two buttons but returned the best results and that’s what you just loved it. the I Phone is far  simpler to use than any smart phone that became available and it is the first one that people really loved.

Another reason why simple is good is it forces you to do one thing extremely well and you have to do that to make so many people love.

RYAN: it is really important to create a simple product but also I want this project to be simple for me I don’t think this is the only thing I am going to be doing in 2015, so I want to create a project that is not going to take the entire year to do so if that very reason don’t really want to create a daily or weekly pod cast show. I am not focus at the moment on creating an ongoing business from this where I am  regularly updating content build a list of followers I want to create a product and a marketing cycle that address people when they need to set up a podcast and that’s it.

Again just like on property where I was trying to solve just one problem where I learnt that I need to just try and solve one problem that’s what I am going to do in this project. I am going to just try and solve the one problem which is how do you set up a podcast and get running without being all complicated. So it is not going to be a daily or weekly show it is more likely going to be a progressive show so step by step sort of show so you start with step number one so step number one will be the first thing you need to do when you starting a pod cast, episode number two would be the second thing you need to do and so on and so forth.

I am guessing that for the free content I am probable going to look at creating about thirty to one hundred episodes and the good thing is if I create this step by step guide and I show people how to do it then people will know that I know what I am talking about and they will potentially try out my product and services and the other good thing is if I already have this step by step in terms of my free content what I can do is simple convert that step by step into EBook format or something like that so rather than having to write the EBook from scratch the content that I am using to market my website I can actually use that and convert that into my EBook that I am going to do.

The goal is to have a progressive show that takes people through the steps they need to take in order to set up a pod cast and then what I want to do is just finish it. I want to have an exit so I either want to exit it and have the passive income coming in so passive income from the EBook sales, passive income from product type services or potentially I might want to sell that to someone who wants to continue grow it get a lump sum up front and then move on to the next thing.

Chances are that I am going to want that passive income over the sale because what I love about the passive income is that it then gives me the freedom to go on and try new things. One of the awesome things about on property is that I have done so much work in 2104 that now in 2015 I can tweak I can manage it I can improve my sales cycle and I can still make sales and I can still make money on that site on that service without putting in a lot of extra effort and that frees me up to go and focus on other projects.

Eventually I will get to the point where I have too many websites to manage and it is going to be better to sell them get the money up front so I can focus on other things but for the time being having that passive income coming in where I don’t really need to worry much about how to pay my bills is going to be very valuable to me, so I think I am leaning towards the passive income rather than selling it. Now when  it comes to creating a podcast and how to set up a pod cast I am not absolutely the best person to do it and there are already some awesome resources out there. there is Cliff Ravens class who has been in pod cast since 2005, he has an awesome course, there is Pat Frin who set up this awesome free tutorial on You Tube about how to create a pod cast there is a lot of people out there that are talking about how to create a pod cast that are guru than me they know more than me they are more in depth than me and so who am I to enter into this space.

Well I am actually encourage by this episode of the ask Gary V show where someone asked should I wait till I am a guru or should I just get in there and do it have a listen.

“Kelsie asked, what are your thoughts on starting to share content before you are an expert, do you wait or do you share your journey? Kelsie that’s an interesting question, first of all I think this whole expert thing is a ridiculous notion, am I an expert are you an expert you know when does one get to claim they are an expert, I mean I thought I was an expert when I was twenty two I pissed that I want able to make these videos when I came out with gig 98 I brought serious thunders to the wine world I saw raw young, hungry and angry Gary V and that would have been very interesting to look back on so say nap that journey baby because the truth is expert is subjective.

I have seen people tweet that I am a bigger expert than people who I think are way more accomplished than me and other people put me in tweets with other people like clown every day of the week and more value and is pinky than them so expert is clearly subjective and more importantly here is the real punch line put that content out because you are going to be able to look back at that content. Your grand kids are going to be able to look at that content because you will see things happen and how they evolved.

My 1998 video would have been in 2002 every single person is going into a store with a cell phone because they are blowing me up in London right now and they are going to be come in and be able to tell the price of every single product so sell your products at cost that would have been a big no, wrong that would have been fun to look at so there are no experts except the audience deems you an expert or somebody deems you an expert as young talent out the gate kudos of you, start building now.”

One of the things that I love of entering the market where I am not a guru is that I don’t talk in complicated language I understand the process that people are going through in order to start a pod cast or in order to do these things because I am learning myself I am learning how to do it and I am       not such an expert that I forget how hard it was in the beginning so in some ways actually having an advantage not knowing as much as these other people because I can talk to people in a more basic way.

The other advantage I have is that all the time once you have been in the industry for a long time you tend to add complexity and cost to your products and services as a way of making more money and solving more problems, like my on property membership where I try to add the reporting because it would solve an extra problem but with that I had to add cost to that to make it worth all the investment I was putting into it.

The same thing goes in the pod casting space people realize that it is pretty hard to start a pod cast so people need coaching and they need a lot of different tutorials not just about how to set it up but they also need tutorial about how to start a pod cast how to market a pod cast and they are offering this complete package. However these complete packages are really expensive you are talking two thousand three thousand dollars for these complete packages.

However coming in as a new entrance to the market and especially on these project bases where it doesn’t matter too much to me whether it is a blazing success or whether it just make a little bit of money because it is just a project I will be working on I can go in at an entry level and I can compete on cost by offering something simpler not a complete solution but something that a lot of people would find useful and a lot of people can use so that’s kind of where my head space is at, at the moment when it comes to youcast.fm.

I am going to have a progressive show step one, step two step three step four and I am going to turn that into a product and also offer product type service for that and then once I am done then I am done and I will step back from it and it will either generate passive income or I will try and sell it, it is going to be an exciting journey you get to follow along and I will let you know how I am going when I set up the website what has been hard what’s been easy.

I will let you know when the pod cast is live and what sort of feedback I am getting what sort of growth I am getting you get to see all of that stuff so it is going to be really exciting to look at over the coming months. I don’t have a time line on when I want to get this finished but that is something I need to think about and I will get back to you guys in the future episode about that one.

That finishes us off for today’s episode, in tomorrow’s episode I am actually talking about reclaiming my passion, I actually watched a video of myself that was recorded over six months ago and it made me a bit depressed because I was so passionate in that video talking about property and I look at what I am creating now and I am just not passionate my attitude my flair my charisma is not there and so I talk about trying to reclaim my passion and the fact that I am moving away  from daily pod cast for on property. So here is a snippet how to listen.

Before through our bodies we drop down to nothing, in Maluwi secondary school you have to pay school fees because of the anger I was forced to drop out of school, I look like my father and look dry food it was the future I could (16:10) I feel very happy to be at the first year of secondary school so I was daming to anything but possible to receive education so I went to a live rally.

If you want to get access to that video and make sure you don’t miss it then you need to subscribed to the pod cast so go in to I Tunes or go into radio and search for instructions not included and hit the subscribed button, or go to instructions not included.tv to see the full list of episodes.

Thanks for listening and remember if you want some instructions fo and buy some furniture.

So I’ve decide to launch a brand new business in 2015 and I want to share the journey with you…from inception all the way through to completion.

Learn about my idea process as well as the types of products I am planning to create for this new venture.

I have also found a name for this venture and bought a domain name which is exciting.

In Today’s Episode

• My career path will be about projects…not careers
• I’ve decided to launch a brand new business
• What I am launching a business on
• What products/services I plan on creating
• The name of my new business

So I got a new idea and I am pretty excited about it I don’t know whether it is good or bad but I want you to follow me on the journey from the inception of this idea all the way through to the creation of a business around this idea we are going to see whether it succeeds or whether it fails and the whole process from start up to finish.

Hi and welcome to instructions not include a start up story about me Ryan McLean as I try and build my little online business into something more significant. So when I ask for feedback on the pod cast which you can check out the feedback back in episode six Jessie had this to say about what he wanted to see in the pos cast.

JESSIE: I think for your pod cast I would really love to see some things that you try and test and test over time and I want to see results and if they succeed and fail.

RYAN: so Jessie want to see things that I try and test, he want to see whether they succeed whether and whether they fail and want to follow on that journey and I am guessing he is not going to be the only one it is very rare to find someone that’s willing to share the process from the very inception all the way through to the completion of the project. I have only seen this done a couple of times when people have built what they call niche sites like smaller website that generates an income. I have see Pat Fling from passive income.com do it and I have seen Spencer Hall from nichepersuits.com do it but it is always done in written form and you never get to understand the full process you only really understand what they actually go ahead and do.

So I kind of want to share my thought process as well as my website that I actually take to try and make this a success. In order to explain my idea and why I am pursuing something different I first want to take you back to July 2014 which is about six months ago and I received an email from Seth to go and subscribed to his blog by emails so every time he does a blog update I get an email from him and this one update really struck me and really make me rethink for life and work in general.

I am just going to read you some snippets from this email it is called thirty years of projects. I realize the other day that most people growing up thinking in terms of professional affiliations, I am going to be an accountant or I am going to work for general dynamics so how I always thought of my career as a series of projects not jobs, projects. Things to be invented, funded and shipped sometimes they take on a life of their own and last other time they flare and fade but projects one after the other in my career lucky for me the world operated and my goal shifted from one based and long term affiliations you know jobs to projects.

The stages of a project being started seeing the outcome sharing the vision being rejected finding a home building it editing it launching it planting the seed to growth I am thrilled it is a cycle I am able to repeat hundreds of times over the years. The article goes one and it talks about all the different projects that he has been involved in but basically I had always seen my life as this in some sort of way I never saw myself as following on sort of career from beginning to end my dad has worked in journalism and had the same job for thirty years and although that’s admirable I never saw myself doing that. In fact I saw myself doing maybe ten years of this ten years of that and trying a lot of different things and something I always want to do is psychology and I always knew that I would never enter the field of psychology and start studying that seriously until I was at least forty and so I would change but when I got this email from Seth I started realizing that doing things now there are projects that you can start you can do it you can ship it and you can then move on.

It is a really exciting way to live life and a really exciting way to do business so that email really changes my mind so that’s how I would run business moving forward and as you guys know my plans for 2015 changed because I fought and I tried to go against this post from Seth and what I believe about projects and I thought I am just going to spend 2015 building out one website which is in one property and making that into a big website that makes a lot of money I started to realize that maybe what had in going in 2015 isn’t going to pen out that way.

The reason I thought this was I keep sitting down at my computer and I know that I need to do stuff on property, I know that I need to record videos and pod cast and I know that there are transcriptions that need editing, blog post that need doing I know that there are episodes that I have recorded and but need to be published but every morning I sit here and I just feel like I can’t do the work I feel like I can’t do it. But at last my desire for change kicked in and I will be doing other things in 2015 and trying to make on property as passive as possible and just grow it on the side.

So fast forward to just a couple days ago when I got another email update from Seth that had a massive impact on me it was right around the time that I was thinking about changing my plans for 2015 and it says this. Begin with the smallest project in which someone will pay you money to solve a problem they know they have charge less than it worth and more than it cost you to repeat. You don’t have to wait to be perfect or large or to be amazing you can start.

So he is talking about the next time you start a business begin this way just start small start with something that people are willing to pay for and it is a problem they know they have and you don’t have to convince them they have a problem, this really inspired me because I want to move on to another small project in 2015 I thought this is exactly how I want to start it. I want to start small I want to start with something that I know someone will pay for. I thought recently how I don’t want to invest in something I want to build something that just make money through clicks or something like that I want to actually create a product so rather than the website like fine and sleepy where I can just make money through ad clicks I want to publish a website that is similar to on property where I created my own solution which was in this case a membership site who were willing to pay me money.

Whatever niche I go into I want to go in and be able to create my own product create an offering that doesn’t exist in the market and something that’s different and something that I can charge money for potentially incurring income or maybe I just create it once and sell it over and over again, so that’s really what I want to achieve in 2015. So that lines up with that and child’s lesson is worth and cost you and that’s kind of how I then to run.

So in episode eight which was on Wednesday the 17^th of December I talked about brain storming and I had some different ideas about projects that could potentially work on and one of them that really stuck out to me was the idea of pod casting I could talk about the topic and moving the gold post which is something that I did recently I could talk about holidaying with your Pees I could go into more details in one of my other blogs I could talk about my Christianity my faith or where I see church going in the future and I really feel like something is changing in that environment or I could talk about pod cast.

Pod casting is something that I am super passionate about as you guys can tell I have this podcast which almost daily I have on property pad cast which is daily, I have a public speaking pod cast which I did a bunch of episode for. Pod casting is something that I am really passionate about and something that I see growing over the next five to ten years, something I believe will be big in the future but is currently small and growing in the moment there is so much opportunity so I have the idea of pod casting and working in that space a couple days ago and then really, my mind began to think of the world of technology and what I actually want pod casting to be and I made a You Tube video in 2014 about what I believe pod casting would become in the future and previously about six months ago I had the idea that I would love to build like a search engine for pod casting that was better than I tunes so you would use voice recognition to index all of the pod cast so you would know what they are talking about at what point in time. And then someone could search and it would bring up results based on what actually said in the pod cast.

At the moment you got I Tunes which is really just a large directory and a search functionality in I tunes is pretty crappy, it is just generally based of the titles of the post and not much else so when you trying to search for something you don’t get good results back so I thought about that and I thought that would be great to do but obviously very expensive it is a different world doing text than it is creating content and then that was six to twelve months ago so I am thinking about that and then when I decided to enter the pod casting space again.

I want to make pod casting easy for everyone and so I had the idea of maybe creating a blog spot for pod casting. If you guys don’t know what blog spot is years ago back before it was easy to create your own website they didn’t have their own websites they didn’t have face book and all that sort of stuff there was this company called blog spot or blog.com where you could create a blog absolutely free and host it on the website. I think it actually ended up getting purchased by Google but basically it gave the ability to have a blog and to have somewhere where you could share your thoughts on line and gave it to the masses and made it absolutely free.

Well maybe I should do that with pod casting and then I thought maybe really pod casting needs to be more like you tube people are streaming video to their phone so people could stream pod cast at the moment you also have to be downloading pod cast but may be you could go away with that and change it to streaming create a website then app where it is more like you tube where people have their own channels and there is a lot of suggestions, there is a social media aspect to it where you can write comments and you can share post and you can subscribe and all that’s sort of stuff.

Maybe that’s what the world of pod cast need a You Tube for pod casting and one of the problems with my mind is that when I actually get started on an idea my mind actually goes down the rabbit hole and start thinking in so much detail about that potential idea so that thinking about what to user interface would be what kind of features you would actually need how would it integrate, what the app would look like. I couldn’t actually stop my mind so I spent most of yesterday pretty stressed because I knew that I had this idea I knew that potentially a very good idea but I also knew that running a text data is not really something I want to do.

If you are not technical and hopefully most people in this room are you really want a technical co founder there is this weird thing going on, on stars right now where it becomes popular to say you know what we don’t need technical funders we are going to hire people we are just going to be great managers that doesn’t work to our experience soft ware people should really be starting soft ware companies, media people should start media companies.

That’s from Sam Odeman from Why  Combinator which is a start up incubator in the States, if you want to see the full video search how to start a start up in You Tube or go to instructions not included.pt/11 to see the link to that video. First thing I am not tech savvy but secondly it is such a hectic life style and I am a family man I got two kids, I got one on the way and I really don’t want to make that sacrifice where I am going over to the states working sixteen hours a day to try and create this data.

So I sat on that idea for a while let my mind think it over you know and I knew I wasn’t going to do it once my mind get started it is hard to stop but eventually it kind of came to stop and I realize that what I am good at and potentially what I am called to is more sharing content and helping people through my voice and through my communication skills rather than creating platform for other people to speak off for pod cast to reach wider audiences to make pod casting more easy.

I am passionate about pod casting I really want someone to make that but I am probably not the best person to make it. I need to disturb you, actually this is silly but it’s hard to be a hotel in Kyak but I think you got to decide what you are because it is going to prove to be much harder to do whatever you decided to do and producing company, if you are a studio and that’s what you should get really good at.

In other word what he is saying you guys are contact guys not tech guys stick with what you know.

That’s from episode four from a pod cast called Start Up which is an amazing pod cast that actually inspired me to start this pod cast, if you want to check out that episode go to agarstartup.com or again go to instructionsnotincluded.tv/11 to get the links to that episode directly. However despite the fact that I don’t want to go into tech and I don’t want to do pod casting for the masses I do want to make pod casting easier for people, so my idea for the moment is to go into to the pod casting field and to in some way make pod casting easier for people.

My plan at the moment is to create a pod cast about pod casting because it is not that many out there, so far I have found pod cast is the man which is my Cliff  Ravencast which is in the pod casting since 2005or something like that, and there is another one called the audacity to pod cast, I listened to both of these and I actually find them really frustrating.

I admire Cliff Ravencast as a speaker and a pod caster but man can he talk and can he ramble and the same with the Audacity to Pod Cast there are forty fifty minutes episode about one topic that could be covered in potentially five to ten minutes, and so where I believe the world of pod casting is actually moving towards in the next two three maybe five years is not necessarily to the extreme long form content of forty to sixty minutes of people just rambling but more the way You Tube progress started with these You Tube creators and people thought it funny and now You Tube is a search engine and you can go on and you learn how to do things.

I was talking to my uncle about it the other day he was building a shed out in the back that the boys were going to live in and he was saying that any time I need to learn something I just go on to You Tube and search and watch some tutorials so You Tube changed from people just doing daily journals and stuff like that into a full fledge search platform, and I think that pod cast is going to do a similar thing and most people at the moment when they want to start a pod cast or learn about pod casting I don’t think that they want to listen to someone rambling for forty minutes just to get one point across.

I think they want to learn about something specific they want to move forward in their pod casting they want to get their pod cast set up as quickly and easy as possible and they don’t want to sit through someone life story in order to get access to that and so the plan for me at the moment is to create a pod cast about pod casting as a way to market myself also to get those transcriptions convert them into blog post like I do with onproperty.com and also I am thinking about creating an EBook.

I know that John Lee Dumas who is the host of Entrepreneur on Fire which is a ridiculously successful pod cast has a EBook on Amazon that sells very well about pod casting but I also think that there is an opportunity to make it simple. What I do is I am good at making entry level products and making it simple for everyday people my wife has said it best.

“ I think you probably have an entry level product exactly like people always made, it is an entry level product for normal people.”

On top of the EBook I am also considering providing services so back to the Seth goes, begin with the smalls project in which someone will pay you money to solve the problem they know they have cost less than it’s worth and more than it cost you, the problem that people know that they have is that they would like to start a pod cast but they don’t know how to start it or they can’t be bothered starting it or it is too much effort for them, so I am considering offering done fee services where I would set up a pod cast for people and so they can just with one click and then in twenty four or forty eight hours have the podcast set up on their website and ready to go.

I will be focus much and charge less than it’s worth and more than it cost you so it won’t be super expensive maybe thinking around the ninety seven dollar mark or something like that to get it set up. it is not going to cost people hundreds or thousands of dollars to do it but it will actually be extremely be affordable. So that’s where I am kind at with the idea at the moment obviously once I go down this path and I actually building an audience things always seems to change. I remember with on property when I started and I just wanted to teach people how to find positive cash flow properties and so I set up a website and I had video tutorials on how to do that and some people liked it but then as things progress I find out that people actually want to see properties more than they want me to teach them how to find the properties and so my product changed and things progress as I grew my audience and the good thing about growing an audience is once you have an audience you can them what are their problems what do they want and you can then go ahead and try and solve those problems for people and make money so that’s what I will be focusing on creating a pod cast and a blog post in order to build up that audience. At the moment I am thinking of advertising it with EBooks and services but I am not completely sure.

So the last thing is the name for the new pod cast, now by the time you are listing to this chances are the name won’t be set up but I have purchased it and in the near future it will be set up and there will be something going on there I am not exactly sure but I have purchased youcast.fm so that is the main name that I am going with I went through hundreds and hundreds of domain names looking trying to work out what I could call it and easy pod, easy cast, easy podcast, my pod cast broadcasting.fm, I speak air cast, audio air, easy air, how to pod cast the how to cast, learn to cast, learn to broad cast, radios head, sound cast.

Man I could go on forever I just tried so many different things I love the word cast so I wanted to have that in there so I had blue cast, one cast, air cast, go cast, be cast, improved cast, master cast, hill cast, out cast, happy cast and in the end I ended up settling on youcast.fm so that’s what I am going to be going with moving forward and you guys will get to follow me this journey so I will update you as things go along and as I launched my episode and stuff like that and whether this succeeds or fails it doesn’t necessarily matter.

I want to share this with you so you can see from start to end can I actually create something and do what Seth says begin with the smallest project in which someone will pay you money to solve a problem they know they have. Can I create a product can I create a project that is going to make me some money and something that I can do for a little while move on from it and hopefully it creates passive income and become as sales able asset that I can sell in the future.

In tomorrow’s episode I flush out this idea in more detail and going into the details of how exactly I am going to build this what it is going to look like and that sort of thing, here is a snippet from tomorrow’s episode.

So I really do believe that I have identified a growing market, like they say one of the ways to identify a growing market is to be on the edge of that market and to know the future and to be living in the future. I am an intense consumer of pod cast and thus I am kind of moving in the future of what people would be doing in the future when it comes to pod cast. I know how I want to consume it I know how it is going to be better I know the type of content that people are going to be looking for and so this gives me a good opportunity to enter this market and to do something.

If you want to get access to that episode or any of the previous episode and you need to subscribe to the pod cast. Go into I tunes if you are on a I phone or stitch a radio if you are on a android device and search for instructions not included and then hit the subscribe button or go to instructions not included.tv to see all the episodes over there and remember if you want instructions go buy some furniture