Ryan McLean : Slightly Unconventional

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With part of our 3 year goal moving forward to August I am exploring ways to accelerate the passivity of my business.

Hey guys, Ryan here from Instructions Not Included. The series about me, Ryan McLean, as you guys follow my life and me trying to make a decent living online. I kind of already make a decent living, but I don’t have the complete lifestyle that I want.

So I’m still working towards my goal. In the last episode, I think I talked about On Property and talked about the things that I wanted to do with that in terms of making half of the income from my own products and making half of the income from recommending Ben, the buyer’s agent.

Made some progress with that. I was talking to my wife, talking about offering – rather than doing a yearly subscription, just offering a one-off pricing. I offered that, had a whole hundreds of people visit my sales page and no one signed up at that price. So I decided, okay, let’s try something else.

That didn’t work, so let’s try something else. So I tried shifting it to $29 a month. Just $29 a month to join up and no other options, no annual options or anything like that. Sent out an email about it and got a whole bunch of people that signed up for it.

So the goal with On Property is to make about $40,000 to $50,000 for my own products, $40,000 to $50,000 from recommending Ben, the buyer’s agent.

I went through all my subscribers, which I have 150 members, which is what I’m actually going to cap my membership site at because that’s going to deliver my income goal. So I worked it out because people have different pricing tiers from the past and things like that.

And I worked out that I’m set to make – if all things stay the same, which obviously, they change. But based on the current members, I make about $45,000 a year from my existing members. Obviously, I got expenses and stuff on top of that, but that was my revenue goal – was $40,000 to $50,000 from my own products and so I’ve got $45,000 coming from my own product, anyway.

What I’m going to do is probably cap the membership at 150 people. Because that way, I have some scarcity. That way, I don’t have too many customers to deal with and I’m still going to hit my income goals for On Property by doing that. And then, once I fill up, then I’ve got the freedom to experiment and to recommend other products that I sell and things that. So that’s the plan at the moment – is to have just 150 members and that is going pretty well at the $29 per month. So we got a few people signed up at that rate. So, hopefully, we can keep that going and it works well.

I was talking about where I want to be in 3 years and something that me and my wife have been about was to buy a camper van and to be able to go on holidays and stuff like that.

We don’t want to live in a camper can or anything, but we love to have what we’re calling the “adventure van” to go away on weekends and things like that. So the plan with that at the moment, it has kind of been fast tracked from 3 years to maybe in a couple of months because I do have some commissions coming through in August, which would give us enough money to buy the van. And we’re looking at different options.

It’s difficult because we have 3 children. So we want to be able to sleep 5 people and seat 5 people inside a camper van. So it’s not a very easy thing to do. It’s not easy to find campers that do that and the ones that do, anything we can find within our budget of about $10,000 have done 300-400 kilometers. So probably in its legs of its life, so not something that we really want to invest in.

So our plan at the moment is to buy a van, probably something like a Toyota Hi-Ace that is just a van. It’s not a camper van. That way, we can get something that’s newer and we can get it in better condition. So buy that, we’re then going to get child seats installed, which you can do for around $2,000-$3,000 and so, looking at a budget of about $10,000 for the van with the seats installed as well and we would then sell our second car, which would probably sell for around $5,000 or something like that. Overall, to get the van just with seats, no camper or anything is going to cost us around $5,000 or something like that.

So that’s kind of the plan at the moment. That would be phase 1 and we would then probably put in probably some mattress in the back. Spend $100 or $200 on a mattress in the back. And it will just be super basic that we can take for a day, not even to stay overnight to start with. But we can fit all the kids in and we can also hang out in the van if we need to. So that’s kind of phase 1 and then, we’ve decided that we’d probably do it up ourselves and add things along. So that’s kind of the plan at the moment.

Part of being interested in the van is we’ve been looking at and watching other people who do live in their vans and what works well. We watched a couple of things last night. One couple who had a camper van with a kitchen and all this sort of stuff and they seem pretty miserable in their van.

There was another couple who did what we were talking about and they had just purchase one, done a couple of modifications to it, living a very simple life and they seemed a lot happier in that and that’s kind of what we want to do – simple modifications and only use it for the weekends.

But something interesting came out of watching that. It was me and my wife were talking about, what are the things that we accumulate that we would keep and the funny thing is, if you can see behind me, if you’re watching the video. I have a whole bunch of old TV’s. I play Super Smash Brothers Melee, we play them on these old TV’s behind me and I’ve sort of started collecting them because I really like them.

I’ve got a set designed behind me, which we’ll be adding tables to to raise it up today so it looks a bit better. But I have 12 TV’s so that is a lot of TV’s. And so, what I was thinking when my wife was like, “What would you keep?” and I was like, “The only things I would keep is I would keep 1 TV that would work in the van so I could still play Super Smash Brothers, so that was on the list. I would have a laptop for work. And then, a hard drive with pictures on it.” I think that was it.

There was nothing else that I could really – oh, and have the phone. And then, I’d be happy with that sort of stuff. Of all that stuff that we’ve accumulated, all the stuff that I’ve accumulated, I’d be happy with just 3 things – a TV with the Super Smash Brothers setup, so that involves a Wii and a controller. So, TV, a laptop and a phone is all I would need and all that I would want. And my wife had similar, she only had a couple things that she actually cared about.

It’s interesting to think that you spend so much time accumulating things, spending your money on things and then at the end of the day, if you had to pare down and you could only choose X number of things to take with you, it becomes so clear so quickly what things you actually value in your life and it just makes you see things really differently. So that’s been exciting to watch that and to see things very differently.

The fact that we’re moving the van purchase forward, the fact that we’ve been watching these things and talking about what 3 things would you keep if you could keep things has given me a new perspective on my business.

The fact that I run my business on a 27″ iMac rather than a laptop. The fact that my business does involve a lot of day-to-day upkeep and things like that has just made me want to accelerate the passivity of my business. So to have websites that I can just work on with a laptop, that I could go to a cafe, spend a couple of hours, write some articles and that could be my day.

It’s really got me starting to think differently about my business. Started to think differently about the types of websites that I’m running or the types of websites that I plan to start. How I plan to make money from them and stuff like that.

It’s been really good to do that. I don’t know how I’m going to simplify it if I will or what’s going to change, but I’m glad that On Property is setup again. I’m working closely with Ben to drive sales there and referral fees there. I’ve got my 150 members, so I just need to maintain that. I don’t need to really grow it. And then I’ve got freedom of time to explore other things and other websites.

So that’s where I’m at at the moment in terms of my business. Things are going pretty well, I’m pretty happy and I don’t have money stresses at the moment. I did almost run out of money because we bought a second car, but we’re kind of back in the green. So I’ve had some good product sales of my own, some good referral sales from Ben. And so, the buffer fund is building up again, which is great. So no stresses there.

So now I’ve got the freedom to think about, okay, where to we want to drive this business moving forward? How can we get it to a passive situation faster than I may would have otherwise done.

So that’s where I’m at. That’s kind of what I’m thinking about at the moment. Haven’t created a lot of content lately. Something that I need to get back into because I think that’s probably one of the best things that I can do and it’s one of my core strengths. So something that I need to get back into doing.

I don’t know why I haven’t done as much content lately. Just haven’t felt inspired. But, hopefully, this episode of Instructions Not Included is the warm up that I need to create content for my other websites. I wish you the best of day in your business. I hope that you have a great day. I hope that you move things forward and until next time, if you want instructions, go and buy some furniture.

I think we’ve worked out partially what we want our lives to look like in 3 years and I might even have a plan to get there.

Hey and welcome to Instructions Not Included, the series about me, Ryan McLean, as I try and make a decent living online. In this episode, I’m going to talk a little bit about where I think we want to be in 3 years’ time because I’ve got some clarity around that. As well as becoming a content business.

If you’ve been following me for any amount of time, you know I’m constantly changing strategies and so, this may be just another one of those changes or it may be a new direction moving forward.

First, let’s talk about where we want to be in 3 years’ time. I talked to you in the previous episode about looking at my business in terms of where I want to be in 3 years’ time and designing my business so that I can achieve those things in 3 years’ time.

I see so many people starting businesses not thinking about the future and basically finding themselves trapped in the future because their business isn’t designed to give them the life that they want.

For example, Ben the buyer’s agent, he makes a great deal of money. He has a really solid income from his business. However, his business is very reliant on him, very reliant on a lot of client interaction. If he wanted to work less or didn’t want to be a buyer’s agent anymore, in order to get himself out of the business, he would need to hire sales people.

He would need to hire people to manage clients. It would just be very difficult because then he’d be managing those people, which is still a job in and of itself. So in terms of his business, it isn’t really a business where it can just be managed and he can go and do what he wants.

He does have a rental agency on the side that I think he partnered with his mom in order to start that. And that, he doesn’t have to do a lot in because his mom runs it. So he started a business, he’s not the only person in it.

Someone else is running it and he basically doesn’t have to play a large day-to-day role in it. So that’s 2 examples of 2 different types of businesses that generate different outcomes for you. Really, you need to think at the start; okay, what business do I want?

Anyway, to get to the point, I talked about thinking about where I want to be in 3 years and trying to design a business around that. Well, something that me and my wife have always been inspired about is kind of this tiny house living, traveling in a caravan or a motorhome – even thinking back to 4 or 5 years ago, when I used to work for Alpha Pharm, a large pharmaceutical company, we always talked about getting a caravan.

Potentially doing some travel around Australia. Even quitting my job to do it or maybe just getting a caravan and doing weeks away in it. So, we’ve been talking about this for 4 or 5 years and it’s gone through a lot of different phases – from caravans to tiny houses.

Now, we’re kind of on the vein of it’d be awesome to get a camper van that could be my second car rather than having the little second car that I have. Sell that, have the camper van as our second family car. But have it so that it could seat 5 people, so we could all fit in it. And also, sleep 5 people and then we could do trips away, just for the weekend or something like that.

We’re not going to live out of a camper van with 5 of us. That would probably just be insane. But that idea of being able to get away whenever you want is something that is really important to us and something that we definitely want to work towards.

I’m thinking with my business in the future, I definitely want to me more hands off. My ideal business, I would be able to take basically a week’s holiday every single month would be my goal so I could work for 3 weeks and then have a week off and do something fun with the family.

We home school my daughter. We may be sending my son to school next year, so that might change things. But we basically have the freedom and the potential, if we decide to home school our kids, to be traveling whenever we want because we can just still do school while we travel. That’s pretty cool. Basically, I’m thinking about that and I was talking – no, I wasn’t talking, I was writing down. I was talking to myself.

I was writing down in my notepad the sort of things that would make a perfect website or perfect business for me.

The perfect website in terms of – this will lead into me talking about my content strategy – is something where I can create content for the website and I can help people through the content that I create. It’ll be a website that would generate no incoming emails for me to deal with, so no customer interaction, basically, there. A third party website or I’d recommend third party products would be the ideal. So things like Amazon affiliate sites, AdSense websites. Sites where you recommend other information products and stuff like that.

Ideally, you would just be an information hub and then you’d go ahead and recommend people to other places. So, in a perfect world, that’s my perfect site because it’s something that I can work on building and I can create content when I want, but it’s something that I don’t need to actively manage so it gives me the freedom to go away when I want.

It’s not really going to affect my website. Whereas, at the moment, in 2 days, we’re heading off to Sydney for a week. I’m going to have to keep monitoring my emails for things related to On Property. Maybe new customers, maybe customer issues, etc., etc.

Basically, in a perfect world, I’d be rid of that and I just have these probably niche websites that I would run on the side and build those up over time. In a perfect world, I’d also have websites where I could pay writers to help me write content for those sites so I wouldn’t be doing it all myself and it wouldn’t be all built on me. Because at the moment, in terms of my content empire, all the websites that I have, it’s all built on me and the content that I create. So in a perfect world, I would have websites where I could hire people to write for me and that would be a viable option.

Thinking 3 years into the future, and this leads me into the content strategy and things like that, is the business that I would like to have is a very hands off business, but it’s something that makes sense in terms of I can continually build this because I continually add in content and the more content I add, the more money I can make, which can pay for more content. So it kind of got this perpetual machine feel to it. However, there wouldn’t be ongoing management, which is a thing that I want to get away from.

Now, looking at my current situation and where I am now, I’m definitely not there yet. I don’t own enough money to be able to take a week off every 3 weeks. Firstly, we couldn’t afford the holidays. Secondly, I need to be working in order to generate enough money because I just need to kind of make things happen. So I’ve still got a bit of a ways to go to get to where I want to be.

At the moment, and I think I talked about it in the previous episode, On Property kind of generates around $40,000 a year through my own products and $40,000 a year through recommending Ben the buyer’s agent. I would really like to see that continue. I have made some changes to my products so On Property is no longer a yearly recurring subscription.

It’s just a one-off payment of $299. Property Tools is now a one-off payment of $99 and you get 12 months access. I’ve moved from a membership model, which I feel like wasn’t necessarily working for me to a one-off sales model, which I’m hoping will have less friction and, therefore, be able to generate more consistent sales for me – things that I can predict. It sounds strange to move away from a membership model where you think will be more predictive to a single sales model.

However, when I look at generating $30,000 a year or $40,000, I look at really, I need to get 2 sales per month for On Property. No, not 2 sales per month, 2 sales per week. So that’d be 100 sales in a year or $300, that’s $30,000. And then I have Property Tools on the side as well as eBooks and courses that will kind of make up the extra $10,000. So, $40,000 would be covered there if I can get 2 sales per week.

So I have changed On Property from a blog that also has products into On Property is now this membership and I also have a blog to help market the membership site. That change has just taken place – haven’t had any sales yet. It will take time to work out; is this having an impact that I want and is it going to generate the income that I want? In terms of recommending people to Ben, we’ve got a lot of great strategies. We worked together on Friday.

We got a lot of great strategies to send people to him. Basically, we’re in this situation at the moment where I can send him more leads than he can deal with. And so, we’re just working on how to communicate better with each other so that I can deliver him the amount of people that he needs and that he can handle and help while maximizing the return on investment for both of us. So, not sending him too many people like we did with the webinar a couple of months ago, where he had 100 strategy session requests.

That’s an hour of his time each, so even if he works full time for 2.5 weeks just to make strategy sessions, 40-hour weeks, we would get through those 100 people.

It will take him 2.5 weeks, that’s doing nothing else. So 100 people is not really viable. And so, we’re working on strategies to basically maximize the quality of people that are coming through so he can work with less people but they have a better chance of converting into a sale. And then also, just managing it so that he’s getting just enough – not too little, not too many. And so, we’re working on the communication there.

Hopefully, in a perfect world, $40,000 from him would be great. And then, I’d also like to build up my content website. This is things like Public Speaking Power. This is things like my niche website. I’ve got an audio book website. I’ve got a website about podcasting. Each of these makes a little bit of money. I think Public Speaking Power makes $50 a month or something like that. The goal for these sites were basically to build them up where they could maybe make $20,000 a year within the next 12 months. And so, we’ve got $80,000 coming from On Property, but then we’ve got $20,000 coming from these niche websites.

The goal towards as we get to the 3-year mark, would basically be to have a sustainable income coming from websites that don’t require email assistance, don’t require ongoing customer support, that sort of stuff. So 3 years’ time down the track, that’s the goal. So I’ll be creating a lot of blogs, a lot of audio, a lot of reviews, all of this sort of stuff so that I can make affiliate commissions, be diversified in the affiliate things that I recommend. So I’ll have lots of different income streams coming through. And so, they’re more protected and also, that it’s more passive.

That’s kind of where I want to be in 3 years’ time as well as the strategy for getting there. At the moment, On Property is still my biggest website, so that needs to play an important role in it. But overtime, I would love to see these new sites do even better. That way, we could even change the strategy for On Property and just recommend Ben or go the advertising route or do whatever we want with it. We’ve got the potential there to do what we want with On Property if we have other income sources.

So that’s where I’m at in my business. That’s my goal for the next 3 years. I hope that you’ll follow me for the next 3 years and see how this happens. And hopefully, in 3 years’ time, I will have the camper van, we’ll be going on weekend trips. I’ll be having a week off every 4 weeks and I’ll be living the life that I want. We’ll see how it goes.

Life never works out as planned, but we’re going to try for it and see what happens. That’s it for me and my business. Go ahead and work on your business and just remember; design a business that’s going to give you the lifestyle that you want, rather than just creating a business and hoping that the lifestyle will come in the future because you might create this perpetual machine because as businesses get bigger, they feed on themselves and they require so much more.

Just be careful when you’re starting out. Design a business that’s going to give you the life that you want. That’s it for me. Until next time, if you want instructions, go and buy some furniture.

Pretend On Property didn’t exist and I was starting from scratch. Would I enter the property space again or sell similar products? The answer is surprising.

Hey guys and welcome to another episode of Instructions Not Included with me, Ryan McLean, as I try and make a decent living online. Now, I am driving at the moment, heading from the Gold Coast to the Sunshine Coast, which is about a 2-hour drive.

I’m going up there to meet with and to spend some time with Ben Everingham who’s my buyer’s agent of choice that I am very closely partnered with. So we’re going to be hanging out, setting up some systems together, doing some videos for the On Property website and stuff like that. So it’s going to be a good day.

I’ve got a drive ahead of me and so I thought I would take the time to record an episode for you guys because it has been a while since I’ve given an update on what’s happening with my business and how I’m moving things forward.

First, let’s talk about On Property. So I’ve been asking myself the question, “If I was starting from scratch, would I start a property website again?” and I’ve also been asking myself the questions, “If I was a brand new start-up and I was deciding to get into the property space, what would I do to be able to generate X amount of income per year?” and I changed the figure based on how I’m feeling or the answer that I want to get.

So I say, if I am starting a brand new start-up today, pretend that On Property doesn’t exist and I want to earn $100,000 a year from this business – that’s the goal of the start-up. What would I do to generate that? Would I go down the path of property tools in which I’m selling low-cost software for property investors? Would I go down the path of selling educational courses? Would I go down the path of being a lead generation tool for people like Ben the buyer’s agent and potentially other people as well? Or would I go down the path of selling my own courses and things like that? I mean, would I go down the path of my membership site where I am showing people properties and things like that?

They’re like the 4 kind of options that I have because it’s what I’ve done. It’s the space that I know. And also, when I look at the property field, I can’t think of anything else that I would want to do because there’s a lot money to be made as a buyer’s agent or there’s a lot of money to be made marketing new build properties because they have huge commissions for them. But in terms of marketing properties, they’re generally overpriced – the new build properties. In terms of being a buyer’s agent, that’s a lot of work that I don’t want to do.

I love creating content. I want to be an education company, not a one-on-one sort of consultancy-type model. So they’re kind of out of the question and so, it just leaves me with kind of the strategies that I’m already using. And so, I just kind of think, “Okay, well, starting from scratch, what would I do?” So, property tools would be out of the question because I looked at the data, it started about a year ago, it’s probably made me about somewhere between $6,000-$10,000 in the space of a year.

Now, that’s not too bad as a little side income, which is what property tools is. But if I was starting a start-up, would I go after that cash flow calculator sort of market? No, I wouldn’t because it’s not going to generate me enough money. I can’t market and scale that at all.

Then, I look at the courses that I created. Okay, I started creating courses about a year ago as well and they’ve made even less money. They sell for about $100 a piece and they’ve made about $3,000 or $3,000-$4,000, something like that. So they’re not really a viable option either because they just don’t sell in enough volume and I have decent volume on my website. We’re talking over 100,000 people a month come to visit my website, which is quite high for an Australian property blog.

You have to remember, Australia only has about a bit over 20 million people, compared to America which has over 300 million people. So you’re talking about a much smaller market. In terms of courses, not something I’d pursue because you really do need to sell the high value courses. You’re talking $2,500 to $6,000 courses in order to make significant money in this industry.

So that leaves me with that lead generation and it leaves me with m membership where I am finding and sharing with people positive cash flow properties. And so, I looked at the revenue for both of those and from Ben, the revenue was roughly around $40,000 in the last 12 months and from my membership site, the revenue was roughly around I think it was $60,000 to maybe $80,000.

I didn’t do hard figures in the last 2 years, so kind of about $40,000 per year each. Though, I know those figures are wrong because I didn’t make $80,000 in the last financial year. So, I don’t know what’s messed up there or what calculations I’m doing wrong, but the takeaway from it is that they’re basically even.

And I was also thinking, well, they kind of serve 2 separate audiences. So my audience in terms of On Property or the product that I sell – the membership site, is really for DIY investors. People who want to go out there, find the properties, research the areas. They want to learn how to do it themselves. And my membership site is great for that. I show them properties, but I don’t help them negotiate, I don’t make decisions for them.

I provide them with the courses that they need to learn how to do different things. I provide them with the cash flow tool as well, so they can go ahead and use that to analyze properties and things like that. So I kind of give them a kit that they need to become a DIY investor in terms of positive cash flow property. But then, Ben’s offering is very different because these are people who don’t want to be DIY. These are people who want someone to hold their hand.

They want someone to lead them, someone to help them. And so, that’s a different market segment, I guess you would say, a different type of customer. And so, it kind of works perfectly that those 2 would be aligned with each other – that I’ve got this audience of general property investors. A portion of them will want to be DIY, which will be my membership site. A portion of them will want the helping hand, which will be recommending people to Ben.

So I guess the answer that I came to when I thought about if I was to start from scratch, what strategy would I take? And it would probably the dual fold strategy in terms of marketing my membership site as well as marketing Ben’s service for people who don’t want to be DIY. So that made me think, “Okay, let’s try and re-vamp On Property.

Let’s try and again bring it back to this membership site concept.” and I was thinking, originally, “Okay, people just want the properties. Maybe I should strip the membership site away and just sell people the properties again.” which is a path that I’ve taken in the past and it kind of works.

I don’t really know, I haven’t tested it enough, but people are happy to sign up just for the properties. But then, I was talking with my wife, Kelly, about it and talking about the different products that I have, talking through all of this. And she made me realize that the properties themselves aren’t just what people need. So people want the properties, yes, that’s probably what most people are paying for. But then, people also want the calculator so that they can calculate those properties or so that they can calculate their own properties.

They also want the courses so that they can learn how to be a better and more confident investor. So, rather than seeing my membership site as all these different things, like you’ve got property listings, you’ve got tools, you’ve got courses, I see my membership site now as one complete package that helps people invest in positive cash flow properties if they want to do it themselves.

Every little bit forms an entire solution to help people find positive cash flow properties and if I only shared the properties with them and I didn’t provide the tools, then I wouldn’t be providing that complete package for people and they wouldn’t be getting everything they need in order to succeed. So it made me realize that, okay, probably not best to break it all up, but probably best to leave it as a membership website.

We also talked about subscription versus on-off payments. We were talking about the comparison between Netflix, you’re paying, in Australia, it’s like $8-$12 a month for Netflix. You’re like, “Yeah, I’m happy to pay that subscription.” Easy to sign up for that because it’s so cheap. You hardly even notice it and you can cancel any time. So when you’re making that decision, it’s not a big decision that you have to make. However, when you’re signing up for something like On Property membership and you’re talking about $300 per year, the thought that goes through people’s minds is very different to that. So they’re thinking, “This is quite a large commitment that I’m making, $300.

I need to think about whether I can afford this now as well as whether I can afford this in 12 months’ time.” So the question is, would it be better to sell it as $300 per year and just get less people, but get them as subscribers or would it be better to sell it as a one-off payment of $300 and then, they just get 12 months access. And at the end of 12 months, they’re not re-charged, but they’ll obviously have an opportunity to sign up again if they want to. And after some discussion, I’ve decided to at least test the fact that it’s just $300, it’s a one-time payment.

And I put myself in the mindset when I’m making business decisions and things like that, if I’m signing up for a subscription that’s a yearly thing, I need to think about that. I need to think about, “Will I be using this product in a year’s time?” I remember there was a product, Countdown Monkey, that was $79 per year. And when I signed up for that, I had to think, “Okay, will I be using this in 1 year’s time or not?” And then, you’ve got to schedule in time to cancel it if you want, so it is a much bigger decision.

Whereas, when there’s software that I purchased, like once I purchased the SEO Yoast Plugin for videos, right, and I think that was the same price. Like $79 or something like that and it came with 12 months of free updates and support. Then, after 12 months, you don’t get any more updates. So it’s in equivalent the same sort of thing that I’m going through and I was like, “Yup, okay. I can purchase that.

I know it’s going to be good for 12 months.” And then, the service didn’t actually end up working for me. It didn’t end up being what I needed. And so, when 12 months came around, I didn’t renew. But the decision to sign up with Yoast versus the decision to sign up with Countdown Monkey was so much easier because you’re just doing a one-off payment, there’s no commitment. And so, I’m hoping that by changing On Property from an annual subscription or a monthly subscription to a one-off payment with 12 months access, that I will gain more members.

I also wanted to change On Property from being a blog that also sell products into a product that also has a blog. So, the membership site is going to be more heavily featured. I’ve created a new sales page which will go on the homepage. And then, the blog will be kind of separate link that people need to click on.

Most people come to the individual pages through the blog, anyway, and return customers are there, but they’re not huge. And so, basically, I wanted people to think On Property – that means positive cash flow properties. So if I want to find positive cash flow properties, I go to On Property. Not, I go to On Property and it’s this property blog/video/podcast and, “Oh, look, they have products as well. Maybe I’ll check them out.”

I want it to be like, okay, this is what On Property is. All the marketing that we do is to support this and that’s to support the membership site. And then, obviously, there’s going to be huge marketing opportunities for recommending Ben through the email list, through the podcast, through the videos, through a whole different variety of sources that we’ve been talking about. It doesn’t distract away from the offering that I’m bringing because there’s so many people who aren’t interested in my offering that may be interested in getting the one-on-one help.

That’s kind of my new strategy for On Property moving forward. If I had the question in mind; Okay, if I wanted to start On Property today or start a property website today with the goal of making $100,000 per year in revenue… Then, it seems feasible now that my membership site could generate half of that. My referrals to Ben could generate the other half of that. And so, combined, they would make $100,000 together. Whereas, individually, I don’t think I could make $100,000 from either of those things. So, that’s cool. I feel like I’ve kind of got clarity on On Property again.

I’ve got some work to do to bring that to the point that I want it, but I’m very excited. And so, a takeaway for you guys with this is to really get rid of the idea of what you have now. So I’ve already built this thing, I’ve already got this traffic. For me, I’ve already got On Property that’s generating. Over 100,000 people a month are coming to that website.

That’s a pretty valuable asset, but if you just strip that all away and say, “Okay, if I was to start today, would I build the same thing or what would I build if I was to start today?” And so, I think doing the same activity for your business could be helpful for you because you can say, okay, get rid of that ‘sunk cost bias’ they call it because I’ve already sunk so much time or so much money into this, I need to keep going with it. Get rid of that and imagine yourself starting from scratch again. Starting brand new from scratch, what would I do?

That’s really helped to get me clarity and hopefully, it helps you give you clarity as well. In terms of other side projects, I was thinking of building on publicspeakingpower.com. I’ve kind of decided against that just because it’s not generating enough revenue and I don’t think it will. My niche website is doing pretty well. I think it made about $100 last month.

It’s probably on-target to make somewhere between $100 and $200 this month. So in terms of that niche website, that’s doing well. And there’s some other niche websites that I want to start as well. So rather than focusing on trying to grow Public Speaking Power into some big website, which is never going to make a lot of money, I’ll just leave it there. It makes like $50 a  month and it pays for itself, so I’ll just leave it there doing its thing and I’ll focus on On Property and I’ll focus on other niche websites that I’m starting as well.

My wife keeps encouraging me to start a review site to review all the things that I love to talk about. Things like microphones and phones and whatever it is I’m buying at the time, you know, tripods, adapters, all these sorts of things. Just a random website where I can talk about different marketing things, different software that’s just product reviews and so, I think I’m going to do that. I kind of did with pelt.co and I kind of do it with pelt.co, but Pelt is, I’ve realized, such a dumb name and it’s taken me so long to realize that.

I always knew Pelt was a dumb name, but I thought if I could make something big enough and exciting enough, then it would take on a life of its own. Just like Google has, but I think, really, at the end of the day, Pelt’s just a dumb name and I probably should’ve never created a website with that name. Oh, well, but anyway, so I’m think of starting a website. Something like Ryan’s reviews or reviewed by Ryan or something like that. There is a Youtube channel called Lachlan Likes A Thing, where this guy does really great reviews on headphones.

I’m not sure if that’s still running, but that sort of concept – that it’s just me, I like this thing. You’re coming because it’s my reviews. It’s not something that I’m going to scale into this big business like The Sweehome or The Wirecutter or something like that. It’s just me reviewing products in my own way. That’s something that’s on the cards, but I haven’t started at the moment.

That’s it for me today, guys. I think I have babbled enough and talked enough. I’ve talked about On Property and what I’m doing with that. I talked about also focusing on niche websites and really just leaving Public Speaking Power there. And I’ve also talked about creating a review site as well. And so, that’s where I’m at in my business. I’m still on the drive. I’ve just got less than 2 hours to go now because I’ve been talking to you guys for about 15 minutes. It’s going to be a good day on the Sunshine Coast.

It’s pretty sunny weather. Nice and warm up here for winter in Australia. It’s going to be a good day that I think we can create some good content with Ben and I think we’re going to strengthen our partnership and hopefully generate a lot of business as a result of this time that we’re spending together.

Hopefully, we’ll get either some coffee or some beer or both because I love coffee and I love beer. So, maybe coffee in the morning when I get there and maybe beer before I go in the arvo. Not too many because I still want to be able to drive. No drink driving, that is a terrible thing. I would never do that. So, yeah. So that’s where I’m at today. I wish you the best of luck in your business and until next time, if you want instructions, go and buy some furniture.

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I want to push the creativity of the content I create, that means Instructions Not Included is becoming a vlog also!

Hi, and welcome to the very first video episode of Instructions Not Included, the series about me Ryan McLean as I try and make a decent living online.

This isn’t the very first video that I released. I have done interviews in the past, however, this is the first vlog style video where I’ll be giving you an insight into my business. In this episode we are going to look through my office space.

We’re are going to look at the new potential office space that I’m looking at moving into in my house. And we are also going to be talking about business staff in the future in general because I have been thinking about this a great deal. That is what is in store today for Instructions Not Included.

If you are listening to the podcast, absolutely love my podcast. If you want to watch this video go to ryanmclean.net/youtube and that will bring you to the Instructions Not Included YouTube channel where you can see this episode.

I’m going to flip the camera around and show you my current office space. This is the current office space at the moment. It’s nothing too glamorous at all. We have a space out there and this is actually my bedroom. You can see my bed there and stuff like that.

This corner here is where I film so you’ve got my background there – that’s the Super Smash Brothers logo which is one of my websites that I do and here is my desk. I also have over here — just so you know it I’m not drinking beer out of these, I actually use these as water bottles so I’m non alcoholic. I’m not drinking at work. I also have this TV and a Wii u which you can see there for my Super Smash Brothers set up. We have to play on these old TVs. Basically, this is the space at the moment.

Let’s go for a walk to check out the new office space – what’s going to be the new space. So we go out of my room and we are going to head downstairs. Oh my gosh – let’s just stop quickly – they love this saying, “All you need is less”. It’s definitely about less rather than more – simplifying life.  This is going to be the new office space. It’s not much at the moment but it’s going to be exciting.  It’s actually my garage.  Let’s go ahead and flip this light on.

Where you can see all that stuff in the background that curtain is actually going to hang up on the roof and will block all of that out. This is actually a huge space so if I go into the corner you can see quite a large space here. I think it is four metres by two and a half metres or something like that. I’ve got a window here so I’m not just in a garage in the dark. That carpet we are going to put across the whole floor. That’s 20 bucks so I’m going to buy five of them and spend $100.

The floor will be carpeted and I’ve got rubber mats down as well for underneath that. This is therefore going to be the office space. The desk is going to be where you see the window over there. So I’ll have my desk there with my computer, maybe with my TV set up as well. And then I’ve got so much room so ideally we are going to have this wall as my backdrop so we may put up some black boards across there. We may put up a green screen or who knows but there is more than enough space in here.

I should probably hide that old water heater as well.  There is more than enough space in here to do a proper lighting set up and to be able to be able to film with good lighting and to just improve the quality of all of the series that I do.

One of the big things that I was thinking about today is where do I want to be in three years time and what do I want to be doing in three years time. One of the things that I was thinking about too is that I don’t want to be sitting at my desk every day nine hours a day or whatever it is that I’m doing in three years time. I’d still love to be interviewing people.

I would love to be creating more dynamic, more interesting content, definitely all stuff on video. I would also love to be travelling with the family and be able to be mobile. That would be a huge thing for me. I’d love to travel but with the family to do family stuff. I would love to travel for Smash Brothers work as well and for the content that I create. That would be absolutely awesome.

I’ve been thinking about that, thinking about the future, watching some vloggers and stuff on YouTube, getting inspired by them. I do not want to start a vlog but I want to get better at editing. I want to get better at story-telling. And that’s definitely something that I’ll be exploring into the future.

I’m therefore looking at getting this better space, getting a decent camera setup, better microphones set up and all of that sort of stuff so I can create better content. I’ll also be looking at shifting away from the very basic talking head content that I have towards higher production value, better storytelling sort of stuff. I’m probably not going to do that with Instructions Not Included because this doesn’t make me any money and it’s more just a documentation of who I am and what I do.

I’m just going to go to the kitchen and get a drink or get something to eat.  Yes I’m excited for the next few years. I need to think about what do I want to do, who do I want to be, what sort of stuff do I want to be working on because truthfully if I’m honest with myself I’m bored. I’m bored of my business. I’m bored of creating content. I can sit there and I can create videos, I can drive traffic, I can generate revenue. It’s like it’s all laid out for me.

The plan for the next three years to get the income that I want it is all there, it’s all mapped out for me. All I have to do is to put in the work. I’m creative person. I like pushing them all. I want to improve myself and just doing the same thing every day for the next three years sounds like death to me. So we’re going to get creative, we’re going to try and do some new things. Some may work and some may not but I’m going to try and put more of myself, more of my creativity into what I do.

That is kind of my plans at the moment. This battery pack for my phone – I absolutely love this thing by the way. My phone just dies so easily — look, we’ve got some cookies. I’m going to munch on some cookies and I’m going to edit this video. Hopefully that won’t take too long. And then I’m going to continue to think about where I want to be in three to five years time but I’m definitely thinking that I don’t want to be stuck at my desk nine hours a day just creating talking head videos.

I want to be doing something creative. I want to be out about in the world. I want to boost my confidence in terms of speaking and vlogging in public and stuff like that and I just want to create really engaging content. I’m getting better as a public speaker. I’m getting better at storytelling but I still have so far to go.

That is it from me. You’ve seen my office space which is just an office in my bedroom. You’ve seen the new space which will hopefully be set up in the next week. I’m just waiting on some internet stuff because the Wi-Fi is really bad in there so I’ve got what is called a D-link which connects to Internet into that room. I have an Ethernet cable into my computer cables for Internet.

It sounds crazy to me but apparently it’s going to work so I’m waiting on that. After that we’re going to buy the carpet and then I can go ahead and move in.  Hopefully by the start of next week, worst-case scenario end of next week I will be in the garage as the office and with a bit of luck that will just give me more room and more freedom to create better content.

I hope that you are moving things forward in your business. My business is unique because I generate enough income to live. Now, I’m trying to think about where do I want to be three to five years time, what I want to be doing and how could I push the boundaries of what I’m currently doing at the moment. So you go out there, work on your business and push your boundaries.

Until next time if you want instructions go and buy some furniture.

With my business performing well at the moment my mind is freed up to think about what I should be doing now to set myself up to have the life I want in 3-5 years time.

Hey and welcome to Instructions not Included. This series is about me, Ryan McLean, as I try and make a decent living online.

In this episode, I want to talk about actually planning for where you’re going to be in 3, 4 maybe 5 years’ time because that’s exactly what I’m doing at the moment.

I’m trying to put in the work and trying to put in the plan, the system in place so that in 3 years’ time, I can do what I want to do.

Generally, for me, it’s really hard to plan forward more than 12 months because when you’re running your own business, when you’ve got 3 children under the age of 7, things change pretty quickly.

Me and my wife, our friends call us gypsies because we move so much. We’ve relocated to different cities 3 times. We’ve moved house 14 times in the last 7 years.

So planning ahead can be really difficult for us when it’s more than 12 months into the future. Generally, we only live in a house for 12 months, if we’re lucky.

But what I have been thinking is like, we have started homeschooling our daughter who is 6, she’s in Grade 1. We enjoy it.

We have a lot of reasons for doing that. Thinking of starting a website on homeschooling where I’ll discuss those, but I won’t waste your time here. But basically, in my mind, anyway, I’ll talk about it in a different episode if people are interested. So, we’re homeschooling our daughter. Our son, who is 4 is in what’s called pre-prep.

Here, where he does 3 days a week and then they start prep or like, kindergarten next year. And so, we’re talking about, is he going to go to kindergarten? Is he going to do homeschool? What do we think we’re going to do? He’s happy at school, but then, he wants to do homeschool because his sister does homeschool. I don’t know.

We don’t really know what’s going to happen. But then, fast forward 3 years, and our youngest who is currently 1 to 1.5, he will be 4 to 4.5 and we will be making these decisions again for him.

So fast forward 3 to 4 years, there is the possibility that we could be homeschooling 3 children if that’s the route we decide to take. Now, we haven’t decided to take that route yet so we’re not sure. But we kind of need to prepare for that and I am currently doing the majority of the homeschooling.

The responsibility is on me. So I spending the mornings doing school with my daughter and then come to work. If we were to add one more child to homeschool, I can foresee it being a lot more difficult than it is. I may need to drop my work hours. You know, things may change.

Basically I’m at the point in my business now where the business is quite successful. onproperty.com.au is quite successful. It makes decent revenue in terms of my own products. Then, there’s revenue on top of that in terms of recommending a buyer’s agent. It’s one of the biggest property blogs in the country.

It’s got a big presence in terms of podcasting and in terms of YouTube that is just continually growing, which I think will be the future. Anyway, that’s ticking along and doing well. But given the Australian property market, it may continue to do well for another 10 years or it may not be a stable source of income in the future. We’re just not 100% sure about that.

So I’m trying to think now while I’ve got stability of income, spending a couple of days a week doing On Property. That frees me up, I’ve got a couple of days a week to do some other things. It frees me up to think, “Okay, 3 years or 4 days down the track, let’s just imagine that I am stepping back from work a bit.

I am doing more homeschool. Hopefully, we’re travelling as a family – that’s something I would really love to do. What do I want my life to look like? What do I want my income to be coming from?” all that sort of stuff.

They’re the kind of questions that I’m asking myself now. Because I don’t have to ask, “Where is the next paycheck is coming from? How are we going to survive the next month? What do I need to do to make that happen?” I can begin to ask, “Okay, in 3 years’ time, what sort of revenue streams do I want to have in my business? What sort of flexibility do I want to have?”

The ultimate thing for me is to generate as much semi-passive income as possible. I do make money from a bunch of different sites. On Property makes the lion’s share – 90%+ of my income. But I do get advertising income, I do have affiliate income from other sites like my public speaking site, podcasting site.

I’ve got a site about online marketing. I’ve got a site about Super Smash Brothers Melee. I’ve got this personal podcast as well, which doesn’t really make any money at the moment. And then I’ve got a software tool that is associated with On Property as well.

I’ve got another niche site. I’m thinking starting another one. And so, I’ve got a few sources of income and they all kind of add up a little bit. But the great thing is, like with the public speaking site, I haven’t touched that in probably 3 years now – 2 to 3 years. That’s something I want to start re-investing in. But that still makes money today, which is just absolutely amazing.

I’m just going to go ahead and check my Google AdSense in terms of YouTube as well as in terms of the website – in terms of how much money that website is making. Because that’s something I want to scale up. I want to create a lot more content for that. And so, let’s go ahead and have a look. I have not used this site in quite a long time. There it is. I’m actually going to change the brand name back to Public Speaking Power.

I decided to change it to outspoken.co, but they never did anything with it. So I think I’m going to change it back to Public Speaking Power. Wow! I have 711 subscribers and I’ve got 36 videos on there. So, not too many videos. I just got to login to a whole bunch of different stuff so bear with me for a minute. Let’s go ahead and sign in.

So in terms of revenue from YouTube, we’re looking at $10 a month. Not much, but that pays for 2-3 coffees a months. Actually, I pay about $3 per coffee, so a coffee a week it pays for. And then let’s go ahead and look at the performance reports for the website. Common reports, websites. Okay. Not last 7 days, let’s go last month. We’ll look at that. In terms of that revenue, we’re looking at above $60. So we’re looking all up about $50-$100 a month.

I’d love to take that up to $100-$200 a month. And then, as well, work on other stuff and build them up. Even if I had 10 different things making $100 a month, but that is super passive. That’s just a baseline income that could pay my bills if we needed to travel. Do you know what I mean?

That’s what I’m trying to think about in terms of the next 3 years. How can I build up these things? Change this from $50-$100 a month to $100-$200 and then do that multiple times and do that for a couple of different sites. Last month, let’s do this month. So this month’s tracking very similar, but I do have a niche site that is now generating probably $10 a month. So, yeah, I’m building up that sort of stuff.

So it’s kind of going back to what I was doing years ago in terms of content creation and niche sites and stuff like that and I come back to this. But I guess, I just want to take the things that have been working, build them up. And then opportunities kind of come out of that.

So with On Property, for a long time, it was just advertising. Then, I had my own products. Then, this agreement with Ben came up and I’m making more money now through that agreement than I’ve probably made through advertising in the history of the website. As you grow bigger, as you become more noticeable, as you build up in the community, these opportunities come out of it. And so, I’m hoping that as I build up these other sites, opportunities will come out of those as well.

At the moment, I am focusing on maintaining On Property, keeping that source of income. But as well, building up my passive income and doing work now that’s probably not going to pay off any time soon. But they will hopefully pay off in 3 years. And so we can look back on this in episode 500 in 3 or 5 years’ time of Instructions not Included.

I’ll be travelling and I’ll have these passive income sites on the side and I’ll be doing what I really enjoy, which is creating content.

Hopefully, this will work. I wish you the best in your business. I hope that you’re not just thinking about today, but you’re thinking about 3 to 5 years down the track as well. That is it for me. Until next time, if you want instructions, go and buy some furniture.

This week was a pretty normal week business related, but unfortunately a broken arm made life difficult.

Hi and welcome back to Instructions Not Included, the series where you follow and track me Ryan McLean as I try and make a decent living online.

This week has been a very interesting week. On Saturday we had an absolutely great morning as a family. We all went rock climbing together – well, the kids rock climbed.

I belayed them which means that I stood at the bottom and held the rope making sure that they didn’t fall and plummet to their death, but we had an absolutely great time. My son won a medal for the best effort for the day.

However, when he got home he then rolled off the couch which is like half a meter off the ground and he broke his arm. He broke two bones in his arm straight after we got home. So he then proceeded to spend the next two days at hospital with my wife.

It took a day before they could get him into surgery and to reset his arm. It didn’t need any screws or bolts or anything like that, just reset it and it’s in the cast. Therefore all is good there but this definitely threw us for a six for the weekend in terms of ‘family time’.

I lost a lot of sleep in terms of stressing about it and basically I had a pretty rough week recovering from that.

In terms of work, not as much work got done this way as there was not as much time to spend on work. My brain hasn’t been as engaged as I would have liked. However I did get quite a few things done because before the broken arm incident I did have a lot of interviews lined up for the week.

I had some On Property interviews and I had some interviews for my site melee.com which is a site about the game that I play Super Smash Brothers Melee. I had some of those interviews so at least I’m still productive and still able to get content out the door this week even though I wasn’t really feeling peppy. I was kind of feeling tired and stuff like that.

I had some of those interviews so at least I’m still productive and still able to get content out the door this week even though I wasn’t really feeling peppy. I was kind of feeling tired and stuff like that.

Melee.co has now started so let’s go ahead and check out YouTube and see how it’s going. The easiest reach tweet I have ever gotten is tweeting out that the interview with this person has gone live. You kind of tag them in the tweet and then they just go ahead and re-tweet it because obviously they’re featured in the interview. Therefore in terms of getting

Therefore in terms of getting exposure that way it has been very easy. But the people that I have been interviewing aren’t the biggest people in the industry and in terms of getting thousands of views that’s not really happening. Let’s go ahead – I’m going to go into the analytics of my YouTube account and just see where we’re at.

First let’s go to the video manager and just see how many views we’ve got. We got 55 views on one video and 22 on another which isn’t massive but it’s better than the zero views that my other videos have all gotten – less than 10, less than 5 views. So if we go to the analytics I guess this will be the true test to see how people are actually watching and enjoying these interviews for a long period of time because the interviews themselves go for about an hour if not over an hour.

We can see that I’ve got in the analytics 41 views on one of the smash stories. A total watch time of 400 minutes so for 40 that’s a hundred minutes. Is that right? If 40 people watched it for 400 minutes and they are watching it for 10 minutes each, therefore on average people are watching it for 10 minutes. That means some people are going to be watching it longer and some people aren’t going to be watching it at all but people are watching it and so I am happy.

We can see that I’ve got in the analytics 41 views on one of the smash stories. A total watch time of 400 minutes so for 40 that’s a hundred minutes. Is that right? If 40 people watched it for 400 minutes and they are watching it for 10 minutes each, therefore on average people are watching it for 10 minutes. That means some people are going to be watching it longer and some people aren’t going to be watching it at all but people are watching it and so I am happy.

In terms of revenue let’s just say it’s on ten cents. That’s not much revenue coming from this at the moment. I’ve got a few more as I’ve done three more recordings and these need to go out and that will generate more which over time will generate more revenue as I get more and more people onto the show. So this is going to be a long term thing. This is a passion project and eventually it could generate a nice little passive income on the side but it doesn’t generate anything super serious.

This is a passion project and eventually it could generate a nice little passive income on the side but it doesn’t generate anything super serious.

In terms of On Property, that has been going well. I’m just going to go to YouTube and check out On Property as well. We’re hitting record-breaking figures in terms of traffic for this site so both the site and YouTube are definitely improving. I remember back when I was getting 300 views a day for On Property; however it’s now consistently most of the time over 600 views a day. It is still not massive in terms of the viewership compared to the blog however it is very popular and I have had some episodes that are starting to do quite well in terms of generating both traffic and revenue as well.

It is still not massive in terms of the viewership compared to the blog however it is very popular and I have had some episodes that are starting to do quite well in terms of generating both traffic and revenue as well.

So even though the bulk of my income comes from my own products and comes from Ben I’ve still made – looking at last month almost $100 in ad revenue for the month which isn’t much given that I make $5,000 to $10,000 a month in terms of other stuff. But every little bit counts. On Property has been going well. Melee.co is going well.

There is nothing really massive to report in terms of making strides in my business or anything like that but I’m just continuing to work away on it. Today I had a situation where I just wasn’t feeling it. I was just kind of sitting here staring blankly at my computer and decided to have a shower – a nice long hot shower and get a coffee. That really resets my mind and allowed me to do this recording today. I’m then going to go on and do more recordings for On Property as well as for Melee.

I was just kind of sitting here staring blankly at my computer and decided to have a shower – a nice long hot shower and get a coffee. That really resets my mind and allowed me to do this recording today. I’m then going to go on and do more recordings for On Property as well as for Melee.

That really resets my mind and allowed me to do this recording today. I’m then going to go on and do more recordings for On Property as well as for Melee.

If you’re ever stuck on your business, consider take the timeout, sacrifice a half an hour or whatever go have a nice long shower, get a coffee and hopefully that will help you to focus like it has for me today. There is nothing huge to report but business is going along as usual and if things change then I will let you guys know.

Until next time if you want instructions go and buy some furniture.

This week I have found myself a unique angle to grow Melee.co as well as a potential profit stream.

Hey guys and welcome to another episode of Instructions Not Included, the podcast about me Ryan McLean as I try and make a decent living online. In terms of my online business On Property which is my main source of revenue, it has been going really well.

My partnership with Ben who’s the buyer’s agent and referring people on to them is generating enough profit for me to get by. It is also building up what I like to call a buffer fund. The way I look at my business account is not how much money I have in there but how many weeks of runway that I have.

I know that my own products basically pay for all of my online expenses plus I’ll probably get a little bit of profit from that. So anything in my bank account is basically runway. It’s basically savings that I’m using to live off so I draw a certain portion of money each week.

Back in December you may remember I actually ran out of money and I didn’t have enough to pay myself what I would normally pay myself each week and so I was slightly behind. Luckily I scraped through and was able to get enough money that I didn’t have to draw from savings. But I’ve slowly been growing up a buffer fund and I’ve now got a buffer fund of about 12 weeks so that is about three months.

In Australia it is kind of coming up to tax time in a couple of months. The end of June is the end of our financial year and so a portion of that will need to go towards tax which means I don’t really have three months buffer fund but at least I have enough money to pay my tax bill which is obviously very important.

I have started a new website because that’s what I do called melee.co. This is a domain name I actually bought exactly a year ago. Well, it’s not exactly a year ago but a year ago this month. I bought it because I was getting into Melee. I found it interesting and I thought maybe I’ll do something in this space in the future if I do become passionate about this game like I thought I would. And lo and behold I have become very passionate about this game and I’ve actually found an avenue to build up this website into something that could potentially be substantial enough to generate some profit and to generate some income for me. I’ve done 15 episodes or something like that.

I started back in March and I was just documenting my journey as a Melee player. If you don’t know what I’m talking about – Super Smash Brothers Melee – it’s a fighting game on GameCube that is quite competitive. So basically the biggest tournament got about two hundred thousand people watching the grand finals. I play this game competitively so I started a website about it called melee.co.

Little over a month ago I started documenting my journey as a player but I did know that this wasn’t going to get many people interested in it. This was more just for me to fulfil my desire to create content about something that I love. Therefore I created this and it basically had no views. I can go ahead and check on YouTube for you if you want to know. I’ve had just over 10 views like the last month. Therefore it is not very many views at all on this channel. And look, I expected that.

I thought this would be something that would be great to document and to look back on over the years. And often I find that when I start in a niche and I am not a hundred percent sure what to do I just start with something and see what happens. So I started this YouTube channel. The stuff was going on the website but I didn’t have the website set up properly. I didn’t have my theme set up. I didn’t have it looking nice or anything like that.

But then the other day not that long ago, it was on Friday the 22nd of April – so a little over a week ago I decided that I’m going to take the next steps (something I’ve been thinking about for a short period of time) and actually start to interview pro players.

This is something that I feel there’s a hole in the market as there are a lot of people out there talking about the top 10 players in the world but there’s basically nobody talking about the top 100 players. And so I thought a good approach for me would be to approach those top 100 players, get interviews with them, interview them, share that and then obviously get those players to share with their audience as well. These are players that are just I guess undeserved in terms of people creating content about them and they have some interesting things to add and benefits to add to the community.

I had this idea a few weeks ago but didn’t really do much with it. I got my virtual assistant who is absolutely awesome – I got her to generate me a list of the top 100 players, their names, what character they play, their Twitter accounts, etc, which was quite easy to get from the website that does the top 100 rankings. So she pulled that.

On Friday I just decided that what I was going to do was to just tweet at some pro players and see if they would be interested in interviewing me. Rather than going from the first player working my way down to the second best, the best, etc, I actually kind of went backwards starting at a hundred, working my way up the list towards number one.

There was one person that I was trying to get on the show that kind of inspired me to start this and kind of inspired the idea of interviewing pro players. I thought I would get him on first as an honour to him so I contacted him through a whole bunch of different methods and he just never responded. So I thought I was going to reach out to these pro players. The chance that they would respond was probably going to be pretty slim to none. So I would contact maybe like a bunch of them and see what the feedback was.

I contacted 13 players thinking maybe one or two would respond to me and lo and behold I had a massive response. And think about this – I was tweeting at these people so I had 140 characters to work with. Not a lot and even less when you take into fact that I had to be at them on Twitter – 130 characters or something like that.

So far I’ve already done two interviews. I’ve got five more lined up. All of the 13 people that I got in contact with I was able to organize seven interviews so that’s more than 50%. I thought I’d get one or two but I got seven and so I’m kind of overwhelmed with how many interviews I need to do. There are quite a lot but it’s good to say this is the response I’m sort of getting and in future I’ll probably contact less people at a time just because the response has been so good and it has been hard to schedule things given the time zone differences between me and these pro players who live in America.

Therefore my avenue is that I’m going to interview pro players. I’ve already done two. Basically we talk about their back story, what got them into the game, how do they practice, how do they get better, what they see for the future and just having a conversation with them about the game. I’ll be contacting them, interviewing them and then I’ll be sharing that through YouTube, the podcast and also on the website. I might even publish it to Twitter.

I’m not actually sure if you can do that or not but everyone who plays this game really connect with each other on Twitter. So that’s something that I need to consider as well. And then hopefully we’ll get the flow-on effect of these players who have been interviewed. As they’ve been featured they would want to share it with their audience and as a result we’ll get some flow-on from that. We’ll see how it goes. This is the avenue that I’m going down to grow my audience.

Also, in terms of profiting from this because this is unique content and because I’m not using copyrighted material, etc, I can make money through YouTube advertising. Therefore this isn’t going to be something that makes me $100,000 per year. However, this is something that I enjoy doing, something that I’m passionate about and the great thing about YouTube is that it’s fairly passive income once it is set up and once we got the episodes there it kind of generates income.

And while I’ve got income coming in from On Property, generating external income, generating more passive income, separating my income just from one side and generating multiple streams of income is a big goal of mine. So if I can do it in this niche that I’m passionate about even if it becomes like $100 a month or something like that I don’t need it to be thousands of dollars but it’s an extra source of revenue for me and it’s something that I’m passionate about.

It may change in the future and I may have product ideas or things like that. I’m not a hundred percent sure but I’m excited about this. I’m having a lot of fun interviewing these players. I’m having a lot of fun creating this new revenue stream.

The niche website that I started has started picking up and getting decent traffic. That’s something I need to work out – how I am going to focus on this niche website as well. I kind of need to get my head around how am I going to run so many different websites because at the moment all my focus is on running On Property or running melee.co but I want to be able to improve all of my websites. I therefore kind of need to get a process down where that becomes easy and I haven’t really worked that out yet. That is something that I’m working towards.

Also, another thing that I wanted to say was I’m doing kind of like an experiment with melee.co.  In a lot of cases a lot of websites, a lot of businesses they try to interview the best people in a space because once you get the best person or the most well-known person it becomes easier to get everyone else.

In the property space, now that I’ve interviewed Steve McKnight it’s easier to get other people. In the Melee space if I interview top players like Armada, Hungrybox, Mango etc, it would then lend their credibility to me to get other players. But I’m interested to see if I do it the other way around – if I interview lower-end players, first of the top 100 if that will I guess encouraged top players to be interviewed by me because I have already interviewed all these other players who aren’t as good as you or aren’t as ranked highly as you maybe I should interview you as well. I wonder how that will go.

I’ll see how it goes because this is an experiment for me but it could be a good approach. At least in this particular space in order to work my way up to the better players and to get them to say yes. I would say, “Look I’ve interviewed all of these people who are lower than you on the rankings but I haven’t interview you yet so maybe I should interview you.”  Again, it’s an experiment. We’ll see what happens.

That’s it from me today guys. That’s what I’ve been working on this week. I hope that you’re having a great week working on your business. Until next time if you want instructions go and buy some furniture.

There is a lot of talk about the Australian property market crashing, would that take my business with it and what can I do to help my audience (and stay in business) if that did happen?

Hi guys, Ryan here from Instructions Not Included, the show where I talk about me and my journey to making a decent income online. There’s a lot of different aspects of that I talk about and today I want to chat a little bit about what would happen if my market completely crashed.

If this is your first time tuning in then you may not know but I run a mildly successful website called onproperty.com.au which is an Australian property investing website.

I do a lot of general information, I do a lot of interviews on there and I make money through selling access to my membership site where I find certain types of properties as well as recommending people and referral fees for recommending people to a buyer’s agent who is a friend of mine.

Something that a lot of people have started talking about lately is the potential for an Australian property bubble, an Australian subprime crisis, the big shark, whatever you want to call it there’s a lot of people out there who are now starting to say that the Australian market is a way of a price that it’s got similar markets to what the Japanese market had before it crashed, what the Irish market had before it crashed.

And then there are a lot of people out there who are protecting the crash of the Australian Property market.

This is all speculation at the moment so I don’t know if it’s going to happen. I’m doing research, getting in contact with people, trying to line up interviews so we can talk about this more and understand it more.

I definitely don’t understand this topic enough to say yes the market is overpriced and it’s going to crash.

I recently did a video on just talking about the Australian property bubble and it was me reading through a few articles talking about what I think about it and just kind of talking about it. That video has gone gangbusters as it has done better than almost any other video that I have in that short amount of time.

It’s my number one video for the last 28 days so I’m just going to go into my stats now as I talk to you guys and check this out. It has done way better than I expected it to do. It is just a little video that I created – nothing really serious but it has done a lot of use.

But this is something that I need to think about, it is something that my buyer’s agent friend Ben needs to think about, something that I guess everyone in this industry needs to think about.

What happens if this is true and it is a property bubble? How is that going to affect my business? For me more importantly I’m thinking about well how’s that going to affect the people that follow me and how can I help them? I want to understand this so the people who follow me – my audience I can give them the best insight the best advice as quickly as possible before all of this stuff happens.

If I look at views last 28 days then this has had almost over 2,000 views and it’s about 1,000 views ahead of my second most popular video.

I’m just trying to work out when I actually uploaded it because I don’t even think it’s been out for 28 days. It’s only been out for half of the month and it’s already got almost double the number of views as my second most watched video.

So that’s pretty crazy in terms of lifetime views it’s probably not going to be up there. Because I got videos that have had 12,000 views and stuff like that. But it’s getting out there like within probably two months it’ll be in the top 10 of my most viewed videos ever.

However, this is just something that I need to start thinking about, “What happens if the market crashes?” And this is the really interesting perspective on me, Ryan. Because a lot of business people might be saying, “If market crashes how am I going to protect my business?” Whereas I am so passionate about this topic, I’m so passionate about my community, about the people that I’m helping my thought process goes like this – “If the market crashes yes that’s probably going to affect my business.

I’ll probably be able to scrape through and survive but I’m not too worried about that.

But I think about if the market crashes how is that going to affect my audience and what can I do now to prepare them for this so that they can make money they can exceed if and when the market crashes.”

I think so many people approach business that if this happens how we’re going to protect our business. And I’m thinking about I don’t care about my business, I care about the people who follow me, I care about the legacy that I have, how can I help the people that follow me. And if that means it’s going to affect my business then so be it but I want to help those people.

Therefore that’s something that I’m dealing with at the moment, trying to think about at the moment. Is it something that I think is going to happen in the next year? No, I don’t think it’s going to happen in the next year. But is it something that will probably happen in the future? There’s definitely a possibility out there that this could happen in the future.

I’m not a hundred percent sure how this is going to go down but I definitely wanted to chat about it, put it down in the podcast as part of my documented history that this is something that I’m thinking about, this is something that I want to help my community with and this is something that I think if I start talking about this, start warning people.

Not really warning people but making them aware of it and helping them by saying if this happens here are some things you can do. Then I think that this is the best long-term strategy for my business because that’s going to give me the reputation that I need moving forward.

If I don’t want to exit this market in the next year, if I want to be in this market for the next 5-10 years then my reputation and what I say today matters. Therefore I want to say the best thing with the best knowledge that I have to help my people now no matter how it affects my business. And that’s just the truth of it.

I am trying to be of high integrity as possible with my business and seriously help people. I think in the long run that’s going to be the best decision that I can make.

That is something that I need to think about and as I’m thinking about that as I’m talking about it now I do think this means that other parts of my business I will need to focus on like other niches and things like that. I’ve got other niches like public speaking and I’ve got a niche site that I started.

I also want to start a podcast on home-schooling just for fun. But I definitely need to start thinking about other revenue streams from other websites. This is great because I have been thinking of just spending a couple days a week on On Property anyway as it only really needs a couple of weeks of my time.

I’m working with my virtual assistant to take over more of the admin tasks for On Property so there will be less of those for me to worry about. Therefore I’ll spend more time creating content for the site and then creating content for other websites as well.

I’m getting really passionate about video, about audio and less so about writing so I just think that that’s the future.

I look at my own web habits and I just see myself doing a lot more searching on YouTube rather than on Google now and so YouTube is really my first search engine now and Google is becoming my second search engine except for specific topics where I don’t think I’m going to find the answer on YouTube then I might go to Google. But I’m doing probably more searching on YouTube than on Google or if anything it’s very close to 50/50.

I’m focusing on video a lot and I’ve just invested in a lighting kit and so I spent about $150 or a bit less on a three-point lighting kit. I’ve invested in that and eventually if I can build up enough buffer in my business I will also invest in a DSLR camera and some better audio equipment but that’s potentially down the line and I’m not 100% sure.

That’s where I’m at, at the moment. There could be a market crash in the future, in the near to medium future, probably not next week, probably not in the next year but probably within five years or something. It would-would be a good chance of this sort of thing happening – not a good chance – good chance is the wrong word – there is a chance that this could happen.

It is just something I need to think about, something I need to start preparing for because if it does happen I’m not ready to go back to work for someone else and with the large majority of my income coming from one website I do want to spread that out and spread my risk.

I think I talked about in the last episode but the strategy that I’m moving towards I’m calling it phase two of my business because I’m kind of out of survival phase is that I want security – I want to build up security of income, passivity of income and then I want to improve my production quality and get more production out the door and more videos and things like that. So I’m working on those things – security of income, passivity of income, I should probably add to that diversity of income as well as it is something that I want to work towards.

I’m having a great time in my business. I am doing very well financially but I’m well aware that the world doesn’t stay the same that the world changes, that tomorrow my circumstances could change and I’m trying the best to think about and prepare for that. So you will hear more from me about this topic as I think about it, mull it over and take actions towards it.

I wish you the absolutely the best in your business. Go out there, make a splash in the world, be integrit, help people like I’m trying to help people. And if you want instructions you know what to do – go and buy some furniture.

Hey guys, Ryan here from Instructions Not Included. And today, I’ve got with me Tom Hunt, who is the creator of Virtual Valley, which is a virtual employee marketplace as well as the podcast 0-$4 Million where he’s documenting his journey.

Very similar to what I’m doing in terms of his business.

Ryan: Hey Tom, thanks for coming on.

Tom: Ryan, it’s a pleasure to be on a very similar podcast, actually, as we were just discussing.

Ryan: Yeah, for those who don’t know you, can you just give us a quick outline of who you are and what your business is?

Tom: Yeah, sure. I’m 26 and I’m from England. Up until I was 22, I couldn’t do anything entrepreneurial.

I was just like the perfect student, I guess, or perfect employee. And then, we started selling male leggings as a joke to try and impress girls, I think. And I just got sort of addicted to selling. Not selling, but helping people and getting money for it. When that happened, when we started selling male leggings…

Ryan: So male leggings, are these like tights?

Tom: Yeah, yeah, they’re like – no, well, they’re not tights. They’re leggings, actually, Ryan.

Ryan: Okay, sorry. I don’t know the difference.

Tom: But they’re leggings for men. There’s whole story behind it. Basically, me and my friend wore tights, actual female tights to a fancy dress party and we looked really good and felt really good.

We were on the bus on the way home, actually, I said to him that we should sell them, but for men. But he was like, yeah, okay, but we’ll do it for leggings.

And then, one week later, we were on this marketplace in East London selling female leggings that we’d bought from eBay and like [inaudible 1:48] drew on a logo that made them male.

And we had this market stall, we had 18 pairs in stock and we were selling them for £15. So it was like $25 Australian dollars, probably, if I got that right? How many do you think we sold?

Ryan: Zero or 18, either.

Tom: Zero. You got it right. Anyway, so we still persevered and then we actually got male leggings designed and made them in China and we started selling them in an e-commerce store. Anyway, so the point of the story is that when we sold those [inaudible 2:25] pairs, I was like, “Yeah, I need to do this and not work in the city of London at my boring job.”

In the last 4 years, maybe similar to you, I’ve built loads of small online businesses and like failed most of them. I’m not saying you failed, but I failed a lot.
Ryan: No, I have. Definitely. A lot of them have just tanked.

Tom: Exactly. But there’s a couple that have stuck and if you should ask where I am now is focusing on the two – with the leggings company and this virtual assistant marketplace that have stuck and kind of working.

Ryan: Yeah. And so, you’ve also started a podcast to document your journey, which is 0-$4 Million. Do you want to talk a little bit about that? And why “0-$4 Million”?

Tom: Yeah. Great question. This is going to be interesting to compare your motives as well, but the motives for us having our podcast serve us value was; a) I don’t have much money. So I need to do content marketing for this platform to start with until we make some more money.

It just so happens that people that would be interested in what we’re doing would also potentially be customers of Virtual Valley, right? So first, content marketing. Second is to network with people like yourself. Third is accountability or myself. And fourth is improve speaking skills. So that’s the reason that we’re doing 0-$4 Million.

I had this goal since I started selling male leggings to sell a business for $1 Million and then, I was talking through some projections with another entrepreneur and he was like, “No. If you hit those projections, you’ll actually be worth $4 Million.” So then, I just changed it to $4 Million.

Ryan: Okay.

Tom: So my question for you is, Ryan, why did you start your podcast?

Ryan: I started my podcast probably out of boredom of my other websites that I was running. I was following a lot of business podcasts and things like that. And the StartUp Podcast, which I found really interesting and I thought…

Tom: Oh, the StartUp Podcast is so good, isn’t it?

Ryan: Yeah, so good. But then, they’re venture-backed and everything and I thought, you know, I’m not wanting to go down that path. That’s not my ambitions and so, I thought, you know what – it was kind of two-fold.

I wanted to document my own journey to look back on later in life because you just forget so much. And then also, boredom out of wanting to do something different than just talk about property, which is my most successful website. It was kind of like those two things, as well as, just a bit of fun for me. It’s always good to improve my speaking skills and things like that, which I want to do.

Tom: Exactly. And it’s not actually that hard. To promote this marketplace, I spend a lot of time doing guest blog posts. And so, by going on finding people’s blogs to write a blog post for, it takes like 6 hours, right? If you have a podcast, you can then speak to your podcast friends and you could jump on each other’s podcast, like semi-promotional point-of-view.

You just sit here and chatting, right? You can produce good content for people. Still adding value, but with less time investment.

Ryan: Yeah. Well, it takes an hour to record a podcast or something like that versus 6 hours to write a guest post and it’s so much more “intimate” is the wrong word. You get to know people better, you build trust better.

I get a lot more hits to my website in terms of blog traffic, but then in terms of the best customers of mine and the people that actually drive my business in terms of monetary value are generally people who either listen to my podcast or who watch me on Youtube. And I think it has something to do with just the fact that you build trust there even though that’s way less a traffic driver than the website itself.

Tom: Yeah. Can I ask about tracking? Sorry, I’m sort of hijacking this interview. But tracking leads from podcast, have you been able to do that effectively?

Ryan: Not really. You can track them so you can send people to a unique URL. So you go to ryanmclean.net/podcast or /freebie or you’d name it whatever you want. But you only give out that link to people on the podcast. And so, there’s a special offer through that and they go to that link, then you can track that.

Alternatively, like my main business driver of my property site now is buyer’s agent. So, requesting people to someone who will help them buy a property. So he asks those sorts of questions, like, “How did you find out about me?” and they’re like, “Oh, I found out about you through Ryan’s podcast.” etc. And so, that’s how I kind of made that assumption, but I don’t have hard numbers to back that. But just from the discussions that we have with the customers.

A large portion of them come from the podcast. And seeing as my web traffic to my website numbers would outrank my podcast and video views by – it’d be at least double, or maybe three times the amount to the website, to written content versus to audio or video content. But we’re getting probably more than half of people are coming through the podcast or video.

Tom: Which is what matters, right? The website views is just more a vanity metric.

Ryan: Yeah. Well, that’s the thing. You don’t really care. At the beginning you care how many people visit your website. I had a goal, originally, to get 30,000 people a month to my website, which is quite good for an Australian property blog.

You care about that in the beginning and you aim for that. Now, I get 2.000-3,000 a day. So we’re talking like 100,000 visitors a month to the website. I don’t even track it anymore. It’s just kind of like, am I creating the content I want to create? Am I driving the business forward and earning enough to get by?

Tom: Yeah.

Ryan: So let’s talk about Virtual Valley, which is a marketplace for virtual assistants. What caused you to start that and what gap did you think there was in the marketplace over things like oDesk, which is now Upwork or the other sites that are out there? What is it? There’s the Virtual Staff Finder as well.
Tom: All awesome sites.

We’re going to have to go back to the journey as well, back to the male leggings days. When we started the e-commerce site, I was in the corporate world and I was working in project management and I was working in outsourcing. We also had a virtual assistant that manage the admin and customer service for the leggings site. So we can just focus on selling and designing leggings, which is what we really like doing.

Ryan: Can I just ask you, how many leggings are you selling through this site or were you selling?

Tom: Year 1, 2013, 150 units. Year 2, 450 units. Year 3, so last year, 850. This year, we’ll probably sell 1,000 and we’ve increased prices. So it started like a side project that just me and my 2 best friends run with a couple of hours a week. So it’s not serious, but maybe we’ll all leave our jobs and [inaudible 9:52] and focus on male leggings, see what happens.

Ryan: Well, it’s definitely a very niche market. It’s amazing that you can sell 1,000 units of male leggings.

Tom: It is. Yeah. We started off trying to re-define male fashion, but now, we just sell them to people that do yoga. Anyway, picture this. I’m stuck in the corporate world. I’m selling a few pairs of male leggings a week. Obviously, not enough money leave. I needed to build a business that would enable me to leave the corporate world within a year. I wanted to leave within year.

I decided to take the service that we had with our virtual assistant and offer that to other startups in London and charge double the salary and be the middle man and use my consulting skills and project management and outsourcing skills to help them make it all work. So I did that and it was awesome.

I left the corporate world, but when we scaled to 6 clients, I was spending all my time working in their systems and not on mine. So I stopped marketing and delivering that and build this marketplace. I thought when I was spending time hiring virtual assistants for that first business, it was basically too time consuming and I was having to do a lot of admin to hire these people to do my admin or to do other people’s admin.

So the goal of Virtual Valley is really to just reduce all of the admin you have to do around outsourcing your admin, if that makes sense.

So there’s other services that you mentioned, like Upwork. If you go to Upwork, yeah, amazing platform. But you have to scour through the database of 200,000 freelancers and it takes time. While Virtual Staff Finder, again, amazing service where you pay for them to give you a virtual assistant. But then after that, you have to spend time managing them and you have spend time working how to pay them. With Virtual Valley, we have a curated database, which means that you can come on and hire someone really quickly – within 5 minutes or 7 clicks.

We have screenshots that you can look to check what they’re working and then the payment’s automatic. It’s just saving that time around outsourcing your admin, is basically what we do.

Ryan: Okay. So is it like a curated version of Upwork then? So you’ve got a higher quality staff on there.

Tom: You got it. “Curated version”, that is the differentiating factor from Upwork.

Ryan: I’ve hired people through Upwork before. I’ve hired transcribers. My virtual assistant, I actually found her originally through there. And now, she works for me. But yeah, there’s a lot of people who just aren’t very good on there. I remember I went to hire a transcriber for videos or my podcast. I had a little test in there and it’s just like, “Just transcribe the first 10 words of this video.” and I left a link to Youtube. And seriously, 90% of people couldn’t even do that. The first 10 words.

It was only 10 words. They would try and they would just make all these mistakes. I didn’t choose a super difficult 10 words. So I can see the issue there in terms of Upwork and I wouldn’t want to really go back there to hire someone because I know how much effort it’s going to be.

Tom: You have a good point that you’re making, but I don’t think if we’re going to be able to sell this marketplace for the $4 Million as you see on the podcast there. Having the curated version of Upwork is really differentiated enough? Because ultimately, I’m going to want to sell it to Upwork or someone like Upwork. And if all we have is built like a clone of them, then they probably not going to want to buy.

So this is the reason – I talked about this a lot on the podcast, actually, probably too much – is because I built this platform which is freelancers that I’ve just paid to build this spec. What I’m doing now, now we have some revenue and I’ve proven that I can build something and that people are interested in this service, is bring on a technical co-founder. I’ll give him up to 30% – him or her, up to 30%. And we’ll work to build something that’s truly differentiated from Upwork.

I’m not 100% sure what that is now. But we have the baseline of marketing and customers and feedback to do that now. That’s the plan for the next 6 months.

Ryan: So, is what you’ve done so far kind of like the minimum viable product that they talk about on laying startup?

Tom: Pretty much. Pretty much, yeah.

Ryan: So how did you or how do you curate people? Say I want to go to hire your services, how do I know that people on there are going to be good?

Tom: Here’s an interesting piece of content marketing, I designed this recruitment process based on a book called Topgrading by Brad Smart. All of the best companies uses Topgrading principles, apparently. So I designed the whole recruitment process. For 2 to 3 months before we launched the platform, we were recruiting.

I then posted this process on my blog, right? So I’m actually telling everybody how to go away and find your own virtual assistant, but the process is quite long and complicated so it’s sort of like innately saying, “You can go do this thing that’s really long complicated or you can click this link and go into our database and find someone.”

To answer your question, how do I prove that they’re good? I don’t really prove that they’re good. I show the recruitment process and then you go and try it. Because it’s free to go in and hire someone. You just get charged like all the time is tracked and you’re automatically charged to your PayPal account. If you feel that they’re not good, you’re going to lose $10.

Ryan: Yup. I find the same thing in my business. I originally wanted to teach people how to find positive cash flow properties. That was what drove me to start my website. And then I teach them how to find it and I kind of did this little add-on thing where I would go out and find a few properties and share them with my members. And then everyone just wanted that.

No one wanted to find them themselves. And now, even with the buyer’s agents that I’m working with, we recently ran a webinar, we basically went through step by step, here’s everything you need to do to research and find a good property to invest in yourself or you can hire Ben’s services for thousands of dollars. And a lot of people will do that because either they’re overwhelmed…

Tom: They just don’t want it?

Ryan: Yeah. People just don’t want to do it. They’re interested in reading how you do it and learning about it. But then, they don’t want to go out and do it themselves. They just want to hire someone to get the job done and I’ve seen that time and time again.

Tom: Which is perfect, right? It’s awesome. Like, yeah, you can just do that and pay me all the money to do it. That’s fine.

Ryan: I really like that business model now. I don’t know if you’ve heard of the guys Empire Flippers. Have you heard of them?

Tom: Yeah, yeah. Aren’t they just a marketplace for websites?

Ryan: Yeah, but they originally started out, they would build websites themselves and they started a podcast talking about how they build websites and giving people tips and stuff like that. And as a side thing, they were saying, “Oh, by the way, you can buy our websites.”

Originally, they were on Flipper and then they started selling them on their own site. And then people were like, “Can I sell my website through you?” and it kind of just all evolved out of them teaching people to do something that people didn’t want to do. They just wanted to buy websites off them.

Tom: That’s a great story. I’m going to check out their podcast.

Ryan: Yeah. Check out their podcast. They’re great guys over there in the Philippines.

Tom: They’re based in the Philippines?

Ryan: Yeah. They’re American guys based in the Philippines. Let’s talk about your podcast and some of the things that you’ve gone through moving from a leggings e-commerce business to a brand new virtual assistant platform. What are the ups and downs been of that?

Tom: Oh my God! If we talk about the evolution from the legging company to the outsource service company, to the marketplace, both of those first two – the leggings and the outsource service company.

It was very much I had just created myself a job. The three of us created ourselves a job with the leggings company with the fact that we were designing the leggings. Before we had our virtual assistant, we were doing the admin and customer service. We were doing marketing.

When I created the outsource service company, again, I was like working a lot within the business. And you have to do that when you start, right? When you start learning and when you read, for me, like The E-Myth: Revisited and Work the System by Sam Carpenter. These 2 books, I realized that I had just created myself this job and yes, it’s okay to do that when you start out.

But the goal is to start removing yourself so that you can work on the business and not in the business. So that’s when I stopped developing that outsource service company and start building Virtual Valley was because now, I wanted to build a system that I would sit on top of that would create value for people completely without my time. So that ultimately, I’d be able to sell this business.

Ryan: Yeah. So you wanted to create a system that created value. A business that you didn’t have to be a part of. Basically, that could run without you.

Tom: Correct. However, I am still recording a podcast everyday. So the marketing of that system is my job, let’s say. But when we start bringing enough revenue to hire someone to do the marketing, then I could just hand that over like the podcasting and everything.

In answer to your first question, like what are the pitfalls, what did you learn? The first thing that I’ve learned is to try and build this system and as soon as you can, try and remove yourself from that system. And then, you can have something you can sell. I believe that’s ultimately what an entrepreneur is and how an entrepreneur will be successful.

Make sense?

Ryan: Yeah. In terms of my own business and things like that, mine’s more like a lifestyle business so I don’t actually plan to stop working. But I do firmly believe in like as the business owner, slowly or as quickly as you can, I guess, is to take yourself out of the low value task and to hire someone to do them or to automate them in some way so you can do more higher-value things. Similar to your building the business and now you’ve kind of stepped out of it a bit, but you’re still doing all the marketing.

Very similar to me, I was doing everything in my business; from recording episodes to editing them to transcribing them myself sometimes, publishing them, doing everything. Now, I’ve got a system where I will record. Like this interview, I’ll do a quick edit and then I’ll put into Dropbox and then my VA will take it from there and she will upload it to everywhere. To Soundcloud, to my website, to Youtube or whatever.

The transcriptions will get ordered. Once they’re delivered, they’ll be published on the blog, etc., etc. So I’ve got like a full process in place.

I can spend more time doing the things that I enjoy, which is interviewing interesting people like yourself, creating content, all that sort of stuff. And then she gets it done in half or a quarter of the time it used to take me.

Tom: Are we filming this for Youtube, by the way?

Ryan: No, no. This will just go on the podcast.

Tom: Okay, that’s fine. I’ll just give you something to edit there as well. Okay. Should we talk about the pitfalls? Because that’s probably more interesting.

Ryan: For me, right. We were talking about it just before we started recording. I had that episode where I’m 3 weeks away from running out of money. Now, I’m in a place – I’ve still got like 3 weeks in the bank, but then I’ve got revenue coming in that’s going to give me 3-4 months buffer. So I’m not too stressed about it.

I’ve had situations like that where I’m like, my business isn’t looking viable, I’m [inaudible 22:13] for my own money, what the heck am I going do to? Have you had any of those circumstances?

Tom: Oh my God! Yeah. This is I want to say one of the lowest points in my life. But looking back, I’d think it’s funny now. After I quit the job and I had the outsource service company. It was bringing load of money. But then, I realized that I don’t want to do it anymore because I just created myself another job.

I stopped marketing that and I did a couple of other things. I had one website that was giving me money, but I didn’t really have anything that was working. And this marketplace was being built in the background. [Inaudible 22:45] marketplace, right? And with all the little things like I didn’t like them and they weren’t really working.

The hope that I had that I was going to be this very successful entrepreneur within the form of this marketplace. With the leggings company, we’ve never taken any money out, we just invested money back into the business. So there was one point, I was actually in Venezuela at the end of last year just waiting for this marketplace to be built and it was like almost ready to launch. We were launch no the Monday and it was Saturday. Now, two things happened in the next 48 hours, which my life felt like it was crumbling.

The first of which is my laptop broke. And so, I went to 5 different Mac Stores in Venezuela and they’re current situation does not mean that people – basically, they weren’t very good at fixing Macs, so I basically didn’t have a laptop. Second things is I let a different freelancer into my hosting account to fix the malware of one of those other sites I just mentioned.

A freelancer that I’d only worked with once and he took a backup of that one site that he was fixing and he just deleting everything else from the folder where all of my other domains were, like my personal blog. All the other websites that I’ve been working on, including the 5-6 months of Virtual Valley [inaudible 24:07]. I got loads of angry emails from the developers and I didn’t even know what was going on. I didn’t have a laptop to even go and sort it out. They were phoning this contractor, this freelancer in India trying to get everything sorted.

In the end, we had all of the functional code backed up on the developer’s hard drives or whatever, but the HTML and CSS had to be completely redone, which is another 2-3 weeks and another I don’t know how many hundreds of dollars. In the end, it was fine and we just delayed by a month. But that feeling, stranded in another country, no laptop, the feeling like your hope of being a successful entrepreneur has just been wiped off the face of the earth. [Inaudible 24:52]

Ryan: With the delete key – one delete key from one contractor.

Tom: Yeah.

Ryan: Did you have money coming in at this time? Were you still doing that contract services business?

Tom: No. The outsource service business didn’t exist anymore. They have one Filipino who was hired by a startup in London that still had – but that was like $300 a month.

I had this other website, which I’m not proud of. It’s not an amazing site. It sold like, if you wanted to get your app reviewed on the Play Store, it’s just the site that you come and buy it and then there was a pool of people that would review it for you. So, not very good, ethically. But I just bought it a year and a half ago, when I was desperate to leave my job and it was still running, managed by a virtual assistant.

So that was like $1,000 a month. And then, I think that was probably it for income at that point. So I had barely enough to live in Venezuela. I have savings and stuff, but I didn’t really want to go to that.

So, yeah, that was really horrible. But we got it back and we launched just a month later. And now, it’s bringing in a significant amount, I guess. Not really enough to live on, but enough to cover the cost. I’m investing in more development, which is what we need to do.

Ryan: Yeah. When you launched Virtual Valley, did you have a launch plan? Did it create a big splash or did you just launch it and it was just crickets? And you just had to – because I feel like a lot of people do like I used to get excited about launching something.

And now, I kind of just launch it and it’s like this piece of poo website that’s up there for 3 months, but I’m creating content or whatever. And then, 3 months ago, I’m like, “Oh shit, I’m getting some traffic here. I better actually improve the website and take it off the default WordPress theme.”

But were you expecting to launch it and to generate revenue instantly? And then, what happened after you launched it?

Tom: To be honest, I love the description of your product launch if you should start an internet marketing product called “Ryan’s Product Launch”. Okay, now, what happened? Because I had all this time while it was being developed, I spent a lot of time learning online marketing I’d have been for the past 2 years, but I spent more time learning about startup marketing.

So I actually have this 2-phase marketing approach that basically in the line, it was like the lean startup methodology. While the product was pretty shit – can I swear in here? While the product is pretty rubbish, I’m just doing some guest content blogs.

Creating our own content and going on Twitter, just to drip feed a few entrepreneurs, and that’s what’s happened. And then, we’re going to get their feedback, make the changes – like, try and truly differentiate. And then, when you turn on the tap in phase 2 with like [inaudible 27:50], affiliate program, referral program and partnerships with people that I guest blog with.

In answer to your question, no, there wasn’t – I had an email list of about 200 people. So I send an email, a few people started on day 1. But no, it didn’t make a splash. It wasn’t a big launch. But I had no reason to expect that. Just releasing a curated Upwork and not spending 6 months building a list for it.

Ryan: In a way, I think it’s smart to do the MVP, but at least you have a few people. And obviously, you get feedback, you try and iterate on it before. You want something to be working well before you turn on the tap. You don’t want to spend thousands of dollars in Facebook advertising and then get $100 back or something.

Tom: Exactly.

Ryan: It’s better to know how much money you’re making from each email lead or whatever it is and I can spend up to X amount to get a client. It’s just so much easier to scale because you know you’re not going to go bankrupt doing it.

Tom: Yeah, you know you’re not throwing water into a leaky bucket, right?

Ryan: Yeah.

Tom: Currently, I still think we have a leaky bucket. Which is why we’re not on phase 2 yet.

Ryan: Yeah. So how long has it been open?

Tom: For almost 3 months. I’ll drop some numbers on you. The goal over 2 years, I think this is pretty ambitious, is to give entrepreneurs back 1,000 hours of their time – no, not 1,000, 1,000,000 hours of their time. And if we do that, we can sell for $4 Million, I think.

Now, in total, in the 3 months, we’ve given back 1,500. And so, we make approximately $1 per hour for the platform. Because 20% of the hourly rate comes to us. So we made $200, $500 and $700 in the first 3 months. That’s revenue for the platform. In terms of hours to go on our 1 Million count, we still have another 900…

Ryan: 998,500 or something?

Tom: Yeah, yeah. Exactly. So we have a lot to do. I think once I have the bucket that’s not leaking, I can turn on the tap.

Ryan: And so, what is the plan? Until you get to phase 2, are you planning on – obviously, you’re doing the podcast, you’re doing guest blogs like you are on this. Is that the plan at the moment? Just use content marketing to grow the service at the moment?

Tom: Content marketing and Twitter, I guess.

Ryan: Is that just because they’re free? Or have you got a more long term strategy?

Tom: Yeah, pretty much. (a) They’re free. We have money to invest, but I don’t want to invest in something that I’m not 100% sure is really going to work or really going to be – I’ll get a return. Two, they give a foundation for me.

In my mind, like a foundation in SEO in content and social so that when, again, when we turn on the tap, people can come to our site and come to our blog and see that we’re actually doing stuff and helping people. I think that really helps. They’re free, they’re giving a foundation and number three, they’re giving it the right, I call it a “trickle”. So just a few entrepreneurs.

Like an entrepreneur will sign up everyday and maybe a team member will get hired or a virtual assistant will get hired everyday, so it’s just the right amount to make sure we have that 1-on-1 relationship with them. Make sure everything’s happening, like the connections are occurring and the virtual assistant knows what they’re doing. It allows us to control the process and get the feedback.

Ryan: Yeah. So it’s not happening too quickly for you.

Tom: And not spending money and building fund.

Ryan: Yeah. Like I just ran that webinar with a friend of mine the other night for his buyer’s agency and usually we might send like 5 leads a week or like people interested in his service a week. And I think we got close to 100 people interested in his service in one week.

Tom: Was he happy with that or was he overwhelmed?

Ryan: I think he was a bit of both. Extremely happy, obviously, because there’s just so much opportunity. But then, obviously, having so many more people compared to usual can make things difficult so you do need to be careful with that.

How do you go about making sure that you’re getting the right feedback from people? How do you get feedback from customers that are coming through so that you know how to change your product, how to differentiate, etc.?

Tom: So that’s coming into the end of phase one. I’m moving to phase two now. I haven’t been great at that. So I spend the time in the last month really trying to find a technical person who is going to really good and is excited about the vision. When I sorted, which will be in a couple of days, I’m going to go through and speak to every entrepreneur that’s charged time. Probably between 20 and 25 now and try and get them on a Skype call like this.

I think it’s very important, the questions you ask. You can be very leading with people and say, “Would you like it if we improve this?” and they’re probably going to say, “Yes.” But then, I’m going to start conversations just saying, “What did you think of the service? What did you like? What did you dislike?” and just take all of that information that is unbiased, without my leading questions. I think that’s the key.

Ryan: Yeah. That’s one of the hardest things that I’ve had to do; get feedback from people, but actually decipher the feedback into what the whole audience would want. Sometimes, I’ve taken something that one person and I thought, that’s great feedback, that’s a great either feature idea or product idea and run with it. And then, a month later, you wasted a month on it and then, you launch it and no one cares.

I did that once with property as I was listing. I think I did leading questions and I was like, “Would you be interested if we shared data around the suburb that the property’s in and the property itself? Like when it was previously sold or this sort of stuff?” and so then I went out and did that and it was just a waste. People liked it, but people weren’t staying any longer in my membership.

I had it even integrated into my sales page so no one was signing up based off it. And so, I doing like, well, I was paying for my virtual assistant to do all this extra work that was just unjustified. I think it went on for 2 or 3 months or something and then I turned it off and I just stopped doing it. I kept lists, like sharing properties but I just didn’t put the data behind it and I think one person might have asked me about it. Like, “Where’s it gone?” No one really cared.

Tom: After that, you were like, “Fuck!”

Ryan: There’s been a lot of things that have just been like, “Oh! Why did I do that? It was such a bad idea.” Like I just didn’t test it beforehand and I put so much of myself into it and I’m just like, oh, this was just such as waste. So that’s why now, when I launch new websites or something like that, I try to put minimal amount of effort into it and only when I see some signs you get some sort of return then I’ll re-invest. But that’s because I do a shotgun approach.

So I have a lot of different websites in a lot of different niches and so, I can do that because if something fails, it’s not a big issue. But if someone was just doing it with one product, like you with Virtual Valley, I probably wouldn’t recommend the Ryan McLean way of launching websites.

Tom: This can go in your internet marketing course as well. Product launches and shotgun approach.

Ryan: You think I should run one?

Tom: Yeah. I think you should start an information product on how to launch and build websites.

Ryan: How to launch and build crappy-looking websites. For me, I have this theory or I guess, an ideal that I live by, which I call “function before form”. So something needs to work properly because people don’t actually care as much about what a thing looks like if it doesn’t work very well. And that’s just come from my experience of spending hours and days and weeks perfecting the code on the site so it looks exactly the way it looks and all the while, I’ve got 10 people a day visiting my website or something like that. And then, a month later, after I spent all that time, I’m like, “No. This theme or the way this website looks is not what I want.” and so, I good back to the drawing board.

So I think I’ve spent enough years of doing that that I’m like, it’s a waste of time. When you’ve got the volume and you can measure a change that you make. So if I make X change, how does it affect the viewership or attention or whatever it is you’re measuring, then I’ll go ahead and do it. But otherwise, it’s just not worth my time.

Tom: Rapid feedback, I think, is the solution, right?

Ryan: Yeah. But it is, like you were saying, it’s hard to get the right feedback from people and it’s daunting to contact your customers and get on a Skype call with them. I find that daunting, to be like, okay, you’re paying me money and I want to get on the phone with you and get you to tell me what I’m doing that’s not very good. That’s worrying to me. Does that worry you?

Tom: Yes. I think so. I think I’ll just do it anyway. If they don’t want it, they can just ignore it, right? Or they’ll just say, “No”. If they agreed to go on the phone with you, they’re probably going to be okay.

Ryan: Yeah. So why haven’t you gotten feedback earlier? If you’ve been up for 3 months and you’ve had customers for longer?

Tom: Good question. I think the same reason why it took so long to get Virtual Valley launched, is because I’m scared. I know the reason, so it took 5-6 months to build and launch Virtual Valley.

We could have probably released something after 3 months, but I was scared of it not working. And as we said before, my image of being a successful entrepreneur with this marketplace, I was biased towards that. And so, I wanted to delay my face-off with reality. As I believe, probably, exactly what’s happened in the past 3 months is I had a little bits of feedback with a couple of the entrepreneurs that I know and have spoken with.

But I haven’t gone out and scheduled 10 Skype calls to get them to tell me that – to try and get them to tell me their thoughts because this face-off with reality that it hasn’t still actually helped people.

Ryan: How will you know if you’re ready for phase 2? Do you have a metric in terms of, I need X amount of entrepreneurs to – like, for each person that comes in, they need to make X amount of dollars to go to phase 2 or is it just kind of a gut feeling that you have?

Tom: Actually, phase one or phase two, it was actually only crystalized about a week ago. I had phase one and then people – I actually went to London to…

Ryan: So phase two is just something you invented a week ago? Is that what I’m hearing?

Tom: No. Here’s what happened. Talking to the [inaudible 39:30] co-founders and the serious ones are like, “So, what’s your marketing plan, Tom?” And then, I’m like, “So this is what we’ve done. But that’s only phase one. Phase two, after we work with you, it’s going to explode the traffic.”

I’m there like, I truly believe this, right? I have a marketing plan right from the start, be it with a clearly defined phase one or phase two. Phase two will start when the technical co-founder comes on. I’m 100% confident about our technical solution. We have a double-sided referral system in place. We have potentially innovated somehow with this whole outsourcing admin virtual assistant thing and tested that. Then, I’ll start phase two.

Ryan: So what do you mean “innovated and tested” that?

Tom: Okay. I’m just going to slur a couple of ideas about what we might do. This is actually top secret, Ryan. I have only discussed this with my adviser and [inaudible 40:22]

Ryan: I promise I’ll only publish this to the whole world and no one else.

Tom: But what I want to do and again, I haven’t even validated this idea. I haven’t tested this, but I think we can build an automated Slack app bot. So you know the collaborations of it.

Ryan: Yeah, I use Slack everyday.

Tom: I don’t know, 200 million users. If we can build an app within Slack that a business can install for free and then when they interact with us through this application, through this bot, they can interact with this bot to find a virtual assistant automatically.

We’re bringing you the correct candidate without any interaction with a human. You can hire the human, the virtual assistant, from within Slack. Once hired, you actually talk to the real virtual assistant. You communicate and you talk about your task within Slack. All that time is tracked and the payment is setup with a PayPal account that you’ve also done within Slack, if that’s possible. You know, it is very early stage.

Ryan: It sounds very difficult to do.

Tom: Yeah. It probably is. And all of this happens within Slack. I think that is going to be a key channel for first to scale. And I think that’s an innovation. I’ve searched a lot for anything sort of like this. So that’s just an example of one thing that we might do.

It’s still having that vision of 1 Million hours of admin, of time given back to entrepreneurs. It’s just the method of by which we do that, I think, needs to be a little bit more innovative than what we currently have.

Ryan: I guess what I’m hearing is that you’re pretty happy with the marketplace idea and what you’re trying to innovate in is the form or marketing that you’re using to market your marketplace.

Tom: Yeah. You’re right. That’s one part. There are other ways that we would potentially innovate. Not just on the marketing, but also on the way that you would interact with a virtual assistant or a pool of virtual assistants.

Another idea that I would like to do is just, again, a portal that you pay a monthly fixed fee for and you can just somehow throw your task really simply into the portal. You’re not working directly with the virtual assistant, but the tasks are being done and thrown back out at you within X amount of time and you get unlimited access for small tasks. Similar to WP Curve business. [Inaudible 43:11]

Ryan: I’m a customer of WP Curve.

Tom: What do you think?

Ryan: Well, it’s easy. All you do is email them. So you sign up. WP Curve is, for people who are listening who don’t know, it’s like a subscription service for small developer or coding task that take a developer less than half an hour.

You can only do on one, I think, it’s like WordPress website and it’s like $100 a month or something like that. But you just email a tweak that you want made or something that you want done out to them. And they just do it usually within 24 hours and then email you back to say it’s done. Here’s what it looked like before, here’s what it looks like after. And then, when you’ve got your next task, you just email it again. It’s pretty simple.

Tom: And that’s so simple. That’s just a simple business model. Relying just on email, right? That is so simple. That guy doesn’t have to set that. Fair play. He’s done really, really well there. I think we can innovate. I like to eradicate email on this.

It’s like this portal that you get access to. You just go in there and you chuck a task in we make it as simple as possible. But, yeah, he’s done really well. Because I thought with WP Curve, you had to login and there’s some not magical portal, but it’s like this cool thing that you submit tasks into, but it’s actually [inaudible 44:35]

Ryan: No. You just seriously, just email.

Tom: [Inaudible 44:38] That’s awesome.

Ryan: Yeah. When I email them, I don’t even say what website it’s for because my email must be linked to, obviously, one website so they know what to do. I gave them access.

They’ve got their own login and so, they’ve got those details on their backend. And often, I’ll get delivered a task and if it’s not 100% or something, I’ll email back and that’s tracked. And then, someone else, because the developer’s gone home for the day, so some other developer will finish it off. Yeah, so email’s pretty cool.

I tried to use Fiber the other day. I used to use Fiber for transcriptions all the time. And I went on Fiber and it’s super broken now and horrible. I was super disappointed.

Tom: Really?

Ryan: I don’t know. If you had eBay in Australia, right? You can search for things. But now, eBay has the option where you can have multiple different options for different prices. So you’ll search for something and they’ll put in – the sellers will put in one crappy option for $1 and every option is like $20 or something. You’re like okay, here’s a picture of this. It’s $1. And you go in and the thing that’s pictured isn’t actually $1, it’s something like a piece of paper for $1 or something equally useless.

Tom: It’s the same on Fiber.

Ryan: It used to be you’d go in, and like 1GB would cost you $5. And so, you go in, order transcription for $5 and now, it’s like, someone said, “I’ll do 30 minutes of transcription for $5.” and you go in.

Now, it’s like, “I will only do 30 minutes for $5 if you buy 1GB add-on.” which is like $20 or something. They’ve got all these clauses that you have to weed through so when you search for it, you can’t find what you want. So I’ve just given up on Fiber after that experience.

I have someone who hires people for transcriptions and stuff like that. Having an affordable service where you could get tasks done. Definitely useful to people who… Because I’ve got friends who run businesses who don’t need full time or even part time VA’s, but every now and then, they’ll have a task that they need done and that could be cool. I don’t know.

Tom: Yeah. It’s like working out what the pain is and solving the problem. With Virtual Valley at the moment, we’re solving the problem of recruiting, managing and the payroll of virtual assistants. I think there’s a problem that we can charge more that’s not connected with the time of someone.

So we’re not charging for time, we’re charging for solving a problem. And that problem is getting rid of the admin portion task in your business for $50 a month by access to this portal. I think that is more profitable and also, it’s going to solve the problem. So let’s see what happens.

Ryan: Which a very different business model to what you have now. Dude, you sound like me. As an entrepreneur, and you’re starting new business, you have to try all these different things and which sticks and what works.

Tom: [Inaudible 47:35] And then, we can move into phase two and [inaudible 47:39]

Ryan: And then phase two, the magical phase two. Where it’s all rainbows and unicorns.

Tom: Yeah. When we get to phase two, we should have another chat and see what I actually have.

Ryan: Does phase two really exist? And it was actually like, “I’ll just turn the tap on and all of a sudden, I’ll starting farting money.” or is it like more complicated and difficult than that?

Tom: Who knows what’s going to happen when phase two comes?

Ryan: Alright. We might call it a day there. Because it’s what, 2:00 AM or something over there now?

Tom: Yeah, yeah. Nearly.

Ryan: Thank you so much for coming on and for having this chat. It’s been good to learn about your journey. Where can people find you if they want to check out your business or your podcast?

Tom: virtualvalley.io. You got this [inaudible 48:27] linked. Well, virtualvalley.io/podcast so you can get to the podcast page.

I want to thank you, Ryan. I think that was the most honest podcast interview that I’ve ever had. I was very honest, maybe a little bit too honest. I also want to commend you for what you do for your podcast. A lot of podcasters take their podcast really seriously, you know what I mean? It’s just not as genuine or real as yours, of course. So I want to thank you.

Ryan: And I think we’ve learned through this episode that I obviously don’t take things too seriously because it’ll be months before I setup a proper website for anything I start. That’s half the fun, you know? We’re both working this out.

I like that and like being raw and real and I like that there’s someone else like yourself doing it out there as well that’s probably more polished than me, but at least you’re sharing the ins and outs of running a business and I think people crave that and people need that. So I wish you the best with your podcast as well and I’ll definitely be listening to it and seeing how you go and we’ll get back and chat at phase two.

Tom: Yeah, yeah. I think we should have you on 0-$4 Million as well. You can share some of your insights with my audience.

Ryan: Yeah, for sure. Well, let me know whenever you want me on and we’ll do it.

Tom: Yeah, yup. Sweet. Thank you.

Ryan: All right. Peace out.

Alright guys, that completes the episode with Tom Hunt. I hope that you enjoyed that. I enjoyed getting him on, having a chat with him. Just a fellow entrepreneur trying to break through and create a business that adds value to people’s lives, just like I am.

Hopefully, I can get on his podcast soon and we can chat about something because I had a great time talking to him. I hope that you enjoyed the podcast and you can check him out, as he mentioned, you can go to virtualvalley.io or you can search for “0-$4 Million” in the iTunes Store or Stitch Radio or wherever it is that you listen to this podcast.

Thank you, guys, so much for tuning in and until next time, if you want instructions, go and buy some furniture.

Business is going well at the moment and I am having a lot of fun working on some new projects.

Business is doing quite well and I am having a lot of fun again in my business, which is exciting. I have a lot of little projects that I am working on but I guess one of the things that I need to work on is managing my time that I am getting more stuff done and getting high-value things done.

Hi, I am Ryan from Instructions Not Included, a podcast about me and my journey to make a decent living online. Since the last update which was when? When was the last update? Let me check.

It was the 21st of March 2016 so about 2 weeks ago. What has changed in that time? Well, last week on Wednesday, I went up to the Sunshine Coast to meet with my friend and buyer’s agent Ben Everingham, who runs a great business up there. We went up there to talk about our partnership.

We have a referral partnership with each other and so we went to talk about that, talked about all the terms and conditions to draw up a contract with him to give us both some security there so that was great. And then we ran a webinar together that night. Now, when I thought about running a webinar, I thought ‘we do not really need to do it.

It is kind of a waste of time. What is the point?’ But we decided to go ahead. Ben was really keen to do it and I was like ‘yeah, alright. Sounds good.’ And I had seen one of the webinars that he ran before and I thought ‘yeah. This is good fit for my audience so let us go ahead and do this.’

Anyway, we organized it. I thought I might be pushing it to get 200, maybe 300 registrants from the webinar and I have a list of about 15,000 people and maybe get less than a hundred to turn up.

I think the last webinar I ran by myself I had 14 people show up to webinar so that was pretty devastating so maybe that is why I have not ran webinars in the past. And I also ran one with a lady who does renovation courses and for that one; I think we had about 60 people turn up for the webinar. So, I was not super confident with this one however, I had worked out how to do one-click webinar registration which was so valuable in the end. I did that through LeadPages or LeadLinks.

If you want to check out Leadpages and if you want to do that yourself, you can go to my affiliate link pelt.co/LP for LeadPages or you can go to Leadpages.com; I really do not mind. But yeah, I was able to do one-click registrations so send out an email, if they are interested in the webinar they click the button and it automatically registers them for the webinar.

So we had over 500 people, 530 people registered for the webinar, which was massive. We ran the webinar at night and just before the webinar I realized that Ben had a cap of 100 people on the webinar but he said, “Look, it should be fine. I ran it in the past and a hundred people cap means nothing. They will let us go over; it is fine.” And so I was like ‘yeah, alright. Do I think we will get more than a hundred? I am not 100% sure.’ Well, lo and behold one minute past after the webinar started, we started getting all of these notifications of people not being able to access the webinar because it was full so massive fail on our behalf and I think we had over 90% of people stay until the end of the webinar.

And even we did half an hour of question and answers, we had over 80% of people stay until the end of that, which was crazy. Definitely next time, we will be upping the limit from 100 to – I think the next tier up is 500, and then a lot of people really liked the webinar. They thought it was awesome and then a lot of people signed up for a free strategy session with Ben, the buyer’s agent.

They will go on that free strategy session; if they decide to use his services then I will get a referral fee for that. So that is the business purpose behind the webinar and in all, we have over 70 people interested in free strategy sessions, 35 of which came from the webinar night itself and then another 35 came from a thank-you page after they have  registered for the webinar as well as an email after the webinar. The bulk of them in the webinar or before the webinar, huge response there so Ben sent me a text today and he was like, “Yeah, looks like I have a busy week,” and he just had so many free strategy sessions that he was running with people and consultations to hopefully get some clients. Yeah, that was massive and we had a great month in terms of sales so revenue is not something I have to worry about this month.

I am probably going to nearly run out of money by the end of this month, so it is the 4th of April at the moment. Looking at my runway, I might, might just scrape through until the end of April where I should get quite a large payment – 2 large payments from 2 different sources actually, which should then extend my runway to about 3 to 4 months. And then if I have another good month, that should extend it again but obviously the more I earn – now I am pushing into having to pay a decent amount of tax so a lot of that may go into tax bills.

I am not 100% sure so I will probably save it and I will look like I will have heaps of runway and then we may get to the end of the financial year, which is the end of June here in Australia and I may need to spend all of that in tax and my runway may go down against so I am not 100% sure.

In terms of On Property, things are going really great. I have also been working on a new website for the game that I am really impassioned about called Super Smash Brothers Melee so I started kind of documenting my journey there; not too dissimilar from this podcast where I am talking about my business journey. There I am talking about my journey as a competitive Smash player. This is a game that is going in popularity. It was a game that was released on GameCube back in 2001. If you are not familiar with it, it is my outlet.

I absolutely love it. I am really passionate about it and so I thought ‘you know what, I am going to start a podcast, start a YouTube channel documenting my journey so you can see through it, documenting the things that I am learning but it also gives me the opportunity to interview some great people in the industry.’ I want to improve my interviewing skills and get better at that and there is the potential to make some sort of passive income from this. Maybe minor passive income in terms of ad revenue and things like that. If we build it up large enough, I could potentially launch a membership site. I think I said in the first episode that I recorded that I had no plans to make money with it, but that is not entirely true.

I think that I am doing it for fun because it is something that I am passionate about anyway, something that I spend a lot of time thinking about anyway and so I might as well do this. It would be great to document my journey and hopefully down the track it will be small income generator that I can add to my portfolio of income generators, so I have been working on that.

A niche site that I created a while back has done alright. I think it has made about $30 last month and traffic has gone up from about 5 visitors a day to 30 or 40 visitors per day. Now I need to get my ass into gear and work on that again. My focus will be On Property still I have to focus on that. After the big payments that come through when I have a decent amount of runway, I am actually going to close my membership site to that so I do not need to run that anymore.

I do not need to worry about new members or anything like that. Basically, I will be putting all my eggs in one basket, which I do not know whether it is a wise thing to do or not but I will be doing that and going full in with Ben as almost my only source of income from On Property – will be recommending people to him. Time will tell if that is a good decision. I am confident in him; I am confident in our relationship and our partnership and I want to pursue that so we will go after that.

It puts more risk on the table but I still have my platform and so at the end of the day if things do fall over, I will be starting from scratch in terms of product and things like that but at least I will still have my platform to work from and my audience and things like that. Obviously, when I think that is going to happen in the future…but yeah.

So, that is where I am at at the moment. I want to create more and more content across more and more different sites and so I am working on doing that. I put on another transcriber who I found through Fibr, which has gotten really bad lately. I definitely do not recommend going through Fibr anymore. So I brought her over onto my team. She is going to be working for me on an ongoing basis hopefully.

I just need to iron that out. And yeah, things are going really well. I hope that your business is growing. And in tomorrow’s episode, I have an interview with a guy who has done a podcast similar to me, sharing his journey, things that he is going through and building up his business, learnings that he is taking away so go ahead. Go into iTunes and search for Zero to Four Million with Tom Hunt I think it is, and you will see his podcast over there.

I will interview him and release that tomorrow which is really exciting. I did that interview with him this morning. That was a great interview, to talk to someone who is sharing their journey just like me; talk about business and basically just hang out. That was a lot of fun.

I am having a lot of fun in my business. I am not 100% sure where the direction is moving forward but I am confident in terms of the money that I am currently making and I am playing around to try and make money in other niches at the moment as well as maintaining On Property.

So, that is where I am at. I am going to close it off for today because it is starting to get late. Thank you so much for your time. Thanks for listening and until next time. If you want instructions, go and buy some furniture.