So I’ve decide to launch a brand new business in 2015 and I want to share the journey with you…from inception all the way through to completion.
Learn about my idea process as well as the types of products I am planning to create for this new venture.
I have also found a name for this venture and bought a domain name which is exciting.
In Today’s Episode
- My career path will be about projects…not careers
- I’ve decided to launch a brand new business
- What I am launching a business on
- What products/services I plan on creating
- The name of my new business
So I got a new idea and I am pretty excited about it I don’t know whether it is good or bad but I want you to follow me on the journey from the inception of this idea all the way through to the creation of a business around this idea we are going to see whether it succeeds or whether it fails and the whole process from start up to finish.
Hi and welcome to instructions not include a start up story about me Ryan McLean as I try and build my little online business into something more significant. So when I ask for feedback on the pod cast which you can check out the feedback back in episode six Jessie had this to say about what he wanted to see in the pos cast.
JESSIE: I think for your pod cast I would really love to see some things that you try and test and test over time and I want to see results and if they succeed and fail.
RYAN: so Jessie want to see things that I try and test, he want to see whether they succeed whether and whether they fail and want to follow on that journey and I am guessing he is not going to be the only one it is very rare to find someone that’s willing to share the process from the very inception all the way through to the completion of the project. I have only seen this done a couple of times when people have built what they call niche sites like smaller website that generates an income. I have see Pat Fling from passive income.com do it and I have seen Spencer Hall from nichepersuits.com do it but it is always done in written form and you never get to understand the full process you only really understand what they actually go ahead and do.
So I kind of want to share my thought process as well as my website that I actually take to try and make this a success. In order to explain my idea and why I am pursuing something different I first want to take you back to July 2014 which is about six months ago and I received an email from Seth to go and subscribed to his blog by emails so every time he does a blog update I get an email from him and this one update really struck me and really make me rethink for life and work in general.
I am just going to read you some snippets from this email it is called thirty years of projects. I realize the other day that most people growing up thinking in terms of professional affiliations, I am going to be an accountant or I am going to work for general dynamics so how I always thought of my career as a series of projects not jobs, projects. Things to be invented, funded and shipped sometimes they take on a life of their own and last other time they flare and fade but projects one after the other in my career lucky for me the world operated and my goal shifted from one based and long term affiliations you know jobs to projects.
The stages of a project being started seeing the outcome sharing the vision being rejected finding a home building it editing it launching it planting the seed to growth I am thrilled it is a cycle I am able to repeat hundreds of times over the years. The article goes one and it talks about all the different projects that he has been involved in but basically I had always seen my life as this in some sort of way I never saw myself as following on sort of career from beginning to end my dad has worked in journalism and had the same job for thirty years and although that’s admirable I never saw myself doing that. In fact I saw myself doing maybe ten years of this ten years of that and trying a lot of different things and something I always want to do is psychology and I always knew that I would never enter the field of psychology and start studying that seriously until I was at least forty and so I would change but when I got this email from Seth I started realizing that doing things now there are projects that you can start you can do it you can ship it and you can then move on.
It is a really exciting way to live life and a really exciting way to do business so that email really changes my mind so that’s how I would run business moving forward and as you guys know my plans for 2015 changed because I fought and I tried to go against this post from Seth and what I believe about projects and I thought I am just going to spend 2015 building out one website which is in one property and making that into a big website that makes a lot of money I started to realize that maybe what had in going in 2015 isn’t going to pen out that way.
The reason I thought this was I keep sitting down at my computer and I know that I need to do stuff on property, I know that I need to record videos and pod cast and I know that there are transcriptions that need editing, blog post that need doing I know that there are episodes that I have recorded and but need to be published but every morning I sit here and I just feel like I can’t do the work I feel like I can’t do it. But at last my desire for change kicked in and I will be doing other things in 2015 and trying to make on property as passive as possible and just grow it on the side.
So fast forward to just a couple days ago when I got another email update from Seth that had a massive impact on me it was right around the time that I was thinking about changing my plans for 2015 and it says this. Begin with the smallest project in which someone will pay you money to solve a problem they know they have charge less than it worth and more than it cost you to repeat. You don’t have to wait to be perfect or large or to be amazing you can start.
So he is talking about the next time you start a business begin this way just start small start with something that people are willing to pay for and it is a problem they know they have and you don’t have to convince them they have a problem, this really inspired me because I want to move on to another small project in 2015 I thought this is exactly how I want to start it. I want to start small I want to start with something that I know someone will pay for. I thought recently how I don’t want to invest in something I want to build something that just make money through clicks or something like that I want to actually create a product so rather than the website like fine and sleepy where I can just make money through ad clicks I want to publish a website that is similar to on property where I created my own solution which was in this case a membership site who were willing to pay me money.
Whatever niche I go into I want to go in and be able to create my own product create an offering that doesn’t exist in the market and something that’s different and something that I can charge money for potentially incurring income or maybe I just create it once and sell it over and over again, so that’s really what I want to achieve in 2015. So that lines up with that and child’s lesson is worth and cost you and that’s kind of how I then to run.
So in episode eight which was on Wednesday the 17th of December I talked about brain storming and I had some different ideas about projects that could potentially work on and one of them that really stuck out to me was the idea of pod casting I could talk about the topic and moving the gold post which is something that I did recently I could talk about holidaying with your Pees I could go into more details in one of my other blogs I could talk about my Christianity my faith or where I see church going in the future and I really feel like something is changing in that environment or I could talk about pod cast.
Pod casting is something that I am super passionate about as you guys can tell I have this podcast which almost daily I have on property pad cast which is daily, I have a public speaking pod cast which I did a bunch of episode for. Pod casting is something that I am really passionate about and something that I see growing over the next five to ten years, something I believe will be big in the future but is currently small and growing in the moment there is so much opportunity so I have the idea of pod casting and working in that space a couple days ago and then really, my mind began to think of the world of technology and what I actually want pod casting to be and I made a You Tube video in 2014 about what I believe pod casting would become in the future and previously about six months ago I had the idea that I would love to build like a search engine for pod casting that was better than I tunes so you would use voice recognition to index all of the pod cast so you would know what they are talking about at what point in time. And then someone could search and it would bring up results based on what actually said in the pod cast.
At the moment you got I Tunes which is really just a large directory and a search functionality in I tunes is pretty crappy, it is just generally based of the titles of the post and not much else so when you trying to search for something you don’t get good results back so I thought about that and I thought that would be great to do but obviously very expensive it is a different world doing text than it is creating content and then that was six to twelve months ago so I am thinking about that and then when I decided to enter the pod casting space again.
I want to make pod casting easy for everyone and so I had the idea of maybe creating a blog spot for pod casting. If you guys don’t know what blog spot is years ago back before it was easy to create your own website they didn’t have their own websites they didn’t have face book and all that sort of stuff there was this company called blog spot or blog.com where you could create a blog absolutely free and host it on the website. I think it actually ended up getting purchased by Google but basically it gave the ability to have a blog and to have somewhere where you could share your thoughts on line and gave it to the masses and made it absolutely free.
Well maybe I should do that with pod casting and then I thought maybe really pod casting needs to be more like you tube people are streaming video to their phone so people could stream pod cast at the moment you also have to be downloading pod cast but may be you could go away with that and change it to streaming create a website then app where it is more like you tube where people have their own channels and there is a lot of suggestions, there is a social media aspect to it where you can write comments and you can share post and you can subscribe and all that’s sort of stuff.
Maybe that’s what the world of pod cast need a You Tube for pod casting and one of the problems with my mind is that when I actually get started on an idea my mind actually goes down the rabbit hole and start thinking in so much detail about that potential idea so that thinking about what to user interface would be what kind of features you would actually need how would it integrate, what the app would look like. I couldn’t actually stop my mind so I spent most of yesterday pretty stressed because I knew that I had this idea I knew that potentially a very good idea but I also knew that running a text data is not really something I want to do.
If you are not technical and hopefully most people in this room are you really want a technical co founder there is this weird thing going on, on stars right now where it becomes popular to say you know what we don’t need technical funders we are going to hire people we are just going to be great managers that doesn’t work to our experience soft ware people should really be starting soft ware companies, media people should start media companies.
That’s from Sam Odeman from Why Combinator which is a start up incubator in the States, if you want to see the full video search how to start a start up in You Tube or go to instructions not included.pt/11 to see the link to that video. First thing I am not tech savvy but secondly it is such a hectic life style and I am a family man I got two kids, I got one on the way and I really don’t want to make that sacrifice where I am going over to the states working sixteen hours a day to try and create this data.
So I sat on that idea for a while let my mind think it over you know and I knew I wasn’t going to do it once my mind get started it is hard to stop but eventually it kind of came to stop and I realize that what I am good at and potentially what I am called to is more sharing content and helping people through my voice and through my communication skills rather than creating platform for other people to speak off for pod cast to reach wider audiences to make pod casting more easy.
I am passionate about pod casting I really want someone to make that but I am probably not the best person to make it. I need to disturb you, actually this is silly but it’s hard to be a hotel in Kyak but I think you got to decide what you are because it is going to prove to be much harder to do whatever you decided to do and producing company, if you are a studio and that’s what you should get really good at.
In other word what he is saying you guys are contact guys not tech guys stick with what you know.
That’s from episode four from a pod cast called Start Up which is an amazing pod cast that actually inspired me to start this pod cast, if you want to check out that episode go to agarstartup.com or again go to instructionsnotincluded.tv/11 to get the links to that episode directly. However despite the fact that I don’t want to go into tech and I don’t want to do pod casting for the masses I do want to make pod casting easier for people, so my idea for the moment is to go into to the pod casting field and to in some way make pod casting easier for people.
My plan at the moment is to create a pod cast about pod casting because it is not that many out there, so far I have found pod cast is the man which is my Cliff Ravencast which is in the pod casting since 2005or something like that, and there is another one called the audacity to pod cast, I listened to both of these and I actually find them really frustrating.
I admire Cliff Ravencast as a speaker and a pod caster but man can he talk and can he ramble and the same with the Audacity to Pod Cast there are forty fifty minutes episode about one topic that could be covered in potentially five to ten minutes, and so where I believe the world of pod casting is actually moving towards in the next two three maybe five years is not necessarily to the extreme long form content of forty to sixty minutes of people just rambling but more the way You Tube progress started with these You Tube creators and people thought it funny and now You Tube is a search engine and you can go on and you learn how to do things.
I was talking to my uncle about it the other day he was building a shed out in the back that the boys were going to live in and he was saying that any time I need to learn something I just go on to You Tube and search and watch some tutorials so You Tube changed from people just doing daily journals and stuff like that into a full fledge search platform, and I think that pod cast is going to do a similar thing and most people at the moment when they want to start a pod cast or learn about pod casting I don’t think that they want to listen to someone rambling for forty minutes just to get one point across.
I think they want to learn about something specific they want to move forward in their pod casting they want to get their pod cast set up as quickly and easy as possible and they don’t want to sit through someone life story in order to get access to that and so the plan for me at the moment is to create a pod cast about pod casting as a way to market myself also to get those transcriptions convert them into blog post like I do with onproperty.com and also I am thinking about creating an EBook.
I know that John Lee Dumas who is the host of Entrepreneur on Fire which is a ridiculously successful pod cast has a EBook on Amazon that sells very well about pod casting but I also think that there is an opportunity to make it simple. What I do is I am good at making entry level products and making it simple for everyday people my wife has said it best.
“ I think you probably have an entry level product exactly like people always made, it is an entry level product for normal people.”
On top of the EBook I am also considering providing services so back to the Seth goes, begin with the smalls project in which someone will pay you money to solve the problem they know they have cost less than it’s worth and more than it cost you, the problem that people know that they have is that they would like to start a pod cast but they don’t know how to start it or they can’t be bothered starting it or it is too much effort for them, so I am considering offering done fee services where I would set up a pod cast for people and so they can just with one click and then in twenty four or forty eight hours have the podcast set up on their website and ready to go.
I will be focus much and charge less than it’s worth and more than it cost you so it won’t be super expensive maybe thinking around the ninety seven dollar mark or something like that to get it set up. it is not going to cost people hundreds or thousands of dollars to do it but it will actually be extremely be affordable. So that’s where I am kind at with the idea at the moment obviously once I go down this path and I actually building an audience things always seems to change. I remember with on property when I started and I just wanted to teach people how to find positive cash flow properties and so I set up a website and I had video tutorials on how to do that and some people liked it but then as things progress I find out that people actually want to see properties more than they want me to teach them how to find the properties and so my product changed and things progress as I grew my audience and the good thing about growing an audience is once you have an audience you can them what are their problems what do they want and you can then go ahead and try and solve those problems for people and make money so that’s what I will be focusing on creating a pod cast and a blog post in order to build up that audience. At the moment I am thinking of advertising it with EBooks and services but I am not completely sure.
So the last thing is the name for the new pod cast, now by the time you are listing to this chances are the name won’t be set up but I have purchased it and in the near future it will be set up and there will be something going on there I am not exactly sure but I have purchased youcast.fm so that is the main name that I am going with I went through hundreds and hundreds of domain names looking trying to work out what I could call it and easy pod, easy cast, easy podcast, my pod cast broadcasting.fm, I speak air cast, audio air, easy air, how to pod cast the how to cast, learn to cast, learn to broad cast, radios head, sound cast.
Man I could go on forever I just tried so many different things I love the word cast so I wanted to have that in there so I had blue cast, one cast, air cast, go cast, be cast, improved cast, master cast, hill cast, out cast, happy cast and in the end I ended up settling on youcast.fm so that’s what I am going to be going with moving forward and you guys will get to follow me this journey so I will update you as things go along and as I launched my episode and stuff like that and whether this succeeds or fails it doesn’t necessarily matter.
I want to share this with you so you can see from start to end can I actually create something and do what Seth says begin with the smallest project in which someone will pay you money to solve a problem they know they have. Can I create a product can I create a project that is going to make me some money and something that I can do for a little while move on from it and hopefully it creates passive income and become as sales able asset that I can sell in the future.
In tomorrow’s episode I flush out this idea in more detail and going into the details of how exactly I am going to build this what it is going to look like and that sort of thing, here is a snippet from tomorrow’s episode.
So I really do believe that I have identified a growing market, like they say one of the ways to identify a growing market is to be on the edge of that market and to know the future and to be living in the future. I am an intense consumer of pod cast and thus I am kind of moving in the future of what people would be doing in the future when it comes to pod cast. I know how I want to consume it I know how it is going to be better I know the type of content that people are going to be looking for and so this gives me a good opportunity to enter this market and to do something.
If you want to get access to that episode or any of the previous episode and you need to subscribe to the pod cast. Go into I tunes if you are on a I phone or stitch a radio if you are on a android device and search for instructions not included and then hit the subscribe button or go to instructions not included.tv to see all the episodes over there and remember if you want instructions go buy some furniture
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