Ryan McLean : Slightly Unconventional

#12 Fleshing Out The YouCast Idea – Launching A New Business

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

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

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

life-lowresIn Today’s Episode

LIFE OF RYAN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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