Ryan McLean : Slightly Unconventional

I change my mind every week, currently I am struggling again with OnProperty.com.au. Everything is fine but in terms of growing the business I am nervous.

Hey guys and welcome to another episode of Instructions Not Included. You can find this episode and all of the episodes over at RyanMclean.net and Mclean is spelled M-c-l-e-a-n.

Now, in today’s episode I want to talk about where I am at in my business. And if you have been following me for any amount of time you know that I change my mind every single day or maybe every single week but very often. And I do not know why that is. I do not know why I am not as maybe motivated or dedicated as some business owners who can commit to one thing. But for me I get bored and I start looking at other ideas. I do not actually know it.

But anyway, at the moment I am struggling again with OnProperty.com.au. The site is going fine. Everything is going well. I have a whole bunch of customers. I have traffic coming in consistently from all the content that I created so I have all that long tail SEO coming in and I have a couple of courses due to come out in the coming months.

So everything there is set but in terms of growing the business and expanding the business and getting to that point where I have that consistent income that I want, I do not know if I do not know how to do it or if I am just nervous to get back into free videos and creating lots of videos. But yeah, I am here today and I am in my new office and I have my tripod set up and then I feel like I do not even know what to talk about.

I do not know what to create a video about. I am kind of doubting myself. I do not know if I have a place talking about property when there are other people out there who are so much more professional than me, have so much more experience than me. And I hate that thought. I probably should not have that thought because I get emails all the time from people thanking me for the stuff that I put out. They are really happy and grateful for what I do.

But as well I kind of had a mental shift change in terms of my financial goals and in terms of property and stuff as well. Because with On Property, the stuff that I teach about is all people who want to I guess want to get quite wealthy, become financially free. But then my mind has really shifted in the fact that I do not necessarily want to be “financially free” but I want to have the lifestyle that I want.

I want to have the free time and I want that to come from a business not necessarily property. And so I guess I am just struggling within myself as to what I am teaching people and what I should be saying and how I go about teaching things now.

But yes, I am not a hundred percent sure how to move forward. I have products, I have courses that I want to create free videos and call to action in those videos to promote those courses. But I just feel stuck like there is nothing that I could create content about. And should I even be in the property space anyway. Should I be doing something more interesting or something different or something that I feel more passionate about, that I can talk about more and more often so I do not know what to do. I think I guess probably what I will end up doing is that the direction of On Property will begin to slowly transform and slowly change to match up more with the motivations that I have now.

So rather than it being all about investing in property, buying 10 properties and achieving financial freedom through property, maybe it will start to shift and talk about setting lifestyle goals and I am not looking at achieving good things in life and how property can help you do that. So yeah, I am not a hundred percent sure what the plan is now, whether I should maybe focus on Outspoken.co and create a product about public speaking. I kind of said to myself I do not want to create any more free videos for Outspoken.co or for PodcastFast until I have a product to sell for those sites.

So that kind of makes me stop because I would need to create the products before I create any more free content for those sites. And I was thinking about creating content for Outspoken.co just about how to become a better public speaker in the privacy of your own home and to sell that for $50 or $100. So that could definitely be something that I do to get good traffic to that site but it is making basically no money at the moment so maybe I should be looking at creating that product and selling that product, talking to people about how to become a better public speaker, how to become more confident from the privacy of your own home which is where I think we need to practice public speaking.

So I do not know. I will let you guys know tomorrow maybe if I get a chance to record. But at the moment I am getting ready. I am going to try and do some filming or On Property. I am going to just create a video. I do not care how good it is. I do not care what it is. I am just going to make a video and see how it goes and then hopefully I can create a few, create a few called actions and then generate some sales.

And so wish me luck and until next time, if you want instructions go and buy some furniture.

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[youtube id=”ouMUg28noJk” align=”left” mode=”normal” maxwidth=”400″]Night terrors occur when your child has a tantrum but isn’t actually awake. Today I talk about Lully, a product that stops night terrors in children.

Hey guys, Ryan here from Instructions Not Included. Today is a great episode because I actually interview another startup founder. This guy’s name is Varun and he started a company called Lully or Lully, depending on how you pronounce it; tomato, tomato. But this is a really cool company. They solved the problem of night terrors in young children. Now, if you don’t know what a night terror is, then consider yourself lucky.

A night terror happens when your child – they wake up but they don’t actually wake up. And generally, it results in them having a tantrum but they’re not actually awake. And so, you can’t console your child, you can’t fix the tantrum. Often, when you go to try and help them or hold them down to stop them hurting themselves or something, they don’t respond to you and, in fact, they get worse. So, night terrors are a really serious issue for parents because it’s very traumatic as a parent.

I have a child who gets night terrors. It’s very traumatic as a parent to watch your child go through these traumas, to go through these nightmares where they don’t wake up, but there’s nothing you can do about it.

Varun created a company with his co-founders that solves this problem. Basically, they created a product which is like this disc that goes under your child’s bed and vibrates. Along with software, it’s an app on your phone, that tells you when to turn it on. We talk about how they started the company, a whole bunch of stuff around night terrors and how they ended up going through and getting this product created.

This was someone that I really wanted to interview because I really love this product. It solves the problem of night terrors for my child and I hope that by creating this, some people out there will learn about night terrors and learn about how to fix it for their children as well. So, here’s the interview with Varun from lullysleep.com.

Ryan: My kid had night terrors and I actually found out about you through This Week in Startups. Do you listen to that podcast at all? Jason Calacanis.

Varun: Oh! Yeah.

Ryan: Yeah. So, anyway, he was interviewing a VC and they were talk about, “Oh, yeah, we invested in this company that helps people whose kids wake up screaming in the night.” I was like, “Oh my god! That’s my kid!” I didn’t even know what a night terror was. And then, I heard that and so I went on a Google spree to find you. Because they had mentioned, “Oh, they were from MIT or something” so then, I’m googling “MIT night terrors”. Eventually, I found it and I was able to get one and ship it out to me.

How did you even start to think, “Oh, I know, we’ll deal with this issue that’s like night terrors and we’ll just put like vibrating disc under kids’ beds and that’ll fix the problem.” Because there seems to be no other solution out there. It’s just so random solution. What happened?

Varun: Stepping back a little bit, it sort of started because my co-founder grew up with a sister who had night terrors and more recently, his nephew had started experiencing night terrors. Both of us were at Stanford at the time doing a healthcare innovation fellowship. It’s a program that essentially helps you find ideas what’s [inaudible 3:28] and a lot of the times, it results in companies being spun out. Anyway, so, we met as a part of that program and he brought up night terrors as an interesting area.

He’s a clinician by training. It was sort of an interesting insight where the clinical community looked at night terrors and really thought they were benign. They’re something that kids will eventually grow out of. There were really no terrible adverse outcomes from night terrors. And so, the clinical community had said it’s not a problem. But in reality, for a parent dealing with night terrors and specially a family with consistent night terrors, it’s pretty draining. And it’s pretty emotional to see a child in that state. As we were looking at the problem, we thought it’s something that definitely warrants solving. So, that’s sort of how we got started working on night terrors.

Ryan: I think that’s interesting because night terror, for people who don’t know, is like your kid wakes up screaming in the night sometimes throwing a tantrum but they’re not actually awake. And if you try and console them and try and calm them down, usually, it makes things worse. Super frustrating as a parent because there’s nothing you can do.

But I can see clinically why people have ignored it because my child doesn’t even remember having them in the morning. So it’s really stressful as a parent, but as a child, I don’t even know if that registers for them that these things are happening.

Varun: Exactly. The kid doesn’t know. I think another part of it is pediatricians really didn’t have a tool. If they did start seeing night terrors was a problem, their hands are still tied because they can’t really offer you a solution to it. Part of it is that playing out as well.

Ryan: Yeah. Do we know what causes night terrors? Like, why does this happen?

Varun: Yeah. So, we don’t know exactly what causes night terrors. When you do overnight sleep studies or polysomnograms with children who experience night terrors, they tend to have a lot more spontaneous partial awakenings from their deep sleep – a lot more frequently than other children.

Ryan: Does this mean they don’t have a standard sleep cycle where they go into REM sleep and then come out and go back in?

Varun: Overall, their sleep architecture remains the same. But most kids, they’d go in a deep sleep. During a continuous period of deep sleep, they may partially awaken once or twice very, very briefly but they’re in deep sleep for majority of that time. Children who have night terrors have multiple – significantly more of these partial awakenings from their deep sleep. What people believe is those are triggers of night terrors.

Ryan: So what is a partial awakening? Is that like, when you kind of wake up and you roll over and pull the covers on yourself or something like those sort of moments?

Varun: That’s one type of partial awakening. The clinical definition of a partial awakening or non-sustained awakening is, I believe it’s less than 3 seconds. There’s no recollection of the event in the morning. You may do something that you typically do when you’re awake, like, yeah, roll over and pull the covers over. But you really haven’t fully woken up from sleep and you really don’t remember ever doing it.

With nigh terrors, what tends to happen is during some of those partial awakenings, the brain enters a dissociative state. And what that means is, part of the brain is awake while the rest of it is asleep. With night terrors, the part that’s responsible for motor activity is awake but the parts of the brain that are responsible for processing external stimuli and for laying down memories is asleep. So, they act like they’re awake but they can’t process any input. So, if you’re trying to hold them, you’re trying to control what they’re doing, trying to keep them in bed, they tend to fight you off.

Ryan: Yeah. So, why does it result in a tantrum? They can move around but they can’t respond to input. So, they don’t know you’re there or they don’t know that someone’s touching them or something. Why is a night terror not just like the kid stands up and walks around the room or something like that? Why is it so severe in terms of a tantrum?

Varun: Yeah, yeah. It’s interesting. We’ve gotten a couple of questions along that [inaudible 8:45]. There are actually a spectrum of sleep disorders called disorders of arousal and night terrors is probably the most intense. And then, the middle of the road is sleep walking. So, your child is still appears to be awake, they walk around the room but there’s no yelling, there’s on screaming, there’s no crying. And the mildest form of disorders of arousal is called confusional arousal. So, your child usually is still in bed. They may mumble a little bit, they’ll toss and turn, they may moan a little bit, but nothing…

Ryan: Is this like sleep talking?

Varun: Yeah, a little bit. So, they all fall under the same umbrella of sleep disorders and they’re all tied to the same dissociative state in the brain. They’re all very, very similar.

Ryan: So, with Lully, so it’s a vibrating disc under your bed that you, as a parent, turn on at a certain point in time. You get an app on your iPhone that connects to it and you turn it on and it vibrates for 3 minutes or you turn it off when your kid starts moving.

How did you guys come up with the idea, “Let’s use vibration to interrupt like a sleep pattern”? I think it’s genius because I don’t have to medicate my child. I hardly have to do anything. I let the app know when my kid goes to bed and then it notifies me and says it’s time for Lully and I do it when it’s time and that’s all I have to do. How did you come up with the idea, like, “Let’s skip medication, let’s just try vibration?” Did you try a bunch of things or was it just…

Varun: Yeah. It was sort of 2 parts to it. The program we were in at Stanford, called “Biodesign”, it teaches a very specific philosophy to innovation. You really identify the problem that you’re trying to solve and then you build a set of criteria that the solution to that problem needs to meet. This is way before you even start thinking about whether you can solve the problem or not or how you’re going to solve it.

Ryan: So you just say, “Here’s our problem. In order for this problem to met, we need to meet certain criteria.” And that’s kind of how you start.

Varun: Exactly. One of our most important criteria was it shouldn’t be drug-based. Criteria like that are things we gather talking to customers. So, we talked to moms and dads who are dealing with night terrors and try to understand what are the most important aspects that a solution needs to meet for it to be adopted by a parent dealing with this problem.

So, it not being something that was drug-based was really important. It not being something that interrupted with sleep routine or the sleep environment was really important. It not being something that they’d have to wear was important from a compliance standpoint. So, we put together this list of 8 to 10 requirements that are really important for a solution to meet. That’s sort of phase 1 of coming out with a solution.

Then, phase 2 was really clinical-research-driven. Spend a lot of time looking back at early literature about night terrors. Honestly, there isn’t a lot about night terrors, but…

Ryan: Yeah. It must be hard if clinically, they think it’s benign so let’s not worry about it.

Varun: Exactly. So no one wants to study it. No one gives you a grant to study night terrors. But we did find a handful of papers – they were just case reports. So, 2-3 kids being studied back in the ‘80s and some clinicians describing a technique called  “Scheduled Awakenings” where they suggested keeping a track of your child’s night terrors and then walking into the room at some point in the night fully waking up your child, keeping them up for 5 minutes and then putting them back to bed. It was a small sample size in terms of clinical studies, but the results look really compelling.

These were families that were dealing with night terrors for years on end and all of a sudden, they do this for a couple of weeks and in 12 months of follow up, these children didn’t have their night terrors come back.

Ryan: Was this something that parents would do every night?

Varun: Yeah. Parents would do it every night for up to 7 weeks. So, there was some clinical data which said, “Hey, there’s something about interrupting sleep cycles that looks like it may make sense.” So that was sort of data point number 1. The second was, we were at Stanford and we were really lucky to be at Stanford because sleep medicine as a field was created at Stanford by Bill Dement and Christian Guilleminault back in the ‘60s and ‘70s and Dr. Guilleminault still practices there. So, we went and started working with him and he’s sort of a walking encyclopedia about sleep.

We’d walk into his office on a Friday afternoon and just rattle off questions and he’d just answer them off the top of his head.

Ryan: So it’s like Google, but for sleep disorders and stuff.

Varun: Yes! Exactly! For a very, very specific space [inaudible 14:26]. We were also lucky because there was a clinician from the University of Minnesota who used to come to Stanford once a month only to run their parasomnia clinic and nigh terrors are considered a parasomnia. He’s someone who’s being invited to Stanford only to run a parasomnia clinic because he is one of the best in the world. So we had tremendous resources at Stanford, 2 clinicians who understood what was going on.

And then, the third bit was talking to pediatricians, talking to the sleep community about why scheduled awakenings hadn’t caught on. The data looked so compelling.

Ryan: Yeah. That’s what I’m thinking, if it was done in the ‘80s, why has no one picked up on it?

Varun: Yeah. So no one practiced it. That was always curious for us. What we learnt through talking to both clinicians who recommended it and parents who had tried it was your clinicians would talk to you about scheduled awakening in a 15-minute appointment and tell you, “Keep a track of your child’s night terrors and then at some point before that, go into the room and wake your child up.” So, this has a bunch of problems once you get back home.

One, you never know when you should be waking up your child because no one really told you when to wake up your child. The second is you’re breaking a cardinal rule of parenting, which is wake up your child once you’ve put them to bed.

Ryan: Yeah. Never wake a sleeping baby, isn’t that the rule?

Varun: Exactly. So, you’re stuck as a parent with not having enough information to implement it and being really worried about implementing it because it took you an hour to put your child to bed and now they’re telling you to wake them up. So we sort of looked at that and said, “Compliance, education, automation and awakening were the big problems with scheduled awakening as a therapy as it existed.” We looked at it, can all of this be automated? And technology is a great way to automate things that have compliance problems.

Technology is a great place when you have a compliance problem. And so, we looked at this entire problem and said, “Okay, is there a way to reduce this technique to something that can be taken home with someone and implement it without really needing to know anything more than, ‘put this under your child’s bed and start using it’?”

So that’s sort of how we learnt about this being an effective solution and started defining and designing the product. This is a long, withered answer to your original question of, “How we thought about the vibrating pod under the bed?” It sort of came back to some of those really important criteria that we set out for a solution. We wanted it to be something that wasn’t wearable and outside of the – that didn’t disturb the environment of the bed, didn’t disturb bedtime routine; which is why it went under the bed.

We also learned that about 40% of children share a bedroom with a sibling.

Ryan: Yup. That’s true for my children. They share a bedroom.

Varun: Okay. Yeah. And so, we didn’t want, you know, if you think of other ways to partially awaken a child, it’s light, sound, vibrations and light and sound could potentially wake up someone else in the room as well. Whereas, vibrations is very personalised. And so we picked that as an intervention mechanism.

Ryan: Was your original goal that we use these vibrations to actually wake the child up?

Varun: That was the other key bit that we learnt working with the clinicians at Stanford. A big hypothesis we had was – all the studies previously had said you have to wake up your child and keep them awake for 3-5 minutes. We said, if that was required, we couldn’t productise this. No one’s going to do that.

So, we instead tried to understand why waking up your child worked. And the reason was it sort of resets the sleep cycle. It gets the entire brain into the same state so that you don’t end up with part of the brain being awake and part of it being asleep. So we sort of speculated…

Ryan: Is that because the whole brain wakes up? Or, does it take you out of REM sleep and put you back to the start of the sleep cycle, what does it do?

Varun: Right. When you wake up someone, you take them out of whatever stage of sleep they’re in. You bring the brain entirely to the awake state. And then, if they nod back to off, they’d into light sleep and back into deep sleep. So that’s why fully waking them up works.

We were looking at whether we could do the same thing without fully waking up someone. So we came up with this concept of partial awakenings where you get the child, you bring them very, very briefly out of the deep sleep state that they are in, but don’t keep them in the awake state long enough that they fully wake up but let the body go back to sleep.

What the vibrations does is very briefly bring them out of deep sleep. And as soon as the brain sees that trigger, it tries to put the child back to sleep without ever letting them fully wake up. That was sort of a critical insight for us to be able to translate this technique into something that’s actually a product.

It was a hypothesis that we came up with while we were still at Stanford and then we ran a scientific study to validate it. We had children who had night terrors enrol in the study and we practiced this partial awakenings technique on them for a period of 3-7 weeks and saw comparable results to what was published in the previous studies back from the ’80s.

That was sort of our aha moment of, okay, we know how to build a device that doesn’t wake up the child but is enough to reset their sleep cycle. We can do it from under the mattress without preturbing their sleep and without interfering with their sleep. Now we have something that met all the criteria that we initially set out.

Ryan: Yeah. That’s awesome. Can I ask you, sometimes when I do the Lully, my child doesn’t move. So it goes for the 3 minutes and they don’t move at all. Does that mean they’re not getting that partial awakening? Or, are still getting it but their body is not responding?

Varun: Yes. It’s the latter. Because the brain can still be activated and have a partial awakening without the physical manifestation of a movement. But without having a bunch of leads on a kid’s head, you really can’t pick those up. When we see a movement, there’s a guarantee of a partial awakening, but once the vibrations are on, there could be a partial awakening that doesn’t result in a movement.

Ryan: This is so good for me to know. It makes so much sense now why you turn the vibrations off once your child starts moving, because they’ve obviously achieved that partial awakening state. I didn’t know that. I didn’t know why do you turn it off when they started moving. I thought it was just so you didn’t wake them up fully. So, yeah, that’s cool to know.

Varun: Yeah. That’s a good point. That’s probably something we need to spend some time educating our users about.

Ryan: The way it happened for me, my child would only have night terrors maybe once a week or twice a week to once a month, it really varied. So, we didn’t really know what it was. We didn’t know what a night terror was. We didn’t even know we really had a problem. We just had a kid who woke up screaming who you couldn’t fix.

We would fix it, we would have to put on a TV show like Peppa Pig and wake him up to get him out of that state. That was a solution we had come up with and it wasn’t until I heard about, oh, there’s this startup company that’s done this thing. And I was like, “Oh my goodness! That’s the problem that we have.” I didn’t know.

So, you did all the studies. You came up with the idea. Talk to me about how hard was it to start a company like this and to get a product created to be able to sell it? I sell information products, but I’ve never had to create something physical.

Varun: It’s definitely it’s own set of challenges. Today, all physical products have a software component, so I almost fell like we’re taking on the challenges of both the software and the hardware world when you build physical products these days. It’s definitely a journey. It takes a lot longer to develop physical products.

Rewinding the clock a little bit. So, we wrapped up at Stanford June-July of last year. We spent the rest of the year doing our clinical study to show that what we claimed was an effective way to help with night terrors was in fact effective.

Ryan: Is this so you could market the product as effective for night terrors? Because otherwise it could potentially be…

Varun: It sort of had 3 different reasons for doing that. One was to prove to ourselves that this was a product worth developing. And it actually solved the problem we were going after.

Ryan: Yeah. It’s not snake oil or something that you just think it helps but it doesn’t actually.

Varun: Right. Exactly, exactly. That, as a company, as founders, was really important to us. The second was to be able to make the claims that we do. We needed to have data backing it up. The third, honestly, was to get investor buy-in.

We were talking about a problem that isn’t talked about a lot and talking about a solution to a problem that hadn’t ever existed. So, there was definitely skepticism behind both whether this problem really existed and whether this problem could be solved the way we claimed it could be. That clinical study was definitely played a very big part in getting us across that hurdle.

We raised a little bit of money towards the end of 2014. We were fortunate enough to apply and get accepted in Y Combinator, which is Bay Area-based accelerate incubator now fund.

Ryan: Yeah. I didn’t know you guys were in YC.

Varun: Yeah. We were in winner 15.

Ryan: Okay. Cool. To get the product made, did you guys do – I think I pre-purchased the product or you had sold out and I purchased it before the next run. Did you go through YC and then do a Kickstarter or something like that to get it funded, to create it?

Varun: Yeah. We didn’t go down the Kickstarter approach because this really was problem that parents wanted solved today and not 9 months from today. It felt like something we needed – when we took someone’s money, we need to promise them a solution to it. So, what we did, we sort of did in 2 parts. During YC, we did 100-family beta.

This was to show that we could put a product in the hand of the lay consumer and they could use it and see comparable results to our clinical study. So, that was 100-person beta we did. And then, starting July this year, we started selling the full commercial product.

Ryan: Yup. I think that’s when I bought it. It was in July or maybe even a little bit before that. I don’t know if you did a pre-sale, did you?

Varun: Yeah. So we were taking pre-sales before our launch for a couple of weeks, that’s right.

Ryan: Okay. So I got in on the official launch, did I?

Varun: Yeah. You did.

Ryan: Awesome!

Varun: You’re an early adopter.

Ryan: The reason that I committed was just the sheer fact that there’s nothing out there. Once I realised I had this problem, you do some googling about it and really, there’s no solution out there that’s, like, this is actually going to fix my problem. And then, I think it was your sales video as well. When I saw the parents’ experience in that sales video, it’s like your kid isn’t waking up and then when you said you try and help them and they get worse.

I’m like, “Yes. That is me.” I’m like, if this is going to cost me $200 in terms of Australian money, then that’s totally worth it for me.

It’s so funny. As a parent, you’re willing to spend money on this even though your child doesn’t remember it and you’re child’s going to grow out of it. It’s such a traumatic experience that you’re like, “I will pay almost anything to not have to deal with this.” It’s just too much.

Varun: Honestly, it’s a combination of the trauma, the unknown, the heartbreak and the sleep deprivation. We have families that have 3-4 night terrors a night and it’s been going on for 3 years. I don’t know they’re functional.

Ryan: Yeah. I can’t imagine doing that. I have 1 every week or so and that was hard enough. I can’t imagine having a couple a night.

Varun: Right. It’s hard to deal with as a parent, each one is really hard.

Ryan: Yup. So, what do you guys think your plans will be from here? Is it just really get more distribution of the product and get it out there?

Varun: Yeah. Right now, we’re definitely focused on getting the product out there, helping as many families as we can. Both in terms of educating them about night terrors and then offering a solution if that’s warranted. Ultimately, our goal as a company is to be the children sleep company.

One of the things that struck us as really odd or struck us as a really good opportunity was the fact that technology had helped parents in so many different ways and it helped make parenting so much easier. But the one guarantee as a parent today is you’re going to be sleep-deprived for the next 2-3 years. It was sort of shocking.

Ryan: Yeah. I’ve got 3 kids a the moment and I’ve got a 6-month old who’s sick at the moment. And he is up all night with sickness. Yeah. I’m very sleep-deprived.

Varun: It was sort of shocking to us that in today’s day and age, with all the technology we have that was an area that hadn’t seen much of improvement and saw an opportunity to come at it from the medical, the clinical or the scientific side of things. A lot of products in the children and baby space are more consumer-driven products.

Ryan: Yeah. Like toys and colourful things and stuff like that? Cots and beds and that sort of stuff? Yeah.

Varun: Right.

Ryan: I know. I mean it. [inaudible 31:21]

When I shared this with my friends and stuff like that, one of the things that I was asked; I’ve got a friend who has – I can’t remember what the condition is called, but they had nightmares but while they were awake and they can’t move their body. Do you know what I’m talking about?

Varun: Sleep paralysis?

Ryan: Yes. Sleep paralysis. I was just wondering, can something like this or something you guys work on, will that ever help with sleep paralysis? Because that seems like one of those things that there’s just no solution and it’s just really bad.

Varun: Yeah. And that’s really scary for the kids themselves because in sleep paralysis, you’re actually fully awake and you know what’s going on and you have memory of the event.

Ryan: It kind of sounds like the opposite to night terrors. Like, night terrors your motor functions work but you’re not awake.

Varun: Yeah. They are. Right, right.

Ryan: Yeah. So they were asking me, can Lully be used for sleep paralysis? I’m guessing the answer is “No”.

Varun: Not the product we have. The product we have in the market right now is really for night terrors. But as we work through our product pipeline and get more and more products out there that are able to help with sleep, hopefully, one day, we are able to find a way to solve sleep paralysis.

Ryan: Are you able to tell me what other problems you are working on? In terms of what other sleep issues?

Varun: I can tell you broadly that it’s still within the infant-toddler-pre-schooler sleep space. I’m not sure I can get necessarily into much more detail, but we’re staying very focused. We’re not going into the adult sleep space. We’re not going into the clinical sleep space. We’re sort of focused at helping babies, infants, toddlers sleep better.

Ryan: Cool. I’ll definitely be monitoring you guys and finding what’s coming next. Because I still got toddlers and I still got young kids. And that’s the thing, I never knew I had a problem and so, if you’re saying the things that you’re creating can help parents with sleep deprivation, dude, I am all on board with that! That sounds great for me. I’ve been running off 4 hours sleep a night sort of thing for this week. Because I’ve got a sick kid and I’m like, “Oh! I just can’t do this anymore!” I can’t work. I struggle to focus. So, yeah, it’s really, really exciting.

Thanks for coming on. Thanks for telling me the story. This is a product I am pretty passionate about because it deals with such an intense issue that I have in my family and I hope that by creating this, some people will find it as well and will realise that there’s a solution to their problem. Where can people go to check you out and to find out any information that you guys have, whether it be your product or your educational stuff on night terrors?

Varun: They can go to lullysleep.com. We have a ton of information about the product. We’re constantly creating more and more content about night terrors as well. Hopefully, we’ll be the go-to resource for education on night terrors soon.

Ryan: Yeah. I hope so, too. I hope there’s a lot of parents out there who can find a solution. Because we don’t want them to have to deal with that.

Alright. Thanks, Varun. I really appreciate you coming on and I wish you the best with your company and fixing sleep deprivation for parents.

Varun: Thanks again and it was my pleasure sharing the story. It’s always really exciting to hear from parents and users of the product. So, really appreciate you reaching out as well.

Ryan: I hope you enjoyed that interview, guys. If you have kids with night terrors or if you want to check out Lully at all, go to lullysleep.com, L-U-L-L-Y sleep.com and you can check it out.

Just so you know, they currently only ship the product to the US. And this was something that I had a problem with. They couldn’t ship it out to Australia because I think they weren’t sure about the compliance and stuff like that. So, to get around this issue, what I did was I setup an account with I think it’s myus.com. Let me just go ahead and check that, myus.com. But basically, this is a US company that receives shipments on your behalf and then forwards it on to you.

So, obviously, there’s a bit of an extra cost there in order to get it shipped out to you. But you can purchase the Lully, MyUS gives you an address, you can give them the address, get it shipped out to you and you can then get myus.com to forward it on to you.

I think, also Lully is now available on amazon.com. Just going to check it for you. Let me just check for you. It’s called Lully Sleep Guardian – Proven to Stop Night Terrors. It’s on amazon.com for $129 at the moment.

I think I paid $169 plus all the postage, it ended up being over $200 Australian for it. But it was absolutely worth it for me and I totally recommend it if anyone has children who have night terrors. Absolutely, 100% works. I hope that you go ahead, check it out. And if you need it, go ahead and buy it. And if you don’t need it, I hope that you enjoyed this episode nonetheless to learn about someone else’s journey and how they came up with this idea.

Could you move from working 70 hours per week to just 2 days per week? Not everything in business as about increasing profits, it can be about improving lifestyle too.

Hey guys! Ryan here from Instructions Not Included and I am just doing some cleaning as I record this so if you hear some background noise or things like that, that is because I am actually doing stuff in the background. So hopefully it is not too annoying for you but I am not actually working. I am down in Sydney on holidays.

I actually live in the Gold Coast, in Queensland in Australia. So I am down in Sydney, my grandfather passed away as I think I mentioned in a previous episode. So we are down here for the funeral and we are just leaving one apartment to go to the next apartment and so I am just fixing up the beds, doing what I call the final sweep of the house which I just check under everything. I check every drawer, I check under all the beds just to make sure we have not forgotten some sort of toy or anything like that.

I have been actually listening to Instructions Not Included myself and I really loved it because it is 6 weeks behind where I am at now so the stuff that comes out today is actually stuff that happened 6 weeks ago. And so it is really interesting for me to see where I am at in my journey but then to look back and say, Okay, where was I 6 weeks ago? what was I thinking? How have I got to his place? It is a lot of fun for me to go back and look at that and I think the one that I was listening to today, I was talking about how I was just creating an eBook and I was creating the 30-day Property Journey eBook and I was going down that whole eBook path which has really been a bit of a dead end for me. I have actually removed the eBook link from my site.

I am selling like an eBook a day or something like that but selling an eBook for $2, making $2 a day, 365 days a year, what is that – $600, $700 in a year. That is not just going to quite cut it to feed the family of 5 that I have.

So I am now down the course path, looking at creating courses. I pre-sold my course for $50. I sold 18 tickets to that course. I have now closed it off. I have finished half of that course and so I still have half to go. And then I am going to be relaunching it at the full price. And so that will be interesting to go through and to say, Okay, this is something that I pre-launched.

People could have gotten this at $50 less but now it is actually available. What is the response going to be from people, are they going to be willing to pay $50 more. How much of this course am I willing to sell? I have actually the feeling that people will be more into it because it is not pre-launch, it actually exists. It is a course that I can download, that they could buy it and watch it straight away. That will be pretty cool to see.

But while we are down in Sydney, my best friend Ross is in Sydney. And so it was great. I caught up with him last night, it was after the funeral yesterday so I was absolutely shattered but it is good to see him. We text every single day but we hardly ever get to see each other. So it was great to see him. And then I was texting him today because I have really gone down the path of – probably the last 6 weeks to 2 months where I was saying, Yeah, I really want to grow my income. I want to make $150,000. I want to get rich.

We are not rich but I want to earn a decent income. Here is what I want to earn: $100,000 profit for the year which means I need $150,000 in revenue. And then I just kind of turned everything around and said, Well actually I do not want that. I just want a 20% increase in revenue from $60,000 revenue to $75,000 – $78,000 in revenue. That is my goal now. And I actually want to cut my work hours from 48 hours a week or so to 25 hours a week and I want more freedom to be able to go surfing and freedom to spend more time with my kids and family and stuff like that.

One of the things that really inspired me along with Jams Schramko, as you guys know, from SuperFastBusiness.com. He has a podcast as well. And he talks about effective hourly rate which means if you work out how much did you earn for the month and how many hours did you work in a month, well how much did you earn per hour? And I was talking to Ross and he was talking about his business. They do these market stalls at the big shopping center near here.

He was talking about how much they make at those stalls and how he could basically make the same profit that he makes in his little shop with these stalls being open in this big shopping center just 2 days a week. He was all inspired about all the profit he could make of these and I am making him aware of the fact that this could actually replace the income from your existing shop where you are working 70 hours a week. You could move from working 6 days, 70 hours a week to working 2 days or maybe 3 days, 30 hours a week or 40 hours a week, less 25 hours a week.

So I think I really inspired him. Not necessarily that they are going to do that and they close the shop, like I would not recommend that but just the fact that not everything in life is about growing your profits. Not everything in business is about growing your profits.

It is actually creating the lifestyle and the life that you want. And it depends like some people just want to run big business and that is the goal. I want tot grow the business into as big as I can be and that is completely fine. Some people have that motivation and I do not that that is a bad motivation. I do not think it is bad to not want to grow your business but definitely when you are in business, all the podcasts, all the business books, all the conferences, it is all about more, more, more, more, more, more profit. More business. Bigger business. More profit. Let us do more, more, more!

Let us actually sit back and say, Well, what is the purpose of more? How is that going to impact my life? If I earn an extra $20,000, is that actually going to change my living circumstances if I have to work more? Or can I actually improve my life better by earning less but working less at the same time? So I think I inspired him a little bit and as well talking about that kind of inspired myself.

See, this is why I do final sweeps. I just found this whole – full of food. So if you hear rustling, I am just packing some food. So I am at a point right now in my business where I need to work out really strategically how am I going to achieve this. How am I going to continue to increase my income but actually work less. And as I said, I think it was the last episode, I got through this week. I worked 2 days and I got everything done that I need to get done for the week.

There was more that I would have liked to do to grow my business but in terms of maintaining my business, 2 days a week — easy peasy. Just keep things going but yeah, I am getting there guys.

This course, we are good. I will talk you through the actual launch of this course and how that goes. But if the actual launch of this course goes good well then that will really inspire me for future courses. Because if I do the launch of this course and it sells well, then I can do a pre-launch for another course or I could potentially even skip the pre-launch all together and just go straight into the course and just create it and then sell it as a launch. I just need to work out what is most profitable for me. Pre-launch is great because you can test the market and you can say, Well, how many people are going to buy this? Is it worth creating it? But the problem is if you do a pre-launch and it is a minor success, is it worth the time putting in the time creating it? And I guess you need to have goals around that. But if I can do a good launch of this course selling for $100 each and if I can get residual revenue from this course, $100 every now and then, then this could potentially be the business model that I have been looking for that is going to move my business forward, provide lots of value to my customers. But also be residual for me and allow me to work less.

So, that is kind of where I am at in terms the business. That is kind of where I am standing at the moment. And it will be interesting to see like I still have those goals of growing my business bigger. I still have those goals of creating a big media company, education company, all of that sort of stuff but I also have this family goals and lifestyle goals. How do you balance that?

Anyway, I do not know why I created this episode. I am just cleaning. I am just inspired by listening to myself but I do not think I have anything super awesome to share with you guys or super awesome tips or anything like that. But I just want to share my thought process inspiring my mate in terms of setting goals, not just about earning more, more, more, more.

That is setting goals about living more, more, more, more rather than earning more, more, more because money does not always equal happiness. And he was working crazy and I was like, I saw him last night, met him at his shop because he was putting up shelving. And so I left at 10 and then he was going upstairs to do more work and then he was getting up at 4 to go to the shopping center. So he would be getting what, 5 hours of sleep at night, working like a dog.

Is it worth it to earn $50,000 more and to add more hours or to keep working more when you could just earn a little bit less, $10,000 less, $20,000 less but work a whole lot less. That makes a whole lot of sense to me and something that really inspires me and something that I want for my life. And I hope that inspires some of you as well.

Alright guys, I am out. Final sweep is almost done. Just have to take these stuff down to the car and then I will do the final final sweep just to make sure I have not forgotten anything while I am talking to you guys. Thanks for hanging out with me while I am cleaning up this holiday house.

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

And also guys, you can check out all the episodes from Instructions Not Included by going to ryanmclean.net or you can head over to soundcloud.com/InstructionsNotIncluded and you can check out all the episodes over there. Peace out!

My grandfather passed away and we are going to Sydney as a family. This time off is forcing me to get a lot done in a short amount of time.

Hey guys! Ryan here from Instructions Not Included. You can get all of these episodes over at ryanmclean.net and this week has been an interesting week. A bit of a sad week, my grandfather passed away on Thursday or Friday last week and so we are heading down to Sydney for the funeral this week, we are actually heading down tomorrow.

And so basically what that means for my work is that it cut my work week dramatically from 5 days to 2 days because we are heading down to Sydney on Wednesday, have the funeral on Thursday and then staying in Sydney on Friday, coming home Saturday. So spending some time with family which is very important; it is important to time with family especially when it comes to death in the family.

We need to prepare and get ready for Sydney. But one of the things that kind of threw a spin for the works for me was that I have pre-sold this course How To Find Positive Cash Flow Properties with the promise that I would deliver 2 modules each week for the next 4 weeks. So what that meant was they gave me just 2 days to create the next 2 modules rather than 5 days to working and create the modules.

So I have really been a nose-to-the-grindstone, did some work Sunday night, did a lot of work Monday. Got filming-all of the filming done for all the modules. Got module 3 up and edited and got the thumbnails done for that so module 3 is completely in the bag, done and ready for consumption. And then module 4, I have completely filmed and I just now need to edit it and upload it and then Tuesday is my last day working. So I just need to get it done today, get that up. And then I need to email out to the subscribers to say this is now available. We are not doing Friday because I am heading down to Sydney, blah, blah.

But it has really been interesting because as you may know if you listen to past episodes, my goal is to begin to work 25 hours per week. By the end of this financial year, by the 30th of June 2016, I am hoping that I would be working 25 hours a week.

That might be 5 hours per day or it may be 2 days and 10 hours and then a 5-hour day and then 2 days off and then the weekend or something like that. I kind of got that flexibility there but I really want to get into other activities, spend more time with my kids, spend more time at the beach, go surfing more or that sort of stuff. But this is kind of been good to say I only have 2 days this week, what is the most important stuff to get done and then just hammer it out. So go to work, work hard, get it all done and hammer it out.

So I think it has shown me that I can definitely work 5 hours per week and I probably could get as much done I think in 5 hours a day as I am getting done in 8 or 9 hours per day just because I will be so much more focused when I am working, less dillydallying, less poking around just doing random stuff, watching YouTube videos. Let us get to the point, what is my biggest impact activities, let us get those done and let us move on with our lives.

I guess sad week but then also a good challenge to try and get this work done in just 2 days and to see if my goal of 25 hours per week is actually achievable which I think it definitely is. So yeah, that is kind of where I am at. We will deliver those modules. This is going to be a really good course. I am really excited about this. I think the value is there to sell this for $100. I think it is going to be a good course.

I think it is going to sell continuously and it is going to sell in a not-heaps-of-copies, maybe one or so a month or a couple of months or something like that but it is a good course and is something that I will be proud to recommend that people purchase and something that I think will really help people do exactly what it says which is find positive cash flow properties all over Australia.

So I am excited to get this first course out. We will see how it will go and then I will be looking to launch a second course and probably do the same sort of thing, pre-sell it and implement it over a 4-week period, and then put it up for sale for real. And the next time will probably on how to research an area. That would be cool and yeah, I will just enjoy in building up all of these courses.

Alright, that is it for me guys. Until next time, if you want instructions go and buy some furniture.

Today I realised (as I was driving to get some dinner) I need to stop consuming business podcasts. I also need to reset my values if I want to move to 25 hours per week.

Hey guys! Ryan here from Instructions Not Included. Just a quick recording in my car. It is Saturday. I did not actually work today but I have been thinking about my business and I think I talked about it in the last episode but basically I kind of set a goal for myself that by the end of this financial year I want to be working for 25 hours a week or about 5 hours per day, with enough time to go surfing or enough time to spend time with my family and things like that.

And today I realized as I was driving somewhere, I think I was driving to pick up dinner, we got some take away, some pizza, crust pizza, which if you are in Australia, crust pizza is absolutely awesome. Chicken Peri Peri, so good!

Anyway, I am driving to get pizza, I am listening to a business podcast and I realized I really need to stop consuming business podcast. If i want to work 25 hours a week, how many hours a week do I spend listening to podcast. It is probably an excess of 10. So I am thinking I could save 10 hours per week on my business just by stop listening to podcast. I already know what to do.

I already know what to do to be successful so do I need to learn more of all of these stuff which kind of takes me in different directions and spins me around? Well no. Probably not. So something that I could do is to limit my podcast consumption for business podcast.

So okay, that is interesting. And then my mum is up here from Queensland so I dropped her home and I am driving back listening to music, just some quiet and I am letting my mind think. And I am thinking to myself I actually need to reset my values if I want to move to 25 hours a week. Because if all I am doing is listening to business podcast and thinking about business, business, business,business..I am putting so much value on my business that every waking hour that I am not doing something I want to be working on my business and that is because I value it above everything else.

So I need to actually make the decision to value other things, to value surfing, to value time with my family, to value these things and to stop spending time on other things and to actually begin to try and see the value in these other things that I want to do.

And I guess part of that is stepping away from listening to so many business podcast and business audio books and listening to other things or not listening to anything but thinking about my family or thinking about other things that I want to do and actually getting value and getting enjoyment out of other stuff apart from my business.

So that is a big step for me and so I thought on the way home I just quickly stopped to get some ice creams for my wife – she has had a hard day, so I thought get some ice creams, give her a treat. And probably if I was not listening to a business podcast on the way home that thought would not have even entered my mind because I will be thinking about my business, how I can make more money, blah, blah, blah. So by changing what I value and by changing what I  am spending my time thinking about I can actually change the outcomes in my life.

So I am thinking about if I want to achieve that goal of 25 hours per week, I need to change my values. I need to change the things that I focus on. And that is going to be a big process because I love business podcast. I love learning about business. I love the game. But just business is not making me happy. So that is going to be a process but it is going to be fun.

Alright guys. That is it for me for tonight. Thanks so much for listening!

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

I made a big strategic decision to move towards working less. I only working 25 hours per week and I want to spend more time living my life.

Hey guys! Ryan here from Instructions Not Included which you can find over at ryanmclean.net, R-y-a-n-M-c-l-e-a-n dot net. Now I made some big changes today, really strategic changes around my business because I made the decision I want to move towards working less.

You know, Oh Ryan you are not happy working for yourself, working the hours you want… No. I want to shift my lifestyle. I want to spend less time in my office working and I want to spend more time living my life and being with my family, going surfing, and also I want the time that I do spend working to be more productive. So rather than sitting down for 9 or 10 hours and just sometimes getting lost in the haze of my own thoughts, I would rather have a strategy, have a business that I go and I work 5 hours and I just smash things out and I just get things done.

So I really want to have a systemized business that has just more structure to it. I do not know if that is going to work for me because as you guys know I change my mind every single day so having a structure to my business might not work. But we will see how we go. But basically the goal is to work 25 hours a week or around 5 hours per day. And I would like to begin, start surfing again and doing that sort of stuff.

I just find that when I am surfing I am a happier person, I am a better father, I am a better husband and I will probably be better at running my business as well. So I need to free up some time to do that. I want to take the stress away, focus away from the business and start to focus on my life. I actually believe that as I do that then my business will continue to grow and I will probably find even more creative ways to make money.

So something that I have decided to change is On Property Plus, which is my main source of revenue at the moment. The way that I have been selling On Property Plus is through an Evergreen launch funnel. Now if you do not understand what that means, I am just going to quickly explain it now. Basically a launch funnel is when you create a series of videos or a series of blogposts or whatever it maybe, generally it is videos, and you send them out over the course of maybe 1 to 2 weeks and you have 3 videos that just add massive value. Free content, you teaching people about how to do what you do or why, why it is important.

So for me I have the first video on the 3 different ways you can find positive cash flow properties. Second video is on the biggest mistakes probably investors make. And the third video is on some research tools that I use or that you can use to research property. And so I give away these free content and then that leads into the fourth video which is a sales video which says you can sign up for my service, On Property Plus. You get property listings, you get education, you get tools that you can access and all of these sorts of stuff. And so basically they go through this 2 weeks series which leads them to the sales video. And then the sales video opens for them on a Tuesday and closes on a Saturday night.

And the reason it is called Evergreen Launch Funnel is because every single week you have a new group of people going through that funnel but the way it happens is that it is a real limited time offer for that person because the page that they get access to, it is open from Tuesday to Saturday, and then the link that they have disappears or goes to an expired page. And the next group of people that go through the next week get a different link. And so it is only groups of people at a time that have access to the deal. So it is a work around the launch funnel so that you can make it open to a small group of people for a certain amount of time but not to the general public.

And so I have been running with that for the last maybe 4 to 5 months and it has done well but it has definitely slowed down lately, definitely not seeing the results that I have been seeing in the beginning. It is just not working as much as I would like anymore and I am finding that it is just not me. I feel that the sales funnel process… it is a little bit of a sneaky tactic. I find it a little bit sleazy because it is that high pressure: it is closing, now is the last time for you to get in.

And I just find it frustrating that I cannot just create a video and market it on property Plus and sell over the link for sign up. And I know for myself if I am signing up for a tool to go through a sales funnel and to do that is not something that I really take action on anymore. It is not something that I really ever taken action on. All the tools that I signed up for really are tools that just exist out there. So I have Real Estate Investor, I pay $100 a month for that.

I have Hosting which I pay hundreds of dollars for. I have access to lead pages that is available all the time. So all of these stuff that are out there are always available and I could sign up and I could cancel them anytime but I do not.

And so my thinking behind changing On Property Plus from this launch funnel back to being available all the time because I think this will decrease my revenue. I think this will actually decrease how much money I am going to make from On Property Plus but it is going to allow me to automate my business more.

It is one less thing to have to think about. Every single week I have to go in, I have to adjust all the links, I have change all the emails, I have to fix everything up but if it is always available, I do not need to worry about that. And I can go, I can create free content and I can market On Property Plus and I can send people there. If I want to be working 25 hours a week, I do not want to be spending an hour or 2 changing my launch funnel every week which does not actually move me towards my goals. So I just want it to be – Evergreen, I want it to be available all the time and so I have made that move.

Another big move that I have decided to make with On Property Plus is to rename it. So I am renaming it On Property Listings just for clarity purposes. So I want people to know exactly what they are going to get, exactly what they are signing up for. And On Property Plus, the whole idea behind it was that it is on property plus you are getting a whole lot more. And originally when I launched it, it was not so focused on the listings.

It was more focused on the trainings that were in there as well as the tools that were available. Really because I felt like the listings did not have enough value and I could not justify the charge for the listings with what I was charging, which at the time was $20 a month or $200 per year. And so I added all those things in and so that is why it was named On Property Plus.

Now, I am actually going to remove the whole membership site aspect and I am going to charge more. So I am making the product less like they are getting access to less and I am going to actually charge more. And my reasoning behind this was I was listening to James Schramko and he was talking about his membership site and he was talking about people do not want 200 videos that they have to sit and look through. People want results. And so you need to focus on giving people the results that they want and anything that is there, that is fluff.

That is not going to give them the results that they want, you should strip out and you are actually giving people a better experience by doing this. So by changing the name from On Property Plus to On Property Listings and by stripping everything out and by focusing on the listings, well then I am giving people exactly what they want. And I am actually not having a membership site. It is going to be delivered directly to their inbox and so they are going to get emails with all the property listings in there. Now also, they might have access to the membership site if they want but I guess my goal is that very few people would ever log into the membership site. They will just receive it via email.

And so I am changing it. I guess stripping everything away and then what I am also doing is increasing the price. So currently it is $49.95 per month or $297 per year. And as you guys know, which we talked about yesterday, and I was doing the modeling; if I have it at $297 per year, I need – I think, over 400 people to reach $120,000. If I had it at $50 per month, I needed 200 people to hit $120,000. And so for me, I have decided to up my price and change the way that I am positioning it. So now rather than doing $49.95 per month, I am just doing $50 per month if you want a no-contract monthly subscription.

If you want to commit yearly and pay upfront, then that works out to $40 per month but it is a one-off payment. So rather than saying it is $480, I am saying it is $40 per month in a one-off payment built annually or paid annually. And so this is what a lot of different websites are doing; leadpages.net does this. i have seen a few others do this. A lot of them do this, wpcurve.com does this as well. So I am doing that.

And then I am also going to trial and offer a 2-year subscription where you pay upfront for 2 years and that is going to be worked out to $30 per month or will be $720. And so the price that I have at the moment is going to expire on Saturday, at $297 will no longer exist and the cheapest you can get it for will be $30 per month which is $360 per year, $720 for the 2 years. Yeah, so the price that exists now is going up. So that is the change that I am making with On Property Listings.

And another reason to strip it is that there are these people who want to see the listings and there are these people who want to train themselves. There are 2 different types of people. The people who want to see the listings are less likely to be the people who want to go through the training. And so by splitting them up I can then create another division of On Property which I am going to call On Property Courses, and that is just going to be training courses.

So there will be courses on how to find positive cash flow properties, how to research an area, how to save your deposit, how to increase the rent of your property, all these sort of stuff. That will be a lot like Udemy which is you go sequentially through this courses and that would be $100 each, just a set price of $100 unless I create a course that I do not think is worth $100. I might sell it for $50 or if I think there is a course that is worth more or more complex, I might sell it for $200 or something like that.

You can see from my pricing, I am actually changing away from $99, $297 to $50, $100. And the reason that I am doing that is it is just so much easier to talk about. The reason that I did that is originally with Property Tools. I set that at $5 per month or $50 per year. And I thought this might be a tool that people talk about and recommend. And when they recommend it someone says, Well how much does it cost? and they can say, It is just $5 per month. They do not have to say it is $4.95 per month. That just makes it harder for word to spread. And as well when people are buying it, $4.95, it is kind of arbitrary number.

I guess the goal is that you are not really thinking how much it costs but when you say $5, sure that is cheap. It is only $5. Again, I just think it just improves the process. So yeah, I am just moving away in a more straightforward, less sleazy tactics and more of ‘here is my business, here is what I am offering, take it or leave it, buy it as you need it.’ And hopefully with the launch of the courses and having multiple courses and having the listings that people will be able to sign up for multiple things and multiple purchases with me so they do not just have the one option and the one subscription.

And so that is the big move that I have made with On Property and On Property Plus and again I am making that move so that I can transition and by the end of this financial year, I want to be working just 25 hours per week but I still am aiming for that goal of $78,000 in revenue or I might just lower that goal to $74,999 in revenue. And by lowering the goal to that, that means I will not have to pay GST. I will not have to deal with that and I just need to manage my expenses so that I can make the $60,000 that I am aiming for this financial year in terms of net profit.

So yeah, I guess those are the big changes that I made with On Property. With the course that I pre-launched, that has gone really awesome. I have sold 16 out of 20 of those so I have made $800 in pre-launch revenue for that course which really justifies to me that this is a course that will sell, this is a course that people want.

The fact that 16 people are willing to pay for this course upfront without any other course being delivered and I was very clear in my video, You are going to receive this over 4 weeks, blah, blah, blah. That is pretty awesome, so excited to have that, 4 more spots. Hopefully I will fill them before, Friday was the goal. I guess I will send out an email tomorrow or something like that, try and fill those 4 spots but either way I am happy with 16 if that is all I get. $800 in revenue for a course that before I launch it I am getting paid $800 to make the course that I am going to sell. I am getting paid to make an asset that is going to generate me passive income. So that is pretty awesome and I am pretty excited about that.

So that is me for today. That is what I am working on, just working on creating the content for this course now. I am going to create 2 videos to send out on Friday and then also need to work on the sales video for On Property Listings and get all of that in order and fix up my email subscribers and all that sort of stuff. A lot of work to do but I am excited about moving forward, excited to be creating a business that I can begin to step away from and work less but actually deliver more to my customers. So I am excited about that.

So if you guys want to check out all the past episodes, you can go to ryanmclean.net and that is M-c-l-e-a-n for Mclean. I am Scottish so it is a weird spelling. So sorry, really I should be called Ryan Mclean because that makes more sense but it is Ryan Mclean. So go to ryanmclean.net if you want to see all the episodes over there.

And until next time, if you want instructions go and buy some furniture.

I learnt a technique from James Schramko on product modelling. It gave me HUGE insights into my business and is a great way to fast track a business plan.

Hey guys! Ryan here from Instructions Not Included and last week was a pretty hectic week. I do not think I even got around to recording one episode. Did I do one on Monday? I cannot remember. But basically I made a promise to myself that I would never go and backdate episodes and so I will never let a buildup of episodes happen because if that happened then Instructions Not Included becomes a chore.

It becomes an effort. So basically you guys get this, I am trying to do it each day when I am working but sometimes I just do not get around to doing it or sometimes I forget to do it. And so when that happens it just means you guys miss out.

So this one will probably be a bit of a longer episode where I talk about some of the things that happened last week and some of my plans moving forward which as you guys know change absolutely every week. That is part of running a business, a lifestyle business where you just make stuff up every single day like I am creating value basically out of nothing every single day. And so things change and my life changes and I have 3 kids and so things are constantly changing, constantly different and so I guess that is why I change things.

One of the big things that happened last week was, I was listening to a podcast, I think it was on Tuesday, by James Schramko. He is over at SuperFastBusiness.com. I think I spoke about him before because I really do admire his business and his work ethic like he works hard but he works super smart and he does not believe in the whole hustle, hustle, hustle game. You know Gary Vaynerchuck, who I also really like.

He just preaches hustle work in 16 hours a day, 20 hours a day and that is not me. And James Schramko just talks about running a business that has a high impact, that you enjoy but also go surfing every day. Live your life, spend times doing things and create systems so that you do not have to do it all yourself and hustle, hustle, hustle. But yeah, work hard but work smart. And so I really admire him and he was interviewing someone and I cannot even remember what they were talking about but he talked about this idea of what he called modeling.

This was where you basically take a business and you take the products that you are going to sell in that business. You put in the price of how much those products are going to be and then you basically work out how many of these items do I have to sell in order to achieve my goal, in order to achieve my goal income or in order for the business to be viable. And basically this is like a way to fast-track any business plan. It is just to say, Oh well I have a membership site, On Property Plus, or I have a course or whatever it may be. I am going to sell it for this much, how many do I need to sell in order for my business to be viable. And then you can begin to see that Okay, this is going to be really hard in order to achieve this or Yes, this is going to be viable. And so you might find that at the price point you are going at it is not just going to be viable for you.

So what I did was I did some modeling on Tuesday and I set the goal of $150,000 in revenue. The reason I set that goal was I thought I would like to be earning $100,000 a year. That would be nice. But in order for me to take home $100,000 a year, I probably need to be earning about $150,000 in revenue. And that was just base off last year where I earned about $60,000 in income or in revenue and then I had to pay about $20,000 in expenses so about a third of my revenue was expenses so I thought $150,000, a third of that is $50,000 in expenses. That would leave me with $100,000.

And so I started doing some modeling around this and I just did some modeling for all of my products and basically I said, How much of each product would I need to sell in order to reach $150,000? Actually I am going to adjust this spreadsheet that I have here as I talk to you guys. But let me just work out, so goal income we are going to put in $150,000, and then I am going to copy it. So basically I have put in all of my different products in here at $150,000.

So the first one is On Property Plus monthly membership and I have put in a frequency of 12 times per year – 12 months in a year. So basically assuming people stay on for 12 months or consistently replenishing people that have left, in order to reach $150,000 I would need to have 250 members. And currently I have 39 monthly members so massive job in order to do that and that has obviously freaked me out. On Property Plus annual membership which is about half the price of the monthly one, I would actually need 505 members to achieve that goal. And at the moment I have 90 so again a massive jump.

And then I looked at Property Tools and so currently that is selling for $5 per month. So at $5 per month I would need 2,500 members in order to achieve that and what have I got at the moment? Maybe like 60 or something, it is growing pretty quick actually. I am pretty impressed with how Property Tools has been doing. Let us have a look at monthly, annual and 5-year, so I have 55 members at the moment for Property Tools including monthly and annual. So monthly I have 28 and then annual, I have whatever is left. That is too confusing for me to try and work out. But yes, monthly I need 2,500 of yearly which is $50 so they just gain 2 months for free.

Then I need 3,000 members to achieve $150,000 which considering how niche I am, getting 3,000 members for a cash flow calculator, probably not going to be achievable.

EBook bundles, so this is the bundle that I am selling for $6.99. Those are my 3 eBooks. I would need to sell 21,459 eBook bundles which is just completely – yeah, that is never going to happen. And then courses which I plan on selling for $100 each, I would need to sell 1,500. And these numbers just absolutely freaked me out when I did it and I was like, Oh my God! I can never achieve this. This is just unachievable. Maybe On Property Plus over a few years but everything else is just ridiculous. Like 1,500 courses? Like 21,500 eBooks? Like 3,000 Property Tools members? That is not going to happen.

But then I got wise and I was like, Hold on. I am not modeling to make $150,000 per product. I am modeling to make $150,000 for the business. And then I was like, Okay, let us try and break this down and see what I would need to earn in order to achieve this. And so what I want to do is make $60,000 from On Property Plus monthly members, $60,000 from On Property Plus annual members. From Property Tools I want to make $12,000. From Property Tools annual I want to make $5,000. From the eBook bundles I want to make $2,500. And then from the courses I want to make $10,000. So now this is looking a bit more achievable but definitely not this year. B

ut On Property Plus monthly I need 100 members, annual I need 200 members and again I am at 40 and 90 so this is basically more than doubling that business. And that would form the bulk of my income so $120,000. Property Tools I would need a total of 300 members and that would make me $17,000. The eBook bundles I would need to sell basically 1 a day so about 350 to make $2,500. And then the courses, I would want to sell 100 courses at $100 to make $10,000. And that would bring me pretty close to $150,000. I think a little bit short of $150,000.

And so that was more achievable but still freaking me out. I am having a little bit of a mini, mini meltdown where I was just like I am not getting enough time to work and I was stressing out. And things are just hard and as well because I have been diverting my attention because I have had to recreate this training videos for my virtual assistant in order for me to be able to put a video file in Dropbox and then for it to go all the way through I would have to redo everything. So my week has been spent on that.

And then my son, we went to a specialist and then he had to go into surgery the next day on Thursday. So Thursday and Friday were wiped out taking care of him. And so I was doing like a couple hours on Sunday and I did 3 training videos for my virtual assistant. I got to the end of the third one and realized that the whole work flow was actually broken.

And so everything that I did, I took half my Sunday and then basically do nothing. I did have a little bit of a breakdown where I was like, Oh my God! I cannot do this. I do not get to work enough like I need to take care of my family but I do not feel like I can work enough in order to earn enough in order to achieve what I want to achieve. So I almost cried. I did not quite cry but I was pretty frustrated.

And then last night, just hanging out with my missus, with my wife and realized that last year I earned $60,000 or $40,000 profit. If I did that again this year, that would be fine. That would be okay like we would get by, we would have the same lifestyle we have now. We would not be able to buy a house but we have been talking and we do not really want to buy a house yet anyway just because of what our lifestyle goals are and things are and things like that. We do not really want to make that commitment right now. Maybe in the few years when it is really easy financially but to push for that is not something we really want to do.

And so to have that realization that if I earn $60,000 then that would be fine; that would be enough to get by. And then I thought well, let us push it a little bit and let us try and make $1,000 a month, so $52,000. And basically $52,000 divided by 66.66 times by 100, this is how much revenue I will need to make. So I need to make $78,000. So I made $60,000 last year and remember I launch On Property Plus in April of last year. And so I had a couple of months and we were at June until July. And so I am in a much better position now than I was before so even at this current state, with 39 sales of On Property Plus, 90 sales of the annual, and Property Tools, 55. All up, I am kind of on track to make like $53,000 in revenue anyway. So to push that to $78,000, which is what an extra $25,000 is probably not that hard.

That is probably quite achievable for me. And so when I had this realization I was like, Ryan, what are you doing? Why are you freaking out? Why are you melting down? Why are you pushing yourself so hard mentally to try and achieve this when you do not actually need to do it.

Alright, so $78,000 is what I am aiming for. I have not actually done the modeling for this and what we would need to achieve but I am just going to make up some numbers. So let us say 50 monthly On Property members. Let us say 100 of the annual members, that gives me my $60,000. Property Tools, let us say 50 monthly and 50 annual, they get us up to $65,000. I still would like to sell 100 courses at $100 which is an extra $10,000. That gets me the $75,000. And then eBook bundles, I think I am not going to sell 1 a day. Let us put 100 in there, sell 100 over the course of the year. So I need to adjust this, Property Tools, how many people are signing up for monthly versus annual, it is pretty similar.

So we have 55 at the moment, we launched in May. It has been June, July, August, it has been 3 months and we are at 55. So let us say another 3 months will be 50. So we could maybe hit 200 by the end of the year. So let us go into our modeling and let us just say 100 monthly and 100 annual and then we have 100 eBook bundles, 100 courses, that gets me to $81,369. So my goal would be 50 members to On Property Plus monthly, 100 to On Property Plus annual, Property tools would be 100 members for monthly and annual, eBook bundle would be 100 over the course of the year, and then courses would be 100 as well. And so that is probably pretty achievable.

When I was freaking out on Friday, I actually decided On Property Plus is not making as much money as I wanted. We need some more revenue straight on. We need to pull some stuff out of thin air. There are no instructions for this, let us just pull it out. And so what I did was I decided to launch a course and I had started work on How to Save Your Deposit but then I was looking at some other courses that I wanted to create. One was on How to Find Positive Cash Flow Properties, another one was How to Research an Area and I thought, the one on researching an area, I will probably launch that. But then I was looking at it and I was like, Okay, positive cash flow property I know people want this because they paid for it already with On Property Plus.

I have some training in there for On Property Plus that I wanted to redo so let us just redo it as a course. And so I set up the course, the outline, and it was like 8 episodes, 8 lessons. And so then what I did was I used canva.com, which is a cool tool to create graphics.

I created just some slides of what each would be about, of the 8 modules. And then I created like a Keynote with each of those slides. What I then did was I just recorded my screen like recorded the Keynote and just talked about: Hey guys! I am going to be launching this course but I am going to do a pre-launch sale. And what you are going to get is you are going to get 50% off. So it is only going to be $50, not $100. And you will also be going to get access to a private group where we can discuss this and I can get your feedback and we can improve the course based on your feedback.

And so I put this together on Friday because I was having my meltdown or freaking out; sent this out Friday afternoon to people, like I set up a sales page. I used Snappy Checkout to receive sales. I absolutely recommend snappycheckout.com if you need to receive sales. The guy Mike over there who runs it is absolutely awesome. And the fees are started small, it is ridiculous. So use Snappy Checkout to set that up. I am hoping to get him for an interview soon.

Anyway, I sent out an email to my list of On Property members or On Property email subscribers, which is about 10,000 people. I cannot believe I have actually grown to 10,000 people. Sent that out and then by the end of the afternoon or by the end of the night, I have done probably $350 to $400 in sales so 7 to 8 people. And then by this morning I had done 12 sales which is $600 and I think as I am recording this I just saw an email come through with another sale.

Let me just go ahead and double check that: You have received a payment for $50 for How to Find Positive Cash Flow Properties course. So there you have it, $650 at 13 members. And I have said I would accept a maximum of 20 which will give me $1,000 in revenue and would really prove that this is a course worth creating and I am getting paid upfront to create it so it is absolutely awesome. And the goal is to put this on the courses page which will then I guess create passive income and move me towards my goal of selling 100 courses over the year.

So each of these courses is half-priced so selling 12, that is equivalent to 6. So I need to sell like 10 a month in order to achieve my goal of 100. So I am pretty pumped about that, pretty excited to create this course. I think it is going to be really good content.

I am excited to trial this group in Slack, this private membership group because again this private membership group is going to be a way to get feedback but then also if people find this valuable this could be something that I could sell in the future, a private group of property people where you can ask property questions, you can get help on something that I could consider launching.

I am not really planning on doing it because as you guys know I like the stuff that is really passive. I created products, sell that over and over rather than subscription stuff where you have to keep doing stuff. I just do not like that for some reason. I want to create stuff and then be able to have my lifestyle without having to do this over and over and over. So yeah, I think that kind of wraps up last week and wraps up where I am at at the moment. Breakdown over.

We got our modeling so we have our targets set up now for On Property Plus, Property Tools, eBook bundles and the courses. And basically that is going to get us there. And then if these courses work well and are easy to create, well I could create some of these $100 courses for Public Speaking Power which is going to become OutSpoken.co. I could create one for PodcastFast as well.

These easy $100 courses I will just bam out 10 videos and there you have it, Bob ****. So maybe to get to 100 course sales, I want it to be through On Property only but I might also be through OutSpoken.co and also it might be through PodcastFast.

So yeah. Pretty exciting stuff. I have stopped freaking out which is really good and I guess now I just need to get to work on my course. One of the good things about when I created this sales video for the course was like, Here is the course. Here are the first 2 videos, they are going to be delivered on this date which is Friday of this week. The next 2 videos will be delivered the next Friday and I was really clear, 2 videos each Friday for the next 4 weeks.

I actually have 4 weeks to create this course and as you guys know I come from a history of making a video a day so to only have to do 2 videos each week to deliver this course and I am getting paid $650 upfront in order to do it or maybe $600 after you take my costs into account, that is pretty awesome. Pretty, pretty awesome. And then I am going to have a course that I can sell over and over again and that is going to be pretty exciting. So I am pumped. I am excited. I am very excited to do this. And that leaves me with where we are up to.

Just rambling now. I have a text from one of the guys in the Super Smash Brothers community so I am hoping to get out sometime this week and play some Smash Brothers although you guys know how I go with that if you care which you probably do not. But it is my podcast so I guess I could do what I want so bad luck. You just have to listen to me.

Alright. Another thing that I have been thinking about last week, I might just leave this until tomorrow because this is getting pretty long. But we are going to do it. We are going to get it done, smash it out of the way. Something that I was really looking into last week was actually investing in precious metals. Random. Ryan.. what?! Precious metals?! Going on a tangent here, what is going on. But yeah, I was listening to an audio book by Robert Kiyosaki, who was the Rich Dad Poor Dad guy. Let me just find out what the book was called. The book was called Second Chance by Robert Kiyosaki. Basically I love his stuff.

I love the way he thinks about money and he was just talking about currency and how the currencies that we have – the US currency, Australian currency, all these currencies they are actually fiat currencies, are actually backed by silver or gold or anything like that and so using gold and silver, buying these things can be a good way to retain your wealth and avoid inflation because obviously gold and silver have been used for thousands of years as currency. Precious metal is always going to have a level of desirability to it and then if these currencies go to zero then you still have wealth like intrinsic wealth.

Whereas if the US dollar goes to zero how much is a piece of paper with the US dollar printed on it going to be worth? Not much. But still that will be of value so I have been looking into that, looking into investing in silver. I have been doing some research into that which is cool. Apparently silver is pretty low at the moment but it has been going down for a number of years. It may go down some more. But yeah, the people that I was listening to that I resonated with were saying, When you start investing in silver or gold start small. Start small. get a couple of coins, a couple of ounces and then build it up slowly over time. Do not just go gungho into it. Learn a lot about it. Start small and then build up your portfolio or your stack, as they call, it over time.

So I have been looking into a few things here, speaking to my wife about it and she is like, Yeah, I am on board. I understand it. We talked about the currencies and all that sort of stuff. How it is fiat money and how inflation and it is kind of protection against inflation. And she was like, Well, we have a whole bunch of stuff in the garage we need to sell. You have a Nintendo 64 you need to sell. How about we sell that stuff and then we use that to invest in silver.

It is going to be heaps smaller to hold than a couch. Now that we have what we need to sell and then it is kind of like a way to invest that does not affect our money supply. And like we have a backup supply of money as well for lifestyle reasons and this would just be another way to have a backup money supply which you could then sell in the future and liquidate if you needed to.

Yeah so looking at investing in silver as I learn more about it I will let you guys know as I invest in silver I will let you guys know as well. But that could be pretty cool. Thank you guys. That is it. I am out for the day!

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

I had another mental breakthrough. I realised that I want my business to be more passive so I can do other things with my time.

Hey guys! Ryan here from Instructions Not Included and I had another kind of mental breakthrough which is pretty cool! I think the last episode I talked about setting my goal of improving my reach from where it is at the moment which is around 94,000 people in a month to reaching a million people a month. And something that kind of came out as I was talking to my wife and I was thinking about my business and talking to her about the fact that I am looking 3 years ahead and I do not see us needing to be more wealthy in order to be more happy.

And I was saying to her that what I really want is just to have more freedom of time and to not have the stress that I have right now, that if I stopped working on my business I am not going to earn enough money for us to survive. Because at the moment I feel like I need to work on my business every single day. I need to put in good hours in order to generate that income that I need to generate.

Like the last month in July, sales for On Property Plus were lower than usual, somewhere around the $2,000 to $3,000 mark instead of maybe $4,000 to $5,000 or even $6,000. And so I was a bit stressed about that. I am not stressed this month because I have a buffer but if that happens for another few months, well then I could be in a difficult situation.

So I really wanted to set up my business in such a way that I was never in that situation like I never want to put myself in a situation where money is running dry and I just need to pull something out of my ass in order to move forward and in order to support my family and survive. And so that was something that I really wanted to change in my business and I guess that is part of the motivation that I have had creating eBooks and the courses that I now am looking at creating – was the fact that these are not things that I need to create over and over again.

It is not a service that I need to provide. It is just something that is out there that sells on an ongoing basis and the eBooks have been selling a copy every single day mainly through my website. There hardly is any action on Kindle. But that makes sense because I do not know a lot of people in Australia who use Kindle. Amazon is not as big over here in Australia because we do not have Amazon.

We only have online Amazon so there are less people using Kindle than maybe there are in the US, I am not 100% sure. But I have been finding that people are finding my eBooks through my website. They must be just finding it through the main menu navigation on my website, just a little bit a link there that says eBooks because they are going through there and they are buying my eBooks. People are buying the bundle, $6.99 for that bundle.

They seem to be purchasing that the most and I just get notifications all the time of a new sale here, a new sale there and I worked out that if I just sell one of those bundles a day that is almost $3,000 in a year in revenue.

Yeah. I have the goal of a million people in a month that I want to reach. I also have the income goal of I want to be earning enough income every month where I do not have to stress about it. I really want to free up my time now so I can focus on other things in my life.

I want to start going surfing again. I want to start exercising. I want to have the freedom to spend more times with my kids and with my wife and not stress out about that. I would eventually like to build some sort of structure like a tiny house or a tiny office or something like that. And so now what I am working towards is yes to impact: more people – a million people but also to make my business more passive.

And so something that I am doing this week to make my business more passive is I am completely reworking every single training video that I have for my virtual assistant. And the goal here is to take me out of the process completely.

I want to be like James Schramko who is from SuperFast Business where he has a team. He creates a video, puts the file in Dropbox and then the next time he sees it is it is published on his website. So I want to have that. At the moment I am setting up the processes. Also we are editing the video and things like that. But once it is edited I will out it in Dropbox and the process will go all the way through from there, all the way through to that post being published on my website and going live.

So I am setting up different spreadsheets in order for my VA to manage the ordering of the transcriptions of those podcasts. I am also setting up spreadsheets to order thumbnails and something that I will be moving towards is getting a designer to create my thumbnails because I have been doing them all myself and if I work a full day I can probably create about 40 thumbnails or something like that. But I should really be spending my time on creating more content, creating more courses and things like that.

So I am setting it up so that eventually designer can take over those thumbnails and create images for my blogposts as well but at this point in time I will still be creating those thumbnails until I feel like I know how I can communicate with the designer and how I can hire a designer in a cost-effective way to get the look and the quality that I want.

So I am pretty excited. I have what I think is a 14-set process or a 15-set process that I am setting up at the moment. The very similar process that has been a few little tweaks, a couple integrations with Slack and Dropbox using software or service tools called Zappier which every time I upload an image or a video or whatever to Dropbox it then pushes a notification through to Slack and then my VA can take that and roll with it and do the full process.

So I have a 14-set process or maybe 15 steps. I have done 2 videos today, today is Tuesday. 2 videos today, hopefully I am going to smash out a few tomorrow. I would like to get this done by the end of the week, chances that happening is pretty slim, probably Monday or Tuesday next week that will get finished. But yeah, I am excited to have that process in place to be able to just put the file in Dropbox ad then it all happens after that. And that could potentially open up a new business opportunity where other people have videos and they want to get them published in the same way that I do could hire my service and get me to do it for them.

I am not planning on launching that but hey, I could in the future if I wanted to. So that is pretty exciting. And that process – me not having to do that, will free me up to spend more time on videos, creating courses which will move me  towards the reach that I want to achieve – the million people in a month, and will also move me towards my goal of not having to stress about how much I am making and just be financially secure in that.

So this has been interesting guys! Find me on my journey! I really appreciate everyone who listens and enjoys this.

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

Today I set a goal to improve the reach of my business by 10 times. Incremental growth isn’t inspiring but 10X’ing something is exciting.

Hey guys! Ryan here from Instructions Not Included and today I set a goal to basically 10x my business or to improve the reach of my business by 10 times. I have been really inspired by businesses like Google and other businesses and books and audio books and podcasts. They talk about the benefits of having a goal to see a 10x improvement in what you do because when you are trying to get incremental growth, 10%, 20%, 30%, even double your business, you are just kind of doing the same things over and over again. But if you are trying to improve something and make it 10 times better, you really need to change your thinking and approach the problem in a completely new way.

And so as I was thinking about yesterday, filling a bit disoriented with my business, I was sitting down thinking Okay, what do I want for my life? What do I want my life to look like in maybe about 3 years? That is about as far ahead as I can really conceive at the moment. And I am thinking about how much do I want to earn and I kind of earn enough money at the moment and I am pretty happy with what I earn.

I would be pretty happy to still be earning that in 3 years’ time. And that is kind of somewhere around the $60,000 to $100,000 a year mark. Obviously, pushing beyond that and getting over $100,000 a year would be nice but in terms of me really seeking a goal and saying I want to be rich and I want to have this, I do not want that at all. I love tiny house living. If I could I would live in a tiny house which is like miniature houses they build on trailers that are 2 and a half meters wide by 6 or 7 meters. If I could and I did not have 3 kids, I would be living in a tiny house traveling around Australia or something like that right now.

So for me, looking forward, looking at my goal, money is not really the driving force. I make enough money. I can see that as I grow my business making more products, I am going to make more money. So it is not really a goal I need to stretch for there. But what I do when I do is have a bigger impact in people’s lives.

I want to be able to reach people and help people. And so I have decided that rather than focus on money, which I am already happy with, why do I not focus on the actual impact of my business and what I can do there. And so I was thinking maybe I will aim for like 100,000 visitors a month to my website because at the moment for On Property, I thought I was getting around 30,000 visitors. But then I looked at my 4 main websites which are On Property, Public Speaking Power – which is going to change the brand now to Outspoken.co, then we have Podcast Fast, and we have Instructions Not Included.

And I looked at combined how many people are reaching with that in terms of visitors to the website, views of the videos and downloads of the podcast, and overall it was reaching, I think it was about 94,000 people if we tally all that up in July. So my goal of 100,000 was kind of basically already achieved. So alright, let us set a big goal. Let us go ahead and 10x this and let us aim to impact about a million people a month through those 4 main websites.

So that is the goal that I have set for myself and I have started thinking about how can I achieve this goal? What things do I need to be doing differently? And one of the things that I need to be doing differently is offloading more to my virtual assistant. and I think I have talked a little bit about not having enough work for my virtual assistant and so one of the things that I am setting up at the moment, when I created a video and uploaded that video into Dropbox, I would then have to go into a Google spreadsheet and type the word ready into a whole bunch of different columns so that my VA would know what tasks are ready to be done. And so now I am setting it up so that there is integration with Dropbox and a messaging tool I use called Slack.

So every time I put the file into Dropbox, it automatically creates a message in Slack saying there is this new file that needs to be uploaded. So I am basically taking a step out of it. I am automating that step and then the VA is going to take that file from Slack and import the relevant stuff into the spreadsheet and then go ahead and upload those files. So basically I am trying more and more to take myself out of different things. Eventually I want to not do any design myself, so not design the thumbnails for the videos and stuff myself.

I would like to outsource that to someone who can do a really good job. I would also like to outsource the editing of the audio and the editing of the video as well but that is down the track. So basically I would really love to have my life be like James Schramko and what he does or what he used to do was basically he just created a video a day, put that video in Dropbox – just the raw file, and then someone would edit that for him and his whole team would go through the process. And the next time he would see that was when it was on the website. And so I guess that is the point that I am trying to get to, for me to be able to film a video on my iPhone or whatever device it is, put that raw video file into Dropbox and then in a couple of weeks or whatever it is, it spits out in the other end and is finished and published.

And so that is what I am trying to get to and is part of the way that I am thinking about 10x-ing my reach is by taking myself out of this back end processes and so then I can just focus on creating videos and creating content and I guess getting more creative with the content that I create.

And so that is my day. That is kind of my goal. I guess setting a goal for myself has made things more exciting and has made my work more enjoyable because now I have something challenging that I am going to try and reach for. Going from 100,000 visitors to 200,000 is probably pretty easy in a year just working it out or maybe 1 to 2 years. But going from 100,000 to a million, that is going to be tricky. I do not know how I am going to do it but I am excited to try, at the least.

Alright guys, that is it for me for this week. Small week, only working for 2 days this week because of sick kids but I have a little bit done and I have a bit of mental shift going on there. So hopefully we will have a productive week next week, working 5 days a week getting stuff done.

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

Sickness hit our house hard this week and I’ve had some time off. I was bummed on my business at the start of the week and was a bit bored.
 
Hey guys! Ryan here from Instructions Not Included. Now I have not been updating in a couple of days because I have not actually worked in a couple of days. I have had 3 sick children, all with fevers and it has been absolutely hectic at our house. No one has been going to school or Kindie. Everyone has been home. I have been sick as well so I guess one of the benefits of having an online business is that I can take that time off and I do not have to tell a boss or anything like that.
 
And if you would like to answer, it is you guys because you are like, “Ryan, why was there not an episode? What the f man? I have been hanging out for it!” Actually no, if there is anyone listening or hanging out for the episodes because these have not gotten live yet. But I hope you guys are and I hope you are enjoying that.
 
So anyway, I had a few days off and now back into it. I was actually pretty bummed on my business at the start of the week, as you guys know. If you have been following, I totally go up and down about the business in terms of ideas as well about how I feel about business. And I guess the last little while I have just been again a bit bored with my business because it is not really challenging. I spent so many years.
 
I spent 7 or 8 years just trying to make this online business thing work, trying to make this viable, trying to make it generate a full-time income, trying to make this work for me. And it is just struggle, struggle, struggle, struggle and then finally now I am at the point where I am making decent revenue like last month I did almost 7 grand in revenue and I am paying for my way of life. I am paying for my family.
 
We have a bit of savings as well so if the income stops today, it would take us probably 6 months to completely run out of money and enter an oh-my-effing-whoa we just need to work something out. So it is good to have that buffer there and I guess I just have not been challenged that much and so that has been frustrating me because I know that my system works and all I need to do is put more into the system. So if I put more podcast episodes, if I create more products, if I make more email marketing campaigns and just do what I am doing,  do, do , do, then it is going to equal more money. More money.
 
I do not know but something about that is just a bit boring for me. More money, why am I bored about more money? I do not know. It is a bit stupid.
 
I am very grateful. I am super grateful for what I have but I guess my passion comes out of being challenged, wanting to learn things, wanting to do really difficult tasks, wanting to really grasp something that is difficult to understand and to make it work like the way that my brain works, it is like I do not understand something at all and then I study it, study it and study it and then all of a sudden, finally something clicks and I just see the whole picture and understand the full concept of something.
 
And so sometimes like I would listen to an audio book and I would have to listen to it 3 or 4 times and I get a little bit out of each one but I might listen to it the fourth time and then I am like, Oh my goodness! I get it now! Okay, that makes so much sense. And all the little bits that I learned, they are great by themselves but when I can tie the whole concept together and understand everything that is just when I become like a powerhouse, when I understand something.
 
And I think in the last 18 months or 2 years of working on my own as well as the 6 or 7 years that I did part-time or on the side was me really trying to understand how things work, how my business model works and all of a sudden they clicked and I understood it and then I grow bores.
 
So I guess I am just trying to stir things up a bit, trying to make things a bit more interesting. I am pretty passionate about the property industry and helping people in this industry and making this industry better because there are just so many people wanting to rip people off and one of the things that I am considering doing – I think I have talked about this before, is actually sharing my income, like my revenue and some of my expenses on my website, on onproperty.com.au.
 
I could share with you guys as well but I just feel like being transparent and being someone who is transparent about how much I earn will just open people’s eyes to the industry and will increase people’s expectations when they deal with other parties, like if they know how much I am making and they might want to know how much is that free property advisor who is actually making $40,000 in commission, how much are they actually making from me? And I feel like being transparent, even if I am not earning that much at this point in time -$7,000 revenue is nice but I think people will understand it is a business and a $7,000 revenue is only like $90,000 a year or something like that, that is nice but that is not massive.
 
But if it gets to the point where I am earning $20,000 or $40,000 or $50,000 or $100,000 a month to have that transparency there and to say Look, this is what I earn, and if you are not happy with what I earn, totally do not buy my products and just give people that transparency and if people are like, Hang on, you are earning $100,000 a month. Why are you charging this much? To give that transparency to people would be pretty interesting and there could be backlash from it for people.
 
The only way you make money is not through property, it is through teaching people about property.
 
Oh yeah, that is my situation. So I think I am going to do that. I think a lot of people will say to me Why are you doing that? Because I know a lot of people in the internet marketing space do it and people feel like they do it to show, Okay, they are teaching about internet marketing. How to make money online. It is their proof of how much money they make. But then there are these people, like Justin and Joe from EmpireFlippers.com, they put up their revenue reports but they are not teaching people how to make money online, they are brokering websites.
 
So they definitely do not need to do that but it is just interesting to look at their things, and because of them doing that I engage with them and I am going to do an interview with Justin and we are going to talk about monetization strategies of podcasting. The fact that they do that opens doors for them. The fact that they are so transparent in their business may make some people want to compete with them. But for most people like myself, it makes me trust them. It makes me really grateful to them.
 
It makes me want to work with them and help them in whatever way I can just because they have that transparency and that trust there and I just want to see them to be great people. You know, they did over a half million dollars in revenue last month and I am not sitting there and say, Whoa, why are they charging 15% in brokering fees? Like this is ridiculous, they are making too much money. I am like, Good on you! Go and smash it! Like you are offering so much value, good on you. So yeah, I guess I will give you guys feedback on how that goes.
 
I was speaking to Ben who is a buyer’s agent that I partner with and I was telling him about these plans because he pay me a referral fee and that was going to be in there and he was just like dude, I do not care. You are transparent about getting a referral fee from me. Anyway, so it is no big issue. He was like then you do not need to do it. And he was kind of encouraging me out of it because thinking there is no point. And I totally understand that. There is no point.
 
There is no reason but I feel in me, there is some point. There is some reason. And I just should do it and then after I do it I find the point is, what the reason is. And so that is kind of cool. I did an interview today for podcastfast.com, edited a bunch of things, did another video for On Property, and so I have done a bit today. And I have done pretty well.
 
I did terrible, for those of you who wanted an update of my super smash bros tournament because you who is listening to this is not passionate about Super Smash Bros may…, right? Okay. For those of you who do not care about this, you can tune off now because there is no more start up stuff for this episode. But in my Super Smash Bros tournament, totally annihilated. Lost every game, lost every set, did not win one game at all. I play as Peach, Princess Peach, she is the best. Lost completely. But then I played a bunch of friendlies, I bought a couple of those and I feel like I got so much better.
 
I am really excited to go to my next one which probably will not be for another 2 months or something like that. But that was really fun. I bought new CIT TV, like one of those TVs with a big backs because apparently you have to play on those because otherwise there is lag on the HD TVs between when you actually input your control and what actually happens on screen.
 
So you need a super old TV to go with my super old game cubes. I bought one of those and it will actually arrive in a couple of days so I can practice properly in a tournament-like scenario, and I  have met a few cool people as well, someone in Gold Coast, someone in Brisbane, who hopefully I can meet up with some nights and practice with them and get better. So stay updated for my next tournament in a couple of months because I do plan on winning not just some games bot some sets as well. So there is a lot of practice to go in until then.
 
All right guys! That is it for me today. Until next time, if you want instructions go and buy some furniture.