Ryan McLean : Slightly Unconventional

#75 Interview With Tom Hunt On Starting A Business and Transparency

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

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

Ryan: Hey Tom, thanks for coming on.

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

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

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

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

Ryan: So male leggings, are these like tights?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ryan: Zero or 18, either.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ryan: Okay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tom: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tom: Pretty much. Pretty much, yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tom: They just don’t want it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tom: They’re based in the Philippines?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Make sense?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tom: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tom: Exactly.

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

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

Ryan: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

Ryan: 998,500 or something?

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

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

Tom: Content marketing and Twitter, I guess.

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

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

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

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

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

Tom: And not spending money and building fund.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ryan: You think I should run one?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ryan: Yeah, I use Slack everyday.

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

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

Ryan: It sounds very difficult to do.

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

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

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

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

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

Ryan: I’m a customer of WP Curve.

Tom: What do you think?

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

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

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

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

Ryan: No. You just seriously, just email.

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

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

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

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

Tom: Really?

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

Tom: It’s the same on Fiber.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tom: Yeah, yeah. Nearly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tom: Yeah, yup. Sweet. Thank you.

Ryan: All right. Peace out.

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

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

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


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#74 I’ve Got A Lot Of Fun Projects I’m Working On

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 


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#72 Moving House Sucks, Fraud Sucks but Business Is Good

iniartworksmallI have had a crazy last couple of weeks with horrible house moving, fraud and bond issues. But luckily business is doing well.

Hey and welcome to episode 72 of Instructions Not Included, with your host, me, Ryan McLean, the guy who is trying to make a decent living online. And wow, have I had an interesting number of weeks. One of the big things that we did in the last few weeks is that we moved house – to a new house. We were renting in an old house.

We were having problems with the agent who weren’t treating us well and we’re about to go through a renovation that the owner was doing we were going to live there through renovation, but they were just treating us so poorly. We were so scared about living through this renovation that we decided to pack up and to leave and we have moved to a much nicer place that is slightly bigger. It has a backyard, has some grass where our other one didn’t.

And so, we decided to move, which is stressful enough in and of itself. Not to mention that on the day of moving, 2 hours before we’re meant to move, I get a call from my removalist saying, “Hey, look, I don’t actually have a truck because my truck is broken.” So I’ve got these random guys that are going to move for you.

These guys rock up like 2 hours late. They take ages to pack all our stuff. We finally get to our new house when the sun has gone down at about 6:30 at night and they can’t get up the driveway.

We were homeless for a night with no furniture. Ended up sleeping at my mother-in-law’s. I had to go out late at night and buy a blow-up mattress so we could stay there because there weren’t enough beds. And then, almost had to pay an extra $600 or $700 the next day. But luckily, thanks to my wife who can get angry, she saved us a lot of money and we ended up getting that second day for free. So moving didn’t cost us heaps, but it was massively painful.

The next day. After we finally get into our house, I get a message from the bank saying, “There’s some strange activity on your card that we believe may be fraudulent.” So then, we enter into this massive saga of how 2 replacement cards that were being sent out to the bank were somehow intercepted, activated, and someone had gone on a $1600 spending spree on our behalf.

The issues dealing with the bank to get this sorted was very difficult. Fast forward another week and I got another replacement card because, obviously, some were compromised, and that has also been intercepted and someone’s gone on a $500 spending spree on my behalf. So, all in all, spent over $2,000 of my money through these stolen cards. Needless to say, we have changed banks and I’m just working through that fraud issue at the moment.

That wouldn’t be that big a deal. $2,000, I’ll get it back eventually, but on top of that, the bond, which we were meant to get back from our real estate agent hasn’t come through yet. And so, that’s another $2,000 out of pocket that we have. Definitely, very interesting situation. Luckily, we’ve got enough savings to get us through all of this, but I do feel sorry for the people who don’t have savings like we do to weather this storm.

If you’re living week by week, month by month, we would definitely be in a very difficult position. Over that couple of weeks, I also did a trip to New Zealand to go to an old friend’s wedding. A guy that I’ve known for many years, who I met at space camp. Super nerdy, but that’s a story for another day. But that was an absolutely awesome trip to go over there.

I also got to attend a Smash Brothers tournament over there. If you’ve been following me for any length of time for the last year, I’ve been into a game called Super Smash Brothers Melee and playing that competitively. So I got to go to a competitive tournament in New Zealand. There was 18 entrants and I came 5th. I was pretty happy with that result, that’s my best result at a tournament ever, so very happy with that.

A lot has been happening with the business as well. Business is going quite well. On Property, I haven’t even looked at the traffic recently. So let’s have a look live on podcast. How well is On Property doing and is it maintaining its traffic levels, which were about 3,000 people a day? So, traffic levels, yeah, seems to be between 2,500 to 3,500 people per day, so traffic levels are going good.

I am focused more heavily on recommending my friend, Ben the buyer’s agent, and that’s going well as well. So we’ve had 5 sales this month and we’re halfway through the month, so that’s a nice income for me and our goal is 7 sales per month, which will put us about $10,000 or so per month for me in terms of revenue and probably 4 times that, so like $40,000 for him per month in terms of revenue from those. Plus, he also has his own customers and his own marketing methods and things like that.

So in terms of On Property, things are going well. In terms of life, in terms of stress and all that sort of stuff, maybe not going as well. But at least I’m not having life to stress about and also having business problems and money problems that I need to stress about. So, no money problems apart from the fraud and not getting my bond back. The business seems to be doing well. Now that we’re in our new place, I really need to again assess where I want to go moving forward.

It’s hard to get back into the swing of things after losing over a week to moving house, the issues we had ,the fraud, the going to New Zealand to come back into it now and to be like, “Okay, what am I going to do? What am I doing?” I have found myself sitting in my computer at times not really 100% sure what I should be doing to move forward in my business.

I created a few videos, but I don’t really have a studio setup where I can film at the moment. I had the perfect corner, perfect wall, perfect lighting – okay, it wasn’t perfect, but it was really good. I had this huge window at my old place. The new house, our bedroom, which is where my office is, so much darker making it so much harder to film. So this is an issue that I need to resolve so that I can go on creating content.

But also, I need to think about what sort of content do I want to create? It’s getting harder and harder to create content for On Property. Interviews, I’m definitely getting better at and they seem to be happening more and more often. I’m not having any problem creating content for interviews, but when I’m doing solo content, which is probably 50% of the content I do, it is a lot harder to find topics to go into that I haven’t covered already.

Because I have done over 350 episodes now. So 350 interviews, that’s easy – talk to a new person every single time – not easy, but easier. But when you’re creating solo content, you’re trying to answer people’s questions, it does get a bit harder. So hats off to Pat Flynn who does the Ask Pat podcast and has done hundreds of episodes there. Hats off to him for doing that. Originally, I thought it was easy, but it does definitely get hard.

So I’m just trying to assess at the moment what do I want to do moving forward. I don’t want to spend all my time on On Property. I do want to spend a couple of days a week doing it, but what I’d love to do is do full, hardcore 2 days a week for On Property, but then be done for the week with On Property. And then have the rest of the week to explore things like the niche site that I’m working on as well as other projects that I’m pondering and maybe interested in.

I do want to begin developing more streams of income and I do want to develop more passive streams of income.

I created a website, pelt.co, where I created a bunch of videos. Let’s go on now to the Youtube channel and I’ll find out how many videos I actually created. It was probably around 20 videos or something like that. So let me go to Pelt, which currently has 65 subscribers. Let’s go to the Creator Studio so I can see my videos. Because I don’t actually know how many videos I created. Okay, I’ve created 32 videos for pelt.co. Some of these videos are short videos of a couple of minutes long.

Some of these are full 12-part series on how to create a membership site, etc. So I’ve got a bunch of videos there – 32 videos. And if I go to the analytics for Pelt, then I can see that these videos are making me, in the last 28 days, somewhere around the $10 mark. So $10 a month, but what I absolutely love about this is because they’re on Youtube, they’re not costing me any money. I don’t need to maintain any websites. There’s absolutely no work that goes in to maintaining this, but I’m getting some passive income from it.

Let’s go to Podcast Fast, which is a series I created on how to start a podcast fast and a bunch of other videos. So let’s see how many videos we have. Again, I’ll go to the Creator Studio and we can see that I have 29 videos. And again, in the last 28 days, around the $10 mark in terms of revenue. Let’s go to Public Speaking Power, which is a site that I haven’t touched in years. Probably 2 years since I added the last content for this one.

I’ve got 36 videos on there and that one is creating a little bit less than the $10 per month. So those 3 things combined, $30 per month Now, that is not going to blow your socks off, but that is $30 per month and if On Property goes the way of the dinosaurs and for one reason or another, ends up crashing, then I’ve got some small amounts of passive income on the side that I’m generating. So I do want to build that up.

I don’t know how I’m going to do it. I am focusing on this niche website, which last month made me probably $10 or something like that. And so, looking to build that up and build up multiple sites.

Basically, my goal was by the end of the year, I wanted On Property to be 50% of my revenue. Now, On Property is growing in terms of revenue, so 50% of that is getting harder and harder, but hopefully, we can at least move it up 10%, 20%, 30% from other sources. So we’ll see how we go by the end of the year.

I am happy to be back at work. I’m happy to be podcasting and talking to you guys. If you have any questions, you can email me, ryan@ryanmclean.net and I will answer them on the air. That will obviously give me content for Instructions Not Included on the days when I’m not feeling super inspired.

That’s it for me for today. I will continue working on my business. I will continue working on my Smash Brothers skills. I will continue moving into my house, getting my studio setup, etc., etc. and I hope that you continue working on your business as well. Things are going well enough.

I am happy that income is growing. I am happy that I don’t have to stress about the income, but I do need to work out what am I going to do with my time? If income is covered for me, how am I going to grow it and basically protect myself against the things that may happen in the future? Signing off for today.

I’m Ryan McLean. You can check me out at ryanmclean.net and see all the episodes over there for Instructions Not Included. If you want to get your own website setup, then I do suggest Arvixe as a web host.

They are not the best web host in the world, but they are pretty darn good and they are one of the cheapest web host in the industry. I think I signed up for maybe 2 or 3 years and I pay something around $3.20 per month. So it’s ridiculously cheap and I host about 4 or 5 websites through Arvixe. Go ahead and check them out, go to pelt.co/arvixe and if you use the code, “PELTDISCOUNT”, you’re going to get 20% off your first invoice.

I use Arvixe, I recommend them. They’re not flawless, but they are very good and very cheap. So if you need your website hosted, consider Arvixe. And again, use the code, “PELTDISCOUNT” to get 20% off.

That’s it today for me, guys. I wish you the best in your business and until next time, if you want instructions, go and buy some furniture.


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#68 A New Approach to Marketing On Property Listings

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iniartworksmallThis feels like the 1,000th time I have had a new approach to marketing On Property. But here we go for another round.

Hey guys, Ryan here from Instructions Not Included. I just wanted to record an episode to talk about what I’ve been going through in On Property over the last couple of weeks and to flush it out for you guys.

However it’s really for myself to look back on and to say okay here’s where I was at a point in my business where things weren’t going well, here’s the way I was feeling, here are the things that I did. And then hopefully I can look back on this in a year and I can see how I turned it around. It’s actually interesting I started Instructions Not Included about a year ago.

I think I started in December of 2015. So for it to have been a year since I started this podcast is quite amazing. And to think of the things that I’ve tried in those 12 months is quite significant. To think of the success that I’ve had maybe not as significant but I’ve tried a lot of things and I’ve learned a lot and I feel a lot more knowledgeable and I feel like I can take on the world more.

And even though things haven’t necessarily gone my way and I haven’t got everything right I am very grateful for the year that I’ve had in business, the things that I’ve learned and the position that I’m currently in to move forward with my business.

Let’s just talk about where we are with On Property. I talked about in a previous episode how I came to the realization within myself and with my wife. I did the data – I went digging through all of the data – What’s my retention rate for On Property Plus? How long are people staying? I discovered that 90% of people are leaving within a year.

Therefore what I thought was a sticky and a recurring product actually really isn’t because people are gone within a year and I’m not necessarily bringing in a lot of people to replace that. In fact, my customer base has actually decreased in 12 months but my revenue had slightly increased because of the increase in pricing that I had.

So I was kind of going backwards or being very stagnant in my business and so I came to the realization that On Property Plus isn’t going to make money in the way that I thought. It isn’t going to make the amount of money than I thought it was going to make and as a result I really need to rethink this and go back to the drawing board.

What we went back to was the original evergreen launch strategy that I had done with On Property Plus in the past. I was going to redo that and launch it again through an evergreen launch funnel basically using the exact funnel that I used about six months ago. I think it was back in May that I started it and it ran for about four months. Well I’m unhappy to say that it’s been three weeks – now is the fourth week and I’ve had over a thousand people through that evergreen launch funnel and I’ve had one sale of $300.00.

The evergreen launch funnel – I don’t know why it’s not working – I don’t know why the people aren’t as targeted – I don’t know what the go is but definitely it hasn’t been performing as well as it previously performed in the past. What I thought could get me potentially to my goals or get me a decent passive income out of On Property is probably not going to work.

Therefore that means back to the drawing board again. I went through an entire week where I was thinking about this and came to a conclusion and an idea and then actually scrap that idea yesterday. My idea was I could potentially Crowdfund On Property because I do believe that there is an opportunity in this space to provide non conflict of interest advice and education around investing in property.

And I thought some people might be passionate enough to get behind that and to support that because they want someone who is going to give them the information that’s not skewed towards the overpriced properties that are selling or whatever.

So I got on that bandwagon and I was going down that path thinking okay this could be good if I reach maybe $6,000 a month in crowdfunding then I can release all of my products for free. But the problem that I came to in the end was the people that are having success with crowdfunding – and by success we’re talking $10,000 to $20,000 a month and have absolutely massive followings.

We’re talking millions of views on every video that they have on YouTube, millions of subscribers or hundreds of thousands of subscribers. Compared to me you might get 400 views a day on YouTube – 10,000 views a month or that sort of thing.

It probably just wasn’t going to be viable for me to do it because so few people would actually put up money for effectively no reason or for the ability to crowdfund this that I just didn’t have the scale or I didn’t think that I had the scale to actually make this achievable.

I therefore went down the path of crowdfunding thinking about it a lot and ended up coming up with the fact that I’m probably not going to be able to crowdfund this because I really just don’t have the volume of people to make this successful. I was then back to square one again thinking, “Oh my goodness what am I going to do? How am I going to turn this business around?”

Basically I have been focusing a lot on my new business which is teaching people educational videos. That’s over at www.pelt.co so you can go and check that out. That is about teaching people how to set up a membership site, how to set up an evergreen launch funnel, a bunch of WordPress staff.

Mostly I will start with internet stuff because I can market referral programs, affiliate programs and make commissions there but eventually I’ll move into broader education for Pelt. I’ve been spending more time on that and really talking to my wife about it. We are thinking that On Property we want to tick away but we’re not going to heavily invest in it.

So we want it to provide us with enough money to get by until Pelt takes over and starts to make the bulk of our income which is where we want to be eventually as a company.

I have a whole bunch of ideas thinking around about what different things I could do. The idea that I finally settled on that I’m creating a sales page for and launching it this week was that I was going to basically roll everything into one again like I’ve been doing and really simplify things in terms of my website.

What I’m going to do as a marketing strategy is take the properties that I’m listing inside my membership site and I’m going to put them on my free site onproperty.com.au. I’m going to put them on the free site but I’m going to have them censored so the images will be blurred, there’ll be some information about it like price range, rental yield, potential cash flow of the property but it will be very limited.

Therefore people won’t be able to understand where this property is or what is the address of this property unless they remember. So the goal is that each post that I put out because I’m already going out and finding a property every single day and that’s daily content for the website and the goal is that people will then be able to peruse these properties and then it will encourage them to become members of On Property to get access to the properties.

That’s what I’m going to be doing. I’m going to launch the sales page. I’m creating it now so it will probably take me maybe two or three days to finish that.

I then need to set up a new process and some educational training videos for my virtual assistant so she can take things from my membership site and create the free content as well. However, the goal is really that the free property listings are a way to drive people to the members’ area.

I was thinking about it and I was thinking when I had previously looked at properties in the past there was a site that used to do a similar sort of thing called Cash Flow Capital and I used to look at it and they would share property listings but they wouldn’t share the addresses and then you would have to sign up and become a member in order to get access to those addresses.

I saw this and I thought that is actually a much better way to do it. And it just makes a lot more sense because people then see the properties and they create curiosity in them so they get interested and want to know about the property. I don’t even have to explain what On Property is to them necessarily. I just have to go ahead and give them access to the stuff. That’s where I am at the moment.

I just arrived at Melee so I’m going to go in and play a bit. Thanks for listening. I just wanted to get that off my chest to understand where I’ve been, the ideas that I’ve gone through and where I’m at the moment. I will be dropping the price to $99 a year but then I will be having a higher tier pricing so it will $99 a year just for the properties which I think is super affordable and then $249 will be the complete package.

They will get access to properties, they will get access to courses, they will get access to the FaceBook group, they will get access to the calculator and other stuff as well. Hopefully a large portion of people will go for the $249 but even if they would just go for the $99 I’m fine with that as well. That’s my pricing structure at the moment. I was thinking about adding a middle-tier but I’m not sure whether I’m going to do that at the moment so I’ll see how it goes down the track.

If at 99 bucks a year I can get 200 members that’s 20 grand a year and that will at least pay my expenses for my business and give me a little bit of profit as well and allow me to focus on building up Pelt. So hopefully it works. I’ll keep you guys updated obviously.

Until next time, if you want instructions on buy some furniture


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#65 The Day I Realised My Business Wasn’t Actually Viable

iniartworksmallToday I realised the business I have been focusing on and try to grow for the last 2 years may not actually be a viable business.

In the last episode, I talked about how I had lost my niche, but it was actually a lot worse than that and my business was in a way worse situation than that. And it’s still kind of is in a really bad situation. That’s what I’m going to be talking about in today’s episode of Instructions Not Included.

How I came to understand that my business wasn’t in fact viable and wasn’t going to help me achieve my goals and then what I’m doing to kind of get myself out of that hole and to convert my business into something that is actually going to help me achieve my goals. Because, obviously, we’re in business, we’re in online marketing for a reason.

We want to generate a certain amount of revenue, a certain amount of income and live a certain type of lifestyle. And so, for me, I guess the ultimate goal for me is to earn about $100,000 in revenue or $75,000 a year in take home profit that I can live off, but then I also have the caveat that I want the majority of that income to be semi-passive income.

So I don’t want to be doing a lot of work in order to generate that income. For example, I could do consulting and work with local businesses.

I could do client work and setup websites for people, but that could generate me and help me achieve the $100,000 a year, but I’ll be working full time in order to achieve that. However, I’ve got stuff like my membership site, like Property Tools, like On Property Plus that requires little upkeep and little maintenance and that’s the sort of income that I want to create.
Alright, so let me take you on the journey that I went on to discover that my business wasn’t viable. And then, let’s talk about the steps we’re taking to turn that around. I think this is going to be a very important episode for me.

It’s a very important episode for a lot of people to actually do this stuff first and understand what you’re doing in your business so you don’t go 2 years like I did before you realise, “Hang on, the path I’m going down probably isn’t actually viable.” Okay, I worked on Sunday because my wife was away on Friday and I took care of the kids. So I took a day off Friday and I worked on Sunday. And what I did on Sunday was that I went through the past history of my membership site, so I’ve got two.

I had On Property Plus where I find positive cash flow properties for people. And then I’ve got Property Tools which is a calculator to help people calculate whether or not a property is going to be positive cash flow. So On Property Plus goes back about 18 months. Property Tools goes back about 5 or 6 months.

So I looked at those and focused mostly on On Property Plus, which I had changed the name to On Property Listings, but it’s going back to On Property Plus, we’ll get to that in a second. Basically, I went through my stats, all the way back for 18 months.

I looked at it and I realised that in the space of 12 months, in terms of monthly members to On Property Plus, I’ve gone backwards. So in the last 12 months where I think my business is growing, traffic on the website is growing, monthly subscribers to my main membership site, my main source of income, have gone backwards by 4 customers. And my income had gone up a little bit by about $270 or $280 or something like that. So imagine, in 12 months, working in your business for 12 months and you grow your income by $280 a month or $3,000 a year, is basically what I was looking at.

So what I realised when I looked back was that in the course of the year, 90% of monthly members left the service. And so, basically, every single year, I’m starting from scratch. Every single month, I’m starting from scratch to get new members and to get revenue coming in.

In terms of the goals that I had, I’m likely to achieve that. We’ll get to that in a sec. I also looked at annual subscribers and this was a little bit better, but only 30% of those stay around when it comes time to renew their membership.

I didn’t have as much data on annual members because, obviously, it takes longer for them to churn. But from what I can see, about 30% of annual members renew their subscription a further year. And so, with this knowledge in hand, I was really realising that even though I have a subscription business, not many people are staying around. And so, I can’t just focus on getting new customers and my business is going to grow as a result of that. Basically, each year, I need to get all brand new customers for my service. So that was the first realisation.

The next thing that I did after having this realisation was I went back to modelling my products. And so, I looked at the income that I wanted to generate and I’m looking at, “Okay, based on different price points, how could I generate this income?” Let me just bring it up on my computer so we can talk through this together and it’ll make a lot of sense to you. I’m just going to log on to my spreadsheet. Basically, what I decided was that for On Property Plus, I wanted it to achieve $60,000 per year.

I figured Property Tools will probably make anywhere between $5,000 and $15,000 a year. Then there’s extra affiliate stuff like my affiliate deal with Ben and then extra sites and stuff like that on the side as well. I just thought $60,000 for On Property Plus is the goal that I’m going for.

Let me bring up my modelling page. I was looking at all different price points. So recently, I had raised the price from $300 a year to $480 per year. I was looking at, “Okay, how many sales would I need in order to achieve my goal of $60,000?” remembering that the majority of people are actually leaving every single year. And so, I was looking at my goal of $60,000 and at my previous price point of $300, I would need 17 new subscribers a month to achieve that goal. And when I looked back over my statistics, my best month was 17 in the one month. Most of the months were more like 7, 8, 2, 13.

It went up and down, but my average was about 7 or 7.5 and I needed 17 every single month in order to achieve my goal because people are leaving every year. So I’m looking at this and I’m like, I haven’t had a new annual subscriber in the last 2 months at the current price, which is $480 and I’ve had a few monthly members, but they’re going away every year. So I’ve decided, I really want to focus on annual subscribers.

I think that’s the easiest way to achieve my goal and so I was looking at different price points. At $100, I would need 50 new subscribers per month. At $200, I would need 25; At $300, I would need 17; At $400, I would need 13 and at $500, I would need 10 new subscribers per month. And so, I was looking at this range, I thought, the most achievable is the $200 to $300 range. $100 is too cheap, I need too many. Between $200 and $300 or 17 and 25, is something that I could probably aim for. Really, I was thinking about this and I’m like, “Yeah, I can’t achieve this. This business isn’t going to achieve the goals that I thought it was going to achieve.”

I realised that as my website traffic was growing, the income wasn’t growing with it. And so, I can’t just focus on growing web traffic in order to get more sales. There is one saving grace for me, though. And that’s the fact that looking at my data, about 30% of annual members re-subscribe. This means that my goal of 17 per month can drop down to 12 per month if 30% of people stay. So, 12 per month is more achievable – it’s only 5 off my regular goal. So what I eventually came to and I had a long discussion with my wife. We’re talking through what are we going to do? What should we look at? There was a few conclusions that I came to

. The first was that On Property Plus isn’t going to be the runaway success that I had hoped it would be – that would eventually generate over $100,000 a year by itself. That’s just probably not going to happen. So that was the first big realisation.

So then, we’re just looking at, okay, rather than thinking about this as a recurring product, even though I would still sell it as a yearly subscription or monthly subscription. I really need to look at this as one-time sales moreso. And so, realising that, looking back over the data, I did an experiment for a couple of months – I think about 3 or 4 months this year where I turned off On Property Plus. So it wasn’t available to the public, but what would happen was each week, a new cohort of people – and a cohort is just a small group of people, about 100 people, would go through a sales funnel like Jeff Walker talks about.

So they go through 3 free videos then there’s a 4th video, On Property Plus opens for them for 5 days and then it closes. So a bunch of people go through this every week and when I looked at my data, my biggest month was when I was doing this experiment, that was 17. And also, the majority of those months were quite good and quite high in terms of the subscribers that I got.

I’m just wondering if I can find it and show you guys. When we made this change, which was May in 2015. In terms of new customers, we had 15 one month, 17 one month, 8 one month and 6 one month. But then, before that, we’ve had like 7 one month, we had 16 then we had 2, 2, 3. So on average, it seems to be higher.

What I could tell from the previous experiment that I had done is actually this is probably the best way for me to sell On Property – is to close it down, have this evergreen launch funnel where people only get an opportunity to join for about 5 days and after that, the opportunity closes for them.

I can also supplement this maybe twice a year or something like that where I can open it up to the public and do a bonus offer and things like that. Something that I haven’t done in the past, but something that I would definitely explore moving forward now. So if I look at this and I look at 15, 17, 8 and 6, the goal of at least 12, but hopefully 17 per month is probably achievable.

If instead of focusing on more traffic, I actually focus on conversions. Conversions from my website to my email list and then also conversions from the email list into On Property Plus members. So that was the second big thing.

First big thing was we realised that it’s probably not going to be the money-maker that we thought it was. And then, the second big thing was that the best way to sell this is probably through the evergreen launch funnel. So we need to reactivate that and go through the process of reactivating that. Since last time, I’ve moved from Ontraport, where I was previously hosting this to Convert Kit. And to actually run this evergreen launch funnel was a bit harder in Convert Kit.

I had to word out how to do it and maybe I’ll do a tutorial on that in the future. That’s the point right now. It’s that, okay, it’s not going to be the money maker that we thought it was, but if I launch this evergreen launch funnel, then potentially, we can achieve our goal of $60,000 on this product each year. Instead of focusing on new content and driving more traffic to my blog, I’m instead going to focus on conversions. So converting the email subscribers more, getting more people to sign up for my email list and so forth.

So, yeah, we had a big realisation that the plans that I had weren’t moving us in the direction that we thought that we were going to get. I actually thought my saving grace would be Property Tools, which is $5 a month or $50 per year. And then when I looked at that and I’m looking at average churn for that, they say a churn of 5% is good and churn of 2%. Churn is the percentage of customers leaving each month. So churn of 5% is good. Churn of 2% is world class.

My churn, some months it was below 5%, some months it was over 5%, but basically, I think my churn is going to be around 5% or a little bit higher. For me to even achieve $50,000 per year from Property Tools, I would need 1,000 members and if I had 1,000 members, my churn at 5% would be 50 people a month. So that’s 50 people a month that I would need to replace and I’m getting about 10-15 new customers a month. So to go from 10 to 15 to 50 with Property Tools is probably not achievable.

I always thought, that long-term, Property Tools will be my saving grace and that it would be the best long-term generator of cash, but now that I understand churn, I understand that Property Tools will eventually cap it up and it’s going to be probably be nowhere near that $50,000 year example that we just talked about.

So that’s not going to be our saving grace. On Property Plus wasn’t moving where we wanted it to. So this week, I’m just working on converting On Property Listings back to On Property Plus, providing everything that I did previously in the past so people get access to courses, to calculators, to all that sort of stuff. So it’s back to being a membership site, rather than just an email that gets sent out to people. So I’m all the way back to where I started, which was back in September, a few months ago and I basically got the same strategy.

It was really good to realise this stuff, but also really painful to realise it as well. So I definitely recommend that you go through your stats, and then model forward and say, “Okay, how many units do I actually need to sell to achieve my goals and is that actually achievable?” Because for me, it wasn’t really achievable unless I make some drastic changes. And for me, that’s converting to this evergreen launch funnel. And then also focusing on how to increase my conversions as well.

By doing this, by doing the modelling, by understanding that this business probably isn’t going to be what I thought it was, actually gave me some really good action steps that I can take to improve the chances of me generating an above average income from my business.

Another thing that we decided as well is that On Property is probably never going to be the home run success. And so, for me to generate a full time income online above that $100,000 revenue that we talked about, I’m really going to need to start diversifying into other niches. Dreamy Dad was the start of that with talking about night terrors. But that’s probably not going to be a very big site so I need to explore other things that I can do. At the moment, I don’t have any ideas.

I am thinking about doing some tutorials on how to setup a website, how to sell your own products, that sort of stuff and make some money through affiliate commissions, but I haven’t done the research to understand how competitive is this market. Can I compete in this space? Is it even worth doing? At the moment, I’m not 100% sure. I’m just going to try and get On Property set up so that it’s ticking away. And then, I’ll try and find some other niches and see what I can do.
Big realisations this week. Big, big, big changes in my business. Kind of depressing to realise that what I’ve been working on for the last 2 years probably isn’t going to achieve the goals that I have for myself, but at least now I know and I can move forward and try and find a way to achieve my goals. At the end of the day, that’s what it’s about, hey? We run our own business, we learn these things and we’re constantly adjusting to try and achieve our goals.

I hope that this encourages you to go and look at your product. Go and look at your business model and to say, well, is this actually going to help me achieve my goals or not? And then see what action you can do to actually move you towards your goals.

I’ll keep you guys updated with how I go moving forward. Different niches I decide to go in, etc. and how my business evolves. I hope this has been interesting. This has been a super important realisation for me. This will be a very important episode for me to look back on and to realise the mistakes that I made and to stay focused on business that will actually move me towards my goal. I hope that encourages you guys.

This episode is sponsored by Snappy Checkout, which is, I think, the best way to collect payments and to deliver your products. To collect payments for your products and I use it on all of my sites. I use it for every product that I sell. It’s got a great backend system to track all your sales and things like that, integrates with Stripe.

It’s really affordable as well. So go to pelt.co/checkout. So pelt.co/checkout to go and have a look at Snappy Checkout today and I definitely think it’s the best way to sell your own products. And I’m working with Mike, the owner there, to actually work on a one-click upgrade. So you sell a product and then they go to an upsell page and then with one click, they can be charged and get access to the upsell. So that’s something that we’re working on together.

Hopefully, we’ll have that together soon and I can start working on some upsells and things as well, which can just add a little bit to my business. So, again, go ahead, check it out. Go to pelt.co/checkout. That’s my affiliate link and it helps support this show and helps support what I think is an absolutely awesome product. So until next time, guys, stay positive.


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#64 I’ve Lost My Niche

iniartworksmallAfter feeling like I had no idea how to move forward I have decided to refocus in on my niche of investing in positive cash flow properties.

I think I have worked out the solution to my problem. I am not 100% sure that I have worked out the solution, but at least I’ve got something to go with now. So if you have listened to the last episode or if you haven’t, go back and listen to it.

Basically, I am struggling at the moment because revenue has decreased in my business and I don’t know what I did wrong, and I don’t know what to do. So it has been laying very heavily on my mind as to what exactly I need to do to get myself out of this rut and to transform my business, get my business healthy again and keep it going.

On the bright side, I have spoken to Ben and he was saying that there are some good leads coming through his buyers’ agency. so in terms of cash flow I don’t think I have anything to stress about. But in terms of the longevity of my business that’s what I have been stressing about and I don’t really have a solution.

And then I was just thinking about it and thinking about it, talking to my wife about it, thinking about it some more and I came to the realization that I used to be the positive cash flow guy and everything I would talk about on my site would all be around investing in positive cash flow property. And then the issued that I had was that I had kind of tapped out that market in terms of organic traffic, in terms of search engine traffic and SEO because only so many things you can write about how to find positive cash flow property which is really the problem that I solved.

And so what I then did was I started to create content that was just about general property investing. So, I expanded my niche.

But I think the mistake that I made is that I should have still remain the positive cash flow guy and still focus on that niche but my free content is just more general in nature in order to reach a larger audience. So what I did and the mistake that I think I’ve made is I went from the positive cash flow guy to the property guy.

And being a property guy in a space of thousands of property advisors, buyers, agents, property marketers – all of these sorts of people, I’m just one in a sea of thousands. And so I think the mistake that I made and again I could be wrong on this and I could need to change my mind, but the mistake that I have made is I’ve gotten away from my core message which is investing in positive cash flow property and helping people invest in positive cash flow property.

And so I was thinking about my products. I was thinking about my offerings. And the way that I came upon – I guess, this discovery that I had lost my niche was I was wondering with this problem – Is it a product problem?” “Do my products suck and I need all new products? Is it a pricing problem? So my products are overpriced or under-priced or just not priced correctly? Or is it a marketing problem and I’m not marketing my products correctly? And I do feel like it’s a marketing problem – that I’m not marketing my products correctly.  Because I’ve got a lot of people that signed up for my services and my products and are happy with them.

Therefore, I’m pretty sure that it’s not the products. I’m pretty sure it’s not the pricing. I’m pretty sure that it is nothing. So I’m thinking along this train of thought and then came up with I guess the idea that I’d lost my niche.

As a result, I was rethinking through my products and what I have to offer and how I can position them and I only got back to being the positive cash flow guy or on On Property to be all about finding positive cash flow property. So what I’ll have is On Property listings which I’ll probably might even change the name to Positive Cash Flow Listings just to make it more obvious. I’m not 100% sure about that but I have the listing so that’s a service that I hope you will find real positive cash flow properties.

I’m going to merge my courses into one which I’m going to call Positive Cash Flow Boot Camp. This will be a three-part course. Therefore, the three courses that are selling as individual units will now become one boot camp. And I really feel like when you say boot camp it makes you think about an intensive something that you go through. You can chew on the content quickly. You build up the skills quickly. To me, that’s exactly what a boot camp is. Therefore, to take the three products that I have, packaged them together into positive cash flow boot camp I can show people how to find positive cash flow properties, how to research an area and also how to evaluate individual properties. So I’m confident with that.

Also, property tools I think I may need to put – not on the back burner but just not a huge focus on my site.  Nevertheless, there are property tools I’ll be marketing as tools to help you invest in positive cash flow properties. So I’ve got all of that same sort of products – a tiny bit of repackaging with the boot camp, but basically the same. I’m just changing the marketing around it and changing my focus back to my original niche which is helping people find positive cash flow properties.

I also wanted to record this episode quickly because I’ve listened to something and I don’t want to forget it. I was listening to The Fizzle Podcast which is great. It’s an awesome bunch of guys over there at Fizzle and they were talking about finding your true voice and there were two things that they’ve talked about in the podcast episodes. It’s episodes one and two of that podcast if you want to go check it out. But two things that they talked about that resonated with me around this topic of finding your voice, finding your niche – all of this sort of stuff. And one thing that really resonated with me that was really cool was when they were talking about choosing the niche or choosing the market that you go into.

Often we talk about passion. We talk about our calling. We talk about all of this sort of stuff and that can just be so overwhelming. I know I’ve been overwhelmed at times thinking about, “Am I passionate enough about this market, about this business to pursue it for the next five or 10 years? Am I passionate  enough? Do I feel like God is calling me to work in this business?” And I have really struggled with that.

But reframing it – they reframed it as, “Is this something you care about?” And by reframing it to building a business around things that I care about just makes it so much easier. Do I care about the property market and helping people invest in property? Absolutely. But then I also care about helping parents with night terrors and I care about a whole bunch of other things and I could add those into my business.

So by changing the language to what we’re passionate about, to what we care about has really inspired me in terms of choosing my niche, feeling comfortable with it. Even though it may not be my biggest passion in the world or my biggest calling in the world, it’s something that I care about, it’s something in an area that I want to have an impact and so that’s important.

And they also talked about finding your own voice and a lot of them have gone through this passage – I guess you would call it, of starting with very generic content or copying someone else that they had seen, some guru in the market or something like that and just not getting a lot of traction. But then, they found their own voice, start putting their personality into things and then things really took off. And they interviewed one of the guys – the guy who started a [inaudible7:28] fitness.

He was saying he was writing five articles a week for nine months and he got no traction or generic articles. And then what he decided to do was to move back to two articles a week but to really inject who he was – really inject his new newness and his passion and family guy references and style was references into his blog post and that’s when things started really taking off for him.

So when it comes to finding my voice, I guess what I want to do is find what is my voice, what makes me different in the property market. Because I’m not just a property guy, as I think if I’m just going to be a property guy then there’re other guys who are better. I therefore need to find my specific angle; my specific voice and I’ll be trying out a whole bunch of things. I’ll be trying out how to podcast. I’ll be trying out high quality videos with more editing. I’ll be trying out longer podcast episodes potentially when I’m doing rants and going on rants and things like that.  What I’m going to do is try a whole bunch of things to see what resonates with me, what resonates with my audience and to try and find, I guess the voice that I want to have in the market.

So I was feeling very stuck. I’m feeling a lot less stuck now. I’m passionate to get back to work tomorrow. I took Friday off so I’m going to be working on Sunday and I’m passionate to get back to redo my homepage to focus on positive cash flow property. I’m also excited too I guess, to redo my products, to put a much larger emphasis on finding and investing in positive cash flow properties and then moving forward into the free content things I’ll be creating.

Then I will be looking to find my voice, trying a few things and I guess, injecting up as much of whom I am into things. And so that may be like so much about these references. That may be my new newness that I have. That may be just me being quirky or whatever. I’m not 100% sure yet but I’ll go ahead and I’ll give it a try.

There were emails that I sent out and I’ll just give you a quick update. I did make four new sales for property tools so I got four new members for that. I think I got three new annual members, one monthly. So that was good. However, that was four emails sent out to like a database of 10,000 people. So it’s definitely not a massive conversion to make $155 on a database of 10,000 people over four emails.

Actually, as I’m recording this I just got a new customer – let’s open this up and see if it’s from property tools. That takes it from four to five. Actually, they have spent $99 so they must have bought a course – “How To Find Positive Cash Flow Properties Course.” As I said, I will be selling them individually again so take that $155 up to $255.

All of the way that I receive my payments and stuff, I use a product called Snappy Checkout which I have an affiliate relationship with which you guys can check out. They’re sponsoring this podcast in a way because they are an affiliate deal. They are something that I absolutely love and recommend. I’m looking to do a whole bunch of videos around how to use them and some of the cool things you can do with Snappy check out now that I’ve got this affiliate thing. So that’s another thing that I care about -helping people sell their products and helping people do things well. I think Snappy Checkout is an awesome tool and that’s something that I’ll consider creating some episodes about, some tutorials about.

So you can check out Snappy Checkout – just go to www.pelt.co/checkout  and you can go straight through to see that product. It’s absolutely awesome and will help you sell your products or subscriptions, memberships, all that good sort of stuff. So go ahead www.pelt.co/checkout  and I’ll get a small affiliate commission if you end up using them.

I absolutely appreciate you guys listening. I appreciate you taking the time and letting me vent what I’m feeling and the conclusions that I’ve come to. Hopefully as I get to work this week we’ll start to see some results and we’ll start move things forward.

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


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#61 Never Be Afraid To Hit The Reset Button

iniartworksmallWhen running your own business you often need to change strategies all the time. You need to never be afraid to hit the reset button.

Sometimes in business and in life you just get an intuitive sense of things, and I have often found that if I acted on those intuitions, acted on that feeling, then most of the time good things will come about. Occasionally, you would believe something or believe that you have felt something and you would realize to discover that it was not true. But the majority of the time, you get a sense of something without fully understanding the entire picture, and that is what happened to me today.

I understand the importance of sending out email broadcast to my list. It is not something that I remember to do on a regular basis. I am trying to do it consistently on Wednesdays, but today is Friday and I had not done one yet. I was listening to a podcast or something and they were talking about email marketing and I am like, “I have a list of 10,000 people. I need to send something out to them. I need to communicate with them, and I need to market my product – my suburb research course.”

I am in the fortunate position now that I have been paid by Ben and I am not in a cash-strap position, and so I do not need to send a thousand-dollar worth of this course within the next week in order to survive or to not have to pull from savings. So I am in that good position, so I decided – I wrote an article, I did an episode about what really drives capital growth or the appreciation in price of a property.

And so I just created an email broadcast about that with the marketing message at the in saying, “If you want to learn how to find areas that are likely to grow, and then check out my course.” And also, if they actually went to the article or went to the episode and watched it, then there is a call to action in that as well. And I sent it out and you know, fairly decent response in terms of opens and click-throughs and stuff like that. But how many sales? Zero.

I got a sale for the suburb research yesterday I think that kind of came out of the blue that may have come from one of my episodes. But all in all, not many sales for this course and I sent out this email, and within a couple of hours I had this intuitive sense that this course is not going to do as well as I have thought. This is not something that I can just market to my list and they will automatically buy. And this is something that is very specific to their situation. And then I have an idea.

I had an idea to reach more customers with my courses because I feel like these courses focused on a particular aspect or particular skill of investing in property, and by keeping them single courses I am only appealing to people who are looking for them right then and there. So if for example the suburb research course, I am only appealing to people who want to go ahead and do suburb research immediately because they are looking at buying a property right now.

So the people who are researching and looking to buy a property right now, that is going to be a small segment of my population, of my user base. So you have property owners, people who have invested in a lot of property, who feel like they know how to research suburbs, they do not want to pay a hundred dollars for a course. And then you have people who are not quite ready to buy yet so they do not feel like it is worth signing up yet. So really, it is just not appealing to enough people and so I had this idea and I realized I was not going to sell this course as much as I thought.

So I decided to do some data diving, which is looking into the data and traffic for my website to begin to understand why are people coming to my website; what do I need to create to sell to people who are then going to buy this suburb research course.

I discovered that a large percentage of my audience were coming to my website looking at things around building a property; and something that I learned through a video series with Ben, who is my buyer’s agent, and we talked about the ins and outs of building a new property. At the end of the course, there was a call to action to getting contact with him and organize a strategy session. And for all the people who went through that course, we discovered that not many people were actually ready to buy, ready to take action, ready to invest; that a lot of these people were actually just in the research phase of their journey and just researching about building a property. They were not necessarily ready to buy one. So this means there is a lot of traffic coming for this particular term, but there is not a lot of money actually being spent by these people, so it is a very small portion of the audience that actually wants to go ahead and buy property.

So I was thinking, “Okay. We have this audience, a large audience that is researching this topic. I know there is not a lot of good information out there because I have written some of it and I have also done the series with Ben. I just know my space, so I know there is not a lot of information out there. So I was like, “Maybe I could take what I did with Ben and create an eBook out of the key aspects of what we talked about and what I learned: so the ins and outs, the most important things to know when building a property.” And so I was like, “Okay. Yeah.” Create an eBook. I could sell this for maybe $9.95 to these people, and I have thousands of people coming each month around this topic. And so I thought $9.95, this is a great thing that I could market.

I could probably sell a couple of these a week. I was not really thinking about how many I would sell, how much I would make for a year, but I was like, this could be something. And I was thinking about what would I include in this eBook, and I wrote down an outline and I was like, I could create a mini-video course, not as high production as I usually do, but that would actually create the content that would then get transcribed, which I could turn into an eBook.

That would be the fastest and the easiest way for me to do that. And so then I am going down this avenue and I am thinking I will sell this eBook with a free course attached to it because that is a value-add. The course will be available for free anyway, but I will package it up and say, “You get the eBook and you get a free course.” And then for some reason – I cannot actually remember the exact moment, but I had the idea in my mind that this course is an extra course that I want to create. All of a sudden I am starting to get quite a lot of courses! I have How to Find Positive Cash Flow Properties.

I have the Suburb Research Course. I am about to create a Property Evaluation Course. I will then have this course and I was thinking, what other courses could I do? There is one on Saving a Deposit, which I get a lot of traffic from, and there is a bunch of other courses that I have thought of; mini courses like How to Increase the Cash Flow of Your Property, How to Do Renovations. There are just so many things that I could create courses on.

And so this is how my thinking is going, how my thought pattern is progressing. And then I am like, this could be a really good membership site in the way that James Schramko talks about it, which is a membership site is kind of like a supermarket. You go to the supermarket and you are never going to buy everything in a supermarket in one visit. However, you know everything that you need is at that supermarket and you often go back to that supermarket over and over again to get the things you need as you need them.

And so in the same way you can create a membership site that is a buffet, that is like Netflix, that has all of these potential things that you could want and you can then just go in as a customer and you can just access the things that you need. And I was thinking about this and thinking about the courses that I wanted to create and I am like, this would be awesome to get people over the barrier, who do not need a course in their specific situation right now. So I am thinking, people who do not need to do suburb research right now might not buy the Suburb Research Course but they might buy access to a membership site that has a whole bunch of courses in it including Suburb Research.

So Suburb research adds to the value of that membership site but they are not buying it for that specific situation. But then you also have people who want specifically to learn about how to do suburb research, I can say. “Look, this course is available inside this membership site. You just sign up and you get access to the course that you want.” So it kind of reaches out to people who do not necessarily want that exact course right now. And then also, it serves the purpose and the need of the people who want to get access to that course and want to solve that problem. So that is a massive plus.

And then I have also been thinking about the thousand true fans theory, which you guys may have heard of. If you have not, simply google thousand true fans, and this is the idea that an artist, that a creator does not need a massive global following in order to generate a decent income. If they have a thousand true fans, and these are the people that would come to every one of their shows, buy every one of their albums or artworks or whatever it may be. If someone had a thousand true fans that they could get to spend $100 a year with them, that would be $100,000 a year, and that would be a decent income. It is not a a multi-million dollar business but it is a decent income for a lot of people.

And so I have really been inspired by these thousand true fans, and my passion really does lie around providing high quality, low value products to the market. I get off being generous. I get off on pricing my products low. I get off on people saying, “Why are you charging so little for your products?” And I get off on just shocking the market because I can and because of who I am as a person, that I can give generously and I can do it because I do not need the money. And so in an ideal world for me, I would offer everything that I offer in On Property, the listings, the tools, all of that sort of stuff.

In a perfect world, I would love to offer everything for just $10 per month, and to have a thousand true fans and $100,000 and bygones be bygones, and then that would be it for me. I do not have the ability to do that at the moment because of the revenue needs of my business as well as the revenue needs of my family. But definitely if my site scaled to a point where I could do that that would definitely be something that I would want to do.

But then I thought, “Hey, if I tack this course onto Property Tools, which is my Property Calculator, where people are already paying $5 a month; and I have about 75 members that I have built over the last 3 or 4 months in there. If I added the courses onto this, change of pricing from $5 a month to $10 a month, then that is the exact amount that I would need to work towards that thousand true fans. And so that is exactly what I did. Today, I changed my sales page. I changed my pricing, and I set up the membership site to also contain these courses. And I launched the new version of Property Tools.

I did not tell anyone about it. I updated my homepage; just put an announcement on my homepage announcing the new version of Property Tools where you get access to all of these. And I am happy to announce that I launched it, as I am recording this – it is 8:30 PM; it probably went live about 4:00 PM. I have made my first sale within a couple of hours. My first $9.99 per month from one of my one thousand true fans has come through.

That was super exciting to see, super exciting to get that feedback and to get that instantaneous customer. And also, I just feel like I am passionate about this. I feel like this is really valuable. I feel like I know what I am offering is awesome, and as I build this up and as I build up more and more courses, really, you do become like the Netflix of the property industry. That would be something that could be really, really exciting. Netflix in Australia, I would not go with anyone else because Netflix just has such a wide variety of things. They have awesome documentaries. They have awesome Netflix show.

There is no point going with anyone else. I think if I can build up this repertoire of property information at such an affordable price, eventually people would be subscribed and they would be, “Why will I go anywhere else when I have access to all these information from Ryan at On Property and all the courses in there for $10 a month. Why would I pay $2,000 to do a course? Why would I go somewhere else when I can stick here?”

So within the space of a day, or a couple of hours, I went from trying to promote a course to completely changing the pricing model and the way that I am selling my products. And really, it is a move back to what I previously had in On Property where everything was bundled in there, which is a bit strange because I just moved away from that a couple of months ago and unbundled everything. And now I am bundling it all back together again. The listings are still separate but everything else – the teachings and the tools, are now bundled together.

So maybe in the future I will unbundle them again, once I add more and more courses, and if the community grows, then I could unbundle the tools again. But at the moment it is good to have the tools bundled in there because it is just  a better excuse for people to stay subscribed for $10 a month because that is the only way they could get access to that calculator. They cannot just go in, download all the content, and then leave because then they will not be able to use the calculator. So by having the calculator in there is encouraging people to stay and as I have said, like eventually if I get enough courses in there and it is Netflix where there is this buffet of content available, then maybe I can unbundle it again in the future.

But that is where I am at now, I am very excited, hoping to drive this forward. I am glad I do not need revenue straight away, and so I can work towards getting more and more customers at this $10 a month price range and work towards eventually getting a thousand true fans and a thousand customers at $10 per month and make about $100,000 a year. I will be very, very happy with that. I could go on and live my life and would not have to worry about things. So that is where I am at.

I hope things are moving forward in your business. One of the things me and my wife always say to each other is to never be afraid to hit the reset button; and in a way that is what I have done today. So I just want to encourage you, no matter how far you have gotten down a path in terms of your pricing strategy or the products that you are creating, never be afraid to hit the reset button, or to backtrack, or to change strategy. So I wish you the best of luck in your business and until next time, if you want instructions, go and buy some furniture.


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#60 Niche Site Update

iniartworksmallAn update on the progress of my new niche site. Good news is that I have finished all the work for it in just 3 days.
 
Hey guys! Ryan here from Instructions Not Included, and I want to give you guys an update on how I am going on the niche site or the small site that I am creating to market the Lully, which is the product that helps stop night terrors in children. My child had night terrors and this product helped him to stop having night terrors during the night.
 
If you do not know what night terrors are, consider yourself lucky; but basically that is when your child wakes up kicking and screaming and having a tantrum but they are not actually awake. So it is very stressful as a parent because you cannot console your child. It is very difficult to wake them up and to make them stop having these night terrors.
 
So I was really excited to find this product which solved my problem. And I was also quite frustrated with the product that it was such a hard solution to find out there.
 
If you are a parent and you have a child with this problem, then it is very hard to find out about this product and I locked into it because I was listening to this week in StartUps and eventually Capital Fund who was talking about how they funded this startup and so I had to do a lot of googling to find them and I found them through like a sleep study blog post on Stanford website about the Stanford Sleep Study or something like that. So it is very hard to find, so I want to help the parents out there who have children who have night terrors.
 
I want to share this with them to help them, but also there is the opportunity for me to market this product through Amazon, because it is available on Amazon.com. I thought I could create a website; I could market this product and I could send them through my Amazon affiliate link, and if anyone buys then I get a commission for that.
 
So that is kind of the basis for my website. I set the goal to creating about 10 articles and spending no more than a week on this site, was what I gave myself. And I am happy to let you guys know that I have created 13 videos, which will turn to articles, and I have only spent 3 days on this site. So today is the third day that I am spending on the site and basically everything is being done now.
 
I have just finished the videos and I am just uploading the videos. And then I just need to write a couple of descriptions and then I am done and I will hand it over to my awesome virtual assistant who will then go ahead and will upload all those to YouTube, will upload the podcast to Soundcloud and will order those transcriptions. And so really, I am done at the moment in terms of what I need to do for the site.
 
I will probably need to revisit it in a couple of weeks when I can actually get those transcriptions done. My transcribers combined can do about 2 hours of audio transcriptions per week, but they are currently working on stuff for On Property. So they will be finished with that in about a week or so, and then I can provide them with the Dreamy Dad ones.
 
In case you did not know, the site is called DreamyDad.com. So I will provide them with those transcriptions, that will take another week for them to deliver those; and my virtual assistant will then receive those and will upload those both to YouTube and to the website, so in a couple of weeks we should have the transcriptions done. We should have them up on the website, and then we are hoping to start to achieve some things, start to get some traffic and maybe get some sales. I am not hoping for a lot. This is really, I guess, a trial for me. But if I could get any sales through this, that would be pretty cool.
 
So at the moment, I think we have uploaded 7 videos of the 13 because I am still processing some of them. But let us go ahead and have a look and let us just use the term night terrors. I am searching in YouTube to try and find myself. I uploaded these videos probably about 24 hours ago now, and I am now on the second page and still have not found myself; third page, okay. So it looks like I am definitely not ranking for night terrors at the moment, but that is a pretty highly searched term so I am definitely not expecting to rank for that in the early days, maybe down the track if my videos do prove popular.
 
One of them was symptoms of night terrors. Let us search for that and see if we come up. Alright, so I am not on the first page, scroll down, not on there at all. So basically, I am not appearing in YouTube at the moment and I am not surprised by this. I am used to putting video up in YouTube for On Property, and if it is for an obscure term it is going to rank for that basically, instantly, for On Property. But I do have a couple of years history with that site, and YouTube knows that people watch my videos and that people like my videos and stuff like that. I am not completely surprised that my videos are not showing up. Let us try this one: how to deal with night terrors.
 
Let us have a search for that. Okay, if we search how to deal with night terrors in YouTube, I am actually the 6th result at the moment. And we have not created any thumbnails for these yet. Well, I have created them but they have not been uploaded.  I am actually the 6th and the 8th results on that page, so that is good. And we also have some thumbnails to upload which will make the videos more likely for people to click on. So nothing really happening in YouTube at the moment, but it has only been 12 hours so I will report back to you guys in the future.
 
But basically, I am super excited to get this done, super excited to work on something that is different from On Property. And it is also just good to get in the creative space of doing something new and then thinking about how can I take that across and apply that to my main site which is On Property. And so I have been thinking, I have been mulling over the last days about potentially doing more high-quality content in the future. So rather than just a talking head video, I am actually thinking about doing some higher production stuff here and there to really engage the audience and to have awesome videos. But that is not something I am going to launch any time soon, but it is something that I am thinking about.
 
And I did really enjoy creating this site for the Lully, creating DreamyDad.com, and I like the process of creating this mini-site to solve a real need out there where people need help and to recommend a product that I absolutely love myself. So definitely I will be thinking through things and how can I replicate this across another website. At the moment I have no ideas.
 
And then the other thing that I am quite passionate about is Super Smash Brothers Melee, but there are a lot of issues about copyright and stuff like that if you are going to be uploading footage of the game. And Nintendo does not seem to be very happy to work with players and creators so I am probably going to stay away from that market.
 
But so I am going to monitor my life and see what other problems that people might want solved on the internet, is there a product that I can recommend, or even if I just create videos and make some money through advertising on smaller sites, that is definitely something that I want to pursue and want to consider because my goal was always to be a media company, not to be a property company. And so for me to be working on this night terror website, I know it feels like I am doing what I wanted to do, which is creating content, creating media and then hopefully making money through that. We will see how we go with this, if it does well, if we start selling some products then I will expand it and do more videos.
 
And I will also consider talking about sleep in general and also I will probably go back to the founders of Lully and see if we can get another interview with them to cover topics in more detail and call on their expertise. But whether we see any traction before I go down that path and make the effort because I can see I am getting traction, I am selling their product then I can say, “Hey guys! I am selling x amount of your product per month. I really need your help in doing a video,” and they are probably more likely to do it.
 
So I am excited about this website, DreamyDad.com. If you want to go ahead and check it out, it is a small niche and I am not even sure if I am going to make any money, but hopefully I can help those parents out there who have night terrors.  So we will see how it goes. That is my update, so 3 days of work. Let us track it and see how much money are we going to make from this website. Was it worth the 3 days of work or should I have just spent those 3 days creating videos for On Property or working on other things.

But it definitely made me think again about Outspoken.co as well as PodcastFast, and particularly about not pursuing those sites and not pursuing creating my own products because it is just so much effort. And rather than pursuing those, to try and find other areas where I can create content and market a product and make money in easier ways. So I do not know. I will be mulling over it.  I will keep you guys updated as thing go. But that is it for me for today.
 
So until next time, if you want instructions go and buy some furniture.
 
At the end here, I just want to quickly mention the sponsor of the Instructions Not Included Podcast, which is Snappy Checkout. Now Snappy Checkout is the tool that I use to collect credit payments online, or credit cards online. It helps you manage all your products. It can help you deliver your products as well and provides a really seamless checkout experience for customers, both on mobile devices and on their computers. So it is absolutely awesome! It connects with Stripe, which is a very popular payment platform or back end system. And the fees are super affordable. I think it is something like you pay 30 cents or 2%, whichever is less per transaction.
 
For a lot of places like Gumroad, you pay a 5% transaction, so on a thousand-dollar product that is $50. With Snappy Checkout, you pay a Stripe fee which is 2.9% plus whatever fee – $2 or whatever percent it is, whatever is less. So if I went with Gumroad and sold a thousand-dollar product, I will be paying $50. If I use the Stripe with Snappy Checkout, then I end up paying – I think, it is around $31. So it is a big difference. It is a big saving and it is a really awesome tool to manage things on the back end and also provide you with a lot of analytics of how many products you are selling and shows you your monthly stats. So I track all of my sales through that and it is really useful. Great customer support as well, I highly recommend it. If you want to check it out, go to pelt.com, P-E-L-T.co/checkout.
 
That is my affiliate link for Snappy Checkout and thanks to them for providing me with that affiliate link so that they can be a sponsor of this podcast and hopefully drive some revenue for this podcast so we can keep it going and potentially increase the production value of this podcast. If it starts making money then I will spend more time investing in it and maybe even try and get some people to help me with it just to increase the production value of this site. So thanks again Snappy Checkout! Go to pelt.co, P-E-L-T.co/checkout to look at Snappy Checkout and sign up to day.


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#56 Marketing Strategy To Sell My New Course

iniartworksmallToday I flesh out my marketing strategy for launching my new course and trying to sell myself out of my cash-strapped situation.

Hey guys, Ryan here from Instructions Not Included. I wanted to give you an update on my marketing strategy for the suburb research course and basically coming up with enough money to survive until Ben’s money comes through as well as some of the problems that I’m having and I don’t know what I’m going to about.

But I’m hoping that as I talk to you guys, some ideas will begin flowing. I feel that really creating this podcast does help me understand things more and getting things out there really helps.

So, I sent out my first email today to my list about my suburb research report. I didn’t do a special offer or anything. I just said, “It’s available. Go ahead and check it out.” I wrote it kind of as if writing to a friend.

So, it wasn’t super sales-y, but the whole purpose of the email was to get people to check it out. So, it wasn’t like, “Here’s some free content. Oh, by the way, I have this course. You should buy it.” It was definitely like, “Go ahead, check out this course. If you’re interested in suburb research, then I think you should buy it.”

So, I had 2 sales straight away. So, that’s $200, but that’s all I’ve had today. I definitely would have liked more than that. My goal is $1,000, but this is only one part of my strategy to achieve that. That was one email and then I’m going to create some free content and send out emails around the free content; which will also market the course and hopefully get more people into the course.

It’s hard because this is a course that’s designed to sell overtime to people who need it at that point in time. It’s not a course that I designed to sell in one big hit like I’ve done with previous products that are just like, “Go ahead, buy this product. Sale ending soon.”

The problem that I have now is I’ve taken the time to write down ideas for content that I could create. Originally, I was thinking, “Okay. I’ll do 7 episodes over 7 days.” I wrote down a whole bunch of ideas and I’ve got 20-30 ideas for episodes that I want to create. So, I put them all on individual index cards and I’ve kind of ordered them and I’ve got a row of primary things. Things that I think are super useful to market my product and to sell as many as I can in the next week or two. So, that’s in one line and I’ve got 4, 8, I’ve got 12 of those.

I then got a secondary line, which I think will be very useful to people and will help me sell this course over time. And I’ve got 12 of those, but one of those index cards should be fleshed out to 15 different podcast episodes. So, 12 to 28 or 27 in the secondary pile. And then, I’ve got a third pile which has 4 in it; which are kind of interesting but won’t necessarily help. It’ll just be a nice-to-have.

So, really, I’ve got 12 to create and then another 12 that I’d like to create. And so, my problem is, rather than do 7, can I do 24? And how can I handle that increased workload and how can I make that happen? So, that’s what I want to talk through with you guys today.

And then, I have one other issue, which I also want to talk about; which is this podcast and how can I get these episodes done more quickly and get them out. Because I’m finding I just don’t have enough time in the day to focus on Instructions Not Included and spend the whole day editing these episodes and getting them out.

Okay. So, let’s approach this. Let’s think, “How can we do this?” Alright, so we’ve got maybe 24 episodes that we to create instead of 7 and we’ve got a week to do it. Okay, well, the majority of my process is already done by my virtual assistant. So, she orders the transcriptions. She publishes everything to the blog. She uploads all of the episodes. So, that’s fine. But the things that I do is I’ve got to outlines for all of these. I’ve got to record the episodes.

I then got to get the episodes on to my computer, edit the episodes and then upload the episodes to Dropbox. I also have to export the episodes, I guess, after I’ve edited them.

So, how can I make this process quicker? How can I get 24 episodes done – not in a day. I couldn’t do it in a day, but in a couple of days. Well, I’ve got a week. If my entire week was focused to that, then it could be achievable. My day is almost over, so I can’t do much today. But what I can do is write, in order, each of these episodes. Or, I can write one piece of paper per episode, because that’s generally how I do my outlines.

Now, generally, I don’t like going too far ahead. 24 episodes is a lot of episodes ahead and I don’t like doing that because I find my mind changes and I just end up doing nothing with the data. But because we’re trying to do this over a couple of days, I’m going to try it and I think that’s going to be okay.

So, we’ve got an order. So, today, I can write out that order and maybe even begin working on some outlines. And then, really, it’s just a matter of focusing the majority of my attention this week on to creating these episodes. What I usually do is I’ll film an episode, I’ll import it and I’ll edit it. Maybe I should just record these back to back. Do absolutely no editing at all, but just check each episode and make sure the sound is good. So, record them all or record as many as I can.

And then, I could go through and do editing. Because you do get tired, so maybe I could record one day and just do a full day of recording. And then the next day, I could do a full day of editing. And then a full day of recording, a full day of editing and get as many done as I can. It’s worth a try.

This afternoon is outlines, as many as possible, get them all in the book. Tomorrow, which is Wednesday, will be record as many as possible and I won’t be editing any tomorrow; which means there’ll be nothing going out tomorrow. Thursday will be edit as many as possible. And so, I can edit them and then I can batch that and I can get them all uploading Thursday night to publish on Friday. Friday, I could be creating more videos. And then, maybe Monday, I could do some more editing. So, definitely achievable.

And I also need to think about Instructions Not Included and how I’m going to get around to editing this. Because I’ve got a 6-week delay, but at the moment there’s no episodes going out because I haven’t edited them. So, how am I going to find time to edit them as well and batch them and make them make sense? I have no freaking idea because the episodes aren’t even labelled. So, I don’t even know what they’re about to create a title in order to upload them. Yeah, I don’t know what I’m going to do for Instructions Not Included.

But I’m pumped about creating these 24 episodes and just going, “Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam!” for basically a month on suburb research to market this course. That’s going to add tons of value to people. Over time, it’s going to drive a lot of sales for me. It’s just a lot of work. Alright, I’m going to go ahead and get into it. I’m going to try and smash some of these out. It’s 3:09, I’ve got a little over an hour left until I finish the day.

Hoping to get on Smash Brothers tonight. But we’ll see how we go with the missus and if she’s okay with that because I have been out a couple of nights, so not 100% sure. With Smash Brothers, I did research that people who played Fox and Falco – which are the two best characters, but also the two hardest characters – tend to have more hand problems than people that play with characters that require less buttons.

So, I’m definitely happy with my decision to go with Peach. And I’ve got a secondary character now, which is Marth and I’ve been practicing a bit with as well. So, I’m getting better, looking forward to the next tournament that I’ll attend some time in December. You guys know I love Smash Brothers. Super Smash Brothers Melee – I don’t know why I talk about it in this business podcast, but it’s definitely a big passion of mine.

Alright, I’m done. I’m just rambling now. Until next time, if you want instructions go and buy some furniture.


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#55 Why I Created A Parody Sales Video

iniartworksmallToday I was working on the suburb research course sales video. I decided to create a parody video as a way to connect with my audience. Here is why.

Hey guys! Ryan here from Instructions Not Included. Basically this is my audio journal where I document my process trying to create a successful online business.

I talked in the last episode about my plans to market my suburb research course which I have now completed. I am very happy to say that the course has been completed. All the training videos are done. They are all uploaded. They are all on the page, everything is a go. All I am working on at the moment is the sales video and that is something that I have trouble with.

I am not a copywriter. A lot of the way to write copy goes against the grain of what I do which is being very upfront and honest and not trying to trick people like exposing bad tactics that the industry does.

So I find it hard to write sales videos and I have an idea from my wife for this sales video was actually to create 2: create one sales video that is like super sleazy, kind of like a parody sort of thing; and then create a second sales video which is the real one which is just me being honest with the audience and saying, “Here is my course. Here is why I created it.”

So that is exactly what I did. I have created 2 videos. One is short. It is less than 2 minutes, just kind of a parody thing. You are going to be super wealthy if you buy this course. I used heaps of stock video as well so it is quite stupid. I talked about being rich and then the printing press appears. I talked about flying first class and you got like the typical plane flying sort of scene, all these sort of dumb stuff. And so I kind of made it like a parody.

I guess my goal is I am going to in some way incorporate that into my sales and marketing. And so I will say there is a salesy video here. I will probably just incorporate it into my emails that I send out. So sales video, working on it today. I was hoping to get it done by today and to get the sales page up. But like I finished the sales videos which is good. they are just processing now. And so tomorrow I will be working on the sales page and hopefully I can send out an email tomorrow afternoon.

The first email in the marketing – the launch of this course and so hopefully I could send that out tomorrow because that allows me to send at least 2 emails this week: one next week or maybe one on the weekend as well. So that is kind of what I am working towards. I am definitely running low on money. I have a couple of weeks of revenue left at the moment.

Definitely do not want to have to approach Ben and ask him, “Hey bro! Like do you mind if I get paid early because I am about to run out of money.” I do have personal savings that I can draw from so I am not going to actually run out of money. But it is getting down to the well.

So I am excited to get this sales video done, to get this course launched and then market this course and create some podcast episodes marketing this course as well. I really need to drive some more sales. I have had a few On Property listings signup recently which had been good.

There have been monthly registrations which is great because monthly because it is the most per month in terms of cost. But then it is not great because I do not get a bunch of revenue upfront. If someone pays for a year upfront, I get almost $500.

If someone pays for 2 years upfront then I get about $750 or $720 or $740 or something like that. And so it is great when people sign up upfront to get that chunk of cash. But monthly is kind of the best long term because it is the largest source of revenue. I guess you would say because people are paying more per month and they are not getting a discount.

So ideally I would love to have 200 members that are all paying $50 per month which would give me 200 times $10 is $2,000 times by 5 that is $10,000 a month. Is that right?! 200 times $50 is $10,000 a month. That is insane! So I guess that is my goal. That is crazy. But I am not getting all monthly people. I am getting annual people. I also have people who are on discounts from back in the day. So I am not aiming for $10,000. But yeah.

So that is what I am working on at the moment. I am also going to sell my old computer so hopefully I am going to get some money on that, $500 to $700 or something for that which will keep me in the black. So I am still working on getting all my old data off that and will need to restore that computer, bring everything back up to scratch. But yeah, I am excited where this is going. I will keep you guys in the loop as to how the marketing goes and how the launch of this course goes and what sales we get and stuff like that. I think that this is a great course.

I hope that my sales message is good enough to get through to people so they will understand what this course is about and why they need it. And I am even thinking like get the draft of the sales video out tomorrow and get the sales page created but then maybe adding video overlays and stuff to the sales video of like inside the course and stuff which I could potentially do at a later date.

So that is something that I will be exploring. That is where I am at. Alright guys, until next time. If you want instructions, go and buy some furniture.


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