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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#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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#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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#57 Update On My Strategy To Market My Course

iniartworksmallI’ve decided to make the month of November “suburb research month” as a way to market my suburb research course. Will this help me get out of my cash-strapped situation?

Hey guys, Ryan here from Instructions Not Included. I just wanted to give you a bit of an update on my strategy to create content and to market my suburb research course. What I did was I created a bunch of content today. I did my list like I talked about in yesterday’s episode and I created outlines for 12 or 13 of the articles. I mean, of the videos that I’m going to create.

What I decided was – I had like 24 episodes, anyway, and then a couple more and I thought, why not just make the month of November suburb research month? I’ve wanted to move towards daily podcast episodes, anyway, and this is just the perfect excuse.

What I’ve done is the first episode is going to go out on the first of November, which is in a couple of days. Basically, I’m going to create podcast episodes so every day in November an episode goes out about suburb research marketing my suburb research course.

Now, I only did $200 in sales when I sent out my email, which is definitely not ideal. Money is going to be tight so I am a bit concerned, but we shall see how it goes. See if I can pull something off. I’ve got a computer to sell. I’ve got some other stuff that I can do. I am getting new customers to On Property Listings and On Property Tools, but these new customers are coming in at $50 a month, $5 a month, $50 a year.

So, I’m getting these small amounts of money. These small amounts of money will probably tie me over for another week or so, but it’s definitely getting tight. I don’t like it. I don’t like being in this situation where I need to work my way out and it’s quite difficult. I like being in the forward-thinking situation where I’m just like, okay, how can we move this forward? What’s the best step to take? I don’t like being under the gun.

That’s all right. Sometimes you need the pressure to move your business forward. Oh, yes! I forgot. I was just thinking. I’m getting 2,000 visitors a day to my website, which is massive for an Australian property website. And I’m just thinking, what I can do is I can put a title bar at the top talking about my course. There’s one called Hello Bar, I’m just googling it now. Maybe I could go ahead and use that one and create that and I can market my course to the website visitors and hopefully get some sales.

Maybe I need to do a sale on the product? No, we’re not there yet. If we get stuck and we’re legit running out of money, then let’s do a sale, but for now, we won’t, okay? All right. I’m going to go ahead and setup a Hello Bar. I’m going to put that on the website.

I created 5 videos today – nowhere near the 12 I had planned to create in a day. I can not do 12. It is too difficult. It is too mentally straining to create these videos. So, 12 definitely unachievable, but 5 today and I actually edited them and uploaded them as well. Well, they’re processing now and I’ll upload them overnight tonight. So, 5 done in a day – edited and uploaded. I’m pretty happy with that.

All right. I’m going to put this header bar up there and see if that helps at all. Wish me luck and I’ll keep you guys update with how everything goes. So, until next time, if you want instructions, go and buy some furniture.


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#53 I Have To Redo My Entire Course *sigh*

iniartworksmallDon’t you hate getting to the end of something online to realise you need to start all over again? Well that happened with my today with my course sigh

Don’t you hate it when you do something and yet all the way to the end and then you’ve realized you’ve made a mistake and you need to start all over again? Maybe you built some sort of furniture using the instructions and you go on all the way through and then you’ve got a bolt left over and you need to undo the entire thing and start again to work out where that bolt goes.

Hey, I’m Ryan from Instructions Not Included and that’s exactly what’s happened to me with the course that I’m creating at the moment on suburb research. It actually happened to me 12 months ago, almost to the day, where I was creating the complete self-leasing kit. I spent a whole month of my life on it and then, ended up finding out that the end of that that the market didn’t actually want this product and that I couldn’t even sell it and it wasn’t even worth marketing it.

But this one, the suburb research course, what happened was, I was creating the product, creating all these videos about how to research a suburb if you’re looking at investing in property. There’s a lot of data that you need to look at and you need to be able to interpret that data correctly.

So, I’m just teaching people how to do this. What happened was, I got 80%-90% of the way through it, was just about to create one of the last videos and realized one of the free tools that I’ve been using had changed their data. Like change the data they display and so they stopped displaying certain portions of the data and I was like, “Oh my goodness! This sucks!” So, I need to work out, well, how can I get access to this data in some other way?

And so, I started googling and when I was googling, I came across a couple of articles on suburb research and how to analyze statistics by this guy who is super awesome, really clever and it just blew my mind, some of this stuff that I was learning. And things that I thought you needed to look at for certain suburb ended up to be incorrect. And so, some of the things that I was teaching in my course weren’t actually correct. And also, in the midst of that, I discovered a tool that gave me access to better data than I’ve had access to – more up to date, shows you the trends and everything.

So the entire lid was blown off my course because I could now teach people more advanced techniques. I could now provide them access to better data for free and I’d learnt some new things and learnt that part of what I was teaching was actually incorrect. Basically, I’m 80-90% of the way through this course, about to launch it. It was meant to be on the 15th of October and it was like the 13th and this is when all of this was happening.

So, I was like, “Yup, final tweaks on this. Ready for launch on the 15th.” And then I realize on the 13th, oh my goodness! I am going to have to re-do this course completely. And so, that was extremely frustrating for me to have almost completed this course and then to have to go ahead and re-do it.

Now, this course, once it’s completed, is going to be absolutely awesome. It’s going to be something I’m going to be so proud to recommend. It’s going to be better than anything out there in the market. More straightforward for people, really give people a basic understanding of suburbs and how to research it.

I know that this is actually a gap in the market because compared to the self-leasing kit that I released last year that hardly sold, this one has sold $600 worth of product before I’ve even launched it. And I haven’t done any big marketing campaigns for that or anything and it’s already sold $600 worth. So, I know that there are people out there that want this.

I know that this is going to be a popular course over its lifetime and make me thousands of dollars. But, yeah, it was just very frustrating to have realized that I’ve got this far into it and now need to reset it. So, very annoyed at that, but I’m going through, I’m creating it.

I’m more than halfway through creating all the new videos now and I’m hoping to get it done by the end of this week. But I’m guessing it’ll probably be sometime next week that I actually get this finished and get this course completed. At the same time, my computer decided to basically die. I always get the “rainbow wheel of death” is what I call it. On the Mac when it’s loading, it just brings up this rainbow wheel and I think my computer’s on the fritz. So I bought a new second hand computer yesterday. So I spent about $1,700 on a new 27-inch iMac. It’s not new, it’s second hand. I got it off Gumtree, which is kind of like eBay here in Australia. I’m just setting that up and I’ll be using that moving forward.

My old computer, another 27-inch iMac did me 2 solid years. So, I think this new computer will probably do me I think 18 months is how long this computer will last me before I need to upgrade to another computer again. I just use and abuse my computer because I do so many videos, so many podcast, lots of editing. I use it all the time, so it just gets used and abused. I think 18 months, give this new baby 18 months and I think it’ll be going solid.

A good news is that Snappy Checkout, who’s the payment processor that I use to collect all my payments. I’ve been talking with Mike, the guy who runs Snappy Checkout, absolutely awesome guy and he’s decided to allow me to become an affiliate of Snappy Checkout. I’ve been asking him, can I become an affiliate? I want to recommend Snappy Checkout to people on my podcast because I think it is absolutely the best payment processor out there. Paypal, you know, it’s so old.

I think Paypal is still a good option for convenience. People like using Paypal and Snappy Checkout integrates with that. But this is just a beautiful overlay so you got your sales page; you click “Buy Now” and then, the pop-up overlays over your webpage. Or, if you don’t have an overlay, it opens a new page with a black background and so it looks like it’s overlaying, even though it’s not, which is really clever. I went through so many different tools that I was looking at and this one was just the most beautiful one, so that’s why I chose it.

After I was using it for 6 months or something, I realized, it’s actually the cheapest one as well. It has super cheap fees. I think the maximum you ever pay for a transaction fee is $2. So, I was previously using Gumroad. If I do $1,000 transaction through Gumroad and I do sell some things that are that expensive. Then, I do pay 5% to Gumroad, so $1,000, I paid $50 in transaction fees.

With Snappy Checkout, you integrate with Stripe so you pay 2.9% through Stripe, so of $1,000, that’s $29. And then Snappy Checkout takes a maximum of $2 off the purchase price for their transaction fee. So, rather than paying $50 per $1,000, I’m now paying $29 plus $2 from Snappy Checkout. So, it actually ended up being super cheap and I really, absolutely love it and so, I’m very proud to recommend it.

I’ll talk more about it, how to use it. Maybe I’ll try and integrate some lessons to talk about how you can collect payment, how to do a pre-sales. Maybe I can teach you guys some of that sort of stuff that I’ve been doing and we can then talk about Snappy Checkout for those of you who want to try it. And then, that can be my revenue source for this podcast. So, we’ll see how that goes. My affiliate link for Snappy Checkout, you can check it out. Just go to pelt.co, so P-E-L-T, which is my overarching business name. pelt.co/checkout and you can go ahead and check out Snappy Checkout over there. You can see what it’s like and go ahead and create products. I’m probably going to create some tutorials and stuff for it and some comparisons between it and Gumroad in the future.

This is the first product outside of my own products that I’ve been excited to market to people. So, I’m not just going to do it through this podcast. I probably won’t do, “This podcast is sponsored by Snappy Checkout.” But I will just mention it whenever it makes sense and mention my affiliate link as well. You guys obviously won’t pay more through that, but I just get a commission for recommending it to you.

Also, something that I’ve been doing is a video course. I did a video course with Ben Everingham, who’s my buyer’s agent. This was even before the video course, the last month, had about 3 people go through him and ended up signing up. And so, I get a 25% commission on that. I think it was $1,700 or $1,800 in revenue. So, for me, it comes out to a bit under $4,500, which is great because this month hasn’t been that good for me in terms of product sales.

Because I’ve been focused so heavily on creating my products, I haven’t been actively marketing them. So, it’s really good to have that partnership with Ben and to get those sales through him to get that income through so I don’t have to stress about money. Especially because I just had to buy a new computer and spend $1,700 on my new computer. So, yeah, it’s great to have that coming through.

I’ve got a new build video series with him as well. In the 4th video, we do a call to action where people can book a free strategy session with him. So far, I’ve sent that out to just probably about 1,000 people have received that course all the way through and I’ve got probably 10 people who signed up for that free strategy session through that. So, it’ll be interesting to see how many of those people convert.

It’s just another source of revenue for me. The problem that I have with this is I’m scared of being reliant on someone else for my income. So, it’s a great kicker. A piece of advise I got from a very successful young businessman who I used to actually rep to, he was saying that when the money is there and when the money is flowing – like when there’s a profit opportunity, milk it for all it’s worth because it won’t stay around forever. So, I think with Ben, I’ll work with him and we’ll do this partnership for as long as it lasts and as long as it makes sense and in an essence, milk it for all it’s worth for both of us and to just make the most of it.

But I also want to prepare for the rainy day if that partnership ever does dissolve, then I’ve still got my products and my own source of income and stuff like that. So, even though I might be making more income because I’m recommending people to him and such a high dollar-value, I guess I don’t want to build my business on expecting that revenue just in case something happens. Our partnership is awesome at the moment, but obviously you got to be prepared for things like this. So, it’s a great source of revenue, but something that I don’t want to build my business.

I’ll just use it to use the income that comes from it to grow my business even more. I don’t know. I’m excited about it. I love working with Ben and I love partnering with him. I love having someone that I can chat to about the stuff that we do. But, yeah, I still want to make sure that my business is going to be rock solid moving forward into the future years because it’s absolutely my livelihood.

Alright guys, that’s it for me for today. That is my update. I’m working on my course hoping to get it done by the end of this week, but I think probably early next week is when it’s going to get completely finished. Released the video course I did with Ben. That’s going out to quite a few people this week. So we’ll see if any of those people end up converting into customers. And I got a new computer that I need to migrate everything over to. So that’s where I’m at. I hope you guys are having a great week.

I’ll try and talk more in the future about Snappy Checkout and how to collect payments and teach some lessons and stuff like that. Until then, you can check out Snappy Checkout yourself through my affiliate link. Just go to pelt.co/checkout and you can have a look at Snappy Checkout over there. I absolutely recommend it. I love it. I love Mike. Customer service is awesome. They’re a great tool.

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


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#41 Could You Make The Same Earning Less?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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#39 Resetting My Values By Listening To Less Business Podcasts Sat 22nd Aug 2015

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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#38 I Only Want To Work 25 Hours Per Week Wednesday 19 Aug 2015

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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#36 What I Really Want From My Business Tues 11th Aug 2015

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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#35 10Xing My Business Fri 7th Aug 2015

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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