Ryan McLean : Slightly Unconventional

Today I am completely demotivated. I feel like I don’t have any work that inspires or challenges me.

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I want to push the creativity of the content I create, that means Instructions Not Included is becoming a vlog also!

Hi, and welcome to the very first video episode of Instructions Not Included, the series about me Ryan McLean as I try and make a decent living online.

This isn’t the very first video that I released. I have done interviews in the past, however, this is the first vlog style video where I’ll be giving you an insight into my business. In this episode we are going to look through my office space.

We’re are going to look at the new potential office space that I’m looking at moving into in my house. And we are also going to be talking about business staff in the future in general because I have been thinking about this a great deal. That is what is in store today for Instructions Not Included.

If you are listening to the podcast, absolutely love my podcast. If you want to watch this video go to ryanmclean.net/youtube and that will bring you to the Instructions Not Included YouTube channel where you can see this episode.

I’m going to flip the camera around and show you my current office space. This is the current office space at the moment. It’s nothing too glamorous at all. We have a space out there and this is actually my bedroom. You can see my bed there and stuff like that.

This corner here is where I film so you’ve got my background there – that’s the Super Smash Brothers logo which is one of my websites that I do and here is my desk. I also have over here — just so you know it I’m not drinking beer out of these, I actually use these as water bottles so I’m non alcoholic. I’m not drinking at work. I also have this TV and a Wii u which you can see there for my Super Smash Brothers set up. We have to play on these old TVs. Basically, this is the space at the moment.

Let’s go for a walk to check out the new office space – what’s going to be the new space. So we go out of my room and we are going to head downstairs. Oh my gosh – let’s just stop quickly – they love this saying, “All you need is less”. It’s definitely about less rather than more – simplifying life.  This is going to be the new office space. It’s not much at the moment but it’s going to be exciting.  It’s actually my garage.  Let’s go ahead and flip this light on.

Where you can see all that stuff in the background that curtain is actually going to hang up on the roof and will block all of that out. This is actually a huge space so if I go into the corner you can see quite a large space here. I think it is four metres by two and a half metres or something like that. I’ve got a window here so I’m not just in a garage in the dark. That carpet we are going to put across the whole floor. That’s 20 bucks so I’m going to buy five of them and spend $100.

The floor will be carpeted and I’ve got rubber mats down as well for underneath that. This is therefore going to be the office space. The desk is going to be where you see the window over there. So I’ll have my desk there with my computer, maybe with my TV set up as well. And then I’ve got so much room so ideally we are going to have this wall as my backdrop so we may put up some black boards across there. We may put up a green screen or who knows but there is more than enough space in here.

I should probably hide that old water heater as well.  There is more than enough space in here to do a proper lighting set up and to be able to be able to film with good lighting and to just improve the quality of all of the series that I do.

One of the big things that I was thinking about today is where do I want to be in three years time and what do I want to be doing in three years time. One of the things that I was thinking about too is that I don’t want to be sitting at my desk every day nine hours a day or whatever it is that I’m doing in three years time. I’d still love to be interviewing people.

I would love to be creating more dynamic, more interesting content, definitely all stuff on video. I would also love to be travelling with the family and be able to be mobile. That would be a huge thing for me. I’d love to travel but with the family to do family stuff. I would love to travel for Smash Brothers work as well and for the content that I create. That would be absolutely awesome.

I’ve been thinking about that, thinking about the future, watching some vloggers and stuff on YouTube, getting inspired by them. I do not want to start a vlog but I want to get better at editing. I want to get better at story-telling. And that’s definitely something that I’ll be exploring into the future.

I’m therefore looking at getting this better space, getting a decent camera setup, better microphones set up and all of that sort of stuff so I can create better content. I’ll also be looking at shifting away from the very basic talking head content that I have towards higher production value, better storytelling sort of stuff. I’m probably not going to do that with Instructions Not Included because this doesn’t make me any money and it’s more just a documentation of who I am and what I do.

I’m just going to go to the kitchen and get a drink or get something to eat.  Yes I’m excited for the next few years. I need to think about what do I want to do, who do I want to be, what sort of stuff do I want to be working on because truthfully if I’m honest with myself I’m bored. I’m bored of my business. I’m bored of creating content. I can sit there and I can create videos, I can drive traffic, I can generate revenue. It’s like it’s all laid out for me.

The plan for the next three years to get the income that I want it is all there, it’s all mapped out for me. All I have to do is to put in the work. I’m creative person. I like pushing them all. I want to improve myself and just doing the same thing every day for the next three years sounds like death to me. So we’re going to get creative, we’re going to try and do some new things. Some may work and some may not but I’m going to try and put more of myself, more of my creativity into what I do.

That is kind of my plans at the moment. This battery pack for my phone – I absolutely love this thing by the way. My phone just dies so easily — look, we’ve got some cookies. I’m going to munch on some cookies and I’m going to edit this video. Hopefully that won’t take too long. And then I’m going to continue to think about where I want to be in three to five years time but I’m definitely thinking that I don’t want to be stuck at my desk nine hours a day just creating talking head videos.

I want to be doing something creative. I want to be out about in the world. I want to boost my confidence in terms of speaking and vlogging in public and stuff like that and I just want to create really engaging content. I’m getting better as a public speaker. I’m getting better at storytelling but I still have so far to go.

That is it from me. You’ve seen my office space which is just an office in my bedroom. You’ve seen the new space which will hopefully be set up in the next week. I’m just waiting on some internet stuff because the Wi-Fi is really bad in there so I’ve got what is called a D-link which connects to Internet into that room. I have an Ethernet cable into my computer cables for Internet.

It sounds crazy to me but apparently it’s going to work so I’m waiting on that. After that we’re going to buy the carpet and then I can go ahead and move in.  Hopefully by the start of next week, worst-case scenario end of next week I will be in the garage as the office and with a bit of luck that will just give me more room and more freedom to create better content.

I hope that you are moving things forward in your business. My business is unique because I generate enough income to live. Now, I’m trying to think about where do I want to be three to five years time, what I want to be doing and how could I push the boundaries of what I’m currently doing at the moment. So you go out there, work on your business and push your boundaries.

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

With my business performing well at the moment my mind is freed up to think about what I should be doing now to set myself up to have the life I want in 3-5 years time.

Hey and welcome to Instructions not Included. This series is about me, Ryan McLean, as I try and make a decent living online.

In this episode, I want to talk about actually planning for where you’re going to be in 3, 4 maybe 5 years’ time because that’s exactly what I’m doing at the moment.

I’m trying to put in the work and trying to put in the plan, the system in place so that in 3 years’ time, I can do what I want to do.

Generally, for me, it’s really hard to plan forward more than 12 months because when you’re running your own business, when you’ve got 3 children under the age of 7, things change pretty quickly.

Me and my wife, our friends call us gypsies because we move so much. We’ve relocated to different cities 3 times. We’ve moved house 14 times in the last 7 years.

So planning ahead can be really difficult for us when it’s more than 12 months into the future. Generally, we only live in a house for 12 months, if we’re lucky.

But what I have been thinking is like, we have started homeschooling our daughter who is 6, she’s in Grade 1. We enjoy it.

We have a lot of reasons for doing that. Thinking of starting a website on homeschooling where I’ll discuss those, but I won’t waste your time here. But basically, in my mind, anyway, I’ll talk about it in a different episode if people are interested. So, we’re homeschooling our daughter. Our son, who is 4 is in what’s called pre-prep.

Here, where he does 3 days a week and then they start prep or like, kindergarten next year. And so, we’re talking about, is he going to go to kindergarten? Is he going to do homeschool? What do we think we’re going to do? He’s happy at school, but then, he wants to do homeschool because his sister does homeschool. I don’t know.

We don’t really know what’s going to happen. But then, fast forward 3 years, and our youngest who is currently 1 to 1.5, he will be 4 to 4.5 and we will be making these decisions again for him.

So fast forward 3 to 4 years, there is the possibility that we could be homeschooling 3 children if that’s the route we decide to take. Now, we haven’t decided to take that route yet so we’re not sure. But we kind of need to prepare for that and I am currently doing the majority of the homeschooling.

The responsibility is on me. So I spending the mornings doing school with my daughter and then come to work. If we were to add one more child to homeschool, I can foresee it being a lot more difficult than it is. I may need to drop my work hours. You know, things may change.

Basically I’m at the point in my business now where the business is quite successful. onproperty.com.au is quite successful. It makes decent revenue in terms of my own products. Then, there’s revenue on top of that in terms of recommending a buyer’s agent. It’s one of the biggest property blogs in the country.

It’s got a big presence in terms of podcasting and in terms of YouTube that is just continually growing, which I think will be the future. Anyway, that’s ticking along and doing well. But given the Australian property market, it may continue to do well for another 10 years or it may not be a stable source of income in the future. We’re just not 100% sure about that.

So I’m trying to think now while I’ve got stability of income, spending a couple of days a week doing On Property. That frees me up, I’ve got a couple of days a week to do some other things. It frees me up to think, “Okay, 3 years or 4 days down the track, let’s just imagine that I am stepping back from work a bit.

I am doing more homeschool. Hopefully, we’re travelling as a family – that’s something I would really love to do. What do I want my life to look like? What do I want my income to be coming from?” all that sort of stuff.

They’re the kind of questions that I’m asking myself now. Because I don’t have to ask, “Where is the next paycheck is coming from? How are we going to survive the next month? What do I need to do to make that happen?” I can begin to ask, “Okay, in 3 years’ time, what sort of revenue streams do I want to have in my business? What sort of flexibility do I want to have?”

The ultimate thing for me is to generate as much semi-passive income as possible. I do make money from a bunch of different sites. On Property makes the lion’s share – 90%+ of my income. But I do get advertising income, I do have affiliate income from other sites like my public speaking site, podcasting site.

I’ve got a site about online marketing. I’ve got a site about Super Smash Brothers Melee. I’ve got this personal podcast as well, which doesn’t really make any money at the moment. And then I’ve got a software tool that is associated with On Property as well.

I’ve got another niche site. I’m thinking starting another one. And so, I’ve got a few sources of income and they all kind of add up a little bit. But the great thing is, like with the public speaking site, I haven’t touched that in probably 3 years now – 2 to 3 years. That’s something I want to start re-investing in. But that still makes money today, which is just absolutely amazing.

I’m just going to go ahead and check my Google AdSense in terms of YouTube as well as in terms of the website – in terms of how much money that website is making. Because that’s something I want to scale up. I want to create a lot more content for that. And so, let’s go ahead and have a look. I have not used this site in quite a long time. There it is. I’m actually going to change the brand name back to Public Speaking Power.

I decided to change it to outspoken.co, but they never did anything with it. So I think I’m going to change it back to Public Speaking Power. Wow! I have 711 subscribers and I’ve got 36 videos on there. So, not too many videos. I just got to login to a whole bunch of different stuff so bear with me for a minute. Let’s go ahead and sign in.

So in terms of revenue from YouTube, we’re looking at $10 a month. Not much, but that pays for 2-3 coffees a months. Actually, I pay about $3 per coffee, so a coffee a week it pays for. And then let’s go ahead and look at the performance reports for the website. Common reports, websites. Okay. Not last 7 days, let’s go last month. We’ll look at that. In terms of that revenue, we’re looking at above $60. So we’re looking all up about $50-$100 a month.

I’d love to take that up to $100-$200 a month. And then, as well, work on other stuff and build them up. Even if I had 10 different things making $100 a month, but that is super passive. That’s just a baseline income that could pay my bills if we needed to travel. Do you know what I mean?

That’s what I’m trying to think about in terms of the next 3 years. How can I build up these things? Change this from $50-$100 a month to $100-$200 and then do that multiple times and do that for a couple of different sites. Last month, let’s do this month. So this month’s tracking very similar, but I do have a niche site that is now generating probably $10 a month. So, yeah, I’m building up that sort of stuff.

So it’s kind of going back to what I was doing years ago in terms of content creation and niche sites and stuff like that and I come back to this. But I guess, I just want to take the things that have been working, build them up. And then opportunities kind of come out of that.

So with On Property, for a long time, it was just advertising. Then, I had my own products. Then, this agreement with Ben came up and I’m making more money now through that agreement than I’ve probably made through advertising in the history of the website. As you grow bigger, as you become more noticeable, as you build up in the community, these opportunities come out of it. And so, I’m hoping that as I build up these other sites, opportunities will come out of those as well.

At the moment, I am focusing on maintaining On Property, keeping that source of income. But as well, building up my passive income and doing work now that’s probably not going to pay off any time soon. But they will hopefully pay off in 3 years. And so we can look back on this in episode 500 in 3 or 5 years’ time of Instructions not Included.

I’ll be travelling and I’ll have these passive income sites on the side and I’ll be doing what I really enjoy, which is creating content.

Hopefully, this will work. I wish you the best in your business. I hope that you’re not just thinking about today, but you’re thinking about 3 to 5 years down the track as well. That is it for me. Until next time, if you want instructions, go and buy some furniture.

This week I have found myself a unique angle to grow Melee.co as well as a potential profit stream.

Hey guys and welcome to another episode of Instructions Not Included, the podcast about me Ryan McLean as I try and make a decent living online. In terms of my online business On Property which is my main source of revenue, it has been going really well.

My partnership with Ben who’s the buyer’s agent and referring people on to them is generating enough profit for me to get by. It is also building up what I like to call a buffer fund. The way I look at my business account is not how much money I have in there but how many weeks of runway that I have.

I know that my own products basically pay for all of my online expenses plus I’ll probably get a little bit of profit from that. So anything in my bank account is basically runway. It’s basically savings that I’m using to live off so I draw a certain portion of money each week.

Back in December you may remember I actually ran out of money and I didn’t have enough to pay myself what I would normally pay myself each week and so I was slightly behind. Luckily I scraped through and was able to get enough money that I didn’t have to draw from savings. But I’ve slowly been growing up a buffer fund and I’ve now got a buffer fund of about 12 weeks so that is about three months.

In Australia it is kind of coming up to tax time in a couple of months. The end of June is the end of our financial year and so a portion of that will need to go towards tax which means I don’t really have three months buffer fund but at least I have enough money to pay my tax bill which is obviously very important.

I have started a new website because that’s what I do called melee.co. This is a domain name I actually bought exactly a year ago. Well, it’s not exactly a year ago but a year ago this month. I bought it because I was getting into Melee. I found it interesting and I thought maybe I’ll do something in this space in the future if I do become passionate about this game like I thought I would. And lo and behold I have become very passionate about this game and I’ve actually found an avenue to build up this website into something that could potentially be substantial enough to generate some profit and to generate some income for me. I’ve done 15 episodes or something like that.

I started back in March and I was just documenting my journey as a Melee player. If you don’t know what I’m talking about – Super Smash Brothers Melee – it’s a fighting game on GameCube that is quite competitive. So basically the biggest tournament got about two hundred thousand people watching the grand finals. I play this game competitively so I started a website about it called melee.co.

Little over a month ago I started documenting my journey as a player but I did know that this wasn’t going to get many people interested in it. This was more just for me to fulfil my desire to create content about something that I love. Therefore I created this and it basically had no views. I can go ahead and check on YouTube for you if you want to know. I’ve had just over 10 views like the last month. Therefore it is not very many views at all on this channel. And look, I expected that.

I thought this would be something that would be great to document and to look back on over the years. And often I find that when I start in a niche and I am not a hundred percent sure what to do I just start with something and see what happens. So I started this YouTube channel. The stuff was going on the website but I didn’t have the website set up properly. I didn’t have my theme set up. I didn’t have it looking nice or anything like that.

But then the other day not that long ago, it was on Friday the 22nd of April – so a little over a week ago I decided that I’m going to take the next steps (something I’ve been thinking about for a short period of time) and actually start to interview pro players.

This is something that I feel there’s a hole in the market as there are a lot of people out there talking about the top 10 players in the world but there’s basically nobody talking about the top 100 players. And so I thought a good approach for me would be to approach those top 100 players, get interviews with them, interview them, share that and then obviously get those players to share with their audience as well. These are players that are just I guess undeserved in terms of people creating content about them and they have some interesting things to add and benefits to add to the community.

I had this idea a few weeks ago but didn’t really do much with it. I got my virtual assistant who is absolutely awesome – I got her to generate me a list of the top 100 players, their names, what character they play, their Twitter accounts, etc, which was quite easy to get from the website that does the top 100 rankings. So she pulled that.

On Friday I just decided that what I was going to do was to just tweet at some pro players and see if they would be interested in interviewing me. Rather than going from the first player working my way down to the second best, the best, etc, I actually kind of went backwards starting at a hundred, working my way up the list towards number one.

There was one person that I was trying to get on the show that kind of inspired me to start this and kind of inspired the idea of interviewing pro players. I thought I would get him on first as an honour to him so I contacted him through a whole bunch of different methods and he just never responded. So I thought I was going to reach out to these pro players. The chance that they would respond was probably going to be pretty slim to none. So I would contact maybe like a bunch of them and see what the feedback was.

I contacted 13 players thinking maybe one or two would respond to me and lo and behold I had a massive response. And think about this – I was tweeting at these people so I had 140 characters to work with. Not a lot and even less when you take into fact that I had to be at them on Twitter – 130 characters or something like that.

So far I’ve already done two interviews. I’ve got five more lined up. All of the 13 people that I got in contact with I was able to organize seven interviews so that’s more than 50%. I thought I’d get one or two but I got seven and so I’m kind of overwhelmed with how many interviews I need to do. There are quite a lot but it’s good to say this is the response I’m sort of getting and in future I’ll probably contact less people at a time just because the response has been so good and it has been hard to schedule things given the time zone differences between me and these pro players who live in America.

Therefore my avenue is that I’m going to interview pro players. I’ve already done two. Basically we talk about their back story, what got them into the game, how do they practice, how do they get better, what they see for the future and just having a conversation with them about the game. I’ll be contacting them, interviewing them and then I’ll be sharing that through YouTube, the podcast and also on the website. I might even publish it to Twitter.

I’m not actually sure if you can do that or not but everyone who plays this game really connect with each other on Twitter. So that’s something that I need to consider as well. And then hopefully we’ll get the flow-on effect of these players who have been interviewed. As they’ve been featured they would want to share it with their audience and as a result we’ll get some flow-on from that. We’ll see how it goes. This is the avenue that I’m going down to grow my audience.

Also, in terms of profiting from this because this is unique content and because I’m not using copyrighted material, etc, I can make money through YouTube advertising. Therefore this isn’t going to be something that makes me $100,000 per year. However, this is something that I enjoy doing, something that I’m passionate about and the great thing about YouTube is that it’s fairly passive income once it is set up and once we got the episodes there it kind of generates income.

And while I’ve got income coming in from On Property, generating external income, generating more passive income, separating my income just from one side and generating multiple streams of income is a big goal of mine. So if I can do it in this niche that I’m passionate about even if it becomes like $100 a month or something like that I don’t need it to be thousands of dollars but it’s an extra source of revenue for me and it’s something that I’m passionate about.

It may change in the future and I may have product ideas or things like that. I’m not a hundred percent sure but I’m excited about this. I’m having a lot of fun interviewing these players. I’m having a lot of fun creating this new revenue stream.

The niche website that I started has started picking up and getting decent traffic. That’s something I need to work out – how I am going to focus on this niche website as well. I kind of need to get my head around how am I going to run so many different websites because at the moment all my focus is on running On Property or running melee.co but I want to be able to improve all of my websites. I therefore kind of need to get a process down where that becomes easy and I haven’t really worked that out yet. That is something that I’m working towards.

Also, another thing that I wanted to say was I’m doing kind of like an experiment with melee.co.  In a lot of cases a lot of websites, a lot of businesses they try to interview the best people in a space because once you get the best person or the most well-known person it becomes easier to get everyone else.

In the property space, now that I’ve interviewed Steve McKnight it’s easier to get other people. In the Melee space if I interview top players like Armada, Hungrybox, Mango etc, it would then lend their credibility to me to get other players. But I’m interested to see if I do it the other way around – if I interview lower-end players, first of the top 100 if that will I guess encouraged top players to be interviewed by me because I have already interviewed all these other players who aren’t as good as you or aren’t as ranked highly as you maybe I should interview you as well. I wonder how that will go.

I’ll see how it goes because this is an experiment for me but it could be a good approach. At least in this particular space in order to work my way up to the better players and to get them to say yes. I would say, “Look I’ve interviewed all of these people who are lower than you on the rankings but I haven’t interview you yet so maybe I should interview you.”  Again, it’s an experiment. We’ll see what happens.

That’s it from me today guys. That’s what I’ve been working on this week. I hope that you’re having a great week working on your business. Until next time if you want instructions go and buy some furniture.

Hey 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today I explore the hedgehog concept from Good To Great and try to work out what I can be the best in the world at.

Today, I want to talk about what I could potentially be the best in the world at.

Hey, I am Ryan from Instructions Not Included and this is a show where I talk about how I am trying to make a decent living online. Just a quick update, we have had a seller month in terms of referrals for Ben the buyer’s agent, my friend who I recommend.

We are looking at potentially cracking $10,000 this month in terms of referrals, so absolutely stoked with that. You may know if you listened to the show for a while that we had huge cash flow issues a while back and hopefully, that is all going to be part of the past as we continue to recommend Ben and his services and work closely with him.

So, that has been really cool. We have not hit that yet and obviously there are still things that can happen between when the sale is made and the waiting period before commissions are paid and things like that.

Anyway, we have been doing well. I got halfway through the month and I have had a great month; I earned enough profit to get by for the month and I was only halfway through.

And so I started thinking about what do you do when you are earning enough money in half a month? What do you do with the other half of the month? Now obviously, you can do things to earn more money or to prepare for the leaner months which we know I have had in the past, but I wanted to think about ‘okay, I know I want to dedicate 2 to 3 days to On Property exclusively and basically smash out On Property in 2 to 3 days and run that site, build that site, maintain that site, all that good stuff.’

What am I going to do with the next 3 days of my time and I was thinking about – you know, the truth is I need to do stuff every day. I do not want to sit around doing nothing, playing games on my phone or something like that. I would love to play Super Smash Brothers Melee every day but I do want to grow my business, I do want to have a positive impact on people’s lives and I am not going to do that through sitting on my ass, just playing games all day.

I need stuff to do every day and so even if On Property always made enough money for me to get by – more than enough, even if I were completely financially free I would still want stuff to do. So the truth is I need stuff to do every day. I have those 2 or 3 days where I need to maintain or grow On Property to make sure that money keeps coming in but I also need to grow some other income streams that are separate from On Property just to hedge out bets against things.

And other thing that I wanted to do is I want to dramatically improve my communication skills. I thought I was a pretty good speaker. I thought things were going pretty well until I went to New Zealand and I tried my hand at commentating some Super Smash Brothers. Now, if you have listened at all, you know I love this game called Super Smash Brothers Melee, which was released in , but I played this as a competitive.

There is a tournament scene that I attend and compete for prize money for a whopping $10 for third place up to $100 for first place for a whole day of gaming. It is not big money in it but I love the competition; I love the game. Anyway, I was over in New Zealand, there was a tournament. I went to the tournament. I got kicked out; I came fifth and so I decided to try my hand at commentating some of the games that were going on. And instantly, I knew I was out of my depth. It was very hard to commentate, very hard to talk about the things happening in the game. Everything was so fast-paced.

I actually spent a lot of the time talking about what players did wrong, which is actually considered quite rude. And the more I think about it, the more I look at commentary that happened; it was pretty bad of me to do. So basically, I failed at commentating – I did a really bad job, and in some cases where I said some offensive things. I did not mean to be offensive but it was just not very nice. And so, that was a big eye-opener to me – that I need to dramatically improve my communication skills if this is what I want to do for the rest of my life.

And so, I started thinking about the hedgehog concept in Good To Great, which if you have not  read Good to Great, it is one of the best business books out there. It is up there with The Lean Start Up, with Linchpin by Seth Godin. Good to Great is probably on my top 5, definitely probably – that is not a good statement. It is definitely on my top 5 of the best business books I have ever read. Innovator’s Dilemma is also up there as well, so there, you have 4 books. I cannot think of a 5th that I would absolutely recommend.

Anyway, the hedgehog concept is this combination of 3 areas that define something that you build an excellent business that goes from good to great. And so, these 3 areas: what are you deeply passionate about, what drives your resource in general – how do you make money, and what can you be best in the world at; and by finding the combination of these 3 things, that is the goal to create a really great business. So, I went through this activity looking at these different aspects and what is the middle and combination of these 3 things for me and I am trying to work that out. And so, what are you deeply passionate about?

So, this is actually a myriad of different things. I am deeply passionate about communication skills and public speaking. I am deeply passionate about gaming and Super Smash Brothers Melee. I am deeply passionate about my family. I am deeply passionate about God and Christianity.

I am deeply passionate about helping people, financial freedom, encouraging people to be the best they can be, all of these sorts of stuff. So it is a whole myriad of things that I am deeply passionate about. I am not just passionate about one thing; I am deeply passionate about a lot of different things. I was not off to a great start there.

Next, I looked at what drives my resource engine? What makes me money and what can I survive off? And so my resource engine when I looked at it across all my websites, I make money through advertising.

I make money through affiliate sales so selling affiliate products. I make money through referrals like I refer people to Ben the Buyer’s Agent. And I also make money through my own e-products, things like e-books, courses, membership sites, that sort of stuff. So, my research engine is all kind of standoff my websites but yeah, advertising, affiliate sales, referrals, e-products, all sorts of stuff online.

And then I was thinking what can I be the best in the world at. I just watched a tournament of Melee called Battle of the 5 Gods and my favorite player won the tournament and he is currently ranked number 2 in the world. By the way, he is going, he could definitely be ranked number 1 this year and I thought could I be the best in the world at Super Smash Brothers Melee? Probably not.

Could I be the best in the world at communicating? Probably not, in terms of being a public speaker and up on stage. What could I be the best in the world at? And it came back to something that was in the very first episode of Instructions Not Included, which was when I asked my wife ‘what do I do? What makes me useful online?’ and she says “You have a way of explaining really complicated things and making it easy to understand for people.” So, I take really complicated concepts – things that are hard to understand, and I make them easy to understand for people, and I thought you now what, that is something that I could probably be the best in the world at.

It is making complicated concepts or ideas simple and easy to understand. I remember an example when I was interviewing someone for On Property and she was talking about some concept – the person that I was interviewing, I cannot even remember what it was, but it took quite a long time to explain that and I was then able to narrow down what she said into a succinct sentence.

I was able to take all of these concepts that she was explaining in a very complex, very difficult to understand way, and I was able to summarize it into one sentence that would make sense to almost absolutely everyone and that was a moment that I remember where I was like ‘okay, take note of this because I am probably very good at this.’ And so, I was thinking about it and I was thinking I could be the best in the world at taking complicated things, making them simple, and that would combine my passion for communication and getting better at that all the time, which I am deeply passionate about, as well as the other topics that I am deeply passionate about and like to talk about.

So, when I look at this hedgehog concept, what could I be best in the world at that is making complicated concepts simple and understandable. What drives my resource engine is all the advertising, affiliate sales, my own products, etc. and then what am I deeply passionate about is the variety of things. And so I looked at my sprawling business of a bunch of different websites like one on public speaking, one on property investing, one on podcasting, I have this personal one as well, I have some niche websites as well, and I thought ‘you know what, like I am kind of living the hedgehog concept but I just need to refine it slightly.’

So, I am doing what I am the best in the world at which is taking complicated ideas and making them simple for people and I am doing that through the content that I create. And I am creating content about things that I am deeply passionate about and I am driving revenue through advertising, affiliate sales, etc.

And so, I have found out – at least I think, and as you know I change my mind all the time, but I believe that I can run multiple different websites and that I do not need to run just one website because what I want to get the best in the world at is taking complicated ideas and making them simple to understand. I want to do that in the future even when I plan to study psychology and maybe work with kids with autism or stroke victims or things like that in the future.

This is still going to be something I could potentially be the best in the world at so I want to work on that skill. I want to get better at that skill but I can use that skill across a variety of different niches and I do not have to focus just on property and be the best in the world in property investing because I am not deeply passionate about that. I am deeply passionate about helping people across a variety of different topics. So I guess as I say this, what are you deeply passionate about, I am deeply passionate about helping people like helping people to make good decisions and take control of their life and all of that sort of stuff.

I love the idea that I could potentially do this and spread myself across a variety of niches that I can talk about property, I can talk about public speaking, I can talk about business, all these things. But what I am best at is that communicating complex things, making them simple and so I just need to do that more and more every single day as much as possible. And when I look at how I spend my days, I spend a small portion of my day – maybe half an hour to an hour, where I am actually doing that and the rest of my day is spent with busy work and things like that.

So, I am definitely passionate at the moment about setting up systems where I can expand my niche so that I can jump in and jump out of things as I need to, so for example, I would love to be able to jump into PodcastFast at the moment creating a new series there; jump back out.

I would love to jump into Public Speaking Power, create a couple of episodes there and jump out. And because I have a resource engine of advertising, affiliate sales, etc., that fuels that, I can actually do that. So that is what I will be focusing on moving forward for the next week or so is getting a system in place where I can jump in and jump out of niches so that I can take concepts that are difficult to understand, explain them simply, but then I will jump out and move to something else because otherwise, I find that I am just forcing myself to create content.

It is not very good so I want to be able to explore my passions, talk about the thing that is on my mind and that I have been thinking about at the time and obviously continue to drive resources for me.

So with that, I have decided to start a Super Smash Brothers Melee website. I bought the domain Melee.co a while ago and so I am going to set up a website for that. I already created 2 episodes, basically going to document my journey from a failing new player – only played for about a year, hopefully on the way up as I become a better and more professional player.

We can see that progression happening. So, that is something that I could fund potentially get some advertising revenue through that, but you never know. So, that is something that I am starting. I am also working on my other sites as well; continue to work on On Property. But yeah, I am pretty excited where my head is at; I am pretty excited about my business moving forward.

I have found some things to do to fill my time even if On Property makes me enough money. I am absolutely excited about that. I hope that you are excited about your business. I encourage you to go through and do this exercise yourself and to find the combination of the 3 things; again it is what are you deeply passionate about, what drives your resource engine, and what can you be the best in the world at.

It is not easy to understand; it has taken me years to get to the point where I think I have it nailed down and then it may change over time. But it is a worthwhile exercise and one that I found very interesting. So, go out there. Do this exercise. Take some strides in your business and until next time, if you want instructions go and buy some furniture.

I 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.

What I am doing in 2016 has already changed from the original plans I had in January. Here is an update on some old project from 2015 and what I am doing now in 2016.

Hey, and welcome back to Instructions Not Included, the podcast where you follow me, Ryan McLean, as I try and create a decent living online.

If you followed any of the episodes for 2015, basically, 2015 was all about On Property. Creating, growing and eventually getting to the point where On Property was quite successful, but wasn’t going to be the runaway success that we wanted.

I’ve done one episode for 2016 already, but I through I’d do another episode and just update you guys and update myself on what’s been happening. You may remember from 2015, if you listened to those episodes, I created a website called dreamydad.com where I talked about night terrors in children.

I created a bunch of videos around night terrors and a solution that I linked to on Amazon on how to solve them, which is called the Lully, which is a vibrating disc that goes under your kid’d bed. It’s a solution I’ve used myself. It’s basically the only solution for this problem out there.

Well, an update for that is it’s had a total of 352 views on Youtube.

It’s had a total of 15 visitors to the website and it’s made a total of $0.02. So given that I probably invested $50-$100 into this website, we can basically say that this is a flop. And Dreamy Dad, I will leave it up and see how it goes, but I probably won’t renew the domain next year and I’ll probably leave the Youtube videos up there just to help people out. But in terms of making money, Dreamy Dad, definitely a flop.

Pelt, as well, P-E-L-T dot C-O was a site that I created to talk about how to do particular things online, like how to run an evergreen launch funnel, how to setup a membership site. I went through and I created a bunch of episodes for that.

It has done better than Dreamy Dad, but it hasn’t been the business that I had hoped it would be. I think back when I was looking at moving on from On Property, moving on to an educational website, that being Pelt, I was hoping that Pelt would be the be all and end all of my business.

I would start with teaching online stuff and then I would move on to other areas and it would basically be like Lynda, which is just a site where there’s so many different courses on there. It would be like that, but it would be free and I make money through affiliate deals and that didn’t turn out as expected.

I think I’ve made over $100 in affiliate commissions through that site and I am making some money in terms of Youtube ad revenue as well. I think I checked it yesterday and this moth so far, it’s made $4.15. So definitely better than the $0.02 that Dreamy Dad made.

I invested less money into this. I have invested some transcriptions into the episodes and things like that. I think I’ve got $20 a month that’s recurring subscription as well, like a recurring affiliate commission as well, so hopefully that will continue and we’ll get more of those, but Pelt has been put on the back burner for now as I ran out of things to talk about. And I just wasn’t excited enough to do reviews of every internet service out there, every hosting company to do comparisons and all that sort of stuff.

It was something that I was interested in when I was creating courses how to start a membership site, how to create an evergreen launch funnel.

That was exciting, but when I looked at the keyword data and looked at what am I going to need to do to make this site successful, I was going to have to create a lot of content that just wasn’t going to be very interesting for me, so it’s there. I may re-approach it, but it’s kind of just on the back burner at the moment. We’ll make a little in affiliate commission and some ad revenue, but nothing major.

PodcastFast, I did plan at one stage to create a new series on how to create a podcast because a lot has changed since I created the last series about a year or 18 months ago. So I wanted to do an updated version of that, but just haven’t got around to doing it. So that’s all my list of things to do this year.

When it comes to On Property, that has been a journey and quite an exciting one recently. I had been umming and ahhing about selling On Property versus keeping it on autopilot.

Basically, I approached a friend of mine who’s in the industry and said, “Hey, look, here’s where my head space is at. Think of selling On Property, not 100% sure. Would you want it?” and that led us down a whole path in terms of conversations, in terms of talking about partnering with each other and talking about him acquiring On Property and acquiring me to work for his business.

We had a lot of back and forth discussion. I really had to dig deep and really come to terms with what do I want for my business? What do I want from my life? In the end, what we’ve decided on or, I guess, what I decided on because it wasn’t his first choice. I decided that I couldn’t sell it and go and work for someone else. I wanted to be the captain of my own ship and run my own thing and that’s just something in me that wants to do that and so I’ve decided moving forward, I’m keeping On Property.

I’m not going to sell it, but I have decided to partner with this person and to basically turn On Property into a lead generation tool for them. So I’ll be de-focusing a lot of my own products. They’ll still be there, but I won’t be putting a lot of focus on them in terms of marketing and I’ll spending more of my focus on marketing this person and their service.

So, On Property, we’re moving forward doing that. Hopefully, this gives us an opportunity to – I found that one of the hardest things about On Property was that a lot of my time was being spent doing customer service and I didn’t like that. I wasn’t passionate about that. I love creating free content. I love the aspect that I’m helping people to not get stung, helping people to make good decisions.

I loved that aspect, but I was just getting bogged down in customer service. Bugs for my products that needed to be created, all this sort of stuff. And so, this seemed like a great opportunity for me to market someone else’s business, help them grow their business. But at the same time, I can stop focusing on customer service and focus on what I do best, which is creating great free content.

You know, building an audience, building a community, all of that sort of stuff. So I’m pretty excited about this and I’ll talk more about it in a few episode, but On Property, it’s not on autopilot anymore, so I will be updating it probably about 3 times a week. So I’m looking at putting about 2 days a week’s work into On Property. And then, I’m also building out a new niche site, which will hopefully be one of many this year.

I did state in a previous episode that I wanted my income, which is now 95% or more comes from On Property. I would like 50% to be coming from On Property by the end of the year. So 2 days a week, I’ll be focusing on On Property. 3 days a week, I’ll be focusing on different things. Partly on this new niche site, party on things like this – Instructions Not Included – and maybe some other niche sites down the track.

I found a niche that I’m very interested in that I’m not going to reveal to you guys, but I’m excited about it and I’m going to work that and see how it goes. So far, I’ve had 10 or 20 people visit my site. So nothing special is happening there at the moment, but as I build it out, I will give you guys periodic updates as to how things are going. I’m looking at building out a whole bunch of different niche sites to try and build up the income and I guess diversify my income.

That is where I’m at, at the moment. Dreamy Dad, dead and a dud. Pelt, on the back burner, not really doing anything, just leaving it there, but it is creating a little bit of passive income. So that’s nice, it’s great to get that ad revenue. Views do look to be growing on Youtube as well. So hopefully that will improve and continue to become better. Podcastfast, I would like to create a new series for that when I get around to it. On Property.

I’ll be building a lot of new content and marketing someone else’s services as the primary revenue source there. And I’m looking at creating a new niche site as well.

So things are evolving in 2016. Already, I’ve changed tack from what I thought I was going to do at the start of the year and I’m looking at different things and I’m sure that by the time we get to the end of the year, I would have changed 5 or 6 times again. I’m just trying many different things to see what works. Hopefully, we’ll get there and by the end of the year, we’ll look back and we’ll see that this has been a great year.

I hope that you continue to work on your business. You don’t give up that when things don’t go your way or things don’t work out perfectly, you just keep striving along. Because that’s what I do, I just keep trying, keep trying, keep trying. Oh, let’s try this. That didn’t work, try something else. That didn’t work, try something else. That didn’t work. Oh, that worked okay, but we need to try something else and just goes on and on until, hopefully, we’ll achieve the success that we want.

Look, I’m pretty happy with my life, pretty happy with the way things are turning out and I’m happy to keep working at this.

I hope you guys go and work on your business. Be encouraged that it’s not going to be perfect every time, but that’s the best thing about online business, is you get a lot of different go’s. And one of the things I love about On Property is I have an audience of over 100,000 people a month come to that website and so I can try something.

If it doesn’t work, then I can try something else. And I’ll keep trying until I hit on something that resonates with the market and then, basically, I can run with that. Alright, guys, that’s it, Ryan out. Until next time, if you want instructions, go and buy some furniture.

The first episode of 2016 and my new site has already made over $50 in income.

Hey, and welcome back to Instructions Not Included where you follow me as I try and generate a decent income online. And let me tell you, it’s not as easy as I would have hoped. I have been trying to do this for a number of years – basically, since 2006.

I discovered it when I was 18 years old and been trying to do it. I’ve been working full time online for the last 2 years now and still haven’t quite made it, I wouldn’t say. So I’m earning enough that I don’t need to go back to work, which is great, but we would always like to be in a better position. So, welcome back.

It feels like forever since I did my latest post and a lot has been happening.

December was a pretty tight month for me. December tends to be my worst month of the year. The property market in Australia doesn’t dry up, but people lose interest in investing property over the month of December with Christmas and New Years and Holidays and everything happening.

There’s just not a whole lot of action in people researching and thinking about investing in Australia. So, cash flow did get very, very tight in December, early January. We’re talking I basically had a week or less than a week left of income before I was going to run out of money and need to pull from savings.

This is because I pay myself every single week. So the business is always profitable every month, but it doesn’t necessarily pay what I need in order to support my family. So I got to the point where I was basically a couple of days from running out of money, but cash flow has since improved and we’ve sold a lot of memberships to our membership site.

We’ve had some commissions come through so all is good. So we’ve got months of income in the bank now so that should be fine.

One of the things that I tried that failed last year was trying my evergreen launch funnel sequence again, which worked great back in May, June, July of last year. But when I re-did it, I had over 1,000 people go through it. Usually, we’re talking anywhere between $5 and $10 per email subscriber, I was making in this launch funnel. All of a sudden, I had over 1,000 people go through it and I think I did one sale of about $300. So it wasn’t doing very well, wasn’t generating the income that I needed and so, I shifted gears again.

I re-marketed my product, setup a sales page without a sales video and setup 2 tiers – one property only and one a full membership for $300 a year and property only was $99 per year. Sales of that have been going good and going fairly steady and hopefully, they continue into the future. So that is good.

I have also started another site called pelt.co where I’m doing a lot of education videos around how to do certain things in internet marketing, like how to setup an evergreen launch funnel or how to create a membership site. And that’s going to be my big project of 2016. So I look forward to working on that more and sharing more details with you guys on that.

I started working on that the very end of November and a couple of days ago, we got our first income from that – an affiliate sale that was worth about US$40 and then we got another affiliate sale that was worth about US$9. All off, in the first 2 months, it’s made US$50, which isn’t stellar, isn’t going to fund my lifestyle, but hey, progress is progress and any income is better than no income at all, so I’m happy with that.

Also, I’m going back and learning about how to build niche websites. So I’ve been following Spencer over at nichepursuits.com and so I’m following the Niche Site Project 3 and re-looking at that and looking at apply the things that I learn to existing sites that I have or even potentially launch new sites into the future. I’ll give you guys updates on that as they go around and as they happen.

I did spend a day or two creating one article that was almost 3,000 words in length to target a specific keyword that was low competition and I think it just had 70 views a month or 70 searches per month. Within 1 day, I was ranked within the top 120. Within 2 or 3 days, I was ranked in the top 40 in the Google search results, but I kind of hovered in the top 40 for that last 5 days or something like that. And so, this is quite low competition and a lot of the people ranking in the top, they’re good websites, but they’re not targeting that keyword, not answering that question.

I really want to rank for this so I did some stuff today to drive some links back to it. I created a Youtube video, which will also go out as a podcast on Soundcloud. Both of those will link back to the website.

I did some internal linking on my website as well and I am thinking about doing some Pinterest post or social media marketing to link back to the site as well just to give it a little bit of juice, a little bit of love and hopefully push it into the rankings a little bit faster. I also adjusted it so it had less affiliate links in there. I think I had about 20 affiliate links going out, which sounds like a lot, but it was one image and one link per item that I listed.

There was 10 items in total, which equaled 20 links. I basically removed the links from the images except for the top 2 recommendations because I figured they’re the ones that’ll be clicked on the most. So, I’ve got 12 links now instead of 20 links going out. Also did an external link in the post to a reputable source and so I’m trying some on-page SEO as well as some minor, very minor back linking – very minor white hat back linking. Linking from Youtube back to the post, etc. And so, we’ll see if that can boost rankings and if we get into the top 10, I will definitely record an episode and let you guys know about it.

Writing a second article now on the same website also targeting a low search volume. I think it was about 40 searches per month, but low competition as well. So we’ll try and rank for that one and both of these searches are trying to make money through Amazon associates or Amazon affiliates. So linking people over to Amazon and basically getting them to purchase over there. We’ll see how we go.

I would like to make a little bit of extra income from Amazon. I would like to diversify my income away from On Property. I think my goal is really to get On Property earning 50% of my income by the end of the year and earning 50% of my income from other sources – 50% or more. Whereas, at the moment, it’s more like 95%-98% of my income comes from On Property, so we want to change that.

That is my quick update of what I’ve been doing in the last couple of months. I hope that your business has been going well. Go out there, work on it. Even if it takes you 7-10 years like it’s taking me, know that in the end, it’s going to be worth it. So, that’s it, Ryan out. Until next time, if you want instructions, go and buy some furniture.