Ryan McLean : Slightly Unconventional

I finished my public speaking course but it took me 4 attempts to create a sales page for the product. I also added a sales email to my autoresponder.

Hey guys! Ryan here from Instructions Not Included. I just want to give you an update on my week. I had Monday off which was great. Working today, doing a shorter week this week and today I was just focusing on my course on Outspoken.co on How To Become A Better Public Speaker In Private. You want to check that out, just go to Outspoken.co/private, if you want to see the course and the sales page over there.

So basically I spent the day finalizing that course. So once they purchase it, there is a page that they go to that has all the videos; I had to set that up. And I have also gone ahead and created the sales page for the course which actually took me 4 attempts to create the sales page.

First I did a text-based sales page which was pretty average. And then I started writing an email to send out and realized how bad it was. I then created a second sales page and while I was creating that I realized it is probably better if I create a video or an audio for this. And so I recorded an audio for it. And then I created a page on that. And then I realized that this is just overkill, the audio went for 7 or 8 minutes for a $30 course.

It was not even an awesome audio either. And then the last thing that I did was just create a products page at Outspoken.co/products and just have a little description of the course, a little square image like a title cover for the course and then a buy-it-now button down the bottom.

And so I decided to sell the course for US$30. I just thought US$20 was not enough and made it sound like a cheap and crappy course so I upped it to US$30. I would like to go for $50 or $100 but I just do not have a good enough relationship with my readers and stuff. I do not think to charge $100 for a course. So I thought $30, happy medium.

I also went ahead and added like a salesy sort of email to my order responder for Outspoken.co and so that will go out to everyone who signs up for my course which is probably about a person-a-day or something or maybe even less than that. I do not actually know. I have never tracked it.

And then I have just sent out a broadcast email as well to my subscribers and I have 750 email subscribers for people that are interested in learning more about public speaking and who have signed up for my public speaking crash course. So I am hoping and praying that one of those people actually buys the course. And the next time that I am recording, the next time that I am talking to you guys, I will have a beer in hand.

I will be drinking the beer and we will be celebrating the first sale of this course and also my first US dollars in a long time. And if this course sells and i this course is something that people are interested in, then that all of a sudden makes Outspoken.co a profitable side project and will make me more inclined to invest more heavily in that site because at the moment the site is in shambles. It is a bit buggy.

It is missing a lot of things that need to go on there but I just have not done anything with it because it does not make me any money. So if I fix it I might get more traffic. People might stay engaged longer on the site but it is not going to result in any profit for me and so it has not been worth it.

But if this course proves profitable, if this is something that people are interested in then I will go ahead and invest more in the site. And I will also try and think of some other courses that I can create that I could sell to people and try and make this site profitable.

I would definitely like to diversify away from On Property because at the moment 99% pf my income is coming from On Property and if the Australian property market was to crash then that would severely affect my income. Or if something was to happen to this site, I am too exposed and I would rather spread my risks across the 2 sites. And as well, if I can make money from Outspoken.co then I feel like I could then teach how to make money from a podcast through PodcastFast.com.

So we will see how it will go. That was what I was up to today, not as many hours to work today which I am finding a little bit difficult, a little bit stressful. But I will get whatever I need to get done this week.

There is nothing urgent that I need to get done so it is no big deal. But I am working less this week. Spending more time with the kids and doing my test for working 25 hours a week. So we will see how we will go. We will see how I can handle it, not working as much. Can I do it? We will see how it works with the family and stuff as well. So I will keep you guys updated on that.

I am bout to finish. I am about to go pick up the kids from kindergarten in about 20 minutes. They just have vacation care today. I will pick them up soon and hopefully we will sell a copy of this course. Come on! Let us sell a copy! Hopefully tomorrow you will be hearing from me that I sold a copy. Or you will be hearing that I have not. But hopefully I will have.

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

I recorded the entire public speaking course in just 1 day…well I filmed all the videos but I still have some editing to do and a sales page to create.

Hey guys! Ryan here from Instructions Not Included.

Just a really quick recording to talk about how I went with creating my public speaking course and I have good news for you. I finished all 7 videos – actually 8 videos yesterday. So I recorded the entire course in one day but that has taken me more time than I would have liked to get that course up and available.

My goal for today was to get it all edited, all up and actually create a sales page and even send out an email about it to try and sell my first copy. But it did not get that far. I have edited and I have uploaded all of the videos. I have some design work to do to create the thumbnails for each of the videos and so I have to create a sales page in order to sell this product so I am still a couple of days away from that.

I am going to have Monday off. I have a Smash Brothers tournament tomorrow so I will let you guys know how I go with that. And then my weekend is going to be Sunday, Monday and then next week I will only be working 25 hours during the week so this is my trial week and so because I am taking Monday off. And I will probably do like 4 6-hour days or 3 6-hour days or one 7-hour day or something like that. Work less. Spend some time with the family and yes, see how we would go.

I do not know when I am going to get this out. Hopefully early, some time this week. It is not early next week but some time next week and how much do I want to sell it for? That is the question that I am asking myself. Do I go – I think the highest that I would charge would be $50 and the lowest I would charge would be $20 so I am really umm-ing and aah-ing about how much to sell this for. So the course is called How To Become A Great Public Speaker In Private so how can you train to become a better public speaker in the privacy of your own home.

If you want to check out the course, if that is something you are interested in, go to Outspoken.co/private and you can check out the course there. By the time this goes live the course will be up there and be available for sale. I am still working at how much I am going to charge for it and something that I am absolutely stoked about is that I am going to charge US dollars for the course.

I have said in a previous episode that one of my frustrations is that I earn Australian dollars and I spend US dollars. And so what that means at the moment is it is about 1.5 so that every US dollar that I spend, it is almost a dollar and fifty Australian that I need to earn in order to cover that cost.

So I am excited to have this course out, just start selling this course and hopefully I can earn some US dollars for the expenses that I have in US dollars and so yeah, I am pumped to do that so it will be somewhere in between $20 to $50 US dollars. I think if I did a better production of it so because obviously I recorded it in 1 day, recorded it in my bedroom.

It is a pretty cruisy production. If I have done a good production of it I think I will feel more confident charging either $50 or $100 for it. But because the production is not awesome I am not feeling super confident to do that so $20 to $50 will probably be where it lands. But yeah, I was excited to be able to smash out 8 videos in one day, an entire course. And I have them edited and all I have to do is create a sales page then I can put it up on my site to sell it.

So pretty pumped to be in that situation and to finally, finally, finally have a course for Outspoken.co which previously Public Speaking Power which is a site that I have massively struggled to monetize even though I get great traffic to it. So I will keep you guys updated with how it will go, what I decide in terms of the price, and whether or not I can sell any unit. And as I promised yesterday, if we sell just one copy we are going to have a big celebration and crack some champagne or drink a beer or something like that.

If we sell a copy I will call an episode While I’m Drinking Beer and we can celebrate that together. Alright guys, that is it for me for today. It is 4:35 on Friday and I have the weekend coming up. I have the tournament tomorrow. I have to hang out with the kids and the family and have some dinner. I hope you guys have an awesome weekend. So until next time, if you want instructions go and buy some furniture!

If you have nothing and try to make it twice as good you will still end up with nothing. This is the problem I have been having with my public speaking site.

What is a 20% improvement on nothing? It is nothing right? What is 100% improvement on nothing? it is nothing right? So if you have absolutely nothing and you try and make it twice as good you are still going to end up with nothing because you have not done anything.

And I think that is the problem that I have been having with my public speaking site which is now called Outspoken.co. I cannot improve it because it is not really making any money. I do not have any products so I cannot create a product and see what the feedback is and kind of improve upon it. I do not have anything on there.

I think a big part for me about getting On Property to the place where it is at was simply constant improvement. I launched my first membership site, my first product, in April of 2014 so it is about 18 months ago. So I launched it, it was a membership site where I taught people how to find positive cash flow properties and I was going to list some positive cash flow properties in there but it was pretty infrequent that I was listing those properties.

What I found out as I started selling this site I then adjusted the sign-up forms to say which part of the site did you sign up for? Was it the courses? Was it the tools? Was it the properties? And 90 plus percent of people said they signed up for the properties.

And so I started learning as I ran this site, as I created this site that this is what people want. This is what people are willing to pay for. And then also I was getting feedback from people saying “you are only charging $200?” like there is something wrong with this like I am undercharging. And so I began to understand what is this actually worth to people.

I was only charging $20 a month or $300 per year and so people are thinking, “it is worth more than this, what are you doing?” and it was kind of like people were hesitant to buy because it was cheap and so I was learning about that.

I was then learning more about how to teach people about finding positive cash flow properties as I got more customers and different things that I could sell. If you have been listening for any point in time you would have known that I talked about creating and selling eBooks which sold pretty well but they were so cheap that it is not worth it.

And then I kind of graduated onto creating and selling these courses that are going for $100 each and I have sold probably $1,200 worth of courses at the moment which would take me hundreds of eBooks to sell and I only have to sell to 20 or so customers. So, pretty awesome there.

What has happened with On Property is over time I have been invested more into it because it is making me money. And I have also adjusted my courses, adjusted my products, adjusted the things that I sell and slowly improved upon them.

So what started out as pretty crappy, as a membership site that was not super awesome slowly became better and better over time as I made progress to that and as I improved it. And so one of the things that I think is holding me back from expanding into other niches like into public speaking, into podcasting, is I do not have any customers. I do not have any products to improve and I have not actually gone ahead and done it.

So why am I talking about this? Why am I saying all these? Well, I have decided that I am going to create a course for Outspoken.co. It is going to be a course on how to become a great public speaker from the privacy of your own home. So one of the things that has really helped me in my speaking ability over the years was just simply talking and creating videos and doing a lot from the privacy of my own home.

So I have done a lot of videos and if I go back to the first videos I did on public speaking, well the first videos I did here on On Property, I definitely cringe at them. They are very cringe-worthy for me because I see what I used to be like and how I used to present. How stiff I was. How unnatural that was for me and how poor the quality was and I have come a long way. My quality is still, in terms of the video image is not awesome but in terms of my speaking ability, my ability to talk impromptu, my ability to come up with stuff on the spot, be confident enough to do that, has really grown.

It used to be really emotionally straining for me to create videos and the more and more that I do it, the less straining it is; the less emotionally straining because it is kind of like a subconscious thing that I do now like riding a bike. And so I am creating this course on How To Become A Better Public Speaker Without Leaving Your Own Home. So you can actively do it in the privacy of your own home to become a better public speaker.

And so the goal of this course is not to be the most awesome course that I have ever created. I think something that has held me back from creating a course for Outspoken is I see the quality of stuff that is out there and I just think I cannot match that. I cannot be as good as Patricia Fripp who is a famous chick who teaches public speaking, probably makes millions of dollars. I am not as good as her. My quality is definitely not as good as hers.

I am not as well-dressed as her. I do not have makeup that is as nice as hers. Of course I do not wear makeup. But I could wear makeup. I could have cats.

Anyway, something that has held me back a lot is that too scared to sell something, too scared to even create something because I feel like it is not going to be good enough. But if I create something and I try and sell it and I see how it goes and then I can improve upon that. If this course is going well; it is resonating with people, I can improve this course and make it better. I could re-record it down the road so it is more professional if I wanted to. Or I could go ahead and create another course. What I want to do is I want to get out there and I want to get this course created.

So that is what I am doing today, I am recording this course. So I have done 4 videos. It is a 7-part course but it has an introduction video which I have done and I will probably have a conclusion video as well.

So let us say I have 8 videos that I need to create all up. I have done 4. Ideally, I would love to get them finished by the end of today, by the time I finished working. But what is the time now? It is probably like 4:30. It is 3 o’clock and I finish work at 4:30 so can I get another 4 videos done in an hour and a half? Probably not.

But I can get some of them done and what I  am trying to do is just get all these recordings done because I feel like if I do not get them done quickly then I am not going to get them done. It is a scary thought for me so I am motivated now. I want to just go ahead and do them. And then it is easy for me to just have a cruisy day and to edit the course and then to put it up for sale.

So I want to get a course out. I want to get it created. I am halfway through. Give me some encouragement. Hopefully I can do it by the end of today or at least some time tomorrow to get this completed.

That is where I am at, creating a course for Outspoken.co. I am really excited to get my first course out for this. We might sell one copy and I am going to be over the moon and I will definitely, definitely share that with all of you and let you know. We can celebrate together. We can crack some champagne or a bottle of water, whatever it is that you want to drink. So wish me luck and we will see how it goes.

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

A quick update about my nervousness from yesterday. I went ahead and made 4 free videos yesterday…so much for my fear about creating free videos.

Hey guys! Ryan here from Instructions Not Included. I just want to give you a quick update over what happened yesterday.

Basically after I have recorded that episode saying I do not think I can make any new videos, I went ahead and I made 4 videos yesterday. 4 free videos to go out and at the end of each video I did a call to action to one of my products. They will go out over the next couple of weeks and once I have gone into the swing of things it was definitely a lot easier to do these free videos.

I think I have just been out of it so long and the only free videos I have done have really been interviews where I have done a few videos where I am not in front of the camera so to have myself in front of the camera, to be doing these videos was just difficult to get started. But once I got started it has been good and yes, I think those 4 videos will do pretty well.

I have a couple of other videos that I want to get recorded. Today, I just worked on my product and editing the video out for my product which is on suburb research.

So I have a few of those videos edited so that is almost done. I think I have 3 more videos to create for that but I will definitely, definitely get it done by the 15th of October. It should be absolutely simple in order to do that and yeah, things are going pretty well.

I have hit my income goal for the month which is over $6,000; $6,200 so I am happy with that and so really, it is just about continually working towards getting a more sustainable income for me.

So next week is the week when I am working only 25 hours. That will be interesting to see what I can get done in 25 hours. Can I get the same amount of work in that time and if I can maybe I should drop to 25 hours earlier. And also, does my family even want me to be home during those hours or would they rather have me away and be working and not annoying them. So it will be a good experiment.

This Saturday I have another Smash Brothers Tournament coming up so for those of you interested in that, I am getting better and so I hope to win at least one game at that tournament. That is my goal for the tournament, to win one game and so we will see how that goes. And really, no master plans, no massive changes in terms of business at the moment. Just continuing to plug along with OnProperty.com.au and really do not have any breakthrough ideas for other niches that I want to go into. But after creating the videos just yesterday, I am thinking about maybe doing daily videos again for On Property.

It was such a good way to grow my business and to grow it quickly back when I started 2 years ago. And so I am thinking especially now when I have products that I can market, I can do a call-to-action in every video for these products. Then I am going to get a return in investment for that and it is just going to be worthwhile. So I am definitely, definitely considering moving back to daily videos for On Property.

However, I am just a bit worried that I will not have enough content to create. But maybe I just need to create shorter videos and not go as in-depth with particular topics. One of the videos that I created yesterday was really sharing my thought process on things so rather than it being really mathematical about the property market or data-driven, all that sort of stuff, it was just me encouraging people to question why they are doing what they are doing; why they have the goals set the way that they have them set; and who knows, maybe more of my videos will move towards that.

So I do not really know the next steps for me. I do not know if I am going to go ahead and do daily videos, that is a big commitment. I do not know if I like On Property enough to make that commitment to On Property. But definitely something that I am considering especially now that I have all my training videos out for my virtual assistant to get my videos up – like I created 4 videos and in 2 hours she has done all the work that I would have needed to do to get those videos uploaded, to get them to SoundCloud, to get them on my site, to get the transcriptions ordered, all that sort of stuff.

It should take me like a week. I would record like 7 videos in a day. It will take me 4 days to get them all up. I can record 7 videos in a day and then my virtual assistant does everything else. That takes her a quarter of the time it took me maybe she is just technically inclined or she is better at that than me.

So yeah, daily videos is definitely a viable option and would not lead to me working in excess of 25 hours a week. But it could definitely generate the extra income that I need; drive more people to my products which is what I need in order to get that sustainable income.

So definitely something to think about, ponder, and consider this week and next week. We will see how we will go. We will keep you guys updated on what I am doing and how my business is progressing throughout the week and next week, how I go with the 25 hours. But until then I do not really have much more to add. So until next time, stay positive.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[youtube id=”ouMUg28noJk” align=”left” mode=”lazyload” maxwidth=”500″]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Varun: Oh! Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ryan: Is this like sleep talking?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Varun: Yeah. We were in winner 15.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Varun: Yeah. You did.

Ryan: Awesome!

Varun: You’re an early adopter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Varun: Right.

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

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

Varun: Sleep paralysis?

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

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

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

Varun: Yeah. They are. Right, right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today I watched an episode of Healthcare Triage and learned that sitting down is literally killing me. For every hour I sit down I apparently lost 23 minutes of my life.

Hey guys! Ryan here from Instructions Not Included and I just watched Healthcare Trios and I learned that sitting down increases your risks of death quite significantly over the course of your life and so I am standing up and I am pacing around because it is advised that you get up and you walk for about 1 to 2 minutes every 20 minutes which is a lot which I do not know I can do. But maybe doing recordings like this, I can walk around.

It was saying that if you sit down for an hour to watch television, you are losing 21 minutes of your life. That is the equivalent of the risks associated with sitting for long periods of time. And so that is quite scary. But yes.

So today I moved my office around. We actually moved our bedroom. There is a larger bedroom in our house which we were in and there is a smaller bedroom in our house but that has a balcony which opens out onto the bush. It has a nice view.

It has that outside space as well and so we moved our bedroom and we moved my office into this room so that was a cool thing to do today. The kids now have the bigger room. We have a smaller room but what we believe is a nicer room so that is cool. And then in terms of work, I edited a few videos.

I did a video series with Ben Everingham, who is a buyer’s agent and we talked about all the things people need to know if they are going to build a new-build property and the goal with that one is when people get to the fourth video, there is a call action to organize a strategy session with Ben. So I went through and I edited those which was pretty good. I have most of them done. Actually, now that I think about it, I should set one of those up to export while I am doing this and so I did that.

And then I also created a template for my next course which is the Suburb Research Course. It is a 7-point checklist that people go through in order to research a suburb. It is a really simple way for people to research. And so what I did was I created that template and I also went through and I found some photos and started setting up some Keynote presentations.

So I set up my first Keynote presentation so tomorrow I should be able to record video number 1 of that course. And then also, I will probably be looking at it and I think this is going to be an easier course to create than the last one on How To Find Positive Cash Flow Property. So that is cool. Hopefully it will not take me as long as the last one to create which just means that I can get it out of the way and I can focus on other things of my business creating my third course or marketing this course more often.

So that is cool, I am just setting this to export. That already exists; I must have already exported that one.

It is going to be a cool course because something that I think I am good at which my wife said a while ago, was I am good at taking complicated things and just breaking them down and making it simple for them. And a lot of stuff when it comes to researching an area is just so complicated.

There is so much data to look at, there are so many things to analyze that people just get absolutely nowhere. And so the fact that I can create this 1-page checklist for people that they can go through, it is not going to give them everything they need and I will present it to them in that way – like this is not the be all and end all of suburb research, but it is going to give you a great outline, a great overview of the area. And it is just helping people take that initial action and helping people to at least get somewhere because somewhere is better than nowhere.

And so by breaking down and making it simple, hopefully people will not be overwhelmed about suburb research. And in the next course Property Research and I can really help them with that.

And so I am excited about this course. I will go ahead and record it tomorrow. I have another sale of the How To Find Positive Cash Flow course, that was $100 there so that is pretty awesome. Definitely I am over what I achieved in my highest month in terms of my own products sales. And now I am just trying to hit that $6,250 in a month which will put me on target for my $75,000 a year.

So that is where I am at, few videos tomorrow in order to create that course and I will let you know how that is going. But it just seems course sales are going pretty well. No sales on On Property Sales lately which I am not concerned about because I did a big push on it. But I do not need to start thinking about how am I going to market On Property Plus more so I can continue to get people through the door and I can reach that 200 membership limit that I want to reach which basically guarantees my income for the year. So yeah, I will start thinking about that tomorrow and see how it will go.

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

Pretty cruisy day today, not because I don’t have any work to do but because I don’t have any deadlines. All the deadlines I have I manufacture for myself.

Hey guys! Ryan here from Instructions Not Included and back to work today, on a Monday.

It has actually been a very cruisy day for me not because I have not done any work but just because I do not have any deadlines at the moment. Most deadlines that I have I manufacture for myself like I presold my course and had delivery dates for those so every week I knew I need to deliver 2 new videos this week for that course and so I had that.

And so the only manufactured deadlines I have at the moment is delivering my next course in a month’s time, on the 15th of October and then I have another deadline for my third course on the 15th of November. And so what I did was I sent out an email of Friday saying to everyone, “Look, final videos for your course on How To Find Positive Cash Flow Properties are out.

Go and check them out and here is a special offer as well for the next 2 courses.” And so I gave them 50% off the next course and actually 75% off the following course just because it is going to be so long between when they pay for it and when it comes out.

I just want to reward them and give them that discount. Of the 18 or 19 people that have signed up for my first course, 2 of those people purchased the next 2 courses and they both actually signed up for both the next 2 courses. It is good to see – yes it is not a massive portion, 50% of people coming across, but it is good to see there are people that enjoy my first course enough not just to buy the next one but to buy the next 2 and that shows me that I am not just filling a need in my course that someone is like, “Okay, I want to find positive cash flow properties. That is it. So enlist Ryan’s course to help me do that.”

But they are actually wanting to learn from me about investing in property, how to research an area, and the entire process. So to have 2 people that signed up for 2 more courses is absolutely awesome and that is another $150 in revenue for me which might have actually pushed me over my top month. So let us go and I am going to log on and check that out and see if we have actually beat our best month ever in terms of revenue for my own products.

Now I am very excited about my own products. I want to keep growing that, not so much fast about affiliate stuff. So oh yeah! So my biggest month was June with $5,817 and now for September, $5,883. So that is absolutely awesome! I am really, really stoked with that.

I was asking my mum the other day while we were driving, “What is $75,000 divided by 12?” Because my mum is a math nerd. And so she actually came back and she was right, $6,250. So if my goal is $75,000 per year that means $6,250 in revenue per month. And so what have we had? July, my revenue was very low, around $2,000. August was around $4,000. But then September, I am likely to hot that revenue target and then I have the whole year to grow.

So I guess what probably is going to happen is that first 6 months of the financial year will be slower with some bumps. This is obviously a bump this month because I did the closing down of On Property Plus and changed it to On Property Listings and upped the price so it is a bit of a bump in terms of revenue. But I am guessing it is going to be a bit slower in the first 6 months and I will continue putting out free content, continue building more courses and then get more and more sales towards the end of the financial year.

So my goal, $6,250 per month and that is what I am working towards and I think we can hit it this months. We are only $400 off hitting it this month so that is cool!

Another thing that I was I am thinking about is I want to start earning some US dollars. At the moment the Australian dollar seems to keep going down compared to the US dollar and I am just wondering with the world economy and the way that China devalued their currency, if the US currency is going to increase in value as people, I guess, pin their hopes on the US dollar as the one currency that kind-of the world relies on.

So I do wonder if the US currency will get stronger as more and more people invest in US dollars as China devalues their currency, etcetera and that is going to affect the Australian currency. And the reason that that affects me is I earn money in Australian dollars, everything from OnProperty.com.au is earning in Australian dollars but most of my expenses are actually in US dollars.

My hosting is US $100 per month. I have all of these stuff that are in US dollars and when I am paying US $100, at the moment that is more like $150 Australian dollars. And so what I would love to do is create a course for Outspoken.co or Podcast Fast and sell it in US dollars and just kind of cover my costs.

So I would love to earn enough US dollars that I could pay my virtual assistant and I could pay all of my expenses in US dollars from the US dollars that I make. In that way I am not just playing the currency game, I am just making enough in US to pay my US expenses and then I can focus on making my Australian money in order to pay for my lifestyle and pay for my wage and stuff like that.

Today I did a couple more videos for my virtual assistant just really around creating content and so now there is a complete flow for when I upload a file in Dropbox getting that all the way to getting that uploaded to YouTube, to SoundCloud, getting it on a blog post, ordering the transcriptions, all of that sort of stuff now flows all the way through. And so that is really exciting because I did not have that set up for a while and it has kind of held back my content creation.

So now that I have that system in place, it is going to encourage me to create more content and just makes it easier for me to get that content out because there is less management on my side that I have to do. And more content generally equals more money because more people drive into my site, more people learning about the products and services that I do have.

So that is where I am at today. Tomorrow, what else will I be doing tomorrow? I do not know, maybe some free videos or maybe I will work on some of the paid modules, I am not a hundred percent sure. But until next time guys, if you want instructions go and buy some furniture.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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