Ryan McLean : Slightly Unconventional

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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#52 What Is More Valuable Than Collecting Someone’s Email Address

iniartworksmallThe whole goal of marketing to date has been to build an email list. However I think social media has changed the landscape and it has changed my strategy moving forward.

The money is in the list – or so they say. But will the money always be in the list? That’s something that I’ve been thinking about quite a lot lately. I touched on it briefly in a previous episode, but I’ve actually changed my strategy in terms of how I’m marketing OnProperty and how I’m marketing… Yeah, I guess, more OnProperty because that’s my biggest source of income.

A lot of marketers talk about the “money is in the list.” And so the whole goal of marketing is basically, you create content, you drive people to a website, you convert those people into some sort of free content in exchange for their email address in order to be able to market to them over and over and over again – and that’s super effective.

I think that will still be effective in the future. However, I think there’s something that is more important that’s at play and I think it’s kind of being caused by this whole social media revolution and the changes in social media.

So, social media started, we had MySpace. We did MySpace, yeah, it’s all well and good. But then, we changed to Facebook. Okay, so, we move across to Facebook. Facebook – biggest social platform in the world. Over a billion people use Facebook, it’s absolutely massive. But then what happens? Then, Instagram comes along. So, then, we shift from Facebook to Instagram and we start consuming content on Instagram.

Then Snapchat comes along, so we start using Snapchat. Then there’s something called “Jot”, which a lot of high school people are using because it uses their phones to create a network, so the schools can’t lock it down. So, they move from Facebook to Instagram to Snapchat to Jot and all the while, we’ve got Pinterest happening in the background, we’ve got LinkedIn, we’ve got all of these sorts of things.

So, what used to happen is that people used to consume content on the internet. You’d go to Google. Google is your homepage. You’d search Google to find content and you will then go from there. And so, it was very linear in terms of the way we use the internet was we go to Google and then we’d go through to our website and then we use their email as well. And so, email really was key to get people back to your website.

But now, there’s even more valuable, I think, than someone’s email address. And that’s someone’s – not just their trust, but their “admiration” is probably the best word I can think of at the moment or their gratitude. Yeah, probably their gratitude. That is that you provide so much value to someone that they recognize you as a person, they are grateful to you as a person. They want to follow you and consume the things that you have.

The reason that this is so important is that we’re always going to be jumping from one social network to another. Things are going to be changing. I still use Facebook, but nearly as much as I used to. I’m on Instagram a lot more. I’m not that much on Snapchat just because not many of my friends are on Snapchat and I don’t need to Snapchat teenagers – that would just be super creepy.

Things will constantly change, but if you can get the trust, the admiration, the gratitude of someone, they’re going to follow you across different platforms. So, if they’re on Facebook, they might look for you on Facebook. If they’re on Instagram, they might follow you on Instagram. If they’re on Snapchat, they might follow you on Snapchat.

What’s going to happen over time is that you’ll build trust, you’ll build gratitude with these people and when you market a product or when you finally comes time to ask for something from them, it’s probably going to be pretty easy to convert a whole bunch of people. Because we’ve got a whole generation growing up that don’t really use email. Email is something now that is corporate. Something that old people use in the workplace. Young people, if I want to get in contact with someone, let’s say I want to play Super Smash Brothers with someone on the Gold Coast. I don’t call them. I don’t even text them.

I put a thing on the Facebook groups or I will instant message someone through Facebook Messenger and that’s how we get in contact with people now. I don’t email anyone. I don’t even know any of their email addresses. I don’t need to know any of their email addresses. So, things are changing.

So, the money is in the list – yes, at the moment, but I think as this generation grows up, as the millennials grow up or whoever is below the millennials grows up, things are changing. The way we use the internet is changing. What I’m finding is that my content is going to stay there. There’s still always that process of people going to Google and they search something. Or, maybe they might go to Youtube now and search something. Or, they might go to Pinterest to search something.

So, there’s still always that sort of avenue, but people are subscribing to you in different ways. And less and less are people to subscribing to you via email.

I follow a guy called Pat Flynn and I subscribe to his podcast. He’s got 2 podcast, I like one of them. The other one was a bit too basic for me. So, I subscribe to one of his podcast. I subscribe to his emails as well, but I don’t really give a damn about them. I also know he has a Youtube channel and I visit it from time to time. So, my relationship with Pat Flynn from Smart Passive Income isn’t through my email list. And if he sends me an email, yeah, I’ll probably read it, but if he mentions something in a podcast and does a call to action in a podcast, he’s actually more likely to reach me that way than he is through email.

So for me and my strategy, rather than focusing on the email marketing – I’m not ignoring email, I’ll still be using email. I have Funnel setup to email people. It’s still an element of marketing, but it is not “the money is in the list”. Its email is the be all and end all because email is changing. I think content is the be all and end all because you can reach someone over and over and over again.

You can reach them at a precise time. And that’s why I’m trying to do content with a call to action that is related to that content and a call to action to one of my products. And so, rather than it being like a hardcore call to action, trying to get someone to sell. It’s kind of like a side note at the end of each video. I’m doing, “Oh, by the way, there’s this that you can do. Just go to propertytools.com.au to sign up.”

So, they’re getting this good content. They then get a call to action at the end and they probably act, but what’s going to happen is they’ll then do another search. They’ll find me again. They’ll do another search; they’ll find me again. They won’t go on to social media, but they might go on to Youtube and they’ll find me.

They might subscribe to my podcast and listen to 10 episodes, or something like that. And then, eventually, they’re going to come to a point and say, “I need some help in finding positive cash flow properties.” They Google it, I come up. They’re like, “Ryan. Sweet. I know him.” They watch it. They see your call to action go to my course or to go to my site and they’re like, “You know what, I’m in a situation in my life right now where I need help with this. And so, I trust Ryan and I’m willing to purchase his products.”

So, I just think the whole buying process, the way that we use the internet is changing. And the way that you interact with your customers is changing as well. And if you’re so focused on email, I think you’re going to miss out on the way that the internet is changing and the way that people relate to internet celebrities, would you call them, or internet personalities. The way that people relate to them is changing. I think the leader in this is Gary Vaynerchuck. I follow him on Youtube. I used to subscribe to his podcast, but not anymore.

I just subscribed on Youtube because it’s the same content. I’ve been following him for a long time. I’ve got his books, I’m his friend on Instagram. If he launches a new book, he doesn’t need to send me an email for me to buy that book. I’m going to find out about it. If he launches a new book, he’s got the #AskGaryVee book coming out.

I know he has the #AskGaryVee book coming out. I’ve already decided to purchase this book ahead of time because I will just purchase anything that he makes. I know that this is coming. Because I’ve been following him, I know that’s coming. He hasn’t even sent out an email. He hasn’t even done a call to action, but I know that there’s a book coming in the future that I’m going to purchase.

So, all that needs to happen – he launches that book, I’ll find out some way. I’ll find out through his Youtube channel or through his podcast or through some other podcast that I listen to that he gets interviewed on or maybe I’ll just see it in Instagram – it’s probably what’s going to happen. As soon as it comes out, what do you think I’m going to do? I’m going to buy it. Did he email me? Did he do a sales Funnel with 4 videos in order to sell me something? No, he didn’t.

He’s just out there putting out content. I trust him. I admire him. I’m very grateful to the advice that he has given. And so, therefore, I’m following him and I’m going to take action based on that. And I’m not the only person who’s doing that. He’s not the only personality that’s doing that. So if you’re thinking long term about selling something.

If you’re thinking about long term about marketing something – yes, email is powerful. Yes, if you collect someone’s email now, put them through a sales funnel, you will convert a certain percentage. But, I think, long term, there’s going to be so much power in being – not being everywhere, but just being where people need you to be and helping them in the way they need you to help them.

Like for OnProperty, for example. If we said, yeah, there’s a “Be Everywhere” strategy. So if people are on Facebook, I need to be on Facebook. Are people on Instagram? I need to be on Instagram. Not really – not in the property space. Facebook, there’s definitely opportunity for videos and content on there, which I haven’t explored – which I probably should. But for me, to do Instagram and to run an Instagram channel – yes, I will reach some people.

But most people, when they’re thinking about property and looking at property, they’re still just googling stuff. Or they’re going into Youtube and they’re searching for stuff in Youtube. Or, they listen to a daily podcast or a weekly podcast or whatever.

In terms of my market, I don’t need to be everywhere. I just need to be in the most important places that matter the most to my potential customers. So, for me, that’s Google, that’s Youtube and that’s podcast. Because people want to consume content, learn about property investing so I need to be there. Could I get more sales by being in Facebook? Yes. But it would take away from the most important areas that I need to be.

If Facebook was the most important area, then I would be on Facebook and not be in other places, maybe not be in a podcast or not be on Youtube or something. But because the most important places for me to be are Google, Youtube and podcasting, I need to put my focus on that. And if I look at Facebook, then I’m taking away from that.

So, yes, there’s going to be avenues that are good. But then, there’s avenues that are the most important and I guess you need to work out can you impact people more? Can you build more trust, admiration and gratitude by re-investing and investing heavily in the places that are most important or can you get it by going into some social media avenue like Pinterest or something like that? I used to do Pinterest and Pinterest I don’t do anymore because people aren’t searching in Pinterest for property tips. For me, it was just a little tactic to try and get back links so it’s not the most important place that I need to be.

So that is my rant on the changing landscape of the internet. I think it’s going to be years before we really see a lot of people doing this. And before we actually click in our minds and day, “Oh, yeah, this is what’s happening.” And this is the way the internet is changing. And so the reason I think I’ll be successful with OnProperty compared to the other property blogs out there that I’m competing with, compared to the people that have affiliate programs that I’m competing with, compared to the property magazines that are still in print, the reason I think I’ll be more successful than all of them is because I understand how the internet is changing – how the internet is progressing.

And I’m building a relationship with my potential customers that’s based on trust, that’s based on admiration, that’s based on gratitude that will permeate multiple different platforms. And as the internet changes, as people’s behavior changes, then I will change my focus based on that and invest more heavily in where people actually are. And so, when I look at like the podcast space for example, I’m the only daily property podcast.

I made a video on the 10 top property podcast, there wasn’t even 10. There was like 8 and then I had to put through some finance ones in there. A lot of the once that were in there were just really bad or they released a couple of episodes and they were done.

If you want property information in Australia, there’s probably about 5 or 6 podcast, maximum, that you could listen to. And if you want content on a regular basis, I’m the only podcast that offers that. Everyone else is weekly, monthly or every 2 weeks. And so, I am in that space where people are looking, people want this sort of content and I’m over-delivering compared to everyone else.

I guess I encourage any of you guys who are trying to market, find out what is the most important to your customers. How can you build trust, admiration and gratitude – in what areas? How can you over-deliver and just make them so grateful for what you have done that they end up buying all of your products and become your best customer ever. What can you do in order to do that?

I am going to explore some sponsorships for this podcast in the near future, guys. So, if you see me talking about any sort of stuff, I may have secured some sponsorships or I may just be marketing affiliate programs. It’s just something that I want to try to let you guys know some cool tools that I used. Or, I just might recommend products that I like and enjoy that I think you guys will benefit from, even though there’s nothing in it for me – no payment in it for me or anything like that.

Alright guys, that’s it for me. As you can see, I have opinions about the way the internet will change. They could be right; they could be wrong. But I’m pretty certain that this is the way it’s going to progress and I’m pretty certain that everyone is going to be focusing on what worked years ago, instead of focusing on doing the things that are going to pay them dividends 2 or 3 or 5 years down the line.

I think if you start this stuff now, you get a massive head start on people because there’s only so many people in my life that I will trust and that I will put in that sort of “mentor” status. And so, if you get in there first, you kind of lock that down for the future compared to everyone else who might try and do it 5 or 10 years from now.

So, best of luck, guys. If you want instructions, you know what to do, go and buy some furniture.


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#51 My Best Customer Ever

iniartworksmallOf all the customers you have in your business what is the absolutely most a customer can make you. For me it was previously $400-$500, but that just got increased.

What is your best customer worth? Of all the customers that you have in your business, what is the absolute most a customer can make you or has made you? For me, with OnProperty, my best customer – up until a couple of days ago, made me probably somewhere around maybe $400, maybe $500 or something like that.

They might have purchased an annual subscription to OnProperty Plus for $300, maybe some eBooks or courses up to the value of maybe $500. Or, I could have had some that was a subscriber for $300 subscribed to 2 years. Okay, maybe $600 is my best customer ever.

Well, there was actually a customer the other day, on Sunday – a day when I wasn’t even working, that beat that record and spent somewhere around $800-$900. Almost $1,000 and this was absolutely awesome to see. I through phases where I get a bit worried about money.

Last month was really good in terms of I closed down OnProperty Plus, changed it to OnProperty Listings and as a result, increased the prices. So, I got a big influx of income – about $4,000 or something like that from that promotion and people signing up as a result of that promotion.

So, I’m going into this month, into October, thinking, “Okay, a bit more stressed about this month.” I don’t have $4,000 automatically coming in. I’ve got about $1,000 revenue from Property Tools as well as OnProperty Plus/OnProperty Listings monthly subscription. So I’ve got about $1,000 coming in. I’ve also been working closely with Ben Everingham, recommended a few people to him. So, it might be $2,000 coming from him, but it’s never certain with buyer’s agents.

They’re working with a couple of clients and if they can’t find the property, then, Ben is so honorable, he gives the money back. So, that could potentially result in no money coming in. So, I’ve got about $1,000 guaranteed and I’ve got about $2,000-$3,000 a month in expenses now. Things just go up as you become a more profitable company.

So, going into the month, just a little bit more stressed about how much money I’m going to make. What am I going to sell? How am I going to do this, blah, blah, blah, blah… And then, I get this customer on Sunday who spends $900 – almost $1,000 with me. And I go, “What am I stressing about? I’ve got people who want to spend this amount of money with me. I must be doing something right.” And anyway, there was one offer – I had 2 conflicting offers, one for $50, one for $80. So, I emailed this customer, I said, “Thanks for being the best customer ever. I just want to let you know there was an offer on this for $50 for people who bought this other course.

I’m going to honor that and refund you $30.” emailed them, blah, blah, blah… I got an email back from best customer ever yesterday and they said something really interesting to me over the course of this email, which was quite long. But they said, “Ryan, don’t underestimate yourself.” He said, “I wanted to buy everything that you had and it was a lot of work for me to go through and to find all your products and to purchase all of your products individually. So, don’t underestimate yourself and why not have a ‘buy the lot’ option as a way to convert every customer into your best customer ever?”

I was like, “Oh my goodness! You are a genius! Thank you so much. You’ve just gone from best customer ever to absolutely best customer ever because you’ve given me an awesome idea.” This customer has shown me that the buying process that I have isn’t ideal for my customer. I create videos, audios and blog posts so customers can consume my content in whatever way they want. But when it comes to my products, I haven’t exactly made it easy for customers to purchase everything.

I guess part of that was I wanted to break things down for customers and service their needs. So, kind of like a supermarket where you go to the supermarket and they’ve got thousands of items and they never intend you to buy everything in one shop, but what you need is there for when you need it and when you need something else, then you come back.

I guess my product strategy was the supermarket sort of strategy where I’ve got a whole bunch of different things there that service different needs. Come and purchase this product when you have that need. And when you’ve got a different need that I can serve, come back. But I never thought that maybe there’s customers that are passionate enough they just want to purchase everything all at once and I need to make their experience better. So, definitely going to add a “buy the lot” option to my products page.

At first, I was like, “Well, how am I going to do this?” Because OnProperty Listings has monthly, annual and 2-year options. Property Tools only has monthly and yearly. How am I going to do this? But I think the way I’m going to do it is I’ll scrap the monthly because if someone wants to buy everything, then they’re pretty keen on spending money and I’ll just offer a yearly and 2-yearly options. Yearly for OnProperty Listings is $480.

Yearly for Property Tools is $50. So, that’s $530 plus everything else. And then, the 2-year option for OnProperty Listings is $720 and then I’m just going to leave 2 years for Property Tools at $100, so no discount for getting property Tools for $100. So it goes $720 to $820 plus then I’ll have 3 courses at $300 each so that’s $1,120. Plus I’ve got the eBooks that’s $7 so it’ll be like $1,127. So, I could, eventually, once all my products are out, I could have a “buy the lot” where someone could spend $1,127 with me in one go.

All of a sudden, I only need 4 customers a month in total in order to achieve my income goals that I set for the year. Obviously, not everyone’s going to do that, but maybe get 1, 2 or maybe 3 of those customers a year and that’s a nice little kicker. Definitely, big thank you to my best customer ever who has now spent the most money ever with me and has also given me a great idea in order to improve how much my customers are potentially worth. That was a really cool breakthrough for the week.

Bit of an update from last week, when I worked 25 hours a week, took me a little bit to get used to it. The first 2 days I think I finished the day and I was a cranky shit. I was like, went down and I was just cranky for some reason.

I was quite rude to my family. I don’t know why exactly, but I think it was just the stress of it. And the mindset of working less and feeling like my family is taking away from my work time, which is not the intention at all, you know. I value family over work, so I don’t know why I was thinking that. But I kind of felt like that and I was like, “Oh, well, this is crap. I don’t get to work” So, the first couple of days were hard.

Third day, I had about half an of being cranky after I finished work. And then, by the fourth and fifth day, I was quite happy with the work schedule that I had and what I was doing and I was less stressed. So, I had a great day on Friday with the family. I had a great weekend. And then, Monday was a public holiday up here, it was super hot. So, we ended up going to my mother-in-law’s place to swim in her pool.

Even though technically, I’m not doing 25 hours a week anymore, my stress levels – oh my goodness, have they gone down so significantly! Because I was like, “Yup, absolutely. Let’s go for a swim in the morning.” We went for a swim. I started work at 11:00 and then I finished work at 3:30 of 4:00 or something. I actually wasn’t feeling very good that day. I had a super sore back and ended up passing out asleep at 5:00.

My stress levels have gone down significantly. So, Tuesday, I did 8:00-4:00, that was yesterday. Today, I’m doing kind of 7:30 until 3:00-ish because as soon as the kids come home from school, we’re going to go for a swim because it’s hot again. Then, tomorrow, I’m going to see The Martian, which is an absolutely awesome book that I read and apparently, it’s a good movie, too, so I’m going to see that. And then, hopefully, got Smash Brothers tomorrow night. We’ll only work a few hours on Thursday, which I’m fine with. And then Friday I’ll probably do a full day there.

I think the 25 hours a week, definitely something that I want to move towards. It was great to that example and to do that week. As well, to work with my wife and to be able to help her out more with the 3 kids. Because having 3 kids and taking care of 3 kids is really hard. Not just for her, but just in general. And so, being able to help her more reduced her stress levels, leads to a better family balance, better emotional health; which leads to a better relationship that we have together. Definitely something that I want to pursue more is work less and be more focused.

Another thing that I realised about working 25 hours a week is I’ve got more important shit done! Often I’ll spend a day and I’ll just fat ass around. I’ll get some emails done. I’ll do some admin stuff. I’ll get stuff done, but it’s not stuff that’s super important. When I got 5 hours a day, I lean on my virtual assistant more. I’m like, “Okay, I’ve got 5 hours. What am I going to get done? Alright, I’ve got to get some videos done.

Let’s get these videos created, let’s get these videos edited and uploaded.” Bam, they’re done. Off to Dipti in order to manage them and publish them. So a lot of work that I was doing was more valuable work. I can actually potentially achieve more working 25 hours than I could working full time. Because I just do less stupid tasks that I probably shouldn’t be doing anyway. So I’m going to have to think about this.

We’ve got school holidays again in about 8 weeks. The kids have 9 weeks off or something like that. So, I think, over that Christmas break, I’m probably going to do 25 hours a week for maybe 8 weeks or 9 weeks or something like that. In Sydney for a week, so that’ll be a holiday. Probably have another week of holidays, but I was thinking and talking to my wife and we’re saying, “Yeah, well, let’s just do this.” At least we know if I run out of money or we start running out of money or I’m not making enough, I can just increase my work hours again and find out ways to make more money.

So, yeah. That’s where we’re at. That’s where we’re at. Enjoying my Smash Brothers, practicing that pretty heavily and getting into that. So wanting to become good and, eventually, would love to be able win some competitions, win some tournaments in Smash Brothers as my Peach player. But that’s another topic for another day.

That’s it for me today, guys. Until next time, stay positive.


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#50 We Are Not Drinking Beer Today. Zero Sales :(

iniartworksmallSometimes you just get lucky first go…and sometimes you don’t. This is an example of me not getting lucky.

Sometimes you just get lucky first go, and other times, you don’t. I remember, it would have been 3 or 4 years ago, I was still working as a pharmaceutical rep and I had a property blog and I had a little over 1,000 email subscribers, over 100 articles, less than 120.

Were getting a decent amount of traffic and I thought, you know, I need to make some money from this – I want to make some money from this. And so, I decided to create and launch a membership site where I would teach people how to find positive cash flow properties. So, what I did was I created a single page.

Literally, a single webpage that was password-protected. That was it. It’s a functionality within every single WordPress page or WordPress post – you can set a password on it.

So, I created that and I put a video on it or a couple of videos or something like that. It wasn’t even complete, the product. I sent out an email to my list saying, “Launching this product.

Here’s a 50% discount.” or something like that and I sold it for $50 and I had $2,000 in sales in the space of 1-2 days. Before then, the most I’d ever seen in terms of a month was maybe $300-$500 in AdSense revenue. So, for me, this membership site was a big kicker for me.

This membership site, eventually, over the course of a couple of years evolved into OnProperty Plus, which is now OnProperty Listings, which makes me a good 4-figures per month and means that I can work from home and I don’t need to have a job.

That was striking it lucky. I was very lucky to launch that and to get so much success off the bat with that. Just really struck a cord with the market and what they wanted. One that’s not so lucky is my public speaking course. Yup, no sales. We are not drinking beer today. We are not celebrating and getting drunk together because there are no sales for my public speaking course.

I sent out an email to my list of about 700-800 email subscribers talking about the course. Had a bit of traffic to the page, but absolutely zero sales, nada.

I was thinking that maybe today I create some free videos for outspoken.co, but at this point, I just don’t see the point because I’m not making any money from the site. I haven’t “nailed the coffin” so to speak. I haven’t given up on outspoken.co or given up on this product.

I will still give it probably a month to see do people go to it? Are people interested in it? Do I get any sales? All I need is one sale to really encourage me to push this site forward. But I know this is my first product that I’ve ever created and it may not be aligned with the market, it may not be what they want. It has a good learning experience for me, but I definitely did not strike it lucky with this course.

It’s not something that I just launched and I sold a whole bunch of copies to this course. So, I don’t know if that means it’s a dud course, I don’t know if that means that public speaking is a harder niche to monetise. I’m not 100% sure what it means, but definitely didn’t strike it lucky. So, I’ll wait a little bit longer and see what happens and then, maybe go again and create another course or try and market it in some other way.

So, yeah, I was hoping to strike it lucky. Hoping to get a little bit of traction with this course so I could then justify working more on oustpoken.co, but unfortunately, that’s not the case. So, I’m back to just focusing on OnProperty, focusing on creating more marketing materials for that. So, more free content and driving people to my products.

I am thinking about the long term and longevity of OnProperty and me and this business and what it’s going to look like moving forward. And something that I’m doing is at the end of each of my videos, I’m doing a call to action to one of my products. So, rather than just trying to get more and more email subscribers now – which I actually think is becoming less and less relevant, less and less valuable over time. But the content is going to hold it’s value and so I really have this sense that the value is in the content. The value is not in the email list, as people say.

Obviously, collecting people’s emails are very important. But when you’ve got people who are so segmented online now, so many people surfing the web through apps. So many people go into a lot of different websites using Facebook and stuff like that. But you still develop a relationship with the person.

So, whether you’re watching someone on Youtube or you’re watching their video on Facebook or you’re interacting with them on their website or they send you an email, it’s all the same person. And I think that as I grow this brand, as I build up this brand, I think email will become less and less important over time.

I can’t remember the last time I actually bought something from an email that was sent to me; which is really interesting. But I do know that I follow people like Gary Veynerchuk, I love all the stuff that he does. I follow his podcast or his Youtube channel. And he’s the same person there. He’s the same person on iTunes as he is on Youtube and when he has a book out or a call to action, I find it through the videos he does and I then go ahead and take action.

So, I’m thinking that emails aren’t as important as they used to be. Still important, but they’re not the be all and end all. And so, what I’m doing, because I believe the content will hold value for longer into the future than collecting email subscribers, I’m actually marketing my products at the end or within each of my videos. So, I’ll do a subject like I just did one about the biggest mistakes that people make when doing suburb research, when investing in property.

So, at the end of that and throughout that video, I was talking about I’m launching a course on suburb, which you can get at onproperty.com.au/suburb. So, I’m integrating it into the videos. I did other videos and marketed other products, like my course on how to find positive cash flow properties or my membership site, OnProperty Listings.I’ve been doing more of this free content with a call to action.

So, we’ll just see how that goes and see whether that’s going to work. But I think in terms of long term strategy, I think that’s going to be the most successful way to do it, is to just have in-content discussions about my own products. I think that’s going to be pretty cool.

I am considering moving back to daily videos. I did this back in 2014, so last year. What I did was I release a new video, podcast, article every single day. So, the video gets transcribed into a blog post. It also gets converted into an MP3, into a podcast. And I saw huge growth over my site in that period of time and I’m still seeing upwards of 1,500 people visit my site every single day from the content that I produced partially during that period. Some of the content was before that.

I have noticed that as I release articles talking about the courses that I’m creating, like I’ve released some of my videos are sales videos, I’ve noticed that I’ve had sales that I feel are related to that – not to the emails that I sent out. And I know this because some of the people who purchased my product weren’t even email subscribers of mine. So the only way they could have found out about it was through the actual episodes themselves or through the menu tab on my website.

I think that it’s powerful. I think that getting people in the routine of listening to me, I think the idea of getting more and more content out there and just smashing my competitors in terms of how much content I have, how much I can be found in Google and have people find me is going to be super valuable. And I think the long term strategy of absolutely owning this space in terms of the market and getting people to come to me really allows me to have a more positive impact on people’s lives than if I was to do affiliate deals to try and sell my products and stuff like that.

I want to be like Apple and basically be fully integrated. Everything from my marketing to my products. I don’t want to make money selling other people’s products. I don’t want other people acting as affiliates for me. I want to do everything myself, which is, I guess, less like Apple, more like James Shramko and what he does over at SuperFast Business where he doesn’t have any affiliates marketing his stuff, but he just does it all himself. And I think that’s going to be the best long term strategy for me and for my business. And if I’m creating all these free content now and I’ve got the backend, like my virtual assistant Dipti, she’s absolutely awesome.

She can get all this stuff up. So I can create 3 videos in the space of a couple of hours. I then upload them, let her know about it and then, bam! She’s away, gets everything scheduled, gets everything ready and published on time. So I don’t have to worry about all that backend stuff anymore. It’s not sucking my time. So, I think it’s more achievable for me to do daily videos now than it used to be.

So I’m excited about that. That’s going to be good. I think we’ll move towards that I was doing 2 videos a day for a while and I’ve just started moving to 3 videos a day. I’m going to get my way up to 5 videos, so Monday to Friday there’s going to be a video every single day. And then, as soon as I have enough content and I feel like I can keep it up, then I’ll go ahead and I’ll do fully a video every single day.

I think that’s going to be exciting because then once I’ve created this course on suburb research and then I’ve created the course on how to evaluate an individual property, then I can just focus on marketing those courses.

The free videos could be all I do. That could just be the only stuff that I have to do on my business. It’s just, I do free videos and I do customer service, like emails and stuff like that. And then I could definitely work 5 hours per day. Working 5 hours a day has been pretty rough.

It’s been getting difficult to get into the habit. But I think now that I’m starting to do it, starting to get used to it. I think there’s massive value in it for me, for my family, for my wife – to help her out. But then, also for me, in terms of socially, I will then have more time. My wife will be less stressed, so she’s okay if I go for a surf or if I go to someone’s house and play Smash Brothers or something like that. I think it’s going to be good, I think it’s going to be long term.

I think I can definitely make enough money – if not more money doing just 5 hours a day than doing 8 or 9 hours a day. So, it’s definitely something that I’m going to be working towards and it’ll probably happen faster than I expected.

Anyway, I have rambled on enough. I’m excited to get on with the day to go ahead and make some videos. I’ve got 4 hours until I finish work. So, let’s see how many videos I can get done. If I get 3 done, I’d be happy. But why not push for 4 and then I’ve done 7 this week, hey? Well, we’ll see how we’d go. Hope you guys are having an awesome day. I hope that you are working on your business. I hope that sometimes you get lucky and you get a quick win like I did when I first launched my membership site for OnProperty.

Sometimes you just don’t get lucky and you need to re-evaluate and think, “What did I do wrong? What can I do better?” And also, I want to encourage you, it’s not about doing the grind and working 12-16 hour days. It’s about achieving what you want to achieve, having the biggest influence that you can – positive influence on people’s lives. And then living the life that you want. Living the life that you want is super hard to work out. So hard to work out what kind of life do I actually want. What I want to do for work? What I want to do with the rest of my time when I’m not working? But it’s totally worth it if you can work it out.

I’ll keep you guys up to date on that. Until next time, if you want instructions, go and buy some furniture.


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#49 Hoping and Praying To Sell A Copy Of My Course

iniartworksmallI 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.


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#48 I Created A Product In A Day…Kind Of

iniartworksmallI 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!


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#47 Creating Something From Nothing

iniartworksmallIf 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.


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#46 So Much About My Nervousness

iniartworksmallA 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.


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#45 I Am Nervous About Running My Business

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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#44 On Ending Night Terrors With Varun From Lully

[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.


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