Capturing Your Smallest Viable Audience

So I was biking to the gym last night and just go get a sauna session and just to kind of calm my nerves a little bit. And I'm listening to the Tim Ferriss podcast, and he's talking to some epic drummer who they call him the mercenary of drummers, and they're talking about how they prepare before they go on stage. And Tim Ferriss starts telling his story before his Ted Talk. And he says they have something called the zen room or the chill room. And he goes in the back. Into the zen room, and there's a bunch of polished, really well established speakers in there, and they're just losing their shit. So he said it was like if you're in the wilderness with Bear Grylls and he starts losing his shit. He was just like, I cannot be in here right now. And I was like, OK, everyone, everyone gets nervous before they give a little presentation. Chris, let's start out. Can you share? Can you share a moment like that with us? Have you ever had some nerves before? Oh, have I ever had some nerves? Are you kidding me? I'll tell you my worst story ever. The worst story ever went is when I had to speak at the motion conference in Santa Fe and the event organizer, she wanted us to memorize an 18 minute talk. So I've not done that since junior high or high school, and I was sweating bullets then and I'm sweating bullets now as an adult man. And I remember rewriting the talk up into the very minutes of the presentation, but unfortunately we had to submit our deck days earlier and she wanted it months earlier, but I sent it to her two days prior. So now I've rewritten my talk, but the slides don't line up to what it is, I want to say. So it's like, what do I do? So finally, we get during rehearsals. I get to actually see the stage and the setup and the monitor and the notes that you sent with your monitor are tiny and it's far away. And I'm like, oh, shoot, this is really going to be a tough one. So I remember just my heart pounding out of my chest. My throat was getting really tight the night before I'd stayed up to 4:00 in the morning, helping out another speaker with her talk. So I was already wiped out. So talk about nerves. I was like pacing in circles. I was doing all the Amy Cuddy power posing exercises like I'm wondering woman in the back, I'm doing all the vocal things and just looking like a freakazoid walking around. So my nerves got to me for sure, but I powered through it and I was able to get through it. And I have to tell you, I don't know if you ever, ever had this happen to you before, but as soon as the talk was done, I had no idea what I said or I couldn't even recall anything. And then people clap. Some people cried. It's like, what did I say? So I had a total blackout moment. All right, all right, so you're human, I am human. Yeah, I don't know. That was a really good podcast. They just talked about doing some like different calm meditations before or whatever. And I think everyone goes to that when there's get some adrenaline pumping, when there's a lot of people watching sometimes. So but the best thing to do is be well prepared. That's what they said. So I hope that I'm there. We'll move on with this. This call is going to be for people looking to find better qualified leads, which when I first joined the group, I asked everyone took a poll on pretty much the one thing that they wanted to focus on either them or people within their company, like the most valuable skill. And then I went through a couple other different Facebook groups, and pretty much everyone said the same thing, like they want to find better qualified leads. And kind of secondary to this presentation, it's going to be for aspiring content creators, people who might have been on the edge of on the fence for a long time, just wanting to start doing that, but they haven't quite built the nerve for it. OK it's going to be a case study on how to find your dream clients. So I graduated from high school in 2009. By the next year, I decided not to go to college despite planning on it my entire life. And pretty much having a straight track to go into Pixar. My parents thought I was crazy. And kind of I guess this isn't going to be a debate on school or not school, I think those happen and a lot of other places, but. The reason that I didn't want to go is I looked at school as a really broad subject and. I wanted to learn how to get to specific places, so when I actually went to meet with some Pixar people at one of the animation programs. And one of the guys who had worked on up, he told me, yeah, like, you're going to be working on getting really good at hair textures or something like that, something really specific and that wasn't the type of specific that I was looking for. But I wanted I wanted to find people who had done similar things to what I wanted. And I wanted to just learn their story. Finding them as a mentor and kind of just go experiment through the world. So I want to ask you guys, when is the exact moment that a business fails? How are we supposed to answer that? Was that rhetorical question? Yeah shoot for it. Go ahead. When a business talks to adapt or doesn't want to change to changing environments. So what happens is then what happens after that? Then they become stagnant and address the market's needs anymore. And after that, if they don't ever adapt, then they go bankrupt and they close. There you go. That's what I'm looking for right there. So Thanks. A business fails when it goes bankrupt or basically when you quit. I mean, you can go bankrupt as many times as you possibly can. Keep going. I wouldn't recommend it. So after I'd not gone to college, I got a corporate job, living in San Diego, doing security systems. They gave me a company SUV, unlimited free gas. I had an apartment close to the beach. And one day I just woke up and realized that I was really bored and I feel like I'd kind of plateaued. So when I think when you feel that comfortable, you need to take a really big leap, and so I. I'll get to what I did next. I have this Facebook news newsfeed eradicate. I don't know if any guys use this, but I was logging into Facebook the other day and I read this quote. I thought it really applied to of my story along the way of being able to keep a low overhead, so I moved into my parents' basement. Not everybody can do that. I got rid of my company. I saved my job, my apartment, and I moved into my parents' basement in Utah. And it was dead of the winter. It was really cold and drab. And so. Came into a period where I just wanted to work for a long time, I locked myself in the basement. I said, I'm not going to hang out with anyone until I can start getting clients or open a business, whatever. And it took me really until the next year until I published my first animation video, which I'm sure a lot of you guys saw the trailer for the presentation, but that animation video. I talked a little bit about. How Chris has touched on this subject before. Of being able to teach something to someone and can kind of instantly make you an expert in any field, do you feel like I'm putting words in your mouth? Chris is. Do you have a better way of putting that? No, you're not putting words in my mouth. OK so that's what that video was for me is I was really frustrated with my business partner at the moment because we'd started out as a web design agency. I wanted to get into motion graphics and he didn't think it was a good idea. So I just kind of. Stagnated for a while, and then finally, I was like, no, I'm going to do this, and I channeled my frustration into teaching other people how to deal with their emotions, and I can't say that I've mastered how to deal with my anger or any of that yet, but it definitely helped. And I think it helps some other people because 300,000 views isn't amazing. But for my first project, it gave me some confidence. OK let's dig into this concept, the smallest viable audience, so. I know a lot of you guys saw Seth Godin was on the show a couple of weeks ago. And if you read his latest book, this is marketing, this is one of the big concepts in it. So I think maybe why that video worked, why it connected with people is because I partnered up with a blog that I was already a big fan of called existence and. Then I took this concept from a book, and really I knew that the owner of this blog liked this book because I'd read it, read about it in the blog, so I knew that it was a concept that was going to connect well with this audience. So, and yeah, so just real quick for the people who didn't see that video. Could you explain like what the smallest viable audience is? Yeah so Brendan, are you asking? Oh OK, I get you. The smallest viable audience was it's kind of like a new age type of blog. The book was called Conversations with God. It's it was kind of just all about. People learning to understand their emotions better, and self-improvement was a big topic on the blog, so I felt like just based on all those concepts folding over each other, that it would be a good match. Does that make sense? Yeah, but for the smallest viable audience, when you're talking about, you know, marketing to different people, like what would be the definition of that? I'll touch on it pretty much as we go throughout the whole thing, so let's. Maybe come back to me at the end if you don't feel like that's been answered yet, but I'm going to touch on that subject quite a bit. Cool coop. So I think because it connected with that smallest viable audience, it was prone to being shared by bigger channels. And there was this channel called Spirit, science that now they have 12 million. I don't know how many likes add back then, but it just dwarfed the size of the audience we were working with. So I think the point is if you can connect with a very small audience very well, then it has the potential to. Spread to something much bigger than that. So we built a case study. And nobody even knew that we didn't get paid to do this project, so. Based off my experience and how I got started, I would recommend that that's a good way to get good clients because once we build this case study, we had some good credibility. And that kind of advanced into a whole thing where we ended up getting obtained by an investor or partnering up with an investor later that year, moving down to Austin, Texas. By the way, I'm sure if anyone in here has worked with an investor, they would advise that's a bad decision, but I was young, hungry. So since then, I've traveled around the world and I've made a core team of partners. Between us, we've worked with a lot of big brands. And this has been a really big process of blood, sweat and tears, so I'm not going to cover in between of how that happened right now, but we're going to focus on some other topics for now. Despite despite being able to pull together some of these logos from previous projects. I saw this graphic. The other day, I thought it was pretty relevant. Chris, you don't get imposter syndrome, be less and less every day, excuse me. I've shared a story before where despite having won awards and done a ton of work, that when I enter into a situation that is unfamiliar to me, that's when that imposter thing starts taking over again. So I've done a lot of exercises and kind of self-awareness to know, like when it starts to creep in and I have to have a conversation with myself to quiet that. What does that conversation sound like? It's like one of those, I think there's like a Jack candy moment, those positive affirmations like you're good enough, you're strong enough, and gosh darn it, people like you and you've done something. And if you think about the exercise we did earlier, which is to kind of think about what we're grateful for, what we're good at. I think that helps to quiet that other really loud voice like, no, gosh darn it, I've done something with my life. I've been able to help people. The more Zen Buddhist kind of way to look at it is to take the focus off yourself and focus it on other people. So when we feel like an impostor, it's like we feel like everybody's looking at us and everybody's thinking, what's that person doing here? They don't deserve to be here. You're not good enough. Why are those kinds of thoughts happen? And the more you think about it, the more it amplifies in your mind. So if you push it away and say, this is not about me, I just want to enjoy the company of other people and get to know other people. Or maybe I can be of service to other people and shifted away from like, oh, everybody's looking at me. And truth be told, nobody's looking at you and nobody cares. Well and then all right. So we'll touch a little bit more on the smallest viable audience thing here, too, with thousands of fans. I'm sure a lot of you have heard of 1,000 true fans. Can someone can someone in here give a 20, 30 second explanation what 1,000 true fans is? I can try. So how I understand 1,000 true fans is something people also you also call a tribe. So these are, say, 1,000 people who are following you who are inspired by what you do, who actually enjoy the content you put out and. They engage the it's basically. The people who. Just enjoy whatever you have to give. Is that am I close? Hello is anyone else? Yeah we're all listening. I'm going to venture a guess to add to that, they're willing to do what you ask them to do. I believe maybe it's Tim ferriss, somebody else who talked about this. And if you have, I thought his number was 10,000 or something like that. If you have 10,000 people willing to do what you ask them to do, you can have a lifestyle business and you don't have to work for anybody. If you write a book and say, please purchase my book or tell 10 friends about the launch of this thing, then that's when you have a true fan. So a lot of people can hit Like and Subscribe. That's not enough yet. They have to be able to take action. I remember at the YouTube conference that I went to recently, they had suggested a lot of YouTubers try live streaming and they said, before you do live streaming, even though you may have a lot of subscribers, ask them to do one simple thing. And if you have enough people do that one simple thing, you're ready to go live because you're asking them to jump from this thing to something else. Yeah, I think a way of putting it is whether you're playing music, maybe it's people that are willing to drive. 10 hours away to go see you. My Mike's working right? Yeah, we hear you. Button keeps disappearing on me. OK and. You know, maybe you get 10, 10 people to buy $1,000 object, or maybe it's 100 people to buy a $100 object. It's somewhere in between there. There's a core tribe number, and I think that ties in really well to the smallest viable audience. It's basically the same thing because the 1,000 true fans, it could be even smaller. It could be hundreds people. It's just an arbitrary number. So that video that I made the first animation video no jobs ever directly came from that. It's not like somebody watch some animation video about their motions and then hit me up and was asked for a job. But it created a lot of confidence and it created scarcity of my time because a lot of other people wanted to work with me after that. So for my next content project, I wanted to go smaller, I wanted to find someone more business focused, find that audience that had more of a business focus. Because I felt like that would lead to more business inquiries from content. So if you guys haven't seen this video of finding your super power, I'd recommend to go check it out. It'll be in the resources. Chris does. I don't know how many times you did this presentation, Chris. Probably multiple times, but this one's in, I think, Milan, Italy or something like that. And he talks about trying to find the crossroads of all of these different things to find what the superpower actually is. Anything to add to that, Chris. I've done that presentation, I think, exactly three times. And the reason why I had to do it in Milan was they sprang it on me. Initially, they can't do a workshop and just talk about the future a little bit. When I got there, like, no, we need you do a talk, a 20 minute talk. I was like, shoot. So I had to put something together within hours of going on stage. So there's a very similar concept that I was unaware of. It's called ikigai is the Japanese concept. It's very similar to this. What you're seeing on the graphic here, except for it takes away one of these things. OK cool. Which long does it take away? I can't remember. Maybe passion. You don't have to be passionate about it. Well, I mean, when people use these prompts to fill out like opportunities to kill happiness, passion and service to others that some of them are redundant and they overlap quite a bit. So I think the ikigai thing is actually quite brilliant. It's like four four nodes instead of five. And I thought I would just give somebody more prompts to help unlock what it is that they're good at. Makes sense. So I thought long and hard after being in the group what my superpower is. I mean, I've worked on a lot of more commercial work, but where I really love being is in the content marketing industry. So after the. Five natural emotions video in 2013, I helped start a blog that was very business focused and helped grow that to over 10,000 subscribers. The next year, we launched a podcast for it and we took over a new noteworthy for marketing. Got 200,000 downloads in the first two months. And later on that year, I was launching a Kickstarter product. I was able to reach out, get it on published on Forbes within really. My first person I reached out to was the expert for internet of things on Forbes. So my point is, I think my superpower is really finding influencers and doing content marketing. Being able to get them to share it, but. I joined a big agency after that, didn't do much content, and so I really put on the ego condom, as Dan Mace talked about in the recent future video. If you don't know what I mean by that, it's basically like you're working at a big agency. And it's not you that has full ownership over the end product. So you really don't care as much. You don't have as much at stake and you're not the one embarrassed if it fails, really so. After doing that for a while, I wanted to publish my next piece of content and I decided to do it. Just under my own name on medium. And so that made me really nervous because I was going to promote it and I was going to stand behind it and. I knew, like with some previous past successes and doing blogs, there was like a real bar to hit. So I published this article called still my app, I dare you. I'll just explain it for a SEC. Basically, it was an app idea that I came up with a long time before I published this and I wanted to keep my things more organized, so it was a way of like really visualizing my organization within bags. And so I made a whole prototype for it, made a whole brand for it, and I basically just gave it away on a silver Platter in this blog post. And the first month they got 8,000 views, so for me, that was like pretty disappointing. And it wasn't a total embarrassment, at least, but yeah, it was not like inspiring. I think for a lot of these things, you're focusing a lot on the metrics and less on really the message that you're trying to convey because 8,000 for me is huge, like my first medium post. I think it only got like maybe 500 views. And like, I was pretty excited about that. I was like, hey, 500 people saw what I wrote. I was pretty excited. But you know, when you get up to eight thousand, that's a lot. Your first YouTube video that you put out got up to 200,000 views. That's huge. I think the first video that I put out, I was like 14 years old, maybe, and I think five people watched it and I was very ecstatic that five people saw what I put out five people for my work. So I mean, what you're putting out is, like, really, really great. He's killing me. I know it's good. He's an overachiever, right in my mind. I'm superman, right? But yeah, yeah, good point. Just a lot of these things, you really you're really achieving a lot, but you're not taking a second to really recognize that you're at a higher level than a lot of people starting off. I bet you, Mason has a point in this where it's all going to be like, here, here's he's going to make it crystallize it right? And this is a three part story. And we're like the second half the comeback kid disappointed after his 300,000 views and 8,000 I looked at them like, damn, 8,000 how that was great. I got all. Now I'm going to go the opposite way for a second. Keep going. Keep going. So the next month, I saw this pop up on Twitter. And I. I didn't even know what to say, because I look up to Tim Ferriss quite a bit. He's in my roundtable of mentors. So, yeah, as you can see, something can happen pretty quickly once an influencer shares it dwarfs those other 8,000 numbers. And it pretty much tapered off after that if you're not promoting it anymore, but. The question is how to get influencers to share your work, and I've thought about this long and hard. I wrote a blog post called How to Get Tim Ferriss to share your blog post and is just a little case study with some of those numbers in it, mostly. But I've been thinking about it, I think. I think why he shared it was because I'm a fervent student of his and I read his work. I know very well. And he talks about scratching your own itch a lot. And I think I kind of maybe scratched his itch a little bit by like giving him credit for this idea. And in this blog post that I had. And he's never really written about it in any of his books. I don't think so. I think he was just glad that someone had talked about it, giving him credit for it. So what happened with this blog post is it was a writing prompt. And that's really what got me to pull the trigger on publishing. It is someone had written a writing prompt called share your work and/or show your work. And it was going to get a share by Cory Doctorow if it won the writing prompt. So I started there. I knew that this prompt was going on. And then another thing I would do to promote it would be to add some, some subreddits to it. So and all these different little subreddits that might fall within the smallest viable audience. And now this remember, this smallest viable audience is really trying to go more business focused on it, so. Once again, the Tim Ferriss audience just dwarfs where I started, so I started really, really small and then get a share from a big influencer that dwarfs it in size. Brennan, maybe this goes to what you're saying like. After I got that share, I could have been super excited about it, but I kind of torture myself, I guess that way that I always want to do better, better. So I really like this quote I heard the other day. Starting a company is like staring into the abyss and eating glass. I would advise people to have a high pain tolerance. So you would think that this boosted my confidence, and I'm just like, I'm going to start posting blog posts every day, but I basically told myself that I just got lucky and I really haven't published anything since. Chris, can you read that you want to answer that for me? Yeah, so what was my self-talk like before starting in the future? Yeah, maybe in years or months before weeks, days. So now we're going to get into a little bit of drama if I'm able to tell the story correctly. And I think this is one of the great things about the pro group is we can share pretty openly about where we hurt, where we're weak, where we're strong. So I'm going to go ahead and tell you what's going on. So months prior to starting the future, Josie and I were just at crossroads with one another, and I could see very clearly we had different vision, mission and tactics on how to achieve what we wanted to achieve. And I'm not saying I'm right or he's wrong or he's right, I'm wrong. But I knew I couldn't work with him and remain friends with him for very long. We tried many things to remedy that. The community was reaching out to us and saying, please don't separate, don't separate. You guys are better together. And if you've been doing something with somebody, there's that familiar part to it, which you think if I break apart what happens? And how much of the momentum and how much of the personality and the brand and the charisma do I lose? Can I do this on my own? I think if you've ever suffered through a breakup in your personal life, I think we can relate to this. And that's the reason why I think we hold on to old relationships much longer than we should because we know it's not going to work through several months of mediation through good friends of ours. We're able to come with some clear understanding of what he gets and what I get and where we can be as whole as possible while going our separate ways. But is this as soon as we got through that? As soon as the legal paperwork was signed, I felt more free and liberated than I have in a really long time. And I learned something about myself. I learned that I just don't play well with you, with others, like, I'm not a person who is meant to be an employee and having failed at three partnerships before, I just knew, like from this point forward, I made a promise to myself. No more partners, no more people where I have to justify what I want to do and I get to just call the shots. And the reason why I need to do this, this is not from an ego thing I need to clarify with you guys. The reason why I need to call the shots is because I move really fast. I take big risks and I see things that people don't see. And to try to justify it or explain it to a board or a partner, I just feel like all the energy that would have gone into making this thing get sucked out in kind of the decision process. So you guys have heard this term before, it's no clear whenever you have to share the decision, at least from my point of view, which is paralysis by analysis, and that kills me. It makes Chris a dull boy, and I was feeling like that's where I was heading with staying with Jose because we would sit there, debate, argue, plan, strategize and like, dude, I could have already finished three versions of this already. And that's where the frustration was coming in. So of course, you're scared. You don't know if people will follow and people will judge me and Jose for whatever it is that we do and what they think is the truth. But that's what some of the talk was. That's that's interesting, because that's really similar to why I made that animation video in the first place was I was in a very similar situation between wanting to go do motion design, and my partner was saying, no, that's bad idea. Stick to web design. And after a while, I was trying to deal with my anger because I realized that my anger was actually healthy. It was what was going to take me to go do that and start a new company branch off. But as far as doubt, Chris, do you feel like do you feel like? You'd already done it before, right, so it wasn't a the future was just a rebrand, right? Yeah but you know, when you start over, you have to deal with all the frustration of what we've been building up the school's Facebook page and it got kind of to a decent size. Not great, but it got I don't remember now like 10, 15, 20,000 people on it liking it. So when I started over, I had 300 people like it. So here we go again. It's like, I have to build it from scratch. The only thing I was able to retain was the YouTube channel, so we rebranded it. And then people are like, where's jose? Where's jose? And I had to deal with that for about a year. But here's the cool part, and as a testament to content marketing, which was I created, I commissioned somebody to do the type typography tips, the 10 tips into a video. I shared it on our Facebook page for the future, and we got tens of thousands of people liking the page within a couple of months. So that was like, OK, we had a little rough start because nobody's going to look at your page until you have a great piece of content and then everybody jumps in. Who was who was the smallest viable audience during that moment? I don't know. I struggle with defining who our audience is, and I think I'm the person who's inside the bottle and I can't read the label on the outside. I have some guesses as to who our audience is, and I think we're mostly for people that are in transition between careers, between school and work, and they need a little help. And I'm a big believer in transitions in life because the gap, even though for some it looks like it's really small to us, but to them it feels like it's a mile wide. It's like the Grand Canyon. So all I'm trying to do is make those gaps a little bit more palatable to encourage people to step forward and that they can actually clear it. So anybody that's in transition? Cool Thanks. All right, let's get to My biggest obstacle, so. There's this book called The obstacles the way by Ryan holiday, and the premise is that. You can take your biggest obstacle. Your biggest trial and turn it into a triumph. This this is a print that they sold with the book, and it's a kind of a graphic illustration of one of the famous battles that took place in, I think it's the Civil War. I want to just go through a quick story about triumph. It's instead of a battle story, I'll figure out tell something more relatable to me real quick. So this kid right here, I'm going to cruise through this because I know everybody here isn't into sports, but this kid right here without the hat on. He was a really gifted football player that I played with growing up, and everybody knew that he was going to play in the NFL. It was that type of gifted. And now there's a video online called what happened to the unluckiest college football player, ever. So when he was playing college, he got injured two seasons. Actually, three season ending injuries in a row despite being a Heisman candidate and the next year, his brother passes away. Its fourth and last year. Same thing happens season ending injury. So he really got no chance to play it in college. Surprisingly, he got picked up by Green Bay in. Last year, and they let him go right before the season started, so. Nobody want him. Is sad. Everybody knew he was going to play football eventually, but it took one coach to see a talent in him. And if anybody is following football this year, they know that this team is looking to win the Super Bowl. They're doing very well. And this coach saw this kid with all the weaknesses that he had and invented a whole new style of offense around it and. I mean, I don't want to bore you guys or football for too long, but it's. Keep an eye out who's going to win the Super Bowl this year? If they do, you can come back to me and say, wow, that kid really fought, fought, fought. And that's kind of the point. One point of this. This presentation this week is like starting a business is really hard and you got to keep pushing, keep pushing through those barriers time after time again. That's that's the only thing that I've really learned. So I've worked with some big companies, but my biggest obstacle is still finding new or better clients. You can't really ever. I don't feel like many people get past that, everybody wants that. And sometimes you think working with the biggest, most well-known clients is awesome. And then you realize that that's not where you want to be. You want to be a little bit lower down on the spectrum. So I want to turn that into. And to something that I can help you guys along my journey of documenting that. And I want you guys to be able to learn to do the same thing. So one step is really finding a problem that. It's not only a big problem for you that you're going to scratch your own itch, but it's really relatable to other people. And then you can put it in front of them. And that's really your smart, smallest viable audience is people that have really relatable problems to you. I would argue. So one big problem with documenting the process of. Of a. Of a process of going through finding clients is like you might fail, and if you document the process along the way, then you're basically just documenting your failure, showing it to the world and wasting a lot of time. So there is a lot of risk and doing something like that. But having engaged, read this book rework, have you read this book, chris? OK I started it, I haven't finished it. Anyone in here. It's OK. I never finished. All right, well, one concept I can remember is a couple of years ago I read it, but I remember this concept of. Byproducts and I found this, I found this booklet that they'd kind of talked about in the book, it's a booklet about Ford motors called industries within an industry with someone going to say something. No so. The concept is that when Ford was making cars, there was so much waste and they wanted to figure out a way to turn that waste into an actual byproduct, something usable recycle it. And so nowadays, they're like taking this even further. They're taking agave from tequila and turning it into car parts. Like, I didn't read too much into it, but it just seems like. They're still into the same thing hundreds of years later. I'll include this PDF, it's pretty interesting if you guys want to read it, so that'll be in the resources, but I interrupt. I want to tell you what that article says because I haven't read the article, but I know that story back one slide. The forward. One is that in producing cars, they had a lot of wood parts and remnants. And I think what happened is if I remember correctly for turn the scrap into coal or charcoal briquettes, and I think they invented that like charcoal, which is pretty amazing. Mm-hmm Yeah, actually, I believe the biggest briquette company. I forget what they're called, but I think that was owned by Ford. may I add some? I was reading an article recently about Apple. It was written by Chinese company. And then it will start an introduction of how they build up those retail stores and then why they particularly invited the woman that was responsible for sales in Starbucks. So right now, they're trying to create the feeling in Apple stores, as in Starbucks. So it's like it's more about being social. This is why we see, like more people are getting involved in teaching basically like the stuff is teaching, like how they should photos, how to share their moments, how to share, like and building the economy. So it's like it's a transaction period. So this thing may be like closest to what is Apple doing right now? Using a byproduct of people coming together. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and actually, Starbucks, yeah, this is called actually Starbucks entered China as Starbucks as coffee wasn't that popular in China like they like, they will only drink. It's all about drinking tea. And then when they said, you can go to coffee and enjoy being around with your friends and you can stay there as long as you want to have, like Wi-Fi for free stuff like that. So this is how they build up the social network around coffee shops and introduce coffee to Chinese society. And this is what Apple's trying to do right now. And maybe in China, but I think it's in the world as well. So this is why I think in UK, they rented the most expensive building that is on the list of the heritage buildings in London. I think it's the second building. And they just they just spend money for doing this like to create the community about the brand. that's cool. So we're going to say something. Yeah, it's just going to bring up that. So really, what I'm kind of seeing is just like just reframing like the idea of failure, like if you're trying to accomplish a project that's kind of like the star, the North Star that you're following and whether or not like even if you're documenting your process, whether you got to that end goal or not, somebody else may be coming across a different path and then they see your work and they're like, wow, that solves exactly the problem that we were trying to fix or that we were racking around in our brains and we could never come to that conclusion. So while you may so while certain projects may fail personally, it's really just about, you know, who, if it doesn't work for me, who does this problem work for? So, yeah, like reframing. I think there's just a lot of things that have been created by pure accident, like X-ray imaging, microwave ovens, all of these things people were not trying to actually create. It was just a byproduct of failing at something else. I agree. Yeah yeah, that's exactly what I'm talking about. So I'm wondering how can we apply this to designers and filmmakers, and I have to imagine that. Some of you guys have been onto the same ideas that I have for a long time because we're all in a pretty similar vein, but back when I was living in Austin in 2013 I was doing design sprints with my clients where I was recording them time lapse in them, and I never published any of this stuff. But I've been working towards it. For a long time. And I can't help but think that Chris was on to a similar vein with the whole by-product thing with the future, because essentially the future is the byproduct of blind the way that I see it. Did you want me to respond? OK No, keep going. Just keep it on there. I don't need to respond. You can tell me if I'm wrong. All right, so I told you guys that we're going to talk about this as marketing, that's that book that just came out a couple of weeks ago from Seth Godin. One interesting concept he was talking about was creating tension, and I didn't really quite get what he meant in terms of marketing because I understand tension in terms of filmmaking or storytelling. But I guess that's where they come together is storytelling is marketing, so tension is knowing like this might not work. And really taking a first step of a journey that you don't really know how it's going to end. And the people falling along with you don't know how it's going to end either. He was talking about strategy versus tactics and how one of these can't be stolen, so. Strategy is something that nobody can really take from you, it's so big pictured that they'd have to outwork you for a long time to make it, and tactics are basically a list of different tools and experiments underneath this strategy to test, test, test. It doesn't work. You try the next one. He talks about good enough, and this is an issue that I struggle with a lot because I'm pretty perfectionist, but I might argue that it's good to strive for perfection, but not to the point where it's never going to reach anybody. Because if you don't put your content out there, then he says it's so true. He says you're stealing from other people like you're stealing your ability to help from them. And so if your ideas just sit inside of you for the next. Five, 10 years your whole life. Then think of all the people that you could have helped and. You're basically stealing from them. Do you have a system of coming up for what good enough looks like to you whenever you're working on a project? No, I think. When I think you just have a feeling like when you're so prepared, more prepared than I was for this, I only had a couple of weeks for this, this keynote. But like when someone's done something so many times like you, just could wake up and do your job like in the middle of the night if someone just shook you awake and just a type of preparedness that I think can take weeks or months. So that's really what my struggle is being consistent with that quality is I put a lot of time into the pieces of content I've made, but I know that I can't do that and be consistent. At the same time, I can't have that amount of perfectionism and put something out every day or every week. So that's something that I struggle with, man. Seth Godin brought up another point about, you know, in the right, something like do something every day, I think, is what it was called, where he's like, I'm not, I'm not looking for perfection, he said. When people have writer's block, he said, just show me, show me your bad writing. So when people are looking for perfectionism, it's just because they can't really define what that end goal is. He's like, you know, you put out work all the time. If you keep putting out your bad writing, eventually you're going to start getting good writing. And even in your bad writing, there's still a little there still might be little tidbits of like, you know, good writing in there that you can use for a larger blog piece or a book or something. So I think along the journey, you just kind of look at everything that you're producing as a whole and then, you know, just put the content out there because people out there will decide whether the content is good or bad and not necessarily just in your head, you know, trying to look for perfection. Yeah, that's really true. It's a good point. I think it's really important to be consistent, show up every day on whatever you're working towards. So right now with my obstacle, my smallest viable audience, I would say that they both want to find more qualified leads, and they also might be interested in starting a blog or a podcast, something where they can document that part of the journey. I think the future group fits really well within this, and I want to do like a super group on top of it that we can start really small and hold each other accountable for doing content. So speaking of perfectionism, I've worked on this. Medium post. It's 10,000 words long, and I've worked on it for a long time, and it's kind of like the essence of my story, the path, how I got here. And the whole point of it is really programming yourself by your story, so I would say that a story is the most important thing that you're going to have in your own mental programming, and it's subjective to its there's what happens in your life, and there's the story you tell about it so you can choose how to frame it and what it means. So I think in westworld, they called it the cornerstone. The corner went the cornerstone, yeah, in westworld, they call it the cornerstone, it's kind of what your entire story is built off of that determines your behavior and how you act and how you go about your life. Yeah, I love that show, so I can dig that. All right, back to scratching on it for a second, so I was thinking about how this was actually the birth of the iPhone, if any of you guys have read the Jony Ive biography. It's a really good book that I would recommend. He talks about the moment that the iPhone was birthed and how it was basically a boardroom of people with blackberries, just talking shit on how bad their phones were and how they wanted a better phone. So they scratch they're owed itch and built it. So I want you to think of how you can do this with content and like the future for me was. I don't know, somehow I found it when there was maybe 100-5200 1,000 subscribers on YouTube. Sounds right, and I don't know how it got that big without me finding it, because if I would have found that before then, I had just been looking for this content for. Ever since I started an agency like. For five years in the past, just looking everywhere, if this content, somehow I didn't come across it. And that's like the kind of desire you should have for the content that you're making, like what? What's something that you would search yours for just because it would be that valuable? Well, can you make that? Maybe, maybe you can't make that right now, but maybe you can document the process of getting to that point where when you get to point B. You will have shown people how to get there. So I talked about this with your question, Brandon. Another obstacle for me is consistency, which is why I want to do a group that does one piece of content once a week. How dare you? That's that's my tagline. There will be a weekly topic. And medium with challenges. So if anyone's interested in that group hit me up or check in the resources. And I can give you more information about that. All pretty much everything about the job, the talk could be in the resources, all the different blog posts, authors, books, et cetera. So I'll post that probably in the group or wherever you guys want me to. Fantastic I want to first thank you for doing this, I can see that you put some work and thought into this and that it is public speaking and presenting to a group of 70. So people in the group is not an easy thing to do. So I applaud you do that. I want to encourage others to step up and do it. And I like seeing you guys talk. First of all, it's easier for me. Obviously, you guys do the work and we get to learn from you and I get to see where your mind is and what you take in. So I have some thoughts, and some notes I've written down while you were talking here. OK, cool. Some things that I would like you to do and think about in subsequent conversations is to possibly reverse engineer. Why you think that video got 300,000 views? Why do you think your blog posts on your medium posts got picked up by Tim Ferriss and the strategies that you may or may not have use but reverse engineer for us? And I think I'm able to look from the outside and see something that you're doing, that you're targeting influencers, you consume their content and you think what would be of interest to the influencer that they may want to share this thing? I think that's an excellent strategy and something that we all can do. So as an experiment, I'm going to try to think about something like that. And see if I can't replicate your success. And I think really awesome. I think really the overarching message that I got and it wasn't super clear to me. So I'm going to say, and then you correct me if I'm wrong. Your whole premise of how to get clients is to build content that people are going to share and consume. That puts you on their radar, gets you known, and then you can begin to build that bridge on. If you like this piece of content, you may consider me to speak, to write a book or to hire me or something like that. Is that pretty much the thrust of your presentation, mason? Yeah, that's AI should have had you write the tagline for it. It's OK. I do summaries on the show live, right? So I have to do that anyways. So I think that's really what it is. So in your way, the challenges are, who do I speak to? So Mason talked about the smallest viable audience survey, I think, right? Or and then he talked about creating the minimum viable product. There's a lot of words like small and minimum that he's talking about. And I think it could be very daunting if you think about the vastness of humanity connected on the internet and then you lose yourself. So I think what Seth is talking about, even though I've not read his books, is niching down into something where you can kind of visualize who you're speaking to and create for them, that's the whole scratch your own itch thing because those people are just like you. There's a good chance if you have a problem, maybe 100,000 other people have the exact same problem as you and I put in the chat chat window here. I was surprised because I didn't know that this had happened until recently. You know, I get questions all the time about how to get more clients, how to get more clients. I don't know. I just got tired of them asking that because they're all looking for a quick fix and easy solution. So I wrote a little post on our site called How to Get more clients. And I believe and I didn't go incognito mode. But if you search for get more clients, we are the top five results. I think we're number three on organic search results. And I didn't even know this just had to happen. I just wrote it because I was tired of answering the same question over and over again. So if you want to verify that type in your browser because obviously I have browser history, it's going to want to show me more of what I've already done. But it should be top 10 search result. So that's pretty. That's pretty bananas. And I'm not even a content marketing guy. I just wrote that thing. OK you talked about I think it was Brendan who asked this question. And Brendan, Thanks for coming in with a good questions. I don't want to geek out, but awesome, Mike. Awesome camera there. Very good. Guy Kawasaki in many of his talks he talks about it's OK to ship with elements of happiness that even the first iPhone had elements of happiness. That the GPS didn't quite work. The maps didn't quite work. It was difficult to make calls, but they shipped it anyways, and then they keep iterating. On top of that, it needed to make calls. It needed to have a screen and surf the internet a little bit. And so that was their minimum viable product. I would love to kind of have some dialogue on topic or slightly off topic. Anybody in your questions so that Mason can answer them. I was just going to mention that there was another talk that Simon Sinek had done where he mentioned there's two types of players in and like business. There's people who play for finite and for infinite. And one of the things that he mentioned was that Apple or one of the people who play for the infinite, so they're not really worried about like, oh, we have to make the next iPhone, you know this or like this or like, technically amazing, like a next Marvel. He basically mentioned that, you know, Microsoft is someone who plays for the finite game where they're always trying to match what Apple does like. What's the next camera that they're going to have, or what's the next antenna or anything and they try to beat it? But Apple is someone who's looking for, you know, how to like, how will this play in certain communities and thinking about the long run in the future? So I guess you kind of have to decide this side like who you're really like marketing to and who you're creating the product for? Are you creating it for a very specific thing to try to match? You know how to get your business up to $200,000 or something like that a year? Or are you trying to produce longevity for how to, you know, impact certain communities, build schools, how to design a city or something like that, things that will last for a very long time. Anybody else? Um, I wanted to ask Mason a question. So I really well, I wrote my first article on medium on why starting a business in your early 20s is a perfect age and I didn't get the numbers that you got. I just got 100 reads, sorry, I'm a little sick. So how do I keep building off that message of why this is the perfect time to start a business because of our lack of adult responsibilities that we have of having a family to feed and stuff like that? So how do I keep building off that message to create more content? Yeah, honestly, maybe if I were you, I would take my favorite things about that post and keep them. And it doesn't have to be the end game for that, for that post. So you could either post new versions of it or iterate on top of it because with a lot of my big shares that I got, it wasn't until a month or months down the road that got shared. So you can continually be working on that and trying to be figuring out how am I going to get this in an influencers? Attention and get them to want to share it. And you can constantly be working on that, it doesn't have to be like it was published, and that's the end for that. Maybe, maybe you do want to keep that article the same, but you could do different guest posting iterations of it on different blogs and keep working with that idea until you figured out. The trigger for someone to share it an influencer. OK, thank you. Hey, guys, I want to share something based on our own experience, there's a couple of ways that you guys can make content and the most obvious ways like what am I most interested in, write or produce a video based on that? But there's a slightly more scientific way is you go and Google Trends and you see what's trending in terms of what people are searching for. And if something hits you, maybe you might want to talk about that because there's already an audience for that. So instead of saying looking at like, OK, in my world, this is what I'm interested, but shouldn't we be searching for that? You might surf the Reddit forums and see like, something's blowing up and you have an opinion about it. Well, that's probably a good time to write an article or something about it, so you want to be reactive as well as what is it as well as anticipate, like what people want? I do want to say something a lot of us feel like how who am I in the world to be able to create content? Here's what I've realized something that even people like Seth Godin and Simon Sinek. What I think, first and foremost is they're good storytellers, but they're built on research. So when Seth finds out about this little town that has an interesting object, he is able to pull that out. So he's just combing through the world to find interesting bits of information. And then he tells it to you in an interesting way and ties it together with a point. So if you are just a good researcher, which I know many of you can be, because if you have a half a brain, you can be a good researcher, find the things that are of interest to people that maybe they haven't heard before. Try that and see what happens. Your your number one goal should be tell your audience something they didn't know. And if you can do that. And you can do that consistently, you're going to get the attention of people. Yeah, one thing I might add to that is. How you're saying to be reactive and really have that feedback loop closed at all times when I published that medium article, it was to a writing prompt that was focused on Simon Sinek and Cory Doctorow and Tim Ferriss. And so I knew that group was already that second smallest viable audience was kind of already there, but it was like a very timely thing. I'd written this blog post years before and it just been sitting there, and it wasn't until I saw the writing prompt that I was like, oh, this is a good time to publish this. I have a question. Go ahead. It's from what I understand your video in the five emotions was either one of two things one, it was lightning striking out of nowhere or it's the tip of the iceberg and you created the iceberg by putting, putting, putting work and owning your skills and. Which of the two was it? So obviously, it was the latter. And when I do promotion, I do it very painstakingly and I learned this working with my investor that I partner with on the first blog that I started and the way that he does promotion. So he would basically find all these little smallest viable audiences out of different subreddits. Or I mean, that was how I would do it, but that was his concept, how I want to do it. So we'd go through and I'd find all the relevant subreddits and we try and create a piece of relevant content in there that people might click to the final blog post or something. And just catering all these little tiny audiences just getting that feedback loop. But that's the only way that you can really get seen, because I'm not sure if you guys post on Reddit or just whatever social media. Sometimes it's like, you know, something's good. You put it there and it gets like 20 likes, and then you see some other guy that does the exact same thing, lower quality, and he's getting like 5,000 likes. The difference is it's just reach like nobody saw. It's not that it wasn't good, it's just that nobody saw it. So you got you got to do that initial promotion and make sure that enough people see it. If it's going to spread that it will, if it's not going to spread, then it won't. But if it's going to, you need to make sure that it can. Second of follow up in this. So basically, OK, this is a skill that it's a tool that you sharpen and you work on it and becomes better and better and better. My my main disconnect from this story, the reason I cannot really connect with it is this leads to having success or having a prolific content strategy or content content business. How about so? I understand that for me that I want to do brand new identity content is something I need to do. But on the other hand, I don't know how much of my time should go in this and how much of my time should go to everything else. Am I asking for a shortcut, chris? That's you, Chris. I'm sorry. Sorry, I was busy on Twitter. My apologies. Ask that again. My bad. So like for people, so the people, Mason or the people you say, like Seth Godin and even the future, in a sense, a lot of their businesses actual content. It's part of their business for a business that doesn't have content as well as one of the goals. And it's just a means for expression. How much of the I don't understand how to make this tool sharp enough, but on the other hand, don't neglect everything else. OK that's a fantastic question, because I think it's relevant to most of the people in our group because most of us are not in the content business, right? So I do help me, help me close the gap. Let me try to do this, ok? Now, if you're in the service space and you don't actually have an information or knowledge product to sell and you're like, well, you know, it's easy for you to say because this is what you do. So here's what we want to know. I don't know if you guys have been watching some of the live streams with the design therapist that we've been able to find. And you might ask yourself, how the heck did I find these people? Well, they made it really easy to be found because they put out content. So I found March demons, who is from the Netherlands, because he would produce these little animated videos and I would watch them or Mickey, and he would produce little video. So that's all he's doing. He's just showing you his process. He's documenting it. And I really was really leaning in when Mason was talking about, why would you film your process if you're unsure of the outcome? Because the last thing all of us want to do is the world to see our failures, right? Nobody wants to see that. But actually, maybe people do want to see that, and there's good reason why. But here's the first thing that you guys can do. I can help you guys all take this one super shortcut today, like right now to becoming a content marketing beast. Here's what you need to do. You need to download this app called screen flow. It will record what you do, and then I want you to buy a 12 terabyte drive from G tech, which is like only $300 or $400. And what you do is when you're working, it doesn't matter what the heck you're doing. If you're writing or if you're doing anything, just hit screen capture. And when you're done, save those files and don't even sweat what the heck those things mean today. After the project is done and you're OK, that turned out pretty good, right? I learned four new tips or tricks in the creation of this project. Go back and open up those files and start editing them. You have days worth of content. The only thing I want you to do now is respect the time and attention of your audience and edit it together. So it's nice and sharp. That's it. Don't make me watch seven hours of you trying to figure out one trick. The more condense you can make it, the more likely it's going to be shared. And viewed now. The last little part is you have this really great video you need to capture people's attention. Everybody's bombarded every single day with a million messages vying for their attention. Give them a reason to care how you do that, especially on Facebook. If you want to get known really fast, is to use the Black bars above and below your video. There's gold in those Black bars, ok? Think about I hate to say this a clickbait title. Give them a reason to care. Don't say, oh, I found this to be interesting. Now many of you guys will find an article and say, oh, you must read this, and then you put the link and then you wonder, like, why didn't people read it? Why didn't they come in and share it? Because you've not done any work for me. You've literally copy and paste it and link and to check it out, instead, saying I was really surprised that in order to get new business, you actually have to do x, y and z. Well, if I'm interested in that, then I will click on the article, so give me a reason to care. So the Black bars on top and the bottom is your headline. It's your hook. Give them a reason to check it out. A person who does this beautifully is a guy named NAS daily. I think he's from palestine, and he does this thing where it's like this paper is made from poop. Like what? So that's the hook. That's why I'm going to tune in to watch a 1 minute video. I think that's what you guys need to start thinking about. OK you all can do this today. So people pop up on my radar because they produce something that's remarkable Derby hero, who I've hired to do like 10 or 12 logo illustrations for me. He just graduated school like a couple of months ago because he was on a live stream, and we're drawing something and he's like, I could do this. He draws a rough sketch. He posts it and I saw it. I was like, this is so good. This person was watching our show and did this live with us. I need to figure out a way to work with them. So look them up on Instagram. And I saw this all this beautiful lettering work. So the way to get work is to get known, to find people, to like you, to get people to trust you. So the first part of the puzzle is to get known. So nobody's going to find you just hiding the whole time. OK all right. I thought, oh, OK. First of all, did I answer your question so we can move on? Yes thanks, Chris. I was typekit beautiful. Let's go to Roxy and then whoever else popped up, we'll get you. I'm sorry, Devin, are you raise your hand. You're very Democratic. But I heard roxy, Roxy go and then Devin, you're right. I raised my hand and talk at the same time. OK, so. I have the like, I'm working for a client that has this influence. They have 106 120,000 followers on Facebook and the videos that we're making, they're creating a lot of views. The first one was 125,000. The second one and 148,031 was not doing so well, but it is still like a month and a half in between, so it could pick up 7,000 almost eight, and the new one is 11,011.5 1,000. Now the things that they post the videos, so where they credit us on the videos as well. So there's a link there, but or followers are not really growing, even though the video has a lot of engagement. So I don't know how to turn those into my advantage, or should I just like post negatively on our Facebook page and not rely on that? OK OK. So I take this first. Chris yeah, go ahead. OK so I think, like Brendan was saying earlier, it's not the numbers that are important, really, and that's kind of the point of the smallest viable audience is sometimes you need a hone down even further. So maybe you got half a million views, but maybe 10,000 views could have been better on a different topic with a smaller punch. I mean, we are already on a niche. We're not like doing about anything like they are. They are a vegan news platform thing. So it's really, really, really, really needed. And so I don't, I don't know. I'm just like, we're starting out also. So her feeling very lost here. So what do you say? Well, I still think it's not about the numbers, it's, you know, maybe you could go smaller and have an even bigger effect with the 1,000 true fans. You could have 1,000 fans that give you $1 each month, or you could have hundreds that give you $10 or you can have one that gives you 1,000. It's all the same thing. Yeah I mean, what we're hoping here is much like it so like because we're already getting the videos are getting promoted on the niche and that's the niche that you work for. It's already we want the exposure for other leads, for other projects. You know, it's not like we're not really pursuing the YouTube revenue or something like that at all. It's more like we do motion graphics. All right. Let me jump in here. Let me jump in here. OK you are trying to drive more traffic to your thing. Currently, if I understand it correctly, you're creating videos for other people hoping that somehow they'll figure it out, that it's and then follow you back, right? Well, they credit us and when they publish it, a matter. But what you're doing is you're helping somebody else generate interest in their company, right? And you're saying you create gets lots of views. So this is a classic case of the shoemaker's. Kids have no shoes. You're busy making shoes for other people. So, roxie, what I'm going to tell you prove the hypothesis to be true, that it's your work and your ideas and your design and your animation that gets the views. Make content for yourself. Come up with an idea or write something, animate it. Make it beautiful. Post it natively on your page and put in subtitles and make sure it's super short and that there are subtitles underneath it. Or it's a visual story because we know that people scroll on Facebook. They don't necessarily turn on the audio until there's a reason to turn the audio on. So that's your trick. Now, believe it or not, our little Facebook page, there's a video on there that has over 4 million views. I'm like, dang, what was it? And it was a very simple thing that people can relate to. So I think we've talked about this and maybe there's a course I've worked on our lecture, but I'm blurring it all together in my mind. There are four or five things we call the viral quotient and why videos go viral, and we were just studying what behave like, how people behave and what they react to. So if you can solve a common problem that cuts across boundaries, that's going to get your video viewed, it touches on an emotional, raw nerve, something that's been festering underneath the surface. People are going to share that video. So if you just did design memes. Just joking on design designers and how they think there's a lot of those things like OCD or what kind of Illustrator are you, Illustrator user, are you? Those are the little things actually a lot of people like and share. So the first thing is to get attention to your Facebook page so that when you want them to take action, you at least have some kind of audience. Try that and you'll see what happens. Facebook loves actually almost all technology platforms, loves the adoption of new technology. You notice that when you're doing a 3D photo, those things appear in your timeline like mad right now because they want people to use that because they want to promote that. Any time that you use new technology and create content natively, the algorithm favors you. So when you put a link out like we do to YouTube, they're going to put that content down. When we post natively, there's a much better chance of it sharing of it being shared. The sad news is this that Facebook and YouTube change the algorithm all the time because they're adopting or adapting to how people use it. So now it's much harder without boosting your video for it to be shared or watch by everybody. So you may want to find a good piece of content. You're like, you know what? That's pretty good. Why don't we put $20 a day on it. And see what happens for a week? $100 and see what happens. That's what you're looking to do. So be strategic. OK all right. Let's let's move on, Devin. Faraway man. Yes so my question is about content for peers versus content for potential clients, because you can get a lot of followers from maybe other graphic designers that just think your work is cool. But does that translate into paid projects and eventually getting that kind of attention? So right? Great question. What kind of content and how much towards both? Yes, great question. But I'm going to let Mason answer that one first. Cool So that was the whole difference between my first video and my blog post. That was after that was I was trying to hone down more. I don't know if there's a clear separation between student and client potential client all the time, but if there's one thing it's like you want to, you want to hone down closer on like a business niche, I think, and then you'll start finding an overlap in there. I don't know. That's what I'd say. I'm going to weigh on this, and I'm going to be slightly controversial here, guys. Get ready. Controversial alert button boom, boom. All right. The biggest breakthrough and I was on a podcast yesterday and somebody asked me this question. What was the biggest breakthrough in the future when we stopped marketing our services and products? We actually grew an audience. Imagine that when you stop advertising to people. So I believe is a short sighted strategy to try to make something in order to sell yourself because people are very smart. They see you right through it, right? So if we make a piece of content and then all of a sudden at the end, you realize it was a sponsored piece of content, you're like, oh, wait a minute, Chris, you were paid to say this, right? Maybe so that's what happened there, so for the first two years of the future, I'm sorry of the school. A lot of the content was built around selling core. It seemed natural, right? We have a funnel. We have to build awareness at the top about what the problem is so that we can drive them down to sell things. So that did OK for selling core, but it didn't do much for the growth of the ChowNow. So when Jose invited me to join the school, it was like 1,300 subscribers and our average views per day was about 40 or 50 views per day. So when we had 75 views, I was ecstatic. And something felt wrong inside of me. I felt like I was a pitch man. And I didn't want to do that, and I was creating content knowing very well in my mind. This is all dovetailing to selling a product. So I asked, was it like, I don't want to do this anymore? You know, I'm now a little bit more comfortable speaking on camera. I made this going to right. A deck, a presentation on what branding means to me, and I'm going to use one of the projects we did recently for olise and share that with people and show them how we do things. That's the first video that changed the game for us, and it told me something. If you give away freely what it is that you do. And there's no secret sauce, I'll share everything with you. You'll be rewarded with something much greater. People's trust and their attention in time. Now, check this thing out, you guys, this is what I'm grateful for. I forgot to tell you guys what I'm grateful for the first year of business that we ran the school together. I think we did 17,000 in net sales. So if you say stick with the strategy, build awareness, drive them down to sell a product, and if you're as good as we were back then you can hope to sell 17,000 worth of services or products. OK, check this out in November of 2018. We have already sold just in November alone, 370,000 worth of products. How is that possible? The biggest driver of traffic to our products and services, of course, is YouTube. Over 30% of the traffic that we get to the site comes from YouTube. So this is the infinite game at play here. I'm in it to play it for the very long term. If you're looking to make a transaction, sell your services, sell your products, it might work for you. And actually, it's a very smart thing because most people teach that 99% of the marketing content marketing funnel books teach you this very thing. Tell them what it is. Tell them to sell the product and sell them something at the end. But I'm a little bit of an unorthodox contrarian. It's like, I think. I'm going to use judgmental terms here that it's a very lazy approach because people are out of creative ideas. If you create value for people, they will find a way to reciprocate to you. Somehow, some shape or form look at all 180 for you guys here today. So we have at least 180 true fans, there's more than that, obviously, but we have at least 180. And you guys showed up because you like somebody read the article and how to get more clients. Then you showed up, and it's a miracle that people actually sign up on a fairly regular basis to the Pro group because we don't do any active marketing yet. We will, but that's what happens there. So here's what I want you to do. Devin, I want you to create content and celebrate and share your process. Give it all away for free. Don't think about I need to get a client out of this. So what's going to happen is let's just say I don't know anything about you just yet, but let's just say you're a really small fish right now. So a medium sized agency will look at you and say, who is doing some really cool work? Let's float some of our overflow work to Devon, and eventually some clients will start to see that. And then you build interest in that, ok? Just get the ball rolling. And I'm going to say for right now. It's my belief. You play the long game and you're going to win. You will win. Thank you. Go, Devin. Yeah all right, who's next? I only have a few more minutes because I have to go to a Livestream pretty soon. Neighborhoods I have one comment. I notice that people don't have time to read, so if it's a super long article. For example, my life is I'm in a car, I'm not in public transportation, so a lot of my reading time has cut down. So I think that video is so valuable. Everybody thinks, oh, I have, I have three minutes to watch this versus, Oh my gosh, did you see the length of that article? And I wonder if there is numbers comparing how much you affect versus video versus, you know, an article or blog post or something. I do not have the numbers right now, but I know one of my clients who's in the video space produced some astounding numbers for us about retention, engagement, a video because video, unlike reading, has all your senses kind of or more of your senses engaged with sound, music and visuals and graphics and things to keep your attention. And we are fighting an ADD or ADHD culture right now. It's hard to grab people's attention, but I have another hack for you guys. Maybe this is my super buzz. Tip number two, here is this. Right, right, research. That's your force form of content. And put it out there, and Priscilla, people do read long articles. I mean, people are complaining to me that some of my Facebook posts are like 9 or 12 paragraphs deep like. But you still read it, didn't you? And I'm surprised. I'm like, I don't really read that much either. So I got to tell stories. I'm going to make it interesting and I'm honing my craft. Here's the second Super hot tip for you guys. Ok? buy yourself an inexpensive teleprompter. It will change your world. It will change your life. And I will include a link to the one that I use. It's like $700 but it's amazing. It's a built in monitor teleprompter. You can hook your keynote to it, put your camera on the other side. Nobody even knows you look right down the barrel of the lens and you just read your own presentation or your own slides and people are genius. Priscilla's memorize all these things. She's such an amazing, charismatic presenter. No, she just prepared. And then now you have two forms of two pieces of content on one effort. You wrote it and now you're going to read it to Kamara. And then you take that thing and you chop it down to like little bite size pieces. You're like, oh, this was really good here because you looked at your YouTube Analytics and the retention graph spiked right there. So, you know, people really are leaning into this interesting. I thought everybody knew that. Cut that out. Bring it over to Facebook. Put the Black bars in. Put the click baity title and put that out there and link it back to your YouTube channel. You guys will become content beasts and people will take notice. Here's the good news. People are lazy. People are too worried about their image. People don't have this information, so go out there and go make something and you're going to kill it. Priscilla? Yes. Oh, OK. No, I'm OK. I mean, now I got to learn to do video cutting and stuff. It's easy. I taught my 12-year-old. You can do it. I promise you, I will hold your hand. What software you will use? Premier or imovie? It doesn't matter. You have the Creative Suite. Yeah OK. I know what I typically do not do this, but I've been thinking about this. We talk really high level, right. We're in the clouds and everything. Oh, great, but I'm down here. And what are all the steps in between? I'm not opposed to doing this. If you really want to, we can actually work together. I will show you like, I will train you how to do stuff with software, which is screen sharing. We just work through the whole problem. If you guys want it, start that thread. If I see an activity. I would do that with you. OK, we can design together, we can make video together, we can write together, we could do whatever it is you want. OK, I reserve about two hours of my life every single week to be here for you. So you just need to let me know what's going to help you the most, so don't worry, Priscilla. I used to edit, I was trained at it before, you know, I took a class and like, I forgot everything. New software and Premiere is just a thing of beauty. It is freaking awesome. All right. OK let's do it, we can do this. Guys, come on. To find a great theme and maybe something about this community. I don't know. You could just do anything, it doesn't even matter. Just get out there and try something, and then it will surprise you like what people like. You know, I was on that episode with Melinda and she's like, we're inside the water bottle and we can't. We're like trying to look for the label and we can't see it. We just can't see it. And it wasn't until I started teaching, like 15, 20 years ago. Whenever I started teaching that I started to realize, Oh my god, I actually something that people don't pass that I'm like, god, this everybody must know this. This is stupid. Like, I don't even know anything. So the best way to learn is to teach the best way to build your self-confidence is to teach. So short of you, getting hired for a temporary position at the school, just make something to see what happens. It will be so rewarding and you'll feel good because it's good for you. OK all right. Next, we only have a couple more minutes here. I have something to ask. So now that we are on the topic of making a video, I've encountered this very tactical problem of if I'm reading something off the screen, then I'm not looking into the camera. And if I have to look into a camera that I can't switch my eyes around. So if I'm looking into the camera, I have to speak like I'm talking to another person, which means that all the things of communication comes in, like the US and the arms and the changing script every single time we record a video. So I need I need help for that. I'm not moving forward physically. I'm stuck with 100 versions of the same content and it's super easy. It's super easy. And if you guys can write a keynote deck, I can. I can help you. I can help all of you. I want to help you, especially if you're in town. Come by like 10 of you guys come at a time. I will train to help you. I'll coach you. I'll teach you how to be more present in the moment. Learn how to speak with your hands and do stupid things and to dial up your personality. So people want to engage. I am not this normal person like all my life, you know, I work at this. And so I think if I can do it, I think I can help you. I can coach you. And you're right, my screen's over here and I want to look at you guys. But then I'm not making. I have to get like, look over there, Chris, because that's how people connect with you. You got to look in the eyes. That's where the teleprompter saves you because you are literally looking at your own deck and your own notes and your own slides and anything that you want. So all it takes is preparation. I guarantee you if you spend about 5% to six hours in researching and writing, you will have a decent piece of content. I think that's all it takes, become a really good researcher. OK, so maybe in a future challenge, I'm going to have all of you guys write one piece of content. Keynote deck and we look at the decks together. And I'll tell you how to record how to edit and do the whole bit. Ok? I saw some activity, a flurry of activity in the chat. So if you want it, just make sure you talk to the regular group and let's make it real. OK And then I will help you. Just to recap before we kind of say, oh, what is that? Mason wants to do a super subgroup and those are you guys are interested and taking on his challenge about creating content. He dares you to, I think, right? Get in touch with him. He's got some interesting ideas about that. OK all right. Look at. Let me do the call. Thanks for coming, guys.