How We Doubled Revenue, Increased YouTube Traffic, and Hit #1 On Amazon - The Climb Episode 4

Hey everybody. Welcome to the Climb. I believe this is episode four and this is where I document my journey as an entrepreneur. All the highs and the lows, all the way to the top, wherever that top is. And in this episode we're going to talk about some of the companies that I've invested in since our last update. I'm going to tell you how we hit number one on Amazon and had one of actually the fastest trending book on all of Amazon. So I'm going to share exactly how we did that and also I'm going to share some of the case studies that have come out of one of our groups over the last 30 to 45 days. We'll talk about all of this and more on today's episode of the Climb.

First things first, I am really excited about some case studies that have come out of some of our groups since we last did one of these episodes. So I have a little incubator, it's called the capitalism incubator. And this is basically where I get my hands dirty with students who are building the foundations for seven figure businesses. So my background is helping entrepreneurs build seven figure businesses that they can sell. That is my specialty. It's what I've helped hundreds of people do, at least when it comes to the building seven figure business. I have, you know, a handful of people who have built and sold companies for millions of dollars. But that's my sweet spot. That is really what I do best when it comes to helping entrepreneurs. And this month we really started to see the sparks light for the current group of students. So one of our students crossed a million dollars in sales for the first time, which was really exciting. One of our students launched their second product and came out of the gate with 40 sales on launch day. And another, the one I'm most excited about is a girl who has been in our group for some time and finally launched her first product and is getting consistent sales every day. She's not running $1 million business yet. She's not doing even the 25 sales a day benchmark that we shoot for. But she just launched and within a week's time she's doing consistent sales, 2 to 5 sales, sometimes 10 sales every single day within a couple of weeks of launching. Which means that once we clear a couple of hurdles together, she'll be at that 25 sales a day mark and then she'll be building from that foundation all the way to a million dollar business. We just announced inside of our group that we're going to be doing something called launch Week, which is where we're having everyone in the group launch their products in the same week. What that will do is it will force everybody's resistance and everybody is mindset hurdles to the surface so that we can clear them out of the way. And everyone will be taking sales by the time that we have finished launch week. So I'm really excited by the momentum in this group. It is the small pilot group of 25 people that we decided to do this first launch with, and they're already getting amazing results. One of our students put together a pitch deck and is raising $500,000 for the idea that he came up with inside of this training. And he says that the incubator is the best thing he's ever done for business. And I, I would consider investing in his company if he asks me to. So I'm really proud of this group of students and really proud of what we've done as a company because this is a new product for us. It's a, it's a new thing that we put together to help this group of students and have the first group of 25 go through it and get amazing results. We still have six, seven months with this group of entrepreneurs and they're already seeing results now. Makes me really confident that our next group of seven figure success stories is in our group right now. We plan on doing this experience twice a year. And our next one will open up, will start in February of 2021. So if you're watching this and you're like, hey, I want to actually build the foundation for my seven figure business that I can sell. The link is capitalism.com inc. That's inc. And that's where you could fit out, fill out an application to consider working with us the next time we're open.

Next. Something really exciting happened for me personally since we last did an episode like this, and it was that my book, this guy right here, hit number one across all categories. Right. Which is a huge jump. If you watched the last episode of the Climb, I had sold like 10,000 copies of the book, which is good, but it's not, you know, bestseller worthy. So how the heck did we go from, you know, an okay book sales to being number one across all our categories? And I mean, there was a time where it was like Barack Obama, Matthew McConaughey, some dude named Ryan Moran, Michelle Obama, Jordan Peterson and Tim Ferriss, and that was rounding out the top 10. Well, here's what happened. We were getting a lot of positive reviews, and the percentage of positive reviews was really high. So we were sitting around 350 reviews or so, and more than 90% of them were five stars. So Amazon picked us up for one of their promotions right around Black Friday, and they featured us in some of their emails to Audible subscribers. And we got some free press from Amazon. I didn't do anything to get in that. They just chose it because there was such good feedback about the book. And when Amazon promoted it, it rocketed from position 1000 on audible to position 200 on audible. That was enough to get best seller ranking in multiple subcategories, which fed the exposure a little bit more. And after about a day, we jumped from 200 to position 45. And that's when I said, hmm, I think we might be able to make a go at this. So I emailed my list and I posted about it on social media and that helped us break into the top 20. So there was this moment of opportunity and we struck while the iron was hot. And when we broke into that top 20, now we were featured on everybody's smartphone who uses Audible. So if you were to log into Audible and you saw bestsellers at the top of your app, we were in there because we were in the top 20 best selling books on all of Audible. And so for several days we were in that top 20. Now it's come down to, you know, about position 100 or so. Sometimes we break back into the top 100, but it's starting to bounce back and forth a little bit. And it has sold many thousands of copies as a result of that exposure. So now what I'm doing is leveraging that exposure of having a number one bestseller in its category. And I am now booking big podcasts and other other big places of pr. Now I want to set a little bit of context that I think will really encourage you if you are just getting started. It was only a couple months ago that I launched my book and I said on a YouTube live, I was drinking coffee live on YouTube and I said to my audience, I said, hey, everybody, thank you so much for your support of the book. I'm sitting right now at 42 reviews and I really want to break through 50. If you've bought the book and you liked it, would you consider leaving a review right now? Once again, my ask for the group is if you bought the book and you love the book, please tell other people about the book over by leaving an Amazon review. I'd like to cross 50 reviews today. So open up the tab, go to Amazon, review the book. And if you did, on this call, I'd like to say thank you. And one of my followers reached out to me and said, I can't tell you how encouraging it was to see someone of your status still in the grind of getting reviews on a product. The product happened to be my book, but I was still in the process of grinding. For every single review, I'm sitting at 45 reviews, trying to or 42 reviews and trying to get to 50. And I was asking people that I knew to leave reviews for that. Fast forward a couple months. I'm over 400 reviews and ranking in the top books on Audible, and I'm number one in my category. And I'm able to use that as leverage to get on major podcasts all over the place. Now the book is selling thousands of copies per week, which is a huge spike up. But it did not happen in this linear fashion. It happened from me doing the hard work at the very beginning of making a great product. I wrote a heck of a book and then going through basic marketing. I didn't have a PR firm. I didn't have a big launch plan. I just got it out there and promoted it to the people who already follow me. And I focus on getting quality reviews and doing some podcast spots until it started to hit liftoff. That's how it happens. It always looks like slow progress at the beginning, and then there's a big spike up. Most people quit in that suck period. And if you can get through that, then a lot of really fun stuff happens when you start to hit that exponential curve upward.

That leads me to another thing that we're really focused on right now, which is our YouTube channel here. And if you've been following me for any length of time, you may have noticed that there was a distinct change in our style and our Strategy here on YouTube. And in my opinion, the quality is a lot higher. And we're starting to see the results of that from our watch time and our view count and our subscriber count has doubled in terms of daily new subscribers just in the last six weeks. And that had a couple of reasons behind it. One, we made a really strong hire. Our new head of all video. His name is Alex. This is awkward because he's sitting right there and he's listening to me do this video right now. But our new man behind the camera, who is also making me look good on the Internet, making me look, like I say, smart things, has been obsessed with the strategy behind YouTube and making sure that our content is YouTube friendly. And that has allowed me to relax into making great content and not saying things for the algorithm. So we make a really good duo in I say what I think is important for the audience to hear and Alex edits it for, for. For YouTube friendliness. And he's trying to get me to say more things like don't forget to smash the like button. So there's your video video reminder to not forget to smash the like button for YouTube algorithm purposes. But us working together has allowed us to have a really clear strategy for making YouTube work. Whereas before it was just more volume is better, let's throw more down and see what happens. And I've learned the lesson that doing more does not equal better. I think that highlights the one area that I disagree with with Gary Vaynerchuk. Gary is someone that I look up to and admire. We've been on each other's podcasts several times. He has spoken at our events and Gary really inspired me to throw more volume down the pike. And I actually think that was bad advice for me. I create more content that is thoughtful, that is deep in its. In, in, in the. In the type of content that I'm creating. It need. It requires attention. So doing a lot of volume, I think compromised my message. Where, where I really shine is doing a few content pieces a week and making them excellent. And for me and my style, I find that that's getting better response from our audience and I feel better about it. So I feel freed up to do this extremely well. And the results are showing in our subscriber counts and our watch time as well. Now that we have a clear strategy behind this, it has allowed me to set much more long term goals for the results that we want out of the platform as well. So one of the things that Alex and I have been talking about is what if we committed to doing great videos on YouTube for a thousand days without caring about the result? What kind of quality could we create? If we just committed to this process for 1,000 days, that would be almost three years. If we went into something for three years and we committed to it, regardless of what the outcome was, what kind of results could we produce now it becomes stressful when you think about that, when you're just focused on the result because you tend to see the result, feel a gap between where you are now and the result that you want, and then try to hustle your way toward it. But what we're thinking about is, well, what if we just committed to the process for a thousand days, let the results fall where they're going to fall and do this in a way that created the best content possible. And there's actually a deep excitement around that because we're so confident in what we're doing and the idea of not getting distracted from our commitments, it's. It's just exhilarating to think about what we could create in that time frame. It makes me wonder where else in my life could I commit to a thousand day goal or a thousand day plan? And it forces me to think about, well, I gotta be really confident in my strategy or really like the process in order to commit to something for that long. It creates this very different filter over the things in my life. Do I like that project enough to commit to it for a thousand days or am I just testing that because I want to see what happens? Now I know that if I commit to something that I enjoy for a thousand days, you get the result. Problem is, most of us don't really enjoy what it is that we're doing and we're not really committed to the process. So if I'm going to commit to something for a thousand days, I better be damn well sure that I like the process and that I'm committed to doing this because I know I'll get the result if I do that. So I'm starting to use that as a filter for other ways that I make decisions. Am I willing to commit to this employee for a thousand days? Am I willing to commit to this project or this profit center? And it is really setting me free to make thoughtful decisions rather than trying to pursue every opportunity that comes my way. So right now we're committing to doing at least one video every Wednesday day consistently. Our hope is to consistently do two videos per week. But right now, Wednesday is going to be our regular release day. And then Sundays are the kind of. Right now they're kind of our flex day. They're the additional content that we want to add to the channel because we produce a lot of content here, but it'll definitely be every Wednesday. So make sure you're subscribed to the channel and hit like buttons and ring bells and everything else that juices up the algorithm. But just especially subscribe to the channel for every Wednesday video. With that in mind. One thing that we noticed was not working on our YouTube channel was going live consistently on the channel. So I've been going live at least once a week, sometimes as often as three times a week, in order to engage with our members and our followers. And our thought was that that would create a lot of great content that we could use for other things as well. But we found that going live on YouTube actually hurt our progress rather than helped it. There were a couple reasons for this. One, our members didn't like it. So our members didn't like that we were broadcasting all of the private conversations that we were having inside of our members area to the rest of the world. Some people don't want their business shared with the whole world. Some people don't want to have their questions simulcast to every single person who follows me on YouTube. They want more of a closed container. So our members didn't like it and that was reason enough for us to stop doing it. The other reason was it was not growing over time. Our lives were not getting consistent traction because they weren't necessarily evergreen. Whereas doing more long form videos that are about a specific topic are much more evergreen and helpful to the YouTube algorithm and will help us grow over time. So we've decided to stop broadcasting our member streams over to YouTube and we're just going to keep a closed container to be able to create the ability for our members to get the help they need and the content that they desire without it being shared to the rest of the world. World. So what we'll be doing instead of broadcasting everything to everyone is we'll be taking clips from some of our member spotlights and our members area content and we'll be working it into videos like this where we're featuring what's happening to members in our community. Because there's a lot of growth that happens to the people who are members of the 1% and we want to be able to document their growth over time and share some of the wins with some of you who are following on YouTube.

And finally, I want to give you an Update on the capitalism.com fund. So earlier this year I raised $1.6 million to deploy into businesses from followers and members and we have started to deploy that capital. We've started to invest in some of the businesses that are coming from our pipeline. So. So this past month we closed on a significant stake of a company that I have loved for years. It's a company called Keto Brownie. It was founded by a long term follower. His name is Nick. He's an amazing product creator. We will be rebranding and updating the positioning of the company and also deepening that product line. But I've been a fan of their products for years because they're just amazing. Amazing. Nick is really strong at developing great products and he's a little bit less confident in his marketing chops. And so we're really confident that we can come in and create a strong marketing plan for this business and help provide the capital that he'll need to be able to deepen that product line. And we bought a significant amount of the company to come in as partners with the founder and help that company grow. So I'm really excited about that deal. Like, that's the kind of deal that keeps me up at night. I'm so excited. And there's another deal that I'm excited about. I don't have permission to share his business just yet, but the founder's name is Scott, and Scott hit about $2 million in his business, and he's plateaued. And so what we've been doing is coming in with some strategy to be able to free up additional cash flow for him to go build a team. Because right now, he's bottlenecked team. He is doing everything himself. And I know from experience that when we help him get new team members and free him up to be able to launch more products and build the growth of the company, that business is going to double. Then it's going to double again, and it might even double a third time. So that business hopefully will go from $2 million to $10 million over the next couple of years as a result of us bringing in capital and advice to be able to free Scott up to go build a company rather than to be operating it working 16 hours a day, which is what so many entrepreneurs get stuck doing once they hit seven figures or so. So that's our goal with that business. And I'm really excited about that investment as well. We've had several other exploratory conversations with entrepreneurs that need capital or advice. And what we're finding is the vast majority of the people that we're working with need the advice more than they need the capital. So they need our network, they need our strategy, they need our help finding good people to bring into the business. And that's interesting because it's not what I expected. I thought people needed the money more than they needed the advice, But I'm finding that I can go into a business and help them carve out the plan forward, and then we have the capital to be able to make that business able to follow that plan. So it's forcing me to adjust my strategy a little bit. So if you're an entrepreneur who has you at least have the million dollars in sight, hopefully you've already crossed that. But it's okay if you just got it in sight and you need strategy help and you need some money to be able to grow. You can fill out a form over@capitalism.com fund and that will come to my desk and my partner Sam's desk and we'll evaluate the company and see if it's something that we think we can help.

To close this out, I brought on one additional team member. His name is justice, who you might see make cameo appearances sometimes here on the channel because his role is to be our head of product, specifically head of the 1%, which is our members area. So justice has a coaching background, working with entrepreneurs, helping them get unsubscribe stuck, helping them get clarity in their next steps. So he is going to be working right alongside me helping our members build their businesses and get clear steps forward toward the goals that they want for themselves in their business. So Justyce is coming on to lead some of our calls and to be able to restructure the way that we serve our customers because it's been just me up to this point and he's coming in with a different fresh set of eyes to be able to see how we can serve our members even better. So you might see him make some cameos here on the channel once in a while and also you can get his help directly. When you're a member of the 1%, if you're sitting on the sidelines right now and you're not part of our community, it really is a special place to learn how to build a business and invest the profits and you can get off the sidelines and join us over@capitalism.com 1 and you can become a member of the One Percent Moving Forward. We continue to look for new deal flow inside the fund. The 1% is growing. We're actually I think the at the strongest point we've ever been and we're, we're reopening the Capitalism incubator in January, which I'm really pumped about. I was already pumped about it, but the results we got for students in the last 30 days makes me really pumped to open this again. So I think we're going to cap this one at 50 people. The last one we capped at 25. I think we'll cap this one at 50. And this is for entrepreneurs who want to build a seven figure business they can sell. So you can find out more@Capitalism.com Inc. Thanks so much for watching the climb. Thank you so much for being a part of this community. It's really exciting to be able to document this and reference back to watch all of the growth so I really enjoy sharing these with you. So I hope you enjoyed this video as much as I enjoyed recording it for you. I. You hope. Make sure you're subscribed to the channel, cuz I'm supposed to tell you that at least once in every video and smash the like button. All right guys, thanks for watching. I'll see you next time. Take care.