222: All In - Leaving a Full-Time Job to Work on a Side Gig with Tommy Griffith

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Welcome, welcome, welcome to this episode of the Food Blogger Pro Podcast. Alexa here and we are just so excited that you're here tuning into the podcast today. If you listened to the podcast recently, you'll know that we were experimenting with a new format of the podcast where we had a single focus and then each episode featured a few mini interviews focused on that topic. It was super fun. We got great feedback and that probably won't be the last time we publish episodes like that. To be honest, they were just so much fun for us and the feedback we got from you was really, really positive. That said, we're returning back to some long form interviews with some really exciting guests and today's guest is Tommy Griffith from Click Minded, and he's here to talk about leaving his stable full time job in pursuit of turning his side gig into his one and only job. One of my biggest takeaways from this episode was his point about finding your unfair advantage. So while you're listening, we encourage you to think about your unfair advantage and how you can accentuate that advantage in your blog or business. It's a really interesting episode and we think you'll really enjoy it. So without any further ado, Bjork. Take it away.

Tommy. Welcome to the podcast, Bjork.

Thanks for having me, man. Really appreciate it.

Yeah, it was fun to look back, rewind the tape a little bit, and talk through the growth of our respective businesses before we press record on this. Because we were saying right before we hit record, we were like, gosh, we've kind of had similar paths in terms of what it's looked like to grow these things, and we're going to be talking about that. But I would love to rewind the tape and tell your story a little bit to go back to when things first started for you. And you have some incredible experience. PayPal, Airbnb, search engine optimization. So let's start by rewinding the tape and taking me back to when you first got into this thing called SEO, Digital marketing, Search engine optimization. How did you get into it? What was that like?

Yeah, and yeah, it is interesting to bump into people who you've never met, but then you sort of compare notes in your, like, wow, we had similar timelines, we came to similar conclusions at the same times. Right. Like different, different paths, but sort of figuring out along the same, along the same timeline. So it's kind of funny how the world works like that.

Yeah.

Yeah. So my start started in kind of the catastrophe of the 2008 banks crashing. I graduated in 2008 with a finance degree. Thought I was going to move to New York and do the bank thing and everyone was losing their jobs and everything was crashing and didn't do anything with my life related to that. It all started actually with a four hour workweek. Did you read that book? Yep.

For sure. And that was right around the time too, when that was a book where everybody's like, you have to read the four hour workweek. It was like 2006, 2007, 2008. I forget when it actually came out, but I remember I was on trip with Lindsay's family, my wife Lindsey, and we were in Arizona and her uncle had been reading it and he's like, you got to read this book if you're interested in business. And it was just at the time when we were starting to get interested in it. So right there with you. Yeah. So I've read it and familiar with it, right?

Yeah. And so for anyone unfamiliar for our workweek, it's. It was kind of the catalyst for a number of people building remote businesses, Internet businesses hiring remote staff. I think it was written in 07 or maybe the end of 06, but it's probably a little dated now. But the general concept of living wherever you want and building something you're interested in remotely and traveling while you're doing it, kind of the catalyst for that. My very first idea around this is extremely obnoxious. I read the book and one of his recommendations was like, yeah, okay. I mean, if you make physical products, that can be okay, but it's easy to get copied. So if you have an informational product or like a unique set of knowledge that you can share with the world, it's a little bit harder for people to copy that. And I had this weird story where in university some friends of mine and I started a fraternity.

Okay. So you're like, this is my unique set of knowledge, is how to set it, how to start a fraternity.

It's probably the most obnoxious, unique set of knowledge you could possibly have. But as a, as a 22 year old, that wasn't bringing very much to the table. I didn't have a lot of options. But yeah, I said, okay, that's my one thing. And I did some, what I now know as keyword research, but at the time did some keyword research and there were 1500 people a month searching for how to start a fraternity. And so wrote this very dorky ebook and then said, okay, how do I get this to the top of Google? Right? Yeah, that was sort of the Catalyst. The story goes pretty wild from there. I ended up starting a company with a friend of mine while I was traveling. That failed miserably. We borrowed a bunch of money from family and friends. I actually was in this unique situation where I was very blessed and my parents paid for university. I graduated with no debt, and then I put myself into debt trying to start a business directly after school. What was that?

I feel like that's worth doing a really quick detour to talk about that. Can you talk about what your mindset was at that point and then how going through that experience changed your mindset as it relates to debt with businesses or even investments with businesses?

For sure, because it's now been 10 years since that moment, which is pretty interesting. Yeah, it changed everything. And I think the reason why, at a really high level, I did everything wrong. Everything. I mean, every conceivable thing I could have messed up, we messed up. So I was traveling, I was living overseas, I was teaching English. And I got really interested in Internet marketing because of this dorky ebook. I got it ranking number one in Google. And my friend and I started a medical tourism company. The idea was a lot of older Americans that were uninsured or underinsured travel.

To another country that's more affordable.

Yeah, exactly. And so we had a very specific niche we found, which was knee and hip replacement surgery for Americans age 40 to 65 interested in doing it in Taiwan.

Niche, yeah.

And so from the Internet marketing perspective, it worked. Right? Like, we figured out SEO, we figured out paid ads, taught myself everything, got everything ranking and generating traffic. But the actual, like fundamental business was so dumb. So dumb.

What do you mean by that?

Well, I mean, you know, in hindsight we could have done so many things differently, but. But like, at a really high level, I didn't even understand that you can just create. We tried to facilitate surgeries. Right. The plan was to like, you know, market to people and pick them up at the airport and bring them to the hospital and all this kind of stuff. And I didn't realize in 2008 you can just create a lead generation site.

Sure.

Like, and you can just cut a deal with hospitals and sell leads and things like that. It's just one example among probably 100 of things I did wrong. But I remember the moment I was working in US time zones, but living on the other side of the world. And so I was always up late. I remember the exact moment when I had to give up. I was 23, I was on Skype at 2 in the morning talking To a woman in Illinois, I'm in my underwear, and I'm talking about the possible implications of deep vein thrombosis. On the flight home, and I remember just looking in the mirror and being like, what are you doing? I'm in so far over my head, it's unbelievable. And so that was the moment where I said, I got to go home. I got to hang up the towel. I got to start paying off this debt and try something else.

And so this is a small piece of the story, but I'm curious. So did you. So you took money from family and friends within the business to start that? Did then you go and get a job and then pay that money back? Like, was that something where. Oh, wow. So kudos to you for doing that. Cause there'd be a lot of people who'd start a business and wouldn't go through the process of paying people back for the money that they took. So that I was, I'm guessing, took some effort and was part of the puzzle in terms of deciding to cut ties with the business and transition to a regular job.

Yeah. And this is a little side tangent as well, but I'm fascinated now by how much money can ruin people. And I don't mean. I'm not saying. I'm not talking about. I was very. I had a very easy life. But when you have unlimited money, it screws with your head so much, you know? And when you make a decision that you're gonna pay this back and it is your money that you're just temporarily being lent, it changes your who philosophy and psychology on everything. Right. Because. Yeah, I mean, it's. It's. It's very easy to run, to just keep trying and keep trying and keep trying if. If you don't have any skin in the game, you know? And so that was a big deciding factor for me, for sure.

Yeah. So you come back, and at that point, you have enough experience with digital marketing, specifically search engine optimization, to start to reach out to companies that are realizing they actually need this as a position. Does that happen right after you are doing these. Of startups and business ideas? And then you start to reach out to established or startup companies to say, hey, I know, search, you should hire me.

That's exactly right. Yeah. So basically was traveling for two years after university trying to make this work. It didn't work. And came home with my tail between my legs. And it was like the classic, like, hey, dad, remember me? How about, how's that couch in the basement looking? You got any spot for your Son. You remember your son?

Yeah.

And man, I was thinking through, it was an actual bailout. I had no money in the bank. He had to wire me 400 bucks for a one way ticket back to the U.S. it was bad. And yeah, came home. And man, I think the single biggest motivator in the world is being miserable and in debt because it's. It lit me up for sure. And yeah, was doing a ton of outreach. I thought I would be able to get a job at a local agency or some kind of local thing in New Hampshire, where I'm from, a tiny little town outside of Boston. And it was just kind of right place, right time. But PayPal was hiring a search engine optimization manager for emerging markets. So kind of non English International SEO. And I just spent two years abroad and two years teaching myself SEO and it ended up working out. I was 24 years old and was suddenly managing SEO at one of the biggest sites in the world.

Which is kind of nuts when you first started at PayPal, because I think people hear that, they hear PayPal and Airbnb eventually for you as well. And it's impressive, right? Just through the name correlation to that, the connection that you have to that. But also I would imagine that there are elements that you get into it and you realize like, wow, the scale of this is either more than I thought it was or maybe it's like, oh, even huge companies are just kind of beginner level when it comes to certain things. Coming into PayPal, what was that like as it relates to search in your division? Had they already had really established processes that you learned from, or were you implementing things that had yet to be implemented as part of their search strategy?

Yeah, this is a great question. So, yeah, first things first. It is incredibly overhyped. Whenever I say the PayPal or Airbnb thing, or in general, whenever you talk to anyone who's been working at a big company, there's a lot of brand credibility that gets lent. That's very undue. People think about the PayPal mafia and all these early guys that started the next phase of the Internet, and then they associate anyone who worked at PayPal with that, and it's just completely untrue. Like, PayPal is a lethargic, boring, you know, slow company with 10,000 people. That is not moving the ball forward very much. But, but I joined and everyone's like, oh, PayPal, right? But like, I was desperate and like trying to build myself back up. So I'm gonna take everything I can get, you know what I mean? So yeah, no, they. And I don't, I don't mean to throw my former employer under the bus too much, but we got, we gotta be honest here.

So. No.

So, yeah, they really didn't have their stuff together at all. And that's just what's fascinating about big companies is it ends up being a little bit more luck and right place, right time than anything. I think the funniest example, enterprise SEO in general is extremely boring. It's not real SEO. Most people listening, they're in phase year zero to year three of their site or they're just getting their traffic going. Something like that really is up to you. Like when you can make meaningful impacts in your traffic, you really do see that in your bottom line. With bigger companies, it's things like doing presentations to the executives to make sure we don't. No. Index the entire site and traffic to zero. Right?

Yes.

The funniest example of enterprise SEO is that Google has an SEO team.

Sure.

Right. And that's everything that tells you everything. It's big company stuff. Right. It's like we have these massive teams and massive goals and shareholder expectations and comms and press illegal and everything. And we need to make sure we don't. No index the site. That's basically the point. Of course, it differs. PayPal was a much different problem than Airbnb. Airbnb was absolutely incredible, fascinating engineering problem. Some of the smartest people I've ever worked with in the world. But PayPal was much more like a slow bank. And that was kind of the difference.

Yep, that makes sense. One of the things that you talk about in a post that you wrote called Burning the Boats, which talks about this transition from kind of starting out early stages, corporate jobs, and then into building Click Minded, which we're going to get to, is you talk about this idea that this phase when you're at PayPal, when you're at Airbnb, almost had the potential to regress in terms of your search experience? Do you think that was true when you look back on it, where when you came out of it, you actually had to reintegrate in some ways into kind of cutting edge search related content?

100%. Absolutely. And that is the difference between you familiar with skin in the game. This book, Taleb Nassim Taleb, is that his name?

Yeah, I haven't read it, but I'm familiar with it.

Yeah. Right. And the basic idea is he's kind of the spearhead of this concept, but basically don't trust experts and pundits on TV and People at big companies only trust people that have to fight every day, have to wake up and go to war every day. And it's so true. I mean, the things I learned, I managed enterprise, SEO, PayPal and Airbnb for six years. I learned so much. I made amazing friends. I wouldn't trade the experience for the world. And I got to do things I would never be able to do otherwise. But whenever you're at a big company like that, it is a massive crutch. It is a. You get undue credibility. I talk about in the post. I would go to like an Internet marketing conference once or twice a year, and when you have that little, that little sticker that says Tommy from PayPal or Tommy from Airbnb, people want to. I mean, that's a lot of sales guys that like, want to talk and stuff like that. But people give you undue credibility. I'm not saying everyone who works at a big company is a bad person. Not at all. But it's just really funny when people, people sort of build a lot of their identity on their employer. It gets harder and harder to leave every year because the minute you do, it becomes a violent push into the deep end the longer you're relying on that big company. So I left Airbnb to go full time on my side project two years ago. And when it was finally just I left, I got rid of my apartment, I decided to go travel. I put everything into a backpack. And that first day sitting in the co working space and trying to build the next phase of my business, I'm just like, oh my God, like, what is this hellscape that I didn't even know was underneath me the entire time? I have so much work to do, you know, and it was a pretty.

Brutal realization in relation to. When you say so much work to do, in relation to the amount of catch up that you have to do in the industry of search or just in regards to starting this new thing, which is you being your own boss and building your own business.

I think all of it. All of it. Like, yeah, the hard stuff, like, you know, what's working in SEO in 2019 and 2020. 2021. But also, yeah, hey, it turns out if you don't make this work this month, who's going to pay rent?

Yes.

Right. Like, right. Like, how does health care work? What is insurance? All this kind of like, it was all of it. And so it was a pretty brutal realization, for sure.

Sure. So let's talk about clickminded. This is the business that you've referenced a couple times, we've mentioned a few times. We haven't gone deep on it yet, but I would love to explore that a little bit. So this started out as a course that you'd kind of taught in person as far as I understand, and then said, hey, maybe there's a digital product that we could create out of this. Can you talk me through the beginning of Click Minded and the transition to doing it full time? Because people listening to this podcast are interested in that. The start the transition and then eventually we'll get to talking about where you are now and how you've been able to scale it. But let's, let's start with the beginning of Click Minded.

Yeah, sure. And so at a really high level. Yeah. Click Minded is a digital marketing training course for marketers and entrepreneurs. We have seven different courses on Internet marketing, SEO, paid ads, content marketing, email marketing, social media, sales funnels, Google Analytics, our models. We try and use world class experts that teach this stuff every day. Right. So the social media course is taught by the former head of, former head of social media at Airbnb. The content marketing course is taught by the former content strategist from Lyft. And that's sort of our angle and beginner to intermediate digital marketers and people interested in it. That's where we are today. And that's eight years after the inception. So the beginning was, and it was really rooted in that initial story I told you, which was I moved to the San Francisco Bay area, I got this job, but I was still in a lot of debt from my first side project. I was trying a lot of different things to pay it off faster. And clickminded was probably in listeners that are listening to it now and maybe they're in the food blogger space or they're trying a couple different ideas, a couple of different vertical around it. And I have to admit Click Minded was probably idea number 4:15. It's just, you know, I had, I trying so many things and I think the one great kind of no fail test for this of whether or not you're having like entrepreneurial seizures all the time is checking your web hosting account for how many unused domains you have. Right. This is the test of how neurotic you are. And I'm sure you have some.

Yep.

But it's really interesting because I, I go both ways on it. Clickmin had only worked because I finally decided to forget everything else and go all in on it. But to get there, I had to be pretty neurotic in add like I tried a lot of things. And yeah, so it started as on.

That I feel like it's worth pointing out. So how did you, in trying all of those different things, how did you know that clickbinded was the thing then to stick with? And I'm curious to know, was there a pull from the market that didn't exist in those other businesses or ideas that you tried, or was it grinding and saying, I have picked this, I'm going to do it.

This is a great question. You've done this before, haven't you? This is a great question.

I've done this before in my own life. Essentially, it's a version of asking myself questions that I've pondered.

Interesting. Yes. There was a pool, and the pool was. And actually I would very much advise this for anyone who's in the idea phase. So was trying a bunch of different things. And the single biggest factor for me was my own interest in the market and in the subject. So as one example, I had this idea. It was 2011, I was living in San Francisco, and everyone was trying to make iOS applications. Everyone was trying to become an app developer or design an app or things like that. And I created the same process I went through with the fraternity ebook. I went through the process of trying to find a keyword that had high search volume and might be a business opportunity. And I created an iPhone app development lead generation site, right? So it was a site ranking for things like iPhone, app developer companies and iPhone app development cost. And basic idea was get people interested in the app and then sell the leads. It started working. It was ranking, it was generating traffic, it was generating leads, but I just hated it. Like, I just could not pull myself out of bed to work on it. And every Saturday morning when I would go to work on it, I would make up so many excuses and I just wouldn't do it. And it was like the money made sense. Like, it all made sense. It was working pretty quickly, but I just hated it. And so this kept happening. And my feedback to anyone in this phase is like, especially in Silicon Valley, people say, oh, markets are really important, right? And I'd rather have a mediocre product and a mediocre team in a great market than anything else. But when you're in this phase of like, side project trying to get it going, I disagree with that. Because the single biggest engine from going to zero to your first $10,000 or zero to your first $100,000 is you, right? Your own person. You have to be the engine that, that, that gets this thing off the ground and if that's not fired up and revved up and ready to go, you have. It's so much harder.

Yeah. If there is same idea being if there is resistance to you doing the work, you are the only piece of this widget that's going to cause the thing to move. You're the only part of the engine that can actually start it and move things forward. And if you aren't motivated to start and move forward, then it's going to be really hard to make progress.

Exactly. That's exactly right. Click minded is now and we've pivoted a million times from what it initially started. But the initial start was just I like this. That's it. So that's how it worked is I did a. My boss had asked me to do a quick training course for everyone in marketing at PayPal back in 2011. I put together a quick two hour course on how SEO works. I got a ton of really good feedback on it. And more specifically people said you made a very boring topic interesting. And so I just. I'm a huge nerd. I love search engine optimization. I love to teach. I enjoyed doing it and that was kind of the light bulb moment. It ended up I started teaching physical in person classes in a co working space in San Francisco. I would say all Saturday morning nine to five, kind of all you can SEO would teach SEO and then sit down with startups and entrepreneurs and like help them fix their SEO and tell them what I thought that actual business was terrible. It was the same problem it was. I enjoyed doing it. It was working. People loved it, People gave great reviews. But it was a very dumb business. It didn't scale. There was all kinds of problems with it. I was giving a huge revenue share to the co working spaces because I couldn't afford renting it and not booking a class. But what ended up happening was it ended up being just the right place, right time. With this online course renaissance that we're in now, Udemy had just sort of taken off. I ended up putting pushing this course I developed offline onto Udemy, which is an online course marketplace for anyone that's not familiar. And from there it took off and it's now been seven years. We have more than 10,000 paid users and we're kind of a digital marketing training platform for a number of different topics.

Sure. So let's do another quick tangent because a lot of people that are listening, especially in the food and recipe space, search is a really important piece of the puzzle, if not the Puzzle, piece of the puzzle for a lot of people. If you were to sit down and we could do multiple, multiple, multiple podcasts on this. But if you were to sit down with somebody who is in those early stages and they're trying to figure out search, whatever that means, they're trying to get their site to a place where search can be an important component of it at a really high level conceptually. What are the things that they should be thinking about and ways that they should be approaching content as it relates to search on their site? And it might be a hard question cause it's super open ended, but let's say, let's, let's say that you are riding up a very long elevator and somebody asks you that question. What is the advice that you give them?

Yeah, for sure. Um, yes, I'll, I'll try and summarize our, our 10 hour course in 30 seconds. But yeah, this is, I mean people ask us all the time, um, and how do you do the elevator ride pitch on this? I think it's just two simple things. The first is choosing your platform and the second is keyword research. And that is 80% of the game. So a lot of people think the SEO is just Google on your desktop and it's just no longer true. Any modern web application that has to render search results has to have this. Has to figure out what we call document relevancy. Right. If I go to Google's, the obvious one, but if I go to Pinterest, if I go to YouTube, if I go to ebay, Etsy, even Airbnb, when you use these search applications, they have to rank those documents based on how relevant they think they are at a really high level. If you're interested in becoming a food blogger, or you're just getting started, or you're picking your vertical, the first thing to think about is who your customer avatar is and what platform they would be using. There are people now out there that are doing SEO and not using Google because they only want to create content on Pinterest or something like that.

Or podcast would maybe be an example.

Where it's like, hey, it'd be a great example.

Yeah, and so that would be platform you're speaking about. Hey, what is the platform that you are interested in ranking on?

Exactly. Yep. So that's the first sort of concept. And then every platform has their own optimization metrics, right? Google's generally the most complicated. Other ones are, are much simpler. Amazon, great example. You can do Amazon SEO, not even consider Google. And you know, in Google Though one of the primary metrics might be links in Amazon, the primary metrics might be sales in YouTube, it might be completed views. Right. And Pinterest, it might be pins. There's sort of different metrics on each platform. And then the next big platform, the next big bucket after you. This is a long elevator ride. The next big bucket after you.

It's a very tall building.

That's right. Is keyword research. And the basic concept is we can now use third party tools to figure out how many times people are searching for a certain keyword per month. What you can do when you use these tools. I really like kwfinder.com by the way. For beginners that are doing this is a great visually appealing tool to do all this. But the basic concept is we can use a third party to get the search volume data. The examples I used before how to start a fraternity search for 1500 times a month and iPhone app developer San Francisco search for whatever. And you can do what's called total addressable market sizing. So you take all of the universe of keywords that your customers might be searching for and then you start to bucket them into your content. The point here is that when people get really into this, sometimes they say, okay, what should I blog about today? And they go and take a shower and they say a recipe for Paleo carrot cake. That's actually. They just sort of do it based on a whim. But you can be much more clinical about this and much more quantitative about this when you use the data to set your strategy. So my high level recommendation is to actually over invest in keyword research. You kind of want to spend a whole day or a whole week doing this and you let the keyword research guide your content marketing strategy for the year, maybe your email marketing strategy for the year and maybe even your business strategy. You sort of let the data drive you when you're first getting into it.

Yeah, that's awesome, that's great. And appreciate that little tangent. We have reached the top floor, we're going to a different elevator and we're riding it back down to resume conversation around Click Minded. So you're creating this course. You've. You start to get some traction with it. One of the things that I thought was so interesting in the article that you wrote, Burning the Boats, talking about this transition of building Click Minded into your full time gig, having a lot of success with it, is you talk about this point where you're kind of bleeding. You talk about it as, as, like this cash flow is going out. You need a quick fix. But during this time you're actually investing in automations for the business. And I thought that was such a fascinating thing. Just in general, when, when you think about the urgent versus the important. And it seems like that was a time when you were investing in the important things at a time when it would have been easy to get distracted by the urgent. So can you talk a little bit about that period of time and click minded and what that allowed you to do long term as you were building the business?

Yeah, so this phase was pretty interesting and it was another sort of tangent around this was I ended up taking on a co founder at this phase in the business and it was 100% on him. I was not the guy who initially wanted to do this. I wanted to fix the dumb urgent stuff. And he was much more convinced that this was the the way to go. But the high level point there was actually that Eduardo, my now co founder, who was working on this with me kind of beforehand, he was our customer avatar. Even though I'm very, very interested in digital marketing, I've been doing it for 10 years, who our customer avatar is is very much him, which is people that are very sick of digital marketing, media and these kind of clickbaity articles around people increasing your Twitter followers and much more deeply technical tutorials and walkthroughs on how to use digital marketing to grow your business. The big thing around this was that we really knew our customer avatar and we knew that a lot of the automations we were setting up would be really helpful for them. So I think the house was kind of on fire and we were looking at, okay, should we put out these fires? But the bigger sort of media problem in the room was like, is this helpful to our end user? Is this stuff what our customers are going to love and tell their friends about? We hadn't gotten that part figured out yet, but it took a long time. It took a lot of work. We had to create massive email marketing flows, mini courses, webinars, lead magnets for each one of our topics. And it was a long term sort of bet that was great for the users, but we had no idea if it would work. And so I was very much driven by fixing the business, like going into Excel and fixing the numbers. And Eduardo was very much driven by creating more value for the customer avatar. And he convinced me that he was right. And it turns out he was.

Yeah, it's interesting to hear you talk about that because I imagine a lot of people that think about digital marketing, they think about the thing that is bringing, bringing people in the content, user facing stuff, blog posts, podcasts, things like that, videos. It sounds like a lot of what you're doing. If you think of the iceberg analogy, it's like it was the stuff underneath the water. After you have these initial touch points, it's like, what is the journey and what does the conversation look like once people are actually engaged with the brand? Is that true or was it also front facing content like blog posts and podcasts that you were working on?

That's exactly right. The vast majority of that investment was the under the water iceberg stuff, which is, okay, what is the plan with all these people when we get them?

Right.

And what does that product look like and how awesome is it?

Yeah. And what were the things that you were actually implementing at that point? Because I think for people listening to this podcast, we think front facing content, we don't talk enough about what happens after that. So what would your advice be to people that are looking to level up that side of their business?

Yeah. So, I mean, and it is going to depend a little bit on your, your business. Right. Like if you're a super high touch point business where you're doing, you know, a $10,000 monthly recurring thing where you're on phone calls with your clients versus, like your $10 eBook, this is all going to be a little bit, a little bit different. Right. But, but if you think about the basic concept of the sales funnel, not sure how familiar the audience would be with this.

Yeah, let's talk through it.

Yeah, yeah. So the sales funnel, I mean, the way we like to talk about sales funnels and how digital marketers mess this up so badly is we really got a lot of value. And I was taught this over and over and over again at Airbnb. We really got a lot of value out of humanizing our sales funnel. So the basic concept around sales funnel, top of funnel is we're just meeting each other. Middle funnel is, is okay, I'd like to get to know you a little bit better. And bottom funnel is like, I'm just about ready to convert. And then sometimes people also do a retention and increasing customer lifetime value piece of the funnel, which is like upselling and cross selling and things like that. We found that we decided to go. This concept of treating our sales funnel like you met someone at a party. And, and the way Internet marketers go about this is awful, is that, you know, they buy a bunch of paid traffic and they send it right to their landing page and they say, like, hey, buy now, buy now, buy now. Right? And that's sort of the equivalent of going to someone at, going up to someone at a party or at a bar and being like, hey, I'm Tommy, nice to meet you. Do you want to go get married? Right? And it's just too much. And like, the example I use is I just, I met a life insurance salesman at a party once and it was the most horrifying experience in my life. Just like, hey, how are you? So what are you doing for coffee tomorrow? Let's get you, let's look at your finances and get you into a policy. It's like, dude, gross, get away from me. So the better way to go about it is, hi, nice to meet you, I'm Tommy. Tell me a little bit more about yourself. Like, deliver a bunch of value, right? And then the middle funnel is like, hey, I'd love for a way to contact you again. Can I get your phone number? That's what we call a lead magnet right into your email address so we can follow up there. And then bottom funnel, let's go out to dinner, Whatever, whatever, whatever. For us, that was a bunch of content up at the top of funnel, which is your standard SEO. What are people searching for? Create something awesome, get it ranking high and get a bunch of traffic on the site. Middle funnel for us is lead magnets, which is, hey, do you want an updated version of the content you're about to read now? Do you want it as a downloadable? Do you want whatever you're actually looking for? Maybe this page you're on is a walkthrough of how to create a social media content calendar. But here's the actual Google Sheets template for it. Like, click here to enter your email, right? And then, so that's our middle funnel. And then bottom funnel is, hey, we have this 30 minute mini course. It's an introduction to social media or it's an introduction to Google Analytics. It's totally free. You'll get lifetime access to it if you can complete it. There's a bunch of templates and checklists and cheat sheets. Click here to enroll in that and that's free. And then after that, they've done the top of funnel, middle funnel, bottom funnel, and they've experienced 30 minutes of the product. They've been read two or three articles. We say, hey, by the way, it looks like you've really enjoyed this stuff. We have a discount that lasts for 24 hours on this course. Feel free to grab it at this price. And doing that across seven products, right when you have. And our product is 35 hours of HD content. Right. We have, we've gamified the mini courses. Like that's the kind of stuff I'm sort of talking about when we're talking about that high level investment that we didn't know would work. I wanted to fix the, you know, change the checkout button from green to red, that kind of stuff. And Eduardo was absolutely convinced that we knew who our customer avatar was. This is the bottom of the iceberg stuff. Let's invest in it. Even though if we don't know whether or not it'll work.

Yeah. It's interesting to see one of the things that you outline in the post that you talk about this transition is the amount of hours that you've worked over the period from 2012 to 2019 and then the revenue for that year estimate for 2019. 2012-1100-0201-9490,000. But the interesting thing with that is the amount of hours doesn't keep going up. It actually goes drastically down in 2019. And I think that's inspiring because there's things that are working in terms of the Automations that exist behind the scenes. Can you talk about some of the tools that you use to support some of those things that you just talked about? Whether it be something as simple as the email marketing tool that you prefer. Are there other things that you're using that help along the way?

Yeah, absolutely. How nerdy and deep do you want to go on this? Do you want to list everything? Or maybe you could, you could list your.

Let's start with your top. We could say top five, like the top five tools that you'd go to if you, if you only could use five.

Okay. Yeah. So I mean, super high level. Yeah. The site's built on WordPress and that's all the marketing content and then. And the actual product is on Teachable. So Teachable is our learning management system that's installed on a subdomain. We use ThriveCart for our checkout process. Although Teachable has a new teachable payments checkout feature that's pretty good, but it wasn't at the time when we were using it. Everything is based on Drip. So Drip is our email marketing platform and CRM and everything happens within Drip, all the automations, all of that. It's all sort of duct taped together with Zapier. Zapier is the glue that holds a lot of it all together.

Can you, for those that aren't familiar with Zapier, can you share really quickly what that is and how it works.

Yeah. Zapier is like the modern day Internet duct tape. It's a very simple way to get lots of third party web applications to talk to each other. So you can create another version of this. Kind of a more simple version of this is ifttt. If this then that. But the basic idea is both of these services, they let you plug in applications to talk to each other. If I post a blog post on my site, then tweet it out from my account or if I enter something into this Google sheet, then post a Facebook post saying this, if someone enrolls in my course on teachable, then unenroll them from. From that. It just gets a lot of third party services to all communicate with each other. So if you have an increasingly complex tech stack of a lot of services that aren't all native to each other, it's a really nice way to get everything to play nice with each other basically.

Yep, got it. So Zapier and then did you have one more.

Yeah. What else are we. I mean we're using so many different tools but Write Message is another great one. Write Message is a. Are you familiar with them? Yeah.

Brennan.

Yeah, yeah. Brennan Dunn. Yep. So that, that's been a great one as well.

Yeah. Can you share for those that aren't familiar with Right Message, what that is and how that works?

Yeah, Right Message is really cool. They it's basically a tool that allows you to change certain elements on your site based on who your customer avatar is. So one of the first things we do is we ask users who they are. Our customer avatars are entrepreneurs, in house marketers or consultants and agencies or. And bloggers is actually the fourth one we just recently added. And once we know who you are, we change some of the high level marketing copy based on that. If you're on a social media content calendar post and we know that you're an entrepreneur, it might be massively increase train up your team on implementing your social media content calendar with this free template. Or if you're an in house marketer, it might be massively grow the business you work for by using this social media content calendar. You can kind of change the copy and the calls to action or even the lead magnets based on who they are. You can also change the lead magnets based on where they are in the funnel. So if we have top of funnel traffic, these people are brand new. They don't know us. We say hey, grab the lead magnet. But if we know them already, if they're in our CRM and we know that they're already kind of midway down the funnel. Instead of offering them a lead magnet they've already taken, we might say, hey, you've already used a lead magnet. Enroll in the free me course now. Right. So you don't waste any real estate on your site by pitching people top of funnel offers when they're in the bottom funnel. And it allows you to manage that whole process much better. And it's been a huge win for us.

Cool, that's great. So you're at the point now where Click Minded is. It's like a solidly successful business. It's something that is, I would guess, has surpassed what you would expect from. If you were to stay in a traditional corporate job. If you were to look back and say, these are the things along the way that were most important, the changes we made, the ideas that I had around building a business, the things that I didn't do, would you be able to say, hey, these are some of the. These were some of the most important moments along the way. Whether they be really clear kind of fork in the road type moments or something that you look back on now realize happened without you actually knowing it was happening at the time. Would there be anything that you could kind of surface as important points along the way?

Yeah, so. And first of all, the. The latter that you mentioned, which is that I had no idea any of this was happening at the time. So all of, like, I had no intuition about what the right way was.

Sure.

I was just like closing my eyes and blindly flailing and punching and kicking.

Which I think is the norm, more than people would ever know.

Yeah, I was great at that. I was great at looking like an idiot for most of this. But I think the single biggest thing, and in hindsight, the single. And it's going to come back to what we were talking about, about kind of being passionate about it and having a personal interest in this. Is this idea around the unfair advantage and exit velocity. And this is coming out in a couple different ways now. I have a friend, his name's Dan Andrews. He runs an entrepreneur group called the Dynamite Circle and a podcast called Tropical mba. It's pretty cool, but. And also Naval Ravikant, I don't know if you're familiar with him. He's like a tech. He's like a lot of things. He's like a tech Jesus or Buddha now, but he was a venture capitalist for a while and he's talking about a lot of life and philosophical stuff recently. But what he says is, you need to be focused on something that to other people looks like work and to you feels like play. And that's what he calls unfair advantage. Dan Andrews has a different concept of it and it's kind of more catered towards people who, they have a full time job, they're working on a side project and they're thinking about making the leap. And he calls it exit velocity. And he has, I'm just pulling up the definition right here. He called it the amount of exit velocity is the amount of professional and entrepreneurial momentum you have when quitting your job and starting a new venture. Momentum can come from a variety of sources. Investment capital, experience, anchor clients, industry knowledge and connections, AKA unfair advantage. And so the point here is like this is sort of back to my iPhone app developer site. I've met a lot of people who, maybe they're a lawyer or a doctor and they're about to go start a side project and they're about to go sell CrossFit jump ropes or something like that. It's just totally unrelated to what they've been doing for 20 years. And don't get me wrong, if you're interested in CrossFit and CrossFit jump roads and you really wanted to do this for years, of course that's fine. But there's a lot of people that aren't taking any advantage of the company that's paying them right now. Right? They're not doing any of that. And so in hindsight, what I realized was I had some massive advantages coming out of the gates. I was doing an SEO training course, but I was doing SEO at big companies. I was using my product to dog food everyone on the team, anyone who joined the SEO team, the growth team, all the engineers and data scientists and designers that joined my team, they use clickbinded to learn about it. So that helped me, made the product better. And also everything I was doing felt like play. It didn't feel like work. So I think the big, big meaty thing was that the world is just too big now to not do things where you don't have an unfair advantage.

What do you mean by that? I think I'm tracking, but explain that.

Yeah, I think the unfair advantage, I mean my unfair advantage were I worked at two big massive companies that everyone knows and I managed SEO there. That gave me credibility.

Well, and specifically what you mean by the world being too big, like our access with the Internet to a global audience, Is that what you mean or.

What do you mean? Okay, so when someone goes to Google and they type in Paleo carrot cake recipe. There are 20 million results, but only 10 make it to the first page. If you're not the ten best, you're gone. You're toast, pal. And so that's the thing is like the world is getting so extreme on both ends that there's no room to suck. And so the only real option is to find your unfair advantage and to do things that feel like play. Where to other people it looks like work because it's a long haul and you're just not going to survive if you hate what you do every day. You know what I mean?

Yep, yep. And we talk about that often. The idea of it might seem like you've been doing something for a long time, if it's two months or two years or three years. But in your story, it's a great example where you started, you know, 2010, 2011, 2012. And then it's six years of a lot of hard work and hustle until the point where it really starts to tip.

Yeah, it, you know, it's now in eight years I could have done university two times. I could have made a seven year old child. I mean like there's like, I think, you know, I'm very happy with where the business is now, but eight years, you could argue that this business is very bad. I mean like that is eight years is a long time. And I actually list this out in the post. I list out all these companies who, who started after me and I just have it right here. Companies created after ClickMinded, Lyft, $24 billion, Snapchat, $15 billion, Instacart, $7 billion. So like, I mean you could argue that Click Minded is the worst, is a very slow, terrible company as well. So yeah, it takes, I think people don't a little bit underestimate just how long some of this stuff can take. You know what I mean?

Yep. And I think it's a good reminder to have to the amount of time that it takes, but also to tie back to what you're saying before. If it is something that you are showing up to every day and you're in your, in some way getting something out of it other than just the potential of future financial reward, then there is still benefit in that. And I think that's the other key with what you're saying is eight years working on something you absolutely hate and not having something come out of that is a really terrible situation. 8 years working on something that you love and not anything coming out of that. Still a bummer, but great and then, hey, eight years working on something that you love and building a successful business out of that, that's awesome. And so worst case scenario, if you are working on something where you have that unfair advantage or something that you love, something that you're passionate about, is that you come out of that working on something that you actually have enjoyed spending time with, which I think is important.

Summary. You got to tweet that out or put that on a mug or something.

I'll put it on a mug, take a picture, and then tweet it it. So we're coming to the end of the conversation, but I'm, I'm really glad that you're able to come on and share your story about Click Minded. Obviously, there's a really strong overlap with the services that you offer on ClickMinded, the courses that you have, and people that listen to this podcast. So can you. We've talked about it kind of from different angles, but can you give a little recap of, you know, if people want to go through the courses on ClickMinded, what would they be getting? What would be, what would be some of the topics that would be covered and who specifically that is listening to this podcast would be a good fit for some of the courses there?

Yeah, sure. Yeah. Digital marketing training platform has seven different courses you can check out. Again, we use world class experts. There's a bunch of free checklists and cheat sheets and templates and mini courses you can go and check out. I've really liked to follow the model. Are you familiar with this guy, Ramit Sethi? Yep. Personal finance blogger. Yeah. Really great guy. I like him a lot. And we sort of have followed a lot of his model which is he kind of says 98% of everything I do is free, but if you want the advanced version or whatever, that 2% is the paid product. And that's a lot of what we do as well. We've had a ton of success with it. It's like 98% of everything we do is free. But if you want to learn faster or you're trying to train up a team, go for the paid products. Yeah, you can check it out@clickminded.com and let me know if you like it.

Awesome. Tommy, thanks so much for coming on the podcast and talking through your story.

Really appreciate it. Bjork, thanks a lot.

Yeah, thanks.

And that's a wrap on episode 222 of the first Food Blogger Pro podcast. 222. That's incredible. And if this is your first episode or your 222nd. We so, so appreciate you being here. As a reminder, you can find the Food Blogger Pro podcast on your favorite podcasting app, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, et cetera. And we encourage you to subscribe so you're notified whenever we release a new episode, which is every single Tuesday. Subscribing is a great way to keep tabs on the latest news in food blogging. And if you want to take your blog a little bit further, apply what you've learned from the podcast and get even more. And keep accountable. Thanks to other food bloggers from around the globe. There's Food Blogger Pro, our membership site for food bloggers. Enrollment is now open, so you can learn more and sign up if you're ready@foodbloggerpro.com we'll see you next time, friend. Thanks again and as always, make it a great week.