309: Create with Intention - $130,000 in the First Week by Creating Premium Offerings for Your Audience with Shawn Blanc

Hey there. Hey there. You are listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. Excited to talk today to my friend, Sean Blanc from a few different things. He's actually going to talk about his story and the places that you can find him online, but his focus is all about productivity. It's all about digital well being. How can we be creators and how can we be creative while also also being healthy in regards to mind, body and spirit. And he's going to talk about his journey of starting as well. It's one of the things that I find most valuable is to talk to people who have transitioned from not being an entrepreneur. Right. They're doing something else in a different world at a different time, in a different place, and they have made this journey into success being a successful entrepreneur. And Sean's going to talk about his story and how he did that and also chat about some things along the way, just in regards to what it looks like to build a strong company while also not giving your entire life up and sacrificing every living hour to just work and invest into your company. So I have a ton of respect and appreciation for Sean and how he views work and the companies that he's built. And he's going to talk about how he went about doing that in this interview. Super excited to share this with you. Let's go ahead and jump in. Sean, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you. Glad to be here.

We've had many conversations, none of which I don't think have been recorded. I mean, we were hanging out in Colorado, which is the first time that we hung out in person, which is an awesome group of people that you get together to talk about business and life. Maybe technically some of those were recorded but not published. So this will be our first recorded and published conversation. And these are podcast interviews that I love doing because it's talking to a friend, but it's also talking to somebody who I respect and has a lot of business insight that can share with his audience. So for those who aren't familiar, can you share, rewind the tape, kind of go back and share your business story? I think a lot of people who listen to this have a business story or, or they want to have their business story. And in hearing other people's stories, they can find either inspiration or potential, kind of like a business Sherpa, to see if they can kind of guide themselves in a similar way. So what's your story?

Yeah. Thank you. This is awesome. I'm so happy to be here and everyone who's joining in, listening, watching ET CETERA just an honor to spend a little bit of time here. So my story kind of actually starts 10 years ago. Just celebrated 10 years ago of being an indie blogger. Basically. I've kind of expanded since then. I started by myself back in 2011, and now I have a small team. We've got a few people that are full time for us and several contracted writers and editors who are on retainer. And I now went from one kind of personal blog to now a handful of different blogs and different brands kind of around some similar topics, some a little bit different, some overlapping. So I'll share the story behind all of that. So it's 2010. This is one year before I quit my job, and I was the marketing director for a pretty large nonprofit. And it was fun. I loved my job. I was working 70 to 80 hours a week, but I didn't have any kids.

What does 70 to 80 hours look like? Because some people say that. And I don't think I've ever worked 70 to 80 hours. And I'm like, wait a minute, that's like pretty extreme. Are you doing that every day? So you're working weekends?

It's basically 5am to 9pm Most days of the week, five, six, seven days a week.

And that's what you were doing. So you're getting up, going in, sitting down. It was in person, I'm guessing. So you're at an office.

So I would work a few hours at home before going in, and then I would go in, and then I would come home, and then I would have dinner, and then I would finish working and then go to bed. And part of it was we were just a large. Is a nonprofit. And so I like to joke with nonprofits that you have all of the red tape of a big corporation and then none of the money. So I did love it. I really enjoyed that season of my life. And I worked with a great team and we did some really amazing work. And I probably grew more. I was in that role as a director for three years, and I grew a ton as a person, as a leader, as a manager, as a creative person. But my wife and I ended up getting pregnant at the end of 2010, and then a couple of weeks later miscarried that baby. And that was our first pregnancy. And that moment of going, oh my gosh, I'm going to be a dad, and then actually losing the baby and going through that with my wife, and it was just this. Everything kind of slowed down for me. And I sort of felt like Neo in the Matrix that First scene when the bullets are flying to edit and they're all like, they're going by slow. And suddenly it was like all of these things in my life that had been going so fast and felt like they were so important, just flying at me. I'm now able to stop and look at them and pick them up almost and analyze and go. A lot of this stuff actually is no longer important to me. And just values in my life almost changed overnight. And I realized that I will be a dad eventually. Not right now, but I'm going to be a dad again. And I don't want to do 70 hours a week as a dad. I want to have more flexibility for my schedule. I want to be home more often. I want to have more freedom to travel, to go on adventures with my kids or whatever. So I had this little side blog that was kind of my side hustle. And at the time I had been working on the side and was doing like a. Maybe like a thousand dollars a month. And I did some affiliate stuff through Amazon. We're doing sponsored blog posts and I had some sidebar ads. And so it wasn't a ton, but, you know, about a thousand bucks a month. And I would just spend that money on like computer gear or whatever. And I'm like, well, if I'm spending, you know, five, ten hours a week on this here and there, and I.

Can do it from 2am to 5am Right?

Exactly. Somewhere in the in between hours.

Yeah.

And I mean, it wasn't always. It was, you know, sometimes like an average week might have been like 60, like, or like a low, low average week. So.

Yeah, but you're able, like on lunch or weekends, maybe you have a post that you want to write, which is very similar. How Pinch of Yum started. It was like early mornings, late nights, weekends and lunches.

Exactly. Just all the in betweens. And it was kind of one of the things that I was just thinking about constantly. So I'm. When I'm at work, um, yeah, I've got downtime in between meetings or whatever. I'm. I'm writing up ideas for these articles or just doing links to other stuff. And yeah, so just kind of fun stuff like, well, if I'm doing this on the side, I can make a thousand bucks a month. I was like, I bet if I gave it 40 hours a week, I could do 4,000amonth and that would be enough. That's all I need. I live in Kansas City. That would be great. So I decided I'm going to quit the Marketing job. And I'm going to start this blog full time, and let's see what happens. And so I just announced it to my readership. I had about 6,000 people on RSS. I didn't have an email newsletter at all at the time. Twitter was still. This is 10 years ago. So Twitter was pretty young. I had a few thousand followers on Twitter. It was just my blog and just people would read my blog. And so I just put up a blog post that said, I'm quitting my job and you can support me to write this site full time if you want. And it's three bucks a month. I called it like a good cup of coffee. There was no Patreon, so it was going to be through PayPal.

Yep.

And I had a friend who did some stuff like, similar to that, and he recommended. He's like, hey, you should do have them pay like three months at a time at least, because then you're bulk minimizing the transaction fees. So I was like, okay, well, so it's three bucks a month, but it's nine bucks a quarter is basically what it really is. And my goal was, I was like, well, if I got 1000 bucks a month from this, if I can get like 500 members, then I'll be at 2,500amonth because of 500 plus 15, 2500amonth, but they'll pay three months in advance, and so I'll have some chunk there. My wife still was working part time for the ministry, so she had a little bit of revenue. I was like, between that and this, that would be enough to get started and I could be profitable from day one, basically, if I can get 500 members. So I put up the blog post and 400 people signed up the first day. 24 hours.

Amazing.

And 400 people.

And how long have you been publishing content at that point?

Probably three, four, four or five years, I think.

Okay.

Consistently.

Yep, yep. And you had given a lot. Like there's a. There's a Gary Vaynerchuk book that came out long, long time ago that I looked through. But the concept was jab, jab, jab, right hook. Like this boxing analogy for like you give, give, give, and then you ask occasionally.

Yep.

You had essentially been giving for like five years. And then this was the really the first ask that you had of your audience. Is that right?

Yeah, pretty much. I think so.

Do you think you could have done that earlier?

Probably, I probably could have done it earlier.

Yeah.

I bet I could have done it a year earlier. But There was also like in the transition. So this was, you know, it was like a four month transition from when I decided I was going to do the, the go public or go indie to when I actually did. You know, I started reaching out to people that I knew that had been in this space, people that had been successful here before me and just asking for advice and getting input and then kind of writing about some of these things like on the side. And so a lot of people that were paying attention started to sense a transition was coming and so they were kind of like looking forward to it, I think. And when I finally did go live with the announcement, a lot of people just knew it was coming. And then a lot of these people that I had reached out to who were a step or two ahead of me and I'd asked them for advice, they then in turn shared it with their audience. So I got some pretty decent promotion from like, I think Jason Kotke helped support it and John Gruber and some of these guys that had huge audiences. So that definitely helped boost the signal of that. And then within a company, Gruber, I.

Don'T know your space as well, but that when I, even when I hear that name, I'm like, wait a minute, like the tech John Gruber, like, that's a big deal.

Yeah, he was so helpful. We had several conversations. Cause he had been writing during Fireball for a few years before I went full time and he was super generous with any advice and input and really appreciated that. So.

Yeah, and you've referred to it a couple of times as your blog, your site. Can you talk specifically about like what that was and the focus of it, the niche, the genre and. Yeah, so a chance to do kind of some promotion of it, but also wind that into the story a little bit.

So the site was just. My name is SeanBlanc.net and I wrote quite a bit about Apple and tech and design. So sort of that, that space of, you know, do product reviews of iPhones or new apps. I was just huge Apple nerd. And so that was kind of the space. And then the main business model, like I said, was the affiliate stuff. So I'd link to something on Amazon here or there or like at Christmas I would do a roundup and you know, like 300 bucks on Amazon affiliates. And I was like, whoa, so much.

Yeah, yeah.

And then the sponsorship. So people would pay for me to promote one of their products. Like once a week I would do a sponsored.

Got it.

Blog post type of a thing. And it was just kind of whatever I'd wanna write about. So sometimes I would do long form articles that were in depth reviews or just stuff I was really interested in or research I had done. And then a lot of it was links to other interesting things around the web. And this was something that Jon Gruber kind of pioneered with his link list on Daring Fireball. And a lot of sites now do that, something similar, which is super cool. And so I just kind of would do that. Links to other stuff with a little commentary here or there. And then when I took it full time, the perk of being a member was you got access to this podcast I did every day. It was called Sean Today. And it was like a five minute podcast. And I did, I think I did seven or 800 episodes of it over the years. And just that was. You pay three bucks a month and you got that. So that was the perk. So that was SeanBlanc.net that was sort of the genesis of it. And that was my. I did that full time for a while before moving on, or not moving on, but adding to sort of like the site sphere stuff. The portfolio. Yeah, exactly, the portfolio. Yeah.

So do you think. Couple questions with that because I think it's an interesting story that's a little bit different than how most of the audience would think of how they're building their site, which is like, hey, I gotta get a lot of traffic and then I gotta monetize with ads and sponsor content, which is something that you did, but it's actually asking people to support you. Do you think that. Do you think you could still do that today? Or is there some function of what you're doing today where that still exists? And what would your advice be for people who want to ask their audience to support them? Like, I'm even thinking of the newsletter subscription company Substack. Yeah, Patreon. I think there's a version of that. I think Ghost is maybe like the open source version of Substack. So it seems like it exists maybe not in our niche in the exact same way, but how do you think of that today? Like asking people to support you in your endeavor?

Man, that is a great question. I get that a lot, actually. And I've thought about it a lot too. And I think a huge factor of me being able to quit my job to get 400 people to sign up that first day was also the novelty of it at the time. I could count on one hand the people I knew that were blogging for a living, and it was just very, very few people and so for me to say, hey, I'm doing this, a lot of the people that supported me.

It'S like, wow, interesting.

Exactly. Like, this is so cool. Or I'm so glad that someone.

Hundred times. And.

Exactly. And so there was much less just competition, so to speak, in the space of being an indie creator. And in some ways now there's quite a bit more competition. But there's also. It's so much easier to do it now. So when, you know, I did, I had to set up the PayPal thing and I'm getting these people to sign up, but I have no connection between the private, quote, unquote, private podcast and then the PayPal membership and my site. None of this. Copying email addresses, sending emails manually, one at a time with a link to a public podcast RSS feed saying, please don't share this with anybody. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's on your honor. And it was just like, you know, it was just all. It was all goofy, but it worked, you know, and the tools now are so much better and so much easier and so much more refined.

It's less novel now because of that.

But it's also less novel.

Yep. Yeah. How much do you think, in your opinion marketing is, or in the case of what you were doing, how much of it is novelty versus how much of it is having an awesome audience of excited people? I mean, in some ways, it's the exact Kevin Kelly quote of like a thousand true fans. It was like 400 true fans. Right, Right. And you saw that play out in a way that was life changing for you. So how much, when you look back at it, is like, hey, new creative, interesting thing as a form of marketing versus I've been serving this audience and doing a really good job of that for five years, and these are my true fans and they're going to support me in whatever it might be.

Yeah, I think that's really well said. It's a combination of both. I think that the new interesting novel Shiny Thing definitely helps. And a friend of ours, Barrett Brooks, has kind of. We've talked about this before. He's the COO for ConvertKit, but he also has a lot of business consulting and he's just got a lot of insight into this stuff. And he's talked about the difference between the thump value and then the sticking power. And I think that the give, give, give, and not only like, serving your audience, connecting with them, giving to them, showing up, sweating the details, taking pride in your work. That is the sticking power.

Right.

So this is what forges the relationships. This is what makes your product actually awesome and what makes people want to stick around and they trust you and they're engaged with what you do. And then like the big launch or the new shiny thing or whatever, there's like the thump value to that. And even with my own courses, like, we've kind of transitioned from the Patreon and the advertising model to we're pretty much entirely customer funded now. And I'll tell more about this later, that progression. But the very first course I ever launched, I felt like I had to have so much stuff in it and just pack it full of all these extra resources and all these extra features and all this extra content that was ancillary around the core component of the course itself and then charge like one third what I thought it was worth. And. And you know, and that was where Barrett was like, hey, you know, the thump value, you got a lot of thump value here. But at some way, you're also kind of distracting people from the core of what they're actually signing up for.

Right.

So the shiny, the new shiny stuff, where you've. You've marketed it well, you've done a good job of making sure that what you're promoting is going to resonate with your audience or at least with the right segment or cohort of your audience that you're marketing it to. Like, that matters quite a bit as well as. Have you been showing up? Have you been in some ways building in public, working in public? Have you sweated the details? Have you served your audience and built that relationship and that rapport with them so that they trust you? And then obviously they're excited to sign up.

It's interesting. I was listening to an interview today with Adam Grant. He wrote a few different books. His most recent, I think, is. I don't remember if it's like called Rethink or Think Again, but just came out, I think, yeah, yeah, like days or weeks ago. And he was talking about this idea in negotiation, how a lot of times the more points you include in a negotiation for why you're right, the less effective it becomes, as opposed to if you just have one really strong point. And I think the same can be true with what I hear you saying is when you think of packaging something up and offering it to somebody, one of the ways that it can be really valuable is like, here's the really specific thing that you're going to experience in going through this as opposed to this and this and this and this and this and this. And then the idea being like, oh, it's so valuable because there's all this stuff in it. But in actuality, if you can just have one single thing and do that really well in a course or in some type of offering, that can be more effective because of the clarity around it and also that people being able to envision the transformation that they'll go through if they do it. Is that a little bit of what you're getting at in the. You called it the thump value with it.

Yeah, exactly. And I think that the multiple bullet point list also is sort of a symptom of having a lack of clarity yourself about the product. And what does this actually do and who is this for? And if you can't answer that really simply, like, if you don't know, then your audience definitely is not going to know. And I think when you can simplify it down and you can say this is what we do, that's better than anybody else does it like we do this one thing. Amazing. Then you feel like you're, oh, but what about all the other people that kind of want something else that's similar to what we kind of offer and we can add this. Yeah, yeah, it's. You're actually like when you have the huge long list, in some ways you're alienating people as opposed to drawing them in when you can get really specific.

Yeah, you're drawing. Yep. So you had mentioned you're now customer funded. The other version of that was like donor funded. Like, what, what are the two. If those are reader funded, like, can you explain the difference between those and when did you make that shift?

So I can't remember the exact timing, but at some point I finally started an email list and launched a product. It was called Delight is in the Details. And it was just a book about sweating the details. And the way that for us as creators, there is actually joy in that process of kind of getting lost in the product itself and kind of immersing yourself in flow. Flow as you're creating it. So you're sweating the details and that's fun, there's delight there. But then also you're creating a product for your customers that is delightful for them to encounter with. And so I did a little email list and launched this ebook. And I think it was like 19 bucks for the launch price or like 29, something like that. And I felt like such a fraud.

Sure.

Because in my mind I'm like, content should be free. I had been doing ad supported content all this time and then I had the, the membership model. But Even in my mind, like the membership model, like, I had to keep reminding people, like, you're paying and really what you're getting is the writing that I'm doing already anyways, but you're just helping me to keep doing it. So it was hard for me to create content that was, quote unquote, like behind a paywall. So I sort of felt like a fraud and ended up launching this ebook. And the initial launch, I think was, I can't remember the numbers exactly, but it was something like $15,000 or somewhere in there. 10, 10, 15. Or around that ballpark. And I was like, wait, this is amazing. This took me about a month to create and write and build and ship and put together. And then I did a couple months worth of my normal blog revenue and people will keep buying it in the future. And it was sort of this light bulb moment for me of there's a lot of fun in creating the product because I loved it. I loved the work of doing that. And then also as a business model, this could work really well.

Yeah. So at what point. Well, go ahead, finish that thought.

I was going to say, so we've kind of begin to grow on that ever since, was the finish of the thought.

And at what point then along the way did you start to build your portfolio of sites? And can you talk what those sites are? And why not just double down on what was working? You had a success, proven success. If you could make 10,000, you could probably make 20 and 30. And so why branch out into other sites? What did that decision process look like?

Yeah, partly is I like to create new things and ship them. So that's like part of my personality. I enjoy that kind of work. And so that's a huge component of it, of why we've branched out is sort of that's how I work and how I think. But also with the site, with SeanBlanc.net, the biggest month for me was always around Christmas time when I would do these gift guides and I would make a bunch of money from Amazon affiliates. And I was like, man, what if I had a whole website that was just gift guides all the time and I could make way more money from Amazon. So that was this idea. Tools and Toys was the name of the site. And actually that came out, I think, before the book. So Tools and Toys, I think was the first branch in the portfolio. And I just built the site over the weekend one time and kind of coded something. So it was fun to build it. I tossed in some content in there and Then launched this. Here's basically a gear guide for guys. And it was fine paraphernalia and stuff like that. And so now I was writing two blogs simultaneously, which didn't last very long.

At this point, you're the only person writing.

Yeah, it's just me doing everything.

Yeah.

So that was tools and toys. So branching out to the other site. And then eventually with that, what I ended up doing was I was like, hey, if I write every day, then this site, I can't remember what the numbers were, but if I write every day, the site makes about like 20 bucks a day or something in Amazon. If I don't write, the site makes like 300 bucks a month. So $10 a day?

Sure.

It's like, well, maybe I could just find someone that could write every day for 10 bucks a post, and then they can take all that I wouldn't be making, and then I would keep the rest. And this was like my first venture into hiring someone to do some work for me. Paying them and then also getting paid myself. So I found a guy, a good friend of mine, and I was like, hey, would you. One little post a day, every day, 300 bucks a month. And he's like, sure. And then he started writing. And literally, like, that first month, this site ended up doing, like, 900 bucks. So it went to like, $30 a day.

Yep.

And, like, and then you can kind.

Of play the simple numbers game where you're like, wait a minute, like, what if I hired two people?

Yep.

Would it go to, like, 1800? And not that simple. But once you get a little look into the fact that you can. Like, once you build a machine where you put a penny in and it. And it puts two. Gives you two pennies out, then the business game starts to become interesting where you're like, how do I do this in other ways? And.

Yeah.

Um, so what did that look like at that point where you kind of had this discovery of, wait a minute, like, I can kind of build this little machine and. And maybe scale it.

Yeah, exactly. So my. My initial thought was like, now I've got community, so I've got someone that I can connect with, like, who's working with me, which is fun. I'm no longer solo as a. Like, I'm a hundred percent extroverted. So it was nice to have someone else that I could.

Somebody just, like, talk to.

Exactly. And then to say, now here's this other website that's making money. Not a ton, but it's profitable. And someone else is doing the Work. We kind of built the engine behind it and it's providing a job for them. It's growing a little bit, and it's providing revenue for me as the owner. This is cool. Can we do this again? So then I ended up working on. I can't remember all the timeline, but I kind of now began working, wiggling between product creation and website creation. So we ended up, over the years launching two additional websites as well. The next one is the suite setup, and that came out in November of 2013. It was just after my second son was born. And this was for me as an Apple nerd, going to the Apple conferences and just dialoguing with other Apple nerds. Like, a super common thing that I would hear was like, hey, I don't like the default calendar app, or I don't like the calculator app on my phone. Is there a better one? And I was like, yeah, there's some really, really great ones out there. And so I had success with tools and toys and the affiliate model there for Amazon. I was like, well, let's now go into Apple affiliates and do recommend products for people and then for their iPhone, their iPad, their Mac, and then we can make revenue from Apple that way.

And this was like Apple App Store Hazard Rev share program. And if you sent somebody to an app and they bought it, you'd get a small percentage of that kind of similar.

It was like 3%, basically. So a lot smaller than Amazon. But through SEO, we were able to scale pretty significantly. So people are googling for what's the best. Best calculator app, best calendar app, best email app. And we're kind of ranking for all of these accidentally. Like, I actually wasn't into SEO. We just accidentally got good at SEO.

Sure.

By just writing these headlines.

Well, good content too. It's like if it wasn't good, it wouldn't have ranked.

Yeah, right. It was super well researched. And so that was going really well. And we're doing some advertising there and affiliate. So same model advertising and affiliate on the suite setup. And then the writing kind of came on the wall where Amazon or Apple was going to cut their affiliate commissions and they end up just killing it altogether. And so here was this revenue stream for us that was basically going to go away entirely. And then advertising is also sort of a race to the bottom. And we had decent traffic. We're doing four or five hundred thousand page views a month, but that's not that much anymore in the advertising space. Yeah, because you're kind of right in the middle Actually, so the indie advertiser doesn't have the budget to spend a couple thousand dollars on an ad spend for that. But then the big guys who are purchasing all this inventory for ads, they're like, not interested in. Not big enough. Exactly. They're one millions of page views, not a couple hundred thousand. So we're kind of in the same.

And this was at what point?

Like, this is now, like, I think so we've been doing that for a couple of years. And then as I began to see the shift of the business model, it's like right around 2016, 2017.

Okay. And at that point too, that was early in the advertising world where, like, doing actual handshake advertising deals was still more prevalent as opposed to now where it's a little bit more programmatic. A lot more programmatic. And which is why companies like Mediavine AD thrive. They'll say, hey, if you have 100,000 pages, you can run ads against your site because they're not doing as much of those individual deals. But especially at that point for you to be kind of in that middle ground, like, you know, there's not going to be somebody who's going to come and run this huge campaign for a new piece of hardware they're doing because it's just not enough inventory for them to fill and make it worth the time and effort to sign a deal and run ads on the site. Is that kind of what you're saying?

Exactly. So the handshake stuff is what I've been doing all along for years. But it was taking me 25% of my working week, was basically ad sales. And I was like, my time's just more valuable than that. You know, like I'm, you know, for me to work eight to ten hours a week to make a $2,000 ad sale is. Yeah, I would rather create a product that can do 10 times that and then can go on to do continual sales after that as well. On the long tail. And it's more fun for me to create products than to try to cold pitch advertisers.

Right. So.

So yeah, we kind of saw the writing on the wall with that and in between. So this was 2013 that I started this site, and then 2017, where we made the pivot off of advertising and affiliates to product creation in between that timeframe and another site that launched. It was called the Focus Course. And this was sort of like my magnum opus in a way, or like our flagship course that I accidentally created. And it was originally. So I had this podcast, Sean, today If you remember from the beginning. So here we are several years later, still doing the show and I did this like 60 day, or maybe it wasn't even 60 days, maybe it was like a month or something where I just did a series on productivity and talked to people through sort of my approach towards productivity. I talked through these components of how to live a focused life, how to do your best creative work. So kind of all this stuff for my space, I'm in the tech and design space. I don't have an outlet for all the research and all the methods and all the approaches that I developed over the years doing habits and productivity, time management stuff. And there were a lot of other people that were doing it and I was like, I don't want to get into their space. So I was like, well, I'll just do it for my podcast listeners and this will be great to do behind the scenes. And I just was getting emails after emails from my membership base going, this is the best series you've ever done. I want more. Where can I get more and more? And I was like, well, hey, I'll just take the podcast episodes, I'll transcribe them and that'll be the chapters of a book. I'll write a book again. You know, hey, like I delight is in the details. That book did pretty well. So I'll do a book. And so as I'm working on that and going through the book, I'm like, well hey, it'd be great to research some stuff and at least know what other people in the space think. So I'm buying all these books and just going through. So I'm spending a ton of time researching on productivity and time management and goal setting. And personally, here I am, I'm sitting in my office for this stuff. This is my current job that I've given myself to research productivity and write about it. So I'm highlighting the books, I'm making notes and I'm just putting the books on the shelf. And my day to day life did not change whatsoever. Like, I'm sure I'm consuming all this information and turning it into advice to teach, but none of it was actually changing how I was living. I was like, wait a minute, someone's going to buy my book and they have the exact same experience. And I was like, well that sucks. I don't want that to happen. I want people to actually transform the way. Exactly. Actually change. And I was like, well, what if instead of it being a book where you read all this information and at the end of the chapter. It's like, hey, here's this action item for this chapter. Because that was common. And I would always just turn the page. I'd never do the action item. I was like, what if the whole point was, instead of it being information first and then how to take action on it second, what if it was do the action, and if you want to know more about it, then you can read the information, but learn by doing and apply by doing instead of apply by reading? And I was like, well, the best way to do that would be I should do an online course. And I was like, well, and I can charge, like, 20 times more than I would charge for a book, too. So that seemed to make sense, like, not only from the best chance of success for my customers, but also for me as a business model. Like, there's opportunity here. So this is 2015. And so I did a big course launch, and it was called the Focus Course. And I kind of had taken some of the stuff I had learned from the way I launched my membership, the way I'd launched my first book, and then doing this course launch. And it ended up doing, like, $130,000 in the first week, which was, like, transformational. You know, my business at that point was doing about a hundred thousand in a year, and which is fine for me. Like, that's great. You know, I'm doing six figures as a solo entrepreneur, but now to suddenly launch this thing and do a year's worth of revenue in seven days.

Yeah.

I was like, this is holy money.

Don't take shit.

I spent like a month looking at Land Rovers, trying to talk myself off the ledge, but vicariously spending all that money on a new car. But I just stuck it all in the bank. And I was like, I don't know how to spend this yet or what to do with this, but this will change my business and it'll change my life if I do the right thing with it and don't buy a car. So I just sat on it for, like, six months. And then we kind of got to the point where now there was this growing momentum behind the Focus course. Meanwhile, the suite setup was sort of struggling and then needed more help to kind of get to that next level. And then I still had SeanBlanc.net, and my membership and my podcast there, and so I was just exhausted. I had some contractors that were working for me, but they weren't active in the business the way that I was. They're giving five, ten hours a week here and there. They weren't full time. And I just felt like I either need to shut something down or I need to have someone take one of these over full time. And this is right around Thanksgiving of 2015. And just I was talking with my parents, were visiting for Thanksgiving, and, you know, my mom's just like, well, think five years from now, are you still working for yourself, or do you have a team? I was like, I definitely have a team, mom.

Yeah, exactly.

And she goes, okay, well, if you're on, you know, trying to decide if do you need a team now or not, but you have. In five years from now, you. You see yourself with a team. She goes, seems like it's the time to start building the team. I was like, all right. So I had the money in the bank to pay a whole year of my first employee's salary because I was just so nervous that I would hire this person and there would be no growth in revenue. They would bring no value to the business, and I would just burn their entire salary. And then I would be back where I started with no more money, and I wouldn't be able to keep paying them. Well, at least have a year to figure that out. So I hired Isaac. I don't know if you've met him or not, but he's still with us, and he's a fantastic guy. And so he came on and started January 2, like, New Year's Day, and then the next day was Monday. And so he just came in the office January 2nd, and that was fantastic. Best possible thing I could have done.

And so how come? Because I think a lot of people, especially who are at a point where they may have maybe have some traction, they've been working on the thing for a while. They maybe have some of that budget. Maybe they don't have a bunch of money saved up, but they know, like, hey, I could live off of whatever amount. 5,000, and I could spend 3,000, or my blog is making, or my business is making 3,000. I could actually spend all of that because I'm working full time still. I want to bring in a team member to help move this forward. What does that actually look like, to go from not working with anybody to working with somebody? What did you learn in that first year that you'd tell other people?

Um, it's really, really. I don't know if I can give a quick answer. So first thing I learned was the power of community. And, like, two heads are better than one. And so Isaac have. Now I have someone who's able to work with me full Time in, like, he's local. So we were in the same office together and we, you know, we're getting lunch together pretty much every day and we're collaborating on everything. And just like, it was so great for me, you know, like the same way that when I brought on some contractors and I had people to work with in the community there, now I've got someone full time to do everything with. And that was just so wonderful. I just. I loved it. Really happy. So there's just an injection of energy and ideas that happen there and then someone to dialogue, bounce ideas off of and just workshop the next stages of the business with. And then I just made a list of all the low leverage tasks that I was doing. Scheduling my newsletters and uploading the podcast and editing the podcast episodes, Customer support for different things. Like, all of it. I just gave all of it to Isaac, and then I had nothing left to do but just create. And so those are two really great things that I think if I had been a little bit more strategic or maybe more mature, I could have even made more use of my time. So now I have nothing left to do but to create. But I didn't have a vision for what was next or I didn't have, like, a strategy for how to, like, make use of that time again. And so we kind of floundered for a little bit. We tried some new stuff. It took a while to sort of get our feet underneath us and start creating with intention and strategy. As far as this is now a business that needs to support two families, and we got to make sure that we put that penny in and we're getting two pennies out and really being strategic about what work can we now do, that's going to be high leverage. Because now that I have all this time back and that was. It took me years actually to figure that out. And in some ways, I feel like I'm still figuring it out.

Yeah, it seems like I would imagine that a lot of people can resonate with that. The idea of, hey, you bring somebody in, you give them all the tasks that you've been doing that have previously moved things forward. Then now that you don't have those, what do you do? And what if those were actually the highest leverage things that you could do because you don't know what else to do, how did you discover what that is and what does that look like for you now?

I think just it looked like for us, figuring out what was working. So that allowed me to step a little bit more in with the suite Setup and get back involved there a little bit, and then also create some new stuff for the focus course. Now we have these two worlds, and I was able to give a little bit more leadership there. So we created another course on time management, which did really well, and it was in direct response to our customers. We were able to do that customer research now and dialogue with them. And we were able to get a little bit more advanced with some of our marketing and launches and stuff like that, which was fun. And then with the suite setup, we're going to. Well, I think that there should be. We should start doing courses over here as well, because the advertising stuff, the affiliate stuff is going downhill as we're launching courses on these other websites and books on these other websites that's doing really well. So let's bring what we've learned over there and bring it to this audience over here. And so we did our first course on the suite setup. I think it was in 2017, summer 2017. And again, like, it wasn't huge. I think it did like $40,000 or something like that during the course launch, but it was a $29 course, so we sold a higher volume of it. And then at that point, the affiliate stuff had been slowing down so much that we were doing about 3,000amonth in affiliate revenue. We do $40,000 on this course, and now we have another, again, a whole year's worth of revenue generated in like a week. And it's just like, okay, this works. This can really work. And so we had the SEO stuff, and so we were able to just double down on with the suite setup. And over the time now we've. I think we have close to 14,000 customers that we've grown there over the years. And this is now our model of finding the best apps for stuff. But then instead of doing SEO into affiliates, we do the SEO into a membership or a customer version of that.

It's interesting. That's the first time that I ever online connected with you, is I was looking for a course on things, and this was before we had ever met, before we'd ever connected. I didn't know who you were. So you're doing something right. Because I came across it and I was like, this is what I need. I want to learn how to do things better, which is kind of based on the getting things done way of working. We did an interview with David Allen a few years ago that we can link to in the show notes for anybody listening who wants to learn more about that. But you did a course on how to use that software. I went through it, and then like a year or even like six months later, our friend Jason, class B, was like, hey, there's this meetup which we talked about at the beginning. Want to connect you with Sean, see if it might work. So, really grateful for that. But I'm one of those 14,000 customers, which is awesome. And the model, to your point, works where, hey, we can see that we can create content around a specific genre and then we can offer that content as kind of a premium offering, of course. And we're starting to see this exist in the food space as well. And it looks simply, it's just cooking classes. So people say, hey, I have this specific way that we're going to teach you how to cook, or maybe you're a beginner and we're going to take you from not knowing how to cook to knowing how to cook. Well, I think there's a lot of opportunity here, especially if you're not a high traffic site, but you're a focus site to say, this is what we do, this diet, this specific tool. You know, maybe it's instant pot. So for any podcast listeners, it's an important consideration as the value around courses and being able to sell a course for more than you'd get, probably from affiliate or ad revenue, which sounds like in your store, you. You came to discover that was really true.

Yeah, it really was. And then it allowed us as well to kind of focus in on when you're at the site, like, what are we trying to sell? What's the next step that we want you to take as a visitor, as a reader? And it's not to go to our advertisers page on an affiliate link. Yeah, exactly. It's, hey, we want to go deeper with you. And so here's these courses that really take this stuff the next level.

Yeah.

And then, you know, to your point as well, with the cooking classes, there's. I feel like this is even the next phase of where this stuff is going is from the courses on demand to the cohort stuff where it's live.

Can you talk about that? We were having a conversation and I thought about Food Blogger Pro and what we're doing there. It's like, oh, this. I see this happening a lot. There's a small investment we made in a company called Soul Savvy, which does, like, cohort based modules for, like, shoe enthusiasts, which is like, it's a huge industry. But I was like, if they can do it for shoes, we can do it for food. Blogger Pro or for productivity and focus courses. So what is. Can you explain the concept behind that and how it works?

Yeah, so what we've done, I'll just share how we're doing it and we're brand new to the space and just figuring out ourselves. So I have the Focus course. This is our bestselling course and our most profitable course over the years. And, well, I shouldn't say best selling. We've done others that have sold more copies, but this is kind of like our cornerstone stuff. So even everything that we've made around these other courses, like the all the things one that you bought with the productivity, we're stealing some of the ideas and principles from the Focus course. So for me, this is like our cornerstone piece. And as you know, most people that buy an online course don't go through it, they will sign up for it and then it kind of just collects digital dust. And I've done this before and I was thinking for myself that the training that I've purchased over the years as a business owner, as a creative, as a writer, as a photographer, the vast majority of the ones that I've been through, you know, like 75% of the courses that I've actually completed, there was a live element to them. And where it's like, we're having this workshop at this time and this is when it's happening, this is when the course like begins, so to speak. And here's when the office hours are. And it was a little bit inconvenient for me and I sort of felt frustrated. Like I gotta sign up and give, you know, commit a couple hours of my week to do this. But I actually went through it and completed it. And then even years later, I'm still reaping the benefits of that material and I've implemented it into my business. And so I was like, for me as the course creator, obviously I care deeply about the success of my students. I want them to actually go through the material because that's where the greatest benefits are going to be. The greatest success is going to be realized by completing the material. So how do we increase the likelihood of people completing the material? So we started by doing live workshops in person. And we did a couple of them in 2019. They were awesome. Then Covid hit and so we shut all that down. It's like, well, what if we do them live online? So we did a couple like zoom, like a couple day long workshops, which was pretty great. Like, you just block off a day or two, but then you're sitting in front of Zoom for a couple of days. Um, but with the focus course, there's such a, like a depth of material that we go through that it's hard to get all of it ingested in a 24 or a 48 hour period. Uh, and so we're like, what if instead we spread this out over the course of a month and instead of doing eight hours all at once, we did eight hours over four weeks. So we're actually piloting this right now. Like, literally, as I rerecord this, we started our second pilot group yesterday. And what it looks like is you kind of have a enrollment window on the front end and people can sign up and then you have a start date. And for us, we started yesterday on Monday. And I do a workshop kind of training that's live on Zoom. Everyone comes and shows up in person or, you know, through Zoom in real time. And we go through the material there. And then we have some additional workshops during the week that are on Zoom. We have like these study halls for like, here's a dedicated time that you can come. It's like a Zoom cowork space sort of setup where you can actually do the work that you need to, to figure out the answers to the stuff that you're going through and go through the material and the training. Um, and then at the end, you know, you're done, you've completed it. And so the first pilot group that we had, we had 70% of the pilot group completed, complete the material, which is astronomical.

It's huge.

And so the value of, like, you're actually now seeing success in your students. You're getting people that show up to something. And then there's the community aspect of it, which when you do that live online stuff, like, you're forging really amazing relationships with these people. So I think there's as the cooking class stuff, like, if, you know, people do that live on Zoom at certain hours, there's something about the community of going, hey, there's a hundred other couples.

Yeah. That are all energy around that date night.

Exactly. Like date night, cooking classes or whatever. And there's something that's just fun about that and interesting about that.

Yeah, that's a huge takeaway. Even when I think about what we do, I feel like there's opportunity for us to even have a focused kind of segment on like understanding Google Search console. Like, we're going through that with some Foodbagger Pro members now, but I could see us offering that to Foodbugger Pro members and then also opening it up to everybody and saying hey, we have whatever it is, a hundred spots. For anybody who wants to know Google Search console better, we're going to do this, we're going to do it for six weeks. When you're done, you're going to understand it better and you're going to be able to use it, you know, ongoing in your business. Which I think is, you can see the value of that. Especially when we hear from people who sign up for Food Blogger Pro and they're like there's, there's like too much information. There's so much here, I don't know where to start. And with the, the module based learning you can kind of walk them through and say like we're doing this this week, here's what you got to do this this week. And, and the sequential meeting rhythm of it feels like it would be really beneficial. So I can see that, that being a positive thing. Um, we're coming to the end here. For me this is super interesting to hear. There's massive takeaways for me specifically that point about thinking about how we structure even for Food Blogger Pro. But I can see that working for Pinch of Yum as well kind of this course based and also community based learning. I think especially after coming out of a year of not having a lot of community even if it's digital, there's huge benefit to that. But you also, you have a huge focus on productivity on focus. In the last few minutes here I want to hear your thoughts on for us as distracted, you know, endless to do list but also motivated wanting to get a lot of stuff done. How do you as a creator stay sane? Because I think a lot of us are probably going insane with the amount of stuff that we have to do. Any advice for folks kind of in the world of focus productivity and not going crazy with, with, with all the considerations.

Yeah it's it the. I mean the struggle is real, right? Like we, we end our to do our, we end our week and our to do list is longer than it was when we started and yeah, that's no fun. So I'll share my number one productivity tip whenever I get asked this question. I'll share that in a second. One other thing that I've just been thinking about personally. Just on a personal note for me as a creator and I think, you know Berg, I think a lot of your audience and a lot of the Food Blogger Pro listeners are you got that entrepreneurial chip like you want to start something or create something or put something out there and it's you know, as a creator and as a maker, someone who wants to ship stuff and realizing that we have this personally for people like us, there is this standard that we set for ourselves that is, you know, this high bar and we go, this is the amount of content I want to put out there. This is my, the level of quality that I want that content to be be. This is the new ideas that I'm going to generate. Like it's this high bar of creating and shipping and doing the work and then it's never, you know, we're never actually hitting it. Like we, it's. I know some people are listening, not on video. So imagine that your bar is at, you know, 100 and you are operating at 90 and all you see is this dissonance between where you're at and where you want to be. And the truth is that you'll never reach it. Like you'll never actually hit your true, your own bar for success. And that dissonance from where you're acting and what you're doing, what you're actually shipping versus what you imagine you should be doing creates a, it's a dissatisfaction. It can create an anxiety in us. It can create like a creative depression, so to speak, where we feel like we're never hitting it, we're never good enough, we're never doing enough. And it's only by our own standards that we're measuring ourselves. And the truth is, is that our bar, we're, we're producing at 90 and the real bar for success is like 80. So we're already past, far past what is needed for us to do it. What's actually needed is for us to sustain. So hitting 100 is not what makes us win. It's that we can sustain 80 to 90 for years and years to come. So even just that mindset shift of going easy and saying, hey, what's better for me is to have the breathing room and the strength that I need to persevere. Not to crush it every single day and just pass out from exhaustion and depression.

Yes. It's so important to reflect what I heard you saying. Figure out the level that you can produce at quality wise that doesn't lead to burnout for and then just do that, be able to do that forever like as high. It's not the level that you're going to want to be at because the level that you're going to want to be at would probably result in you burning out. So how do you bring that down a little bit and sustain forever?

Exactly.

That's awesome.

So to tie that in with my number one piece of productivity advice, it's this. And I'll give it to you quick. It's tonight, before you go to bed, I want you to set out your clothes for what you're going to wear tomorrow. The whole outfit. Put it on the end of your bed or put it on your bathroom sink, whatever. And then tomorrow, when you wake up, that's what you're going to wear. Put that on. And what you've now done is two things. First of all, you made a promise to yourself that said, this is what I'm gonna wear. And then the next day, you followed through and you kept your own promise. And this is huge. This is personal integrity, where you follow through on your own promises and your commitments to yourself. Because as you plan your creative work, as you plan the stuff you're gonna do, the tendency is to get to that moment and change your mind and say, actually, I'm gonna do something different. And you have this consistency of going, I don't trust my past self. I'm never gonna do what that person says. I only trust me right now. And you end up just. It's fleeting and it's draining, and it drains all your energy. And you're constantly in dual focus and making decisions in real time as opposed to just following through on your own commitments already. So set out your clothes. And the second thing you've done is you've made your future life a little bit easier. So now, tomorrow, in the morning, those morning minutes are so valuable. You've saved yourself some time. You don't have a. There's a decision you don't have to make, and there's time that you don't have to spend figuring out what you're gonna wear.

Um, that's awesome.

And this translates to so many other areas as well. So that's my advice.

I saw on Twitter. We'll see if we can pull it up. You had tweeted about, like, a tomato garden and, like, starting out, and it's. And it's, like, really clean, and there's no weeds. And then as it grows, it just gets more complicated and kind of chaotic. And somebody, like, commented on that, and they're like, I never know if you're, like, actually talking about a tomato garden or if you're, like, talking about a life analogy. Cause it feels like it could fit both. I feel like setting out your clothes. Is that right? Like, it's an actual, practical, functional tip. But it's also analogous to how that can translate into other ways in our life, which is great. And a good note to end on, John. If people want to follow along with you, if they want to see what you're up to, maybe if they want to check out some of the courses, we'll link to all of those in the show notes. But can you talk a little bit about where people can find you?

Yeah. Best place to go is the FocusCourse.com and we have a free time management class there. And then that also gets you on our mailing list and keeps you up to date with all the stuff we're doing.

Cool. That's awesome, Sean. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

Yeah, likewise. Thanks for having me. It was a pleasure.

That's a wrap for this episode. Thanks so much for coming on, Sean, as always. Great to be able to. To chat with a friend, but also a friend who gets this space, gets this world. And I always find that in these conversations I come away with some action items and some things that I've learned along the way. If you have not yet, you can go ahead and subscribe to the Food Blogger Pro podcast wherever you listen to it. Maybe it's Spotify, maybe you listen on the podcast app in iOS. Wherever it is, go ahead and hit that subscribe button. You'll be updated whenever we have new episodes. You can also check out the food blogger pro YouTube channel. We're going to start creating little snippets of these interviews and publishing these to the YouTube channel. So we're leveling that up as well. Even if you. If you dig deep into the archives of the YouTube channel, Food Blogger Pro YouTube channel, you'll see a little gem video there of the first office we ever moved into. And I highlight some of the special features of that office. So maybe a motivation for you to go and check out the food blogger pro YouTube channel. And as a last item, we just want to say that we appreciate you for tuning in, for listening to this. It's one of the great joys that we have is being able to have these conversations, but then being able to share them. And my hope is that it helps you get a tiny bit better every day, forever. That is the purpose and the reason that we exist. All right, that's a wrap. Make it a great week. Thanks, Sam.