How to build an online business, audience, and community with Pat Flynn

If you found a cure for a disease, wouldn't you not be aggressively trying to help people who have that disease? You have that cure now. You know you can cure people with it. So you go out there and you confidently share it. And that confidence comes through in your content, in your voice, and is more well received. If you're not confident in what you're selling, how can a person who you are selling to possibly be confident in buying it?

Really excited to have a, a friend that I've developed friendship that I've developed over the years, a friend back on, on the show today. So Pat Flynn, welcome. Pat, nice to have you here.

I'm honored to be here, Eric. You've been on my show now twice, and I'm just grateful to have an opportunity to be here for you and your audience today.

Yeah, and, and yeah, thanks for the correction there because I said having you back on the show, but really what I meant is that we've had a couple of conversations already. This is the first time that you're on our show. So, yeah, thanks for, for coming along. And before we get into what it is that you do, which I'm sure a lot of my audience members are already familiar with, I thought it was fun to just share the backstory. So we go back a few years and of how we met and, and I'm trying to improve my public speaking ability. And then I'm in this national or whatever it was, public speaking contest and you end up being one of my judges. It was then we connected after that and that was really cool. I remember you gave me some good feedback on my talk then, and, and then that led to us getting to know each other. So thanks again for being my, my judge and critic when I was speaking. Very, very.

Oh, my pleasure. I, I remember your talk too. And at this particular event, it was actually more challenging for the contestants because you only had, what was it, like three minutes on stage, three minutes to like deliver. Difficult to do.

Yeah.

And you rocked it. I remember the story you told and obviously your audience knows about your near death experience and you sharing that really, you know, you could hear a pin drop while you were talking and that's a good sign. But you implemented a lot of the strategies and I know you got some help from a lot of the team there as well. So I was just happy to be a part of that and listen in. And then you and I connected and got on my show and I'm just again, happy to be here and, and share a bit of my story with, with Your people?

Yeah. Awesome. And so now you're the founder of spi, so Smart Passive Income and teaching people how to build online businesses, passive income streams, that sort of thing, I don't want. You will do it better justice than me, though. Can you give us and the audience just a quick overview of sbi? What submission? What do you do?

Yeah, I mean, when people hear the name of SPI Smart Passive Income, they go, really? This guy is coming on the show now to talk about passive income streams. Like, how passive are these things? Really? The truth is there's no such thing as 100% passive income. Even with more traditional passive income methods like homeownership or rental properties or the stock, you still have to upkeep and manage those things. Nothing is 100% passive income unless you're Bobby Bonilla from the Mets. But the cool thing is you can build these businesses, like many of us are, that in the beginning, you're trading a lot of time for $0. But over time, as you begin to build out these systems and automation and team perhaps, and really just begin to understand who it is you're serving and how you can best serve them, eventually you get to the point where all those hours that you put in up front, all that sweat you put in now begins to pay you back. Now you can serve an audience 247 because they have access to your website or your Shopify store or your digital product, your physical product, whatever the case may be. And so now I have over a dozen different income streams coming in from different things. Everything from a physical product that I invented to online courses, to books, to, you know, YouTube channels, all of which I can wake up in the morning and go, wow, I guess we did make that much while sleeping. And although it sounds like a pipe dream, it is possible, but it's not an overnight thing at all. And it does start with a lot of active income upfront. But what we do at SPI is we help people uncover, well, what might we create things about and how do we figure out who to serve and how do we serve them? So we talk about everything from podcasting, YouTube, email marketing, affiliate marketing, creating digital courses, coaching, creating software products, whatever it might be for you and your particular audience. We help people discover what those things are and how to. How to get started with that. You know, it's actually a lot easier than a lot of people think it is now.

Okay, so that's a great segue to my next question because I. I guarantee a lot of people listening, watching, they're thinking of Two things. So, one, they're thinking, wow, all of that sounds awesome. I would love to have a passive income stream, or not completely passive, as you pointed out, you know, alongside my nine to five, you know, build that up and eventually be able to transition to that. But when I hear Pat talk, man, he sounds super switched on into the space. And, you know, know he's like one of those online business gurus. He's been doing this his whole life. You know, that's.

That's.

Yeah, yeah, you know, that's. That's like maybe what they're thinking, right? Like. Like you're just like an absolute expert, you know, at this for. For decades. And that isn't the case, though. Right. So can you tell us a bit about the. The backstory, how you.

Yeah, I mean, I didn't go to business school or anything like this. A lot of this was just learn as I go. And actually that's exactly what had to happen. In 2008. I was an architect. I was an architect for several years and growing in my career path there. I loved it. It's what I went to school for. It's everything I wanted to do. I was.

Contributing to my 401k. I was about to get married. Everything was peachy clean. And then in 2008, of course, the Great Recession happened and I got let go along with millions of others. And I didn't have a plan B because I had followed the path the way I was supposed to. Got good grades, went to a good college, got a great job, et cetera. And yet I still got let go. So I went through a couple months of depression, in fact, because I didn't know what to do with myself. I didn't know if I had to start over or if the economy was going to come back or whatever. I remember watching Back to the Future over and over again, just kind of hoping that one day there would be an actual time machine that I could get into and then fix things, because I just was not happy with how things were. But of course, when the movie ended, I was back to reality and there was no time machine. But one thing interesting about that movie is there is some truth to the fact that the actions we take now help us determine what our future is. We're always writing our story, and it's up to us to which direction we want to go in our story. So I decided then that I was going to do something about where I was going, because the story that I was creating at that time was just a story of depression. I wanted A success story. And so I started to explore this world of online business. And the first thing I did was I went to a bunch of different websites and looked up, of course, how to get or how to make money online. And I just came across all these scammy looking things, things that were asking me to pay a bunch of money before revealing secrets or anything like that. And I just discovered that that was not the path to go. And I could obviously tell those things were not the right path for me. What was the right path for me was thanks to a podcast that I discovered this was right when podcasts were coming on the scene. And. And it was a podcast called Internet Business Mastery. And on this show, which was hosted by Sterling and Jay, I listened to them every single day. But I came across this one episode that featured a guy who was making six figures a year helping people pass the project management exam or the PM exam. And all he was doing was selling a study guide and some practice exams from a website. And I was like, oh, that makes sense. Like he's helping people pass an exam and he's getting paid for it. That's really cool. But that was my big light bulb moment because as an architect, I had to take several different exams. I wasn't a licensed architect yet, but I was on my way. And as such, I was taking a lot of exams. And there was one exam in particular called the lead exam that was for green building and sustainable design. That was very difficult. I mean, it took me over a year to study for it. And a lot of people just had zero resources, including myself. And thankfully I finally passed it, but there were no resources. I said maybe, maybe I could become the resource for that. I know about the exam. I'm not necessarily an expert on it, but I could help people. So that's what I did. I built a website called greenexamacademy. Com. In fact, the original name for it was in the Lead L E E D. But later down the road I learned that you're not supposed to trademarks and domain names. And I had to change my name later again figuring this out as I was going. But anyway, In October of 2008, I had.

Launched a study guide. It was just a PDF file. Again, had no idea what I was doing. I just put my notes in a PDF file. Thankfully, Google was favorable to my website at the time, so people found me through that. And when people found me through that, they started sharing me on forums like, whoa, you guys gotta check out this website from this random guy on the Internet named Pat Flynn. He's sharing all of his notes with us. So my website started to get some reach, but when I sold that study guide, I sold it for $19.99, and. And in October of 2008, after PayPal fees, I had generated a total of $7,908.55. And it just completely changed my life. That was two and a half times more than I was making as an architect at the time. And I was like, what is going? Like this was. I could have been doing this this whole time, but thankfully, I got let go, which then pushed me into figuring this out. And that's when I said, wow, I can't keep these things secret. I have to share everything I'm learning with everybody I can. So I built a second website, Smart Passive Income. And that's when I started to share all of this openly upfront, not asking for anything in return. I shared exactly the strategies I was doing, how much money I was making, how much money I was spending, what I wish I'd done differently. And over time, this website started to gain variety, and I started to get invited onto podcasts to talk about the story. And this really led to multiple books, speaking on stages around the world, YouTube channels, and opportunities that would have never happened otherwise. So I look back to stop rambling here, and the layoff was probably the best thing that ever happened to me in my entire life. Even though at the time it didn't feel like that necessity, it was exactly what I needed. Yeah, exactly.

Right. You know, there's nothing like putting your back against the wall. And it's. I still do that today. Like, I will create constantly agree to doing things before I'm remotely ready to do them.

That's such a good way to do it, though. I mean, honestly, you especially impressive situations will. Will take actions that you wouldn't normally take. And that's the thing. Like, I could have always created this lead business while being an architect, but having the need to support my family and wanting to build a family together and buy a house. Like, I did things that were out of my comfort zone, but those were the risks that needed to happen or that I needed to take to get to where I'm at. And honestly, the money's great. I have freedom with time. And the most special thing about this is I just have been able to spend most of my extra time with my kids as they grow up. Like, I've been there for every single first. My wife and I both walk our kids to school and pick them up every day. Even now that they're teenagers or my son is a teenager, my daughter will be one soon. And again, like, to build a business around the lifestyle that I want was the goal. After that, I was so angry at going down the path that I was told to go down and still getting let go that I said, you know what? I have to take control. And if I fail, I want it to be because I failed, not because of anything else anybody else sort of had control over me for.

I just think it's such a brilliant story. Like, you know, coming from that architect background, I would never associate, you know, that background and a million other backgrounds, but, you know, with, you know, going into online business and becoming so successful at it and, and to me, that's like super inspirational, right, because you didn't have your background in that, like, fell into it. And the other thing that I think is super admirable, you know, you, you made a comment about how, you know, there's, you know, you first are looking at these Internet businesses, and I thought, you know, I think you said something along the lines of, you know, oh, you know, some of these businesses, you know, can you trust them? And all of that. And you've. Transparency has been a huge part of your brand, and you, you took a very, very different approach. And how, how important was that decision to kind of like, open, you know, lift the hood so that people could see, you know, in the car, you know, be transparent with everything. How, how pivotal was that as a decision in your brand building?

It was vital. It was absolutely vital. I didn't plan for it as, like, a strategy, like, oh, my strategy is good. I'm going to be the transparent guy. That's just who I am in nature. And when I think about things like if I'm investing in stocks, for example, a company will quarterly share their reports and how their company is doing because they want their stockholders to just truthfully know hopefully how well the business is doing or how not well the business is doing so they can make informed decisions. I was actually very inspired while I was an architect. I had read a blog. I was really big on blogs, especially financial blogs about saving for retirement and, you know, all those kinds of things. There was one in particular called mymoneyblog.com I didn't know who the author was because they remained anonymous. But one thing that was neat on their website was they shared exactly how many shares they bought of every stock that they owned and sold as well. And I was just like, that's fascinating. I could literally see the moves that you're making and the repercussions of that. So I brought that over to when I started smart passive income. Right away, I started to share how much money I was making, where it was coming from, what I wish I'd done differently, so that when people were seeing me, sort of quote, unquote, teach online business, I didn't feel I was qualified to teach online business at all. But I was definitely qualified to talk about what I had just figured out and learned and never was. I like, you need to do this. All I did was, here's what worked for me, and here's what I wish I had done differently. If you're gonna try something like this, watch out for these things. That's my approach. And that seemed to be very different than anything anybody else teaching online business at the time was doing. And when I found out that that's what people really enjoyed, I leaned into it. There were two things that I really leaned into early on. One of them was that transparency. I did a monthly income report in October of 2008 after that first month, and so many people responded so positively to it and were so baffled by the fact that I shared this that I just kept it going. And I kept it going for eight years straight, every month, sharing my income. The other thing I leaned into was it was interesting. I, again, didn't know how to be anything else but myself, and I was a family man. So I shared that very publicly on the website. I literally said, hey, I don't have a mansion. I'm not rich. I don't have a Lamborghini. My Lamborghini is a. Is a Toyota Sienna. Like, that's my Lamborghini, everybody. Like, the. The doors slide open and the kids can get in. I love it. And I saw the response to people who are like, dude, you're not like, these guys who travel to, you know, the Maldives with their laptops and sitting on the beach doing business, like, you're just like me. Like, I love that you're a family guy, just like me, and you're doing this to support your family. That's what I want to do. And so when I saw that people were responding to just like, the regular Pat, the regular guy that I was, I leaned into that more, and I just. I was very pronounced with guys, I have no idea what I'm doing here. I'm just like you. I'm figuring this out. And later I came up with this analogy, which was like, you know, the online business space is sort of like this jungle, and there's a lot of dangers in this jungle. I'll be the guy with the machete up front. I'm going to carve a path for all of us. I might get nicked every once in a while. You look out for me from behind if you can, but I'll look ahead and I'll. I'll carve out a safe path for all of us. And that really spoke to the audience and making it feel like it was like all of us doing this together. Not me at the top of the mountain shouting down, like, do this, or dictating anything. It was like, hey, let me lead everybody. But I'm just the team captain. Like, I might pass you the ball every once in a while. You score, and I'll be happy about that. So let's kind of work together here. So that's always been a part of the brand, like together doing this as a community and kind of, you know, helping each other out.

So sticking with that analogy then. So you're kind of using the machete, going to the jungle. So how many people are behind you now?

Oh, man. I mean, there's a trail of people that I cannot see past the horizon at this point. I mean, the website itself has seen tens of millions of visitors since 2008. My YouTube channels have seen tens of millions of people just on some individual videos. Hundreds of thousands of subscribers in our paid community. I mean, we have now online courses, and we have them all inside of a community called our All Access Pass. And we have a higher level one for SPI Pro members, and there's thousands of members there who have access to those things. And, you know, the beauty of this is now, you know, it's not just these people on the trail with me kind of looking toward me for help. They're actually on the trail helping each other. They're going, oh, you're thirsty. Here, here's some water for you too. And that's the beauty of community and why community has now become a very big part of the equation. And yes, I still have that architecture website that's still working right? And honestly, I put one to two hours a year into that. Now it's fully automated as much as it can be. And it's still generating a few thousand dollars a month now, 15 years later, which is amazing. I have a physical product called a switchpod. It's like a tripod. I spent a couple years building that up with my videographer, is now for sale on Amazon and on our website and requires very, very little upkeep. And it Generates thousands of dollars a month from us, from there. And then this monthly membership recurring thing inside of SPI is generating some recurring revenue for us as well. And that's probably the least passive of all the things because my team and I are all in on being there and helping and being a part of the community. But there's a lot of people and it's, it's, it's wild now because I'm getting recognized on the street. Actually probably the most interesting story because I'm mostly a podcaster. I have a podcast called Smart Passive Income and it's been up for since 2010. It's approaching a hundred million downloads at this point. But I was at a Starbucks and I just placed an order and the person who had just placed an order turned around and said, I know that voice, you're Pat Flynn. And they didn't know what I look like because at the time my logo just had like half of my face. And they didn't really go to my website, they just listened to me all the time. But they recognized my voice, which was amazing.

Crazy, huh?

Yeah, it's absolutely wild where life takes you sometimes. And then the. My latest project, if you will, was a YouTube channel, a brand new one in a space I knew nothing about. Pokemon. I started a YouTube channel about Pokemon. Yes, those cartoon characters from the anime and those cards. Collectibles is sort of the niche that I'm in within that space. And today we are at 680,000 subscribers. We have over 200 million views on our channel. And I held an event last year for this community in Anaheim, California and 2,500 people around the world came to join and be Pokemon nerds together. And yes, I knew nothing about this. I didn't bring any of my old audience over. And I just leaned into nerding out on this thing that my kids got me into during the pandemic. And now it's turned into this business with. Which includes email marketing, affiliate marketing, partnerships. I'm an advisor to some companies in the collectible space now. It's kind of crazy.

It's absolutely incredible. And there's a few things that you've, you know, the clues for success to me, you know, they're quite obvious with because you have this large community of people, this large audience, and you know, we both know that, well, foundational to any community, whether it's online or offline, is trust. Right? You have to have trust for sure. And you started the brand with, you know, that transparency. You kept yourself as you were, you know, there's no fabrication. You just kept being who you were, which is super relatable. Right, because then everyone can see themselves in you. So you have the seeds of that, you know, incredible trusting community. And, and if you think about.

Now, you've been able to replicate that now with the Pokemon, with the YouTube channel. So my, I guess my question is for somebody listening who's saying, okay, whoa, I'm getting overwhelmed here now there's like so many different things. Like if what, what are the first three things that you would recommend someone do who's in a 9 to 5 already, is starting to build an audience, wants to grow it, you know, to a larger amount, or just, you know, wants to get started. What would you recommend? How, you know, how do we simplify it for them?

Yeah, I mean, there's, there's a couple things. I think creating content is still a very important thing to do, to do a number of things for you and your brand as you grow. Number one, it can show your expertise about the thing that you're talking about. But information today is freely available everywhere. I mean, we got lucky back in 2008 when we were blogging, because when you were blogging about something, typically you could create a lot of new information that wasn't ever available before. Now we have everything from YouTube to TikTok to Instagram to just Google search and ChatGPT now that basically tell us everything we need to know. So as a content creator, how do we stand out? Now you have to bring some story and emotion into it. When you bring story and emotion into story and emotion into your content. Now it's not just about the information that anybody can get anywhere else. This is your or a person you're telling the story of's personal story that is now relatable. That shows a transformation that can go through the same structure as a three act play to really drive home what it is that you're trying to teach, to really show how it might relate or even even cast a vision for somebody's future. That's when a person goes, okay, I can get this information elsewhere, but the way that Eric talks about it, this is who I want to absorb this information from. Click. I will now subscribe. Click. I will now join the email list. Click. I will now support and purchase this product or whatever the case may be. So I think relatability is really key and starting with some small wins as well. If you can offer something that provides a small win. I mean, I like to say that if you want to change somebody's life which, you know, as a business, as a content creator, hopefully you want to do. If you want to change somebody's life, start by changing their day first. Start small to then grow bigger. So a lot of us, I know a lot of content creators, a lot of my students want to go big. They might want to help somebody with, for example, marathon running. I have a student who helps people with running marathons and they struggled in the beginning because they were teaching people who had never run before to try to run 26.2 miles. And I'm like, you have to start smaller than that. Can you create a program that helps a person go from the couch to their first 5k, like start there? And of course that can be a lead magnet, maybe that's a lower level course, for example, but that will get a person a small win that then goes, wow, I can't believe I did this thing that I'd never done before. Let's, let's go on to now a half marathon. Let's go to now a full marathon. Let's do an ultra marathon now. Because I trust you, you've helped me get a small win and I trust you to help me get the bigger ones too. So that's really key. And I think a person starting out can grow a brand by creating content that's relatable, that tells a great story. If you're going to learn one skill as a business owner, the skill, the number one skill I think any business owner should learn today is how to tell a great story. Storytelling. And to do that with your voice, on a podcast or on video, with editing and visuals, or just simply with the written word, you can make such a powerful impact and you'll stand out from all the other generic information that people can get anywhere else. So that's number one. Number two, I have a strategy that works really well for those of you who you might have an audience or even a small one, or maybe you're just starting from scratch. This will help make things a lot easier and unlock a few things in your brain on your way to success. And, and I like to call it the one, one one strategy. The one, one, one. Find one person in your target market, your community, whatever, one person, just one. Find one problem, pain, challenge that they have that person find one challenge and help them get one result with it. One, one, one. A few things happen when you go through this really simple exercise. Number one, the idea of finding a person that's challenging, but focusing on finding one person in a community, it helps you train yourself as far as where do these people go? Where do they exist? Where do they, where are they? On the Internet or in my community, online offline? Where, where are they? This will help you go and figure out where that is. And that information, of course, is helpful for the future, but especially when it comes to finding one person. Then when it comes to the reconnaissance part of finding what is the problem or the challenge, speaking to somebody, talking to them, this is a big deal. A lot of us try to hide behind our keyboards online, but you need to get out there and actually have real conversations with people. This is what I talk about in my book, Will It Fly? Is how to have conversations with people so you can understand what their biggest pains and problems are and also uncover the language that they use to describe that so you can give it back to them and they can trust you more. But when you find that one problem, then you create a single solution for that. And it might, you might not even need a website to do this. You just help that person get that result. It might be instantly, it might be something that takes months to do. Whatever the case may be, you don't know if you're going to write a book or create a course or do a coaching program yet. You're just helping that person. That is your one focus. And when you help that person get a result, a couple of things happen. Number one, you now have this incredible testimonial from somebody who then you can use when you are pitching this to somebody else or talking about it or, you know, you finally set up a website or whatever, you have a real life case study now. But more important is now you've unlocked in your brain that you can actually help people. You can actually do that. A lot of beginning business owners, you know, you might work on creating something, but then when it comes time to sell it or share it or pitch it, we often think, oh, I don't know if this is going to work, or I don't know if this is the right way to go about doing it. But when you now have this proven case study under your belt and you've actually helped somebody, you now can confidently go out there and say, I can help you. I know I can't because I've helped Roger and I can help you too, because you're going through the same things and now you are better and more equipped to help them because you've understood with Roger what the obstacles were and how hard it was. And you know you're going to come across the same obstacles. Not new anymore, but with experience and so this unlock is so huge because it can come in just from the aura of audience listening to you in your voice, in the email. And I like to think about it like, like this. When you come up with that solution, it's almost as if you found a cure for a metaphorical disease. If you found a cure for a disease, wouldn't you not be aggressively trying to help people who have that disease? Yes, again, metaphor. But you have that cure now. You know you can cure people with it. So you go out there and you confidently share it. And that confidence comes through in your content, in your voice, and is more well received. If you're not confident in what you're selling, how can a person who you are selling to possibly be confident in buying it?

Oh, my God, I love it. I love the. When you got to that distillation at the end of. And ultimately you get the confidence that you can help someone. I mean, I can personally relate to that, you know, entrepreneur most of my career. And then I eventually transitioned to, you know, helping other founders and CEOs. And even though I was completely seasoned, you know, came from the trenches, I even still had in my head, like, yeah, but is what I have to say or the guidance that I can provide, is it actually going to be useful? And it's this weird little hurdle that you have to get over. And, and it's. I think people underestimate. Sorry. Or overestimate how far ahead you need to be of someone else within a given area in order to provide, you know, help you. You only need to be like a year ahead, a page ahead, you know, whatever it may be. Right. And that's one way in which you can provide help. The other thing too, I think people overestimate, and I'm sure people get this within your community is sometimes people know what to do, but they just need the support or like the accountability. Right. To do it.

Oh, yeah. Oh, gosh, that one. I have coaching calls with some of my students. I don't do too many coaching calls, but all the coaching calls are the same. Like, they know what to do. They already know what they need to. They just needed somebody to give them permission to do it. Really. Or that they're going to be okay. Right. And support, like you said. And that's the beauty of now with our new business model and bringing community together and what we like to call community powered courses is people are there to support each other as they're all going through those courses together. And it's so key. I mean, we saw a dramatic change in 2020, we were selling our courses one off and we had some of the highest completion rates out of the entire industry. But when the pandemic hit, we started to notice those completion rates from our courses, in addition to our sales were just going down. So we said, okay, we could lean into more marketing just to sell more of these things, or we can just figure out, okay, well, what would actually best serve our audience now? Well, it would actually be like the equivalent of, well, do we set up a gym and just have everybody go in there individually, or do we set it up so that people are there and able to go together and support each other? So we created that with our community powered courses and our all access pass. And it's been the best thing we've ever done. Not only are the completion rates like 70% now, as opposed to, you know, 20%, people are sticking around and moving on to the next course. And they're talking about the new partnerships that they've made and the new mastermind groups that they're making in there. And not only that, we're making recurring income for the first time in our business so it's more predictable so we can put more of those resources back into the community and hiring more team to support them. It's just a beautiful model. And it comes down to my number one business lesson, which is serve first, always come from a place of service. And like you said, you don't need to be the world's leading expert on something to be able to serve people. In fact, oftentimes the world leading experts aren't the best people to teach because they're so far removed from where a person might be. I would rather learn from a person who had just gone through the trenches of something as opposed to the 40 year professor who's lecturing about these things at a university who hadn't been in the field for a while. Right. So we are all qualified to teach others, but that confidence boost goes a very long way like we were talking about.

So how does. So you have to enlighten me a little bit more about. So can somebody just join? So somebody can be a complete newbie and join your community and basically figure out how to create an online business? Is that the gig or.

Yeah, I mean, typically people either subscribe to the newsletter first or listen to a podcast or something, or listen to me on another person's podcast like today, and then they get curious and they go to our All Access pass to see what we have available there and, and what's cool about this is, it's access to all of our courses. But unlike other creators who might say, okay, we have a dozen courses, let's just package them and bundle them all up and make them expensive, you know, obviously a savings by getting them all. It's like that wouldn't be of service to just give you more information. You need guidance through those courses now. So we have team members who are there who are going to help you go through. We're at whatever level you're at, if you're a beginner. We have the three courses in our repertoire that you need to start with, which is smart from scratch, which will get you to figure out what your niche is and what to focus on. Then build your brand, which is another course to help you build the website and the social media accounts all around that email marketing magic. From there to then now build your email list with now the understanding of who it is that you're targeting. And then from there it's like, okay, choose your own adventure. Do you like to be on camera? Cool. Get the YouTube course that's there. And then from there you can go into the brand and partnership sort of workshop to work with brands. Right? Or maybe you want to do a podcast or maybe you want to do webinars to start selling something. We have those pathways available and probably the coolest thing that we've done, and this is, I got to give credit to Ashley on our team. She had this idea, she was a teacher who we hired because of her curriculum expertise and she really did it well. We have this thing inside of our program called Accelerators and that is at certain times of the year you could actually go through a course with other students in an instructor led fashion. So you get access to all the courses. You can go through them at any time. But throughout certain times of the year, here's a four week sort of program to go through this course with an instructor and each other. And I, I got it, like, those are the best things. I have so much positive feedback from people who come out of those not just with like a result, but with now support and friends and, you know, the, the podcasting one's cool. A lot of people who go through that course end up becoming guests for each other's podcast, for example, and support each other along the way. It's just such a fascinating thing in this. We didn't coin the term community powered courses, but, but we're kind of owning that and utilizing that.

Awesome. Love it, love it, love it. And community. It's not just about building an Audience these days, it's about building a community as well. And that in a way to me that relates back to your comment about the only way to stand out today is through story and emotion. Because when you build an audience, it's to me, I kind of think of that more of like a one way broadcast. Whereas community, you know, it's like a two way street. And there's more opportunity for that emotional connection, those stories to form and to be shared. Right. And inspire you know each other.

Yeah. And when you're a part of something, you invest in it. Right. When you're involved, you invest an audience building. Audience building is important. That's like step one, Right. And as I talk about my book, Superfans, that's like if you imagine a pyramid, the bottom of the pyramid, the largest chunk of it is going to be like your casual audience, people who've just come across you, who've just found you. The goal would be to move them into now your active audience, their subscribers. They know who you are now, they're coming back to your stuff. They, they didn't just find it on a Google search. They like kind of know who you are now from there. That's when you bring people into your connected community and that's where the magic happens. Right? People are there not just to talk to you and you to talk to them, it's them to talk to each other. And the beauty of this is some of those people will just become super fans. And I have an entire book about superfans and helping people climb this pyramid. And in fact, I'd love to give that to your audience who's listening. We'll set up a page to deliver that for free for everybody who's listening.

And yeah, no worries. Thank you. And the cool thing is those superfans and even just the community members at the top of the pyramid, they're so devoted to and even have an identity of being a part of your brand that they will be your marketing team for you. In fact, what happens is your business will grow, the better the experiences for those people in your community because those people will feel like it's a safe space to invite people like them into. And now people are coming in, not at the bottom anymore. They're already coming in active and supportive because somebody they knew recommended from within. And you could talk about your own business all day, you could hire the best copywriters. But I'll tell you, nothing is stronger than somebody like a student of yours or a community member honestly talking about their experience in your program or your community, that is the strongest form. And again, it usually is a result of story and an emotion that happens. Before I was a part of your community. This is how things were. And now I'm here and I'm so thankful for that. My life has changed as a result of that and all these friends I've gotten to meet.

You can't doctor and make up an experience like that that becomes the perfect marketing opportunity. That happens organically and it happens and it's a beautiful thing. And I love business where everybody wins and I love community. And I think honestly if you are not focusing on community in your business, you will be left behind. You will get, we will get to a point where you will be left behind because you have been on a one way street. It's got to be, it's got to be a, it's got to be a roundabout now.

Amazing. Love it. I mean there's so many, gosh, so many good points that you've raised here. I mean when I do the write up on this, of course it will give it proper justice. But the ones that are like immediately coming to mind is like, literally anyone can do this, right? You came from the background of being an architect. You weren't this like online business expert.