André Chaperon & Shawn Twing - The Key Elements of a Durable Business

My biggest fear with working with Andre before we worked together is I knew Andre by reputation, of course. We all do. And there was a certain Persona. I thought, okay, if he's really like that, I really like this guy. But I've worked with far too many people over the years. Names that I'm sure your audience knows where person on the stage and the person behind the scenes, not the same person. The biggest relief was when we started to actually work on a project together. And I realized, okay, this guy is exactly, exactly who I thought he was from his public Persona. And later, to deconstruct the wisdom of that, I was like, well, of course it's so much easier if we both just show up as ourselves.

If you like what we're doing, you're never going to have a bad surprise because there's no thing that's different later.

Boom.

Boom.

Boom.

Boom.

Boom.

Boom. What's up, everybody? You're listening to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast with your boys, Mount Wolf and Joe Fear. Boom. Welcome back to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast. Today, our guest is another sort of legend in our industry. Andre Chaperone and his partner Sean Twing are joining us now. Andre was probably one of the first info products I remember buying back around 2009, 2010, when I was first kind of getting into, you know, not getting into it, but diving deeper into the digital marketing world. Uh, the autoresponder Madness course kept on popping up. Everybody kept talking about this course. I don't remember exactly what year I stumbled across it, but this was like the gold standard for how to do your email marketing through storytelling and things like that. And that was Andre Chaperone's course. And that sort of helped him make a name for himself in the industry and become one of the leading experts on email marketing in the digital marketing world. And so we are super lucky and super excited to be able to bring Andre and his partner Sean onto this episode today and. And kind of catch up and talk about what they're doing now. I had the opportunity of meeting and hanging out with Andre several years back at A Mastermind. I think. I think we might touch on that in this episode. I can't remember if we did or not. I'm pretty sure we did. But anyway, kind of stayed connected with Andre over the years and finally brought him back around to talk about what he's up to these days in his marketing career. And we talk a lot about their. Their concepts of emergent marketing and the durable business model that's those are kind of big concepts that they're teaching how to emergent marketing, how to take different marketing skills. And when they kind of come together, this sort of emerging marketing thing happens. And I'm not explaining it well, these guys are going to explain it way better than I could. And then the durable business has very specific elements that they teach. And so they're going to break down their concepts of emergent marketing and the durable business and what they're working on now and then, you know, we couldn't pass up the opportunity while we had them to talk about how to become a better writer of stories, how to do email marketing better, how to do automations in email better. So this, this. Let's kind of consider this episode broken up into sort of two halves, right? The first half of this episode, we're talking about emergent marketing. We're talking about the durable business concept. We're talking about what needs to happen in a business, how to get customers, when you know, when to give value for free versus when to charge. We spend the first half really diving into that topic and then the kind of second half talking about how to become better at emails, how to tell stories, how to do segmentation with your emails, and we get a little more in the weeds and talk a little more about the sort of tactical elements of what makes everything they're doing work. So we were just really, really pumped to even be having this conversation. We sort of broke out of our normal processes and podcast recording. We recorded this kind of earlier in our morning on a day when we normally wouldn't record podcasts because we can't pass up the opportunity to talk to these guys. So you're going to love this episode with Andre Chaperone and Sean Twing, and you're probably going to want the notes on it because we do cover a lot of ground in this. So if you go to flowchartgroup.com so at flowchartgroup.com, you can join our Facebook group. It's a private group just for listeners of Hustle and Flowchart. And when you join it, it'll ask you for your email. If you decide to give us your email, we will for free send you the notes to this episode within two weeks of it going live. So if you're hearing this episode two months after it was released and you go join our group, you're going to get free access to whatever notes were released.

Corresponding with the newest episodes. But if you get them within two weeks of this going live over at FlowchartGroup, dot com, we'll send you the notes. And even if you kind of pass that deadline, you can always email us, and we'll probably hook you up with the notes anyway, because we be like that sometimes. But go to flowchart group.com. join the group. We want to hook you up. So go do that. And I'm done blabbering. Let's go talk to Andre and Sean.

All right, Andre, Sean, we're live. How you guys doing today?

Thanks.

Yeah, well, I think this is going to be a fascinating conversation. You know, like we were talking about. We followed you, Andre, for a long time, and. And I know Matt, you met a long time ago, and I think we were actually recently, it was George Bryant, basically. He was like, you guys gotta have Andre on again. Because I think you interviewed Andre years and years ago. Years ago.

Yeah.

And we've been really reworking all of our email systems based off of a lot of the principles that you have put out there. And now, Sean, you're partnered up with Andre, and it seems like this perfect duo. You got the traffic and this whole different perspective there. But the way that you guys bring it together, I'm so fascinated in the perspective, like the way that you actually do marketing and think about marketing. I think that's going to be fascinating in this conversation, probably some storytelling and how that applies to the whole lot there, the spectrum of everything here. So I guess to start, I think it'd be fascinating to get kind of the background of both of you combined more than individually and how you guys came together, because you guys have been doing this separately for many years. What's the story of combining forces here?

Yeah, if we tell that story, we're going to have to tell the truth to get it right.

There was this time it was a bar in Colombia, and there was a tiger.

Maybe we'll just tell the real story.

Who's going to go.

Andre's. He's the stir.

No pressure, man. Yeah, well, Sean was a customer of mine. That's, I think, how we entered into my sphere of influence. And from there, yeah, we just. Because our interests overlapped so much. And we didn't realize this from the outset, obviously, because Sean was. He was a customer. He was consuming. I think he bought orders. One of madness and sphere of influence. And I had spun up this community called the one percent club, and Sean was inside there. And I think that's how the whole love affair started. Just bit by bit over the course of two years, I think, or three years. It was gradual and Then at some point.

We got a mutual client. And I think that was the first time that Sean and I started to work together, like, physically actually work together. And that was an amazing experience in terms of what we learned about each other and what we do and what came out of that. So there wasn't a, you know, there was no this emergence of thought and ideas that came as a result of the collaboration. And I think that's where everything kind of, you know, struck it for us.

Nice.

Well, I'm curious what sort of, like, roles do each of you play? So, for instance, in our business, I'm kind of more the tech guy behind the scenes, building ads and landing pages and that kind of stuff. Joe's more the networker talker speaker, goes out on stages a lot, does the podcast, all that kind of stuff. So he's more outward facing. I'm more inward kind of building stuff. I'm curious how your dynamic works.

And, yeah, I think we've never thought about that.

Who does the work around here anyway? Someone's got to do something.

Well, both of us, we're writers, so that's our love. And so neither one of us can do all the writing because it's unfair on the other one.

But the thing that we really learned was that when our writing came together.

What came out of that, you know, that. That. That thing that we create is different and better than both of us put together. So I think that was the moment where we thought that, you know, this is. This is kind of an interesting thing to. To explore. And that's how the whole journey started about a year ago.

And it kind of seems like with you guys together, you have this, you know, so, like, emergent marketing is something you guys have been talking about a lot. So I want you guys to. It'd be cool to have you guys kind of define it, but it seems like the components underneath that, like the three phases, awareness, engagement, and then conversion, it's kind of wrapped up with both your guys' superpowers with storytelling, the writing from both you. Your sides. But then Sean on the traffic side, which is really that awareness factor. Do you want to break that down and maybe individually kind of talk about the pieces, maybe those three components, and then we can kind of splinter off into some other pieces there.

Yeah, I'll jump in that one and give Andre time to think about saying something smarter.

The thing that's interesting about the collaboration, so to answer the roles question and this question simultaneously, is that.

We both like to think about this stuff really deeply, and we've got 40 plus years. I don't know, 45, 48 years together combined, doing this work. But we're at that stage now where we just. We like to think about it really, really deeply. And what ends up happening is it's like improv.

One of us has a thought and we'll share it, and the other one just naturally is trying to see what's right in that thought and then add a little something to it. And then it builds, and it builds, and it goes from, like this simplicity to something that becomes really complex. And in a sense, we. In a moment, we sense the complexity, and then we try to reverse it. We're like, okay, we've gone from the simple to the complex, but now we got to go from the complex back to the simple so that we can share it with our audience, right? And it's, you know, my favorite quote is, it's Oliver Wendell Holmes, you know, so I wouldn't give a fig for the simplicity on this side of complexity, but I'd give my right arm for the simplicity on the far side of complexity. So a lot of what we're doing is we're starting with something simple like this. You know, emergent marketing really started with some pretty simple stuff. Then we make it really complicated, and there's. It's just a mess. And the thinking then is, okay, what. What are the kernels of truth in this? What could we share with our audience that's timeless, that they could, rather than give them a fish, we could teach them how to fish with this so that they could understand a principle that will serve them well. And it's just that what. What our audience sees is us doing that every single day. That's just what we're doing constantly is complicating, simplifying, simplifying, complicating, and then sharing. And we created. We figured this out the other day. We created, I think, 115,000 words of free content last year. That's just us thinking out loud, like, for its emails, it's free courses.

That's what we're doing all the time. And then the courses become polished expressions of certain ideas. And really what you describe, you know, emergent marketing is a set of principles, as, you know, as are the three parts of a business. Awareness, engagement, and conversion. That was the. All of that came from going through enormous amounts of thought to realize that that was the irreducible what lies underneath that. Somebody could hear that and say, okay, I understand this differently now. So, yeah, long answer to a short question. That's the fun we have every day.

Well, it makes a lot of sense why you guys are partners then. Because that's how Matt and I. Well, we don't always go from complex back to simple, you know, in that whole like progression. But we will if we, if we have to go on stage somewhere. Our ideas, yeah forces us at that point. But the fact that you can kind of ping pong back between each other, it seems like you have a similar brain, but maybe specialties in different ways break down. If you can break down those three layers of emergent marketing a little bit further, like each of those just to kind of set the scene. Because I think that it was very important seeming right when I was digging into all the content. So what awareness is really everything that.

We do is the foundation systems theory. And the thing that I bought into. I've been two decades in this game running an agency and the thing I bought into earlier in my career was that optimization was a linear process. You send traffic to a landing page and you get some results. You get a certain click through rate, something happens. That's awareness. People don't know you exist. Now they do. So they click on something and they go there. And let's say your click through rate on Your ad is 10%. You think, okay, well I can make everything better if I go from 10% to 12%. That's linear thinking. And you just make your funnel and you make your steps and you do the math. And I think if it's you double, the math gets really wonky. And if you double improvements through a four part process, you 16x your outcome. And I bought into it. And it's a lie. It's not true. The world does not work that way. It should, it looks like it should, but the world actually is a complicated system. And what Andre and I independently stumbled on and now reinforce with each other all the time is that there are forces collaborating with each other in different ways. And those three forces and they all influence each other and none of them is sufficient on its own. So if you can imagine a business that's only awareness, so you get tons of traffic and that's it. No business, right? So if you could have. If I said to you tomorrow, do you want a million visitors to your site? And you say, yeah, absolutely. So okay, well here's the caveat. You can't opt in, you can't generate leads and you can't sell anything. You still want a million visitors. You say, well, why would I care? Right? So the second part is engagement. Somebody engagement is when your audience takes a step closer to you too, it doesn't have to be opting in, but that's really what we think about. The primary thing is that somebody raises their hand and says, this thing I've found that I've now been made aware of is interesting enough that I'm willing to take a step toward it. I want. And sometimes there are ways to do that where it's bright and shiny. Here's the PDF ebook, here's the whatever it is, here's the free video series. We've all seen it, but that's engagement. And engagement can just be the sharing of attention. Someone can read your 15,000 word article and that's engagement. Right? They're giving their time and then conversion is that moment where they become an actual paying customer. We have a philosophy of principle that we work on. We make customers before money changes hands. So we kind of violate our own rules a little bit, but that's not really that important. But if you pull any of those things out, you don't have a business. It doesn't work. It only works when all three are present and the thing that emerges, emerges as a result. The texture of those three things, none of them makes the business. It's how they relate. So if you have a really cheesy curiosity based headline ad that's clickbait and you send some people to a 15,000 word multi page pre sell site, it's not congruent, that gets really weird. But. But when you start thinking about how do they all relate together. So maybe you have a long form Facebook ad that's the first page of a multi page pre sell site that goes into a soap opera sequence email. Now there's this emergent property, that's where emergent marketing came from. Emergent things happen that no single part of the system creates. What creates them is all of the parts of the system working together. So we have that systems view instead of that reductionist linear view and that just mainly because it matches our experience of what we've seen over the last 20 plus years. All right, Andre, say something smarter now.

Yeah. So.

What'S happened as a result of that is that series has become our soap opera sequence. Every single prospect that comes into our world now has to go through the sequence of emails that unpacks that idea of the world through our lens and how we believe business should be done.

So at the end of that, you know, either someone's going to be pulled towards us, you know, it's like, oh yes, I want more of this. Stuff that all resonates with me. Or they're going to think yeah, these two guys are just fucking mad. So we can swear whatever hell you want.

Oh, sweet. Excellent.

Yeah, thanks.

Well it's interesting yeah. That you said because it's true that things are typically done in a linear fashion, but a world, I mean it's just like what you were saying. You go from start with something simple, then make it complex and then you simplify it. Again it seems like folks mainly just understand the simple and maybe not the complexities and all these components that are actually involved in marketing. Whereas you guys have thought deep on that and kind of said no. It's actually this bundle of a lot of stuff happening here, but it's just been simplified. Maybe that's where the linear thinking kind of comes from in a lot of senses with the funnels and all the steps that we see out there amongst the things.

Andre. Oh, go ahead Andre.

No, no, you first.

I mean I think something that we do intuitively that I think helps is that one of the questions we're subconsciously asking ourselves all the time when we get new information is like what are the implications of this new information? And going to the second, third, fourth, fifth order consequences of it. So probably the best example I can share, which I think we share in the five part emergent marketing series is last 2019 I was at Copy Chief live, we were at the speakers dinner and I got to sit next to Dean Jackson which is just a treat. Dean's just a genius. And Dean was really kind of going into into depth about something he shared publicly in other places, which is that when he's analyzed his clients sales performance, one of the things that he discovered is 80% of the sales happen after 90 days. So if you can imagine we get on day one, a thousand people opt in of the people who become customers after that initial engagement. According to Dean's research, 80% of them become customers after 90 days. So we can hear something like that, oh wow, that's interesting. But it could be what we love to call tbu. True, but useless. But when we start thinking about it is like well wait a minute, if that's true, how would we change our approach to things knowing that? And the reality is you have four times the value in your list after 90 days than you do in the first 90 days. So why in the world would you try to sell everybody in the first 90 days? You wouldn't do it. You would immediately. The first implication of Dean's research in that point is realizing that Marketing is a long game. Most people buy between months four and 18.

Once you know that. Okay, well I, you re engineer your thinking for the long game. You're not thinking, how can I get the most sales in the first 90 days. You're thinking, how can I get the most sales period? And most of them will happen later. And that's a lot of what we're doing is we're just, we're looking at something and we're asking ourselves what, what are the implications of this? If it's true, what does it mean? And that just leads us down so many rabbit holes. And that's where all the complexity forms. And then we pop up periodically and think, okay, now something, there's something there. We're pulling on a thread. And then we figure out what that thread is and we put some words around it. And as a writing coach we work with likes to say we put words in front of periods and off we go. That's really what we do. Words in front of periods.

Yeah. And then one of the other nuances that we do.

Is we love to.

Learn in public. So we always taking something simple, making it complex, and then trying to make sense of it. And then once we feel that we've made enough sense of it, we'll then write an email, send it out to everybody and say, what do you think? And you know, that that creates this interesting dynamic where we always sharing our best thinking with them. And then as a result of that, down the line, stuff happens. So we're always doing this with the audience, so they're always part of this, this journey with us. So we've had what we have.

Customers that have been with us for over a decade and some of them have been on this journey like the whole time. And you know, it's really has an impact. But then they'll, they'll, they'll get insights, so they'll have this, this emergent insight and they'll share it with us. And then it's like, didn't think of that. But yeah, that's, that's cool. And then that'll be reintegrated into our thinking.

That's, that's fascinating. And it, it's creating superfans. At the end of the day, it seems like, you know, if they're hanging around with you for a decade, they're not the type that are going to be, ah, who are these two guys send me emails every day or all the time and unsubscribe. It's like, no, you're actually taking them on this journey along the whole path. And it seems like you're, I mean they're coming in probably at the right time or you have all this content that allows people to kind of make a decision and like you said, kind of become a customer before or do a conversion, make a conversion before actually exchanging money. It seems like a lot of cases.

It makes everything easier because you're not trying to figure out.

If you try to have content that's free content, quote unquote, and then you have your paid content and then you're trying to always figure out what do you give people for free? It's so much extra thinking. So when we're creating things, we're just creating at the highest level of quality we can around a certain question. So earlier last year In February of 2020, we each did simultaneous. We like to put, create forcing mechanisms for ourselves. So we said, okay, you know, next week, starting next week we're going to do a 10 part free series. Andre did email. I did paid traffic every day for 10 days. This was like Thursday when he threw it out, you know, he was like, hey, you want to do this? And I was like, sure. He's like, okay, Monday, like wait a minute. But we do that. But when we're writing it, we're not thinking to ourselves like will do this. And then this is incomplete enough that they'll need to buy the course. There was no course at that point. It was, if I have 10 days, how can I share as much actionable knowledge without getting in the weeds? But how could I give somebody enough that they could get a result, shift their understanding, knowing that if we do that later, there will be some consequence that we can't even predict. And it happened. We had people posting in the comments, or people would send us an email and say, I just bought the traffic engine because I went through your free training and I added $50,000 to my business from just these three or four things. So after that I wanted to buy the course and it was like, excellent, because that's what it was for. You really should. And we turn away. It's shocking how many people will come in and will be ready. You can tell they're ready to buy. And it's like, no, go do the free thing first.

And if you mean it.

If someone looks at this as a tactic, it'll fail. But when you mean it, and it's just an expression of how you're working, it works because people sense that it's genuine. And that's really the reason. My biggest fear with Working with Andre before we work together is. I knew Andre by reputation, of course. We all do. I knew him as a customer and there was a certain Persona. I thought, okay, if he's really like that, I really like this guy. But I've worked with far too many people over the years. Names that I'm sure your audience knows where the person behind the scenes isn't. The person who's the person on the stage and the person behind the scenes, not the same person. And that was a huge fear and it was the greatest thing in the world. The biggest relief was when we started to actually work on a project together. And I realized, okay, this guy is exactly, exactly who I thought he was from his public Persona. And later, to deconstruct the wisdom of that, it was like, well, of course it's so much easier if we both just show up as ourselves.

If you like what we're doing, you're never going to have a bad surprise because there's no thing that's different later.

Right?

You don't come to the, we don't have a mastermind, but you don't come to the mega mastermind and find out, oh, they're jerks.

If you like what we're doing public facing, you're going to like what we're doing behind in courses and other things. Because that's just. It's the same.

I love that everything starts with a question, it seems like. And then, Andre, the challenge of like, hey, let's go do this 10 day thing next week, let's go. And it seems like it just creates enough excitement. Obviously new ideas are given to your audience and you never know what's going to come up. But obviously you're going to get feedback. So it's probably going to turn into some type of way that you can continue giving the right kind of value. Is that.

Yeah, totally.

What's the process look like there?

Yeah, well, sometimes we have to trick ourselves to actually do work like that because we love to collaborate on ideas and then we love to see what comes as a result of that. So, you know, and deadlines work so, you know, we have to create these self imposed deadlines sometimes. And then we surprise our audiences with, you know, hey, we've created this thing for you because we thought it was a cool idea. But yeah, that process was just because Sean and I were writing different courses. The only rules was, you know, each day we need to create this body of, you know, this, this lesson over a 10 part series. And every single day Sean needs to give me his lesson, I'll take my lesson and publish it live. So, so there was that, you know, we were publishing it live, emailing our. Our audience to say, you know, there's. There's the next one. So we had to show up and we had to do the work, even if it wasn't perfect or if it wasn't quite, you know, as it would be if we could spend an extra week on a lesson. So, yeah, we just did that and it turned out right. And yeah, that's.

Our collaboration when we, when we working on stuff jointly is slightly different.

One of us will. So we'll both have ideas. So we'll jump on a call, you know, just riff about ideas, create some.

Broad structure, and then.

One of us will take the lead and write that first thing, the first expression of what we think this thing can turn into, all this lessons, and then the next. And then they'll email. So Sean will stick it into Ulysses, of which I can see. And then when I wake up the. In the morning, I'll see what he's written and then I'll jump in and.

You know, add my contribution to that or vice versa. And that, that just seems to be the. Be the process that works really well for us because at the end of a week, or however long it takes for this back and forth to happen for a certain body of work, it's just that in thing that we end up with, you know, we could never have predicted that, you know, that's what we're going to generate. And it's difficult to.

Unpack that really without actually doing it and, you know, just experiencing what that's like, because I've worked, you know, since 2003, up until when Shauna and I started working together, which was.

A year ago, I was always working solo. So, you know, there was no collaboration. That was me. So it's easy to procrastinate and it's easy to, you know, just create a certain idea and then create an expression of that, put it out there. But there's a piece missing, which we didn't realize until we started to work together. And. Yeah, so we feel that the work that we're creating now is just so much better.

How do you guys decide what sort of rabbit hole, what sort of topic you want to start to dive down next? Because I'm on your list and you guys talk about a lot of different topics. One of my favorite topics that you guys talk about from time to time is the knowledge management topic. The whole smart notes and stuff like that. And there's some varying topics that you'll discuss out to your list. So I'm curious, how do you pick which rabbit hole you want to go down next?

That's a good question. How do we do that? We just had something that happened recently that's probably a good example of it. So there's. Again, it's emergent. I want to keep using the same word, but we had a Black Friday promotion for a course that for some reason, I don't know how this happened, but I heard something earlier. I thought we were approaching an entirely different than Andre did.

So I was coming in, and there was sort of this weird friction in there because I was like, I thought we were coming at it from a certain. So the perspective in the original course that Andre had created was based on, if he only had $1,000 left in the bank and had to start over with no list, no anything, what would he do? And then we were going to do an update to that course, and I thought we were taking that same perspective, and he was way farther along than that. He wanted to be something way better and different. So when the conversation happened, there was no. Like, there wasn't. There wasn't something that we came into the conversation saying, we're going to do this. But at some point in the conversation, I don't know which one of us blurted out that, well, what people really want to do is to be able to make a hundred thousand dollars. Like, that just got blurted out. And then there's. There's that pause where you're like, wait a second. What if this was how to go from 0 to $100,000 now? And then we could feel it. We're like, oh, that's actually it. That's what people want to be able to go from. They have a job to. They have this idea and they have enough money to have the lights on, pay the mortgage, put some food in their mouth, and let's just arbitrarily call that $100,000. Like, okay, neither one of us came into that conversation thinking about that. And then. And then it was just over and over. All these kinds of things happened. We were. We were coming at it from how we would do that. And Andre is a visual thinker. And he had put it in my note, and it was circular, and I. As I was looking at it, I was like, son of a bitch, that's a flywheel. And like, they. Each step leads to the next. And. And then, like, all. Like, so much emerged from that. It was all there. But. But it wasn't named. And that seems to be. That's a lot of what we do is that because we both consume a tremendous amount of it information and we're interested in stuff. We're always curious about stuff. So it's. And it gets back to improv again. Some will say, you know, hey, did you hear such and such podcasts like, oh yeah, I like the part about X. Yeah, that reminded me of this. Oh, that's really interesting. What if, what if we took that and applied it to the. And the next thing you know we've got a 10,000 email series or 10,000 word email series because we just unpacked that idea because it was fascinating. Like this is really fascinating. Let's run with it. That's, that's the truth of how it happened. We should come up with something that describes it way more elegantly. And that's funny that actually that's something that we do. I think is different. I was thinking about prior to this call, like, what's, like, what are some real differences? But this is a subtle difference. Most people I don't know pick up on this, including people who teach, which is the difference between descriptive and prescriptive. Most courses are prescriptive, like, hey, do this, do it in this order, like whatever. And then you go see how the people actually do their work. And it looks nothing like. Like that at all. So we try to balance descriptive, like this is what we actually do. This is what it looks like with prescriptive, which is knowing this is what we do. If we have a little distance and perspective, we would probably make it look a little better and it would look more like this. But the combination of those two things, some people just like to know what you do and they want to do that and others want you to, like, I don't care what you do, just tell me what I should do different. I think we find something between those two things that makes sense for us and just damn, we're curious about stuff.

Yeah, we, we're kind of lucky that, that our audience is attracted to the things that light us both up. So, you know, and it's also because we get to pick who we want as customers, you know, based on how we show up in the world. Well, both of us show up in a certain way and it's very specific and we have a certain.

Worldview and all of that is on the website. I mean, there's no secrets. So that's either going to pull people in or it's going to send them away. So we get to talk about PKM's and personal knowledge management because it's something that, that matters to us and it's what we use to take all of our crazy ideas and put them in a place that makes it easier to make sense of. So then, yeah, we just talk about that and then some people like it and, and you know, that's, that's great.

I think that's really. It's really cool because it's. It. I feel like that what you described, Sean, is what Matt and I do all the time. You know, it's like, oh, I just learned this new thing or this concept and it's like, what if we did this? It's like you kind of just take it a little step further. And our content comes out in the form of podcasts like this. So we get a lot of input from guys like you. And then we always have this banter section at the end of it. That's like another 20 minutes of matches. Pretty much doing what you just said.

We literally figure out what our business is through the course of podcasting. We do a once a month episode called Therapy Session where we don't have guests. It's just me and Joe talking. And like, most of our business ideas actually come out like while we're chatting live on the podcast. So.

And it takes people along with our journey, along with the guests that we have. And it's similar to what you guys have, is you're always relating these concepts or other people and, you know, courses, you might have solutions. So it's, it's really cool how it's all tied together and it, yeah, it's. It's this journey that we're taking folks on, and I'm kind of curious about the storytelling side of things. I know, Matt, you wanted to get through that. And you guys are both writers. Is there a different way that you guys approach how you tie all this together as a story and a journey, or are you guys following along pretty much the same concepts together?

I can't wait to hear your answer to this. This is a fascinating question. This is how we learn about each other as we do podcasts.

Really?

That's what's been going on?

Well, I mean, both of us love to write, and writing is our primary means of communicating with the world and our audience, and specifically me, because I feel very uncomfortable doing video and audio. Sean's more comfortable with that. So it's just I had set up my stall early on that I'm only going to use email and the written word.

So, yeah, I think that's just. It's a lot easier to write an email that's kind of like a story, just telling a story to somebody else that happens to be an audience of thousands of people. So I think that's how the whole idea started and it just kind of evolved from that. It wasn't anything.

You know, like premeditated. So.

Because story matters and it's so important to the work we do. Both of us have story coaches now, so we can at least understand what we're doing at a more granular level. Because it's really easy to just do something but not quite know why you do a certain thing. It's just. And if somebody asks you, it's like, yeah, I don't know, I just do it. So there was a lot of that in the beginning. So there's no particular framework that we follow to create stories because, you know, what we're doing is we talking about the business stuff and the marketing stuff that we do. So I don't know if you have any specific questions that we can maybe unpack.

Here's a little more context for you guys. So when we were preparing for this interview today, we went and read your end of 2020 email.

Right?

You guys sent an email, right? At the very end of 2020, we read that email and then we proceeded to click into every single link in that email and then read like every article in all the email series. And it's just so damn engaging.

Right? Like we just, we got mind map followed later.

Yeah, we just got like sucked into all of the emails and the various stories you guys were telling. And I think we're, we're kind of curious to try to dissect that a little bit more. Like what makes this stuff that you guys put out so engaging? Where you. The emails I get from you, when I get them, they're one of my like non negotiables. I'm going to open this email. Like, don't even read the subject line. When I see the from line, I open those emails.

Right.

So I'm curious, what do you guys think is different about. About that than almost like everybody else who's doing email?

Well, you go first. I got a couple of things I'll think about.

Okay, Sean can, can do the good stuff. I was just going to say that.

No pressure. Thanks, Andrew.

You know, it's probably less sexy than you think or than you want to believe so many times. It's just Sean and I just want to share stuff and it just, it's expressed in a certain way. That when you deconstruct it later on.

It'S something that we don't do. So we're approaching it from a different angle and we're not trying to figure out what is this thing that we want to create other than at the end of 2020, it's, let's share links to all the most valuable stuff that was more specific. But even then, it's like we weren't quite sure what was going to.

Come from that. We were just going to share all the things, point to different places. And.

When you do that, and we do that every single day and we're putting stuff onto the website, but we don't always tell people where something is and we don't put it necessarily put it into the menu system, so it's easy to find. We like to make certain pieces of information not hard to find, but when people find it, they have an experience. So we purposefully create these rabbit holes that that email basically pointed to different places that people can find stuff. But you can't go to the website and see, like a nice big list of things to read. So that probably didn't answer your question specifically. So hopefully Sean's going to have something.

I said, no pressure.

I think there are three ways I'd answer that question. First, Michael Pollan, the author. Michael Pollan did an interview with Tim Ferriss and he talked about when he writes books, he's not trying to be. He doesn't try to write a book from the perspective of I'm an authority on X and let me tell you, the reader, what you need to know. What he does instead is he goes on a journey that interests him and then tells his audience about the journey. It sounds like it's very similar, but it's not at all. So a lot of what we're doing is what Michael Pollan is doing, which is we're on a journey. And then we are stopping at certain inflection points, like end of the year or whatever, and saying, okay, like what? What has happened lately that's been interesting. And then that pairs with the second question, which is we use all the time, which is really trying to understand. It's the who cares question. And so often we'll have an idea for all. I'll be working on a draft of an email and there'll be some friction. It's not quite there. It feels like a knife fight. And I'll ask myself. I'm like, who cares?

And it's a weird dialog with myself where I'll answer that question. And I'll ask it again. Who cares about that? And you smash up against that question. And finally. And almost I'm like, pissed, which is. It's hysterical because I'm pissed at myself, but I'm, like, pissed. And I blurt something out or write it with a pencil or something, like. And I'll write something like, almost in anger, like it's because. And then I write a sentence. I'm like, that. That's the thing that I've been looking for. And then I just go back to the beginning. Or we go back to the beginning and we start there because we've figured out that second most important thing, which is, why is this important or valuable to our audience? Like, with crystal clarity, like, what is the value that we can create here? That's. That's so important.

And I think the third thing we do, which is my favorite. And I almost don't want to say this publicly, that I'm going to do it.

It's a secret, because this is.

This is a secret.

We'll cut this part, right?

Yeah. We'll edit this. Edit this out.

Okay.

We often will. When we are explaining something, we're doing the thing that we're explaining as we do it, and some percentage of people get it. And it's the craziest aha moment. Like, we did an email. I can't remember when it was. I think it was the fall enrollment, but it was an email about storytelling. And the whole first. The whole email is about how you can find ideas to create stories with examples of them. But the email is. It's 10 examples of us doing the thing that we're talking about. So when you're reading it, you're. You're getting the experience of reading it and learning it, but it's actually happening to you at the same time. And at some point, someone gets that. And it's not a like, oh, that's interesting. It's an oh, shit moment where someone gets that realization. They push back, and they're like, wait a minute. They're like, that's like, I just experienced it. There are a couple of. If you. If you want to reverse engineer, if you want to have your audience actually reverse engineers, but it feels visceral. There are two ways they can do it that are really good. One is a. It's a TED video. I don't remember the name of it, but the guy. It's like seven minutes or six minutes, but the guy is an illustrator in the video is about finding the face of Leonardo da Vinci. So that is, that's. That is a perfect example of how to reverse engineer an aha moment. Because what he does is he goes through and says, okay, we don't have any known paintings of Leonardo da Vinci, so how would we find them? And then he says, well, or self portraits, right? So he said, here's all the. Here are all the portraits. And these. First thing we can do is remove the women and they do it. But he goes through this process and then at the end he comes down to. And he points that they've winnowed it down to three. They look at the chronological order and he points to the screen and he says, I give you the master himself, Leonardo da Vinci. And you're like. You can feel it in your gut. You're like, oh my. Like it all came together. And another one for the. Which others may. I don't want to give away the punchline, but the. There's a Graham Norton interview with. It's like seven minutes, eight minutes. Graham. Graham Norton and Kevin Costner. And Kevin Costner tells the story about one of his friends who was a writer. And when the punchline of that happens, you'll stand up and if you appreciate writing, if you appreciate a good story, you'll come right out of your chair because it's just, it's that. And that's what we're trying to. Often engineers. When someone has a moment where they just go shit like that, like it grabs and we don't get. We obviously don't do that every time, but that's. That's what we're aiming for. And because we're always aiming for that even when we, we miss. We tend to miss pretty big though. And we're like. We didn't quite get there, but we still, you know, we got a triple. We didn't knock it out of the park, but we're on third base.

So are there scenarios where you're like mid email sequence, but you don't even know how the email sequence is going to end yet you're kind of still in the middle of it? Or does the. Do the emails every single time.

Every single time tell everybody?

Yeah, I mean we've.

It's.

I love this story of about a. There was a. Someone commented for the traffic engine. Actually it was really interesting. Somebody commented for the original version of the traffic engine, the original launch, and said like just kind of deconstruct. It's like, ah, it's so amazing what you've been doing. I'm ready to buy and all this. And, and she was trying to figure out and she had thought she had figured out like what we had done. And sometimes I remember, Andre, you got a video from somebody or an email with like this long video explaining to us what they thought we had done to create this experience. And it's also, I always feel kind of bad going back to him being like, we, we just wrote it organically one day ahead. Like that's, we just, all the, all.

The, all the magic just disappears.

It's like, it's like everything that you thought. But you know, we, we come in with a theme, we come in with some guiding principles that it needs to be independently valuable. Like if somebody goes through the emails and never buys a single thing that we're leaving them far better off than we found them in exchange for their attention. And attention is precious. So we treat, we treat their attention as being precious, that it's an honor. We don't just say it's an honor to have had your attention. We mean it. Like we know we have thousands of people reading this and that's collectively, that's incredible. So we treat it with such profound respect that we, we make our decisions around that and not to persuade. I mean we, we do crazy stuff, we give stuff away on the last day of our enrollments to prevent people from buying who shouldn't. We do insane stuff. But it's all in service to that larger idea that we're, we're optimizing for happy customers and happy customers and you don't have to be a happy customer tomorrow. That's good. Buy something two years from now. But between now and then, you're in the tribe. We're going to treat you like we're going to treat our best friends genuinely. And if you buy something later, great. If you don't, I hope we left you better off than when you came in. And that's how that's who we are, that's who we, and that's who we want to be professionally.

There's two breeds of writers. I don't know if you've heard of the term pantsir. So you get plotters and pantsers. Plotters are somebody like Liz Gilbert, J.K. rowling, where they'll map out the entire book or the entire series in huge amount of detail so they know exactly what's going to happen next. And then all they need to do at some point is then just write it. Then there's people like Stephen King and Don Winslow and there's many, many world class authors. And it's like, I don't know. It's just. All I need is one sentence or one idea, and then they'll just start to write, and that story emerges for them just like it does for a reader that's reading the book. It's, you know, it's almost the same. So Sean and I find that we can plan certain things loosely that we can't go very, very detailed. Like, we can't go down to the little tiny bits and pieces. That's just not how we wired. So we found that if we throw ourselves into these weird.

Places where we just have to show up and write and just create something, and what comes out of that, in that moment each. Each time that we then publish it is just. It's new. It's something that we didn't. That we hadn't necessarily planned for other than having. Having a certain idea. And, you know, those ideas for us many times come from morning pages. You know, Sean's been journaling morning pages for many years, and I've. I've done so more recently, but many times I'll take photos of my morning pages and stick it at the basecamp to just to share insights I've had. And then Sean will just buzz me on WhatsApp. Excuse me, that's my printer kicking into action.

He'll buzz me on a WhatsApp about, like, some. Some crazy idea that he had on page three of his morning pages. And then we'll just run with these ideas. And later, sometimes they. They turn into emails or turn into courses or turn into elements of a course. Can't always plan for it.

Yeah. Now, this is fascinating because it seems like you just. Like the way you guys collaborate normally is you start with something simple, a concept, and it gets complex, and then it gets simple. And it seems like that's maybe the writing process as well. You start with a simple concept, and internally, maybe it's a little bit more complex because you're working it out. You're passing it through filters. Like, who cares? Why am I even. You know, why are they. Why do they even want to read this? Where is it going to go? And then you simplify it through the writing, and then it seems like it's this, I guess, flywheel, because I know you're all about the flywheels, too. Is like it's got this momentum that carries itself through because you kind of have that traction with the writing and connection to the reader at the same time in real time.

And I think there's another. I'm trying to. As I'm. As we're having this conversation. I'm trying to make sure we don't leave anything out because it's always hard when you listen to somebody and if you engage with the material and they. And they gave you 90% of it, and you're like, oh, what was the other thing?

And I think something we may have inadvertently let out. And this is just from my perspective, Andre's perspective on this may be totally different, but our writing starts. Like, for me, when I'm writing the first thing, I'm writing for the person whose opinion matters most to me. So that's a factor in this. So if I sit down and just because of the nature of timing, Andre's six hours ahead. So often, just the way timing will work is I need to have something for him to read in his morning where he has a much longer period of time so that we're not delayed. So I'm writing the first draft of something. Even though it's a first draft and all that, I'm still writing for the person. The first person who's going to read it is the audience is most important to me, which. That has a very important effect. It's not just like, hey, let's get our ideas on paper. It's like, well, I'm getting my ideas on paper. We've had a conversation or whatever, we have a theme, but I'm putting my ideas on paper for my thought partner, co conspirator, but really for the person I'm writing for Andre first and saying, here's kind of what. Here's where I'm thinking. And we use lots of abbreviations. Like, one of our abbreviations is to L thinking out loud. So it might, you know, there might be like some part in there. Like, I'm just to L on this one. I'm not. I'm not sure about this. And then, then he knows what that shorthand is, which is like, okay, this isn't fully refined. Or if, if it, if it doesn't say to L, then he knows, like, this is me bringing. You know, this is. This is my best. You know, we have other. And we have other parts of the collaboration that are interesting too, which is another abbreviation, which is npo, which means no pride of ownership. Where it's. I've. I've written what I can. I'm handing it to you. I know it will be better when it comes back, but anything that you see in it, anything run with, do go anywhere you want with it. And sometimes that means we pull whole. Whole stuff out. Sometimes we start over it is, but it's not. There's no ego. Which is really weird because we have two people who care so much about the craft of writing, yet when we, we write together, there is a complete lack of ego. No one protects his stuff.

It's.

It's weird. I wouldn't, I don't know that I would even believe it if someone described it to me. I like, yes, bullshit. That's not how it actually works. Totally how it works. It's just two guys really writing, I think, writing for each other first. Andre's gonna come on and be like, I can't stand that guy. I never write for me for that joke. But, you know, from my perspective that's, you know, I have an audience of one from my first draft. Like, can I explain my best thinking to my, my co conspirator here and what's going to happen as a result? Or if I read the second version, like, same idea. Like he's created something. What can I bring my absolute best to it to make. To do, make it a little bit better to contribute to make something. And what's weird is when we go back and look at emails, I have no idea who wrote Love that's cool. We wrote this. Yeah, it's wild. Yeah's answer in case he contradicts me. I can't stand that guy.

Well, it's, it's, you know, we're actually doing this, this, this week. So Friday we decided that we're doing a, doing a newsletter. We aren't sure what's going to be in the newsletter yet. So, you know, it's, it's the end of Monday for me. It's, you know, it's Sean's morning or afternoon. So we've only got a few days left to come up with the idea, then write the email and get it ready for Friday, which is when we're going to hit the send button. So that's the only thing that we know right now. At the same time as we also.

Have a third part of a lesson for a course that we busy doing live. And we've told everybody last week that they're getting this lesson on Friday as well. So we've got these two things that are going to happen together between now and Friday.

Whereas the newsletter part, we've got no idea what's going to go in there yet. And the course is what we know what's going to go in there, but it still needs to be written. So.

That'S what we do is we just make life difficult for ourselves.

Well, you're creating deadlines. I think that is because that's what Matt and I too is like. If there's not a deadline, if we're not sprinting, like creating these little micro sprints for each other, then our best work doesn't come out. It's kind of like our podcast as well. Like, we contain our time. We usually record multiple in a day. Today it's just you guys, but, but either way, you know, we, we kind of, and we want to prepare just enough to, you know, for ourselves and our audience, but really it's, it's us as well. And it's. I feel like just with enough preparation, enough, you know, we have a deadline, we know when we're going to talk. No one is. It's just good enough to get the momentum started. And it seems like the writing process is very similar. And it's like this ping ponging of ideas. I think that's super powerful with partners too. It's not having that ego. Probably the hardest part on the outside when you're not doing it, but when you're collaborating with the right person, it just kind of flows.

I think it's worth drawing attention to the fact that not everybody thinks in this way. Some people do and some people don't. But it's okay because there's no right or wrong way to do this. I mean, certain people need to plan. They love spreadsheets, they love structure, and that's okay for them. They should plot out everything, plan everything, and then just go with it. And then what emerges as a result of that is going to be better for them. For us, we just, you know, this is the way that works for us where it's a bit more improv. But we, but we have the ideas already. We just need to mix them in a way that's going to resonate with our audience and ourselves.

Yeah, I've got one last question, then we can go ahead and wrap up. I'm curious, how much are you doing with email automation and segmentation these days? Because. So I'll tell a super quick story. So one of the first times I sort of got introduced to Andre was when we were promoting something for Brian Moran. It was like a, a Facebook ad course or something like that. I actually don't even remember what they. What it was at this point, but I, me and my partner at the time, Bradley Will, we were number two on the leaderboard, and number one on the leaderboard was Andre. And when we met with Brian Moran in, in person and asked him about the Promotion, I think he said Andre sold about three times as much as we did. And we were in second place.

Right.

And so when I finally met Andre, I was like, yeah, we were emailing to I think 100,000 people. How many were you emailing to? And I think you, I don't remember the exact number, but it was a few thousand. And when we asked you how you were doing, it was, it was all about the segmentation. And we're like, man, this guy, he generated three times as many sales off of 2,000 emails. And we mailed to a hundred thousand people. And really the trick behind it was you were just sending it to only the people that showed some interest. How much of that are you still doing in your business? How much of the is segmentation and how much is just, here are our ideas and let's just put it out to everybody.

It's definitely part of what we do. It's really important for us that we only share with people.

That want to hear a certain thing. So although broadly speaking, our audience is into marketing, which is why they're here in the first place, that doesn't mean that they're going to be interested in every single thing that we have to say. So we always make it a point of respecting their attention. And, you know, stuff happens and you know, people lose jobs or, you know, weird things happen. And even if somebody would be interested in that moment in time, then they maybe they're not. So instead of just presuming that everyone's going to always be interested and then just emailing everybody, it's important for us to do those that segmentation. So I think like the quick version is we would, we would write a single email. The more complex version is we'll write a series of emails that unpack a certain idea about something that's, that's going to happen. And then it's always, you know, if you want to hear about this thing, you know, raise your hand by clicking the link. So it's. So it's really simple automation. There's nothing complex about it other than it's been, you know, that we're intentional about asking them first, having them raise their hand. Most people say no. So, you know, their behavior is they don't click the link, but then there's, then there's a segment of people that do. And then everything else happens only to those people. And then after the fact, we will then take all these emails and all this stuff because it's so valuable, and we will put it on the website somewhere for people to find. So nothing's available. Wasted. You know, we, we love recycling work that we've created. So nothing's ever done in isolation, just for one, one moment in time.

So yeah, that's, that's the simple version. But yeah, you can, you can get pretty complex with the, with the automation.

I think the automation reflects the intent is what really is incredibly important. So we did a, we had a fall promotion, fall enrollment for three courses. And you know, you know, a lot of people would say like we'll just let all of your customers know, right. Everybody gets in, we go through it. But instead of doing that.

And this is sort of a, this is a reasonably typical example but we'll often do like we did a Friday email and said, hey, this, this thing's going to happen next week. We're going to, there's going to be, we're going to talk about this idea we have called the durable business. You know, what makes a business long lasting. And we sort of defined it and so we going to do a five part series next week. There is nothing to buy in that five part series. It's just, it's all value. You can ignore it. We're sort of telling them what's coming, but it's all value. And by the way, at the end of that series we're going to then do another five parts and those five parts are going to connect the dots with the courses that we offer which are going to be open for enrollment. In these particular days, if you do nothing, you won't get those other, the extra five emails. You won't know anything about the enrollment. You don't have to. We're going to give value and only if you raise your hand are we going to cross that threshold into talk to connecting the value to our courses. So in week one, if you read all five of those emails, there is no reference to our courses. You can't buy anything. It's just a complete series on five elements of a durable business or defining what it is and how those parts work together and why that's important. You could print it out and be better off with that. But if you, if you want to know more and if you wanted to go deeper about how we specifically think about those components, that's going to be timed with when we're going to be actually talking about our courses and we're going to be opening enrollment. So you have to raise your hand and sometimes we make it really hard, but we, it's not a like hey, don't do anything and you'll get those emails. It's like, no, no, no, you have to do things, you have to raise your hand and once in a while people will reach out and say, I totally, I didn't get to your emails fast enough and I missed that promotion. You know, can I, can I go? Can I get them now? Can you send me those? Fine. But that it's counterintuitive because if you look at the numbers of your entire list and then, and think, okay, I'm going to cut this down by 90% like and only send promotional stuff to 10% at a time, that can't work. And what ends up happening is you save, you're respecting the attention of everybody. So often that, that 10% or 15, whatever it is, who raise their hand are so much more engaged because they've said this is right for me right now.

It's so counterintuitive and so impactful and I don't see anybody else doing it.

So no, really, it's true. And then that's what I was going to say. Everyone's got the megaphone right now and has had for a long time just yelling at everyone. And that's where we've been kind of slapped around by a couple of email folks on this show too. Prior to you guys coming. Like, oh yeah, segmentation. That's, that's like number one thing, you know, is speak to the right person at the right time.

Well, think about like what, what's being said. It's like, okay, yelling loudly isn't working well anymore. So let's yell louder.

Right?

Wait a second. Like when you say it out loud you're like, well wait a minute, that it almost doesn't make sense. So it's like, okay, well everybody's yelling loudly now. So if you, if you want to stand out, if you're in a room and 10 people are yelling, how do you stand out? You're the person in the corner is being quiet automatically. People, people see what's different in situations where, meaning we're pattern recognizing creatures and if everybody is yelling, yelling, yelling for our attention, eventually we, that's overwhelming. But what you will notice is the one person who's not yelling. So now what will happen is everybody will start doing a great job at this and we'll have to be the guys. That's it.

So you're saying that adding more emojis to the subject line isn't the answer?

Well, I think it is. I just think might be, it might be the wrong question. It is certainly the right answer.

Wrong kind of contrast we're looking for here.

Yeah, that's right.

Yeah, It's.

You have to get the right emojis, I guess, is really the question. I'm just trying to imagine a situation where we send it. Actually, Andre uses emojis, so maybe we. I don't even know. Maybe we send emojis and emails. I've never. Two things I've never done in my entire life. I've never used an emoji and I've never taken a selfie, so wow. Thing I just laugh at all the time.

That's actually pretty impressive.

That is very impressive.

At this point. It's like a badge of honor. Never use an emoji.

You can't.

Occasionally I accidentally click the thing and I'm nervous. I'm like, oh, God, don't hit send.

And it's official. It's in the universe.

Yeah, that's right. It's out there.

Yeah. I'll be tempted to add an emoji to some of the emails that Sean writes, because he should. I then publish it.

Emoji by privacy.

Ruin your reputation. Well, let's wrap it up. We already went over time, and I apologize for that. And, Andre, thanks for being on here and doing the video thing too, because I know it's not your jam. So. Big problem.

You're welcome. And it looks like I've got all this, like, weird lighting that's happening now because it's. Because it's dark outside.

It actually looks really cool.

I've been nerding out on the lighting the whole time because I just set up all these LED lights that are, like, timed up in my house. I'm like, I think his is changing to the time. Maybe not. I don't know. It could be.

It's actually. It's just a reflection of his lava lamp that you can't see.

Oh, how cool.

His beanbag chair and his lava.

He's bringing it back. Well, how do. How do folks dive in? Obviously you send so much gold out there, and they can kind of go back in the archives and all that, but how can folks start this adventure with you guys? Yeah.

Everything we do is published to tiny little businesses. Dot com. That's. That's. That's the plural version.

And at the moment, all the courses are closed, so there's nothing to buy. But there's. But there's tons of stuff to read that's perfect.

And there's somewhere. I don't know, it's probably a couple hundred thousand words of free content on there. So just Go poke around. You know, if you're interested in Traffic, there's stuff on Traffic. If you're interested in lead gen, there's stuff on Legion, stuff about conversion, writing great emails. But just go play. Go play in the sandbox for a little while while we figure out how to sell some stuff later.

It's a freeing feeling, though, knowing, like, hey, there's so much stuff out there and, oh, there's nothing for sale at the end of this, and only if you choose to be. Maybe sometime. So, yeah, definitely. We'll link everything up in the show.

People will come. Yeah, the right people will come back, and we'll find that whenever, weeks, months, years from now, that. That thing that they heard, they're ready for it. You know, we're. We're not going anywhere. So when the customer's ready, we're going to be here doing our thing. As crazy as it looks, I love it.

That's how it's done. All right, guys, appreciate your time. It has been an honor, and you're welcome. We definitely. Yeah. Thank you.

It'll be fun.

All right, Joe, I have a question for you.

What is it?

Would you rather.

Oh, God.

Wear adult diapers the rest of your life or never wear underwear again? Oh, that's easy.

Definitely no underwear.

Yeah, I was gonna say the same thing.

Yeah, Come on. Come on.

Although adult diapers would be nice during podcast days.

I was gonna say, I'm like, I probably should have used the restroom before we hit record again, but. Nah, I'm just gonna keep drinking my coffee and pounding my water.

I don't know how many times we're in the middle of a podcast and I'm like, from the waist down, dancing.

Oh, dude. I was dancing when I came into your house today, though. That was different kind of dancing, though. I was freezing cold.

Yeah.

Riding my bike to your house.

That's true. You were. You were like, feel my hands, feel my face. I'm freezing. I'm dying over here.

It was blue. It is in San Diego. I know I'm a wimp, but didn't have any layers on and.

Yeah. Yeah.

So it's been the cold.

So some context around. Would this. Would you rather. We got these things called Pod Decks.

Who.

They're. They're not a sponsor.

They're not.

But I have been chatting with the founder of this company on Instagram and in Clubhouse lately, and I thought this would be kind of a cool concept to every once in a while throw into, like, our outros or, you know, with some of our Interview guests. But also on Clubhouse, right? Like, start a clubhouse room and be like, hey, we're playing. Would you rather. And just, like, start randomly pulling cards and letting people in the audience, like, answer the questions and just have some fun on Clubhouse.

Yeah. Okay, I'm gonna read another one. All right.

You want to do it? Because the original idea for this was I was gonna read one at the beginning, then we were gonna sort of riff on our awesome episode with Andre and Sean.

You know what? I'm gonna. I'm saved.

Save that one for the end.

I have one in my hand. I have not read it yet, so I'm going to wait. So, yeah, wait. Wait for a little bit longer. We're going to do another. Would you rather. Rather. And maybe think of. What would you do? Yeah, what would you do?

What would you do between adult diapers or no underwear at all?

See, the thing is, like, I love it.

I'm pretty. Like, if the option was only wear adult diapers or no underwear at all all the time, that'd be awesome. Because on podcast days, I'd wear adult diapers, and I'd just be like, halfway through an interview, and I'd be like, hey, Joe.

Joe, no, look what I got.

And I'll just stare at you in the eyes. Stare at you in the eyes. Right in the middle of it. Right in the middle of a podcast, I'd be like, all right, I'm good. I'm done.

Just do it in the middle of an interview. You're like, look at that glimmer in Matt's eye. It was 36 minutes into the conference. Oh, that's the moment. That's when it happened. Yeah.

When we finally get Dan Ryan on the podcast, I'll wear adult diapers for that one. So I could stare him in the eyes while I take a leak.

Well, Dan's always asking for his name to be called because we have to pay our royalties. Well, there you go, Dan.

Yeah, well, and this time, it's royalty here. Yeah, dad, you got your shout out, and it's in the context of adult diapers. Congratulations.

Go. You doing life. Good.

So Andre and Sean.

All right. Yeah.

Let me grab my clipboard over here.

Yeah, you do that. Make it official. All right. Andre and Sean. I was. Matt and I were. So we've been following Andre for a long time, but it was leading up to this episode, this interview. Matt and I were both like, dude, yeah, this is gonna be fun. And I've been really excited, and I went way deeper down the rabbit hole than Normal, like prior to this episode, because Sean was someone that we didn't really know much, really anything about too much other than reading some emails and stuff like that. But, dude, the blend of them and their thinking and their skills of writing and the lack of ego when it comes to content creation, but the fact that they can just ping pong ideas and actually present them to the world in this way is fascinating. And they know marketing, like so much deeper than most ever probably will experience. And they're trying to share that. Yeah, we got a little smidgen out in this episode, huh?

Yeah, no, I feel like this is another one. I feel like I'm saying this a lot lately, but I feel like this is another one where we could have gone two hours with them because we're doing our jobs. We had so much we wanted to talk about. I actually had more notes of the things that we didn't get to talk about. I even asked him more questions after we stopped hitting record and went, damn it, we should have got that on record.

Look at my notes. Yeah, I just wrote stuff down. Yeah.

But I mean, I. So I went a little ways back with Andre. I met him in Baltimore after. So I kind of told a real quick story about how he kicked our asses on a leaderboard several years back. Well, because I was in the top five on that leaderboard with my partner Bradley at the time, we got invited to a Mastermind in Baltimore and they covered a lot of the expenses for us to be out there at that Mastermind. And since Andre was number one, he was at the Mastermind too. And so I got to spend, you know, a weekend, like a two or three day weekend hanging out with. With Andre and Brian and a big group of people that were all there. And. And then Andre and I have sort of loosely stayed in touch via email ever since then. But Sean, you know, I didn't know the story of how Sean got involved or why Sean got involved or, you know, what, what Sean brought to the table while working with Andre. So this, that was all sort of new information to me. And I mean, I found it really interesting. Like Sean was a customer and Andre and Sean really hit it off. And I think Andre, I think my impression is that he likes working with other people and having some sort of collaborator. And it just seemed like a perfect fit.

Yeah. No, and there's. It's. I'm trying to find a note because something you just said is probably, oh, here we go. Yeah, it's an emergence. So they talked about emergent marketing and you know, there's. You should really. Everyone should definitely, if you're still with us in this episode, go to the Show Notes page. And we should have links to some of these emails that we read and their content, because most of their content's an email form, but they publish it also as blog posts. Sometimes they can condense all that stuff. Definitely go through how they define emergent marketing, even outside of what you just learned here, because part of that is just emergence, as how they define it is when multiple parts of a system come together and create something that's different or better than the sum of the separate parts. I really think that's probably why Sean and Andre are working together, because it seems like they. Yeah. Sean has this, you know, like, the traffic side. The awareness, which is part of their thing. And. Yeah. With them blended and the way that.

Their relationship is the definition of emergent marketing.

Exactly. It's perfect. And I guess that's us, too. We just have never defined those types of things, but, like, we've done separate stuff for so long, but we always kind of helped each other.

Yeah.

But now combined, we can, you know, sit in the seats that we're really good at, but also combine forces and. Yeah. It's just really cool. Yeah.

Well, so one takeaway, and then one thing that I'm sort of envious, sort of jealous of. So big takeaway for me from this one was when they were talking about how 80% of sales come after 90 days.

Yeah.

Like, how many people. How many? Especially in the digital marketing space, how many digital marketers are out there going from Facebook ad to lead magnet to asking for the sale? Right. That's like most of us.

Yeah. And like, 80, 90%, probably.

And if you're not doing that, you're probably going. Yeah. You know, there's a lot of that advice, like, you don't. You don't go for. For a home run on the first date. Right.

You.

You try to get to first base first. Right.

Let's be honest. It's. It's. If they're doing it or not, like, they're probably just not sending emails, you.

Know, but, you know, like, a lot of people like to say, like, you know, you're asking to get married on the first date when you first, like, get introduced to them. Most people go for the sale, and then you have all of these marketers out there who are saying, yeah, you don't go for the sale on the first day they get introduced to you. And most of those marketers are going for the sale. On day two or three.

Right.

Like, they're going, don't go for the sale on the first day. They send two days of value, and then the third day is asking for the sale. It's, you know, if you look at the data that they're talking about, 80% of sales come after 90 days.

Yeah. So that was what Dean Jackson saying that. So, like, Dean Jackson seen a lot of stuff. Yeah. There's a lot of merit to what that stat is coming from.

Yeah. So, I mean, like, it seems to make a lot of sense to put a lot of effort into giving as much value as you can in the beginning of the relationship. And we covered this a lot with George Bryant, and we covered this a bit with the email marketing guys. Robin Kennedy.

Yeah, right.

But it makes a lot of sense that when somebody gets on your list for the first handful of days or even weeks and, and potentially even months, you're just providing value, value, value, value, value, value. And then when finally there's an offer that's ready to be made, you know, you've created so much goodwill among your audience that that offer is going to be infinitely more effective.

And there's a quote, and I just want to read this really fast, that. That was from one of their emails. Right. On this point is basically everyone talks about the money is in the list. And it's like, no, the money's not really in the list. Yeah, it's in there, but it's actually the money is in the authentic relationships you build with people on your email list. Yeah, that's it.

And here's a theme. So a theme that's popped up, Right. We talked about this with Pat Flynn. We talked about this with Rand Fishkin. We've talked about this today again with Andre and Sean is this theme of things that don't scale and building relationships with your audience at levels that, that aren't really that scalable.

Right.

And I feel like there's sort of an underlying theme here with these guys in that same way.

Right.

Especially in their sort of philosophy of when we do send emails, we're sort of drilling down to the ideal customers for these emails and then only sending them to those people. And those are the ones that make the sales. Right. You feel like you've got a. A real deep relationship with these guys because of all the segmentation they do, because of all of the really tailoring of their sequences that they do. And I. And that sort of theme seems to keep on popping up over and over and over again of like building authentic relationships. But not trying to do it in a way where you're just trying to put thousands of people on your list all at the same time and then sell them something immediately. And then it, like most people seem to treat these email subscribers is almost like disposable, faceless sort of assets that they're collecting. Right. Where in reality, every single person on your list is a human being who has emotions and who's struggling right now with something and who's excited right now about something. And, and, and, and by figuring out how to, like, narrow in on the people and do the things that don't scale and segment your list to tailor to the exact right people and, and. And tailoring your content and, and being authentic yourself. All of this seems to be kind of culminating along, you know, from all of these past few episodes.

Yeah. I think it's a theme we're starting to experience. Like, I'm looking over your shoulder. Yeah. The. Some old writing on a whiteboard, and it's kind of like what you're talking about. I wrote down connect, collaborate, and refine. This was like, for one of the therapy sessions we did.

Yeah.

But, like, I really feel like that's what the theme is for this year, at least for us so far. It seems that way. The three podcasts we recorded are all about building super fans and building solid relationships. It's segmenting. It's using data that people are giving you or that you can find so you could actually speak intelligently and connect with the right people at the right time and not get the megaphone out and blare that thing to level 11 and go, what up?

I stop.

Like, no, hey, none of that going on. Like, I really feel like this year is build the tribe here. It's the time to connect, and you can do that in so many modalities. And I think we're starting to see those trends pop up through the podcast here. And it's probably us selecting those people because they're coming to us at the right time. But I really feel like that's probably the most powerful thing anyone can do right now. I mean, you could have done it before, too, but now more than ever, their whole what the durable business is one of their products. And it's all about how to start a business right now. I mean, you can't buy it right now, actually, because it's not for sale.

No. But the free email sequence breaks it down pretty damn well already.

And you should go through it for sure. The durable business. And again, in the show notes, find some Links.

But with that, within a year, the goal is to make a hundred thousand dollar business out of what they're teaching you. And we talked about the thousand true fans concept in the Pat Flynn episode, you know, and how if you do that really you could just put a, I guess a tag, a price tag on those names and say, okay, every month you're going to get paid roughly a hundred dollars per person or true fan you have. And if you have a thousand of them, you have $100,000 business. I mean apply that concept to here with the durable business and everything they put out there. It's just connecting with the right people and trusting in your systems and your messaging and the content out there that you gonna be fine. Like, you don't need to push, push kind of all this pressure. It's like talk to the right people and eventually they will buy. You don't need to pressure them into a bunch of upsells all from day one or second one. Yeah, it's like dating and then like it's like worse than getting married. It's like, let's just do our whole life in this 10 minute experience of going through a sales funnel, you know what I mean? Like, it's like let's just jump to like the furthest possible experience we can do. That's not how we work.

Yeah, it's interesting. I'm thinking about this and there's actually when this episode comes out, I believe this is our fourth. No, I don't remember what episode this has been this year. So another episode that came out before this one, but in 2021 is the.

Salome Shellac episode. I tried to say it too fast and then just screwed up my talking. Yeah, I don't talk so good sometime.

Hey, that's usually my, my, my mo. Yeah.

But her episode, if you remember, we talked about Facebook ads, but it was specifically engagement. Facebook ads for engagement and audience and building fans, not Facebook ads for the purpose of getting leads and sales.

Very true.

So that one's right in the mix from this month in this year as well.

Yeah, I mean she's in the mix here. So that's four of our latest episodes. At least we think they're the latest. Yeah, I think if there's not a trend here, I don't know what's like. Come on. It's. Yeah, it's not sending traffic to send traffic which a lot of people are. Clicks, clicks, clicks. It's like. No, those are people. Yeah, like Sean was talking about it and this is kind of a take it's like a. I guess a mini note is like he has long. He kept saying long form. And this is in the emails too. A long form Facebook ad. He's not doing these short two sentence things and sending them to an opt in page. That's not their M.O. because that's again, dating and then probably going on multiple dates in one go. It's like, no, let's just date, I guess in this Facebook ad. And if it resonates, then you're probably going to click into it. Most likely it's going to go to another piece of content that they have where you're not going to have to opt in. You definitely weren't going to have the option, I would imagine. But that's. Yeah. And it's just trusting that the right people are gonna raise their hand. You don't have to bark at everyone and potentially piss a bunch of people off or could have been the right person at the right time if you let them develop. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so one more thing. I sort of opened a loop saying that there was one takeaway and one sort of like thing I was envious of. Jealous of.

I remember. Yeah.

So the thing that I'm sort of jealous of is, you know, he was talking about the plotter and the penser. I've never heard those terms before. But like, you know, basically one person is the person who is going to plan it all out and have like an outline and they're going to know what these emails are going to be for the next month or whatever. Or in the case of book writers, they have the whole storyline mapped out and then the pencil, I guess, would be the opposite. Where they're, they're writing it and the story's unfolding for them as they're writing it. They don't know where it's going to go.

Yeah, right.

And for me, 100%, I tend to lean on that more plotter side. Every blog post I've ever written, I spend probably more time outlining it than I do actually writing the article. Right. So like I will sit there and analyze it and reorder the, like, the order of events in the article. I will go and collect stats to make sure I'm backing it up by data and add those to my outline. And I'll spend probably five hours on an outline. And when my outline's ready, the writing the article is easy. It'll take me an hour to just fricking hammer it out because I'm just following along to an outline. The thing that I'M jealous of is I kind of wish I was more of that penser style where I could just like, all right, open my. Open my active campaign today. I'm going to send an email. Let's just see what flows out. But for whatever reason, my brain doesn't seem to operate that way. And that's the. That's the thing that I'm sort of like envious of. I know Andre said that that's how he is. I'm not sure if Sean's the same way or not. Kind of sounds like they have some similarities and overlap there. But like, that's one thing that I wish I could be better at. Like I'm reading a lot of books on storytelling and writing and things like that right now.

Because that is improv.

Yeah. That's like a skill I'm trying to honor. Hone in on right now is just being able to not know where I'm going with something. Start writing and let it just unfold the way it unfolds.

So yes. And. But yeah, I mean, I think you are naturally more of a plotter. I'm naturally more of a pincer. And I mean you gotta think just in that inherently, like we're creating a spectrum between ourselves, between the two of us. But yeah, I think it's funny you say you're kind of jealous that you're not more of the pincer type. I'm more jealous. Or I'm jealous that I'm not more of the plotter type. Again, I don't think there's. Well, not again. But probably shouldn't be any jealousy. Yeah, it's cool to blend it and just know like there's a spectrum happening here. And I think it's. It's there. I mean, your writing is absolutely phenomenal when you do it. But I think there's sometimes some hang ups on the plotter side. Yeah, just like on the pincer side.

A lot longer to get things out.

Totally.

Yeah.

That's why they said deadlines and you know, really going at real time pace helps them get it done. And I know for us that's kind of the same way. You know, if we combine forces, we get this interesting blend of plotter and pincer when we know there's a deadline and we have a general topic we start with and then we go. You know, it's kind of like our presentations, how we do those. Which kind of leads me to. It does lead me to a point really fast here on something that Sean said, which I think we do. And sometimes we don't think about it in this process. And we talked a little. It's a little thing of like they start with a concept that's kind of simple and this goes for any kind of new sequence. They're doing like a 10 day sequence or whatever course even, which that probably comes after the sequence. And they got feedback, which is really cool because it's all in real time. Again, they're not like expecting what people are going to give them. They're just kind of let's. But it's this simple concept and then when they start thinking about it and exchanging ideas between the two of them, it gets more complex and they go really deep down the well. And I know you and I will have a conversation like we are here now, we're just recording it. But like we already went 20 minutes almost. But it's like we'll go deep on things and start asking questions and it gets super complicated. The whiteboard will be filled up or you'll have some crazy flowchart that's just like messy. And you know, for a lot of times we would stay there in the complicated bit, you know, we wouldn't realize, oh, we can go to this like, let's go back to simplifying now that we have this big thing. Mm. Let's start refining. Let's figure out the 80, 20 or even 90, 10, you know what I mean? And then when we present it anywhere, it can be more of a simple concept, but it's more principle based and it shows the connections. I know for a long time we've just kind of tossed a bunch of stuff out there. And in some of the presentations we've done in the past, just to wrap that back up, sometimes we just give a lot of information and it's complex, but I like the fact that they go simple, complex. But then let's actually simplify it for everyone and also probably for them to really lock it in and distill.

Well, I was kind of laughing a little, I chuckled a little bit when you said the presentations. Because a lot of the times on the presentations the role is reversed a little bit. You've built the presentation, you know exactly where it's going. And a lot of times like we'll get on the presentation and it'll be some of the first times I'm seeing some of the slides and I'm like, it's true. I'm kind of rolling with it and improving. Like while we're giving live presentations, a lot of times I think that actually.

Is kind of an issue I. Sometimes I think I talked about it last time we had this therapy session is I'll get in my head. Because I am. I've plotted that whole thing out, you know, like, I would have shared it with you, and you've given me feedback by that point. But typically, I'm the one that comes up with the framework. Well, I mean, maybe you give me a flow in mind, but it's like a very simple flow, like, no detail. And then so I have this in my head. I'm like, okay, I know it's coming up. I know what the flow like. And then you, on the other hand, you're just like, yeah, we just get on this.

On this. We just get into the presentation mode, and I just improv the whole thing. I'm like, where are we going with this?

We'll see the next slide.

I'll be like, sometimes I'll be on the next slide. I'll be like, hey, Joe, what do you mean by this one?

Well, you've done it. I think it was even at the war room presentation or one of these pretty big ones. And I remember you're like, all right, so what are we talking about here? In this one, like, you're looking at the monitor that's, like, on the ground that no one can see. I was like, in my head, I'm kind of. It doesn't matter. I'm just like, you should know that I'm like, I made the slides. That's why I'm all freaking. Trying to be all rigid here. But I envy you in that.

Well, we know the content. I just don't always necessarily remember the order of the slides and the flow and stuff. But.

Yeah, no, yeah, I get it. It's. But it is fascinating. We bounce rolls back.

Yeah. Well, before this. This outro goes too long. We got some things to shout out, and we got one last. Would you rather to do.

So let's do some shout outs first.

Yeah.

And then we'll do that. We'll wrap it up with the. Would you Rather.

Sweet.

So last shout out. Actually, first shout of the last section here is easy webinar. The easy webinar. We've talked about webinars a lot, and we've had some. We want to get some webinar folks coming back this year. Who's the last. We had Jason Fladlian on last time talking about webinars.

We had Sam Bell. Come on.

Talk about webinars. That's right. I really want to get Joel Irway back.

Joel early and Joel Lavery. Is somebody that we've been sort of circling around. I think we booked him once and it fell through and we never managed to rebook him. But Joe Lavery would be a great one to talk webinars with as well.

Yeah. And the point being, it's like, I think a lot of folks just think of webinars and there's like one style webinar, the long webinar. That's value. Build it up to star and then we're going to sell some shit. It's like. Well, it's not always that way. Yeah. Like all those guys are teaching different types of webinars and different types, applications, timings, all that stuff. So Easy Webinar supports all that, which is really rad as a software. It can do any of these types of webinar. Technology wise, you just have to create the webinar still. But it gives you the framework and all the, you know, the pages, the structure and all that stuff that you don't want to do to track everything. How effective. So it gives you all the. It's like your all in one toolkit for everything webinars. So, yeah, and it's easy, hence the name.

So easywebinar.com hustle. That's where you can get that. He's hooking up with a discount. The discount varies based on whether it's monthly or annual, but he's hooking you up because you're a Hustler Flowchart listener. So go to easywebinar.com hustle and start using easy webinar. Start doing webinar stuff.

It's worth it.

Second shout out.

Yes.

If you want the notes for this episode, which these notes are going to be good. I'm looking forward to reading back on these notes myself. Make sure you go to flowchartgroup.com now if you go to flowchartgroup.com that is a Facebook group, you will need to request to join the group. But when you request to join the group, one of the questions is, give us your email and we'll send you the notes. So when you request to join the group, give us that email. We'll make sure you get the notes as long as you do it within two weeks of this episode going live. That's flowchartgroup.com we want to hook you up, so go do it.

Go do it. And find us on Clubhouse and all that stuff if you're on there. And also on all the socials. Go find us, ping us, shout us out, friend us, whatever it is. Let's have a conversation.

Yeah, we like doing the non scalable conversations right now. For now. For now. For now. Eventually. Just for now.

We're not gonna eventually have conversations.

Pretty soon, eventually I'll be a bot. But once the bot technology gets to the point where it's indistinguishable from me and they don't know they're not chatting with me, then you'll probably be chatting with a bot.

Yeah, well, we just got to get that technology from the richest man in the world now. Neuralink. Yeah. Yes. And then soon your bot days will start and you'll never have to talk to me. That's good. Yeah.

Eventually. Eventually you're just gonna hear us interviewing people. But we were never there. It was just a computer.

I mean, we're already there. Descript can do it.

That's true.

We just have to. Let's hire some writers and then throw it into script and then they could voice it out and then boom, we got a podcast now. No, we're not going to do that. There you go.

Maybe, maybe. We'll see.

You would hire Fiverr writers and not saying all Fiverr writers are bad. Not saying that, but you know, I'd.

Hire the one that literally doesn't speak English. And you'll go and read it. Like the podcast announcer will just mispronounce everything.

It has to be machines.

I know, that's what I mean. Like the machine announcer will read the script that somebody on Fiverr wrote and it won't make any sense, but it'll sound like me.

Matt sounds like a blend of all these different. I don't know what's going on out of his mouth.

All right, well, we're off the rails now. We're almost half as long as our interview was itself.

All right, so would you rather be in shape and have a great body but ugly face or have a gorgeous face but be overweight?

Oh.

Oh, boy.

Probably be a shape with the ugly face because, I mean, that's like sort of real life.

Wow.

We just try to cover up that ugly face. Your ugly mug with a beard and big ass headphones. You're doing a good job.

But yeah, I would. I would agree with that because, yeah, you could probably sell some good stuff with a gorgeous face and whoop, I don't know. I want to be healthy. I like feeling healthy. Yeah. And let's be honest, our mugs need some more.

You just grow a beard to hide the ugly face, Right? A beard, sunglasses, and a hat. That's. Dude, that's my Day to day look so well.

I know you signed up for Botox, so that's coming up soon in your future.

Probably.

Probably surgery. It's the. On your schedule. We share a calendar. Yeah. You're getting some injections, like, all over. You're going to have a new nose pretty soon. Yeah.

Yep.

Totally true.

Come on, Matt. Roll with me here.

All righty. Well, if you enjoyed this episode, share it with somebody. There's a lot of people that would enjoy this episode as well, but they may never hear it, and if they don't, it's your fault.

Share it with the right people. Choose wisely.

Choose wisely. Choose widely. Share it with everybody.

Okie dokie. Matt, is that what Andre and Sean would say?

Yeah, because then people will listen to it, and only the ones that are interested will go further down the rabbit hole.

All right.

Share with the world. Get those megaphones out, y'.

All. Yeah.

Go on the top of the.

Write an email with a subject line with a lot of emojis and send it out with this episode headphones and.

Say, listen to this right now. Your business. All right. Right.

All right, let's go ahead and end this one.

Yeah, we're done. Bye now. Thank you. Love you. Bye.

Thanks, everybody, for listening to this episode of the Hustle and Flowchart podcast, for taking the time to listen. We want to give you something a little bit special. Every single episode that we do, we actually have somebody on our team take notes. We basically have a Cliff's notes version of every episode where you can go and find all of the tips and tactics that they laid out, all of the resources that they laid out, all the good stuff from this episode. We actually have a nice, simple notes version that you can find on our website. So go to evergreenprofits.com, find this episode that you just listened to, and give us your email address, and we'll send you the notes. Thanks for listening.

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