How to Make $2,000,000 From Courses and Quit Your 9-To-5

What's the dream revenue that we're going for?

Dream? $1 million.

Pick a timeline. 3 years? 5 years?

Can we say 18 months?

18 months. This could go terribly wrong. In this episode, I talked to Aaron Francis, who did $350,000 in revenue for the year.

Great amount of money. There are 2 of us and we could go get tech jobs. So what I want to figure out is how do we take that and turn that into a long-term sustainable business?

We have to have multiple price tiers.

Okay.

Every time I've implemented tiered pricing, I've noticed at least a 50% increase in revenue. Mm-hmm.

That is obvious, but I'm not doing it.

What you want to do is bring everybody back to this because that's where you have the deepest connection with the audience. The most simple, effective thing to do: lead magnets. In the video, I'm going to show you what to do. Mm-hmm. In the free resource, I'm going to do it for you.

This feels doable. I think coming in, I felt in need of a little bit of guidance. Leaving now, I feel very much more organized and with a path forward.

I love it. Aaron, welcome back.

Yeah, it's good to still be here.

We were talking on X in DMs and, uh, you listened to the podcast and all of that and you were saying, hey, I'd fly up to Boise. Why did you want to fly up to Boise?

Yep. Uh, so my, my specific pitch was I am the smallest creator that you're going to have on, but I will come to Boise and we can go through it. And so here's what I want to talk about. We've got, um, High Performance SQLite, which is a database course, did $125,000. Great amount of money. Very happy with that. There are two of us, me and Steve, and we could go get tech jobs, right?

Right.

And so $125,000 across two people plus self-employment taxes against tech jobs doesn't go that far. So what I want to figure out is, given what we have, which is an audience, expertise, momentum, how do we take that and turn that into a long-term sustainable business that makes more than we could make as W-2. That is, that is my goal.

That sounds good.

And we've got a lot of options, and I'll be curious to hear which ones you think are the best.

Okay, now let's, let's dive in.

Let's draw some stuff.

Let's get a feel for the business today. I will. I'll start with that. So we did $125,000 in 30 days in the launch.

Yep.

Okay, so you got SQLite and then we're going to say 30 days. Yep. But just one thing to talk about here is if we think about the shape of a launch, right, you're going to go from zero to there and then you're going to come down to something and it's going to default to that or that.

Let's, let's call it this one because I think that's probably more accurate.

And so we have to figure out, like, typically what happens in a launch business is we're figuring out how do we do that? And then how do we do that? And usually these spikes keep getting smaller and smaller.

Yes.

And I've watched that play out many times, both myself and in other creator businesses.

Yep.

Okay, so $125,000 in the launch, SQLite in 30 days. What are some of the other courses that are still driving meaningful revenue?

Another property is screencasting.com. Okay. And that has done $115,000 in 9 months.

Okay.

And these are the two primary properties that Steve and I have. This was pre-Steve. So Steve and I partnered up after I launched this.

Okay.

So there is a rehab of this coming with some additional material. And this is the first post-Steve and Aaron thing that we launched. Okay.

That makes sense. So total in the last year, what do you think revenue is at? That we could use as a trend line to understand the audience.

An interesting point about this is we also had a corporate sponsor that paid us, I won't disclose 'cause that's their business, but paid us a not insignificant amount of money to do that on top of 125. Okay. So it's, we'll say, 5-figure sponsorship as well. So we'll just throw sponsorship as a line item. Yeah, throw sponsorship in and let's go ahead and include YouTube sponsorship. Because then I can hide the numbers a little more easily. So let's say on sponsorship altogether, we've done $90,000.

And so we're gonna total all of this up. Let me look in the math. So we're at $105,000, or I'm sorry, $205,000, and then so $330,000 plus some assorted.

Miscellaneous, yeah.

So this business right now, if you could repeat last year, you're talking $350,000 a year is basically what we're at.

That sounds about right. Yeah. Okay.

On one hand, a lot of money.

A lot of money.

On the other hand.

On the other hand.

Tech jobs.

Two people, self-employment taxes. Right. Four kids. Yeah. Not, not a lot of money while being a lot of money. Yeah.

Okay. So as we're thinking about where we're at. So we'll just say today is $350K. Pick a timeline.

We're going—

what sounds good?

3 years? 5 years?

What time horizon are we operating on?

Let's say— can we shorten it? Can we say 18 months?

18 months. Okay. So this is— Is that bold?

Is that silly?

We can do anything.

We'll do anything. Let's say 18 months.

So by the end of 2025?

Let's do that.

Okay. How much revenue? What's the dream revenue that we're going for?

So, so at the end of 2025, what is the trailing 12 months?

Yeah.

Um, dream, $1 million.

Okay. All right.

Which is not the final resting point, hopefully, for the revenue, but in By the time we hit 2025, hopefully we've made $1 million in total.

What is, okay, so it's 2026.

I don't know, but the dream would be, the dream in the fullness of time is $2 million a year. Okay. So if we can do it by 2026, happy, happy as could be.

There's so much that I wanted to get into, like what that enables or that sort of thing. But you didn't come here for like a counseling session. We can do that next.

We'll do 3 episodes. Yeah, exactly.

We'll sit back down. I love the specificity of the goal. Shifting gears a little bit. Okay. Is there anyone, maybe we can brainstorm a few people, who comes to mind when you think of they've pulled off something like the business you're trying to create?

Kent C. Dodds, Wes Bos.

Okay.

Maybe Matt Pocock. Kent C. Dodds is an educator, developer educator, which is what I like to call myself, a developer educator. He has primarily staked out a place in in the React ecosystem, which is a JavaScript framework. And he has, he's got a big team now actually, but he does educational materials and he, you know, has written recently, not recently, in the past year or so about his million-dollar course launch. And I'm like, that seems good. Um, Wes Bos. Yeah, halfway there. Wes Bos, on the other hand, is also a developer educator, but he is following a much more, I think, similar pattern to what we'll have, which is several discrete properties that it's like, learn ES6, learn CSS whatever, and they're all on different domains, but they all funnel back to the Westboss brand. So I think Westboss is probably the closest corollary to what we're going for.

Okay, that makes sense. The reason I ask this question is often we throw out crazy things, you know, like, okay, $125,000 launch, $2 million a year in revenue. It's really hard to bridge that gap mentally. And you can do things where you're like, okay, well, if we just had 14 courses, that would get there. I'd be dead.

Yeah.

Yeah. And you're like, you can quickly say how that's a terrible idea. But what it helps with is seeing, am I trying to do something that's never been done before?

Yes.

Are we trying to climb the mountain that, you know, to date has been proven unclimbable?

That's killed everyone else that tried. Yeah, I don't want to do that.

Or are we saying like, No, people who are wildly talented, very determined and all of that have done it. And actually, they might be friends of mine, actually. Like, and that brings it down into this achievable way. And then you can also do this thing where when you start to look at all the problems that you're going to have between here and there, you could list those out and then you'd be like, well, how did Kent solve that?

Right.

How did Wes solve that?

Problems are solvable.

Yeah. Because they've been solving them.

Exactly. Yeah. Our mutual friend Ben Orenstein, Tuple guy, tweeted not too long ago when I was actually working at Tuple, he tweeted, I think it's something like, I think it's very reasonable, possible, and more people should consider that you can make $1 million a year if you're a good teacher and a good developer. And that has stuck in my brain of like, yeah, I think that is possible. Being a good teacher is a huge part of it and these two guys are, but I think it is very, very possible. Yeah.

That's interesting what you're talking about there of, you know, you think of the other words that you could substitute in there. Great teacher.

Mm-hmm.

Great developer. You know, someone's like, oh, I'm gonna become the best machine learning AI engineer and some FAANG company is gonna pay me a million dollars a year. Mm-hmm. That might actually be a harder path than to be a good developer and a, and a good teacher. Yeah.

It's that combination of skills that I think more people could have. A lot of great developers out there. Honestly, I don't think there are that many great teachers, but the overlap of good developer and good teacher, that's totally available to everybody. So, that is my goal.

Yeah, and there's other people, you know, even as you list out a few people, I think of more, I think of like Adam Wathan.

Yep.

You know, there's, and they've taken a different path in that they made a wildly successful framework.

Right. Yeah, early on Adam would be on this list, but now he has a different type of company, so I can't see myself in him. But yeah, he's absolutely an inspiration.

Yeah. And so we could look at like, we'll put him on the list because of—

we can learn from the early days. Our journeys still overlap at this point because I'm early and this is, this is what he was doing early on.

What do you think are some of the biggest obstacles that you're going to hit? Like what problems, as we get more specific, do we need to solve?

Um, I think the biggest, so like the biggest fundamental structural problem is, um, having enough stuff that people can throw money at. Like there's no way that SQLite gets $2 million. There's maybe a way that screencasting does a million, but like I just don't feel like the surface area upon which people can give me money is, is large enough at this point. And inherent in that is the drawback of being a course company. I don't wanna make a course every 3 months.

Okay.

And so that's where I'm trying to figure out like, what is the right product mix or bundle or guest instructor, instructors that like I can get to a point where this number is reasonable and this number is possible. And I have ideas on how to expand both of those.

Okay. Tell me a little bit about, Kent's Million Dollar Launch and yeah, what was that in, right? Because that's almost 10x the numbers you did.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So was that different audience, different?

Different audience, different lead time, different technology. So one thing about SQLite is it's relatively niche. It happens to be the most used database in the world, but most people in our space don't really use it. It's very much for like, embedded stuff. So it's a relatively niche audience. Databases themselves, relatively niche audience. And when you look at what Kent C. Dodds is doing, it's React. And for the people that don't know, React has eaten the world. And so like everyone needs to know React. And I feel like a lot of his stuff begins at a beginner level. He does have intermediate content, but a lot of the stuff that I do begins more at the intermediate level.

So you think of that pyramid, you're further up, just meaning that there are fewer—

Fewer people, fewer people. There's just fewer intermediates than there are beginners. Wes Bos, I don't know the numbers that he has done, but he does have a lot of, he has a lot of products. And so I think the difference between these two guys is Kent has consolidated everything into what he calls Epic Web. And that includes like React and Tailwind CSS and some other stuff. Wes Bos is like, 30 days of JavaScript, ES6, CSS whatever, React whatever, and they're all discrete. That's more what I am going towards because I don't have one piece of content that is large enough to encompass 10 million people, you know?

Right. Okay, so you're going for more products. Mm-hmm. Is there— really quick, I realized we didn't get the elevator pitch on screencasting.com. What is that from?

Screencasting.com is my— Techniques, methods, technologies for recording high-quality screencasts quickly. So high quality, low effort. How do you do that such that you can put stuff out into the world and move on?

And is the focus of this someone doing internal training or is it someone who wants to be the next developer creator? Yep.

That.

Okay.

It could be for internal training. The way that I talk in the course is more like you are an individual trying to make a audience or grow an audience or create a course yourself or whatever. That's, that's what I talk about.

Okay, that makes sense. What's the price point on Screencasting?

That was quite a bit more. That one's $299.

Okay.

So SQLite's currently $149, Screencasting's $299. I think it's overpriced, um, and I have some evidence for that, but, um, yeah, it's quite a bit more.

Okay, so one problem is enough products.

Yep.

Uh, what's another problem in our path from $350,000 to $2 million?

Um, I feel, and I think we've taken a step towards solving this already, I feel like the administrivia of having all of these things is growing. And so like emails about purchasing power parity discounts, emails about typos in the transcripts, emails with just random questions. And my personality is such that I tend to not, I tend to not be able to do those things very quickly. I tend to put 'em off and then they grow and it's like, well, guess I'll never get to that email 'cause it's been a day now. Guess, ah, it's just bad. So that's a really difficult part for me. And I think some of that is like, I maybe am becoming more of a creative and like I need more of this space and then doing all of these things has become even more difficult. So we've recently hired somebody for 20 hours a week to man all of the inboxes, to help us do a content calendar. It actually came from listening to your podcast about your personal brand manager, and I was like, I mean, I can't afford that, but like having somebody who can do that for the business plus me as we're moving into this is the Aaron Francis brand, that has been a huge, a huge help, but I imagine it's going to continue to grow pretty pretty drastically.

Yeah, but what I like about that is that you've already created that bucket of, like, sectioned off that bucket of work. And so the hard thing for you will be to just stay disciplined about it.

Yes.

And to say, that is not my problem.

Big time.

Yeah.

And she started yesterday, so I'm not quite there yet, but yes.

But there's, like, one struggle that I had was leading from the front or You know, I don't know what, leaders eat last, like these kind of ideas. And so I'd always think like, I never want to ask someone to do a job that I'm not willing to do myself. And so I would be jumping right in there. I just found that I was holding the business back in substantial ways. And so there's two phrases that I think are really interesting. One sounds horrible, so maybe it's just an internal phrase.

I love it already.

But it's where you just say, it's not my problem.

Oh, that sounds great.

And you like that.

What a relief.

That is Your problem. The other one that I heard Andrew Wilkinson from Tiny say recently is he said, I am Teflon for tasks. Love that too. Try to give me something to do. Oh, look at that.

It just looks off me.

Yeah.

That's awesome. I would love that.

And so like getting into that mindset because you're realizing like any of those examples, a refund on this, a transcript bug, any of that, like you can't spend any time. No.

And it just eats away. Not only does it eat away my time at like just little bites all throughout the day, It eats away my energy, right? And that's the hard part when I'm like, all right, you've got to sit down and record 5 videos today, and then you see the email inbox is like, there are 13 people waiting for something. I'm like, oh gosh, I'm just not going to do anything. It's like, no, can't do that. So I feel like that is— and this is very much a personality thing, um, and I think we may be hiring around it, but it is going to be interesting to see as we go how much of that I can like give over.

It takes a level of discipline that's really hard.

Yeah.

One, one thing for me as the team has gotten bigger, you know, on the kids side is really like engaging at the right level. And a phrase that I've started to use is I think I'm involved at the wrong altitude.

Interesting.

And so that's where, you know, we might be talking about overall strategy and then I find myself getting into like the tactics or the email copy or something like that. And people want my opinion on it. Sure. Or they don't want my opinion and I'm inserting it.

And they have to listen to you. Yeah.

Both of those situations happen. But just that, like giving the team that language and all that, like, oh, I'm involved at the wrong altitude here.

I like that.

And you can step back and reset.

You zoomed in too far. I like that.

And so that's the other thing that you can ask This is maybe more for someone who has a bigger team, but to say, if someone's bringing a problem to you, to say either, what role would you like me to play? Like, because you don't want to be the person, like, they're dealing with real problems and you're like, not my problem. But can I just get 5 minutes of your time?

Exactly.

You know, and so you're like, oh, I play the coach role or the manager role in that. Or also to ask, what altitude would you like? To have this conversation about. And that can really help with some of those team dynamics.

Yeah, yeah, I like that. That's very helpful.

Okay, so problems. Enough products. I feel like we have— this is going to be hard.

It's going to be hard.

But we have a plan for it.

We're on a good path.

What other problems do we run into?

Um, I think inherent in this enough products is enough time for me personally to create the stuff.

Okay.

Because, um, not only are we doing courses, but we're also doing YouTube and I'm writing blog posts and Twitter is our top of funnel in some regard. And so like there's a big amount of creation pressure that is put on me. Like I am the face of the business. Steve and I are the business, but I am the face of it. And so like I have to be out there and this just takes a lot of time. Okay. Yep.

I like that. That makes me think of two other problems.

Great. One is brand. Okay.

Yes. You brought up me being the face of the business.

Big, big problem.

Yep. And then the second one, I can't actually write and talk at the same time. I would have sort of just write whatever I—

The second one.

Yeah. It just says the second one. The second one is audience size.

Yeah.

Because at some point all of this comes down to a math equation. Yes. Right? And so, You have to have a plan to grow a significantly larger audience.

Yep. Which comes back to time to create and enough products and I get all— yeah, these are all very related.

Yep, they are. Okay, so as we look at these, well, actually, let's quickly talk about audience size. What size audience do we have right now that we're getting into?

Size audience we have now on Twitter, we're at 39,000. YouTube, maybe 42,000 or 43,000. Across email lists, probably I wanna say close to 7,000 or 8,000 across email lists. You're so good about calling it X. I just cannot. I can't get there.

Here's the thing. If I can let all of you in on a little secret. I was not good at calling it X. And then I went to rebrand my company name and then I switched.

It's a respect thing. It's a respect thing.

Okay.

I see what you've done there. Yeah.

I never would have guessed that.

We can let people in on little secrets. Y'all, please call it Kit. Okay?

So if we're talking about an increase of, you know, 5 times, that's a lie. Could you reasonably increase these audience sizes by 5x in 2.5 years?

Yes, maybe, doubt it. So email, yes, because I've put very little effort historically into growing an email list. And now with the decline, in my opinion, of X, I'm thinking I gotta get off this thing. And so putting a lot more energy there. YouTube, I think, yeah, I could get to 200,000 in, you know, a year and a half or 2 years or whatever. X, no, I don't think I could get to 5 times, that's 200 as well. I don't think I could do that. Okay.

Are there people out there, these people or others, who have hit 5x these numbers, the numbers that you would need to get to?

Yes.

Okay. Yeah.

I think Kent's at north of 200. Wes is at maybe, I don't know, 150. Adam's probably at 150 on Twitter. So yeah, it is not impossible. And I don't know why, but I don't think I can do it. Well, it might be that the algorithm is totally different.

That's right.

Right. I look at—

It's a new age. I have 103,000 on X and I'm like, do I want to push that to 200,000? I don't know that the techniques that I learned and used will scale in the same way.

Yep, I feel that.

Someone posted a tweet the other day and they were like, can we just have the algorithm from 2 years ago back?

Can we please? It was like all my friends plus their friends.

That was it.

It doesn't have to be complicated. My friends and their friends.

Yeah, exactly. So that's something else. Like, I think we can, 5x these audience numbers. The one that I would focus on the most, or the two, is YouTube and email.

Good.

Okay.

That's where I feel most optimistic. So that's good.

'Cause I think about the hub and spoke model for content creation or really for audience growth. And so what a lot of people do is they maybe list it out like this where it's just like, I've got all these channels. Someone said I should grow on LinkedIn as well. So I'm doing that. I'm already making videos, so I guess I need an Instagram. Since I'm on Instagram, I might as well have a TikTok.

Exactly.

And before we know it, we're on every single platform. And you hate it all.

Yep. Speak for yourself. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I love it.

I tried TikTok for a second. I was like, I am too old for this.

And you thought YouTube comments were bad. Wait till you get TikTok comments.

No way.

So in the hub and spoke model, right, if we're making a wheel, you know, we've got a few different spokes coming off. And we're bringing people, right? Each of these, you know, X, YouTube, you know, IG, those are all going to be spokes. And so what you want to do then is bring everybody back to the email list, right? Email is at the center because that's where you have the deepest connection with the audience.

It's the only one I own.

It's the only one you own, right? Like if I really piss you off one day, You can be like, screw it, I'm exporting my email list, my kit, and I'm going somewhere.

Exactly.

Right?

Yep. Please don't. Yep, I won't. Don't worry. Depends on how this turns out, by the way. As long as it turns out good, I'm happy. If you call me an influencer, it's over.

And so in this, you know, you can take this approach because email is really amazing at connection and really, really terrible at discovery.

Mm-hmm.

Right? Like— Agreed. 0 out of 10 on discovery.

Fully agreed.

And so then you can choose what platforms to focus on. Now, what I think is interesting about YouTube in general is that YouTube is really good at discovery because it has both the, like, you should watch this algorithm and the search algorithm.

Yep.

And then it's also not half bad at the connection and that long-term side of it. So it's really interesting. And so the fact that you already have 40,000 on YouTube, and that's growing, gives me a lot of confidence in being able to hit that number.

Good, good. And this has come in one, the past year.

Yeah, that's fantastic.

So that gives me a lot of optimism that you're optimistic about that.

So the thing that I want you to get good at is, and this is maybe where you could write some things down, we'll go up here, is the YouTube to email conversion.

Yeah.

Is there anything there that you've tried?

To the extent we've tried anything, it has primarily been YouTube to SQLite course.

Okay.

There's been very little, which in a way is second order onto an email list, but there's been very little YouTube, go sign up for my newsletter. In fact, when I say very little, what I mean is zero. There's been none of that.

There's none of that at all. Well, there's these things where people have this— some people I've hired recently to help with things at Kit have come in and said like, I'm very— like, this is not going well of some area of the business they're coming in to fix. And they're like, I'm really excited by this. And I'm like, why? Because it's so bad? And they're like, let's just say there's a lot of opportunity.

So much opportunity. What a nice thing to say. Thank you. There's a lot of opportunity here. Yes, I agree.

So we haven't really done any YouTube to email.

No.

So why don't you write down up here, let's go, let's just say like YouTube to email conversions.

So are we doing like a funnel type thing?

Let's just go categories of, let's put a category wherever you want up there and then we'll brainstorm ideas underneath that.

Okay. So we'll say YouTube to email. So what are our ideas here?

So we've done nothing so far.

Nothing.

What do you think would work? We got 40,000 people over here. There's probably some number that are on the email list, right? Because they got an email list from buying the course. Right. That sort of thing.

So we have a few things. We've got, we could do, You know, we could do YouTube video. This is what we're doing now, SQLite course, which in fact puts you on the email list. So you have a hop, skip, and a jump here.

But this is paid.

This is paid. However, there are certain videos that are free to watch provided you put your email in. So you have a free trial. Mm-hmm. Okay. Yeah. So that's pretty disjointed. I think the question that you're asking is how do we do this? And so one thing that I have done is, so this is number 2, this is number 3, I have done this, which again is a hop, skip, and a jump. So from YouTube, I will typically take a YouTube video, turn it back into a written article, put that on the blog, and then the blog has a way, AaronFrancis.com, and then that has a way to sign up for the email list. Very tenuous because this is like, in the description of the YouTube. And so by the time you reach here, it's like there's one person. You've got to finish watching the video, then you read the description, read the description, come here, and then scroll to the bottom.

So here we're like a 1% conversion rate, and then this is a 1% conversion rate.

Lots of room for improvement.

There we go. You catch on quick.

Yeah.

So I mean, the most simple, effective thing to do here in this case is lead magnets.

Okay.

Right? It's a weird, I don't know why we call it that, but here we are. And so what we're doing is just providing something in the video and saying, hey, if you want this, go and download it here. The way that I like to do it the most is in the video, I'm gonna show you what to do. In the free resource, I'm gonna do it for you. As much as I can. So is there a cheat sheet, a, you know, a code snippet, something like that that you're teaching on a regular basis, ideally that you could link to from a series of videos?

Right, exactly.

So you can create it once and get leverage from that.

That does not exist at the moment.

Okay.

I'm not opposed to it. I think my question is the shape of that thing because let's say I'm doing, I'm doing a video on SQLite, I'm doing a video on Laravel, which is a framework, I'm doing a video on JavaScript. Those lead magnets need to be different, I would assume, maybe?

There's probably something we come up with that's generic enough, but— Okay, so— But generally going generic is not what you're trying to do with a lead magnet, so.

So in your estimation, let's say I produce a video on SQLite that goes The content of the YouTube video is SQLite. And then I say, go to AaronFrancis.com/sqlite, sign up, and I'll email you whatever we come up, whatever I come up with.

So let me give you a different example.

Tell me.

And we'll see how this comes out. If I'm, I wrote a book years ago called Authority. And one of the most popular things in a higher package that I sold in that was a 90-day launch plan. So I told you everything to do in the book. Here's all the theory, we walked through it, we built up in the concepts and all of that. And then there was this one thing that was wildly popular, which is like, you want to launch on this day? Here's a plan that works backwards from there. What to do.

It was like a spreadsheet or something?

Yeah, what to do every week from there. And that was so popular. And that's the thing of like, I'm teaching you how to do it in the YouTube video. And then I'm just giving you the resource to make it really easy to apply it. And that's the sort of thing where you say, you know, in my case, I'd be like, go to nathanbarry.com/launchplan and I'll give it to you for free. And they put in their email address and I send it to them. And that's the kind of thing that you can talk about a lot. You know, with screencasting, you could go, here are the—

Camera reviews.

Camera reviews you could do. I would do the 5 biggest mistakes. That I see people make.

It's great. You know, it's a lot easier.

And then especially because the camera reviews change over time. Yeah, the mistakes really don't. We all, we all make the same thing.

So help me understand here. So YouTube to the course, good, produces money, right? And so I feel good about that. Like, yeah, this is, you know, we've got a course, got YouTube up here, and then down here out comes SQLite course, and this is where the money is. So are you saying that this is in the long term more profitable than this? Skipping over driving them to the course and driving them to email?

No, I want to do both.

Okay.

Because the thing about email is it lets me change the message to each person based on where they're at in their relationship with my content.

Okay.

And it, it lets me segment, it lets me do so many things. So if I put out a YouTube video, it goes out to everybody. And so I'm not gonna put out a YouTube video once a month being like, here's why you should buy, not even SQLite, but like whatever else. But if I get you on the email list, then I can say, oh, you came in because you bought SQLite, now you're on the email list. Let me send you an email about how to create screencasting videos. See if you engage with that. If yes, let me send you down an email sequence that really promotes the screencasting course. So that's one side of it is the email, you can personalize things so much more. But the other side is the conversion rate. This jump from YouTube to SQLite probably has a very, very low conversion rate.

Gotta be vanishingly small.

Yeah, less than 1%.

So in your mind, it is more profitable to do this, to go from YouTube to email somehow to course somehow, because then I can go to second course, to third course, to fourth course like that. Correct.

And, and it's not just that it's more profitable, it's that you're going to get that higher conversion rate. I'm going to do both, right? Because you're talking about the— when it's a direct bit, you talk about the sequel, of course. But what I don't want is someone to say, The only reason I would join your email list is if I bought your product. Because think about someone who comes in, let's go upstream from this, right? Upstream from YouTube is a search, right? So I have my search query and that takes me into YouTube and then you're like, buy my course.

And I'm like, I don't know you. We just met.

But if you're like, hey, Hey, Nathan Barry, download this additional resource. I'm like, hell yes, absolutely. And then the other thing that you could do, if we go back to this hub and spoke model, right? And I'll put in the spokes that we're ignoring for right now, but now it lets me hit this from multiple angles. Part of the reason that I think your course launch that we talked about in the first episode went so well when you went live on, you know, on X, is that you sent an email and they got that email and they're like, oh yeah, I'll look at that later. Or they saw the subject line, but then they were scrolling on X and they saw you go live and they're listening to that and they're like, oh, I actually got that email.

And right, you're hitting it from multiple channels.

It's sort of like retargeting. And so in this case, if we get them on the email list, we can have that steady drumbeat of content and we can engage with them, the written content. The YouTube video, what's the thing that YouTube optimizes for most? What do they care about?

Watch time.

Yeah. You know who's great at watching your content? People that click a link in an email telling them, hey, I made a video on this thing.

That's a good point.

Go here to watch it.

Yep.

Right? They click through with so much trust and intent that then YouTube, now YouTube knows that was direct traffic. Right. Right? And, but they'll think about it.

It's not gonna penalize you.

Yeah.

May not help as much, but it's not going to penalize you. Plus, I get to email people and I got to email people. I got to email people.

You do have to email people.

I don't know if you know, Nathan, email is important. I got to email people. Okay. I like that.

Still learning that to this day.

Yeah, I like that.

So the lead magnet, I think, is really important.

Because then that goes like this too.

Right. Oh, it sort of looks like a flywheel. Look at that.

I just invented that. So you're welcome.

So in this, I really want Well, let's just, let's brainstorm some lead magnet ideas.

Okay. Just generally speaking, cheat sheets I feel like are always good and databases are prime for cheat sheets. So is screencasting. Cheat sheets, you said top mistakes or whatever. So I feel like that's another good one. Something that I don't know if it's a good idea or bad idea is some sort of free access to partially free access to one of the courses.

Yeah, it's like with a book, doing a sample chapter.

Yes, exactly. Yep. Um, so I feel like that would, that would be easy to do for me. I think my hesitation is somebody that is cold off the street, are they gonna want free access to a course from a guy they don't know about? Partially free access.

So the thing that I like about that is it has really high perceived value. Okay. Right? Because you, hey, I took the time to create this whole course and all that, and we have a lesson on exactly the thing that you're dealing with.

And I'll give that to you for free. That's interesting.

The other thing that it lets you do is you can have a bunch of jumping off points. Right? Like you could give away little bits of the course and someone who's a true, like who's consumed all your content might be like, I could piece together 27% of this course if I like opted into everything.

Go for it.

I do not care.

That sounds great.

Or you could buy it for $149 and charge it to your work credit card.

Exactly. Have fun.

So the thing about that is you could get really relevant conversion rates without making a ton of content because you could go to, you could have 10 of these.

Yes. And that is interesting to me because of what you just said, where each one could be related to like the video that I just put on YouTube.

Yeah. And so you could go and find the most relevant thing. Go create a landing page in Kit that's dedicated to that, customize the copy. So it's like search intent to the video, to the exact, like at each point the intent and the conversion is really high. And again, just there's 70 lessons in the course. There's going to be more. Who cares?

Boy, do I not care about somebody getting like a lot. This is such a side note. A lot of what people are paying for with courses is organization and structure. So if you can piece everything together, congrats. That's what I did. I had to do that. So I'm super unconcerned about that.

A quick line of— especially as we're teaching skills that make money generally to people who have money. Patrick McKenzie goes by Patio11. He has this line. He says, no, like, payroll department in a company wants to write a payroll check where the memo line says researching free stuff on the internet. 100%. There's nothing free about that. I just paid you $150,000, $200,000.

Yeah, 2 weeks worth of time to just read docs when you could have just paid $149. Yes, totally agree. This moves me. I like this.

Okay.

I like this for a few reasons, not least of which I don't have to go and invent new things, which these will, I think, be good in the fullness of time. But right now, you can do that today.

Yeah.

And I like that.

Yeah, that's good.

Okay, so that I do. I do like this. I feel compelled by that.

So let's put a pin in this because I think we found something good there that we want to go to. And this is going to really take us, you know, to the audience size. We've got some other problems that we need to solve. There's a couple other tweaks that I want you to make here. Okay. One, I want to, I want to double your average order value.

Great. I would love that.

And so the thing that we have to do is we have to have multiple price tiers.

Okay.

Right, so a single price of $149, if this is going to $200, I honestly would not, I like the cheaper price of $149. I would probably keep that. And then I would add a second price of $250, $300.

So the struggle I've had with that, and I, you know, read Authority, I remember your micro-conf talk, I remember Ryan, what's his name, Delk? Yeah, Ryan Delk. I remember his micro-conf talk. The struggle I had with that was coming up with what is the additional tier? Given my moral reservations about putting expert interviews behind a paywall, because I ask Kent C. Dodds to donate his time and then I sell it. I'm like, ah, I hate that. What we came up with, and it's not very compelling, is it's team pricing. And the only reason team pricing exists is to anchor the $149 as being like incredibly low 'cause I'm comparing it to like, you know, $699 on the page.

Yeah, and team pricing is great.

Yeah.

Right? 'Cause developers tend to, you know, flock together.

And we did this kind of on a lark just for the sake the pricing psychology of like $149 is low because it's next to whatever. We sold one team package of 25 seats for like $3,000. Yeah. We never spoke to them at all. They came to the site, hit add to cart, and gave us $3,000. I'm like, huh, we should do more of that. So that's the only tiering we have at this point.

So I think going back to switching styles in your content. Okay. If there's anything where you can go in the course, I will teach you how to do this. And then the next tier is I will do it for you. So if there's anything in here where it's like, hey, this makes it much more compelling, where it's gonna be a shortcut. So an example would be in my first book, it was the App Design Handbook, and, you know, I had just the book for $39, and then I switched media types, and I said you get the book plus training videos, for $99. And then because I don't have the moral hesitations that you do around it, I had expert interviews in the $249 package. But the other thing that I did is I said, hey, what tools do I use? And let me get all of those in there. Right? So I had the cheat sheets. I had the, hey, here's the Photoshop templates that I use, back when we all used Photoshop.

Good days.

But, you know, I was just saying, hey, as a professional who does this in the industry all the time, what are all the tricks of the trade and those things that I can put in there?

So I like that. Where I thought you were going is how can I lump in some of my time? Because I don't want to— yeah, I don't want to get on that. Yeah, I did that with screencasting. There's a $299 and then for $1,000 you get a 1-hour hands-on, and $1,000 is awesome. But then you got to schedule these hands-on. I didn't have very many, but I had, you know, 5. And every one of them, it's like, am I bringing enough to like justify it?

Yeah, you have both the, this isn't worth my time anymore.

Yeah.

And I don't know that this is worth your money.

And so I felt hesitant about that. But adding on non-time-bound things, I think is doable. I would need to— I can't do it off the top— figure out what that might be. Yeah.

So every time I've implemented tiered pricing, I've noticed at least a 30%, if not a 50% increase in revenue. In my own personal stuff, it's been a 2x increase, especially when you're in a market that is not price sensitive.

They're spending other people's money.

They're spending other people's money. And so give them the ability to do that.

Yeah. To pivot very slightly. Yeah. I think bundling and that's, that comes back to this. I think bundling could be a way to achieve similar ends.

Okay, so let's—

do we, do we have another sheet or have you ever done a 3-sheet? Can I do a 3-sheet?

We've never done a 3-sheet, but we might as well.

Can I flip or should we leave these out? Let's flip this one. Okay, so let me give you a— wow, first 3-sheeter. Yeah, I don't know if that's good or bad. Okay, so we've got, we've got a screen— excuse my doctor's handwriting— screencasting over here. Standalone course, right? Flagship course teaches the philosophy of how to do it, how to record, how to edit, how to prepare yourself, how to teach people. What it doesn't teach is how to use Adobe Premiere or DaVinci Resolve or ScreenFlow. So I think, and now with the help of Steve, who's a proper video guy, right, we're going to have a course on Premiere and a course on Resolve and a course on ScreenFlow. Such that you buy, what is that, $299? Such that you buy this for $299 and then some combination of these. Of the platforms. For $99 each. And then maybe we say you get a discount or whatever. But like this increases our average order value 'cause you can say, I wanna learn philosophically, how do I teach people? How do I get comfortable on video? Also nuts and bolts, how do I use Adobe Premiere?

Yeah, and then in your checkout flow you could have it.

Exactly.

On the sales page you're saying, hey, buy this whole bundle. And they say, no, I want just this. You're like, okay, cool. And they buy it and then they say, hey, do you want to upgrade to one of these? And they're like, yeah, what the hell?

Yeah.

You know, or, and then you can tailor that pitch because you're like, all right, you're gonna learn everything you need in all of this. And then you're gonna find out that you actually—

You wanna know keyboard shortcuts and panel locations and how to execute philosophically, how to execute tactically in these. And they could, you know, you could go on, you could do Camtasia, you could do Descript, you could do like, and so I feel like this is a model that I think we can execute on SQLite as well because you've got, here's SQLite the database, here's its Rails implementation, here's its Laravel, here's its Django. And so this becomes one, I think 199 and this becomes 99. And so like you learn everything everything you need to know about the pure vanilla SQLite. And then you're a Rails guy? Great. Learn how to use that in Rails, all of its quirks, foibles, flaws, Rails caching, Rails ActiveRecord, all of that stuff. And that takes the cart price up.

I think that's good. I'm hesitating and I'm trying to figure out why. It's because of this. It's the time to create. Because I've seen enough course businesses to know that you could have 3, maybe 4 courses total and hit this $2 million.

Like, so why do I, why am I making 40 of them?

Okay.

All right. Here, here's my rebuttal. I see, I see. And I, I rebut, um, Steve could do this one. Steve could do all of these because he's the actual expert. I can't teach Rails. I don't know the first thing about Rails. So a guest, I could teach this one, so we'll put AF next to that one. Django, I don't know the first thing. So the things I'm on the hook for, I would actually probably do ScreenFlow, are these two.

Yeah.

That is a rebuttal with embedded in it a problem. Now I'm managing guest instructors.

Which there's a lot, like you can build a great business off of that. There are ways that this could go terribly wrong.

Sure.

Where you could say, oh, let me forever give you a revenue split on this course and all of that. And you might really regret that.

Right.

Or you could say, hey, I will pay you $10,000 to help produce this with me. We'll do all the backend and all of that. And, you know, as you build your audience, I'll help amplify it in A, B, and C. I like that.

So we eat some of the risk for some certainty.

Yeah.

And hopefully that person gets a chunk of change that they're thrilled about. They don't have to market a course. And we can also throw some of our distribution or reach behind them. Behind their personal brand, even though it falls under our course platform.

Yeah, so there's a lot of ways you can solve that, but I think you're right to worry about like, ooh, that, you know, there are some, you know, potholes in that journey.

These I'm not worried about 'cause it's Steve and he's my business partner, so that seems great.

And if you have course creation down to a science, like there's a lot of things where, okay, say on one of these more particular ones, say 3 years from now we're like, actually we don't want these individual ones, but you spent like, a month on each, you know, you learned a bunch, you're now all better at course creation, you've made plenty of money, like it will work. I would just really encourage you to think, as you scale the business, to think beyond scaling products to scale revenue. Because you're in a high leverage business. And so if we look at the equation here.

Well, let's look at the equation. So the equation is what? Number of products I don't know that it's even number of products. Oh, I started off strong, confident that it was number of products times. So we gotta salvage this. Editors, help me out here. What's the equation?

Well, let me think about it. I think it's, I mean, even if we just go, uh, let's just go audience.

Oh, she started a new line.

And then we've got a conversion, uh, and I mean, maybe the price comes first, right?

Mm-hmm.

I didn't write it as an equation.

I know that's a timeline. Yeah, that's okay.

That's good.

Yeah, that's perfect. Much better.

So in this, like, if we can figure out how to grow this audience to 50,000 on the email, which we know we can do.

We know we can do because it's been done.

It's been done before. And then if we can go from a, you know, I'm making things up and we're not gonna do live math, but a 2% to a 4% conversion rate.

I can do that math, that's doubled. That's doubled, that's great.

I wasn't gonna do that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And then if we, you know, price, this should actually be, I'm gonna say ARPU.

Okay.

So average revenue per user. But then if you could take that from $149 to, you know, say $250, right? Then these are the factors that we can play with. And you didn't actually touch product quantity.

Who wrote that? So that's where my brain went was immediately I wrote products because I'm thinking, how do I go here? And I go straight to make more products, bundle more, sell more things.

Yeah, I think that's—

Skip that quite a bit.

Well, so let's stay here for a second. So average order value, there's two aspects of it. There's the average purchase that we're making, and then from there, if we're moving on, then we've got the lifetime value. And so I feel like you jumped to increasing lifetime value before you increased average purchase price.

I see.

Now they go hand in hand, but like you can get really good at cross-selling Actually, on that note, have you done much cross-selling between these? Zero. Okay. So that's the thing where you're like, you're getting into a strategy that involves, okay, we're going to get great at cross-selling. And it's like, well, that's not yet a strength. So maybe let's not.

It's not yet a weakness either.

It could be.

That's right. Yeah, I think this in my mind is the desire for like completion. And like empire building, right? I want to have this.

Yeah.

And I don't know if that's good or bad, but this to me feels like, wow, look at that. Look at all those arrows and stuff. That feels good. I think the easiest or maybe the first thing to do is work on that. Yeah. Or maybe work on that.

Well, they go hand in hand. Yeah. Right? Because we are creating more content that we teach on YouTube. We're documenting in public what we do. It builds the audience, it talks about the course.

Right.

Right, you don't truly put things like, I will only do this and then I will only do that. Well, actually, maybe let's think about the order of operations relative to this funnel.

Okay.

So if we're going here, the action step is to get to a second price tier. Okay. And so we want to get to, I believe, $249. Okay. But you should play with it.

Okay.

So we want to get that second tier. The second thing is we come over to audience here is we want to get really good at converting from email to YouTube, from email to YouTube, from YouTube to email, the inverse of that.

Yeah. I was like, you're not introducing a new thing, are you? Okay, I'm with you. Yep, driving YouTube to email. 57 minutes in, I knew it.

I'd have loved to.

Driving YouTube to email. Okay. I think this is worse worth the price of the trip to Boise.

Okay.

I think this is— that is obvious, but I'm not doing it and I didn't think about it.

Yeah. So this is like, as we're going, coming back to our equation or funnel or whatever, is this is the audience side of it. Because then you keep doing what you're doing on YouTube and then just say, okay, now I'm going to get really good at it. Especially because we have a way to do it with the sample content. And a way to do it, and this is what I'm gonna keep coming back to, that doesn't require more time to create or making new products.

Yeah, I agree. I agree. And that's why this strategy is so compelling to me, because it leverages work I've already done. And if my limiting reagent is time to create, which I believe it is, this does not affect that.

Right. Okay, now downstream, like I would really focus on these two.

Okay.

And then downstream, I would focus on cross-selling.

Right. Which is interesting, and I'm curious from your perspective, these are not related. Screencasting and databases, they're just not related. You can argue that some portion of developers wants to screencast. I mean, it's gotta be like, woo, just that part right there. Whereas screencasting in Adobe Premiere is like, right. So that's where I come back to like, this makes sense to me in like a cross-sell bundle, upsell, whatever. In fact, SQLite plus our next course, which is Postgres, which is a different database, even those make sense to me. Like maybe use Postgres at work and SQLite on a side project. That makes a lot of sense to me. I don't know how I get here. I'm not saying it's not doable. I'm saying, do you think that makes sense?

I think you can cross-sell a lot more things than you might originally think. Okay. The example that I'll use is my first two books were about design, iOS design and web app design. And pretty, you know, that's this PostgreSQL, SQLite level. Like, ah, it's a different flavor, but like—

6 to 1, yeah.

And then I wrote Authority, which is about, you know, how to build an audience and all of that. I cross-sold a decent amount. I don't know the numbers. Let's say it was 20%. It made good money. So there's a decent amount of people who follow you because of the brand. They want to pay attention to you. But what I'm wondering, bigger picture, you really want to make more products. And as much as I'm trying to talk you out of some aspect of that. Like, I think you imagine this brand getting to 6, 8+ products, right?

So I imagine 3, 4, 5 flagships with 3, 4, 5 each compendiums. That's kind of how I think about it.

So I think that you could totally get there. I would just try to, like, get really good at some of these other things before you increase the footprint.

So before I do any of this, try to cross-sell these two that already exist. Yeah.

And I think that you're cross-selling when you do this, it's on hard mode.

Yeah.

And I think that'll be really good for the learnings. Yeah. Because you can see, okay, what actually worked and do it as a test because what you're actually doing is saying, hey, I need to drive LTV long-term and I need to get good at cross-selling. And so I'm gonna use the things that I have, cross-sell what I can, and build that skill.

How do you see this happening in like tactics? So people, somebody signed up because they wanna take SQLite course. What's the move to get 'em to even think about screencasting?

Yeah, what I like to do is to send some automated emails that include talking about screencasting. And so it might be a single one. Pat Flynn does this really well where—

That's a name I haven't heard in a long time.

Yeah, so he has a lot of content around building an online business.

Yeah.

And then one of those emails is all about podcasting. Hey, if you wanted to start a podcast and if you click and engage with that, then he has you tagged as interested in podcasting and then he will pause the main sequence and send you emails about how to start a podcast and go on from there. And that goes into his course. So you're really looking to gather some intent and interest. You can also just run a poll, right? And embed the poll in the email and say, hey, what kinds of content would you like to see from me? You know, more about screencasting, more about this. What's the biggest problem that, you know, or like what's the next skill that you're trying to learn? So I would play with things like that.

So the Pat thing makes me think of a potential angle that I'll be curious your opinion on. I am on camera teaching all of these videos. Yeah. Here I'm teaching you how to be on camera and teach videos. And so I wonder if like tying those together somehow, like, hey, you've bought the SQLite course, you enjoyed it, hopefully. I also have a course teaching you how to make courses just like that, like the one that you just watched and paid for. You know, click here, whatever, whatever, whatever.

Yeah, like you could put a lesson at the end of the SQLite course or in it somewhere as well, right? You can cross-sell, 'cause if you're gonna get—

Oh, back up. I could put a lesson in the SQLite course that is functionally a cross-sell to the screencasting course.

And you could tie it in really well, right? You don't truly understand these concepts until you can teach them. And so let me show you how to teach this so that, you know, you apply it at work or all that, 'cause you're not gonna be like, oh, I got this great Aaron Francis video Let me explain it. And I actually can't explain it well enough.

Literally never crossed my mind to use this course. I thought I had to go through email, but I could potentially use this course to talk about other and, you know, vice versa.

Yeah. The other thing that I want to see you do is, as we're jumping around a bunch, but as we think about the brand, I'd love to see you spend time on the big picture brand and how these things come together. And then say something like, like make a video that is, this is the Aaron Francis content business master plan. Here's the courses that I want to make. Here's how I want to link people between them. Here's the order that I want to do it in. And think of it like it's the combination of your livestream product launch on X and Elon Musk's like, this is my master plan for Tesla. Where he's like, first we're going to have this product and then we're going to level it up into a to, you know, consumer-level sedan and on from there. Where it just tell people what you're doing. And then that gives you another opportunity to cross-sell, 'cause they're like, I didn't even know you had this.

And that is reality. People are like, oh, you have a screencasting course? Like, yeah, you've got the best domain ever and you didn't even know it exists. Yeah, that's very real. And so what you're saying there, if I'm hearing you correctly, is, Zooming, so zooming out a little bit to the level that is above this, which is the Aaron Francis empire, and use some behind-the-scenes content to grow the audience, but also grow all of these in their cohesion.

Yeah, I think that you're not quite clear on what the brand is long-term.

Yep.

You're like 90% there. But requiring yourself to teach it and to explain it is gonna force you to get clear, and then it'll get the audience to be really clear.

What does a clear brand sound like to you? So if you had to describe me as if I had a clear brand, what would a crispy brand statement be? Because I don't even know if I fully understand what that could sound like. Or pick somebody else. Pick, you know, pick Ali Abdaal or Amy Hoy, or pick somebody else who you feel like has a crispy, brand?

I think it's hard to do, but so if we, if we, if we come into it from the perspective of we're just trying to explain what we're doing, where we're going. One is the, it's about me as the creator, and that would be like, I'm passionate about these things and I teach everything I know. And, okay, and so, and so as that brand, I'm expecting like, okay, I'm gonna get training content on whatever Aaron is, is passionate about. In this example, I could say something like, you know, you're coming in, you're gonna learn the content necessary to become a great developer. And I'm gonna teach that to you in multiple levels. First, I love teaching the tactics and the specifics, but then I actually think that the meta skills are just as important. And so in these other courses, I'm gonna teach you how to teach. Because as you show up day to day in your job as a developer, you actually have to teach and advocate for your ideas and explain and be clear. And that's why I have screencasting.com. And then in addition to that, I have this other thing. So it's not like we're getting down to one sentence of like, this is the tagline, but you're explaining the through line of why you chose to create these two courses. Right.

Which are seemingly very disparate. Yeah. Yeah.

And so you're getting into, you know, that idea of like, this is where I'm trying to go with the brand long term. And so this is a place to focus on being clear over being clever. Right. And so it's just like, tell me, you know, I think like a takeaway that I'd love for you to have is the couple hundred word explanation of where are you going with this brand? What do you want to make and why? And then I think you'll see those lines. You'll start to see, okay, where's the audience overlap? One of the most powerful exercises I did early in my creator career is, so I had started out just trying to get, like worked on things that were interesting where it helped me learn to code, helped me learn design, marketing, whatever. And so I ended up with an iPhone app for kids with special needs. I had like all of these different, a book about this, you know, a whole bunch of things. And I drew a Venn diagram of the audience overlap. And then I got rid of everything that didn't have some level of audience overlap.

Okay.

And that helped me find clarity of what the through line was. Now, I think you really love these different aspects of—

I do.

Of the business. And so I'm not saying, oh, because there's only 10% overlap, you've got to kill one and double down on the other. But what you can do is really find what that through line is and spend time with it and then figure out how you explain that to your audience. 'Cause they'll, they'll see the passion and the authenticity from you and what you're creating and they'll follow you through that. You just have to give them the tools for it.

I totally understand that. I think I'm at the point where you were creating an app for special needs kids where you're like, I can do this. I'm interested in this. I'm going to do it. And I feel like I'm currently in an expansion phase of like, I can do this, I can do this, I can do this. And I need to at some point, probably soon, move into a contraction or consolidation phase where I'm like, this is the ethos, this is the brand statement, and here are the things that align with it and the reasons why they align. And here's the thing that's out here that no longer aligns. Yeah. Yeah.

And then especially because you have a business partner.

Yeah. Right?

You guys need to have a shared lens through which you're making decisions. Because otherwise you're gonna get into some point where, you know, you're saying, I really think we need to launch, you know, the next, the 7th specific course or, you know, video editing platform course. And he's saying like, no, actually I think the data says that we should launch, you know, Postgres.

Right?

Or this other one. And you need to have that shared vision of where you're going. Otherwise, at some point it's gonna lead to conflict.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is a place I feel murky. And so that is something that needs to be clarified, especially as we're moving towards putting all of this under my personal brand, which is shared with Steve. But this needs to be identified.

Yeah, and the thing that I love about the way you've built your brand so far is you get to do this, you get to explore this question in public.

Yeah.

And it just, it just adds to the brand.

It does. It really does.

Yeah. So I think as we take a step back, we've covered a lot of ground here.

Yeah.

So today we're at $350,000 a year in revenue. I think it's totally possible to hit $1 million next year and then the year after that to hit $2 million. We've proven with people like Ketsy Dodds, Wes Bos, this is a path that's been done before, right? And so we can learn from them. Now, in all of these different problems, the ones that I'm thinking about the most are how do we get really good at the audience size? And then how do we get really good at increasing that order value? And then the other thing that I love about it is the clear brand that we're talking about is really going to bring you back to that lifetime value. Because if you can get that cross-selling long-term down to a great place, then let's say down the road we bring in paid acquisition and you're like—

God willing, yes.

That's something where you're like, wait, I thought I could only pay $1 per subscriber, but now because I can cross-sell, I can pay $4 per subscriber. Like all of a sudden, I could pay way more.

The money machine goes brrr at that point.

Yeah, exactly. There's all kinds of things.

This feels doable. This feels doable.

I like it.

This feels doable. I want to do this and I think in time that will come. Postgres is coming soon, but like these guys will come at some point, but I think this is the most important thing.

Going from YouTube to email.

From YouTube to email, I feel like is the most important and easiest thing for me to do, which is great. I love it when those two come together and then this will be a good adventure cross-selling to figure out, all right, you want to, you say you want to do this, let's figure out how to do it now.

Right.

Don't, don't spend 3 months building stuff, do it now and see if it works. I like that.

Sounds good. All right, let's take a seat and yeah, chat through the, the final details. Okay. So you made the trip up to Boise?

I did. I did. And I got 3 sheets out of it. So it was totally worth it.

So what, So first, let's just talk about like what you're coming in with and then what some of those takeaways are.

Yeah, so I think I was coming in with a lot of raw materials. Like I think things are going well. I do believe that. And what I needed was a little bit of organization, direction, tactics, next steps, that sort of thing. Because I feel, and I imagine this is common, I feel in the creator, space, it's like I can do everything. I could make anything. The question is, where do I spend my finite time? And leaving, I feel like I have a few things that will move the needle, primarily this whole YouTube to email thing, and then figuring out the cross-selling. I feel like those will move the needle. And I have a path forward to like start to get get a flywheel going. 'Cause right now everything is done through sheer force of will. And if I can get to a point where it's a flywheel, I can breathe a little bit.

[Speaker:NATHAN_BARRY] Yeah, I like it. So as we're going into action items, you were talking about YouTube to email. That was, when you said that of like, can I use the course material? And I realized how it tied in with time to create as a problem, the, you know, the sheer number of products. It just, it made so much sense to me. I love that. Feels great. What are some of the other, like, things that you're gonna implement right away?

The brand discovery thing, I think, is gonna be pretty important as we continue to increase our footprint. We need to have a guiding light, a guiding principle, not only for ourselves, but for the audience so they can see this is the ethos that is infused into everything that we do. So we'll have to, that'll be a fun one for Steve and I to work on. And I think the outcome there is going to be a statement like, this is our, this is our brand statement. We don't ever have to share it, but we probably will. But like for us to know, this is our brand statement.

There's another creator, Tim Graw, who's been a guest on the podcast before, and he put out this video. He runs StoryGrid, which is teaching people how to become great writers. And I don't remember the title of the video or something, but the gist is like, this is my evil plan to take over the world with StoryGrid. And he just like walks through, this is what I'm doing. I'm going to do this and then this, and here's how it's all going to work and all that. And on one hand you're like, you can't show how all of this is made. But he's like, people trust me more now.

Now they know.

Yeah, here's exactly where I'm going.

And like the, the empire thing, it's a good shtick. So I can, I can ride that shtick for a long time. Like this is how I'm going to build my empire. And it's like, oh, that's kind of fun. I like that. So yeah, I think that'll be a fun exercise for us to do.

I like it. The other thing that I want you to do is to really think about what could be an additional price tier on the products. And I would just ask your audience. So I would just send an email to everyone who bought SQLite and say, hey, what's something that's not video that I could include?

And it's not consulting.

Yep.

Yeah.

Yeah. Here are the constraints. Right. And what's something that I can include that would add a lot of value to this course?

Yeah.

You know, and throw out a few ideas and just say, hit reply and let me know.

Yeah, I like that. It's a reason to send an email.

A reason to send an email.

It all comes back to that.

Exactly. Uh, we covered a lot of good ground.

We did. This was great.

So if people want to follow you in this journey, because one thing that, uh, everyone has learned from this is that you will share this whole process live.

I'm going to share the whole thing. So yeah, follow me, follow me, follow me. Yeah.

Where should people go to follow you?

Yeah, I think, um, most real-time updates are going to be on, uh, x.com/aarondfrancis. You could also go to aarondfrancis.com. And you know, while you're there, why don't you sign up for my newsletter? Like, get on my email list. I love it.

How was that?

Was that good? I love it.

That was good. Thanks.

Perfect.

Well, Aaron, thanks for making the trip out.

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me.

If you enjoyed this episode, go to the YouTube channel, just search Billion Dollar Creator, and go ahead and subscribe. Make sure to like the video and drop a comment. I'd love to hear what some of your favorite parts of the video were and also who else we should have on the show.