Zero to $125,000 in 30 Days: My Exact Course Launch Strategy | 043

How I made $125,000 on launching our video course.

In this episode, I talked to Aaron Francis. We dive into what worked and what didn't.

One thing that I thought of the night before, it's a distribution hack that actually scares me.

Are there any mistakes that you made?

I sent emails too quickly and Gmail put us in the penalty box. I should have warmed up the domain better, but I'm hesitant to send emails because I'm a developer.

You have to warm up that reputation even though you've grown a pretty substantial audience. The numbers that you're putting up in course sales are significantly higher.

I have been able to put together an audience that really trusts me. It's not enough to do the work. You have to tell people as well.

The expertise comes from showing your work. This was the hardest lesson that I had to learn in my creator journey, and we share all the details. Aaron, welcome to the show.

Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.

So let's just dive right in. And I want to hear about the course launch that you just wrapped up. Yeah.

So me and my partner Steve just finished launching launching our first solo video course. It's about a database called SQLite. I won't bury the lead, it's at $125,000 in sales right now, which we're very happy about.

Congratulations.

Thank you. It's, uh, we can get there, but it's a very good launch for a moderately niche technology. And I think proof that what we're doing is sustainable. It's not enough to live on, for 2 people, but it is a step in the right direction and we're very happy with it.

So what time period are we talking for that launch?

Oh goodness.

Couple months?

We probably launched a month ago.

Okay.

Yeah.

125 in 30 days.

Not bad.

Not a bad gig.

Not bad.

There's something to this whole creator thing.

Yeah, it might just work out. With a relatively small list size, I think we launched to maybe 4,000, 5,000 on the email list. Okay. And a relatively low price. I mean, we did a sticker price right now is $149. Okay. And they got a $20 off coupon for being on the list. So it's like pretty small list with small value and it's like, you know, still made a lot of money.

Yeah. So you're not doing like some people are like, oh, this is a cohort-based course and it's $1,000 or $3,000. And instead you're like, hey, this is tightly packaged value, like delivering far more value than what we're charging for.

That is the hope. Yeah. So right now I think right now it's like at 70 videos across maybe 7 or 8 modules. And then I've got 2 more modules coming. So maybe another 10 or 15 videos. And after that, early access will be closed. So I would have loved to have finished it all, but we decided, okay, we got to launch, let's launch. And then we can use those as little like bumps, you know, in the future, send out another email that's like, hey, there are more videos and hopefully people will buy.

Well, that's exciting. There's a lot of things when it comes to a course where you want reasons to talk about it more. And we could list out and brainstorm all the reasons that you can promote it again, but one of the reasons is we just launched a new module of 10 videos.

Yep, exactly.

So having that in the back pocket.

So I'm turning my inability to finish it on time into this super positive strategy.

Oh, 100%.

Yeah, I knew that all along.

So basically what you're saying is you've gone fully from developer into marketer.

Exactly. I mean, don't tell my friends, but I am fully a marketer now, yeah.

There's times where conversations come up internally like, I don't know how we're going to get people on board with this or how that's going to work. I'm like, we're marketers. You know, part of our job is to understand what's— not we're saying that we'll spin it in some way, but really of saying like, hey, what's the value for, you know, everyone involved in this? And that's what marketing is. Yep.

Clearly articulating value. And it's working great so far. So this might actually be my preferred strategy in the future.

Yeah.

Launch with like, 90% done, call it early access, which like gets people to come in and say like, ah, I'm part of this thing early, and then do the last 10%, get some bumps, reasons to send emails, and then close early access, which hopefully will be another bump to say like, early access is going away, you have 2 more days to buy it, and then it's going up to $199 or something.

So. So let's talk about that, of the different reasons that you can promote a course and how we can bring urgency into it because people do this thing where they follow creators and they say, that's amazing, I'd love to buy that someday. And they just never do. Until you bring in urgency. So the ones we've talked about so far are ending early access, right? So a price increase, urgency of some kind, or a reason to talk about it around additional modules. What other things maybe have you already used in the launch or are you thinking about in the course business as a whole?

Like every developer turned marketer, I'm hesitant to send emails, right? Because I don't want to bother people because I don't like being bothered, right? I got to get over it. I know, I know, I know. Yeah. So one of the things that I have done is interviews with experts, and part of me feels icky about interviewing experts and then putting that behind a paywall because I'm like, hey, you know, Kent C. Dodds, lend me your time and then I'm going to sell it. It's like, I don't know about that. But what I've done is I've done these interviews with experts and then put them on YouTube and on, we have our own domain where the course lives and on that course domain. And then that allows a few things. One is I get a whole new audience from YouTube. Right. So I get these people who are like, ah, I've heard of Kent C. Dodds. I don't know who Aaron is. Let me listen to Kent 'cause I like Kent. And then it's like, oh, they're talking about SQLite. Let me go check out this course that Aaron is doing. That also allows me to send out an email, and I haven't sent them for every expert interview, but I have sent them for a few that's like, hey, this is free, which, you know, assuages my guilt, my, my unfounded guilt. This is free. You can go watch it. Like, enjoy. Also, by the way, don't forget I exist. Like, that's the kind of thing that I've done. And then in terms of other— so that's like expert interviews, new modules, price increases. In terms of other emails, honestly, not a lot. I haven't sent out a lot more beyond that. And in terms of like, you know, we do have a YouTube channel that now has, I think, 43,000, 42,000 subscribers.

Nice.

And so what I'm doing there is I'm in a really lucky position because the content available to teach is practically infinite when it comes to databases. And so I can do a very specific— here's an esoteric database thing that makes a really fun, interesting YouTube video. And in that put like a native ad of me saying, I teach more. Like, you like this video, you're watching it. I do a lot more of this over there and you can go buy it. And I think that's been pretty helpful. And then to flesh out the different platforms on Twitter, it's very much like behind the scenes, like, hey, here's all my sticky notes on my wall of the videos I need to record. Here's behind the scenes of me actually recording it. And so I feel like each platform dictates what the message should be, if that makes sense.

Have you done behind-the-scenes content on YouTube?

Not on YouTube. I haven't done behind-the-scenes videos.

I wonder if because YouTube is so much more of a search algorithm, but I'd be curious to see how it, how it does. Like, that's something that I would try, like a behind-the-scenes, you know, how I made the course.

Right.

And just see. Yeah.

The thing that really strikes me as a good idea to do there is in this, I just I got to get over this, but the video title, How I Made $125,000 on a Launch, right? It's like, come on, that's, that's an obvious thing you got to do. But I think in time we will have a second channel that is more of the business slash creator side where the primary channel focuses on developer content.

Just on that title, it made me think of the most popular title I think that I've maybe ever written. And that was how I made $27,000 in the App Store while learning to code.

Yep.

And I remember that.

I've been around. I remember that. Yeah.

When, when number one on Hacker News, like 30, 40,000 visits in 2 days. And, you know, it was just one of those things where like the juxtaposition of the title works super well. It was something that people wanted to, wanted to pick up on. And, but yeah, you get into these things where you're like, okay, I know this is going to work. And on one hand, I feel like, "Oh, it works because it's clickbait." Mmhmm. But when I actually take a step back, I realize it works because this is the content people want to consume.

Yes.

Right? It sparks the curiosity. It's well-packaged. And I just want to consume that.

Mmhmm.

And so it's like, give the people what they want.

I know! I know! And, like, the thing— the way that I can, like, justify that is I don't have to promise that everybody can do it. Like, I don't have to sell something.

You're saying how I did this.

How I did it. Here's my story. And if anyone can take inspiration, strategy, or tactics from that, awesome. But I'm not gonna go on any platform ever and say, hey, it's really easy to make $100,000 as long as you buy my $1,000 course. Like, I'm never ever gonna do that, but I don't have a problem necessarily with, here's how I did it, and hopefully this is fun, entertaining, inspirational, or something.

So we're going to go— we're going to do two things. First, I want to talk through like your business lessons learned, all of that. That's this interview.

Okay.

And then we're going to do a second episode where we'll get up on the whiteboard and just tease for everybody what's the business problem that you want to dive into when we're, you know, brainstorming the future of your business.

Going from a successful single event, which is a course launch, and turning it into a sustainable business empire. And I use empire very loosely 'cause it's me and Steve. It's me and my buddy. And we just want to make, frankly, a lot of money, but we don't wanna grow into, you know, 30, 50 people. But right now we're at a point where we have proven the model can work and now we need to figure out how to make it a business and not just a good event.

[Speaker] Yeah, that makes sense. So I wanna go back to the business side and talk about that more. A lot of people, you know, we led with the $125,000 launch. What are some of the things that you feel like you really nailed in that launch that made it so that, okay, this worked really well?

Yeah, I think we did a good job of kind of building up the hype beforehand. So my partner Steve is a proper video guy, and so he came to Dallas where I live. He lives in Boise, actually. So I'm, you know, I get to see him. He came to Dallas where I live and we shot like a, like a hype video, which You think hype video, database course, that doesn't go together. That's what made it so great. It was like the most ridiculous hype video ever for this niche database technology. And so, you know, put that out on Twitter and did great. And we got a lot of people signing up for the list. So got to have the list ready to go. We had a really beautiful— have a really beautiful website/course platform. And I think in terms of like the actual launch, one thing that I did that I thought of the night before was I livestreamed the whole launch process.

Okay.

So I got on, you know, I stayed up on— I think it was a Wednesday night, stayed up till like 4 a.m. trying to finish everything because I'm, you know, very stupid. And Thursday morning I'm like, all right, we got to flip the switch. And I turned on Restream and went live on YouTube and Twitter. And was like, okay, we're launching the course. And everybody knew it was coming 'cause I tweeted about it and they're like, all right, it's coming.

Cued up the emails, all that.

Yeah, so emails are going out, which is a funny story. Emails are going out and I'm like, let's do it live. F it, let's do it live. How many people that you follow are live streaming on Twitter at any given moment?

Yeah, almost none.

Gotta be one or two. Barely any at all. So I go live with a title of like, Launching high-performance SQLite. And so already everyone on X is seeing that little red banner that's like Aaron Francis is live. It's like pinned in the sidebar.

The visibility that you get. Huge. It's like, would you like a fraction of a second of attention for your 280 characters? Or would you like to dominate?

Or do you want position sticky so that everyone sees it all the time?

Yeah.

And By the time it was done, you know, who knows how they count metrics? It's all made up. By the time it was done, it had like 120,000 views.

And how long were you live for?

2 or 3 hours.

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah. It's a long time.

It's a long time. And like during that time, I'm literally like, I have the microphone in front of my face. I've got Steve on speakerphone and I'm like, hey man, this thing isn't working. And you can hear him talk on speakerphone back and like we're trying to figure it out. I'm sharing my screen. We're like trying to do the launch and I'm writing the launch email on stream and people are like giving me feedback like, hey, That sounds really dumb. You should change that. And I'm like, that's actually a good point. And so I think that was an accidental hack that paid off in a huge, huge way because that brought in just a huge amount of attention. And it was novel, which I think is pretty important. I had a lot of people commenting that this was the first time they'd ever seen any like launch behind the scenes.

Because most people will do that and they're saying, hey, we're going to do a webinar and, you know, or we're going live and we're We're gonna teach this thing, or it's, there's a 5-day window for the launch and here's what we're doing each day. And you had this totally casual, like, I'm just gonna show you the behind the scenes. There's nothing polished about this.

Not even a little bit. I am so disheveled, hopped up on coffee, Steve's on speakerphone and we're like debugging. Yeah.

Were there any negatives that came from that?

I honestly don't think so. I didn't leak any, you know, keys on stream or anything. Yeah, there's some of those.

Like, whoops, the GitHub credentials?

No, honestly, I think it was a pure win, which I was just— and to do it just on a lark and have it be one of our best things we did was like, oh man, that's a good instinct. I'm happy that I did that.

So going live, what was the takeaway that you would apply to another launch? Like, are you going to do that every launch going forward?

100%.

Yeah. Yeah, I will.

One is it's a distribution hack, 'cause like we talked about, um, Twitter will pin the fact that you're live on every single person's homepage. And so even if they don't watch it, they're aware that the thing is happening right now. Um, so that was just massive. Plus you get to benefit if you use Restream, you get to benefit from people on YouTube discovering it.

Or as your YouTube audience grows, you're reaching more and more people.

Exactly. So I will continue to do that. Um, and that is, I think that was probably the thing that went the best. The launch to the email list was a little bumpy, but I think the thing that went the best was all of my friends came, and then a bunch of other people came, and then a bunch of other people came, and it was like there's a critical mass watching me do the thing.

Was there anything that you did to make that livestream more interactive? Like, how do those— is that people in comments?

Yeah, people in chat. So, um, the tool that I was using, which I'm not affiliated with, but now I should be, for goodness' sake, Restream, um, it aggregates the comments across YouTube YouTube, Twitter, and I think I was actually live on LinkedIn as well and puts them all in a single chat. And so I could see them. I have a little confidence monitor and I could see them and talk back to them. And that's, you know, when I was writing the email, they're like, you're burying the lead. Like, you got to move that part to the top. Like, oh, that's a good point. So yeah, it was very interactive.

Yeah, that's awesome. I think that's something that I'm going to try. I'm not sure when I'm launching something. Well, the rebrand, when we rebrand from ConvertKit to Kajabi.

Little things do in public. You got to do it.

Yeah. Do it live.

Yeah.

And so we'll, that'll be fascinating to pull together.

Mm-hmm.

You know, like there's a lot of complex things as we move over in that. And October 1st is the date where we'll actually cut over the app and we'll move a bunch of stuff beforehand.

But, but at some point you're going to have to, you're going to have to turn a switch that's like DNS point this way. And like, you want to talk about nerve-wracking edge of your seat, put that live. People are gonna be like, he's doing DNS live. What a madman. Yeah. It's going to be great.

Oh, that's slightly terrifying.

Yeah.

There's this thing in content creation where— or really business in general— of like making note of the thing that scares you. And that actually scares me.

It should. It absolutely should.

And I think that is— it's going to make for great content.

It's great content.

Because like, if you think about the things that you can do in writing content or whatever else, where you're like, oh, And now I'm going to build the suspense a little bit and then I'm going to give that payoff, right? Or you could just do things that are inherently suspenseful.

Yes, you could. You could, you could do terrifying things live and people are going to be terrified, but they're going to love it.

How that popcorn came back. Exactly. All right, let's see what happens to these SEO results.

Exactly. And you're going to get reports like, hey, I can't reach it in, you know, Arc browser. And you're going to be like, guys, they can't reach it in Arc browser. And it's going to, it's going to be great.

I look forward to it. Yeah, that'll be great. Well, if you can make sure to be there in the comments.

I absolutely will.

So that was a big win. Are there any mistakes that you made that others should learn from?

Huge. Not huge, big. Sending emails from a relatively cold domain. And this is something that I need your coaching on, which we'll move into at some point. I sent, you know, we had, I think by the time we launched, we had, you know, 5,000 people on the list. And I sent emails too quickly and Gmail put us in the penalty box. And so we didn't get blacklisted, we didn't get— You got deferred. We got deferred.

Yeah.

And it was like such a—

it's such an odd term.

So odd. So frustrating. Um, and one of the, like, after I, after this whole launch thing, I wrote an article on my blog that says, like, the title is, You're Always Doing Something Wrong. And that's how I feel. Like, the cost of doing things is doing some things wrong. And we did that wrong. I should have either warmed up the domain better, but I'm hesitant to send emails because I'm a developer. Or I should have used AaronFrancis.com, which is literally 25 years old at this point. And I've sent some emails from it, but the domain itself has been in my possession for 25 years.

So you did a domain just as specific. Yeah.

Yeah. So I had people sign up at HighPerformanceSQLite.com and I sent all emails from HighPerformanceSQLite.com. And there are some technical fumbles there, but I think there are also some strategic fumbles around. I still, I mean, it's not like I lost the emails, but around what is our business brand and are we doing discrete brands for every course, that kind of stuff.

Okay, that's interesting. Yeah. So on the deliverability side, you have to warm up as, as you've learned. But for everyone else watching, you have to warm up that reputation. An email sequence is the best way to do it where people start high engagement, they're getting those emails, they open gradually over time. But it does take that time. And you want to start with the most engaged segments of your audience. And it's another reason— we'll get into this in our coaching segment in a second— but it's another reason to consolidate your brands because some of these things that seem easy of like, oh, another domain, that's easy. It's nice. Each project has its own domain.

It feels so clean.

Yeah. I can tell the developer in you is just like, oh, yes. The scope is perfect. And it just, it creates all these unknown downstream effects because you're like, well, did you set up Google Postmaster Tools for that domain? Probably not.

You know? Yep.

I bet you did later.

I did later.

Yep. Oh, that's interesting. Were there any other mistakes that came up in the launch that others could learn from?

Yeah, I think our timeline was a little compressed. I mean, we turned this thing around quickly because, um, we had to. And so I think the timeline ended up being like 3 months. And that put a lot of— 3 months from like, we have nothing to I've read 6 books on SQLite. I've read the entire documentation of SQLite and I've recorded 70 videos and we've made a learning platform. That timeline was a little bit compressed. Um, and it caused me a lot of like stress. And so I would, in the future, let it be a little bit of a slower burn just because of the like mental and physical toll that it took on me recording all of that stuff. Yeah.

Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, so thank you for the deep dive into the course. I think there's a lot of things that first, $125,000 in a launch is fantastic. You know, in 30 days, obviously revenue spikes. And so like the thing that I want to get into next is how We can scale this into a much more established business.

Yes.

So the last 3 years you've grown a pretty substantial audience. The first thing I want to talk about is the relationship you have with that audience, because even though there's a lot of people there, the numbers that you're putting up in course sales are significantly higher. You know, and we're talking at a price point that's not crazy high. Yeah. You know, you're not selling $3,000, $5,000 at a time. And so to get that revenue per subscriber, you have to have a really high conversion rate between your offer and, you know, in the list. And so how do you think about building like a high-trust relationship with your audience?

Yeah, that is well said because I do feel like the relationship I have, and I even hesitate to call it an audience 'cause I, feel so connected to so many of them. Like, um, there are, you know, within a— within an audience, there are concentric circles, and at the very middle, it's like, they're my friends. Yeah, like, they're my internet friends. And so I do feel like I have, um, I think through very careful thought, been able to put together an audience that really trusts me. And I have thought about this a lot because what I have seen— and there, I feel like there have been phases, and primarily where I spend most of my, um, audience or social time is on Twitter. May it rest in peace. So I spent a lot of time on Twitter, and what I have seen is these waves come through, right? So there was the, there was the thread wave, then there was and continues to be the meme wave where everything is a meme. And as I have seen these things come through, I have noticed that like looking back on the thread wave now, a lot of those people that grew massive followings very quickly on doing these super long-form threads no longer have any reach whatsoever. So you look back at somebody who grew fantastically during the pandemic and they're getting, you know, they've got 80,000 to 100,000 followers and they're getting 100 to 1,000 views on their tweets. And I'm looking at that and I'm like, this is not necessarily the truth, but this is indicative of some truth. And I think the underlying truth is they have a very tenuous connection with their audience. So they did one really good thread and a lot of people followed them for that. And then later on it was like, I don't know this person. I'm not going to engage with this person. I have no connection with this person. And so my goal, my entire goal all along has been how can I grow an audience of people who actually know me? As much as someone can know someone else from afar, how can I grow an audience of people that know me? And my strategies there have just really frankly been to to basically share everything that I'm working on and do it in a very, like a non-preachy way. 'Cause I think another trap that beginners or people who are trying to grow an audience fall into is they start talking like Sahil Bloom.

And it's like— Like they're an expert in some way, positioned that way.

Yeah, and like the hard part is maybe they are an expert, but nobody else knows it yet. And when you start talking in these aphorisms and pithy statements, it's like, Who are you preaching at? And so I'm trying to maintain a certain level of like authenticity and I'm figuring this out as I go. And sometimes I do have thoughts that are very like deeply rooted in expertise, but I don't ever want to be preachy. And so trying to find that balance of being a real human being while also trying to gather like-minded people around me, it's kind of difficult, which is why my growth has been a lot slower than some people. But I, and this is maybe a cope, I think it's a lot more dense, right? So I don't have a large diffuse audience, I have a pretty good-sized, dense audience that trusts me.

You brought up the threads and the memes. One thing, like, as we're in our meme phase right now on X, it's interesting. I've heard quite a few people actually talk about how, like, as they've grown their audience further through memes or these, you know, fairly cheap interactions, that the audience just doesn't stick around.

Yes.

And so I think about that with, like, if we contrast threads and memes, they're both in their phases were both very good at top-of-funnel awareness. And so I was thinking about where I ended up, 'cause I wrote a lot of threads and built up my Twitter following to, I think it's 120, 130,000. And that worked really, really well. But I think the twist on it is that I really tried to write threads that only I could write.

Yes. Not top 10 ChatGPT extensions.

Oh man.

Yes, that's what I'm talking about. Yeah. Your reaction is what I'm talking about.

Because right now, like what I'm seeing right now is people are saying like, the Olympics are over. Here's the 10 moments.

Here's the image of the guy shooting 10 times. I'm like, yes, I've seen it. I've seen it. Yeah.

And so it's thinking about what is the thing that brings your experience into it. So like, this is from my experience how to build a great company culture in a remote team. This is, you know, the story of how we did direct sales to grow ConvertKit. And that, especially in the world of AI, I think is so important because content creation is cheap and easy. You know, like before for Threads, someone's like, what Wikipedia article can I copy and paste? And Wikipedia, Google Images, boom, boom, boom, Threads, 100,000 views, we're done. Anyone can do that. And so it's really like, how do you bring in the life experience and the stories? It's like for anyone who's written a book, if you're writing from a position of expertise, it's really hard to trust that expertise until I know, like, when was the painful moment in your life when you internalized that lesson? Like, what was the mistake that you made? For me, like, the time that I learned to build an email list was when I had that article go viral on Hacker News. I thought that I'd absolutely made it. And if you you know, hid that moment in the Google Analytics graph, you would never know that anything happened because I didn't capture that attention anyway.

It all went away.

It all went away. And so, you know, people have told me like, oh, I trusted you on the advice of build an email list after that because I know the painful moment when, like, you gave up what would have been thousands of email subscribers because of that mistake that you made. Other places where you've told stories or brought in like that authentic side of yourself that has added to that connection?

Yeah. So I have done a few conference talks. So the world in which I live is primarily development. So I've been to a few, you know, development conferences and given what would be considered soft talks because they call, you know, technical talks hard talks and anything that's not technical is a soft talk. So I gave a few soft talks. One of them was at a conference called Laracon, which is a Laravel conference, and I was the last speaker and I gave I gave my absolute best talk that I could give, and it was about publishing your work and how basically you can increase the amount of luck that comes your way if you just put your stuff out there. And it was like an impassioned plea to the audience to put their stuff out there. And woven into that were stories of when I watched a bunch of other people get stuff that I wanted and I was bitter. And I was like, why is this all happening to them and not me? I'm smart. And the answer was because they're putting their stuff out there and I'm sitting at home bitter and nobody knows who I am through no fault of their own, it's my fault. And so that was like, that was the inciting incident maybe in 2020 or yeah, I think it was 2020 when I realized like, I've got two options here. I could watch other people make friends, go to conferences, speak at conferences, get jobs, make money. I could watch that and be bitter Or I could just start putting my work out there and see what happens. And the first option is really safe 'cause it requires nothing of you. You just get to sit at home and be mad.

And no one will ever criticize you for it.

No one will ever criticize you for it. The second option is terribly scary because you're exposing yourself to criticism. And that single story has kind of been the through line through all of this, which is like my coming to terms with, exposing myself to criticism and being okay being out there in the void all by myself, which is what it feels like sometimes when you put something heartfelt out and you're like, I'm, you know, bearing a part of my soul here. Like, what are the people on the internet going to think? And then you realize, oh man, I don't care what the people on the internet are going to think. This is all going to be over so soon. I don't want to look back and think, I wish I had cared less what, you know, Buttcrack72 on Twitter thought. Like, I don't care. I need to put this work into the world. And so that was kind of like my painful turning point that has been repurposed into, guys, do not be like I was, do it this way. And it has resonated pretty well.

What's fascinating to me is you and I have such similar creator Arks, basically, you know, I got my start in design and development and then the first content that I made was, you know, a lot of technical content about, about design. And the person that made me switch the way that I was thinking was Chris Coyier, who wrote css-tricks.com. Not because I was like, Chris is amazing, let me copy him. But I remember when he started the website and I watched him launch it and I had this weird perception about expertise. Like he wrote an article and I read that and I was like, who's he to think he's an expert? Like, I know how to do that. And then he'd publish something else. I'm like, I know how to do that too. You know what I was like? I'm better at CSS than Chris Coyier.

That's option one is to sit at home and say, I'm better than Chris Coyier. Yes.

And I fully lived in option one. And then it did get to the point after a while where he would publish an article and I'd be like, well, that's better explained than I would explain. I knew that, but it's better explained than I would explain it. So let me, when a coworker asks, hey, how do I do this thing? I don't know, we're probably troubleshooting Internet Explorer 6 classic bugs. And I'd be like, oh, read this article and then I'll help you with it. And so it went from like, I'm better than this to like, oh, this is useful.

And then there was a point where it was like, oh, I learned something.

And thinking back, I'm like, that's such an arrogant place to be. It is.

It is an arrogant, cynical place to be. And I can say that because I was there.

Yes. And so, but the turning point when I realized, 'cause I was like, we're the same. And we're the same is actually generous. What I thought was I'm better. And—

Revisionist history there, yeah.

Yeah, exactly. And so when Chris came out with a Kickstarter campaign to say, I want to raise $3,500 on Kickstarter.

What a quaint time.

So that I can take a month off of client work and all of that and focus on redesigning CSS-Tricks and make this like a great, a really great site for the community. If you back it, I will, uh, record behind the scenes. I'll record some training material, all that. And that's what you'll get for backing it. And a big thank you. And I was like, $3,500. Like, I think you could probably hit that. We'll see. And it was something like $87,000.

Okay. There we go.

Yep. That, that makes sense. You know, 45 days later. And it just blew my mind because here I was thinking like, I know more CSS. Now I feel like, well, maybe I'm like starting to admit maybe he knows more than I do. But I realized like we are not the same at all. He had the ability to go in front of an audience and say, here's this thing that I want to do. Will you support me in it? And, you know, thousands, 1,000 people or more are like, yes, absolutely. And I had none of that. And so that's when it really hit me that, you know, beyond this baseline of expertise, like it's not that people teach because they're experts. It's we perceive them as experts because they teach. And I had that whole equation backwards. And so it's fascinating as you, like, you went through the exact same thing.

I sat and watched people tweet stuff and I was like, yeah, come on. I know that. I'm so smart. And then it really dawned on me that doing the work and sharing the work are discrete tasks. And you and I both went through the phase of like, oh, I could do that. But then the— there was an entire vector that was missing, which was sharing the work. And so you and I were both doing the work and very, you know, very good at it, frankly. But you and I doing work, we were good at it. But then these other people were doing work of equal quality or maybe less, but they were talking about it. And that was the realization that I had, which was like, it's not enough, depending on your goal, it's not enough to do the work. You have to tell people as well. And so that two-pronged doing things and telling people is where I, that was the big turning point in my life.

So the three different mantras that I really internalized, and then I ended up adding a fourth later, but it started with teach everything you know, of just saying like, It's okay that I'm not an expert, but I just learned this thing. And I'm not teaching it to the cynical person, you know, who— The nitpicker. Yeah, the nitpicker who was me, you know, 6 months ago. I'm teaching it to the person who's one step behind me, who like just learned how to install Rails on their console and get that going. And they're like, I don't know what to do next. And the expert is like, just do this. And they're like, you skipped like 12 steps because it's intuitive to you. I didn't get it. The second thing is work in public. I was doing all of the work and I just wasn't sharing it. And so I remember doing math homework, you know, in probably early high school, and it was still easy enough in algebra or whatever where I could just look at the problem like, that's the answer. And I was homeschooled. And so my mom, as my teacher, was like, you have to show your work. And I'm like, but the answer is correct. And she's like, I know the answer is correct, but at some point It won't be. And you have to demonstrate that you actually know how to do it. And it's the same thing of like the expertise, the demonstrated expertise comes from showing your work, not the polished end result.

Yep. Unfortunately, the build in public, like mantra—

Sort of a meme now.

It is. It's become very thin. It's become very shallow.

Win in public is what it's—

Yes. I think that is exactly right. Or ask silly questions in public. Like, you know, Mac or PC? What do you use? To develop and you're like, guys, this isn't anything. Like what we're not after is like vapid engagement bait. When building in public, the way that I view it as anything that I'm doing that while in the midst of my work, which I think is pretty important, while actually working, I see something that is either interesting or I learned that I should have known already. That's a great one. Like if you can prove Hey, I'm an expert in some area and I just discovered this really simple thing that I should have known. Do you guys know about this? That I find is better fodder for building in public than sitting down on a Monday and trying to come up with 14 tweets to schedule about building in public for the rest of the week. I think that is a huge mistake. I think the real win is do the work and then from that extract interesting things that you come across in the course of working and share that with the world. And then importantly, I think once you share it, your responsibility is done. You've been absolved of your duty once you share it. If it goes great, that's awesome. If it goes poorly, that's okay. Your responsibility is to do the work and to put it out there. And then if it resonates, maybe you learn something about what resonates with the audience. If it falls flat, that's fine. Move on. You've got a bunch more where that came from. And I think I see a lot of people Putting a lot of pressure on their content to do a certain thing and not necessarily focusing on the habit of putting it out there.

Right.

So they do something and it fails and they're like, build in public is dead. And you're like, no, this is the game, man. Just keep going. And so I think that is an unfortunate skewing of what I think is a good tactic, which is build in public. It is skewed a little bit. Cheap and easy.

Yeah, that makes sense. I think it's around the journey that you're going on. There's a creator who I followed years ago named Colas Seed, who, he built the whole Envato network.

Oh, wow.

And they, you know, went to—

NetTuts and all of that.

Oh, yes.

Yeah.

You know, like hundreds of millions, maybe a billion-dollar valuation or more. And he said the best way to be interesting online is to do interesting things offline.

Yes, 100%.

I think about that of like anytime someone says, hey, I want to get into content creation, I'm like, okay, cool. What journey are you going on? And they're like, well, I'm going to do like the build in public thing. And it's like, that's not a goal.

About what?

And so it's thinking about what's that journey that you're going on and then tell the story of it. Like for ConvertKit, when I said I'm going to build a SaaS app to $5,000 a month in recurring revenue in 6 months, and live blogged the whole thing, all these people came around me, you know?

Me included. I remember that. Yeah.

So I think of like, Hiten Shah and Amy Hoy and all these others who said, like, let me help you. They'd get on calls and strategize. Like, Amy Hoy and I wrote a whole bunch of copy together because she's like, I see that you're going somewhere and I'd like to help you, help you get there. Instead of what I think most people who want to be creators are doing, is they're just creating content for the sake of creating content.

Which is where you get the Wikipedia threads.

Yeah, exactly. And then you're chasing those views. One of the things that you've done a lot of that I know from following you on X is you incorporate a lot of video. And I think that's something that intimidates a lot of creators. Yeah. So how do you think about bringing video into the equation, especially if you're, you know, more heavy on LinkedIn or X or a newsletter? And then how that plays into the relationship with the audience.

Yeah, it's very interesting. And I think it's becoming more interesting with the proliferation of AI slop in written form. Right. So anybody can just throw together written content very easily. Not to say that it's good. So I think, you know, going back to Chris Coyier, you, you ascribed to him or you said that he is the expert because he's teaching, right? So these people in public get these certain accolades, deserved or not. As a podcaster, I'm sure you get people saying, oh, Nathan's got a podcast. You're like, oh, I listen to your podcast all the time. And it's like, I'm just sitting down and talking with friends. It's like behind the scenes, that's kind of normal. But this, the outward presentation of it, everybody's like, oh man, he's got a website and he's got a blog. And so I think there are maybe not unfair, but skewed weights put on certain types of content, right? So at the bottom of the pyramid, most people do nothing. That's just the biggest, hugest part of the pyramid is people just consuming. No moral judgments, that is reality.

Still 99% of the population.

Yes, easily. And that's fine. If you lead a quiet life and work with your hands and don't spend all your time on the computer, that is more power to you. Yeah, congrats to you. But for the rest of us sickos, moving up from there, you have like text content, like short-form text content, very easy to tweet. Long-form text content, writing blogs, a little bit harder, takes a little bit more thought, less so than it used to, but a little bit more thought. And then you move up to like video, live coding, speaking at conferences, and there are fewer and fewer people up there on the pyramid. This is not a value pyramid, this is just a population pyramid. There are fewer people up there, so the unfair or skewed accolades accrue to you more because you're not competing with very many people.

Right.

So you get to the top and you're doing video and where there are, to just use a round number, 100 bloggers, there are 3 people making videos, 4 people making videos, right? And so the perceived value of video, I think, goes way up because there are fewer people doing it, but also it's just a lot harder to do. Like it is a lot harder, both technically and emotionally, to make video than it is to write blog posts. And I've done both. And I find that to continue to be true, to turn on the video, and expose my face to the world and be like, this is actually me. There's no hiding behind Grammarly or anything else. It's hard, but I don't think it is without— it is not a cost without benefit. I think the benefit is people really, really connect to other human beings. I feel like that's pretty well understood. And it's easier to connect with another human being on audio or video over text. And so audio podcasts, great way to start, like, not a good way to grow an audience, but a great way to deepen an audience. And then video, YouTube is just a distribution juggernaut unto itself that cannot be rivaled. And so being able to put video onto YouTube, and then hopefully YouTube says, very good, we will reward you, like, that's what you're after. It's just unbeatable, even with with blogging and email, like you kind of have to bring the people to you. Podcasts, boy, do you have to bring the people to you. If you can put video on YouTube, they will bring the people to you. And now that Twitter or X has decayed into basically TikTok, they're optimizing for video as well. And LinkedIn is like, hey, make— go live on LinkedIn. Why? To whom? But like, if the platforms are rewarding it, maybe it's a good thing to think about. Yeah.

How do you think about the balance between, you know, the influencer world and the creator world and your own identity and how you spend your time?

I think about it a lot. So that's how much I think about it. How do I think about it? I have a sort of visceral reaction, and I think it's included in the word visceral that it's a bad reaction to the word influencer. I don't—

Aaron Francis Influencer. Yeah, don't love the sound of that.

Please don't make that the title of this one. Yeah. I don't begrudge people who identify as influencers. I make no moral judgments about it. I don't want to be an influencer. I don't mind having influence. I don't mind that at all. I want to influence people for what I think are pure right and good reasons. However, in my opinion, an influencer is typically someone who has a lot of opinions.

Yeah.

That is typically what an influencer is or does. They have opinions on everything that is happening in the zeitgeist. I simply don't. What I want to be known for is creating really good work and doing things that are durable and last a long time and are of value. And so if I had to give myself a moniker, I would say that I'm I'm a creator. I mean, before that, I would, you know, maybe even at a lower level, I would say I'm a small business owner. Like I'm not a startup guy. I'm just not. Somebody recently asked me, oh, so you like run a startup? And I'm like, well, we run a small business. Like it's not a startup. And so the idea of being an influencer and the value of, the value that is ascribed to me is because I can, I don't even know what an influencer is in our world. Like an influencer in the broad world is someone who's very pretty and posts a lot on Instagram, right? Right. And, you know, the Kardashians have turned that into an unbelievable business empire. And so, like, you can absolutely pull it off. But I want to focus primarily on the work and hopefully the work reflects well upon me. And if people follow me for that reason, I'm super happy. Um, but I don't want to have opinions on what OpenAI is doing because I don't know, right?

Yeah. And that, that pundit aspect of it—

pundit.

Yeah, we had a, um, a mutual friend of ours was, was asking, like, a thing come out a couple years ago, and they're like, Nathan, what's your opinion on this? And I was like, I don't have an opinion.

Yes.

I just, I just make stuff.

Yes, exactly.

And, and I'm here to share my lessons and, and that I've learned from the journey of making things. And that's really the different approach. Instead of this thing coming out and you're like, oh, I have to have an opinion.

The people have to know what I have to think about it. I'm like, I don't. And I get that often. The most that I get that in my line of work is, hey, can you do a comparison of this technology and this technology? And I'm like, I can't. I'm sorry. I don't have enough expertise in one or both to give a fair comparison. And I'm not going to do something just because it's good content. So all the content that I produce has to spring from some well of expertise, interest, or curiosity. I don't have to be an expert about everything, but I have to like be curious about it. And when people come along and they're like, hey, can you compare Next.js to Laravel? I'm like, no, sorry. What else do you have? Because I can't do that and I don't want to do that. And I see a lot of people doing these like, these shallow-level comparisons of all these technologies. And I'm like, I don't know that you use all of those. And so this isn't, this isn't really valuable at all. So I try to stay away from that.

Just give us a little bit. Where should people go to follow you if they want to learn more about the journey, see what it looks like to authentically build in public? Yeah, as you do.

You can find every link at AaronFrancis.com. But where I primarily spend my time is on Twitter, X, @AaronDFrancis. So that's where I hang out the most.

Sounds good. Okay, so that's it for this episode. But what we're going to do is we're going to get up on the whiteboard and we're going to talk about what it takes to turn a $125,000 course launch into a sustainable business for 2 people where we can build this really into, you know, the small empire that they want. 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 and also who else we should have on the show.