How to Make 6 Figures From Info Communities (Behind the Scenes)

Hey guys, welcome back to Top Trends. We got Kyrie. He is an absolute legend and I just didn't know it until now. He's behind roughly 25% of any school games group that you see on the leaderboard. Master of client retention is probably a secret, has some secret knowledge of how you actually get courses to retain revenue. A lot of people in our space just don't have enterprise value or any sort of moat on retention and once you consume the knowledge all of a sudden they're like cool onto the next one. So dude, I want to explore some, some game of what you've been doing in order to make that happen because it's one of the hardest problems to solve in the info space is to get people to retain, refer people like anything backend other than just immediately ascend revenue. So dude, welcome.

Thank you man, nice to meet you as well dude. But yeah, I'll get straight into it. For me it's like when I came into info industry I always used to, I say Stella, I used to see everyone focuses on marketing and sales. Like the front end obviously is the most important thing just logically, right? However, you can attest this. How many brands in the info space have you seen that hit 50k a month, 100k a month, 300k a month and then the next few like even months or even weeks later they just recede back down dramatically and they, they make it 50%.

Yeah. Like at least 80% like almost every matter of time.

Yeah, yeah. So then I was like what if I enter the info industry because I've got a background in vtuber education, right. So I'm very much know about how to build good products. But when I saw the info industry I was like this industry is definitely ripe for someone to come in. And this is my whole, my head, my whole position thing. Ripe to come in and actually build good product that actually gets people results. Like my brand is called product skin, right? Like that's not a brand, it's not my tagline, my own hat, right? And that is my entire like thesis in the info industries. How can we make products that get people results and then if it gets them the result, selfishly the founders retain more revenue because people don't leave. And it's so much easier to upsell people when you're actually helping them. Because most upsells traditionally in this game in my experience are marketing based upsells. There's these fancy tactics to upsell someone. Tactics, fancy urgency, scarcity tactics, sales to someone. If you actually deliver a result you don't need to use all that shit. They will just, they will just give you money like you might see in this case anymore. We have a client who has a $1,000 offer, right? And we managed to upsell 17 people in one month to $50,000 back end package via DM, dude.

So that's crazy, right? And that's not the preferred upsell means of most people in this space. So just, just to back up a little bit too. Because you had start in B2B sales. Now I'm super intrigued.

B to B2 B2B education.

B2 B2B education.

Okay, so now not sales or not. So it was more like how do you structure? Okay, it's a bit, you know, I don't want to get into too much but you know, like consulting, like proper big consulting stuff. Consulting brands. It was that but for like, like big training programs for corporate stuff like that.

Oh, corporate training programs, that makes sense.

So I. Yeah, so I knew a lot about how to struck and these people were selling to. We were like not selling to. We're working with like normal people in corporate jobs. Right? Not every normal human being. So how do you make a course where someone's in the 9 to 5 job and they like, they don't want to take. I don't know if you've had a 9 to 5 job before. No one wants to do elearning and training and stuff. So how do you package something to actually make them want to take it? So that's where I learned that I kind of. That's where my first intro to like product design.

Okay, what were some of those early insights too? Because I don't have anyone that would slot in the corporate training program. But I agree, I. I've been there and you're like, you guys got to do your continuous education but there's really no incentive to do that other than they'll get fired back there.

So back there I can't go too much deeper to into it. But like back then it was the traditional. I'm about five years removed. Removed from this now. But the traditional E learning path was they do an online E learning course, they take some shitty made platform, something like that. Right. I came in, I had to build a. What you. I had to build a program for innovation training within, you know, big organizations with like 10,000, 20,000, 100,000 staff members or whatever. So I was like what if instead of E learning we have an. What I done was an in person training thing. So we created a really extravagant in Person training event and it was goal based and. And then it took me about me and the team like ages to design it. But that's how I learned how to do that. And then I was like, I know how to do this. I. And I. When I started talking to people in the info space, I kind of realized no one kind of knew how to build a good info product. I just realized that really quickly there's maybe a handful. Sam Oven's really enough in my opinion, who you've worked with. He bought a great product and there's a reason that he has known now like how long ago since his. His original consultant, accelerator, whatever it was 10 years. People talk about it because it was an amazing product. How many products can you name that people still talk about? Maybe zero. So it's like exactly. And everyone always says yeah, Sam's mindset course changed my life and stuff. But so in my head it's like if you build a good product that that genuinely changes people's lives, bro. You would get word of mouth growth. And I have clients now who just. I have a client. The biggest school in the world right now. Evolve. Right. The their biggest. I'm not a doctor anything about this, but their biggest legion is at Watermouth that people. It's word of mouth because the product is insane. It's just dialed in and that put us 1.2 K a month.

Whoa. Can you talk about what it is? I'll buy into it, but if you can't, then let me know.

I can't. I can see the product is essentially it serves e commerce owners who make. That is. So I've got a few principles on how to do very good mor products. But they serve a rich ICP like relatively rich RCP 1.2k a month. Um, and it's just. They just get access to a big group where it's a kind of a mastermind thing basically.

Okay.

Of econ people. But it's all about copywriting, not copyright, all about creatives and researching ads. And how did you do the best creative in the industry? That's kind of what we teach. Okay.

So and when you say like word of mouth, there's two places people's head goes. It's like people who. Who are good at referral in our industry usually started in MLM and they took the referral like gamification that they learned there and applied to info and they have really good word of mouth, quote unquote.

But no, this one is like we have a form. The form is like how did you hear us? Why did you join? Referred by my friend. Referred by my friend.

So you're just. Which speaks to product and yes, which speaks to product. Right, because you're just getting qualitative attribution then without.

Yeah, no, no, there's no, there's no. Like obviously we have a referral program but I don't even think these guys are touching that. They literally just saying I'll swing to my friend he should join Evolve and and like that's one of our clients Evolve. We get a lot few clients like Evolve is a dramatic example. Like we're doing 450k a month on school. Only school natively doing that right now. I think we're the only school even doing over 300k month weirdly enough on school platform. But bro, I would say at least at any month. I can't say percentages but high maybe I think the majority every month is word of mouth. It's genuinely insane. And that's happened in the last. Because we've been dialing in maybe in the last five months.

Dang dude. Okay, so for people who have seen this that have either MRR info or maybe not even MRR info but they are just looking to obviously keep and retain revenue that they've sold a lot of times what's funny is people they're like how do I retain revenue? I'm like oh you have mrr. And they're like no, it's just like how do you protect it against chargebacks and refunds? Which scenario or problem point do you find most people are reaching out to you that you solve more commonly.

So I'll. I want to touch him. So we'll talk chargebacks and stuff in a sec. I'll just quickly clever one thing as well for me just anyone listening. This would be weird that my the biggest school in the world let's say does 450k for an end. The back end by the way is massive. But like I am actually not a massive fan of MRR just to put that out there. I like high ticket pain and falls. That is I've got clients who make double Evolve make and they are charging 5, 6, 7k upfront just to put it out there because the LTV say a vote retained someone for seven months. The OTV of that is actually going to be less than just charging. Thank you up front. Right. You know, you know I'm trying to say. Right.

So anyway the unit economics suggests that it's just better model especially if you.

Want ads and stuff but so for both by the way. And one of a big tactic in mor is just charge an annual billing, you know and but, but switch the word annual to something sexier. So we say mentorship, you know. But anyways, so for the whole chargeback thing, the reason people charge back is basing basically all the data I've seen is it's when they get confused. That's what it is. When they get confused and they don't know what to do next and they just get pissed off whenever you. I always say to as a consumer in your own life, when is the one time you want to like be like I want a refund bro. Or like it's when you're angry, annoyed, frustrated. You know, that's those feelings. It's the same in the e commerce. It's not ecom space. It's the same with the info space. When you bought something and you're like how do I use this thing? You get frustrated and angry and you're like, you either do two of you either do three things when you're angry at product. You even roast it online. Go Reddit. This product's a scam. I hate it. Some people do that. Some people just completely. They just don't pay the next fee. They just go to never see them again or they ask for chargeback or refund. Those are the three things. The most damaging is they post about you on Reddit. The next one they ask for refunds and the last one is they just go away.

That's generally what happens because some people are avoidant. They are angry and then they avoid the problem. They detach. Some people just go direct and are like cool tick for tack. The this wasn't what I promised. And then yeah, some people are what, what I would consider vindictive that go to the forums and they're like can I gain consensus? Exactly, yes, agree.

And the way you prevent the charge back and like just for context on listen, I manage about by managers. I've got lots of team members who help me and we have lots of CSMs and account managers and all that stuff. This I think right now projected we're managing about 40 million a year in accounts in terms of how many students we're managing. So it's a lot. I've got a lot of data points.

Dude, you're so, so interesting. So like me having had a marketing agency before but primarily around media buying. So I had just media buyers, copywriters, conversion rate optimization people. What structure like what how do you even build an agency that is geared like yours where it's like it solves the problem that you have which is perceived retention but really it's just higher LTV for and then making the product good. Right.

So is it not mobile how I build my agency? Is that kind of.

Yeah. I'm curious just like the org structure like how many people do you have who reports into you?

So client I've got. I won't. I don't go into too much detail about it just because it's kind of interesting. It's a little, kind of a lot of alpha in there for my own personal agency. But essentially it's each client needs. Let's say depends on there's. I've got a rubric where like one client, let's say that a good account, a good account manager. Just the context I want. What we do in our agency is we. We've got. We place systems and talent into people's businesses. Okay. And then as part of that let's say you have 300 students, you're probably going to need two CSMs. Because one CSM generally, I'm talking great a player. CSM can generally manage between 100 and 120 people. Generally. Okay, that's a generality. Or up to $300,000 in accounts. It's one. It's not usually in either or sometimes it really ebbs and flows but that's generally the rules. So I'll put them into the customer's business and I'll also put a lot of systems in. So I've got lots and lots of clients right now. So we manage all the CSMs. We have then like head of CSMs and ops people who manage some of those CSMs. And then it all comes to me at the end of the like week. So look at and do reports. I can approve certain things, toggle certain things. It's kind of how it works. We're just one big staffing agency. But essentially my agency is a staffing agency. But I've done 40 staffing agencies.

Do you. And they're dedicated staffing. So they're like one of them has 150 clients on one business. You're not assigning them out over three or five clients and they have like.

No, no, no, exactly. Not. It's different. A lot of people compare me to like a sale done for your sales agency. However, sales people are kind of fractional, you know. No, this one is like you hire us, you get a dedicated CSM full time in your business. Then you get all of our SOPs and stuff. But it's Just like what I've learned is that right now we're managing over 15 businesses, right? And the cool thing is our system, this is a marketing or anything, I'm just talking transparently. The cool thing is it's like the systems now work for any niche. I've done a tweet, I've done a tweet about this actually I'm trying to pull it up just to talk about it, but I was like I'm working in so many different niches. Niches. And I found the systems now across info to actually build a good product and service those customers work in any niche. So like I've got, I've got customers in E commerce, how to be a better parent enterprise, B2B, Amazon book publishing mindset, faceless YouTube channels, wholesaling, trading, how to be an influencer and even cooler, how to be better at soccer. Like we've got so many different clients, so many different. Yeah, it's crazy but no matter the niche, the systems work in these areas and that's why I consistently. It's not that hard now for me to reduce people's churn, increase their upsells, reduce their charge racks because the system just works. But there's also like, there's also for me, it's caveat. I'm more careful these days who I take on because I, my, my whole brand is not born a good products. Right. And I hate to take people on who don't care about their clients. So I've been in the, especially in the last six months, I've been very way more selective about saying yes to you. Does that make any sense?

It makes sense. So let's lock in on what's ideal because I would love to figure out a way to work together too. As you know, or maybe you don't know, but we have brands and we are. I know you said you guys sometimes get mistaken for growth operators. We were just like wholly owned publish like in house and we partner with experts. So it has the growth operating dynamic like scope wise but in general in generally speaking we're signing them and it's more like we're paying out a profit share to each of our brands. Right. So to us there's yeah. The nuances in like the actual financial model we can all agree on. I think philosophically we all agree with what. What you're saying though is that we are obsessive and student obsession is definitely part of our DNA no matter what brand that we have and we gauge that by different metrics. But I'm curious, like what actually determines. Is it a qualitative thing and you have to get into the business and see and test do they actually mean this or are there certain, like KPIs, like NPS or anything else that you use to determine does this person actually care about their community?

It's going to be a really bad answer. But I've done so many sales calls and it's just I've got that intuition thing at this point, you know. But second of all, it's like if I go and say you're using what school? Kajabi, whatever. If I go into your community tab and I see like your business is two years old, there's like two wins. I'm like, holy shit. I'm like, yes, you're coming with me to increase your student success. But I'm just like, there is something fundamentally cooked in this, in this product. Like there's some, like, I'm saying, like I can put the best systems in the. You know, they say you can't fucking. What you call it something is it. You can't. What you call it, you know, you can't make something shit into gold, you know. But like that's very rare for me to do that. The thing is there's some info products where the success rate is inherently going to be lower than others, you know. Yeah, but generally it's like it. Has this person ever invested in their student success before? Why are they doing it now? Are they doing it now to save their business? I don't like to save people's businesses from a CS perspective. Let's say they have. Like I've seen it before when like I, I joined someone, join someone's business, let's say, and they've got like a very 20 chargeback or 10 chargeback. Somehow they haven't been shut down. I don't know how but like that's what I hate, you know, you have to save a business because that's just gonna drag my business down and I'm probably gonna end up failing to save theirs and then it's bad for everyone. So there's other things, but it's really hard to give a concrete answer just because. Also another thing, I dislike working with people who are this is some bit bad but truly low ticket without. I can build the Ascension. But a low ticket is so hard because their time frames are very short scale. They're like, my retainer is not small so that I pay retain and rivershare. So they're like, I'm paying you this much let's. You have to save me in a month. I'm like bro, a month to like I would not want to take them all because I like long term thinkers. You know someone that like I like to be able to build on all the systems. We got to get data feedback loops trained to put the staff. You know, it's not a small thing, you know, to build your entire. No, a business unit in your business. We're essentially building a business unit business. You can't do it in a month. It's impossible. So that's why I don't take on people who are doing too smaller numbers.

Got it. What are the. What are the most. I'm just curious, what are the most common scenarios that like someone who is doing pure low ticket. Let's just call it less than 100 doll is looking to be saved from. Is it because they're paying their below roas one and they're like please save me and build an ascension so I have LTV the CAC that's above one or like.

Yeah, that's a good question. So let me get. Think about that. So it's like. Are you asking. Wait, clarify a little bit.

You said you don't touch low ticket and they're like looking to save. Save.

I do some low ticket. It's just I wouldn't say you're doing. You charge $99 a month and you're only doing 15k a month.

Got it.

You don't even need to see it. You don't even need my services.

You don't need it.

You know, however, if you're charging 99amonth and you're in 60k a month. Yeah, I'd love to work with you. I've got clients like that. Yeah, but it's just like basically if you're doing under 30k a month these days, I probably won't touch your touch of business because you can't really afford our service and at that point you should probably focus on acquisition anyways. That's kind of what I meant.

Yep, perfect. Sweet. Well, do I. Do I do a similar type thing too? Is just. I wanted to hear your answer before I go in. When I'm normally looking for even JV partners, they don't have to have the same product and quality standards that we maintain internally or like student obsession. But there's two things that I'm usually looking for and the first is could you please add me into the community so I can just spot check that this thing is like legit or accepting to be Legit. My heuristic is like you either, you either better be the best in your niche at what you do in solving the problem or at least you're, at least you're aspiring to be and I can see the effort and the level of work that you're putting into the community. So when I go into a school group like even one of my own and prime mover we've been lucky to work with Russell and I see that like he was last active an hour ago and that like all of the quote unquote CSMs and community manager people are like within the last 24 that tells me right away, okay, there's a level of caring even if the product doesn't NPS or score as high as I would want that hey, we at least have someone who really, really is going to get there long term and that's what matters to me in addition to obviously the revenue and the financials.

So yeah, that's for me though as well. It's also like I do give my all of our customers some relaxing sense that most people come to our business, even big guys doing 5G month, whatever, they don't have good systems. So I can't, I'm looking at them from the standard that I know because that wouldn't be fair because they're paying me to put that standards into their business. That's why a lot of it is just like when I'm talking to them on the, on the first zoom call or whatever I kind of get quite fast where if, if this is a savior play or this is a I need CS now so I can, you know, I'm just saying because my business essentially is I'll take care of the backend. So you could do marketing sales. That's basically it. And I'm not going to let you 10 extra volume if we're just going to blow your business up faster because everyone's refunding you and your stripes get banned and your ops can get banned and school's going to kick you off the platform, you know. So it's just like that really. That happens very rarely though by the way because weirdly enough if you come to a customer success agency you usually care about customer success. So the amount of. Yeah, so like it's kind of a self fulfilling prophecy. So the people who do come to me 9 times out of 10 I like work with them because who's going to come to my agency and they don't care about product. It doesn't make any sense. Just doesn't make Any sense.

It would be crazy. I imagine it's happened but it would be crazy. Yeah, so do I'll show you Wanted to show you two things real fast of just like what I built for our brands that I thought is interesting too. This whole deck is about community and product success. I usually build like an internal social listening wall of just like stuff we post and then also what our customers are saying about us. And ideally we have usually this up in the office. So that's cool. It just gives transparency to what people are saying about us externally outside the community. Needless to say I look at and that's like my North Star North Star North Star metric is time to evangelize of just like how fast can I get someone in in the community to not only say good things about it in front of other people who have talked about the course but externally with no incentives can I like make sure that people are going to say stuff and then I add incentives in the MLM kind of components that I've learned from just observing those industries but in general like I don't want to I want the product to stand by itself before I play any games. Growth hacking games.

Yeah I agree with you.

Yep. Same for after but that being said we don't have and I've always struggled to think about any sort of semblance of CSM strategy. Normally like we call our quote unquote community managers and now our MSAs on our internal team which are member success advisories. They, they do this handoff and they're really dedicated within the first 30 days. We do weekly touchpoints at the very minimum with all of our students. And that like 100 to 150 band that you kind of talked about that's very similar to us, let's call it maybe 50 to 150 depending on the complexity of the community and product motion that we have that can handle that many clients at one time. What where do you find like these people Historically we've never had a hiring pool or an avatar or really thought about like when I look at all of the people in our community team, all of them vastly different backgrounds, maybe some like personality but like we have no coherent hiring strategy like you do.

I can give you just the industry I'll be pull from. 90% of CSMs are sass because. Because that's not mad. If anyone's listening to this need to hire csm I'll give you a mistake that I would say bro, 70% of my clients make before working with us, they hire CSMs from their current community. Dumbest decision you can ever make. And I don't know that anyone else. I don't know anyone else managing more communities than I do. From a CS perspective, it is a. If someone joins your community, they join because they want to own a business or be an entrepreneur or get out of the nine to five. Hiring them to then go back into the nine to five for one, it's incongruent with generally their goals. Two, they're going to. Then they want to make more money than just the small amount you're paying them as a 9 to 5 worker anyways. Third of all, CS is a whole job thing. It's like a whole. What's the word? Competency or a whole, like what's the word? Like it's a whole skill set.

You know I'm saying skill set that requires mastery and dedicated.

Yes. And it's like I'm not going to put CSM into someone's business who joined to learn cold email. They didn't succeed at cold email. So now they should make you csm. No, I'm going to hire a CSM who's been a CSM for 10, 15 years. You know what I'm saying? You can't compare those two people. So that is essentially where we get our CSMs from SAS. We steal them from those companies. Well, I had a CSM, they were former Tony Robbins CSM. So I wasn't SaaS. But like we have good CSMs. I only hire real CSMs. I'm not in the business of training you to be a csm. If anyone ever like says I'll hire you CSM and then I'll train them, you know, it's good because you don't train you. There's that, there's. The CS industry in the info world is very small, is very small in the rest of the world. B2B SaaS software, that stuff. CS is a huge business unit. Like Salesforce would be truly in CSMs I think but like that's where we get CSMs and it's because it's a real institution. That's where you. That's where Most people learn CSMs. That's where they. So that's where most people learn customer success from the SaaS world. Now education, weirdly enough, and this is. I might be talking about my ass but I've done a lot of research and see my data. Education has higher churn rates than in SaaS and software generally because SASS is your buying a product generally for one use case and that you bang out that use case you lower churn, you know.

Yes.

Like I have a client with, I'm not gonna say their name but their SAS has like a. It's really great. He's doing a SAS to info play, you know software here. The SAS first now is doing it for. But his SAs is like 3% churn. Very low, very low. Because they're buying for. Yeah, but they're buying for one reason, you know. However the same person that info has 16 churn same. So it's like but. And it's like I've seen that trend. Of course all my clients where favor info and sas. The SASS has less churn because info is like people aren't buying from once. There's not one singular deliverable info. There's a lot of different things you have to get right. So it's harder to get all of those things right. Also it's generally more expensive than SaaS, you know, I mean for B2C thing. So anyways, the answer is I get our guys from sas. If they're not from sas, they usually got some kind of account management experience somewhere. And if they're not from SaaS or account management, this has been interesting one hospitality any and that and most of my women but like anywhere where they just got some mad people skills, they've dealt with customers. If you've got 150 students are managing, you better be good with humans, you know, because all of my CSMs can get calls to people they do be mandate and do so it's like if they can't open a call, talk to the client and check in with them, they're not gonna, they're not good enough. And I know that I do the final stage interview for every single CSM because it's such an integral part of my business. So like I know, I know pretty fast. If they're good or not, it makes.

Sense then moving on from there. Thank you, that helps tremendously. Now knowing from there how what kind of training do you do with them and what type of training do you have to do with say the client in order for it to make it not like an instant re experience of inserting someone usually with their most valuable highest paying customers. Right. That they're going to be touching.

So the first thing is, is that the CSMs don't need to be trained to be CSMs. Nine out of 10, nine to nine out of 100 times. However, what they do need to be trained on is the contextual stuff of that business. This is the limit and belief a lot. I have a lot of sales calls. Kiwi, how can you hire CSM for my business where CSM isn't a trading expert, they aren't an ecom expert. They are. They aren't an X, Y and Z expert. Right. You don't need to be. They just need to be an expert at csm. However, I do ask the client to spend like maybe a little bit of time helping the CSM learn a bit more about the business model. Obviously that is the only real thing the client has to do. Okay.

To go through their full course. Let's just.

No, they do. They have to do that. And of course, you know, they have to go through the full course, but they don't have to be an expert in it from the cuff. Because a CSM is different from a coach. A coach is a contextual expert. Like if I find out to you, Nick, hey, Nick, how do I run a webinar and increase my straw rate? And you're going to give a lot of detail. Okay. The CSM doesn't need to know that detail on the way. You need to know it because you're. There's a coach. What the CSM needs to do is though they need to be checking on that student three times a week. They need to have a one to one call with them every week. They need to be looking at other. They complete the milestones in the course and then flagging if they're not completing it. They need to be tracking their attendance on the zooms, on the weekly calls. Like all of this stuff that is like, that's all actually low leverage. The high leverage stuff is asking those really technical, competent questions. So CSM takes away the low leverage stuff from the coaches. So the coaches just do the high leverage stuff. What people are paying for, you know.

Beautiful. I love this. So I'm starting to understand exactly what your systems are doing, which is different than what other people in our industry called CSMs where they're actually the ones closing like Ascension sales too. So do your CSMs that you're trading often flag for Ascension and then they set back to some other closer if there is a higher.

Some of our CSMs is, I always give it client choice. Do you want our systems to close or not? Systems can close, but one of our clients have a $50,000 upsell. They kind of want to do it themselves. You know, the CSMs flag it and they set all the upsells obviously, but it's like the client's choice to be honest with you. So there's not a black and white answer there. It's always the. It's always dependent on my clients businesses. So. Okay.

And typically how. How are I get like how you're like compensating how you like to work with clients. But how are CSMs typically compensated within an info business? If there is.

If they're setting they get. We just copy the standard. If they say and they get a set of fee. If they close and they get the closer fee, is that okay.

So they make a base plus incentive essentially.

Exactly that. Is that the same? Exactly the same. So I just copied it from the sales stuff because essentially upsells are sales. You know, it's just pure profit as well. Yeah.

To me they're either going to be the setter or the closer again right when it happens. Perfect. And then as far as, as far as the let's call it hiring strategy, typically like let's just say again going back to they can handle 100 at a time. Do you recommend when someone comes in, it's like cool, hire two and see if one works out. Do you just hire one at a time and how's the scale?

It's always we do like how many students do you have? How active students, how many one to one video calls do they need of your csm? And then we work out the maps basically.

Okay.

Although there is a weird thing of unit scales though where like one CSM can manage 100 people. You add a second CSM then it goes up to 110, you're a 37, it goes up to like 140. I don't really know why yet. I've just seen that the more systems you add to increase the capacity of the whole team. So it's like honestly I've got clients where we manage 700 students with three CSMs.

Well yeah. So there is some sort of like economy of scale compounding, multiplier.

Oh yeah. But your business needs like say business does 10 million a year. You can probably get away with like 5, 6, 7 CSMs. Okay. Maybe less. Depends on it really depends how you productize the course though.

But dude, I'd be so I'm so interested to show you some of our brands some other time and see how you come in and fit it in.

We'll do what's the call which is.

The more likely scenario because we have some of our brands that don't have any dedicated CSM right now and then we have some that have a lot. Do you prefer to integrate with the current? Like let's Call it cx DSM strategy.

I've got clients. Yeah, so I've got one client, I'm gonna say his name. He came to me, he was doing 800k a month. We took two months now and I was doing a million a month. Not cause of me, just the business grew. He came to me cause he knew the business was gonna grow, right? He already had two CSMs and I was like that's why he came to me. He only had two CSMs. When Andrew came up and it's like hey, you come in and just put your stuff in. So we came in, put my CSMs in, rebuilt his entire CRM to manage. Okay. Now if you're talking about the CRM, most people don't even have a CRM to track their students. I'm not going to show on this call because it's all. Don't want to talk to anyone. But we have an entire database to manage the entire student journey. I built that for him. We came in, we run, redone the entire onboarding processes and stuff and then yeah, we just integrated into his team and then I put an ops manager into his business and then the ops person oversees the current and new CSMs.

Interesting. Cool. What so you do it outside of. And what we do is we run out of Close.com for a majority of us and we have both sales and CSM and CX like all within the same CRM. So that way we can see from the time what was the sales conversation, what were all the individual checkpoints and both sales and CX have transparency to the actual journey of the student.

We use airtable but like I use clothes for my own to sell stuff to though but I use airtable for the CS side of stuff.

That makes sense. An airtable could be used to basically mirror what's enclosed to. I think the export capabilities would allow for that.

The reason I use airtable and anyone listening like if they want to know why is because airtable's got a lot of. It's very modular and customizable, great for automations and also data visualization is really amazing on it. You can visualize data in so many different ways. That's more though of an aspect of me. Some of my clients like to see things differently so airtable lets me present reports and stuff to them in some ways does that make sense? Some guys like, Some guys like Trello board, Kanban style things. Some guys like. I don't know what kind of guy you are but I do.

I'm all three like I like I like Kanban, I like matrix spreadsheets for something and I like visual journeys in like Miro or Depends. It depends on like what the function is and how it should be visualized in my opinion and I agree, I.

Was airtable lets you do all of those. So it's just like, it gives me more flexibility to like stakeholder relations, you know.

Cool. What's what? You don't have to say your preference in data visualization, but what is the one thing that you need visualized for you to track whether or not the client is getting better, quote unquote better at making a good product or at the CSM or working if what. What's the go to metric? What's the go to data visualization?

Yeah, yeah, I don't know about visualization but I know that I know what we go for. It's in the first 30 days, what is the, the most realistic winner student can get and how well can you teach someone to do that in a perfect world? That's the first, that's what I'll do with all my clients. If I said to you Nick, like what is the thing people pay you for? All right, cool. Walk me through it. If they do this every single day for those 30 days, how are they going to hit that goal? If they can walk me through that perfectly and then the CSM just makes the person do that. They're going to hit the 30 day goal and then they're going to pay. They pay the next month because they hit, they go. That's why I do all my clients. It's just activation. It's basically activation. This is the thing in what I love in product development is product usage is the number one thing to reduce churn you have to make. How do you make someone use the product? You will hand hold them the whole time. Yes. So yeah. And that is the metric. It's like cool. How many people are actually doing the milestones? We ascribe, we have weekly milestones basically for the first 30 days. How many people are doing those weekly milestones? And in the CSM has to chase that down. So we have like a database, it's like green, yellow, red and then they have like with different rubrics what makes someone red. And essentially that's, that's the dashboard. So if it goes red, the CSM has to like hunt them down basically.

Okay, so let's talk activation then. Which is one of my favorite things that we skew heavy on in our businesses too. We think of ourselves as like very much activate students as quickly as human, quick as humanly possible and we track outcome in the 30 day like cohorted time horizon from mine. So is there are like though generally speaking very few general activation points that are applicable across all info products. But I do have a few. I'm curious, is there something that always matters to you in activation across anything you touch?

I mean there's basics like did they attend the onboarding call? Stuff like that. But I don't think you're talking about that's kind of too basic.

But like yeah, like yeah, welcome call completed. Yeah, that sort of thing.

Stuff like that. Are they watching videos? But to be honest with you, I, I don't have a generalized thing because it's so bespoke for each client. Each client has like their niches like how to be better at soccer and how to be a day trader. So different. So it's just like the first week is going to be completely different for those two offers, you know. So I have quite a lot of brainstorming sessions with the founders in the first week to really deeply understand what can a student do in the first week to then make week two successful and then what can I do in week two to make week three successful? Then what can they do in the first 30 days to make make them get an eternal this was a great purchase feeling. You know, for example, say you help someone generate leads. We want to get their first lead in the first week and the first sale by the end of 30 days.

Yeah.

The best thing is can they get an OI in the first 30 days? Then in your marketing you can say hey, 60 of people get away in the first 30 days. I like that by the way, more than 60. But like whoa, 60?

Yeah. Anything north of 60 for anyone listening to this is absolutely absurd. Generally speaking, anything over 30% on any info, they get an outcome within 30 days.

The activation point. I've not noticed this too. And this goes back to the whole feelings over real hard data feel is really important. If someone can get a win in the first 30 days that makes them feel like the purchase has been successful, that pays dividends. So it's like in the first 30 days what is the one major milestone we can help the person achieve that will retain them for the rest of the whatever time is. So like if it's cold email, it could be as simple as booking your first meeting doesn't have to be closing. Could be booking your first meeting. If it's about meta ads or whatever, it could be getting your first winning ad, not make A trillion dollars or like it's very contextual. If it's the soccer one, it's getting your first academy trial.

Yeah.

If it. You know, I'm trying to say if it's training, getting your first funded account.

100% for real estate, I can think of ours too. It's like doing your first cold call as activation point like the action based activation point 1. Doing your first deal or just getting it under contract even if it exactly falls out matters.

That's I've got wholesale in one and it's like getting the first wholesale deal on the table. Not closing it, getting on the table.

Just getting under contract which is what we aim for in the first 30. So I'm curious what it is for soccer. Like that's the only one where I can't guess. I'm just like what. What matters in the first 30 days for a soccer program?

The higher level offer is getting. There's academy trials. Like get trial to join the academy, if you know what I'm saying. So scan and stuff getting. Because you always got to think what is the lagging and leading thing? Like the lagging indicator of getting the invites or whatever is like you're getting invites to get the trial. So it's like are they happier? Are they happier getting to the trial? Yes. But the invite is when they're like oh my God, I've got opportunity in front of me.

Yeah.

You know that feeling? They're like oh my God. Yeah.

It's like the feeling of acceptance, right?

Yeah. So that is the first thing. And it's like I'm kind of like jaded now for. So you. It's like have you had when you were younger, did you ever hear those emails that it's like oh my God, this is going to change my life. Those kind of things. 100 that happens to me rarely now to people. But like how can we. But in the, in the education world giving people those moments is still a thing because they are entrepreneurs who are like getting all these cool things all the time. You know, they're normal human beings. Another makes sense. But like so you can in the first stages if you can perceivably help them change their life, they're never going to leave most people. It takes people months to change someone's life for months to even perceive the change someone's life. And by that time they're already googling what other programs are there in the world. So it's like you just want to get someone that first thing. So it's like Nicole email one. It's like we know it takes two weeks to warp an inbox. So in the first 24 hours we're starting the inbox warming up process because that means that we then have an extra three weeks to actually get the first lead or whatever. So it's like what can you do in those first 30 days to just bang out, you know, as far as possible to get our first perceived big win? Yes. Yeah.

Sweet dude. What do you need on the client side? Like pretend we're working with you for the first time. What do you need from RCX and CSM team or me in order for it to go well?

I need someone to lead. Point being my contact to work on the first 30 days to work on restructuring what the program potentially to work on the back end like and the reporting and stuff with you. I just usually my clients either do it themselves or they give me the head of CS or some CSM steps up temporarily to do it for me, someone to do it with me. So that generally.

Well, that's easy enough. So like for an example then for you guys, flag, hey, this course video needs replaced, refined, whatever it is, it's a problem. What kind of turnaround time does that someone need to have if you guys flag something that's urgent?

There isn't. It's just when it's up to the client the day. But it's like I do a whole audit of the people's school community. Well, I have complete torn apart people's school courses before. I have a friend called Jeremy and he sent me his course and it was like 400 hours long. And I was like, well, you just need to go cut it with House. Like for example, Sam Oven's course was too long in the nice way possible. Yeah. Okay. It could have been a quarter of the quarter of the length and it would have probably been even more famous.

Because it probably would have. People don't know that There was over 120 hours in the 2.0 version of there like critical path analysis there. I'm sure you could have found something if you would have spent the time.

And it's like I, I did take control accelerator. I didn't watch the whole thing. That was too long. Right. Just like that.

That was when I looked at the student journeys for accelerator. I saw a lot of that though. But people that make it through at least there's two videos in week two that if they hit them, they're usually.

A fan for which ones were they? If I'm going to start. Which ones? What they were.

I do.

Essential. Was it the. Oh, one sec. The one about doing the workbook. Was it the workbook ones? I don't know.

There is. One of them was Face off with the Devil.

Yeah, that one's good, bro. That's a good feel. That's a good one. That one changed everyone's lives.

Thank you. I mean, it was mainly Sam. He showed me the outline before he did week two, and I was like, bro, I don't know what you're on, but I love whatever this is. This is going to be great. It's going to go crazy. We were doing some crazy analysis on even just we got.

I'm surprised you're even allowed to shop that. Even keep this stuff personally. Supposing I've done NDA or anything. I guess it's all expired now.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I have no idea. Maybe I'm not like whoever owns the. The ip. I'm not sure if it's Godzilla or someone else.

What weird thing to happen.

Yeah, it is a weird thing. They can tell me to take it down and maybe I will. I don't know if you can see this.

That ain't too bad. You know, based on what I've seen in the industry, that isn't too bad.

Yeah.

Well, I remember watching that one. Sheesh. Crafting. Yeah. Of course they get bored off of setting your foundations because they've got to start doing some work. Yeah, it's interesting.

Yeah, it is. Right? So like, that's. And we hadn't had it all figured out yet. Like, if we would have given that product another two. Your two years to mature and like carved it, let's just say even better and gotten the. The David out of the. The marble, I think it would have been even better.

So tell you what, though, the reason. Even though the product's long product and a bloated product, it's still great because I'm gonna try to make sure this makes sense. It's hard to. What I'm trying to say, but it's like you said, take. Make the sculpture and sculpt it nice and stuff. However, it was still marble. It's still. It was valuable. Like the things he was saying, yes, it was an hour too long, but it was all valuable. And that's essentially like a copyright. You've got to make it concise. So like, yes, you could have made it more concise, but the actual things that were being said were still valuable if too long. You know, most people's products, like an hour long, two hours long. They're just not valuable, though. There's rambling and stupid analogies and stupid stories that go off on random tangents. So it's just like.

Yeah, it's like they also hit loom. They hit record and just went, yes.

So it's like the course can be long, but it also then has to be good and it has to be transformational. But you don't need to give a 10,000 transformations per video or you don't have to labor the point so hard. If you laboured it once and you've smashed it, move on. Sam used to labor the same point like 15 times.

Yes.

But each time he done it, it was still good though. So it was like, you know what? I'm still gonna watch. But okay, I get. I got the video 10 minutes in. But because I'm getting. I'm getting value still, I'm gonna keep watching. And that's also same as his YouTube, you know, like some of those videos are long, but I keep watching all those old long YouTube videos because they were still good. But anyways, for product design, that is a big thing. It's just like, how short and concise can you make it to keep it as digestible and life changing as possible? And everyone. This is what I hate about the infoboard. Everyone roasts. I bought a course and there's a mindset section, bro. Minds. What is the one thing Sam stuff was remembered for?

Yeah, mindset.

The mindset section. Right? People forget what it's like to be a beginner. That is life changing.

People forget that. People complain the most about our mindset week too. It was the most cited as the reason why people were successful. It was also the most complained about by the people that weren't. So like, keep that in mind too. Is like, who are you listening?

Too long. That's why it was 10 hours long. That's what I'm saying. If it was five hours short, it would have been better. But the reason my. I do keep mindset courses and my client stuff, I've got actual. I'm not gonna show on this call. I've got an. Because the podcast stuff, I showed an obstacle. I've got a whole mindset framework. Most of my clients use that, I think, for like their products. But it's like, mindset is valuable because if people don't have the right mindset, they won't take action on the knowledge you give them.

Yes.

You know, so my philosophy is mindset knowledge and then action. They need the right mindsets to use the. So they need the right knowledge to like take the actions you want to give them. But if the mindset isn't right, they're not going to use their knowledge. And if the knowledge isn't given properly, they can't take the action. So you have to do all three.

Yes.

Yeah.

So. And you'll know this. This is perfect. Our mindset section for accelerator was chiefly around building a few different things. I think of building social intelligence or awareness about how you work the way you do and then building discipline and focus.

Right.

Are the big takeaways or like actual intangible skill sets that you're building with that mindset? What are kind of the components or the outcomes or the outputs that you're thinking about? Okay. After they go through my standard mindset, they're going to be. They're not going to quit. They're going to look at the world.

Like it's similar to what you just. It's like, do they understand why they're doing what they're doing now? Do they understand the opportunity that's in front of them? Do they understand why not taking the opportunity is going to harm them in the future? That kind of stuff, you know, and it's just like, what are the beliefs that they're holding on to that are going to hurt them? What are the beliefs that they need to install? Stuff like that. And it's very contextual though. Say you're doing Google drop shipping random one to climb over that's actually a client. That's why I chose it. What are the beliefs that you hold there? They're going to hurt you. Spending money to do things in businesses hurt is going to be a bad thing. No, you need to get over that belief. What's Another thing? Sending 100 code looms to pitch clients. The mindset is hard. It's going to be really hard. No, the mindset is one of those. Can change my entire life.

Yeah.

You know, so it's like, what are the mindsets that you have to install? Because every business owner in their specific vertical has mindsets that has helped them in that business that's specific to that industry. So how can you dump that specific industry belief onto your student? So it's not like genetic mindset is you've got me make your identity to be a whatever. It's what is the specific mindsets in the specific industry that you have taken for granted that help you now, you know?

And that is what I identifying the resilience and the things that you built in this industry and applying them to? Yes, almost no one has articulated that like you just did. That's very, very smart. Yes.

Thank you. Yeah. And that is what I've, I've taken the outlook because I've worked with so many different niches now and I used to think as everyone does, mindset is a universal thing. Yes, it is. However, there's specific mindsets that are specific to these industries so that I help pluck those out with my clients and then put that back into their course.

Dude, brilliant. Honestly, let's, let's wrap this up. I would love to do a part two with you but this is a great little like insight to end on. I, I'm convinced I want to figure out a way to work and I love that there's people like yourself now that are emerging that are just like specialized in actually making great products. That was not the case ten years ago at all. No one cared.

Nice to meet you.

Bye.

Peace.