Not Every Week In Business Feels "Good”

The stage of business that we're at right now is the epitome of why having a great idea doesn't matter at all. The idea is 1% of it and 99% is operational complexity and execution.

Because if you find that the number one AD that got responses and calls and enrollments was clients being ghosted, your whole VSL is all about how to solve that. And then, boom, you transition into high.

Resonance call to action. If you want this resource, DM me this, you know, DM me this word, and then you unlock this thing.

So if you try to do a bunch of different things, yeah, it's going to feel overwhelmed. But most things that you need to track, you actually just shouldn't track in the first place.

I just feel like there's this interesting lesson of getting things started. Never takes as long as you think, but getting things working well takes way longer than you think.

Your program is going to solve a lot of problems, but your AD should only ever solve one, and your VSL should. The first half should only be expanding on how you'll solve that one problem. And then you expand to the big awesome.

Boom.

Welcome back to another episode of the Espresso Hour where the running joke is, this is going to be much shorter than an hour. Because despite filming these on Friday afternoons now, we're still hyped up on caffeine. First week of February in the books feels like just yesterday we were recapping January, maybe because it was, you know, only a week ago, but another week in the books, man. How are we feeling?

I think doing these on Friday is funny because every Friday feels like last Friday was a year ago. And I feel like if we did these on Monday, they might be a little more optimistic. I feel like on Fridays it's like, well, here's all the shit that we're doing. And it's, you can feel the week. You can feel the week.

But that's why I think it resonates more with the audience that we film this at the end of the week where maximal number of open loops and you got to carry that weight into the weekend. One thing I have been trying to do a really good job of is setting up two things to have complete by the end of the week on Sunday, and then rewarding myself when those two things are actually done because there's never a shortage of a zillion things that could be done. My two this week were get the IGDM funnel launched, book one call. That was it. One call booked, and we got an enrollment actually, and then two was film, my YouTube video and all the zillion other things that I spent time on that naturally will come up that really don't matter quite as much as those two. And then just you stack 52 weeks of doing two things. We're going to be just fine. Shape doesn't mean it's going to feel good all the time, but we're going to be just fine.

You know what's, what's an interesting observation about getting the DM funnel up and just quick context I guess for this. So we're experimenting with a new lead acquisition source. It's not only organic content on Instagram, but also running ads that are, they're retargeting ads.

So we are running them as retargeting, but it's one click away from sending them to people that we don't have, never targeted before.

Okay. And so it's really just high resonance call to action. If you want this resource, DM me this, you know, DM me this word and then you unlock this thing. The reason why that's such a promising funnel is because if people send you that word, it shows that they're interested in, which then means you can have setters, you know, help start up conversations and then move people further through the sales funnel. What's so interesting about this is it took us less than a week to get our first sale from the DM funnel, but it will take us an entire year in order to get it to be a reliable and consistent and scaled lead acquisition source. And I feel like the lesson there is so maybe not a year, but it's gonna take long.

I hope it's not a year. I hope it's not a year.

That's my only, you know, it's gonna take longer than a week. And, and I just feel like there's this interesting lesson of getting things started. Never takes as long as you think, but getting things working well takes way longer than you think.

What's nice about this one is because you're having conversations, you can iterate faster because, for example, right running the direct application funnel and someone books the call and then doesn't show up, you have no clue as to why, you have no clue what their background is, what they were interested in, why they booked the call versus what's so nice about this DM funnel. And so here's like a golden nugget I picked up from like a Cole Gordon video. Your program is going to solve a lot of problems, but your ad should only ever solve one. And your VSL should the first half should only be expanding on how you'll solve that one problem and then you expand to the big offer, whatever it is. So what's nice about this DM funnel is the way that I kind of like templated the ads out for you was, you know, freelance writers problem, problem based question. Explain it. Here it is. The set process is so straightforward because for example, the one that you have of like clients ghosting you, right? And here's how to follow up in 50 different ways that by responding one, you're only getting people who have the problem. So unlike the unaware to most aware breakthrough advertising levels of buyer awareness, the only people who are interested in that specific thing are freelance writers who are very much experiencing a problem. Then the setting flow is, hey, here's the resource on how to stop being ghosted. Is that something you're currently struggling with right now? Boom, problem identified. Great. What else have you tried? How long have you had this problem? Okay, cool. I got a couple ideas that might be able to help that go beyond this resources. Do you have 30 minutes to chat this week? Boom. That is the setting flow. And it's like how many assets can we create that solve problems? That one specific problem that then you present the whole offer of like, well, if you got this problem, you could probably got this one, this one, this one versus trying to give a big ad that solves 10 problems that just doesn't work. And that's been the resonance I've seen so far within the many chat flows that I'm just kind of like you seeing. It's very straightforward. It's like, hey, you reached out for the packaging and pricing. Are you struggling with pricing right now? Okay, cool. What have you tried in the past? What are you trying to get to? And then you easily sell the call like, hey, my, my team will have a bunch more ideas on this. Way different. You get to test multiple angles. And here's, you know, I'm kind of on one right now. So if we find that the most resonant ad, this is actually how you bootstrap what is worth investing a VSL funnel in, Right? Because if you find that the number one ad that got responses and calls and enrollments was clients being ghosted, your whole VSL is all about how to solve that. And then boom, you transition into the offer.

That's a great point because this is.

The best way to bootstrap any kind of business is you control all the lead flow in your Instagram dm. You can follow up with everyone. You could loom everyone you can. If you have $0, this is 100 the best way to start. It's like DM me and we have a conversation about this and then you try to book a call and you sell them on the call. So that, as I said that out loud, is what we're trying to get to here.

Yeah, I didn't even really think about how big of a benefit there is in isolating each of these problems. You get really concrete data. You're totally right. And I've just intuitively I've been really excited about this funnel for that reason. But I didn't really connect the dots of, well then yeah, just take the highest performing one and make that your VSL and then scale that to cold.

We're just outlining a digital product here because it's like Lean Advertising.

Uh huh.

You test one idea with DMs coming to you rather than one big VSL that you're taking a bet on. So just building on this, right. We had that one banger ad that got a lot of leads of hey, how much money make ghost riding? Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. Next week as you film more of these because one, these were your best ads that you filmed and written. Just want to over communicate that because they float so nicely and Victor did a really good job with them.

Yep.

We should take that same hook and then make it, hey, if you want the ghostwriting crash course that shows you X, Y and Z how to do this, DM me the word crash course and I'll send it over.

Yep, right.

Same hook, different offer that we know has a high conversion rate of watching the whole ad and then have that as part of our repertoire.

Yep. Actually, yeah, I was going to. One of the things on my list to jam on with you is ask next week I want to record five more of those retargeting ads. And then I also want to do five top of funnel, different ones that we can run because I thought I had seen you and fit her or someone go back and forth talking about swapping those out or not really.

So what we really need is just more you can you. It's not necessarily top of funnel, but direct. Right. So what started to fatigue is the hey, I'll be your mentor or hey, why you know, why haven't you taken action? So it's more further down the funnel direct to apply. Hey, people know who you are, they're deeper in the funnel. Then you give them the offer like hey, if you want to work directly with me and that's like A different type of ad that quickly fatigues. So where we're gonna go from here is like, once these DM ads start to work it, and we said it on our marketing meeting, it's like, how do you treat this like its own content platform where for now we have to go create a bunch of content.

Mm.

We underestimate how many ads or variations of ads we need to produce because the frequency is pretty high and you see an ad like three times, you're just not going to watch it again.

Yeah. You know, that's definitely been a learning for me is like, ads are not a. You create them for a day and then they run for a year. Ads are. It's. It is literally like, oh, I create on X, now I want to start creating on LinkedIn. Well, you got to go feed that algorithm now, right? Yeah.

Good realizations though. But it's starting like the cost per message is great so far. You know, if we can convert, that's as. As more of these numbers come through, we'll start to see it work. But if you have more offers there, you're going to start to validate which one is the best one. And it's very easy to ramp the dials on that because you just get more leads. If you're not touching every lead every day, it means you have a setter deficiency. You hire another setter. Boom. Now you're maximizing that. And that's how you scale this type of funnel.

Yeah. How many setters do you think you need per packed closer calendar? In a funnel like this, is it one to one or is it two to one?

I think it's. So the hard part is I think a setter can do three to four calls per day. So that's like almost a one to one ratio if this. If you have complementary funnels, you should really have a one to one ratio of setters to closers, depending on the amount of lead flow though. Right. So it's. What we haven't done the best job of is we've had aggregate setter metrics, how many calls are being booked per setter, but we have not had efficiency metrics. Right. So we actually don't know if we double the setting capacity here, would we double the number of calls? And that's why I'm obsessed with getting the tracking set up by the end of the day today, because without that, you don't know whether or not you're at capacity there. And if you scale ad spend, if you're actually going to convert or service that extra Demand with a setter in the DMs.

This is a bit of a tangential thought, but something I've been thinking about a lot lately is the stage of business that we're at right now is the epitome of why having a great idea doesn't matter at all. And like the, the idea is 1% of it and 99% is operational complexity and execution. Because it's like, I don't know, just more and more I can see how all of our growing pains and issues and things to figure out is like it's, it's never, we don't know what to do, you know, or it's never, oh, there's a shortage of ideas. It's just 100% like, how are we going to measure this? Or like how are we going to track it? Or how are we going to keep it organized? Like you. We have so many different things going now that I never really understood in the past, which is funny because I worked with these companies, but I never really understood why these companies would be like, oh, we need to go spend $5 million a year on like customer data organization software, you know, like why I was like, why are those contracts a thing like that seems like. And now even at our tiny level, I'm like, how do we even keep all this organized in airtable? You know, it is just operational complexity.

From here and we feel it, the number of people that we have to communicate with. But most operational complexity things are solved with focus with. Because operational complexity is usually correlated to the number of things you're taking on. Right. So if you try to do a bunch of different things. Yeah. It's going to feel overwhelming. But most things that you need to track you actually just shouldn't track in the first place. And you know, and that is only through the very simple question, will this change my behavior if this number comes back differently? And I've been trying to bring that home to all of our daily end of day reports and admin tracking and things like that of we need to stop tracking most of these. Like we simplified the liftoff one. It's like how much money is coming in this month? That's it. And everything else is a byproduct or that is a byproduct of everything else. So you don't need to track all those other things. Just like what's the main thing?

Yeah. And then any if, if that number is below KPI or down, then you can go in and be like, okay, so which, which metric was the thing impacting this the most. But you don't need to be reminded of it all day, every day.

Right. And that was why I'm enjoying putting my weekly YouTube videos out right now are the realizations that I'm emerging with. Like putting last week's together where I made the full Miro board of our KPIs by department. It's like, oh, okay, great. Never done that before. Reflecting on the last four months, which is what I did today. Extremely valuable and we'll see if people enjoy it. But it's really nice to get text messages from people that are not like our clients but just interested in business. Like I had a couple of people reach out like, really liking these, please keep making them. And they're people that we look up to and respect. And so keeping those going and hopefully continues to attract talent too, which has been another nice little benefit of this. And same with the stress hour. People listen to this and want to work with us and we're seeing more and more the returns on really high quality talent. Mm.

I would agree. I feel like one of the biggest benefits of YouTube is not even playing the like wide reaching entertainment game. Like that's just such a different game. And how especially in like there's, there's biz tainment, you know, but especially just like hardcore business content. Some of the best channels you get a thousand views a video. But it's like, it's like, wow, this was. I would have paid money for this video.

Right.

You know, so yeah, it's a cool, it's a cool thing to play in. I like creating content not and having a medium where it's like, you know, this isn't going to go viral. And that's the point, you know, it's just unbelievably high resonance with the right person and everyone else doesn't really matter.

Right. The buyers will watch the whole video.

Yeah.

Is what I repeat to myself when I make a two hour long video. Like the people who aren't going to buy weren't going to watch anything.

The people who are going to watch.

This whole thing and that's two hours of resonant watch time that is just extremely highly correlated to making a purchase.

Mm. I see it with the way I consume content.

Mm.

There's certain people where if they put out a three hour video, I will watch the entire thing, you know, and other people do every edit you could possibly use to hook my attention for nine minutes and I'm like, I'm not gonna watch this. You know, so it's yeah, it just depends on what game you want to play.

How are you enjoying the loom style videos?

It's very different. It's very different than scripting in many ways. I like it because it's easier for me. So there's probably an element where I enjoy the fact that it's not as hard and not as time consuming. But what I do like about it that's different than scripted videos is I think it allows for more spontaneous sharing. Like when you're scripting something, you're. You're really trying to communicate one idea and compress it as much as possible. Whereas these longer videos and loom style, almost podcasty type of videos, you have the freedom to mid sentence be like, this reminds me of something that actually would be really helpful. Let me, let me share it with you. And I think it's like, if you're playing for the algorithm, that's the worst thing you could do. But if you're playing for resonance, that's the best possible thing you could do. And so I think having both, like, I'm going to keep doing scripted long form, but also wrapping out these looms. I've, I've gotten a bunch of messages over the past week from people being like, I don't know what you're on and why you're doing a loom a day, but like, please keep doing it because I watch everyone. And like, that's the point. That's the goal.

The goal is to create the ability for someone to watch six videos really quickly. And I think the congruence of having a loom that is more or less the same style of video back to back to back to back. Like really highly educational stuff that leads to a lot of action. More so than a highly edited one, in my opinion.

Mm. Yeah. I mean it's, it's not rocket science. If you sit down and watch a loom and you're like, wow, I learned more in that 20 minute loom than anything else. You're gonna go the other 10 looms.

You know, And I think part of the goal is to make content that people can play almost in the background where some of these looms you don't necessarily have to watch. And the fact that they're going on your podcast goes a long way too. Like, I bet if you looked at your transistor chart, it's probably going up from people who are just listening to multiple things back to back to back.

So, yeah, that's another, that's another priority for me this year. And I'm, I'M pulling content from different places. But I really want to try and set the goal of how can I put out one thing on my podcast feed a day? Because I really see and you know, something I've come to terms with is like people aren't gonna follow you forever or people aren't gonna listen to you forever, but people will go through seasons where they listen to you every single day for three months straight, you know, and I want to more and more cultivate that sort of experience where it's like if you're in that season and you just discover me or just discover you or us, like you can, you can just fully connect to that for that season. And then when you're, you've, you've gotten what you need and you want to go learn from someone else, like go do that. But there is something to be said for the habitual aspect of it.

You know, I definitely resonate with that. Like I check part of my take because I know it comes out on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and I look forward to it.

Exactly.

But even going every day, it's like if you have something and you do this with hormones podcasts, like if you have something where you have 20 minutes of ambient time per day, if you can dominate that person's 20 minutes of ambient time. And then the knock on effect was the nugget we've had of the purchasers connecting their purchase value to your free content after purchase or they will continue to listen to all the free stuff you put out. Like as we started to run this IG damn funnel, we had a bunch of people who are in PGA DM you for the thing. Like this resource is already in pga. Like you already have this. You paid for this, you know.

Yeah, and.

But it was funny because it's like, yeah, you put things out and they want it. And that is ultimately goes to like that was why one of the big takeaways from the event was the best way to lower, to extend LTV and reduce CAC at the same time is content. Because the people who've already purchased from you are more likely to purchase again if you keep putting it out and you acquire people for less. So it's like the double edged sword that allows you to do both at the same time. And I think we've done a great job keeping that the main thing so far or all the other things going on. We are moving the needle forward. But we've put out an espresso hour every week. You're putting out a Luma day. I'm hitting My video quota, like those things are going to compound for the whole year. We just haven't done them long enough yet to feel it.

Yep.

With, with six months of these, even just six months, that's 27 videos for me and 55. Who knows how many for you at that point. Yeah, those are going to compound. I have a really good feeling about it.

Oh, big time, Big time. I'm also viewing it very much through the lens of I think YouTube SEO is extremely underrated. And I feel like there's different, there's very different ways of playing the game of YouTube. And that's something I'm really starting to learn is, you know, you can play entertainment or you can play education, you can play clickbait is the wrong word. But like clickbait headline, you know, like example, a creator is like, I'm quitting YouTube, period. Like that's not gonna rank. You're. You're playing for. Someone sees that in the algorithm. Very different than someone being like, here's an SEO headline, you know, scripted versus unscripted, high professional editing and video versus loom. Like there's lot. There's lots of different ways to play the game and they have different benefits. And something that I'm, I've just sort of mentally earmarked for this entire year is like, I don't even really care if I make a single video that goes viral. I want 300 videos that dominate. If you search anything related to the word ghostwriting on YouTube, you are going to find me and like, yeah, go ahead. Just that, like just, just all. I think there's so much benefit in taking the long term library point of view opposed to the short to medium term. Like how do I get 100k views? You know?

And the nice part about the YouTube algorithm is how much it serves up old content such that you can optimize the thumbnails for all of those and they will pay dividends years down the line or at least months down the line as more and more people search for those terms. If they have good thumbnails, boom. Your click through rate doubles your views on that double. Those are what are going to compound for a long time for us.

Yep. There's also just on the topic of lean advertising or lean content, it's like record 300 looms, take the top 25, do awesome thumbnails for those that's going to have the biggest impact. Leave all the other ones, who cares? Record 300 looms, look for the top 10. Whichever one is the highest performing, script it on that Same topic, and then do high production value and see if it performs better and. Or run it as a YouTube ad. Like, there's so much. There's so much data to be mined and it all goes back. It's all the same principles inside ship 30. It's like, yes, there's tremendous amounts of data, but step one is just consistently creating. That's it.

Right. And we would crush a YouTube ship 30, by the way, if we ever.

Wanted, you know, loom 30.

Right. It's like make 30 videos on 30 things. You know, about. I'm loving putting it in a Google Doc and clicking and highlighting each line, and then I talk on that line till I have nothing left to say, and then I move on to the next one.

That's what I mean. It's great.

It takes the friction out of writing for me so much because I. If there's one part that I don't enjoy, it's the formatting where I got to think about sentence flow. And so here it's like if I have one sentence, another sentence, if I go a third sentence on the same idea, it's three bullet points. Then I weave back out. And it helps me linearly organize every idea. And that is very freeing to me, where it's like a bounce in, bounce out, bounce in. If I need to go deeper on this one, I'm like six bullets deep. And I say, okay, we're in the weeds here. Let's come all the way back out. And boom, I keep going down that. And then for publishing a newsletter of that, I just publish the outline. It's like, here's the outline. I go deeper in the video. But if you just want to skim it, here it is. And then having all of those on my sub stack, I think will go a long way too. And for you, same thing. It's like all of those YouTube videos that are just how to do X, Y, like how to become a LinkedIn ghostwriter. I think we could have either Ash or Colin or whoever. Take that, take your shell, put it on your sub stack, link the video. Yeah. And that's gonna. At least that wins you the SEO title too, on Google. Yeah.

So much juice to squeeze.

I know.

So much juice to squeeze. But yeah, I think our theme we were saying before we hopped on and started recording, this is not. Not every week is there some major takeaway. And oftentimes on Fridays, I feel like mentally I'm trying to parse through the takeaways. Like, we do so much and we're like trying to Move so many different things forward that I don't always know what the takeaway is right away. It sometimes takes some time to reveal.

Yeah. And that's why I kind of leave some space at the end of the week, too. And Saturday morning, I typically do a little reflection on how things went, realigning people, all that. But this is the perfect time to record it because we have no excuse not to. Most weeks, like, yeah, you're traveling next week, and we'll bump it up or do one Thursday or something more. We'll just catch up on our backlog.

But.

This is the gritty reality. Yeah. Not every week you change the world. Some weeks you want to pull your hair out, but you take the lens that it's fun, it's rewarding. And we'll keep looking back on these. I look back on last year, like, yeah, it was really hard putting that four months, failing to hit a million together. I was like, that was.

Over the.

Last four months, dude. But you can all. You get to tell the stories of it. You get to walk away with the lessons. You get to apply them going forward.

Yep.

I feel good about where we're headed.

No, we're. We're in a great place. It's just. It's tiring, you know, and it takes a lot of work. It takes a lot of focus. It takes a lot of discipline. And there are some weeks where you feel it more than others. And I feel like the weeks you feel it the most, it's not necessarily that there's a problem. I think it's. What it is, is you're comparing it to the weeks where you have some sort of dopamine surge, and you're like, wait, where's my dopamine surge? And a lot. A lot of weeks you don't have one, you know, so that's just how it goes.

But also, the dopamine that we would have gotten for this random week, whatever we did this week, a year, two years ago, we'd be like, oh, for sure. Best month we've ever. Best week we've ever had, for sure. So you got to keep that in mind, too.

Hedonic adaptation happens quick.

Exactly. All right, dude. Anything else? Top mine?

Not really.

Shorter one this week. Crazy. We'll be back next week with some more updates on the different initiatives we got going on. I hope people find this useful. I know. I wish that other people running these same type of businesses would do a weekly jam sesh, even if they don't have big things to share, because what's obvious to us at the end of the week is probably very novel to other people. And that's ultimately the value of this. So if nothing else, we'll sign off here. Espresso. I'll be back next week. Keep drinking your caffeine. Leave a comment with your biggest takeaway. Thanks for watching. As always, have a great weekend. See y' all soon. Peace.