Q&A Vegas - Answering Your Questions About Digital Business

Everyone does this with pricing. It's like, how much should I charge? They just throw a number in the air. But you don't realize that what you charge creates different risk profiles. If you are a good marketer, it wouldn't make sense to do that. It would make sense to just go get a zillion people and provide that one service.

Same thing with bottlenecks. I'm trying to get through like a hierarchy. If this, then this. If this, then this. So there's so much that goes into it.

When you do interesting things, you inherently attract interesting people. That's like another little heuristic that I like for creating content. If your content boring or sucks, like you're probably not doing interesting things, you.

Need to go more better on in that order. First, ramp up intention today. Once you do that for a month, it's better. How do you run viral drops? How do you run these other things? But until you're completely maxed out, do nothing else except get that volume to the highest level.

The only reason that we can do that is because we built all the skills by doing the easier models first.

That was the outline of a really good.

Yeah, that actually, that was pretty great.

That was a really good outline. Yeah, a lot, a lot of action going on. All right, Alicia Hicks asks. My agency offers marketing services for B2B clients and I'm struggling to come up with a digital product. As a side note, we do quote too much for clients and you just scale it back. We do LinkedIn, we do email, we do CRM, podcast, legion.

Oh, I saw.

What suggestions do you have?

Yeah.

Okay, so two suggestions. One, pick one. Like, that's way too many things to offer. And then two, this is something I've. I have tried to find better ways to articulate this because I find that it's a very difficult concept for people to understand is that the digital product on B2B is literally you explaining how to do the very service that you provide. So if you provide lead gen, your digital product is here's how to do lead gen yourself. If you provide video editing, it's here's how to edit videos yourself. What people don't understand with that is that they think, well, if I do that, then I'm giving away all of the sauce and then the person's not going to want to work with me. And it's actually the complete opposite. What happens is you're double monetizing. And as people go through it, they realize, oh shit, that's a lot of work. I don't want to do all that myself, which then means that they hire you.

I'm laughing because anytime I hear you just spit bars on something that you so clearly know, I just, I get excited.

I've. I've done it so many times.

So, yeah, I think we've talked. She's doing a handful of things, so pick one. Until this is something I think the digital writing school, we will. I put this in the big brain dump I put to you guys yesterday. But being able to give tangible metrics around certain decisions I think is something we should try to sink our teeth into because. Pick one thing. Okay, pick one thing. Until when is there a time where you don't pick one thing and then expand and being able to, like, for example, a platform. If you're writing on one platform, when do you say, okay, go to another one? It's kind of an amorphous decision for most people, but I think being able to do that for both the agency services, both for any kind of product creator, any kind of like writing platform, would be good for us to think about.

Yeah.

What's hard. I agree. When you said that or posted that a couple days ago, I was thinking about that. The challenge with that is it is so unbelievably subjective. And the nuance is that it's subjective based on your own skill sets. So, for example, if you're not a really good marketer or if you don't have aspirations of becoming a good marketer, then the only other way to grow your business is to take the small number of clients you have and sell them more stuff. If you are a good marketer, it wouldn't make sense to do that. It would make sense to just go get a zillion people and provide that one service. And that's what's hard. Is it? If you use services as the example, when do you add other things? The only thing my agency did was write 800 word articles for like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people, you know, and you could have argued, you know, at 50K MRR or 100K MRR or 150, like, oh, now you. But there was always another level. There's always another level of just go get more people. So I think it depends on the skill set, you know, and that's.

I can already tell it's going to be a challenge with, yeah, total writing school is going to be trying to give that prescriptive advice. But right away my head goes, well, if the 99 is do it yourself, 497 could be done with you. And so it's basically the same information, but if you want very specific guidance on a consistent basis about your situation to apply these things, we could run that same playbook where it's percentage of those clients that you work with, you retain, you're able to work with them.

Yep.

I also think, just riffing on it for a second, I think one of the more valuable, I don't know if it's a module, however, it shows up as an asset that you could create in the digital writing school is around making decisions based on the lowest risk adjusted move. Because I think oftentimes the challenge with these questions is people are like, what do I do? But there's so many pieces of context that impact that. And two massive pieces of context are what is your personal financial situation? Because that drastically impacts what you choose to do and the level of risk that you take on. And then second is people are like, what? What should I do? As if every option has the same risk parameters and they're like, just which one? And the reality is each person's risk tolerance is very different. You know, so like, I think helping people think through these things, or at least give them the framework to think through it.

Hmm. Okay. My brain's marinating on that.

Interesting.

Same thing with bottlenecks. Like, how do you identify what's the real problem? I'm trying to get through like a hierarchy of if this, then this, if this, then this. So you can try to product or give prescriptive advice based on just a survey, but there's so much that goes into it, which why you need like a QC onboarding call where it's, here's what based on their information we suggest, but get context on their situation. See if that's any different.

Yeah.

And then say go do these things.

Yep.

Anything you would add, my head immediately goes to like when you talked about the different levels of risk, my head immediately went, well, when you go try and invest money, you know, crypto is way riskier than bonds. What would it look like to put those kind of rails and kind of create those buckets and those labels for people to think about the different roadmaps that you can follow in the same way that you, that you would think about the different ways you can invest your money. Something like that.

Because there's like a speed of return that's, you know, risk.

Yeah, yeah, Easy example, low ticket digital product, very low risk, speed of return, pretty high cohort based, slower speed of return, slightly higher risk. Because now it's more experiential group coaching Highest risk in many ways because you have the most touch points. You have, it's the most complexity, you know, and that's, I think that is, that's a great point. And doing it in the context of price point is really interesting because oftentimes everyone does this with pricing. It's like, how much should I charge? They just throw a number in the air. But you don't realize that what you charge creates different risk profiles. You know, there's so many rabbit holes, right.

Every time you start to think this would be an easy, an easy survey based prompt, it's like there's so many different ways someone could go.

Yeah.

And I think part of it's what Alex was saying at the last workshop is there's no such thing as a perfect product. I don't think there's a scenario where we go, we finally got it. We can get super prescriptive and give everyone the answer and they magic like because even if you give someone the answer, then you have the other side problem with it, which is all the faulty beliefs. Or I get in my own way or I hear you and it makes sense, but I just can't.

I think that's the most important module. I spent some time outlining that one of like the mindset foundations this morning because there's going to be a handful of things that we repeat like 30 times and having just very clear modules. Go to mindset module 4. No one knows you exist and burn it in your brain, you know what I mean? All right, nice. Well, hopefully that helps, Alicia. All right, next is Carl. I'm struggling with creating SOPs and finding people to delegate this kind of long. So I'll pro. I'll preface that I'm going to read for a sec. Struggling with creating SOPs, finding people to delegate. So I always end up doing the low level jobs and neglecting the high level tasks. My question is how long does it usually take to create SOPs and set up systems in the business? Like, did you do two whole weeks or months to record all SOPs? Do you do it as you go along? This is the first business and I have no business partner and I did not do a business course. I'm a doctor by profession. My business is selling question banks to students taking the licensure exam for doctors.

Wow, love that niche.

So great niche on the right path. I'll take a first stab and just say it's always as you go. There's never a SOP week because no one has ever read the thick booklet of SOPs. That we've tried, that we've never done it.

Just in time.

How would you talk about that?

Yeah, first, just in time. Great point. I feel like most people completely overcomplicate SOPs. It's like this fancy word. The midweek version of creating SOPs is just record yourself on a loom going through the task or the process and then ask you, Betty, to create a checklist from the transcript of the loom video. There's also like a little nugget from Leila hormones, since we're talking about them.

So wait real quick. If you're using AI off the transcript, that means as you do the loom, you have to articulate all the things that you're doing.

Yeah, you, like, imagine you're recording the loom video for somebody who's going to do the task.

Like, okay, so you're explaining it. Yeah. As you.

Okay, yeah, you walk through the task on the loom, speak to all the different nuances. Like just show people how to do it. Show someone how to do a task on that loom, you grab the transcript. I actually created a prompt for this so I can drop it in the digital air community. You extract the transcript from the loom, you fit it to ChatGPT with this problem, which is essentially instructions for the AI saying, here's the recording of a process that I just recorded myself walking through. Turn this into a checklist, essentially, and then you give that checklist to a person or to whoever is going to help you with the task and then you see what breaks. But that's kind of the midweek version of creating an sop. Super simple. What I was going to say is that, and I agree with this, Layla says that she doesn't like using SOPs. She likes using living SOPs, which are essentially checklists, because if somebody cannot check off a box, they're less likely to.

Complete this step 100%.

And so instead of like having a static document, like for example, if you're using notion, just like a little template thing that people can duplicate and every time they're gonna run through the process, they can physically check off the step and that makes them more likely to actually take the step.

Nice.

Super tangent to bring it back. I think that my 10 year guess is that AI dramatically improves people's managerial skills because I think as you use AI, you have to speak in steps. And so it is actually a vehicle for people to practice the skill of speaking in steps, which means you not only get more effective and efficient with technology, you actually get more effective with Humans, you know, because I think like what people struggle with is it's like, okay, I'll show you how to do this. But they really struggle to take a second and go, okay, but now let me break apart each piece and these are the things you have to do. Doing is different than understanding, you know?

Yeah, I agree.

I would. My last point will be back to the just in time. It's most things actually just don't need an sop. And so if you think that everything I do needs to be process created and delegated to someone else, usually way too early. I remember when we were setting our core values very before we hired Jamie and I was working with Tim because it was part of the process to bring on a assistant. You needed like core values. And I remember we put one of like, yeah, I remember this. What was. It was like document relentlessly or something like that. And it was just like always write down what we did. And he's like, I don't think you need that. I don't think it's the smartest thing at your level. And I was like, yeah, we probably won't do that one. So we can. I just thought it sounded like a good core value to put on there. What did you think I was going to say?

I had nothing. I just remember when we went through that you were like, I think we need core values. And I was like, I guess, sure, I guess.

You know, it's us three slack channels, so. All right, good question, actually, second one from Carl and this is one I think we could all speak to. I'm struggling to find a community of like minded people who are into self improvement in business. Current circle of friends satisfied with their nine to five, watching Netflix, scrolling Instagram, drinking alcohol. I'm not saying I want to unfriend them. I just want to expand my social circle of people who are into business and self improvement as well. Did you happen to be friends with these people like Cole and Daniel? Did you join a Reddit group, some kind of discord or school group to get accountability? I know my struggles might sound simple, but these are honestly the struggles I have right now.

Quick nuance on reframing the question because he sort of said it at the end, which is finding a community where I can get and I would reframe it to finding a community where I can give. Because I think oftentimes people are like, where do I go for someone else to give me their time, attention, energy, expertise, mentorship, you know what I mean? And you will find what you're Looking for. If instead you're like, oh, I could go to this mastermind where there's a bunch of these people, and it would be really cool because, yeah, I could learn things, but here's also what I could contribute. Like, that's what sparks the conversation. That's what makes. It's the Internet.

Like, it's always.

It's the Internet. Go. Go everywhere on the Internet and just find people that are doing similar stuff and then DM them and just ask. It's what we were talking about in the Uber here. It's like, just ask. Literally, just ask. Do you want to get Zoom coffee? Can I ask you questions? Anything I can share? I mean, you know what I mean?

That was how, you know, George Mack is one of my closest friends now. And we were in similar Twitter spheres and taking similar paths of, like, the friends we were growing up with. Not necessarily people we wanted to. Like, we didn't want to unfriend them. That's a great way to put it. But it's just, like, you need new people to have conversation with and learn from. George just messaged me, yo, mate, love your stuff. Where are you based? And I've used that same DM to send to people that I want to meet all the time. And Daniel DM me. That's how we met. And so power of DMs, or have someone that could call it introduce you, like Craig did for us. But.

But that's. That's a great example of we got introduced. But that's because of what we're talking about compounding over time. You know, it's like, I did something, then I became friends with Craig, and you did something, and you became friends with Craig, and then those friendships introduced other people, you know?

And I think the last part I'll add is you don't need a giant community. You need one person. You really need one person that you can have the conversations that you're unable to have with your current group of friends to have that feeling melt away. He's like, oh, okay. I'm not actually alone trying to do these things. There are other people. Like, I'm not really part of any big communities that I'm like, oh, I've got 20 friends in this.

Yeah.

No, like, you just.

You piecemeal it together, and then, I.

Mean, he's probably already got it. Someone in Digital Air probably faces the same things, and he could just DM them there. So awesome.

You. You real quick.

Yeah.

You've connected with a whole other, like, group of people. How have you done it?

And I'm surprised you guys didn't mention it. But like writing online, right? Like when you start writing online.

Oh yeah, I forgot the main thing we talk about. But yeah, true.

You, you just attract people who are interested in the same things. They organically also DM'd you. And you know, yeah, when you do interesting things, you inherently attract interesting people. And so that's like another little heuristic that I like for creating content. Like if your content is boring or fucking sucks, like you're probably not doing interesting things. And so a great forcing function for creating better content and attracting more interesting people is just doing more interesting things.

You're yourself.

Yep.

Yeah, I agree.

And responding to comments and dms.

Yeah, it's, it's all the little stuff. It's like PE people are afraid to reach out and introduce themselves or someone sends them a DM and they don't respond, you know, and then they're like, I can't make any friends. It's like, well, yeah, reply to people, you know, Nice.

Okay, good question, Carl. Moving on to Michael. I have a paid Discord group. Group is focused on AI training for solopreneurs. I have eight paid members so far. They like the value. But I'm exhausted debating between two pricing strategies for my paid discord. Keeping the current flat fee at $100 a year versus introducing tiered pricing with added perks for higher tiers like exclusive content or one on one calls. I'm leaning towards tiers to incentivize upgrades, but I've learned that I'm concerned about alienating existing members who might feel nickel and dimed. Based on your experience, what would you.

Advise is eight members? Yeah, this is like trying to solve nine problems you don't have. Like one do not do tiered pricing. It's like you're basically saying I have something that's not working. Should I make it more complicated? Like no. Yeah, it's like, which problem do you want to solve?

You know, I talked to him for a good chunk on our last like hot seat and it's just a marketing problem and that the offer is unclear with the Discord Group. So it comes back to you need to build and this is where the milestone things. Okay, if I was going to advise someone on a paid Discord group, I would make it minimum $500 a year. So at least 50 bucks a month rather than 10 because you're just not going to make enough money on that amount. So find a way to charge 500 bucks a year. And then at least. So that's 50amonth. At least five grand a month before you try to make any kind of change or just focus on that specific thing before you do any kind of pricing change.

Yeah.

I'd even just be curious like why, why go with something as real time as discord? Like that's you're picking the hardest model, you know, and you would immediately make more money if it was something standalone. First of all, as a general framework, more and more I'm feeling like the right answer for a beginner is not doing something recurring and not doing something real time.

We felt that, we felt that with Captain stable ship 30 was perfect. Cause it was cohort based, but it had an end date.

Yep.

And then we struggled to keep up with the recurring nature of a community.

Yeah.

Versus, you know, just selling the digital product.

Yeah.

We were looking for ways to expand. You need like seven digital products to have a good community. And we're just now getting there. You know, we're just now getting to the point where we feel that we have enough content.

Yeah.

That's working an absurd amount in terms of creating it. So that's a good point.

I would immediately remove the, the recurring and the real time nature should be 350 digital product.

Yeah.

I just. In general, you should sell something that's standalone before you try and sell something that's recurring. Like if you can't sell something once, how are you going to sell something that recurs over and over and over again?

And I think helping people do $19 ebook, slash, template, slash something before the 350 in digital writing school will go a long way. It's like validate with three or four different types of ebooks that you feel that you could then turn into a product much lower. No videos, easy chapter. Like here's the template to go and experiment with. People would buy. If people buy an ebook, they're probably interested in the product version of that. So there's some guidance we can give there.

Yeah, definitely.

Does he have a big audience?

It was a marketing problem for the most part.

I mean like something that's been top of mind for me is just like starting with services. You're like not trying to like sell something super cheap from the very beginning. If you don't have a huge audience.

Yeah.

Build zaps for solopreneurs.

Yeah, right.

Build, use, AI, install for one person.

Yeah.

And that's again, we don't have that type of like guidance outlined yet. We can but being able to show the different types of services that is another thought experiment. I want to do consulting versus done for you, like some kind of business setup. Give them a template of. Here are the types of services you could provide. Marketing, sales, operations. Right. Bucket it into those three for the most part and then go from there.

Yep.

Yeah, I agree.

Endless opportunity.

Endless.

Okay, I'm in the process of creating my first paid digital product alongside launching my free newsletter. This is Kirsten. Someone has said to me, your audience parentheses micro business employers is time poor. They aren't going to do a DIY product, so why bother? Do you agree? This goes back to what you just said. Like if you are creating something on the digital product side, if they are time poor and you have a service based offering, that's good. But I also think that you look like you're about to say, well I.

Just, I just think that in general these sweeping generalizations, especially before you've validated it, where you know, it's like I haven't sold a product to this person. But sweeping generalization, they're time poor so they're not going to buy. That's based on. I mean, yeah, you might be right, but it's not based on anything, you know, and even still like founders and executives are the most time poor people, but they buy stuff all the time, you know, and they buy services but sometimes they just impulse buy digital products because they're like, I have a free weekend and I want to know how this new AI tool's working, you know, or I want to give me the checklist for how to do this, you know, so I don't necessarily. I think that's a more of a faulty belief than a real thing.

I agree. Like, and if you think about it like there and you do it all the time actually whenever you want an answer for something, instead of like sitting and watching a 60 minute YouTube video, you just buy the $200 course, get your answer.

And so everyone.

And I'm like, hey guys, I bought this thing.

Yeah, go for it.

So yeah, I'm a good case study. Yeah, I bought that reels course because I was like, I want to know how do you get a million views? Yeah, show me. Like break that down for me. And there's no like for $60, I'm going to buy that instantly. So good.

I agree real quick to like the logic with that is that tier of people also doesn't read and buy books because they're time poor.

Right.

Like of course they do. The thing with a digital product or a text and video course is you're Basically buying a book, it's just shorter with more media and more compressed for a specific problem. But the thing that people don't understand until you start making money is that to save the time, someone would way rather buy that for 500 bucks than buy a 600 page book on the same exact topic but would take them 10 times longer to go through.

And if they buy the do it yourself chances are they want that outcome. If your product does a good job and they are actually as time poor or end up being time poor and you offer it as a service, that's the perfect. Yeah, they're most likely going to buy the digital product version before they go. Okay, I want to work with you on the server side if you have.

That they're educating themselves so now you're monetizing you educating them on what needs to be done.

Perfect. Great answer. Next Vicario I'm a leadership coach currently providing paid workshops for corporates. This year I've been thinking to diversify my revenue stream by charging to the consumer. I'm thinking and I already know where this might go. I'm thinking between executive coaching for founders, cohort based course for managers, self paced course for individual contributors, paid community for individual contributors versus managers. I have doubt because the higher ticket size would require me to be more involved. Meanwhile, the lower ticket size would enable me to delegate most of the work to my team. How would you suggest me to move forward?

I mean there's like a bunch to unpack in that first of all, not all of them for sure. And then the second is over the years I have trained my brain to hear certain things and whenever I hear someone say I could pursue this because it would be more lucrative and wouldn't take up as much of my time. Not true. And certainly not going to be true in the short term or whenever someone's like I could pursue this because then I can delegate it and it'll be really easy. Not true. All these things take an extreme amount of work and so I think a better place to start is what are you most excited to build because it's going to be tiring.

Yeah. The ironic part as I reread this, the belief here that the higher ticket size would require me to be more involved is actually reverse. It's the opposite because when you charge higher ticket you have enough to train and delegate to a high quality team versus the low ticket thing that is too cheap for you to be able. Like we run PGA with eight success coaches now because of what we charge.

Yep.

That is the our High ticket version. And we were able to scale ourselves out of direct fulfillment faster than ship 30 because we had that ability to reinvest in the team. So that's, that's the big answer. It's that I would go for the one that charges the most because that is actually what allows you to delegate yourself out of it faster.

Yep.

I feel very strongly that if anyone wants to enter the world of info and education, the easiest place to start is either low ticket standalone digital product, nothing recurring, pure impulse buy 350 or less, or a small group time constrained cohort based experience. And the only, the only benefit or reason for going cohort based is to learn. Because now you get to interact with people. Because then you can take that and you can decide like going cohort for ship 30 was actually great for us because it sort of was like, well now we can do low ticket because we're just stripping away the experiential part. Or we could do high ticket, which is everything we were doing in the cohort, just forever or evergreen or longer time constraint, you know. But I think, I think it's a huge mistake for a beginner if you go further on both sides of the spectrum. The beginner mistake is either going SaaS recurring membership or real time discord channel or advanced group coaching.

Such a good framework.

Right. Like the middle is where you start. And then depending on how that goes then like the more advanced, like now we can do a paid newsletter.

Right, Right.

With AI. It's crushing it. But the only reason that we can do that is because we've built all the skills by doing the easier models first.

Okay, so this, that was the outline of a really good.

Yeah, that actually that was, that was pretty great.

That was a really good. Alan. Cause yeah, you. For info you have paid newsletter, cohort based course or sorry, digital product, community core based group experience. Those are. And the. I like you said that was if you're getting into Infosys, all services aside, that is not one of the things you're considering if you want to sell your information. Correct. Right.

And, and you compare the two.

Starting with a paid newsletter, you don't have enough content and you probably couldn't keep up with that. Cohort based allows you to learn such that you could go in either direction from that. Yep, I like that. That's really good. Well, almost cohort based allows you to not go higher. It's allows you to go community or digital product, depending on what you like the most. So that's what we do. Like we could have done ship 30 and we' out to. To go infinite ship 30. But we to. We went from cohort down to digital product before we then went the other direction. Because we started with a cohort, correct?

Yeah.

But I really feel like the biggest benefit of cohort in the beginning is just learning. It's like you've never talked to the people you're trying to help before. Why don't you help them directly and then you learn their problems and then you can decide what other models do you want to use.

And so that just has me start to think for like the digital writing school paths. It's service ideally first, I don't know like that's where. How much do we talk about services in digital writing school?

I think, I think it's worth education. It's like it's a business model.

Right.

You know, but it's like are you. Where's the person starting from? Are they starting from. I've never monetized anything or I already have an audience. I just want to monetize with info or I already have a service business but I want to get into info. You know, like there's right. There's different paths.

Okay. But right away I think having the clear delineation of these are the ways to monetize information. Pay newsletter, low ticket product, community, core base experience and having the one like the mastery versions of all of those.

I would even, just just to clarify it, I would even put community further lower on the totem pole where I think the. If you go in order of. I don't know what the two sides are yet, but I would lump SaaS, recurring community, real time like Discord and paid newsletter all in this low ticket recurring bucket. That I think is very hard. I think when you get it right, it's incredible and it's very lucrative. But it is a very, very hard place to start. The middle is. Or up from there is low ticket digital product. 350 or less. Up from there is time constrained cohort. It's not a community. It is, it is like I do this with you for two weeks live or four weeks live time constrained cohort. And then up from there is group coaching.

Evergreen.

Evergreen always on. And I feel like because they're so popular, people really gravitate to the bottom side because they think it's less expensive so it's easier to buy, which is sort of true, but that doesn't mean you make more money. And because it's less expensive, the expectations are higher, which makes it harder and it's Recurring, which makes it harder.

Right. You know, so paid newsletter, real time chat, educational community. Because, like, it's like 2050. 99. Yeah, that's how I would think.

Yeah.

Because, like, you wouldn't charge. Like, I. There's dude on Instagram, he's got like, really cool reels. And I was following them. He sent. He had this like DM funnel and then he sent me this link for like an $11 a month community. I'm like, yeah, what do. We can't do anything there. It's like I. I was expecting it to be 99 and so then 350 and that, like, we can almost put words to every pricing tier.

Yep.

You know, because cohort based and then group coaching. Okay.

Yeah.

Differentiating between evergreen group coaching and cohort base will be important because.

Oh, for sure. But they're very different.

Definitely. Okay, nice. More out, more frameworks. More frameworks. And I'm glad we're recording this. It's very good. All right, Giovanni, this is. This is a good one. Doing a great job in pga. Struggling to grow my own audience. And I know the answer to this one. And so I want you to see, like, which part do you guys hear your ears turn up at? Struggling to grow. My own newsletter about endurance. Running with type 1 diabetes. Very niche. Currently 50 subs. Important premise. This is a side project. Main focus is pga, so I can't say I'm giving it my all. However, the effort is there. One weekly article on substack, One tweet per day repurposing proven content. One thread per week. Two of these. Three social posts I linked to the newsletter. I don't like spamming it all the time, but there's been zero growth in 2025. Could that be that my audience is elsewhere than X and I'm wasting effort? Or I'm. Or am I missing something major in my newsletter growth strategy?

My gut take is probably not spending enough time on, like, really taking like, the hooks and like, the social content to the left, like the level that it deserves because that's where you. Where you get the growth, but also where, like all of that, the time and attention, like, goes. That's kind of my immediate take.

Yeah, that's what I would say to some really tactical things. I mean, one, it's a faulty belief to think if I plug the newsletter too many times, it's spam. It's not true. Plug it all the time, forever. Second is X and Elon hates substack. And so posting substack links get throttled. In the algorithm. So, like finding a workaround with that. Our workaround, anyone's curious, is instead of posting links to substack, we created EECs in ConvertKit. We link to those and then at the end of those EECs, we move those subs over to substack. So super tactical thing. But yeah, I mean, and then the third is like, what's the goal and what's the expectation? I think one of one of my hot button topics is when people say, I like, here's my goal. I really want to make money. This is my tangible goal. But I also want to do this thing that brings me fulfillment. Totally fine. But then you can't look at the thing that you said you wanted to do for fulfillment and go, but it's not growing. And I'm not getting this tangible result. It's not what you just said. And I feel like it's really important to have clarity over why you're doing the things that you're doing.

You know, I agree with all those. As I was reading this, I was trying to reverse engineer, like how I would do an onboarding call and like a path creation. And so I've been running through this hierarchy of like, question number one. Are you currently writing online? Check. Yes.

Good.

Are you on which platform? Okay. X, how many times per day are you posting there? If you are not at the max amount, your next step is to max out more. So he's like, one tweet per day. I'm like, that should be 10.

Yeah.

Right away. That's the only thing you need to focus on. Because if your newsletter is not growing, it's because very simply not enough eyeballs like to put newsletter growth in the same conversation. Is like, how many newsletters I'm publishing. They're completely different things.

Yeah.

You know, so that like, I'm enjoying reading these and going, okay, I know exactly where I would send you. X201, you need to go more better on. In that order first, ramp up to 10 tweets a day. Once you do that for a month, then it's better. How do you run viral drops? How do you run these other things based on that? But until you're completely maxed out, do nothing else except get that volume to the highest level.

And I think it's important to double click on the sequential order of those because it's very easy to hear that and be like, oh, okay, I'm going to try to write those 10 tweets per day while also continuing to publish the newsletter three times per week. And doing all of these other things, when in reality it doesn't matter if you're publishing the newsletter three times a week if you're not growing. And so probably like just focus on one thing at a time in the sequential order. Once you get to the newsletter, once you have enough traffic, you can worry about the newsletter.

Yep. Yeah.

Two other things is one, like, I can hear the little forks in the road with this because if they say X, but they also say the priority is growing the newsletter and the newsletter is on substack, then you should be cross posting max volume on notes on substack. So if you're not doing that, it's like that's the easiest thing you should do. Why aren't you doing that? And then second, this is in cnc, but it'll be in the digital writing school, which is the little checklist that I have for newsletter and paid newsletter, like tangible, objective, offer. I bet if I ran through that checklist that the newsletter and the framing of the value is probably leans, intangible, outcome lean, subjective, not objective. You know, like there's all these things solve the traffic problem. But like that will be the next problem.

And that's why I think my goal is break down. You need the traffic problem bottleneck, marketing bottleneck, and then product bottleneck. Like all three of those. And then it'll always go in that order. If you have a traffic bottleneck that takes priority over the other two. And like how I think the best onboarding calls will go will be, here are your five bottlenecks. This is the most important one. You'll unlock that one right now. Hey, if you want all five of these, we can unlock all five. Now just so you have the information, do you want to go ahead and do that?

Yep.

Cool. Boom. Upsell. Like that's the onboarding flow that I want to engineer. Point out all the next five things that they would need to go unlock. Tell them just the first one, but most people will go, okay, I want all of them. Yep, that's gonna be not easy, but we'll take some effort. All right, couple more questions here.

Let's rapid fire it current.

Okay, from Janice. We're gonna have to do like 2 minute answers here. Cause we got like 10 minutes. Currently do not have any kind of coaching. I just run my wedding photography business. However, I'm looking to pivot more into a consulting coaching business model in the long term since the business side of photography is super interesting. Something I've consistently looked for new books, videos, podcasts. I've Long considered a YouTube channel to help build out my personal brand. But from your experience, is there a platform that has yielded you the best terms of ROI in terms of time and shortest time to build up momentum? Second question that's related. Despite me being brand new to the consulting space, is sharing my journey of learning something can help me build up my authority? Second one, yes. Always good to share your journey. Not fully clear on the question, but I think that for photography business I would actually like everyone's on Instagram. I think if you had a photography thing on LinkedIn, like I put a video up of me doing pull ups on Twitter, I'm going to post that on LinkedIn because I don't think anyone is posting that kind of stuff there. I think LinkedIn's the most interesting thing to just funnel attention into right now because more and more people are spending time on there. So that would be my.

It also lags in the most in terms of content trends like LinkedIn is the last to know about a meme, you know.

Right.

And so or content types or formats. You know, whereas Instagram is probably one of the first X is one of the first for text. As a for photography I would definitely go visual either Instagram or YouTube immediately. What comes to mind is if you want to pivot into info or coaching, I would make the whole frame the business of wedding photography. Like there's so much information about improving shots and which cameras and everything. But I bet there's not very much information on business models, pricing strategies. How do you upsell clients? Like that would be such an interesting niche to dig into.

Yeah, I can speak to that. Paul. My wife, she's a photographer and I can tell you the number one problem everyone in the industry has is they love taking pictures and they hate selling.

Yeah.

Fair.

Yeah.

If you can help people down even.

More, it's like wedding photography sales.

Yes.

Right.

How do you price an offer? How do you do you know.

Yeah, that's it.

Love it. All right, go for it, Janice. Dr. Jonathan. He's been super active preparing my high ticket. Goes through all our stuff. Great student. Preparing my high ticket group coaching offer for HR leaders on school validated as a service. Secured an early bird signup. My inbound efforts are working bunch of stats. I have 99 warm leads on my wait list launching using the CNC prelaunch launch strategy 7 day enrollment window. I have no idea how many will convert but for success for me is ten buyers since this and I think it's like two or three grand since this is the first time running this. I want to be prepared if I hit my goal, what are the best steps to move? What are my next five moves to sustain or scale the momentum if I miss, what are the best next five moves to refine and recover.

So sorry, what's the business model?

It's a high ticket group coaching but I'm pretty sure he means cohort based.

Okay, and do we know the goal of it?

No, I don't know the outcome. I think it's like HR leaders to get some kind of project approved internally and it shows them how to like present the project to the rest of your department and staff and stuff like that. So tangible, pretty tangible outcome. My take is like no, your next five moves are going to be the same. You're going to talk to every single person that joined and I would ask them was there anything that had you on the fence of not joining? That's a big question. And then I'd send a survey to everyone who didn't buy from that hot way list. Hey, I'm looking to refine this. Could you fill out this couple question survey just asking showing me why you didn't buy because that's all you're trying to learn from this is like gather as much data during the launch of what could have made the launch better. But then the shitty part about the cohort based is you got to forget all those marketing lessons and go fulfill and that's what we had to do 20 times. It's like I got 10 marketing upgrades, I've already forgotten about them because I got a live session tomorrow. So figuring out how to like get all that data as quickly as possible and then you fulfill and then have a one on one off boarding call with everyone who joined. Hey, you know what did you like what was frustrating? What would you change if we were doing this again? And then that's your whole next iteration plan.

Anything you'd add or change.

The only thing if small waitlist but also small goal of like in terms of signups like I think doing the things that don't that don't scale. Like we were very big on that in the early days of ship theory and like I think we also like kind of forgotten underestimate how impactful that.

Was through the the eight the 80 person hype fury threads that welcomed every single person and bumped it back up to the top.

Hey, that was another person.

Join another person. Join another person. Join. Not you, not you.

People hated that people like were muting us on Twitter because yeah it worked. I also, if it's too far gone too, the price point definitely jumps out to me because I think, I think we found that the, the one to three thousand dollar range, it starts to become no man's land. And you either want to be sub 1000 like 7, 8, 900 bucks for cohort or you want to be upwards of 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 grand for group coaching.

Good advice, good advice. Okay. And I agree. Yeah, anytime we've sold anything for two grand.

Yeah, it's just too hard.

All right, two more. I'm thinking, I'm trying to decide. This is John Viall. I'm trying to decide how to restructure my live sessions. So far they're the only thing that really makes the coast course cohort based. Everything else is available at all times if the live sessions don't really get great attendance. So I'm thinking about removing them, maybe even offering 15 minute slot for one on ones with students instead. Current low numbers of about 4 people per cohort, but obviously this will be tough with if we get above 20. Unlike the ship 30 calls. Mine are actually a quick summary of the road ahead. I don't teach any frameworks as they're all available as part of the course materials. I'm considering cutting them out altogether. That would make the course asynchronous. But I like the connection with the students and the topic matter is really tough. I think getting some in person help is great. Also builds a small community and I get to do shout outs for people who would have post who have posted in the weekly live call. What would you do? Leave as is, cut the live sessions completely and Go async. Offer 15 minutes instead of live calls. How would you keep the cadence?

I mean there's just so many variables. Like it depends on what the price point is. Depending on the price point, I would probably say just cut them. Or if you're not teaching anything, just make it a loom. That's an instruction that you send out every Monday or whatever. You know, here's the path ahead. But again, if you like, if you listen closely, it's that same cognitive dissonance which is like what's the right move for my business? And by the way, I really enjoy doing these.

Hmm.

So which one is it? Like is this a what's the more lucrative decision or is this a how can you squeeze more juice out of something that you enjoy? Because those are different. If you enjoy it, then keep doing the live sessions.

You know anything? No, I think, yeah, quite a few variables. It all comes down to price though. My guess is that if there's not a bunch of attendance, it's really just. I would keep it as a cohort but find out you really have a marketing problem. You should just send more emails, get the price down to 800 bucks and find out how to get 30. And then you don't have low attendance. Right. You have enough people. All right, last one. My target audience is data scientists and I post on the essential soft skills and soft skills and psychology you need for career growth. I'm debating between building a community, launching a paid newsletter with AI prompts. Which would you recommend?

Neither.

Neither, Neither. And we just talked about that.

And we talked.

Yeah.

350 product.

Yep.

Or group cohort based course to validate whether you want to do a community or a digital product.

Yep.

That's also I think the best way to do it.

Totally.

Yeah.

Also very small nuance with that is I always listen for when someone's niche is something like soft skills or psychology, something that's very intangible. It has to be anchored to some sort of tangible outcome. So like it's not just soft skills in psychology for data scientists, period. It's data for data scientists to do something very measurable, very tangible. You know, because otherwise it's not anchored to anything. It's just like oh, soft skills, that's cool.

Yeah.

To get a promotion versus to switch industries versus to be a good data scientist.

Yeah.

But notice how. Yeah listing those out. If you turn it to level 10. It's like soft skills in order to understand human psychology in order to make the most addicting apps on the face of the planet. Like way more specific and tangible.

True. You know this one, I'm. Long story, I'm struggling to choose the right platform. I should meet people where they are. Can't do it on discord, blah blah blah. I'm. I'm between school and Circle School.

School 100% done.

Very easy. We build all of our stuff on school. So Danny, that's what we would recommend. This is an interesting one. A quick clarification on social content. In ship 30 the focus was on one platform and looking for signal with daily posts. But now in a recent call I said if you're not everywhere, you're nowhere. So I might have been taken out a little bit out of context there. Cuz that's how we think about it. But is this a change of approach or difference for beginner versus continual?

I would say that.

Right.

Yeah. Yeah.

So beginners one platform until you have Something validated. However, I do think we now know how easy it is to repurpose and cross post, especially like Twitter to substack notes. That's obviously pick one platform, get consistent there. But the. I would recommend branching out to another platform sooner than I would have two years ago.

I agree. But I wouldn't repurpose on more than one secondary platform.

Correct.

Just two is max. Just because then what happens is all of your time gets sucked into more and more and more, but you're not improving the quality of the content, which is the true bottleneck.

I agree. Like, I'm personally experiencing this right now. And like for a second, because for context, I'm growing on LinkedIn and posting on LinkedIn every day. And for a second it seemed very obvious and very easy to immediately start reposting all of my stuff on X. I did that for like five days until I realized that on X everything sucked because I wasn't. I was doing the lazy repurposing thing. You weren't. You can do that. But then the results don't show up.

So, yeah. The effort to repurpose is higher than you think to do well.

And you have to understand the nuances in the game, which means you have to spend time on that platform, which means it's a second pursuit.

Yeah.

You know, and being able to give numbers around that, like you're at like 27,000.

Almost. Almost 20,000.

Oh yeah.

Awesome.

Good stuff. And we still wouldn't recommend going to another.

Yeah.

And so it's like you can max out one platform far more than people like. And it's usually just I'm not growing, so therefore I should be on another one.

I think that's generally true for most of these decisions. Like, you can scale your product a lot further than you think rather than building a second one. You can scale your audience a lot further on one platform rather than adding a second. This. This was awesome.

Yeah.

I'm realizing. So to two ideas just to brainstorm here. One, we should do this in the digital writing school where we field questions and then we do a Q and A and we record it and it becomes.

Because we just got Infinite Shorts.

Which is awesome.

Yeah.

And then second is we should do. Do this with different people from our team speaking and answering different types of questions. So like, you know, Katie can do just like success and NPS scores in cohort based. You know what I mean? Andrew can do back end and upsells.

Yep.

You know, Tristan can do. Yeah. Like all these people.

Yeah.