Why The Boring Work Is Your Moat

If you knew how much effort it was gonna take to get to where you are now, would you do it?

To be honest, probably not.

It's so easy to think this product's good enough and then you move on to the next idea. It was like an afterthought bullet point. It was like, this is the thing we're actually gonna work on. But, oh, and by the way, we just need to upgrade the curriculum. And it took us three months to finish this because it was a full blown overhaul.

The strategic mistake was I did not buy the ad for mine. Now I know the dollar value of a landing page visitor. That's why I text you. I'm like, dude, your episode's coming out tomorrow. Can you text him back and buy the.

Of all the different business models that we've tried and experimented with, it's not really a question of which ones can make money and which ones don't like. They all work. But which one allows you to build a business that you love and feel great about, but also allows you to build a life that you also feel great about.

Boom. Welcome back to another episode of the espresso hour. 2024 week. 11 weeks flying by, years flying by. But at the same time, we were talking earlier this week. It's not moving that fast.

It's moving at lightning speed and it's so slow at the same time.

It's a very weird phenomena because we started to look back on our January planning document and then looking, I think.

Oh, that was a trip.

Right. When you make the full year plan and then say, oh, it's only March, we have this much more to go in the year, it feels like the year's gone slower. But if you go, it was just January, it feels like it was going way faster. That's a weird.

Okay, so I'm glad you brought that up because, yeah, we looked at the doc that we made. When did we make that? In December or, like, first thing.

It was first thing in January.

Yeah.

So we're like, this is what the year is going to be like. And even this is what the first quarter is going to be like. And this is what the first month is going to be like. I think we did like 10% of what was on that list. Yeah, maybe 20, 20%. And there's something so humbling about looking back at that. And it's like that constant reminder, like, you're always trying to do more than you think you can do.

Yeah.

Everything takes twice as long and costs twice as much. So let's dive into Some lessons and realizations from the week, which I think a lot of what we just talked about sets the frame for. For context. I've been getting in a habit recently of writing these up throughout the week as they come to us. So this first one was we were talking to the gym yesterday, and you mentioned to me it feels so good to have this done because it was actually a full overhaul, not an upgrade. So the lesson is there's a massive difference between an upgrade and an overhaul. So you want to talk about how you came to that?

Yeah.

This was, you know, our big project for the past three months, has been overhauling the PGA curriculum. And the reason we did it, we've talked about this in previous espresso hours, is we've had over 400 people go through PGA at this point. We've started to realize all of the questions that they have, the little friction points they run into. And what's so interesting about these, this evergreen group coaching model is because everyone's sort of going through the same path. When you have a point of friction along the path, the problem really reveals itself because every single person hits that point of friction or every single person gets to that module and they all ask the same question. So if you don't take the time to fix those little friction points, the more people that you bring into the program, it's almost like the problem compounds because now we need more resources.

Your inefficiency scales.

Exactly.

Your lack of clarity. It's one of the coolest things about writing or creating any kind of course that actually holds people accountable to completing it, rather than if you sold the same thing as an async product, you would never know. You never know. It's just like, I stopped there.

Yeah.

But since we are coaching every single person every single day within the Slack community, we saw, based on our Airtable tracker, it's like this was the bottleneck and it's bottlenecks all the way down. Because we looked at it came into January saying the bottleneck of the business is this. To get that fixed, we need to dig a layer deeper and a layer deeper and a layer deeper. So it was to grow. We wanted to launch the backend of pga. To launch the back end of pga, we needed more people qualified to do so. To get more people qualified to do so, we literally had to fix like module 6 of the curriculum. Started to fix module 6 and realize if you're going to put all the effort into upgrading this, one might as well overhaul everything. So we remove all the bottlenecks yeah, it's.

And it's one of those things, we've talked about it so many times, especially when we've reflected on ship 30, where it's so easy to think this product's good enough and then you move on to the next idea or, you know, you're like, I just need to sell it more. I just need more customers. And, and really, once again, you know, we're what, three and a half years into this. It's like the same lesson over and over again every time we would make a list. PGA upgrade curriculum was just, it was like an afterthought bullet point. It was like, this is the thing we're actually going to work on. But oh, and by the way, we just need to upgrade the curriculum. And it took us three months to finish this because it wasn't an upgrade, it was a full blown overhaul.

That leads perfectly into the second one though, that the boring work is your moat.

Yep.

So you spent three months on this curriculum that was already very good.

It was already very good.

Very few people were not seeing success with it, but we knew it could be better.

Yeah.

I think real quick for context, like you have to be so obsessive about looking for where are the opportunities to upgrade or overhaul. Because up to this point, you know, PGA's refund rate is like 1%. It's very, very low. Yeah. We've gotten so many incredible testimonials and case studies out of it. Like by, by most metrics you would look at it and go, this is fine. This doesn't need any changing. And then we go overhaul it and we're literally like, this is 10 times better than it was already. And so, yeah. As especially near the end, because this has been a push. I just keep telling myself, I'm like, this is our moat. No one's going to go through.

Literally can't do all the work that you've done. No one else could replicate it by any means.

Especially in the time period too. Like, I think maybe other people. Yeah, you can do it, but it's going to take you a really long time.

And so that was the lesson is no one's able to compete with what we're doing based on that level of effort. And it should feel boring.

Yeah.

Because what would have, what could we have done with that time otherwise would be more marketing.

Right.

If we'd only been pushing new marketing channels, starting paid ads, picking other ways to drive traffic to the product that have been a strategic, strategic mistake. Even if it's good. Pretty good. Until we Hit that KPI of people bringing in via referral.

Build till they tell.

Right.

It doesn't make sense to pour as much marketing fire on it. But now with this curriculum and the success infrastructure that we built the last three months, it's funny. Infrastructure week turned into Infrastructure Quarter.

Literally.

That's it. If that's the. If that's the theme of the entire quarter. Quarter. It's what we thought would be a couple weeks. Just ended up taking up the entire quarter. And that's okay.

And the problem.

Zoom out. That's okay.

Yeah, it's totally fine. And the problems, you know, I have slack on my phone and stuff. And so the problems are so visceral where you literally see the same question come through 400 times, you know, and, and, and we have, you know, success coaches and, and sales coaches and other support systems in pga. And so I also then see the Same answer shared 400 times. And so that's sort of the meta takeaway is realizing if you don't take the time to fix those little inefficiencies, it's like not only does the success of the program not increase, but you also have to spend more money on the support side because you're trying to fix the problem with labor when you could have just taken the time to fix the curriculum, fix the product.

And so we're almost at the end of that. Yeah, you gotta feel good.

Oh, I can't wait. I can't wait. You said this the other day, and I felt it too, but I loved hearing you say it, where you were like, I've never had more confidence and clarity in what we're building because the formula for how it works is so simple.

Right. Basically, over the last quarter, really, it ended up being a quarter. I've tried to simplify the entire student acquisition and student fulfillment into formulas, which is just individual success rates at basically every step along the way. This is what's frustrating. I've heard so many people say you should be able to track from click to close of any business you have. I'm like, yeah, yeah, sure, yeah, like, good luck. I don't know how to do that. And so we basically spent three years kind of guessing on traffic acquisition sources, on checkout conversion rates, on email course conversion rates, all that. And we built the infrastructure over the last three months. And now it's so interesting to see it's just one formula. And you can point at one number on one formula and go, all right, we're going to make that number go up. And we're Going to change nothing else. Because the predictability of this given we have consistent YouTube cadence now, a consistent LinkedIn cadence now consistent X, all that stays the same. Which means general top of funnel traffic stays the same. If you can improve the each individual number throughout the whole business, it grows.

Yeah.

And so that it's very simple. And we just finally got to a point where we have it all on one formula with all the numbers making up that formula presented on a weekly basis.

Yeah.

Just to make this super tangible. So yeah, what you dropped in slack the other day is, you know, the first percentage is new subscriber to our eec. So what's cool is like we eat our own dog food. Like everything that we're training other people to do, we are doing for our own business. So the percentage of new subscriber to filling out an application for pga. The percentage of applications marked as qualified. So do they meet the criteria of what we're looking for? The percentage of applications that end up booking a call. So we offer this free strategy call as part of pga. The percentage of calls that are kept on the calendar. So someone books a call. How many actually show up to the.

Call or how many do we not cancel? So some qualified students that we don't think would be a good fit, we actually remove after they book.

Okay, is that percentage counting someone who cancels too?

Very rarely does someone cancel, but yeah, okay, does.

So calls kept on the calendar. Then the percentage of the show rate so who actually shows up to the call and then the percentage of the close close rate. So how many people do we close?

And the way I look at this is. And I could geek out on this exact part of the business forever. So I'm glad we're talking about this. Basically when you put that full number on a single formula, you go from there and say, okay, let's look at all these and try to find industry averages for every single one of them. And so I've been talking to a ton of different businesses who operate in a similar space, just asking what are your numbers in this? And then we're part of some masterminds. I have a rough idea of where all those numbers are. We are above and beyond. And every single time I share our numbers with people, they're like, they're mind blowing serious.

Yeah.

Like what, what how? Without paid ads, without any kind of. It's. It's awesome. And so it took us a while to get there and now the, the number we didn't mention was just landing page visits.

That's the Very top, top, top of funnel thing.

And that's the easiest one to go up because you literally go, all right, we could buy Facebook ads, we could buy Instagram ads, we could buy newsletter ads, podcasts. It's very easy. We could create more, write more, sponsor other people, find affiliates. That is like by far the easiest thing in the world to do do. And it's not until I feel that that formula is up to snuff that it's worth going and putting all that additional traffic on there, including the student success metrics. So beyond that, there's a full formula for student success which you also look at as a second funnel to PGA Scale or Backend Mastermind. And the beautiful part about having an additional product to sell to everyone at any point is your marketing for that next product becomes the success of the product before it. Right. And so it aligns incentives. You should have something to sell someone after they buy the first thing because you're more incentivized to make it so good that they want to buy the next thing.

Yep.

So now we basically I have one marketing and one success airtable. And every single week those numbers populate. And the numbers have been so sustainable and predictable for the last month. I'm like, oh, okay. Like that is the run rate.

This is the business.

This is the business. There is nothing in those numbers that are low hanging fruit to go and improve. Now we've talked about the money tree. That's what we did with all those other numbers is like, all right, this one is the furthest from the industry standard. Let's go improve that one.

What are the isolated and go ahead.

And leave everything else the same. What are the lowest hanging fruit to improve that number specifically? Let's go do that and focus on that number. And we spent the last quarter doing it feel good about it. Now we just ramp up the top of it. It's pretty, pretty simple.

It's.

Yeah.

It's so simple that it's complicated.

Right.

Because you go back to the everyone says you should track click to close and it's so easy to be like I don't know how or. Or you almost like avoid digging into the problem because you don't actually want to know where the friction points are.

Yes. Because it just stares you in the face of all the new work you have to do.

Yeah, it's. It's the ignorance is bliss, you know, so it's, I think a lot of people would almost rather not know and.

Surely creates far more work than you if you didn't Set it up this way.

Oh, yeah.

Because it just shows you. Like you said, go fix this, go fix that, go fix that. But we talked about this, I think like two or three weeks ago that I loved looking at a suboptimal formula funnel. Like, oh, okay, we'll fix that. And we've had, we did all this despite having all these holes. Now it's all that's up and running. Let's go take as many YouTube videos to 100,000 views as we can. That's the plan.

Yeah.

Speaking of. So, yeah, kind of exciting this past week because we just started getting video going. This has been like a two month, three month maybe project of getting this up and running. And same thing is, you know, it's the same stuff we talk about in ship 30. It's like there are always data points there. It's just they're really small in the beginning. You have to be able to recognize them. And we just got our. Because we have the whole funnel now. We could, we can track. We just got our first, you know, EEC subscriber from YouTube going through our whole funnel and then closing and joining pga. And we have, we saw that data point come through and we were like.

Making your first dollar online. Anytime you launch a new product or a new acquisition source or a new funnel, it's like that little dopamine of your first dollar hitting a stripe account.

It was, it was. So when I saw that come through, I was like, full body high. I was just like, it's working.

There's so many moments of that as I think about it. The first time someone sells something for you that you didn't like, you didn't take the sales call.

Yep.

The first time you get an email subscriber, all those first moments, you're kind of just continually chasing as you're building new things.

And it's really, you know, it's validating in the sense that even though we've been doing what we're doing, even starting YouTube, it's hard to go into something and not have that pessimism of like, I don't even know if YouTube is going to work. Like the first, like four videos I've created and we put them up and, you know, they get like less than a thousand views. I'm like, I don't know if this thing's even going to work. And then you see that first sale come through and you're like, it's a small data point, but it's a data point. And we just got to keep going.

It's a little bit of reinforcement. We talk or one of my personal frameworks is it's mostly just operant conditioning where you do the things where you are rewarded. And so if you didn't get that sale, it'd be like, damn, I'm gonna make another YouTube video. I'm gonna go, I'm gonna script this whole thing again. And. But now it's like, clear reward. Continue to do that behavior. And my guess is our traffic is going to double over the next three months. If I, if I could predict that. And that's the goal is we want to take everything we've done. And the beautiful part about having it all on one single formula is like just the now, the business growth is now directly tied to the growth of that number, which is email subscribers to our eec.

And something I'd love to share because we have people who listen to this every week. I think that's the coolest thing. And so a little pro tip here I'd love to share with everyone is what we're going to do is our front end for PGA and also for ship 30. We're really big believers in these educational email courses. That's the top of Funnel. We want to give you something for free. And so one of the first things that we're doing is turning each day of our PGA educational email course into a YouTube video. And so then we can take that YouTube video and embed it in each day of the educational email course, which constantly creates a flywheel of all the traffic we're bringing into the EEC also then clicks through to watch the YouTube video. So it's a great way of double dipping.

I give it about three months until everyone else has that set up.

And you know what?

It's awesome.

Hey, it's going to work. It's amazing. And I, I love finding ways where I'm such a big believer in these evergreen flywheels where you're not, you're not trying to play the virality game. You're like, I'm going to build a system that just, it's a little bit every day. It's like a dividend. And so the idea of growing your YouTube channel by driving traffic to an educational email course that's constantly sending people.

There, it's going to feed on one another. Right. The email course is going to grow from YouTube and then YouTube is going to grow from the email.

Exactly. And that, that's. You're not trying to go viral. You're building an engine. And that engine is going to run For a very long time.

I'm very interested to see what the YouTube algorithm does. Say, that much external traffic on a video.

Yep.

You know, what does it look like to have continual clicks onto a video from an email all the time? Is it going to show it to more people organically? It's going to be cool to kind of figure that one out.

Yeah.

Sort of, you know, dovetails into this next bullet. The Internet allows you to build any business, which means you must start with constraints. I feel.

Go ahead.

I just feel like if you look back at the past three years, we've tried and experimented and built businesses with so many different business models. And it's so interesting to consider, like knowing what we know now, if we were starting over, what would we do? And I don't know, you want to just sort of talk through like.

Yeah, so I wrote that up for you. What was that? Yesterday morning?

Yeah.

Of course, at this point we, I feel very confident in our ability to build anything.

Yeah.

Like we have done SaaS without our full attention and it's had success.

Group coaching newsletter, Digital cohort Base sync. Yeah, everything.

Enough to differentiate between them and make a decision. Now with that in mind, you can chase any of those and shape your life to work around the running of that. Instead. I sat down and said, what does it look like to build the dream, unburnoutable, sustainable, long term business of what days a week are we taking meetings? What type of clients are we working with? What types of content are we creating? How much time we have for deep work versus how much time we have for meetings? A bunch of different constraints that would, had we not set out and plan those before, would have just reacted to whatever we would, whatever it is we try to build. But starting with those constraints will change the types of businesses you could create or, and, and how you create them. Right. So the way you go about building them would be much different. If you say, I only want to take meetings once a week.

Yeah.

Versus I'm going to take four hours of meetings a day.

It changes which business model you go with. It changes how much time you have to spend on fulfillment, your margins, who.

You hire, the sustainability of it. It was really interesting to write that out and go, okay, with those constraints. How does that impact our decision making with what we build over the next year?

And I, I mean, I think, you know, we feel the same way, but of all the different things that we've built, I feel like PGA is, it is about as close to a perfect business as you could get. I mean, it's, it's just so. There's so many things working well in that sort of model. And at least of all the different business models that we've tried and experimented with, it's not really a question of like which ones can make money and which ones don't. Like they all work, they all make money.

That's the hard part.

Right. And so it's very easy to get sucked into one and be like, I'm going to build my life around this thing because it's working.

Right.

But the real choice is going there's pros and cons to each one of these. Which one allows you to build a business that you love and feel great about, but also allows you to build a life that you also feel great about?

Which one could you make money with forever? Yeah, is the real question. And just to Compare contrast, like ship 30, we ran 20 cohorts of ship 30. Likely transitioning that to an evergreen, always on, still community based challenge quote, like mini cohort style. We're not 100% clear on it, but we repeated the same live sessions for 20 straight cohorts. And I just don't think we were going to do that for the rest of our life. Yeah, like we were no longer learning from doing that. I think a lot of people who ran core based courses came to that conclusion after like four or five, which we had a lot more stamina and I think that was why we were able to differentiate ourselves over long term with it.

Yeah.

But that's going to change because now we have a different vehicle that doesn't require that. How can we continue to keep such a good experiment or experience without necessarily being on there for two or three hours per week?

Yeah, there was the repetition element of it. And then honestly, one of my biggest takeaways was just the learning of the time to feedback like the cohort model. And we ended up building one of the more successful cohort based courses. We did well with it, but it's so interesting to look back and realize, wow, we were so constrained by the fact that we couldn't iterate until the next cohort, which was two or three months later. And now having a business where you're able to iterate on a daily or hourly basis, it's like I couldn't imagine going back and being like, that's going to be our primary business model because you're so constrained by that.

I think cohorts are great to start. Like we started PGA with a cohort because you get that feedback. But really the goal is to transition it as quickly as possible to something as sustainable as possible.

Yep.

Which we learned. It's going to be exciting to build that out, which is what we're planning on building next. And so that was the takeaway based on that constraint. Which of our infinite list of things to go and work on next are we going to choose?

Yeah.

Sort of related to this. This last lesson that you put, which is, slogs will proceed periods of accelerated growth. I think what's interesting is sometimes, you know, when you're in a slog, like, the past few months, I mean, you know, I've had a lot of fun overhauling the PGA curriculum, and I know you've had moments of fun where you're like, oh, now I finally have clarity over the numbers. And, like, there's. There's moments where you go, this is really cool. Cool. But the past quarter has been a slog, and it's been a lot of, this is not a shiny object. We just have to show up and do it. But it's also interesting to just look back in time, and in comparison to what we're doing now, there were a lot of ship 30 cohorts that felt like, oh, all right, like another one. We got to do it again. We got to do it again. And so you never, you know, sometimes, you know when you're in a slog, and sometimes you don't know until you're out of it that you look back and you're like, man, that was. That was hard.

Yeah.

It's that one time someone asked, what would you say to yourself if you went all the way back to the beginning of ship 30? And I was like, I don't know if I'd do it.

Yeah.

If you. If you knew how much effort it was going to take to get to where you are now at the beginning, would you do it?

And same with the. Yeah, exactly. I go. And my answer was like, to be honest, probably not. And if you asked at the beginning of this curriculum upgrade, if it was going to take that much time, you'd go, how? Like, what. Where am I. Where am I wrong here? Yeah, it's only after doing it for so long, or you. You kind of get in the weeds enough that you go, okay, this actually deserves far more effort. So it's better to not know how much effort something is going to take and just getting started on it, because if you know it's going to be the world's hardest workout, you probably wouldn't even start it.

Yeah, that's the other Side, that's where ignorance is. Bliss is your friend, you know?

Exactly.

You're like, I don't know. So I'll just jump in.

Exactly. Exactly. Okay. You want to run through a couple of the other things that. That happened this week.

Yeah.

So how's the brand overhaul?

It's really cool.

I'm notice I said brand overhaul and not upgrade. Yeah, I changed the wording in this.

Yeah, great point.

Yeah.

So we hired a design agency going to just be working on overhauling a bunch of our different assets. I think it's really funny, but also amazing how much we've done over the past three years using Canva templates and emojis. Like, we've gotten around a lot of problems by going, we don't need a logo, let's just use an emoji, you know, and that's really great. But at a certain point that's, you know, I think our business has matured and it's time to take it to the next level. So that's great. Ramping our third enrollment advisor.

Yes. A shout out to Josh. So from a bottleneck perspective, as we've ramped up traffic and fixed everything within the PGA acquisition funnel, the bottleneck is number of students who can potentially get enrolled via an enrollment advisor. So we only have two enrollment advisors who take five calls, six calls a day. And we've been booked out completely, which is an amazing problem to have. But we've had someone who's been working underneath us as a setter. We're going to send him into a closer. And it's been fun to immediately when you turn that dial open, all the demand got filled.

Yeah.

Like instantly. His seven calls today and seven on Monday.

Like, really?

A little bit of baptism. Like a little bit of baptism by fire. I'm like, we're just going to figure this out as we go. So. Yeah, shout out to Josh if you're watching this. I hope you had a good first couple days. But it's fun to re ramp someone and get back in the lab of like, coaching.

And really it is a lot of.

Fun going through their calls and stuff like that. So that's going to be. It'll be interesting to see what the next bottleneck is. After that. I don't know what it's going to be.

Yep.

Another cool thing that we did was launch the copywriting leverage formula. So this ebook right with AI, right with AI has been. Been growing. We hit 300 really well. I think we're right about there.

Let's see if we did almost new dashboard. Almost. Almost 300k annualized. That's awesome.

So this has been a fun project. I've learned so much about paid newsletters and the model there. I've talked about this a handful of other times, but I really feel like one of the biggest missed opportunities for people who have newsletters or paid newsletters is they don't repackage and rebundle or find ways to leverage things they've already created. So, for example, you know, we created this ebook, the copywriting leverage formula, basically from the data points that when we would create prompts that had to do with copywriting or sales, copywriting, those were our most engaged prompts. They were the ones that converted the most free. Paid free subscribers to paid subscribers. So we were like, all right, well that data points working. Why don't we turn that into an upsell product?

Okay, so this is just coming to me right now. I'm like looking at the numbers of this ebook sale. We sold the e book for 99 bucks and you got six months of write with AI for free. So I think sales would have been bigger if we call this a mini course, like right away.

Yeah, for sure, if you have writing leverage.

But not like, I think it could be a text based mini course for a good chunk of it versus calling it an E book. I'm wondering if there was any kind of framing there. But you can imagine if you put this in school as text with a grid of all the things versus an E book, I think that could have changed a little bit. That could be an easy upgrade for some of the things we do in the future is like have a school group with all those courses hosted in it that. Right. With AI members get access to.

I think we will probably end up building a some sort of group and or mini courses around. Right. With AI because it's clearly something that's been working really well. So I'm really excited about that.

Talk about small moments. Josh. Just got one.

Congrats, Josh. Way to go live on the call.

Josh take taking down one of his first sales calls of the day.

Well done. That's awesome. Well done. Baptism by fire.

That's right.

Throw him in the deep end.

Just met with him. I'm like, you got seven today. How you feeling about that? He's like, I'm excited. I'm like, all right, great.

There's nothing to it but to do it, you know, you just have to throw yourself in and then learn as you go.

My first dad did 13, remember?

Oh, I remember.

That was Awesome.

I remember I saw you at the gym at the end, you were like, elated.

Yeah, that was something.

Another. Yeah, another one is we purchased these mid roll ads. I'm really interested in a podcast in that.

Yeah.

So we bought the one with your podcast episode with Callum Johnson. So how many views is that up to now? Probably at like 10k, something like that.

Yeah.

So you want to explain that?

Yeah.

Basically what it is is like looking for podcasts that in this, in this case, this was me talking on a podcast. So we wanted to sponsor it, but also looking for podcasts where the guest is talking about writing or digital products or similar tangentially related topics. And so you can be the one to sponsor the episode and have them do a pre roll or mid roll ad read. And so in our case, we're doing this to drive people to our premium ghostwriting blueprint, the email course that brings people and educates them into pga. And yeah, I'm really excited about this because it allows us to tap into completely new audiences.

And so the strategic mistake was I did not buy the ad for mine. I just didn't put two and two together. I was like, busy, Is this worth it? And now it's funny because at the time of that I didn't have the business on a formula. Now I know the dollar value of a landing page visitor and so I could easily run the math and go, okay, we're going to generate this many landing page visitors based on that and be like, oh, that's easy, roi. So that's why I text you. I'm like, dude, your episode's coming out tomorrow. Can you text him back and buy the ad slot? And so I'm very interested in email course lead magnet generation in podcasts because we ran an experiment with paid cold Facebook ads a while ago and ran them for a while and it's just such a different.

It's a completely different audience consumer on.

Instagram and Facebook, the intent is very low.

Yeah.

Like you're on Instagram because you're doing nothing.

Yeah.

Versus if you're watching one of these educational podcasts or newsletters and you're trying to get something. Exactly. So the intent of the, the listener or the consumer is so high if, if it's anything tangentially related to writing, I want to just figure out how to scale this because it's working with newsletters. Our primary paid traffic acquisition right now is newsletters. I'd say probably 50% of that traffic, though. It's almost like a retargeting ad. Because what's the overlap of people who read a newsletter and also read our stuff?

Yeah.

You know, but if we could tap into some new sources here, new medium, new platform. Right? Yeah, I'm very interested with that.

Yeah, that's. That's really cool. And also too, I just want to double click on the fact that you know, we, we didn't even entertain the thought of this a year ago, you know, because. And it's just now starting to make sense to explore these other avenues because we have the infrastructure built because we know the math behind it.

Our next couple. I started to shell out this mindset module. So my take on.

I think this is gonna be so good.

My take on the mindset module is what you've put together with the curriculum is about as spoon feeding of a. You could have literally no clue what it is to write on the Internet doesn't get easy success on this. So the only thing will be any kind of self limiting belief or inability to do the right kind of actions or behavior. So I'm trying to just tackle those. I don't really want to put it as the first module cuz I think that just becomes a friction point.

I think it's just bonus, just.

It's a bonus and like we send it to people.

People.

It's like hey, you're struggling with this. Watch this, watch this, watch this. And it's a nice forcing function for me to clarify some of the principles I've been talking about. So I'm excited to do that and film some videos on it.

In general, this, this sort of builds on this larger framework for me, especially when you're assembling education products or building curriculums because that's essentially all I've done for the past three years is just build those types of products. And so I've learned a lot about how to make these types of products really great. And the biggest thing that I've understood is the core product or the core curriculum basically needs to be as actionable, simplified and easy fastest path from how do I get to the outcome as possible. It's like think of it as the fast pass lane and then your job is to separate all of the other interesting information. Like especially with ghostwriting, there's so many interesting things I could share that. But that doesn't need to be in that fast pass lane. It doesn't need to be in the core curriculum. And mindset is a huge part of that. Where it's. You don't. It's not absolutely crucial, but there's a Ton of value in it being there. And so when you're building these products, it's like build the core path first. Make it as simple as possible, but then surround the path with all these other bonus modules. That's like, yeah. If you're stuck, go check this out.

Yeah.

If you want to learn more about this, you. Here's the rabbit hole.

That makes sense. And I saw as you were constructing the new curriculum, like, okay, yeah, this strip it put in bonus strip it put in the bonus.

That was the first thing I did was like remove, remove, remove.

Good principle there. Okay. Next, we built out the V1 of our referral program. So we've talked a lot about build until they tell. We want to make it easier for them to tell.

That'll be cool.

So we'll spin that up and launch that next week. We talked about this first student from YouTube and then it goes without saying all this happened on top of the world class fulfillment sales marketing that's been humming along that our team's been running. So shout out to the energy tempo.

I'm so proud of our team.

Everyone that's been building. It's been amazing.

I, I've worked with a lot of people, I've hired a lot of people. I. Our team is amazing and I'm. I'm just so thankful for everyone and.

It'S going to grow.

It's going to.

Yeah.

This year we're going to run some.

New bottlenecks on the fulfillment side and the sales side.

Yep.

Good problems to have.

Very good problems to have.

Good problems to have a week.

Glad to be back at it.

Yeah.

Quick personal updates. How's it feel? Back at it. I'm back now.

Yeah.

Have as saddle.

Yeah.

I started the process of buying a house in Arizona which is like I was telling you, is just hell on earth. You know, like everything they need. I understand it. They're like, we're not going to just let you buy this house if we don't understand.

It's horrible.

But it is. Boy, it is quite the process. But again, good problems to have. It's fine. It's just I feel like, because you know, it was like I was planning my bachelor party, then planning my wedding and now it's buying a house and then getting ready to move. I don't have free personal time anymore. It's like we work all day and then I have a part time job called figure out mortgage documents.

Yeah.

It's the once fallacy you've officially reached of like once the wedding's over, then I'll have to plan buying the house. Once I buy a house here, I'll have kid. Once I have kid, I'll have some kids.

So it's over.

Sorry.

This is the rest of my life strapped in. Let's go.

Oh, man. Well, I'm glad to be back. I had to go.

Yeah. What about you?

The fact that I was in Colombia a week ago today is actually absurd.

A little whiplash.

So I had to go from. I went Columbia. My flight was at 6:45am so an hour from the airport.

That'll get you.

I was there up at 4, sat in the airport for two hours to go to Phoenix for a five hour flight to. I'm glad I get to recap this five hour flight to Phoenix for a bachelor party with my college roommate. Which on its own is enough of a thing. We're in a house. I was one of the latest to arrive. So my. What's the word for when you stay at something? Your accommodation? Oh yeah, my accommodation was the third floor.

You got last pick.

I was the third bunk of a triple bunk in a room of two bumps. So I was the sixth bed. I'm like climbing up there on the top, jet lagged. Where am I? Did that for two nights, then got back on an 8am flight, five hours, landed here Sunday, got in the, gotten the sauna cold, plunge, woke up Monday, got right back into it.

And nobody said it was going to be easy.

No one said it'd be easy. And I'm glad to be back. But I'm going to crash hard tonight. Another personal update. Have you had the Trader Joe's banana chips ever in your life?

No.

They're the most crack thing.

I had to share that.

And this is just a reminder to myself, like, don't buy, don't buy the bananas. I ate like three quarters of the bag last night after this little event. I got back late and it was just like. And so I barely slept. Like I slept like. So that's my personal. Second personal update.

I think I'm gonna go buy those bananas right now.

They're like, they're organic. They're coconut. It's just coconut oil and banana. Oh my God. And they're like, oh, unbelievable. So there's my personal update. Don't buy those if you have a tendency to demolish a whole bag.

All right, everyone keep an eye out for the banana chips.

That's the, that's the word here. Banana.

Yeah, banana chip is the secret word.

See how you can fit that one.

In to use it in a sentence, use banana chips.

In a word, you can say something like, sorry about those banana chips, or I love them, or if you've had them, you'll know. So that's all we got for this. Another fun week in the books. We'll be back next week recapping everything we built Learned. Appreciate you all watching. If you're on YouTube, subscribe, hit the like button. We're growing this channel to 50,000. That's right, 50,000 subscribers over the next few months. If you're on Spotify, screenshot it, share it with a friend, hit the five star button. All that good stuff. Have a great rest of the week. Enjoy the weekend, y'.

All.

Peace.

See everyone.