Ryan Shank, co-founder of PhoneWagon, committed to making 100 videos in 2018 using the Slight Edge philosophy: tiny daily actions that compound. He shows how 10-15% monthly growth becomes a multi-million-dollar business over years, and shares his system of turning one video into blog posts and platform content.
Chapters
5, 4, 3, 2, 1. It is Ryan from PhoneWagyu. We're coming back at you. We're gonna do 100 videos this year. That's the goal. Popping it up there so that you can visualize it, so that we can say, we can set it in stone, so we're gonna do the videos. Oh, oh, piece of candy! I put this on my Instagram story over Christmas break, but this is what I want to talk about. Boom! The Slight Edge. Knowledge. I've been reading it. It was recommended to me from one of my friends. In the book, the thing that separates successful people and not successful people is the slight edge, which is basically just simple daily disciplines that are really, really easy to do. Every day I am gonna do one thing I have never done before. That, my friends, is my New Year's resolution. Ooh, that's a good one. Mine is to pilot a commercial jet. And also really, really easy not to do And a lot of times people just give up because they'll be doing these things and they don't see the immediate results. I mean, a lot of times if you think about it, it's related to like health and like gym and stuff. People go to the gym and they don't see like immediate like six-pack and then they give up. But the thing is, these daily disciplines compound over time. So it's like you just do them, you put your head down, you grind. We do that for 40 years and then we die. And then in like 3 years, then it's like they start to just compound and then they start to really come out and they start to really show up. But a lot of times, like 95% of a lot of people don't wait for them to actually show up. Wait for me, Abby Bernstein. So they'll give up early, so that's what you have to do, especially even in like business. So it's funny because one of the things that I was talking with Mike about the other day, and I was like, man, I feel like we're like grinding every single day and like we're not seeing our like MRR, like our revenue just like shoot up really, really fast. But it's like if I look at it over time, it's like we're just slowly, you know, we're winning over time. And it's like we're just slowly like every single month like adding, you know, we're growing like 10%, 15% per month right now. Like I would love to be growing like 30% 10% per month, but it's not happening. But the thing is, it's like you just got to stay heads down because it's like, look, if you just pull it out, the thing that we have on our side is time, right? So if you just like drag that out, even if you grow 10% per month or you're adding, you know, a couple thousand dollars in net new MRR per month, then basically at the end of like 2, 3, 4 years, you're gonna have like a pretty legitimate, you know, multi-million dollar company. And that's the thing that like I am— have been thinking about a lot. I was reading this book for over Christmas time, and, uh, and also The Compound Effect, which we're gonna pop right here too. Compound Effect. This basically kind of like reinforces like the same principles as this book, but it just talks about how like things compound over time, these little decisions, right? So it's like, are you gonna decide to like have like an extra drink or like another piece of cheese on your thing? Or it's like, are you gonna decide to like not put out content or not put out a video every single day? That's why we're committed this year to putting out a ton of content and just like every single day just being super disciplined and actually like hitting our numbers, right? In terms of like one, sales numbers, product numbers, but also just like content numbers. I think that content, putting out video content and like written like be on the ball about and be doing every single day. You guys should be doing it in your business. There's a lot of talk about, you know, like video, and like Neil Patel has that article— we'll pop that right there— spending like $188,000 on video this year, why you should too, or something like that, and how everyone's consuming video now. People are talking about it. That was sort of my thesis last year, and I'm gonna kind of carry that over into this year. And you see, um, there's a lot of ways to systematize it as well. I noticed that on like Close.io's blog, for instance, like Steli Hilversheim he'll record like an 18-minute video, he'll be talking about something, but it'll also then be into a blog post. And I'm assuming, I haven't talked to him, but I'm assuming that his process is he like creates the video, he's just talking in it, right? He doesn't have to sit down and actually type it. And then what he does is, I'm assuming this, right? Then he like sort of probably passes it on to, off to someone who would then create the written version of it. So then boom, then he has a blog post, it's all written out, so it's SEO and search engine friendly. And then there's the video that's embedded. The video's on YouTube embedded into the article, so it's on multiple platforms. And then you're getting kind of like SEO juice, you're getting content, You can distribute it in a bunch of different places because it's like people consuming content from, you know, all these different sources and things like that. So the thing is, it's like they're consistent, right? It's like if you're committing, I think they put one out every like Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday morning, whatever it is. That's a lot of options. There's only like 2 other days that could possibly put it out. The point is that like, you know, you just got to hit your day and get it out. Same thing with like video uploads. If you do it daily, you're going to hit your 5:00 PM upload time and things like that. But those little things, it's like, oh, I came in late. Those things are going to like spew over into like other aspects. It's like, boom, if you don't hit that, then you're not going to hit this. I have been having a really hard day and that's the sort of what this book talks about. It talks about how doing these like little simple disciplines will like compound and basically result in like massive success over time. But the thing is, you're not going to see them. Why is that guy being so loud? But you're not going to see them like as you start to do them, you're going to see them like way later and you got to just like sort of delay and just know. This the key, knowing is better than learning. I know that's kind of weird. Let me know in the comments what you guys are thinking, what you guys are doing, okay? If you haven't, like and subscribe to the channel. We're gonna do 100 videos in 2018. If you guys are new here, my name is Ryan Shank. This is our journey. We're building PhoneWagon from the ground up. We went through Techstars this summer. We just raised a round of funding, and now we're putting our heads down to build a $100 million revenue company. I hope you guys are out there working hard, being pioneers, being wagonaires. Peace.
