Sam Ovens on Building 7 Figure Business, Making Courses & Creating Content | Conscious Creators

It kind of sounds crazy because I'm referencing like all of these different things, but it's kind of like the stars aligning or you being able to connect all of the dots. You can kind of see what's going to happen in the future. The team is generally better and more desirable, or the club is more desirable, the harder it is to get in. Courses are a really great thing to sell because there's a reason why a lot of YouTubers selling courses and you can make a lot of money selling courses. And really what is, is because people want outcomes. They want to know how to get something.

We've known each other for a really long time. I think probably like 10 years now since you launched, I think, what was it called? The beta of Cashflow Consulting with Stanley Lee. And we've both gone through a lot of changes. So What I actually wanted to start off by asking you was, you recently had a child. Now, I want to ask you about that experience from the perspective of like, and this is actually a question from Jesse who works with you, how do you think about integrating family and business now?

I don't know. I can just tell you what I've found is that a family is like a team, right? So, and a business is basically a team, right? And I think, you know, it, it makes you better at being a team player when you have a family and it just gives you a— so you're better at dealing with a team and you are also just, you're ability to deal with chaos, it goes up a lot because, you know, when you've got a baby, there's constant chaos. And I think that increases your threshold to deal with chaos at work. So, I mean, I found those 2 things to be like benefits that relate to business from having a family. Has your mental model on work and business Um, well, I think you think longer term when you have a child, right? Because, you know, children, I mean, they're more than 10 years in terms of a project, right? Um, and so you definitely have to think longer term as soon as you're a parent. And that's another thing that's good in business. I mean, I thought long-term before, but having a child made me think even more long-term. And then also your ability to just, I think you get smarter in how you allocate your time. Like when I was, when I didn't have a child, I My default response was kind of to think I could just do it. I could just assume the extra task. I could do this. I could basically just muscle through anything, right? Because I could just flex my hours or whatever. All I was doing was my— was working and I could push anything around. But as soon as I had a kid, I started to be smarter in how I approached that. I thought, who can I partner with? Or yeah, I got, I started to think way more in terms of partnerships in a community and, and all of these other things as soon as I had a kid as well.

Well, one of the things when you mentioned partnership, um, cause I want to talk to you about like building a team. Um, and we'll, we'll talk about sort of what you've done with Jesse, but before that, um, I know you went through a sort of arduous process to find a technical co-founder. Can you talk about that process and what was that and what was that like?

Sure. Well, you know, I got the idea for Skool, right? And for Skool to be successful, it's basically a social network. And our main competitor would be Facebook Groups. Facebook has amazing engineers and so much money, right? And I'm not a software engineer. So in order for me to even have a chance at succeeding in this new thing, I would need a technical co-founder that was as committed as I was and as hardworking as I was. And that's basically Mark Zuckerberg level or above in terms of technical expertise in software engineering. And I figured if I don't have that person, then I don't even have a chance, so I might as well not even try. And so I spent a year looking for my technical co-founder. And what that looked like is basically I did about 600 interviews. I hired about 5 people to find this one person, worked with many different recruiters, Basically, it was all I did for a year.

And when you're doing those interviews, what are you asking? And the reason I'm asking is because we've talked a little bit offline about the creator world, and one of the things I've found is best creators succeed when they have an operating partner alongside with them, kind of like the role Jesse plays with you. And we get a lot of questions from people of how do we find that person, right? I'm curious, within those 600 interviews, what were you asking them? What were you looking for? What were signals you were looking for, heuristics, and other things like that?

Well, it was very hard because I wasn't a really good software engineer. I wasn't able to tell if someone was a really good software engineer, which is what made this process very hard. So, I was basically just trying to sense, do I get along with this person? Do they believe in the vision? Is there a spark between us, some good chemistry or something? That was all I could assess. I wasn't trying to assess their technical ability because that would just be stupid. I can tell you how I was getting around that technical part. If you want.

Yeah.

Yeah. So I, you know, it all just started by me posting in one of my communities and saying, does anyone— is anyone in here a really good software engineer or do you know a really good software engineer? Right. And I got referred to one guy who was— who had a master's in computer science from an Ivy League school. And I figured, okay, he's a good guy to start with, right? And I got him to— I asked him, who's the smartest software engineer you've ever met? And he told me this one guy, right? So find a smart person that is an engineer and then ask them who the smartest person they know is. And then I found that guy and that guy had a job and he wasn't willing to leave to start because with me. And I, but I managed to pay him like an hourly fee as a part-time kind of thing to review the candidates that I was getting that were applying to work at school. So he was acting as my like technical assessment proxy, right?

Mm-hmm.

And so, you know, all of these candidates were applying, He was telling me whether they were good or not. The ones that he thought were good, I would talk to, to make sure there was like a cultural fit and that they believed in the vision and everything. And then if they got through that round, then he would go on to do more technical assessments with them. It was messy, man. Like, it's hard. But you know, it's amazing what ended up happening is one day this guy applied, Daniel, who's my current co-founder. And this guy who was my technical assessment proxy guy, he said, holy shit, we've been trying to recruit this guy for like 3 years. We can't even get him to like come in or talk to us or anything. But this guy is like one of the best software engineers there is. And he'd applied with me and I was like, oh wow, like And I tried to gauge how good he was. I said, like, how good is he? And he said, like, he can do things that software engineers could never build in, like, a week. That's kind of how he explained it. And I was like, oh shit, this is what I've been waiting for. And, you know, it's really funny because we also just got along really well. Like, there was like a kind of soul connection thing. Like we laughed at each other's jokes and we just got along really well. Like he could understand what I was saying and I would never have to go out of my way to explain what I was seeing in my head. He just got it. And what he was picturing in his head when he talked to me was exactly what I was seeing. And we were just well synced like that. And you know, the story's longer and messier than that, but that's the basics of it.

That's fascinating. And I'm curious, like within that, those 600 interviews, was there a point maybe where like, instead of feeling like you're like pushing and like, you don't really know what to look for, it just sort of like you, you had like the idea of like what you wanted now. And then this person just like, oh yeah, this is it.

Well, I mean, the process sucked and it was, you know, if you ask my wife about it, she would say that I was not very happy at all. And that I wanted to quit, like, but there was no other way around it. I just had to keep telling myself that, like, you'll never succeed unless you have this person. So why even try? There's just no getting around it. This is step one. And, you know, I just had to convince myself with that logic every day. And, you know, I think if you stick to something long enough, I have a few theories about this, but like, you know, one is if you just do something for long enough and you try enough stuff or talk to so many people, eventually you'll get that break, right? Like it's just luck or something, or the universe somehow just gives in because, you know, it's just what you want. So you want it more than any, anything. And somehow those things seem to happen.

Totally. And similar to finding that person, over the last few years while you've been focused on school, you've been working obviously with Jesse, who's been running VTube. So one of the questions that came from Jesse was, can you sort of talk about both the importance and how you sort of did it on the education side of building a high-quality team so that you could get your time back to really just work on strategy and product? Because I think this is something that a lot of creators want but struggle to get?

I think in the beginning you've just got to do it all yourself, right? And then I always just think hire where it hurts. So, you know, wait until you just feel the pain. Like, you're going to get stressed out and overloaded in one area first. It might be customer support, it might be editing videos for YouTube, it might be you know, repurposing content. I don't know what it is, but I think it's very important that as the creator or the entrepreneur, and that you get it right and working first by yourself, and then you start scaling it up. And then wherever it starts to get painful first, you just hire for that role specifically. And then you get— then you hire where it hurts again, right? And then you can scale even further. And At first, these might be just contractor roles, right? But then I think you get to a certain point where you might have 4 or 5 kind of part-time contractors helping you out with these different parts. And at that point, you can probably consolidate all 5 into one full-time position. Yeah. And that first full-time person is basically like your right-hand man or right-hand whatever. And that was Jesse for me, right? Like I had a bunch of people that were helping me out part-time in these different areas. And I got Jesse in and he kind of learned them all and he was just full-time. And then whenever a new thing came up, I'd throw it to him. He'd figure it out. And then he was feeling where it hurt. And then he was responsible for hiring that person beneath him to take that role off him.

Right.

Do you understand what I'm saying?

Yeah.

Yeah. And I think that that right-hand person, if they've been with you from the early days and they're a really good generalist, they will understand the business as a whole. I think this is really important. Like you need to understand the business as a whole, like where the traffic comes from and what the market is like. And who the competitors are and how you're different. And, you know, how that traffic converts into email addresses or into, you know, people that are in your funnels and then how all of the metrics work and conversion rates work so that all of this converts into money somehow. And then the whole cost structure of the operation and how the cash flow from the operations funds all of that and how it leaves a surplus and how that money should be allocated into initiatives to grow even further. It's very complex, right?

Mm-hmm.

And it requires like a holistic understanding of the whole business. And I think the earlier you get one of those people in to kind of grow with you and then get them to kind of hire the different people in the team, then the easier it is for you later on because you've already got that person that knows everything and has the tight relationship with the team.

One thing that you mentioned in that was interesting was you mentioned very like hire until it hurts or like pain, right? I'm thinking back to when—

Hire where it hurts.

Yeah. And until it's painful.

No, hire until it hurts. That's different.

Got it. And yeah, and that's what I was getting at too, because if I go back to like 2016, '17 Sam, when you were doing Quantum, I remember like you were basically like hired until like it actually hurt because you were working like Yeah.

That was a terrible strategy.

Would you do that again or how do you feel about that now? Because you were working like 20-hour days, I think, or something.

Yeah. Well, you know, I learned a lot. I've done lots of stupid stuff and learned lots of lessons. But first of all, you can't really work. You're actually kind of stupid to try to work like 20-hour days or something, because you're not going to be very consistent. You're going to crash and your overall efficiency is going to be not very good. So it's not a smart strategy. I figured out for me, 12 hours a day, 6 days a week was— I could do that kind of forever, right? Like I could do that year in, year out, and I was good. So I just stuck to that. But then the other thing I did, you know, I waited too long to hire people. So I just did it all myself for too long. And then when I did start— so I left it too late. And then when I did start hiring, I hired too many people too fast. So there's that saying, hire slow, fire fast, or hire where it hurts, right? So I hired fast, fired slow. And I hired until it hurt, which is exactly what you shouldn't do.

And this is another note from Jesse. I think he's talking about around 2018 when you were also doing school. That same time, you thought discipline over joy was the way to do business. And then at some point, you guys really downsized the team that wasn't enjoyable to work with and made it more about Can you talk about that transition?

Yeah. So the downsizing wasn't so much to do with that. I mean, the downsizing was just because we hired way too many people. A lot of them didn't even have proper roles. Right. And a lot of people, a lot of the roles that people were hired for, we shouldn't even have been doing those things. So like, if we just removed that task from the business, then we didn't need a whole team. Right. So We did a lot of downsizing, which is a really, really important thing to do as a business, I think, which we are seeing in the markets now, right? All of these companies are bloated. They're all doing it. So I went through this in the past 2 years and now it seems like the whole world is doing it. So there's that, but then there was this whole joy thing, like With Skool, I really wanted it to be— I really wanted it to get to a billion users and I wanted it to be fun and playful. And I wanted people to have like a feeling of joy or fun or playfulness around that brand. So, you know, that kind of came into the spelling of it, like it's S-K-O-O-L. The S is a lowercase, it's not even a capital, so it's like, you know, childish kind of. And then, you know, there's different colors, right? So it kind of looks like a kid's toy. And when I was thinking about the kind of brand I wanted to build, or the company I wanted to build, fun and joy and playfulness were these kinds of values I wanted to have instilled in the company. And so, you know, you can see that from like the logo and the button color on Skool is yellow, right? And so, you know, we wanted it to be like that. And then, you know, whenever we were doing something in the company, we tried to make it fun. And we kind of came up with this philosophy that if something isn't fun, then you you might, you're doing it wrong. So whenever we like come up across something that is not fun and we're having like pain, we'll try to think like, what would this look like if it was fun? Or how could we make this fun? Yeah.

Can you give an example of that? Um, or maybe something you got rid of that you thought you were supposed to be doing, but didn't need to be in the downsizing.

You're talking about the fun thing or the downsizing thing? Because they're kind of separate.

Let's do both.

Okay. The fun one first? Sure. Yeah. So, you know, I didn't enjoy posting videos or doing social media, right? So I just stopped doing it. And then it's not— it wasn't that simple though, because You need to get traffic, right? You need— people need to know you exist, and content is a really good way to do that. So I started thinking, you know, how can I make content in a way that's fun? And then I thought, well, what kind of content do I like to consume? And it's podcasts, right? And it's not audio podcasts, it's video podcasts, and it's typically video podcasts that are done in person. And they're long form and they're not edited. So it's really like natural. And they're not too premeditated. They're just kind of emergent conversations between some interesting people. And I thought, okay, well, could I do that? If I enjoy watching it, then I might enjoy doing it. And then I realized like, oh, I talk to people all the time and I have a lot of fun doing that. Like I talk to I meet up with friends or people in the space and I'll talk to them for like 3 hours or longer, honestly. I could go for 6 or something. And then I thought, shit, if there was a camera there and that was recorded, people would probably really find that really fascinating. So then I was like, okay, well, this— what if I did a podcast and I do it at my place, my office, and we just get in interesting people that I want to talk to in this space? And I just talk to them and then that's it. That's the content. So, you know, I took something that I didn't like doing, right? And at first I just removed it. Then I found out I needed to do some amount of it. Then I realized that there was a way to do it that was fun. And so I think you can apply the same kind of logic to everything. You can try to— if something's not fun, just try to remove it at first because you might find you don't even need it at all. And then if you do need it, try to find a way to make it fun.

Yeah, I actually remember that. It was, um, you didn't do social media for a long time, and then it was the, uh, What's for Lunch thread, and then did that for a while, and then you just suddenly stopped. Um, that's an interesting way to think about it. And definitely like long-form podcasts, um, we were talking offline how, uh, even MrBeast, if you, if you look at it in the last few months, Just basically realized that that's what gets turned into clips and then spreads online and just went on so many podcasts, right? I think it's definitely a medium that's going to really take over YouTube, I think. Let's go to the other side, which is what are examples of things that were painful when you were talking about school or downsizing that you decided to get rid of that weren't really helpful?

Yeah. Yeah. So I haven't had to downsize Skool because I've built it.

And that's right. I misspoke. The downsizing was like previously before Skool.

Consulting. Yeah. Okay. Well, you know, when I analyzed the company, there's this really like interesting form of analysis, which is, I learned it from this book called Lean Thinking and they, and they They basically looked at how Toyota implemented its production line, right? Which is one of the most lean companies there is. And they made this book called Lean Thinking. And they have this process of analyzing all the flows in a business and all of the stuff that people are doing, right? And they try to determine if it's value or waste. So, and value is defined as something that improves the customer's experience. So it's value interpreted by the customer, not value interpreted by anyone else, right? And so I found this really fascinating because I started analyzing like, who are all the people in my company, right? I just listed them all out. What do they do? And only a few of them were customer-facing. Most of them were not, and most of them were doing things that never touched a customer. What I realized is most people in my company were doing things relating to paid advertising, so media buying or, you know, anything related to that, because we were spending so much money on ads that we needed to have a lot of customer support staff and a lot of people moderating like live chat and webinar chat and I would say 80% of my company was doing something related to paid advertising. And then I analyzed the flows of money. Where does most of the money flow in my company? And it was getting spent on ads. So most of my headcount, ads. Most of my money, ads. And then most of my time and attention and headspace, ads. And then I thought, are ads valuable to the customer? And the answer is clearly no. In fact, they don't like it. So I thought, well, shit, this is pretty bad. And that gave me this idea where I was reading about Amazon and Jeff Bezos thought that marketing was waste. And that if the company was efficient enough, it wouldn't need to do marketing. And there was this period, and there was this period way back at the start where Amazon was spending roughly like $10 million a year on shipping. And their marketing bill was also about $10 million per year. And then Bezos had this idea. What if we gave customers free shipping and allocated our marketing budget over to the Shipping budget, would their experience be so good that they would tell their friends about it? Because if they did, then that could be our marketing. Do you see how genius that shit is? Yeah. So I had this similar idea. I was like, what if we just cut our marketing? Like just didn't do it. And we got rid of all the people that we needed to. Because you know, your first thought is well. Well, we can't stop our marketing because we wouldn't make enough money to pay for our bills. But the thing is, is our bills were mostly marketing bills. So if you don't spend that much money on marketing, you don't have the bills. And then you start thinking like, what could— and then we would have all of this free time. What could we do with all of this free time? Right? And so it was very interesting for me. Anyway, it took a while to do that, but I basically got rid of 80% of the company, cut paid advertising to zero, and just had a small team of about 4 or 5 people that were all touching the customer. And we found out— we found a way to get customers organically just by running really good programs, getting people good results. And sharing that as our content strategy. Um, and yeah, that's kind of how the downsizing went.

The interesting thing that you mentioned there and there too is like, we've talked about sort of like how there's like, sort of like info people and the creator people, right? And most of the info people, what I've realized is they're really great at marketing, but shitty at product, which is why like they needed that really intense marketing to make up for the product. And I think that's why a lot of courses, you don't really see courses with word of mouth. So when you downsized the marketing, I know you sort of shifted your focus to product and that's what led to school. But what did you learn during that time about really just creating the best product in terms of online education that gets results for customers and has high And spreads from there.

So, you know, one thing you can do is you can look at your most successful clients, right? And you can see what type of clients were they, what work did we do with them, what was it that got them all of their success, and how fun was it, right? Another thing you can do is you can try to define like what You can talk about making a good course, but what does that really mean? Like, what criteria do you have to meet? And so I remember with Amazon, I keep mentioning Amazon because, you know, they— Bezos taught me a lot about business. But Amazon identified that a great value to the customer with Amazon would be The lowest prices, the fastest shipping, the widest selection, and the cheapest shipping, right?

Mm-hmm.

So, you know, if you think about that with Amazon, you can basically find like widest selection. You can find basically everything, the cheapest prices, it's free shipping and it's like same day or next day, right? So they realized that if they were just the number, if they were the best on all of those criteria, that they would provide the most value and they would win. And so I started to think, what does that mean for like my, my products and consulting.com? And I was like, well, what do people want? Like, I, and I boiled it down to 3 criteria: profit. They care about profit more than anything because you can't, you know, revenue is just a vanity number really. So profit, client results, your clients need to get good results. That's Heavily tied to profit, because if your clients aren't getting good results, you're not going to make that much money. And the other one was happiness. Like how fun is it for the for you and your team, and also for your clients, right? Because if you could make something very profitable, and if you could get people really good results, and you could make it fun to deliver and do for everyone, then that would be value, right? And so, you know, when I started thinking about it like that, I was like, well, working with the beginners, I didn't have that much fun doing that. But working with my mastermind clients, I did have a lot of fun doing that. And then I thought, well, profit, like who's made the most money, was my mastermind clients, right? And then client results, it was mastermind clients again. And so I realized that in order to really improve my business, I should really just shrink the scope of who I'm talking to. I should only talk to business owners that are doing info, which is what I know and what I love doing, that care about those 3 things, and they have to be making more than 30 grand a month. They have to be established. Because if they are, I don't have to do much to help them make an ROI, which means that that's going to be fun because I don't have to stress myself out. Neither do they. And we're all going to win. So, you know, it's kind of cheating a little bit. Like you're not really— because info is different than selling an iPhone or something, right? A lot of the art in an info product is in who it's for and the scoping of, of the audience. Do you know what I mean? Yeah.

Can you talk more about that scoping of the audience?

Yeah. Well, just by narrowing the scope to existing people that are in the info space making more than $30 grand a month, then it's very easy to get them results. Which means the product doesn't have to be that detailed actually, right? But if you're helping people that are going from scratch, like no niche, nothing, there's so much work that needs to be done there.

And when you talk about that and the product, like how has your thinking sort of like what the product should be involved evolved? Because I remember like Consulting Accelerator, right? Which was for beginners. You had basically like 2-hour-long movies as sort of like sessions. So how has that evolved for you? Has that gotten shorter or how do you think about the product now?

Yeah.

What does that look like?

Yeah, well, part of why I wanted to narrow the scope of the audience was so that I could narrow the scope of the content, right? Because then I wouldn't need to explain so much. I could basically start every video with the assumption that they already know a lot of the things that I'm referencing. And I could just be very brief too. So by narrowing the scope of who I was talking to, I was able to narrow the scope of the course itself and narrow the scope of each module to the point that I don't think there's any module really longer than 40 minutes. I think a module should be as short as possible. But sometimes you need to go 30 minutes to an hour on the occasional one, but it should be as short and as brief as possible.

And one of the things you also evolved is sort of like the delivery in terms of like courses and communities, right? So let's actually take a tangent for a second. In the last few years, there's just been this rise of cohort-based courses and it really blew up Sort of like during the pandemic. What are your thoughts on cohort-based courses and sort of the future of those?

I think that they're overhyped for sure, because if you think about it, a cohort is, is just a group of people that go through something at the same time, right? So you're— it's not that revolutionary, actually. What you're saying is a course But you just have to wait to get in and then you go through it live with a bunch of other people. So I didn't understand how the cohort concept was going to revolutionize everything when it first came out, but there was a lot of hype. And my immediate kind of reaction when I saw it back then was, that looks like a lot of work. Because, you know, I've been making courses for about 10 years, and the beauty of doing it for that long is, you know, whenever you have to do something for a long time, you understand how hard it is to maintain things. If something sucks to do and you have to do it continuously for years, you're going to know about it, and you're going to— next time you come across a choice like that, you're going to be like, shit, I've seen this one before, right? And so it kind of reminded me of live webinars. Like if your business relies on live webinars and every week you've got to do a live webinar, it's a pain in the ass real fast because you're just repeating yourself again and again and again all the time. And that's what I thought a cohort-based course would be. You had to repeat the same information again and again and again. And there was all of the logistics of trying to get those people together, get them to go through it together. And I had, you know, after all the years of being in courses, I found just this evergreen model that worked really well. So it was always open and you never had to repeat yourself. Right. And I didn't think that the cohort-based model was better than the evergreen model that I had perfected. But people didn't really agree with me. Which always seems to happen, you know, because it's so hype, right? But then it— I only started to notice this like recently in the past 2 months. I talked to some people who were like doing cohort-based courses and they told me they never wanted to do another cohort because they had— they were on about their 6th or 7th cohort, right? And at that point they were like, they hated it. So bad. And they also told me that, I mean, one, they told me they never wanted to do another cohort-based course ever again. And 2, they said the novelty of the cohort-based course has worn off because we're struggling to get sales to fill out future cohorts. And they said the number one piece of feedback we get from customers is, why don't you just let us enroll right away and watch the videos in our own time? Which is basically just the basic course model. So it sounds like this is one of these classic things where someone hypes up something, everyone falls into the hype, and then people come to the realization, right?

The other interesting thing with that is because you're sort of starting and stopping, you're also having to start your marketing. And then once it starts working, really, you have to stop it again and then you have to start it again. And then I actually interviewed Tiago Forte, who runs Building a Second Brain, and they also realized after cohort 6 and 7, they had to really change their marketing to jump from early adopters to actually more mass people. And he recently also shifted from a cohort-based to more of a membership model. I'm curious, you mentioned the importance of just staying in a market for that long and being in education for 10 years, what are other either advantages or lessons or sort of non-intuitive learnings that you've realized now that you're in year 10 that maybe you didn't know when you were starting out?

Yeah. I think Steve Jobs had a great piece on this about The problem with consultants, like getting a consultant to do anything, right? And he said that consultants never stick around long enough to see the problems of their, of their solutions, right? So, you know, a consultant comes in, they fix something, they give some advice, and then they bounce. And it's the people that have to hold that thing and keep implementing it and maintaining it over the years. They're the people that experience all of that, right? And I had— when you're in business for long enough doing the same thing, you realize what all of those things are, right? And I think that's the biggest learning. You also realize how some things are short-lived and others aren't. Like, you know, There's things that pop up that are so huge and it's like everyone's shouting about it. Like there was a stage where chatbots did this. I've seen crypto, I've seen NFT, I've seen so much shit. And it's like the whole world is screaming about it and then before you know it, it's gone. And you notice so many of those cycles and you notice that they never mattered at all. And then you notice that there's some things you did that didn't last for very long. Like you had to keep doing them again every like so often. And then you notice there's some things that are gradually getting worse over time and you know they're eventually going to die.

For example?

Like Facebook ads. Yeah. So like, you know, at first they're amazing, but with time you just notice this trend. It's clearly going one way, right? But, or like, you know, I remember Facebook fan pages used to post on there and you'd get traffic. Like those things are so dead. It's not even funny, but it seems that everything on Facebook goes that way. Initially you get a bunch of traffic because Facebook's like hyping up a new feature, but then they take it away and make you pay for it. It's their playbook. You've seen them do that with everything from lives to groups to like Fan pages, stories, Instagram, right? So you learn all of these patterns and trends, but there's some that surprise you. Like, I'll tell you what these things were. Like, one is YouTube. So, you know, I didn't even give YouTube much attention. I just made some videos, put them up, but over time I noticed that My channel got more subscribers. My videos kept racking up more and more views. And even at times when I didn't make content, YouTube still kept growing and still kept giving us customers. And then a lot of our customers that we get come from YouTube and they said, I came from YouTube. Right?

Mm-hmm.

So it was very clear to me that every investment of my time that I put into YouTube was worth it. Right? The other one was growing an email list. Like, an email list is one of the best assets you can have. You just send an email out, bam, things happen. And it, it's another great asset. And then good people in your team, right? Like, they get better with time. So you learn these things where like, okay, YouTube gets better with time, email list gets better with time, a few great hires, get better with time. And you're like, all of these things are really good ideas, but all this other stuff was a waste. And yeah, there's also things that you notice that are high maintenance, right? So like things that continuously break, things that are temperamental. So you always need to come and like fix something or replace something or You know, like, for example, I mean, automated webinars did that. They were always causing problems. Or Infusionsoft, right? Oh no, I'll tell you this. It's just automations in general. Anything that's automated. You know, at first I had a lot of automations, like these fancy-ass campaigns. Now I have none. You know, I just send an email broadcast to my whole list, and the most fancy funnel I've got is basically an opt-in to see a video. And so, you know, the, the longer I've been in business, the more simple I made everything and the less tech I had. Um, because you realize it's just about sending great emails, making good videos, getting your customers good results, and hiring good people. And that's really it.

The thing with automations that's interesting is it's like passive income because it's never passive. You always have to do work. And then the things that you mentioned—

I don't know of anything less passive than an automation.

Right. And the things that you mentioned like team and good content and learning from your market and stuff, they're also things that compound, right? So what I'm actually also curious about is given much time in the industry. Was there sort of like a switch for you where instead of really like kind of like digging in and like trying to like pull things out of the market, it switched from that to like the market's kind of like telling you what they want?

I think you just get better at noticing what the signal is and what the noise is, right? So, you know, it's the market's always there and it's always telling you, it's just, you can't hear it. Um, and you just get better. Like you, you notice that there's some things that are hype, you know, like I had seen so many patterns of hype that when cohort-based courses came up, it looked like it followed that pattern. And so I thought, well, you know, and I'd analyze it. Doesn't make sense. I'll forget about it. But then there's some things you hear, you notice from the market that sound real. Like, you know, there's been this market's evolved enough now that there's a significant amount of successful creators, right? So selling to a market that's already successful made a lot of sense because the market's quite developed at the moment. So there's a big market there and there's not so many people selling to the successful people compared to the people selling to the beginners. So that I noticed. And then just looking at my results, like I explained earlier, it showed me the same thing. Organic content on YouTube being the way everything's going compared to ads, and then just the desire for people to like no one really likes courses, right? Like no one people are burned out of courses, and no one really enjoys them. So, and there's so many of them. So like. noticing what people like. People like masterminds. They like hanging out with other people and interacting. And that's what showed me it's more about the people. It's less about the content.

I was going to say another thing like that, that sort of like, I think like for you, like started out maybe as a whisper, but then I think it's grown in and I've seen you bake it into like school is the importance of community and other people. Can you talk about that? The importance of sort of the community In courses and education.

When you think about it deeply, like, you know, I thought about all the courses I'd taken going all the way back, and it was what drove the most change and provided most value over time was the people I met in them, not the content, right? And When you look at any kind of course, it— and if it has a community as well on Facebook groups or whatever, there will be more people will log into the community each day and there will be more interaction in there and more time spent in there each day than in the content portal, right? And then when people post testimonials or they do the win posts or whatever, they'll often thank other people in the community, right? So when you look at all of these different signals, and then when you look at that there's con— you could basically find the answer to any problem online for free. There is no shortage of content. There is too much content. Google has everything. Amazon's full of books. YouTube has got trillions of minutes of content, but people are more confused than ever. So Obviously, it's not working. And then what people are deprived of actually is the people. And when you look at all the solutions and breakthroughs you've had over your journey and others, it often comes from colliding with the right person. And so I could keep going, but I think you get my point. I was trying to think of what does the future of this industry look like? And it was It's about people. How do you get together with the right, with the people that want to do the same thing as you? And then how do you collaborate to achieve the outcome? Yeah.

And in terms of community and that collaboration, what have you learned about just really creating the best community to encourage that collaboration among everyone else so that everyone isn't turning to you as the creator or the course leader?

I think the first thing, the most important thing is scoping of it, right? Like, who is it for and what is the goal and what is kind of like the criteria to be a member? Without those things, it isn't really a community, right? Because if you think about any community, they're the same type of people that have the same shared goal and they're interested in working together to get there, right? So those are the most important things, actually. Then it just becomes about recruiting those people, like getting them in and checking at the gates to make sure that everyone that's coming in fits that criteria. And I honestly think that's most of the work, right? You get the right people in, it just happens. And I've seen this, like, there's this guy I know, Brent, and his— he's got a community of about 100,000 dentists. And the criteria to get in is that you have to be a practicing licensed dentist and they actually check. So like you have to apply, you have to tell them which practice you're at and all of this stuff. And they check you. And once you get 100,000, like real dentists in a group, they can't believe that this kind of place even exists. Right. So it's so pure and every— it's like visiting Disneyland as a kid, except as an adult. You're like, oh my God, there's all of these dentists. They all are like me. They all understand me. They're all nerding out about all of this stuff, right? This community, he has never marketed it. It grows 100% word of mouth. He has so many dentists applying to be in it that he has volunteers just checking people and the wait to get in is months, right? So he's never had to market it. It grows 100% organic word of mouth. It is so engaged and the value in there is so high that a few dental schools around the country in America have recommended joining that group as part of the curriculum to becoming a licensed dentist. So even the professors in dental school are saying this is one of the most valuable resources for any dentist. So like, I think, and it's not because he's in there like going live every day and trying to provide like value, you know, like that's— It's just because he got the right people in. And then they kind of figured it out together.

And is that a paid community or is that a free community?

It's free.

Free. Got it. And then from there, does that then translate to like other products and stuff that he does? I'm sure, right?

Yeah, he's got paid courses and that community just feeds his paid stuff. Like they don't have to run any ads or anything.

That's so amazing. And one of the things that we were talking about last week was sort of this convergence that's happening. There's the info world that sells courses and high-ticket stuff, and then there's creators who have audiences but don't really know that, right? So maybe we can do an exercise because a lot of the people that listen are creators that have audiences. So let's say I'm a creator who has an audience and I've sold $50 courses or whatever, and I'm listening to you and I'm like, okay, I want to really implement this model. Um, maybe we can like kind of like do a quick exercise, like, like run through sort of like some of the stuff that you teach in BTube. Um, how, how should a creator approach having already had an audience or having an audience implementing this so they can get to a sort of 7-figure Zen-style business?

Yeah. Well, you know, in order to have success as a creator selling like info or whatever, You need, you basically need like three main elements. Like one is you need traffic, you and you're always going to need it. And the best way I've seen to get traffic is YouTube and an email list, right? So, and you need to have a traffic machine. You need a way that you can keep creating content and sending emails. Every week for a long period of time. So you need to figure that out because you can't get too burnt out in it. And it, it has to— you have to be able to do it in a way that it doesn't take up too much of your time because there's all of these other things you've got to do. And you have to do it in a way that it works to actually bring you traffic of people that are going to buy your stuff. So that's the— that's probably the hardest part, I would say, of this game. The second part is like conversion. How do you convert that traffic and that audience into paying customers? And I would say the best way to do that right now is a free group. So making a free group and putting a mini course in there, and then it's a nice friendly offer to offer to your, you know, YouTube subscribers or email list or social following. Like, hey, come join this free group, come get this free mini course I made. It's free, you know, you can— they can join it. And that, that's a good way to get to know who's in your audience, because when you've got an audience on an email list or even on YouTube or anything, you don't really know who you're talking to. It's just you're like kind of yelling into the— into a void, right? And then you just see some views Like it's quite strange. So getting people into a community and seeing who they are, it puts it, you get to see a name and a face and that little bio. And you can ask them some interesting questions to just get to know your audience and, and provide value to them. And then you've got them in a spot where, you know, you can build trust with them. You can tell them about new announcements and things. And I think this is the best conversion mechanism. And then the third element you need is, you know, you need some things to sell, like a product, right? And it seems that courses are a really great thing to sell because there's a reason why a lot of YouTubers are selling courses and you can make a lot of money selling courses. And really what it is, is because people want outcomes. They want to know how to get something. And in the creator space, you know, trying to— it's a hard space to navigate because there's a million ways to do everything and most of it's bullshit. And it's so easy to just get distracted, it's not even funny. So you can— the value is provided, the value that people are providing is like what in a course is what to ignore more than anything. And so it's like, forget about all this crap, just do these 3 things right and do these 3 things in this way and you'll— it'll work. That's how people are providing value in courses and also meeting other people that are on the same path as them, right?

Mm-hmm.

So I think you just need to, you know, draw up those 3 things like traffic engine, conversion engine and like product engine and just think which one is— you need a straight line through all 3, right? You need something to sell, you need something that converts traffic to customers, and you need a place to get traffic. Once you get— and I think you start with that one, then do that one, then do that one. So you need those 3 things.

Yeah. And so let's say like you're a creator, you create the free community and you've got a bunch of people in there, right? How do you like start selling? Because I know you sort of switch your thinking to like launches and betas and sales and using sort of like Loom videos and apps and stuff. Can you talk about that process and how you do that?

So is this their first course they're launching or?

I think a lot of people that I know or work with, they've launched a course, let's say, but it's usually lower priced, so it doesn't have any intimacy involved. It's mostly like, let's say, like a $100 Gumroad course or whatever, like those kinds of things. So it really doesn't involve community.

Well, the answer, I think, is to get into a more intimate setting as fast as possible, right?

Which becomes the free community. Or not.

Yeah. I mean, it depends where you're starting from. Like if you're a creator, you already have traffic, you already have a list and you've already got customers. I think you need to move to high ticket next. And by high ticket, I mean something that's $3,000 or more. And it involves a phone call to get in. The phone call is key because you get to meet like you and I are meeting, right? Here, right? You really get to understand your market, and then you get to have work more intimately with those people, and that's when you'll truly understand what's going on because you're you're right in it. But for the people that are just starting, like from scratch, it step one is to build a an audience, right? Then it's to get that audience into a community, and then it's to understand the community, and then it's to try and explore with them what problems they have, right? And you can do all of this in the community, like, and then it will become clear to you after a while what problem everyone has and what solution is needed. And then you can start to think as the community leader, you can start to think, how can I solve this problem for everyone here? Right. And it becomes kind of like a duty, like, you know, you've, you've got the people together, you've organized them and you've, you've identified their problem. If you solve that problem, you know, you're looking after the people. Um, and then once you've kind of figured it out, You can kind of go through a discovery phase with them. Like, would you guys be interested in this if I made it? Then maybe you just make one module and you share it for free in your free group. And if it really takes off and people love it, you've figured out one part, right? And maybe there's some posts that blow up in there, or you could do an office hours call once a month or whatever with your community and talk to them and see what they need. And then after that, you're— it's gonna jump out to you like what the killer product is. So, and then you can make that and validate it with them, and then you can, you can launch it to them, right? And then they'll buy it, and now you've fig— so you— that's why you can go 1, 2, use 2 to figure out 3. You're using 1 to figure out 2, and then 2 to figure out 3. Right.

Yeah. So let's say you've figured out that killer product, right? And the reason I want to ask this specifically is because I think a lot of creators, one, don't like to sell, and two, when they figure out a product, they really jump to the technical stuff. Oh, I need a funnel, or I need this fancy stuff. And I think what you really sort of discovered is a different sort of method with betas and Loom videos. So I'd love for you to kind of outline how you do that.

Yeah. Well, you know, there's this saying in like software engineering that you can make something so complicated that you hide the problem or so simple that the problem is exposed, right?

Mm-hmm.

I think that's really smart. It's like why airplane hangars and race car workshops paint the floor white. So that if some oil leaks or a bolt or nut falls out, it's really obvious, right? Because then that car or plane's gonna blow up and you, you better be able to see it, right? If you, if the floor's all dirty, you, you're not gonna know. So I take that kind of approach with everything I do. It's like, if I can't sell this with a Loom video, in a Google Doc, then it— I shouldn't be selling it because it's the core mechanics of the offer should lift the weight on their own. Like, if it's not, if it doesn't make sense like that, then everything else I'm doing is just trying to put lipstick on it. You know what I mean?

Right. And when you say core mechanics of the offer, like, what are those? Because again, I think for us, like, coming from info, it's sometimes like very obvious. But when I talk to creators, they're not really thinking in that way.

Well, you know, a product or a course, it should help someone achieve some outcome, right? And then the things that it recommends should be really effective at producing that outcome. And it should make sense, like when you hear it. So it's like, hey, if you're this person, you should have these problems. And if you're having these problems, then this is what the solution is. And if you do these things, you'll get this outcome. Right? When you get that right, it tends— people just jump. Like, they're just like, I'm in. And I can tell you what that— I've— what I— I know what that is right now in the market. It's YouTube organic, email newsletter, mastermind, and free group. Like, and having a lean team and focusing on profit, right? Like that's the, that's the magic combination. And so when I just make a simple video and I just say those things, it makes sense because people are like, oh, of course. Like that makes sense. It's not all this other crazy stuff. Yeah.

And so you create like, let's say like you have a $3,000 product, you have a free group, you put the Loom video in there. How are you using member caps and waitlists? Because a lot of what creators deal with is they will just be like, anyone can sign up at any point. And so a lot of times people just kind of wait, right? How do you still create the scarcity and the rush that maybe comes with a core base course or a different kind of launch?

I think this is some good learning from the software world. In the software world, they do private beta, right? No product— you're never going to make a product good enough to just launch publicly and charge money for it right away. That's crazy. People need to use it, right? So, and it's going to have bugs, and you need to find out what those are, and you need to fix them. And people are going to use it in ways you didn't even think of, right? All of this stuff. So I approach courses masterminds in the same way. I would come up with a proof of concept first, share that proof of concept with people, and then try to recruit a private beta or a beta group. That gets you a particular segment of the market that is willing to be the guinea pig, basically. They want to go first. They want to be the early adopter. They're willing to tolerate things not quite figured out. And so that, that's how you get that first. I mean, you could even call that a cohort, right? Yeah. So you get them in and then you kind of co-create it together and figure out the kinks and the bugs and all of that together. And when you've got a few success stories, you can reverse engineer those and see, talk to them and be like, were there things that threw you off? What were the things you focused on more than others? And you can fine-tune the course a bit. And then you can do another intake wave, right? Or a cohort, whatever you want to call it. Except I believe in putting all the people into the same group. I don't think you should separate all this shit. So then you might be looking for 20 people or the next 20 or the next 10. And that way you can market for it. You recruit those people and you can use the success stories from the beta group. You bring that wave in. you make sure they're happy and then you bring the next one in. But you're growing one thing. You're not starting and stopping these different things.

Yeah. And at what point, because I think that there's a point that you reach where everything starts breaking. I distinctly remember when you had that with Consulting Accelerator. So at what point do you sort of switch from maybe what you have now with some beta people to really either fine-tuning product or fine-tuning operations? Because I think it's a very key decision that you have to make. How do you think about making that decision of whether now you have to focus on product or operations or traffic or something else when you have the beta going, maybe you have 40, 50 people in there, you're making money?

Yeah. So it's, it's those 3 things, right? Like product conversion, traffic, and then there's just operations and economics and things like that, right? So you tend to have a goal. That goal is probably profit, some kind of profit number, right? And you are either hitting it or you're not. And if you're not, or you're not growing, the problem is going to be in one of those 3 areas. Like you're, you're not getting enough traffic or you're not converting your traffic into customers, or your product isn't good enough or attractive enough, or maybe you need another product, right? Like, and whichever problem is most pressing is what should take the priority. But it's a nonstop balancing act, by the way, between like all the creators I know that are successful are always like going boom, boom, boom, boom. Like they're just all, and it never stops because yeah.

Yeah. And that's what I've learned when like a lot of the private consulting that we do, um, it's just like, if you fix one thing, it then creates something else here. You got to go fix that. And then that creates something here, and it's like you have to keep bouncing around.

Switching gears a bit— When you get really good at it, you know where it's going to break way before. And you've already thought about it, and you know how you're going to fix it. And you've already kind of got it in your mind. You're just waiting for it to pop, and then you just go and do that thing. And then— so you get good at preempting where it's going to go.

Can you share an example of something like that that you Preempted and—

Yeah, I mean, the most basic one is like, if you, as soon as you, you know, if your bottleneck is traffic, then as soon as you increase traffic and your conversion mechanism is sales calls, you're very quickly going to need another sales rep, right?

Yep.

Yeah. So like, there's a very basic one. Or as, and as soon as you have 3 sales reps, you're going to need management. Right. So like, it's just, you kind of learn once there's enough people, they need someone to look after them. And then the more complicated things get, something's going to break. And yeah, like. You get good at preempting this, or if you notice something is continuously kind of trending down, you know, at some point it's going to get so bad that you need to find another way.

Yep. Like Facebook ads. Um, switching gears a bit. Uh, one of the things I've always sort of like admired in the way you work is you've always sort of like built something. And then when you see another opportunity, you're very good at like Leaving that behind to really focus on the new thing or whatever that opportunity is. And you're sort of going through that transition where you built WeTube and sort of then decided to in a way leave that behind and go all in into school. So can you talk about that decision and sort of through the lens of maybe what do you see as the future of education, online education, and why you're deciding to fully go all in into school?

The first thing is, I mean, on, on changing what you're doing, right? Like there's something in innovation called the S-curve. Have you heard of this? Yeah.

The Innovator's Dilemma.

So yeah, that's the book. That's— everyone should read that. Um, you know, and if you've observed anyone doing anything, you know that Just because you're good now does not mean you're going to be good in the future, right? Like, it's always changing. And so if you're not aware of that, and if you're not— and generally the thing that traps everyone is they get— their ego gets so big when they're winning, and they get so— they stop trying, and then they miss the next thing, and then someone comes up and beats them. It happens all the time in everything. So I'm very aware of that, and I think the best innovators are the ones that they don't wait until someone disrupts them. They disrupt themselves. So the moment you figure out a model and it works, I try to figure out the flaws of it and then start trying to beat it. With the next thing, right? And if I'm constantly trying to do that because that's just the way the world works, and I'd be silly not to. So that's on that one. But then why am I doing school? Well, I tried to grow. I had consulting.com like an e-learning company, right? And I just wanted to just. make something big. Like I wanted to reach a lot of people and provide value to a lot of people and just really try to scale something big. And I tried to grow Consulting. Consulting.com helps people start their own like business online. And I wanted to take it as big as I could. We got it to about $36 million a year at its peak.

So you mentioned that Consulting got to like $36 million year at its height. How big did consulting.com get? Like total, like how much revenue has the company done?

I don't know, but like $36 and the year before it probably did like $18. I think it was probably pretty close to $100 mil. I don't think it's, I don't think it is that. It might be like $80, $90, $100 mil, like around there. Yeah. But at that point it was very hard to make it go further. And all of the cracks were emerging. Right.

Mm-hmm.

Um, and that's when I realized that that business wasn't going to get to like 100 million people or a billion people or anything like that. And that really the key to education was I realized it's people more than content, right? And it's community more than course. But I also realized that the key to getting the reach, to getting to that billion people was building a platform for the people like me. So empowering the creators instead of getting lots of people to become a creator. That was more exponential in its distribution. And then I'd been watching the e-learning industry. I'm obsessed with it. I don't know why, I just love it. And when I first started making courses 10 years ago, phones couldn't be used as cameras. You had to have a DSLR, you had to do all this fancy stuff. And the technology was nowhere near like what it is today. You couldn't use Stripe and stuff like you had to get a merchant, you had to go to the bank to get a merchant account. And, you know, the tech was real bad. And just even something as simple as collecting an email address was real hard. And I remember the first version of Kajabi. Right? Like V1, and I was using that. And I watched courses evolve over time. And I had watched how like at first it was just content, but then it got merged with community as soon as social networking and stuff came out. And then I noticed that crowdsourcing became more of a thing. And then It was a lot of the peer-to-peer interactions in the community that was adding the value. Then live streaming came in with Zoom and stuff. And then that thread kind of got woven into this situation. And I could see kind of the future of how this was going to go. And I also saw that becoming a creator was going mainstream and you could make a lot of money and add value to a lot of people. And then I saw that like Kajabi and these other players, they didn't notice this. They were still just focusing on the content portal side or Udemy or Coursera, right? All of this stuff. So I could see the opportunity. It was like, I wanted to build the platform for all of these creators to run their online businesses and that it would be more community than content. And it would weave all of these threads together. Like, social community content and live streaming. And so that I had the idea for school and I thought, well, this is big. If I do this properly, it'll be huge. And I could also see that traditional education was failing, right? In the beginning, when I first made courses, people would attack me all the time. They'd say, why would someone buy a course from you when they could go to college? Now you never hear that. That's, that's done. Like everyone's well aware now that college sucks. So, you know, I could just— do you, do you know what I'm saying here? Like, it kind of sounds crazy because I'm referencing like all of these different things, but it's kind of like the stars aligning or you being able to connect all of the dots. You can kind of see what's going to happen in the future. And you have enough confidence in it that you want to bet on it and start building for it today, and you hope that it kind of comes true.

Well, one thing that's also interesting is I think in a sense Silicon Valley and tech has embraced courses because if you look at the last 10 years, because it was so engineer-driven, Silicon Valley was about product and the information was free. But then the products, like example Infusionsoft, were so complex that there were consultants or people literally charging thousands of dollars in education, especially on the marketing side or in our info world, because the products were that complicated. Right. And I think in the last few years with some of the new companies, a lot of tech people are actually embracing courses. And then again, it's almost this convergence of info and creators and tech, and they're now also like those mountains on the top of that. is finally meeting and that's happening.

Yeah. And I could see that happening too. It's the, you know, in the early days of the internet, no one wanted to pay, right? Everyone wanted content for free. However, because it was so new, people were willing to make content for free.

Right.

So if you just provided the service, people would make the content free. And then who was paying for it was businesses. with advertising, right?

Yep.

And so, and it was the, the soft— the platforms that were like siphoning all of this money out. Um, and so, you know, it's changed now though. Like the new economics of the internet is the, the whole creator economy is how you— the way you make money in this equation is by charging for your content directly. Right. Because, and that, that's a new business model. So, and those, those creators are now the businesses, right. Whereas before the creator wasn't the business and the consumer was kind of just getting this for free through this ad. Do you see what I'm saying? But, you know, we saw that, we saw the end of that with like privacy concerns, you know, iOS 14. And just ads are not in algorithms. We also kind of saw like the problems with all of that. So, you know, there's this like Zen saying that I think is really accurate. Like once something develops to an extreme, it becomes its opposite, right? It's like a paradox kind of thing. So. And we've seen this just recently in tech, you know, the valuations and the hiring was going up and up and up and up and up. And then before you know it, every company's laying people off. Like, how do you go from hiring like crazy to firing like crazy in like a couple of months? But we've seen it with advertising too. Like, you know, once there was so much content being made, people valued quality. So once quantity was taken to an extreme, quality became the thing. And once advertising was taken to an extreme, people valued their privacy and you could kind of see these things coming, I think.

Yeah, it's sort of like, I think you were probably the first one who introduced me to this, which was the principle of reflexivity from George Soros with the subjective and objective realities meaning. And I think even for creators, because I've been talking about this for years working with some of the creators that I work with, I saw this coming. And it's becoming this thing now where as content is exponentially increasing, it actually is more about the wisdom than the knowledge, because everyone has knowledge and everyone's talking about creating content. And I think what's going to happen is, especially with the rise of these parasocial relationships through COVID and the pandemic, that's where the importance of communities come in. Through that relationship is how you separate yourself as a creator, not through the content that you're creating, because everyone's creating content. So how do you actually create that relationship? And I think this is where sort of like what we discussed with high ticket comes in, because that just allows you to, as a creator, create such a deeper level of intimacy with your audience versus like a $50 course. Because if you're selling a $50 course, you just kind of like, from a time perspective, spend time with your audience or people in there because it's just like not a good use of time.

I thought of something interesting before when you were saying like, you know, there's so much content. Have you ever noticed how hard it is to actually find an answer to something these days? Like if you Google it, right? I'll give you an example. I was just trying to find a coffee machine for my office. And I searched like best coffee machine 2022. You know, I found all of these articles, but and they were all recommending the same shit. But something about it didn't seem right. I was like, this doesn't feel like the right answer. And you know, they were all affiliate links, right? So you know, it's probably just no one actually did the thinking or the. Testing, the person who— the people who are ranking for those articles are just the best at SEO and affiliate marketing. That's how it's working. So like the economic model of the internet has been— it now is malfunctioning. As the consumer trying to find a recommendation, it is giving me the wrong answer. So what I ended up doing is, you know, you could search for I actually think I probably spent 4 or 5 hours trying to research this shit online before I gave up. And do you know what I did to get the answer? I walked up the road to the cafe and I bought a coffee. And then I asked the dude making the coffee, hey, I'm thinking of getting a coffee machine for my office. What would you recommend? And he goes, oh, he asked me a few different questions, like how many people will be using it? of this. He gave me a recommendation. It turned out to be the best machine and it was listed in none of those lists. And I've noticed this happen just so many times. Right now, if you're trying to find the answer to something, it's not about Google. It's about who. Who's the person closest to the thing? And just go and ask them. And they know, and they just tell you, right? It's so much faster, which just kind of proves that like people is more valuable than like content and doing is more valuable than just being an expert online at something. You know?

I totally agree with you on what you were saying about content. It's, and actually I'm curious to hear your opinion also on this, which is like, there's, there's really been this like, especially with like the AI stuff coming in. I think there's going to be this Cambrian explosion of what I call low-value shitty content, SEO content. And I think on what you were saying about going to the barista, it's funny because if you look at the time before computers, that's what we would do is we would go to the corner grocery store and ask that person. And I think this is actually really interestingly what I think the roles creators play where With the internet and these massive audiences, I think a lot of creators are that barista that you went to or are that grocery store owner that you went to 50 years ago before the internet. The only difference is instead of just that local block that they're serving, they can now serve hundreds of thousands or millions of people on the internet.

Hmm.

Yeah. Right? It's like, if you're thinking about what camera to buy, you're going to go look at MKBHD and watch his review. And that's probably way more insightful than searching best camera, and then you just get hit with 60 SEO articles on Google.

But do you know what I think is even better than that? Finding a community of people that At doing it, right? Because best is so like there's many dependencies on like best. You know for what, for who, at what budget. You know what I mean?

Yeah.

Because I don't know about you, but how I learned everything when I was growing up was forum. Like I I used to play professional Counter-Strike and. If I wasn't— how— if I think how I, like, my curve of talent in Counter-Strike and what kind of inflection points happened along that journey that drove the most, like, rapid increase in skill, it was definitely finding the people, right?

Mm-hmm.

So, you know, when you're online playing online and you're by yourself, you only get so good. But the moment you find the other people that play it, Then you can play with them, talk about it with them, and then they share naturally just all of this, all of these recommendations, right? And it's— that's when the biggest like explosions happen in your ability. And those tended to happen on forums. And forums were very fair in like no one was trying to gain fame or reach in forums back then, right? Someone was just a hobbyist and they just wanted to help out another hobbyist because they wanted a friend. That was the economic forums. But then social media ruined that, where now there's these other forces at play pulling at these relationships and interactions and distorting them. So I think if you want to be the best at anything, you just need to find the people That want to do that too and just become a part of that group.

Yeah. And I think sort of like what you were saying, going along with that, the idea of best is so subjective, right? Because it's like, if you're like, who's the best entrepreneur, right? It's like, what kind of business do you want to build? Do you want to build like a billion-dollar massive company? Someone else, this person's the best. You want to build a business where you get to only work 5 hours a week and spend time with your family and have dinner with your wife every night, maybe that's someone else, right? And I think this is where the idea of, like you were saying, apprenticeship and learning from people comes in. Because when I look at my career, for example, when I first started doing podcast sponsorships, I had no idea how to do it. So what did I do? I convinced someone that I would do it for them, and I was like, don't pay me upfront, pay me a percentage. And then I found 5 podcasters Jordan Harbinger, Pat Flynn, and a few others. And I basically just emailed them. I'm like, hey, this is what I'm doing. Can I ask you a few questions? I got information from 5 of them, and everyone was kind of doing it in their own different way. But then I was able to mash that into sort of like my own strategy and implement that. And I think that's sort of like what you were saying is the power of doing it in forums and communities or through forums and communities.

Yeah, 100%. Like, do it and do it with friends. Like, that's the key. Yeah.

One thing I'm curious about is you mentioned sort of like how a lot of social media has kind of like ruined this with like likes and followers and all of these different things, right? So when you're building Skool as a product for communities, how do you balance creating things like leaderboards or things like that, that kind of gamify the community to get people to contribute more, versus it turning into another sort of game that just becomes gamified and people are only doing it to win versus help other people? How do you think about the balance of those 2?

Yeah. So when you're designing a platform like Skool, there's the experience that you get from it, right? is the sum total of like thousands of little choices you made on everything. And you're generally, you're always trading off between 2 extremes with every choice in school as the platform designer. One is like engagement and the other one is like, I would say like value, right?

Mm-hmm.

If you turn engagement up to the extreme, you basically get TikTok, which is really engaging, but it's not very good for the human. It doesn't really give them much value. It doesn't even give them a choice. It basically says, you're too stupid to do anything. I'll just show you lots of videos and you can just salivate. But then there's value on the other end, which is, you know, might be too boring for people, right? Because there's all of these other alternatives. There's like, you could open up a tab and go to Netflix. You could open up a tab and go to Twitter. You could open up a tab and go to YouTube. There's so many other things that give you the stimulation and these feelings. that you can't ignore it because it needs to be enjoyable and it needs to compete with these other things. Otherwise, what's the point if the value's there, but you don't do it? So I'm always trading off between these two. And I think community is a real good way to go about it because people like interacting with other people. It's just Humans are social. It's been that way forever. It always will be. So if you get people to interact with other people, it gives them that that high, which social media does and everything. And if you give people like some likes and some points and some rewards and things, it gives them that little high. You need to do enough of it so that people use it and they keep coming back, and it you know, and there's engagement there, but not so much of it that. People are just doing it to get famous, right? So it's, you know, every single little choice, like when should we send a notification? Like, it's, it's not like one big choice. It's every little choice in everything. Like, how big should an image be? Should we autoplay videos? Should When do we send a notification? When do we not? How do we design the UI? Do we use an algorithm or do we not? Yeah, just so many choices, and I'm always trading off between those two.

What are other examples of these either trade-offs or decisions that you've made with school? Because in a sense, those are going to impact how thousands or hundreds of thousands of communities are run.

You want more examples of that? So, I mean, honestly, most of them revolve around like engagement. So, I mean, on the on the user side, like the people that are using it, it has to be engaging enough for them. to keep coming back and interact, but valuable enough for them to think that it's not like just a time suck, it's actually helping them improve their life. And on the admin side or the creator side, it's got to be engaging enough that they can run a community in there because community has to have engagement, but it's got to give them enough control that they feel like they own it, right? So I'm always like, there's multiple sides to this, like this thing. There's like the creator and we have to appeal to them so that they put their community on there. Then there's the members. We have to make sure they use it. And that's kind of what we have to do as a platform. We have to balance all of these sides and make all of these trade-offs.

How do you think about Let's say someone has a community, right? How do you think about a success metric or a KPI for a community? I'll give you an example, because when we think about the info world, it was just sort of like everyone was looking at the guru and pointed at the guru, right? And then I asked a friend of mine who has run a lot of successful communities, and she made a really interesting point. She's like, for me, the success in the community is actually the number of one-to-one relations that form between members that are not related to the person who runs the community. That is sort of like a function that tells you the community can sustain itself. So how do you think about the success of a community in terms of KPI?

Yeah, I think that's true. So like, you know, a community is a group of people, right? And it's kind of the sum total of all the individual connections, right? So, you know, the tighter the people, like the tighter the community. So I think that's definitely true. And I think that kind of shows up as daily active, monthly active, weekly active users. I think a community is valuable if people are using it, right? If people aren't showing— just imagine if you had a community, a local community where people come to this thing each day, or a church or whatever, right? If people don't show up, then you can't really say you've got a good community. So I think people showing up and people interacting with each other and people saying good things about it, right? These are all really good signs. And I think if you're looking for a metric like monthly active, daily active, weekly active users, right? Um, and then I think the real, the real thing that shows you if it's valuable is if it can just grow on its own.

Mm-hmm.

So if it's so good that people tell their friends, you know, that, that's the, probably the biggest barrier to hit, right? Only some communities get that good. Only some products ever get that good. But I think that's how you really know.

So there's an interesting second order effect that happens when, let's say, like, you have that word of mouth, right? And I've actually heard this from people who are in communities where as it starts growing, it hits a point where actually, as you add more people, the quality goes down, right? So if you're like telling your friends, the quality will start going down. How do you counter that from either like a community manager standpoint Or a product standpoint, how do you keep the quality still high?

Yeah. So, you know, when I was researching the history of all of this stuff, like way before the internet communities, I was like, what are the longest lasting communities? And one that I came across was just the church, right? It's like been around for a long time. Like, it's outlived regimes, countries, like all sorts of things. And its architecture is interesting because it has a global and a local arrangement. So, like, it's distributed nicely. So, you know, everyone had a church in their, like, neighborhood so that they could have— the reason why people came to the church in their local neighborhood was to hang out with their neighbors. and they knew each other and they could have in-person connections, right? But they were all kind of subscribed to some global kind of philosophy, right? And that's how it scaled and was resilient over time. And so I think that's the key, right? I don't think any one community should try to be too big. I think you need— the moment that it starts getting big and you notice these different kind of emerging things, you should distribute it more. So maybe there's like, it's by country or it's by, um, do you know, do you know what I'm saying? Yeah.

You sort of like split off into like different groups, whether it would be by like either geography or the goal people are trying to achieve, uh, or maybe like the stage in their journey or something else along those lines.

Yeah. That's what I think you should do because it doesn't work to just keep adding more and more people to it.

Is there a number when you think you should do that? And the reason I ask that is like, I'm thinking of this company called Chief. I don't know if you know about them. They're sort of like a network for women in sort of like high, higher roles, like VPs.

Yeah, I read about them.

They've grown to like 15,000 plus, and we actually want to reach out to them to interview them. And I'm curious, like, how are they running like a 15,000-person community? So are there like member milestones where you're like, okay, like certain decisions need to be made? Number of member milestones.

Well, it's really when the group, you know, this comes back to what I was saying in the beginning, like, what is the scope of the community, right? Like, who is it for? What is the shared goal and what's the criteria to get in? Generally, when a community gets too big, they tend to be sacrificing something, right? They're like, oh, screw the quality. Let's just let anyone in now.

Yep.

So yeah, so the moment that you start breaking your own rules for how this community is supposed to run is the moment it starts falling apart. Right. Because if people— it's, I think about this all the time because I've got a mastermind and there's 100 people in there and there's criteria to get in. And all the time people are offering to pay me $36,000 to get in, which is the price. I could take so much money, but I really think about how much that would cost me in the second, third, fourth order. Right.

Mm-hmm.

I just think about if this person shows up to a Q&A call, with all of the really good members on there and they ask me some really stupid questions. Immediately, all of those really good members are going to think, why did Sam take that money and ruin this? Or I think of the next live event and everyone starts thinking, is this the right place for me? Because someone's asking weird questions. So you have to say no. And I say no to people for Quantum more than I say yes. And you have to uphold those standards. And if you want to, if you start to notice the demand for something that's lower end, fine, but do it in a separate group. So WeTube was like a Quantum Lite. If you think about it, it was like kind of what we talk about in Quantum, but for $10K instead of $36K.

Right.

And you only needed to make about $8,000 a month instead of $30,000 to get in. So I think that— yeah, does that answer your question?

It does. There's sort of like, for creators, I think there's a very interesting parallel to what you said, which is, and this is something I realized when I was doing sponsorships with podcasters, that what I realized is a podcaster's recommendation is as strong as the weakest sponsor they recommend. As soon as they recommend a sponsor and it's like, you know podcasts where the guy's just reading from a paper, right? They have a paper in front of them because there's no emotion or whatever. And as soon as you hear an ad like that, you go, oh, he's just doing it for the money. Does he actually care about all the other products? Right? So when I represented podcasters, that's why I was always like, if you don't like the product, I'd rather you not do an ad than put a shitty ad in because it's going to influence everything else. And you're saying that's kind of like The same way for the members that you let into the community.

Oh yeah. If you look at the strongest clubs in history, right, like any culture really, or any team, the team is generally better and more desirable, or the club is more desirable, the harder it is to get in. And do you remember those stories about Google in the early days about their hiring process and like no one could get in? That just meant that the smart— well, Google would make you jump through all of these hoops to try to get in. You had to like, it was like at least 12 interviews. It took months and they test— basically you needed to be like one of the smartest people in the world to work at Google. And that just attracted all of the smartest people in the world.

Mm-hmm.

Right. And I think it's very different now. But, you know, like I know Goldman Sachs has a kind of culture like this too. And, you know, the fraternities, they have this too. You need to do all of this crazy shit to get in. Um, and then, you know, if you look at like secret societies throughout history and like even cults and, you know, it's hard to— generally no good community is really easy to get into. Yeah, totally.

And I think it's, as a creator, you can almost embed these things into your products. Like, one of the things I always do is in week 1, or week 1 of a course or whatever, really like get people to do something that's really challenging. Because one, that will tell you whether they want to actually extend it or not. A lot of people will be like, hey, I actually want a refund. I kind of don't want to do this, right? And then the ones that do and actually take action, you know, you know, they're going to be the action. Actually, I want to switch gears a little bit again, which is something we didn't talk about. And I know that it's so important, especially as a creator, is the importance of mindset. And I distinctly remember a phase when you sort of had that realization and started embedding mindset into the core of your product. So when you're even, let's say, dealing with higher-end people in quantum, Do you still see that as a challenge? And what is the importance of that? And how do you help them through it?

You know, I think mindset's tricky because you can put too much emphasis on it and think that all you need to do is fix your mindset, but it's never that easy, right? I think that first and foremost, you need to have a goal and something that you're trying to achieve. And you have to be trying because you don't even know if you have a mindset issue unless you're actively trying to do something. It's your, it's your only way to know if you're making progress or not.

Yep.

Right. So that's the most important thing. Then what I've found though, is that, you know, a lot of the time what keeps people doing it, you might think it's mindset stuff, but I've honestly found people make more of an impact than mindset stuff because it, it just gives you that support, like emotional support. And, you know, humans give other humans, they're called like sanity signal. So like, you know, if I start saying some stuff that sounds a bit weird to you, you're going to start looking at me real weird. And I'm going to notice that and I'm going to calibrate. What I'm saying or what I'm thinking, or if I'm getting depressed, you're going to be like, "What is wrong with you, man? You need to snap out of it," and I'm going to kind of adjust, right? So really, I think community is more important than mindset, honestly, and I think doing it and practicing is more important than mindset. So I've kind of changed on that a bit. I think that mindset is still important. Like you need to have a positive outlook, and you need to be. Learning about yourself, like, and evaluating yourself. But I think a lot of people just get way too caught up in these concepts of of mindset, like like the technicalities. It's just a conceptual maze, like a labyrinth of of concepts that don't even really matter if you can just do it and you're having fun. Who cares? You know what I mean?

Yeah, there's a really interesting phrase from. the spiritual leader around us, which is we're all walking each other home, right? And that kind of talks about the importance of community. One thing that's interesting in that is I'll share more of an extreme that I've seen, and I'm curious to hear your perspective on this. And again, I'm not shitting on the marketing world or the info world, but they had so much of that where I feel like in some cases it was almost taken to an extreme where you basically had people who built these almost like cult of personalities so that when you were in that community, it was almost like the cult of personality is defining the rules of the engagement. So if you're in the community and someone says something off, you can't really challenge it, right? So can you talk about that sort of spectrum of community building? And if you're in a community like that, how do you get out of it? Or if you've just seen that too.

Yeah, so it's a balance, right? If everyone's arguing with everyone over everything, you don't really have a community, right? So there needs to be alignment and shared beliefs, but it needs to be— I think what's most important is for the leader to set The goal and what the values are. So the goal is like, we're not going to argue about this. If we're all trying to grow successful businesses and someone joins and they're like, why are we even trying to do this? Business is bad. Kick that person out, right? We're not even going to have that conversation. That's just not— it's just stupid. So the goal can kind of dictate a bit of the conversation. But then there needs to be some values. Like, how do we know— everyone should be given the right to come up with better ways, right? The leader shouldn't know the best way. It's really the leader's job to share what they believe is the best way and for it to be pretty good. But then it's the community's job to find improvements and for the leader to accept that, yes, this is better. Let's update this. this, right? But in order to judge if something's better or worse, you need like a set of criteria to like measure it on. And so, you know, in, in Quantum, which is my mastermind, we, we have profit, client results, happiness. And then there's a few other things that I like, which is simplicity.

Right.

So if someone introduces us to something that's really complicated, then I'm not really— I don't have much time for that. Or if someone introduces something that doesn't drive one of those things, I don't tell them they're wrong, but if someone brings me something that's more simple, then I give them praise. So you've just got to make it very clear, like, what is the goal and what are the values or how we And then give, give it to them to, to try to improve upon it, because that way you're telling them, I respect you. I think you're smart. And I want you to help me make this better.

Mm-hmm.

Um, we do that in our school community for our product. Like people tell us bugs, feature requests, and you know, if someone introduces something that makes things real complicated, I'll say no, too complicated. But there's been people that suggested shit that is a really good idea. And I praise that. And so that's how I think you deal with that.

Yeah, and I think it's so also important as you're building a team and a company, right? How do you create that? Because it's really like we're talking about culture. How do you create that culture so that even— and I don't mean this in a pejorative way, but let's say the lowest person in the hierarchy, how can they also suggest ideas? And those are given the same weight, at least in terms of evaluating the idea and whether it's useful or not, as maybe the CEO, instead of being like, oh wait, you're an intern, you can't be giving ideas, which is what a lot of companies do and really lose out on that new wave of thinking from the younger generation.

Yeah. Yeah, it's got to be based on the quality of the idea, not on the person at all.

What are some ways in which you've really— you ended up really like changing your mind where ideas came from either Quantum or the YouTube community and you were like, oh wow, this is amazing, I'm gonna kind of like change my thinking on this?

Well, you want a specific like example?

Yeah.

I mean, it's a lot of the time it's just small things, right? Like, oh, you should show, you know, this thing should be blue if there's a new comment or something, right? And I'm like, I immediately— and I'm like, there's a brilliant idea, and we do it. Um, or this thing is confusing, and I'm like, why? And they explain it, and I'm like, yeah, they're right, it is kind of confusing, right? So it's like, a lot of the time it's because someone has actually used it. And they've experienced something, right, then that's how it— and then it's pretty much always good. A lot of the time when things are weird, it's when someone just shares their opinion on something and they haven't used it. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, totally.

Um, I know we're towards time, so, uh, let's end with like the, the 5 questions we always end with, and then we'll draw this to a close. So these are sort of like 5 questions I ask always. Feel free to answer in like 30 to 60 seconds. First one is like, what 3 books have been the most impactful for you and why?

It's hard to say on the spot because I don't just have these lined up, but definitely The Everything Store, which is the story of Amazon. Another one would probably be that Lean Thinking book that I told you about, about Toyota's engineering process. And the third one, probably Made in America, the Sam Walton story.

That's a great one. Just the way, as like a complete renegade, he like built those stores up is amazing. Next one is, what's one piece of wisdom that has changed the game for you?

I mean, the one that's coming to mind is it's all about the people. So the people in your audience, the people that are your customers or your team, it's always about them. It's never really about anything else.

Yeah, team is the most important. Speaking of people, who's someone that you're grateful for? So let's say like if you could give credit or thanks to someone in your life you haven't had a chance to thank, who would that be and why?

It'd probably be like the first ever kind of business mentor guy I had. It was my like ex-girlfriend's dad, but he was the CEO of a successful company and He was the first person that really started teaching me about business and setting just a really good example and believing in me.

I remember the island story from back in the day. That was a good one. Next one is, what does it for you mean to be a conscious creator?

No, you're just thinking like holistically about, you know, all of the— like a lot of the time you can do something and it makes things worse, right? Like it's not really— you haven't thought about the whole situation. So like, you know, doing something that makes things better for like everyone. Yeah.

I love that. And then last one, what are you most excited about or optimistic about in the next 5 to 10 years? And you can compress or increase that time period.

It would be the rise of communities. And I think that there was this period in time, the Renaissance, it's probably my favorite period. Right. You know about the Renaissance?

Mm-hmm.

So it was after like the, the Dark Ages basically, where it was run by all of these like priests and everything. And there was a lot of dogma, like very rigid ways of thinking, and you weren't allowed to do particular things and there was no mixing. Right. It was just, you had to take these instructions from like this, this leader and you had to, you couldn't ask any questions. You couldn't change them. And that was the Dark Ages and not much innovation happened at all. And then the Renaissance happened where there was a lot of collaboration and artists were collaborating with chemists and they were collaborating with painters and architects of buildings. This is like the Da Vinci, Leonardo kind of era. And what made him such a great creator was that he was not just— he wasn't just one thing. Like, he was an architect, an engineer, a painter, and a chemist. So he'd learned chemistry just so he could paint better, so he could mix his own pigments. And he, he dissected bodies at the morgue just so that he could understand the eye and how the eye like how light reflected through the eye. So he could change the way he drew his lines in his paintings so that they were like seen to be more dimensional. Um, but I think what's happened, I think the internet's been just come through the dark age.

Right.

Mm-hmm. So I think I always believe these cycles kind of continue just in different forms, but the social media and the algorithms created a new form of like high priest. and a new form of religion and a new form of like dogma, right? Like there's this one person and they say this rigid thing and you've got to say exactly that thing or you just, you get literally like attacked by the mob. And there was no mixing of ideas. There was no openness and, and there was no collaboration. And so I think the move that's going to happen with community is like the, renaissance of online. And I think all of these different disciplines are going to mix, like software and community and social media and courses. And I think there's going to be a lot of cool stuff that happens moving forward. And I'm really, really excited about that.

Yeah, I agree. I think it's like, because I'm starting to see this now too, which is like sort of this rise of the multi-hyphenate creator. And I think the other thing I see that happening is as you start getting to the top of a mountain in your industry, there's less people that you can talk to, which is why also I think all of this convergence is happening. Because if you're at the top 1%, you almost don't have that many people in your industry. So you have to go meet top 1%ers in other industries, which I think then connects all of them and creates that community.

Yeah. And I think the other thing that happened in the Renaissance is that There wasn't a formal education system, right? People didn't go to university or school. They weren't taught from a textbook. It was apprentices, right? So you wanted to be— you chose a trade or a craft, right? You wanted to be an architect. You went and worked under someone. You wanted to learn how to sculpt. You, you know, you worked under a sculptor or something. And you learned by doing. And if you look at the art and the creations from that era, it's so much better than today. If you look at what's being created today, it's shit across the board, like music, movies, literature. A lot of it's pretty crap compared to how it was. Even like furniture and clothing, and just because it's all made in bulk by these corporations and these machines. And it's, it's all the soul and spirit has been like engineered out of it. And that's why I think people are so unhappy.

Mm-hmm.

Um, and so, you know, I think that the, these, this new era will be like in education is those that are best at doing it will be best at teaching it. And it will be very pure. It's like, if you want to learn something, you'll learn from the best doer. And it's worth the doer's time to teach you because they can make a career out of it by creating an online school. Do you know what I mean? So like all of these economics and, and things can be balanced in this new model. And so if you want to learn any skill, it doesn't matter what it is or where you live in the world, you can find someone that's a master, and then you can learn from them directly and it's worth their time. And then, you know, you can hang out with other people that are as obsessed. And I think that that would just be pretty cool. Yeah.

And I think a huge part of what you were saying, just when you look at the creator lens where everything is the same, is because for creators, like, so much of it is like algorithm-driven because they have to almost be like the slave to the algorithm because then they build an audience and then they get paid with ads. And I think if you're a creator who wants to sort of step off that content hamster wheel, wants to do what we've been talking about and really go to this different model of high ticket and communities, go check out Skool. Website is skool.com. Anything else you want to leave people with, Sam, before we end? Any last words? Or anywhere, anywhere else you want to direct them to?

Yeah, I think samovens.com is my personal website, or school.com is the platform. And that's it.

Awesome. Thank you for doing this, Sam. We've known each other for almost 10 years now. So it's been cool to see your evolution and really capture that journey in this conversation today.

Thanks.