3 Hours of Money Making Advice You Needed To Know Yesterday

I just spent 8 hours with the top 10 business owners on Skool from last month sharing the money-making strategies that they used to win the Skool games. Here are the best ones. The first thing we talked about affected every business in the room and yours, which is how to get more leads and how to turn those into customers.

So it's using a free Skool group.

Okay.

Okay.

So essentially what we do is we create like content on YouTube, Instagram stories. We're doing a bit of cold outreach as well. I thought it'd really help with this.

So you're doing content?

Yeah.

But it was content. Content is one of them. You're doing outreach to the people who follow and all that stuff on your content.

Yeah. And also we would get like school organic traffic as well.

Yeah. Starting to do that.

Yeah.

What ranking are you?

Ranking?

Your free group, like, you know, you are in discovery.

No idea. Like we didn't optimize for that.

I am. Be worth looking at. How many— do you know how many searches a day we get on school?

I don't know.

A lot.

A lot.

Like, yeah, there's a lot. Um, but the pro— honestly, there's more visits to profiles.

That makes sense.

Yeah.

And then they go profile and way more traffic goes through the profiles. But Zane, so you have— so you have content, you have outreach. Um, we'll get you, don't worry about it. Um, we have content, we have outreach. What are you— what else are you doing?

Yes, it's like the school organic. So people just click in my profile and it also being other people's profiles as well. You know, they just join out of curiosity.

Yeah.

So we then get those people, they join the free school group as well. So promote on like whatever platforms.

So how do they, so in each of these, so you make content and do you have it in like the description and do you integrate into the content? Like, hey, yes.

I just like leave the link in the description. Also I put in my Instagram bio. So actually in YouTube videos where I just promoted my Instagram, people would join the Instagram or follow me on Instagram. And they just join the community out of curiosity, even though I didn't promote it, it was just in the bio. With the outreach, we didn't promote the free group. That's only like if people weren't interested, which is like, okay, we've got this free group, you might want to join it. And then with school, people just join naturally.

Okay. So I would say bio links plus description.

Yeah.

Okay. Got that. And so, and what's in there? Is that the free group or the paid group?

It's all free.

Okay. So this, this goes to the free group. Free school. Got it. All right.

What else?

Okay.

So when they join, they get the auto DM, which is the first line of our DM script. Okay. And then we also in the classroom section, so we have like a start here post that tells them to go to the classroom.

So DM as soon as they join the free school.

Yeah.

Okay. Yeah.

It's all on the free group.

Got it.

Okay.

And then we also have like a start here, like pinned post that tells people to watch a course and there's a pinned course. As well. So that's in the classroom section. And the course is essentially like a perfect webinar by Russell Brunson. We kind of break into a course, but it's like a perfect webinar and indoctrinate them to book a call and then we just close them on the call. And then we also did the DMs as well.

So you CTA to call and then what do you do to maintain the value in the community?

Yeah, so our community is actually extremely inactive. So I just put a post like now and then, but it's like the members who are inactive are the ones buying though.

It's like, because they, they, you have like zombies or like dead bodies there.

Yeah. So like the free community, I think it had like 400-ish members, 450-ish, and we got like 53 sales. So it was very like high converting.

Yeah. Yeah.

So it's pretty active.

Yeah.

But the community was dead.

But yeah, people, so you converted 14% of people who went to your free thing. Yeah, exactly. Into your— got it. And did you convert them into just a higher ticket paid community? Is that what it was?

Yeah, so it was $999.

Yeah, got it.

That's why it's dead, by the way, because you just took the most engaged people and moved them out.

But your high ticket community is engaged.

Yes, that's completely accurate.

Yeah, you basically— if you take your most engaged people and you take them out and put them somewhere else and you're like, talk here instead, of course it makes just total sense.

No, it's like the people who are inactive were joining the be hiding because they're active there. Yeah, yeah, that's true. That's actually true.

No, that's exactly why. Yeah, yeah.

And we also tested this with someone else as well. So, um, he was gonna enter the school games, but he just kind of gave up. But he was making like $500 a month, and we got him to $10,900 this month. So what the funnel was, was TikTok and Instagram Reels, short-form content, school community. Exact same process and we basically 20x his income.

So literally just drawing. I mean, I was saying this the other day because somebody asked me this question, I think on a Q&A call, but it's like, how do I convert people from free to paid? And I still think that the single simplest way to do that is just like depending on the price point, like if it's a low ticket paid, then you just add the onboarding call to personalize their experience, which then it's like, hey, what are your goals? What are your obstacles right now? You know what, you might be a really good fit or whatever. And then you can just sell straight into it. If it's higher ticket, then you have your VSL or your webinar or whatever that you incorporate into their onboarding process and allow them to self-select if it's a $5,000 or whatever plus offer.

That's probably the most— I can imagine that would be the most widely adopted method.

This one?

Yeah.

Yeah. It's simple.

It's the most easy to understand. I almost didn't understand anything else that I heard, but that Yeah, I've seen that being used over and over and over again, like in a lot of slightly different ways. But because a free community, if you've got content and then you're promising a free community, conversion rates are through the roof. It's the most efficient mechanism to convert.

That's a lead magnet. I mean, fundamentally, yeah.

And like on the free community as well, you make like indoctrination posts. It's like, you know how Russell Brunson talks about like the internal beliefs, external beliefs? You just basically shatter all their limiting beliefs.

Okay, we need to make a note to make a training on it.

Yeah, I was I'm gonna do a simple version of this, which is just traffic.

Free group.

Yep. Free school.

It's the group funnel.

Yeah. Free school.

We already have that training.

Yeah, but it's old and in the wrong place.

And it was for high ticket.

Yeah, and it's for, yeah, exactly, exactly.

But that works so well.

I, it's probably the most common pattern on Skill is I think someone did an analysis that almost everyone ranking in Discovery and leaderboards has two groups, one free, one paid. It's like the, yeah, it's the funnel. Yeah, it's a tactic and it works. Yeah.

So this, like for everybody at home, traffic, free Skill, DM to Webby plus all, basically you just drive everything there. So your pin posts there, You make content, you soft toss it, be like, hey, make sure you watch this.

And you're doing the pitch in the classroom, which kind of is disarming because you're like, oh, this isn't a webinar.

Yeah.

It's a module.

And we've got some people to rather than making like one long video, because this is what I teach the students as well, is to break it up into small videos and like distribute the webinar like that.

Make it not look like—

Yeah.

It's like there's 4 videos, an introduction and then 3 core stories and the 5th video is I've got this thing for you.

And it puts everyone off guard as well. Cause like I don't sign up to webinars anymore. Cause like I'm in that space. This just puts people off guard completely.

Yeah.

Every step of this is like extremely efficient. Cause like I know if you have a link in bio to a free group, it absolutely crushes. Like those groups are the ones that are at the top of discovery.

Yeah.

Cause it's just so efficient. We see 80% conversion rates on the pages. Like, and so you get them in and then the auto DM sends like 100% of people and then you put them to that module and that module, it starts the funnel and the funnel is like module 1, module 2.

Yeah.

And then you get them onto a call.

Yeah.

Which is probably going to be the most efficient method at converting free to paid.

Yeah.

And some people, they don't even book the course. They'll watch the course. They don't book the call. But then when you DM them, they're like, oh yeah, I've watched the course and then they do it.

So it's like, so you DM again. So basically after they watch it, you follow up DM.

No, so we just DM them anyway, but some people just still watch the course and then book, or they'll book later on. They'll just come back to it. And as long as you're making the post, then they're like, they find, they go back to the course to get the link and then they book it.

Yeah.

How much is the thing that you're selling them, the paid group?

So it's $999 a month.

Okay. But this could work even for a cheaper thing.

Yeah.

Like, like you don't have to do high ticket. You don't even, you don't even have to do a call actually. It could just be selling a $99 a month thing over DMs and maybe even a call? Because for more, I'm just thinking for beginners, you need, because you don't have a ton of traffic and a ton of like, like privileges to work with essentially, you have to like get the most efficient conversion at every point, right? Because you're looking to squeeze every last drop.

It's also, I mean, this is also from a, from a technical complexity, like the This is pretty simple. Like click to free, free to— you make the 5 modules and then you talk to them and ask them.

Well, yeah, this is the most effective. It works amazingly well as well because especially with the short form content, this is something I realized recently. So the guy we was working with, he had like 900 members. He made 1 post and like 800 people joined and we were like, that's insane. And of course we booked like hundreds of sales calls from that.

Yeah, it's monster. This is very simple. I like this a lot.

Do this.

This is great. Really good. The thing that I keep— this is me making a bet— is that I will bet that there's going to be a lot more $1,000 a month type quote high ticket like shifting over partially because of what you noticed, which is if you can double or triple acquisition because it's LTV to CAC ratio and so you can still drive down CAC a lot to improve that ratio. And so I think, I mean, the space always has like a vibe, right? Like you have like the rank and rent, which is kind of coming back, right? I think in the high ticket world, there's a lot of, a lot of people have like the pendulum swung a little bit this way. And I think it's kind of coming back just a tiny bit, um, where people, this is why like brand and content and like value in advance is becoming more and more important because there's not a lot of trust. And to be fair, there was, there will always be less and less trust over time. Um, and the more mature the platforms get, The less just eyeball arbitrage exists. Like if you remember for that 5 seconds that Clubhouse was a thing, like I had, I knew plenty of people who went on there and then were doing like $100,000 a day on Clubhouse because it was just, it was just huge arbitrage of eyeballs. They're getting way more exposure than they normally would. But as platforms kind of settle, then it's like, okay, who's legit starts to rise and who makes the best content and things like that. And so right now there's not like, besides school, there's not like a, another platform that's really like emerging. And so, um, it's my belief that that's why trust, that's why content stuff is so important is because it'll improve conversion across the funnel. And I think that this whole, um, $1,000 a month, like instead of being the $3,000, $4,000 a month, I think a lot more people are willing to stomach the $999 a month. Um, because they can see, and as soon as we roll out more stuff with like reviews and things like that. It'll just make it more and more trusted. And I was talking the other day about this, but like, if I could start Gym Launch all over again, the probably the biggest thing that I would have done differently is I would have probably tried to make it like $10,000 a year and I would have put all my focus on how do I keep 80, 90% of my customers renewing. And that would have been my main focus. Like, I just want such a crazy value to price discrepancy that no one would leave. And they would refer more people, etc., etc., because I would have probably acquired 2, 3, 4 times the customers, but they also would have stuck longer because like over the last however many years we've done like 5,500 locations that have gone through Gym Launch and like if all 5,500 of those locations were still paying me, I'd be richer than I am today. And so I think about that a lot of like, sure, there's on one hand, like when you don't know how to sell, it's very exciting to like start raising your price and be like, oh my God, I just sold $10,000. Oh my God, I sold $20,000. Oh my God, $100,000. Like, it gets really cool. But once you learn how to acquire customers, you then become completely obsessed on the other side, which is, oh shoot, you realize the game. Like Sam and I've talked about this at length, which is you don't want to keep having to go get customers. I mean, of course you have, like you want to be able to go get customers, but not to have to go get customers. And so like, that's the big difference. And so like when I look at businesses now, I care almost exclusively about how much does this thing grow on word of mouth, how much, like what percentage of customers stay every year once they're like in and activated and whatnot. Because then it means that I get credit for customers I sold 2 years ago. And so even if you sold 100 customers a year, if you can keep all of them, 10 years from now you're 10 times bigger. And so the vast majority of like the internet marketing world focuses on growing by simply selling more units because they can't keep anybody. But the people who make the most money just don't lose customers. But you have to like learn how to sell in order to get there. But like, this is kind of the evolution that happens. And so pricing, I like my thoughts on pricing has changed from the, the old school Dan Kennedy model, which is like, say as high of a price as you can without cracking a smile. Um, like it swung back a little bit more to like, well, let's just make them smile at how blown away they are with the value that we have. And then they're more likely to tell their friends, more likely to stay longer. And then like, I wildly underestimate. How, how much word of mouth affects these businesses. Like some of you guys have probably bought coaching courses and whatnot because a friend of yours was like, oh, I went through his YouTube training. It was actually really good. And then that guy doesn't know that you were told that. He just sees an ad and he sees a conversion and he's like, oh, my ads are killing it. But it's not that. It's 'cause the product's really good. And so like in the early days of Gym Launch, we got 100 to 1 return on advertising. It wasn't 'cause my ads were exceptional, it's because everybody who was going through was just printing money. And so like, that's the big shift. And those are the guys who make the most money is the ones who actually have a pretty good product. In the second clip, we talk about pricing and I talk about pricing a lot because pricing has the strongest lever on profit, more than getting more customers, more than even retaining them longer. Nailing pricing will make you more money than any other skill.

I have a question on the pricing because I did— you know, the, what you said, charge as high of a price.

Yeah.

And I tried to increase it, but I didn't follow the principle of only increase the price after sufficiently increasing value.

Yeah.

So I noticed the people are much more likely to ask for a refund at the higher price. Before it was $77 a month, now it's $137.

Mm-hmm.

Should I suggest going down to $87, which is still bigger than the previous price, or should I—

it's not a huge price change.

Okay.

Yeah.

Just $77 to $137 is not like a ma— I mean, it's a, there's definitely gonna be a, a jump in terms of conversion or like rather a drop in conversions. Um, but the, all, all you're optimizing for is conversion rate times LTV. That's like, that's the whole equation. So we talked about the 4 levers in this business, right? Like you've got traffic, you've got conversion, you've got price, and you've got churn. Like those are the 4 levers. So like to grow the business, you have to increase, well, decrease churn, but increase the other 3, right? And so if you know that, let's say you've got 100 clicks to a page. Let's say at 77 you convert twice as many customers. Well, it comes down to really just like what's your earning per eyeball. And in the affiliate world it's called EPCs, which is earning per click. And so you just literally want to make the most money per click over the longest period of time. And so now if the 77 converts at twice the percentage of the 137 and they churn at half the rate, then over when you do that hypothetical max calculation, you'll, you'll be like, you literally just, all of this is just math. You just plot the, see what it looks like, see where it maxes out, see what the other one maxes out at. And you're like, okay, that's the price.

So how would I do that if I'm sending people straight from YouTube to about page on school?

You look at what it's at, what, $137 or whatever. And then, you know, you knew what your metrics were at $77, right? And so you just compare what's the— so here, let's do the math. So let's say you've got $77. Oops, there we go. That's a 7.

All right.

And what was churn on 77?

Well, I don't have the exact number, so that's another issue, obviously.

Yeah.

Okay. Let's just walk through it hypothetically.

Give me a ballpark. 3 months average would stay people.

Okay. So that would be 33% churn, right?

Yeah.

And so you divide that by churn.

I have bad numbers because I started it like 2 months ago.

You're fine. Don't worry about it.

On 147, it's probably like 2 months only.

Okay, cool. All right. So 137 divided by 50% turn means you just double 137, right? And so you've got— what is that? 274 is LTV here. And then here you've got— what's that? Times 3. What was that?

231.

Thank you. 240, 241, 31, 31. Okay, cool. So LTV here is bigger than here. But then the question comes into conversion, right? Which happens before this. So then you're like, all right, what percentage of clicks do I convert here? What percentage of clicks do I convert here? And so can someone do, um, uh, 274 divided by 231 for me?

1.186.

1.186.

Yeah.

Right. So if you can convert more than 20%, more on this one than this one, this makes you more money. Does that make sense?

Yeah. And how would I track that if I'm sending people from YouTube straight to School About Baiting?

Well, you've got to just use some like fancy guesswork. But you should have got a feel of like when you were making a video, how many kind of members joined.

Yeah.

Okay.

And do you know if there was a big drop or if it kind of stayed the same?

I mean, there probably was a decrease, but not, you know, more than 20% or whatever.

Well, 20% might be hard to feel. Yeah. Because it'd be like one day you get 4, one day you get 3, like 5. Like that might be tough to feel. Um, but I know that that metric's coming out soon anyways for us. So once, as soon as that conversion metric's on there—

I've already looked at it, by the way. Wow. Like, conversion rates across the platform. There's a— the biggest indicator is the price, obviously.

Yeah, right.

Yeah. I mean, some free groups convert it 80%. Um, but the difference between, you know, something that's like 10, 20, 30, those things can convert like 5%. But once you get a price that's like over 100, it drops significantly. Yeah.

Yeah. And so here we know what each of these is worth. And so you're just thinking what percentage of people buy it? And that's the conversion. And so if 50% more people buy this, then you're like, okay, well then 50%, even I'm making 50% more sales at this price versus, uh, I mean, this is just a classic like chart of pricing versus volume. That's all it is. I really want to make, to make sure it makes sense though. Yeah. Okay. This is how you figure out pricing. And I would just encourage you guys to be willing to test. Like the PC who owns— who just sold ProfitWell, they did this big meta study. But basically, the more frequently you analyze price, the more profitable your company is. Just— it's like a direct correlation. So companies that never look at their price and never adjust their price are way less profitable than ones that look at it annually, which are less profitable than ones that look at quarterly. So just be willing to test price.

I got some questions for you though, like which one do you think is making you more money on your traffic? Because your traffic's probably remained somewhat a constant, right?

Well, I'm not pushing as hard as during the school games. Oh, I see. You know, I was selling every video and I don't want to do that for long-term brand. So it's hard to compare, but I would say it's more like the optics of being less than 100 a month feels like different, you know, than over 100 a month.

So which one do you think was more efficient?

Probably 77 because it's like, I feel like the product has more, more aligned with the value there.

Your audience is younger on—

you said no, they're not 25 to 60.

Well, I'll tell you personally, we have a portfolio company that we ran. Um, this is like— this, you guys might find this really interesting. Hey guys, if you want to be in this room, it's actually free for all these people because they won the Skool games. And so Skool is a community platform. It helps you build a group and a community that you can monetize online or that you can build for free. And so we give you the tools, we give you the training, and we give you the community so that you can actually recreate that. And as of right now, 54.1% of people who start a paid community on Skool make at least $1. And so I say that because the first dollar in business is the hardest one to make because there's so many skills that require to get there, and we've been obsessing about this for the last 5 years to make it as easy as humanly possible. If you wanna start for free, you can go check it out. And if you wanna ask me a question, I onboard all the new customers every single Monday. So sign up, start for free, and I'll see you next Monday. It's school.com/games. So we ran, we ran, we ran a high-ticket upsell and we tested $50K, $35K, $25K, and $15K. Wildly different price points. I'm just admit, I love this shit. And so it was really interesting is that the conversion rate time, basically the revenue we generated from all 4 of those was identical. And so on one hand you might think, oh, I'd rather just have fewer customers at $50,000. But for me personally, I would rather have more people that I can— again, what's my value price discrepancy? As provided the cost of goods is not like, you know, like I don't want to eat into, you know, crazy margins or something, but provided the margin on all, you know, all the services are still pretty good, I would rather have 4 times the customers to then sell, keep, and then also have a crazy like in terms of word of mouth from those people saying that my thing is unbelievable. That makes sense.

Do you know what I've noticed? Like high ticket, you can like change your price and conversion doesn't move. But with the lower ticket, it really does, which I think it's because it's more intimate. Like when you buy something that's real high ticket, you're, it's small and you're talking to a human and everything. But when it's lower ticket, it, it does seem to make a big difference.

Because I take it fundamentally, if you believe you're going to get this big expensive outcome, then logically $25K and $35K, like if you go and make a billion-dollar business, they're both worth it, like, right? It just like comes down to whether you can actually afford the, you know, the difference. And so I think it becomes like a structural conversion difference where what I mean by that is like some people literally can't afford the difference between, you know, $15K versus $50K. Like there are just some people who just literally can't afford it even though they both might want to buy it. Um, yeah, here you're, you're selling in a, you're alone. It's like you with the, your finger over the button. You're like, mm.

I mean, my fear is that if I decrease it to $87, I would piss off all the people that joined at $147. Yeah. So like, how would I test the price then?

Hmm. Well, the worst case is they could cancel and come back. Not the end of the world because, so just, just for everybody here, like just from a perspective, um, taking If you plan on having this business for a long time, then it's not going to make any difference. Like, you figuring out what the right price point is for your community is going to be the thing that matters most. And so, like, you might lose a month. Like, you're churning already at whatever, 50%. They're going to be gone in 2 months anyways. Yeah. So, like, I'm just being, like, really real, right? So, like, you— we want to tweak this stuff to get it right.

High, by the way. Yeah. Like, it's way above.

What should I aim for at this price point?

Below 20%.

Yeah.

Okay. Like good is, but good is like in between 5 and 10. Yeah. Like 20% is like average. Is it?

Yeah.

Cause I actually analyzed it. Yeah. I actually put the whole platform's numbers into ProfitWell. Oh, sick. Yeah. It took ProfitWell for like 7 days to process it and it almost broke it. Cause there's like, 50 transactions a second almost. But it's like, yeah, that's probably around the average. So what's interesting is it's coming down every month because I think people are learning more about what works and what doesn't work. But the good ones are sub-10. But so if you're 50, that price is too high.

I don't have data, to be honest.

Yeah, okay.

Yeah, this is the main point. You can do it if you just, if you have like 4 hours and some coffee.

Yeah.

So like go to your churned members and it'll click on their membership and it will tell you their LTV. We calculate it on a per-member level. So just go and fill out your own spreadsheet. Yeah. And you'll figure it out. Like it's, the numbers are there. That's what I said. You just have to use some, some different methods.

And for the like general churn, should I just export like the list of all members and compare that to like week to week or something?

No, no, you want to look at your churned members will tell you their LTV. So you want to see all of your churned members and their LTVs and then look at the average LTV. That's your LTV. From there you can reverse engineer your churn. Because LTV would be divided by your price. That gives you your, you can do the math.

Yeah, yeah, okay, that answers it, yeah.

Cool, awesome. Well, this is great. I know that we— yeah, go for it. So just going back to, well, on pricing too, and we were saying with Jim Launch, I do believe I could sell what I've built for $30K. Like, I believe I'd sell it for $30K, whatever. But I also do have a painting business.

That is my main focus.

And I am also willing to sell it, same thing, for $97K.

So just to go back to— this is what my advice to you would be, because I understand your business outside of this business. I think that I would try and— I would want it to be just high enough of a price that they care. And so maybe make it $5,000 a year, maybe $10,000. But the whole purpose is not to make money. I mean, sure, you'll make money doing that, but the real money is that if you can get those people to then open your version of painting under your logo and basically you can consolidate and have them use your systems and whatnot, then it's like they kind of basically become partners of yours as they open up locations underneath of your flag. And if you have the capital, then you can front— I'm sure the capital's not too big for starting painting stuff. I would— I mean, do you know?

I mean, it's like 27 net, right?

You can afford it. So, so like I would be like, I'll front the capital, you can get 20% and I'll give you a base and then I'll show you how to run the business or whatever. And like you're going to be a co-owner. Like that's— I think that might be the mega play for you. And then you can still use that to have that, have skin in the game and you take that community and skim from the top. So it's like you let that— like you don't need to take— you don't need to bet on them. You let them, you hold tryouts, you know, and put the pool sticks in and just see who kills each other and wins the leaderboard. And I'll bet you if your leaderboard was about who is the, who's the next one who's gonna be able to partner with you, I bet you the leaderboard would go up. Ooh, take the notes. Cool. So you got what you need to do. I have a, I have a quick question. Yeah, shoot.

You had that one formula, that one equation, conversion rate times LTV.

Was there like an equals to it? Conversion rate?

Where?

Yeah, you wrote it on the—

I think you flipped it over on the other page.

Oh, traffic chump bottom.

I don't believe that that's where it was, but I don't know if you said that you finished the equation.

Oh, for the— these guys at the top?

Yeah, I think we're just talking about like cost per acquisition.

So this is price divided by churn equals LTV. Okay. That's what this is. And then traffic times conversion. This is the other two of this is then you've got price as your levers and then you have, uh, churn. So these are the four levers of the business that we're talking about. So if you want to make more money in your community, you either have to drive more traffic to it, you have to convert a higher percentage of that traffic, you have to price it as high as you can, and you, and this is all balanced with Churn, which is, okay, well I, I can raise my price, but does that also increase churn and by how much? And so that's why we're fine. Like it's balanced between these two. And price also affects conversion. So there's a bidirectional relation between churn, price, and conversion. And then this is, this is the machine, right? This is your business machine, right? This is the machine that we have at school. This is what you drive into it, which is the traffic. So this is the effort that you guys are doing on a regular basis. This is the inputs into the— like, this is the big black box of making money. This is school. And then this is what we're driving traffic, whether it's Facebook ads or whether that's content or direct outreach or whatever it is. This then just flows into the machine.

You're looking for the maximum, like, yield. Yeah. So, like, how much dollars per click and when? And all of these variables play into that and you're looking for like the most efficient way to turn the click into some money and yeah.

Couldn't you just put that in school like this metric and just get that number so we see it because you have all the stats now.

Which one? Yeah, well I mean like yeah, I can calculate that.

It's like if we had that, if you go into the dashboard, you can see the MRR. If we could see that right underneath or maybe like you know, the churn so we can see it in real time because it's easy to see increases in MRR, but like this takes more effort.

Yeah, that's a good point. Like I, you, yeah, the next kind of metric we're rolling out is like the traffic and conversion stats that helps because now you can see your conversion and your clicks, right? And I already have that data and I've already looked at it. That's why I had some insight. And then we've already got the churn data too. So I guess, yeah, that would be an interesting formula. It would be like EPC.

Earnings per click. I think, yeah.

They could be a cool thing to see. And then— Yeah, good idea.

In this next clip, we talk about beating your competition by doing things differently than them and how to identify a great market and other great opportunities and how to approach them in a way that other people aren't seeing.

If you're on Skool, especially in like the last couple of months, you probably noticed that there's a lot of really good value there, but it's it was getting stuffy. There wasn't a whole lot of like personability.

Okay.

Or fun, so to speak. So it was an obvious niche and it kind of happened organically where the offer was solid funnel builder, stuff like this different business model though, instead of it being a high ticket all up at front and then we give you the package and then fuck off. This one was, hey, we'll work with you and you just give us a subscription.

It is.

So 1,000 MRR.

And so is it $999? What's the price?

$999.

Okay, cool.

So that was the price. And so we started with what you guys were talking about, free and high ticket.

So you had two groups? Two groups. Yeah. Okay, great. Yeah. This is a recurring theme, but it keeps going. And something else that I think— So where was traffic coming from? Just school. Okay.

We, to this day, we've never made a single— Nothing.

Not even social.

Instagram.

My friends don't know that this is going on.

No one knows. Yeah.

That you're—

Okay. Got it. So traffic was going to free group, right?

Um, yeah, traffic was going to free.

Okay.

However, school games front page would bring people to paid. So we had a link there that said, here's the free.

Okay, interesting.

Because that's where a lot of people were coming.

So it's actually kind of like this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anybody have a simpler one? Where, uh, yeah, I said I was gonna answer your question.

What's up? Selling like 15 people, 8 bought within the first hour.

Okay.

And so Everyone's like, who the hell is this guy? And then from that, it sort of was a nice flywheel.

And the presale you did inside of the free group?

Uh, yeah, actually it was friends, family members, basically anybody that had something that we could offer.

Was it a Zoom? Like, did you do like a Zoom?

It was like in-person phone calls.

Oh, okay. People in the world.

People in the world.

Yeah.

Just hitting the floor, hitting the pavement.

Okay.

So, um, that was what got it going. Yeah. But then from that point on, what we were doing was sharing— I mean, Sam doesn't like this phrase, but you know what, we'll have to come up with a different one— a valuable post, something that had it in there.

I wouldn't call what you were doing a value post. This is really interesting though, because I think this industry's gotten real weird with value posts. You know what I mean? It's like people posting value, but no one cares. Yeah, because it's not even value, it's just some bullshit opinion or article. And like, what Goose did differently is he, he made things fun and got other people to contribute on his post. So his posts blew up way more than value posts. There was like hundreds of comments and they were really fun and like alive. And so he bought like personality, fun, and like, I would say personality and fun posts, and that, those were like crushing, a lot of people engaged, and then a lot of people were like, who is this guy, and they viewed his profile, then they saw his stuff, then he got on the leaderboards, now he's got another thing feeding him. And then he got on Discovery, and now there's another thing, so by making things fun, adding some personality and being interesting and not just trying to like post articles, you, everyone kind of started to know who he was and then that energy started going there and then it started looping on itself. There was like a feedback loop. It was really interesting to see that happen, honestly.

Yeah.

And it'll probably start happening more in the future.

The GIF group is then the next one. So we're starting to see this new pattern actually where funny things are working really well. This guy made a group, it's a pure joke. When you get to level 9, you get kicked out. It's really funny. Like, see what that does to everyone instantly and every, all of these serious business owners with 7-figure businesses are joining and just laughing and posting funny shit and like, I love that. I think there's, there's definitely something that we, a topic we could talk about today about community culture. Yeah. Because I think that's how you get retention and that's how you get raving fans, is if it's, there's a culture and a vibe to it. Um, and that's starting to happen and work honestly more effective than the logic that I'm seeing really start to take off. It's quite Interesting.

That's probably how I define it.

Culture. Yeah.

Entertainment business. In other words too, I think what's really great at is making posts that are really engaging. Like I even, they gave again, plenty of 7-figure business owners. I just like, like to make it fun. So that's like your thing that you brought. It's like not a value post, just like a post that drives engagement and to make people like collaborate, which is huge. Yeah. Excellent.

There's a, there's a theory that I have behind it that actually is something that people can probably start to use. Cause it's kind of, I didn't realize it until I was looking in retrospect, but it's something that I call broccoli wrapped in bacon where it looks really stupid and fun. So you're curious about it, but by the time you're done reading, you actually learn something. So each one of my posts take like 45 minutes to an hour to make. Cause sometimes I have the funny part. Or I have the, the broccoli part, but I have to come up with the other part. And so what we started to find in this system was right after you got eyeballs, and as long as you had a good offer, you immediately could just start sharing all of your successes, everything that worked, everything that didn't work, or even how you felt that day if it was somehow valuable, but not a value post, I suppose. And, uh, The engagement went through the roof. And this is what it meant, which might help a lot of people that are here, is one of the reasons we didn't go back and start offering up ads is because at least I was nervous a little bit about the dilution of the quality of the people because they were all coming from school. And those people knew how school worked and were really fucking engaged. And so we have, I don't know, 600 members, something like this, but we're more engaged than groups with 10,000 members, a lot of them.. And every time something goes off, like let's say it's someone struggling with a, I don't know, a heartbreak of some kind, a bunch of community members just swarm on this dude and help him out. And it was that culture, as Sam was talking about, that we somehow stumbled into and realized, "Oh, okay. This is this massive thing." It's not just like kind of a niche. It's totally a niche addressing sort of the personability, the things that you might need from a friend. And then that was why people were signing up for everything else. They just wanted to be able to do that and run their business in like a safe space. So, um, there's something to be said, I suppose, about being able to, uh, reach out to the things that don't logically make sense. And that was what we ended up doing there. So as you said, the, in conclusion, the discovery ended up being that backbone where probably a lot of us should maybe lean on a little bit more. If you can, if you can get that slightly higher, the number of people that are coming into school all the time is just rising. And everyone's looking like if you've got one offer here, you've got another one over there that you can just jump over the same person. It's just a bunch of really high quality leads and people that are waiting to jump onto those. I may not have much for you to chew on there.

No, you're—

no, that was fine.

There's not much to share.

Sweet.

It's the first one we've seen that didn't really use external.

Yeah.

Yeah. Um, I mean, I know Evelyn, I mean, she obviously did drive outside traffic, but she crushes internally as well because she, she has truly valuable posts. Um, and a lot of her posts, like the difference is, so for everybody at home, uh, I feel like the difference between the value post and the quote value post and a valuable post is that the quote value posts are like, here's 6 things to— no one gives a shit, right? The valuable posts are like, I did work for you, or I took risk for you, or I spent money for you that you don't have to spend. And so fundamentally it's a bargain on time or money. And so like everyone's like, hey, I spent $25,000 on ads and these are the ads that I ran and this is what happened. If you were like, oh, shit, well, great, I don't have to do that. And this worked for her. Like, she gives her TL;DR at the end and you're like, that was valuable. Yes.

If you can blend— if you can get a blend of that and then people making like a parody video about the community, like, have you seen the ones people have made for school? Yeah. If you can get a good balance of that, that I would say is like perfection, because you've got the value but you're also smiling and feel like a part of this group. Yeah. And then you've They're like, I can't believe I'm having fun and I'm talking to people that make millions of dollars. If you get those two, it's like—

It's experience and results. So on the customer success side, like in normal B2B businesses, we talk about both. It's like you can get someone results and there's also client experience, which are just like the soft and the hard. And believe it or not, like client experience matters sometimes a lot more than even the results does. Like if you have amazing results and a terrible experience, the moment they can find somebody else who can get them the result, they will leave. But if you have an amazing experience and like mediocre results, they're like, well, I love these guys and they'll stay. Yeah.

So one of the tweaks that we ended up kind of noticing is that we, on Skool, it's so great because community, we actually don't really have the post as a thing or what we do. We really turn it back into them. So the community is the community and we really highlight that versus being like the overlord and be like, here's what we give you guys.

It's like, no.

More and more in the comments, comments, DM, like that was the thing that really just gets super fan.

Do you guys think, I'm assuming you guys engage a lot in your own community, right? And I think that's like most people could do it, but like in terms of the people at home are like, my, my community's dead. And it's 'cause you're expecting like the community to do the work. And in the beginning, like you need to drum it up. Like you need to engage, you need to be thoughtful about your responses to comments and things like that.

There are small things, they're really nuanced. I mean, Skool understands it really well because it uses the platform, but if you're making a post and you're not using a poll, you're fucking up. There's something that you can do that just adds a little bit of flavor to what you're doing. There's also, like we were talking about earlier, pinning to module. Every little thing that Skool has, if you're not using it, you're kind of leaving money on the table because there's usually a lot of thought that's gone on. Behind the scenes for that thing. And I'd even go as far as saying that, you know, we have this free-to-paid system, but probably what's going to start emerging a lot more here is what we did, where there was a lot of drop-off where people wanted to hire us from the free, but they didn't have a grand ready to go, or they didn't have their offer ready to shoot. So they would fall to a low ticket, which was just like a white label GSL, uh, GHL. But we ended up inverting it because people were like, what the hell does this software do? And you had to go and explain the whole damn thing. Instead, we just sold the mastermind, uh, later on and then gave them this as a gift, like, hey, and you also have the software. And then it just went through the roof where people just kept signing up. So inevitably we had free, low ticket, high ticket, and it's just been wonderful having that. And it's just this flywheel where people bounce around within it.

And they, of course, that gift of the software that gives them the incentive to go up, cause they're like, I want you to just do this for me. Now I know it's here, so.

Hmm, so I guess they've got the extra piece on the end of that simple funnel. They've got free, low ticket, and high ticket, which it sounds like that's what everyone eventually wants to achieve from what we've heard at all of these events. But just balancing the traffic source, the free and the paid first, is probably everyone's first step.

In this fourth clip, we talk about something that I made tons of mistakes on early. Either you've got entrepreneurs who are really good at retaining customers and don't know how to get 'em, or they're really good at marketing and sales and don't know how to keep 'em. If you are one of those people who's really good at marketing and sales and doesn't know how to keep them, this is all about making sure that they stay with you. And I'll tell you now, as an investor, the number one thing that I look at in business is how many people from last year are still paying you. It gets way easier to grow when you don't lose 100% of your customers every year.

That's a promise. If we want to talk about engagement, we did it. I've just spent weeks analyzing this and I've, what I found was honestly shocking.

That's a hook. Yeah.

Video ad.

So what's really interesting is classroom content doesn't really matter. First of all, you do not need to make a monster course. In fact, that just overwhelms everyone.

We have an hour.

Ours is less than an hour, right? Anime Shreds launched with no classroom. And no post more than one sentence. Some posts were just like 6 emojis and they had thousands of comments. So it's the things that really work I've seen and that are very low effort too is you get your community to share something about themselves. Right? So the, the, because I've seen these posts that always rip really well. Like they get, they get more comments than like a well thought out article post by the creator who pinned it. So that's like, you know, um, one that always works is like, what's your favorite book? Have you ever seen that one just keep popping up in your communities? Even if some random asks it, it just keeps getting comments in it. Have you seen this? That one, because it's just asking members to share something about themselves and then other people are curious. What's your favorite movie? If you want even the most simple one, what's your favorite GIF? That one, that one's popular. That one just guaranteed like more comments than anything else. And it's kind of a little bit more fun. It's not too much effort to think about. Um, or This one I found is really good. It's like, share 3 things you do, share something you do for fun, where you're from, and a photo of your workspace, right? Because people want to share. And so they're like, okay, I'll take a photo of my desk and workspace. I'm from Germany and I like to play golf, right? That's just sharing themself and they do a comment or a post like that and then everyone looks at the image and they notice other things. They're like, oh, you've got this desk or oh, you're into the guitar. I also play guitar and now they're making friends. You're connecting the community together.

Like we actually do use that one on the course and we tell people if you see someone's introduction post with that, comment a GIF as well and it works amazingly. And it's like the culture of the GIF that they post. Let's say they put a Wolf of Wall Street GIF on their post.

Everyone will start putting them in. Yeah. And so these, this I swear is the key to like, because when someone comes in, they're all, you just need a simple way for them to engage. And once they're engaged and if they meet someone, they're like, if now they meet someone, they're on DMs and then that moves to like a hangout in real life or on Zoom, they associate that value back to your group. Right.

I just add something as well.

Helen, can I just add something?

Yeah, go for it. Yeah, so if you want people to engage, you can do like all these like little tricks, or you can just tell them to engage as well. So like what we've done is we've just like indoctrinated people to engage with each other essentially, right? Like in a good way though. So we talked about the mastermind principle from Think and Grow Rich. We explained it to people and said, this is why you should engage with each other. And then now everyone's just hosting calls with each other, communicating, like that kind of thing. So sometimes you just need to tell people. It's the same with the Q&A recordings as well. Just tell people to watch them, give them a reason, and like tell a story that makes them want to watch it, and then they'll watch it. So it just works with anything. It's just sometimes you just have to tell them why they should do it.

Yeah, this is huge. Like, especially on the Q&A calls, people sometimes have a question like, does anybody here know blah, blah, blah? And if there's like 30 people and there's 600 in the community, we're like, well, have you made a post? And always no. So we like make a post, we'll pin it, maybe if it's a good one, and like just telling people that they can make a post, they almost feel like they don't have the permission when they join the community, but like, no, you can make a post. You can ask if somebody here knows this or does that and just, you know, doing that, especially if something more advanced that you can't really answer in 5 minutes, I think that's huge.

Yeah, that's good for like the regular conversation. I think you need to imagine a blend of like sometimes you need to share like something you did Like, you need to always pay attention to problems your community has, and you as the leady, it's your job to like find the best solution. And you can kind of crowdsource it, but sometimes you have to go and explore your own on your own, and then you find it and you bring it back and you share it. You're like, hey, we found— we know this is a problem, we did this, we found the solution, and here it is. That, that's like good leadership. Then you need but you need some fun stuff in there for sure. I'm honestly shocked at how much of a difference it makes if you have it. I honestly would go as far as saying it's more important than the value. Like, because I've seen 7-figure people join groups that are purely for entertainment, but with other 7-figure people. So it's like the value happens as an accident. And members contributing, Like I think one of the most common problems I've seen is people say, I've got members in my community, I'm posting 5 times a day, but no one's commenting. Right? That, have you seen people say that? Yeah. And it's because the people that have engaged communities aren't posting 5 times a day. Their members are commenting. It's a difference. And when you write an article this long, that's just an opinion piece. What is someone supposed to say? Like, really, like, and you're putting a burden on them to read that fucking thing.

Like, who wants to read that? Another follow-up you can do to get more engagement too is, uh, I like to never answer anything in the comments. I always ask questions. So everything gets answered with a question, which follows a thread for every person. Um, and, and, and you get the research, you get to find out those problems.

You can Yeah, asking a question, it's just that always works so well. It's crazy.

Yeah.

I think a really good idea too is if you have something that's like a community review, like for example, we have Music Money and a lot of, we tell a lot of the artists to post their new music, post their new beats, and then the community members will review and be like, oh, I think you should tweak this, I think you should tweak that. And then we have another community where it's mainly about like content, making good content. And people will post their content or post a link to their content. It's almost like I don't know if you guys remember like the engagement groups, like back in the day where like they'll post it and everybody goes and comments and likes on their posts on Instagram, and that increased a lot more engagement around the community too.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

And just one more thing to add onto that, like I think people underestimate like how well information travels in the form of a meme, right? Like a meme can communicate like a 45-minute video worth of information to the right person, right? If they're a sponge, you can soak the information out of it. And so, I just think like whenever I see like the videos Ryan posts, right? Or like something like that, I'm like, oh, that's funny.

You see the Fast and Furious?

I was dying.

I watched it like 400 times. Yeah.

So like, I think people just underestimate like, all right, like, you know, like what Goose does is like, you know, he makes it fun to read a post. I think a meme just like sucks your eye in. And so it's like if you can figure out how to communicate something through a meme, then you're killing it, you know?

Yeah.

I just watched this movie last night. It's really good. Dumb Money. Anyone seen it? It's about the GME, GameStop versus the hedge funds, and it's a WallStreetBets forum. They have a— they had a very good culture, you know. They invented Diamond Hands, and like, they were making memes of like the WallStreetBets head spanking the hedge funds, like, you know. And everyone just felt like they were in this David versus Goliath like thing. And they were all part of something, and that's the most powerful thing you can get, is when you get that culture there. I think school community in the last month has finally found something. There's like this culture because people are contributing these parody videos. That must have taken them a long time. If you've seen the Harry Potter one—

I made the, I made the Friends one, took me like 4 hours.

The Harry Potter one must have taken a week. Intensive. You've seen the Harry Potter one, right? Yeah.

Um, I've seen the Mortal Kombat too, but the power—

like referencing that dumb money thing, that guy just tweeted out a picture just the other day of a dude leaning up to play games and GameStop stock shot up again from dude just tweeting a picture, right? Just like no words attached, nothing. People are like, oh, it's back on, I need to, you know, buy into this GameStop. And so That's what the power of a meme is.

Is that a kitty guy posted that? Yeah, yeah. You've got to watch this movie. Write it down. Dumb Money. Not only is it an amazing movie just for straight entertainment, but this guy who led that GameStop thing is probably one of the best community leaders we've ever seen on the internet because he brought down some hedge funds. Yeah. And up with memes.

Nothing but memes.

And he wasn't promising the world to people either at first. He wasn't telling people GameStop was going to go up 100x. He was saying this is going to go up 4 or 5x. And I feel like that's another thing people can do is not overpromise whenever, and then people are like, yes, I believe it can do what you're saying it's going to do. And then everybody believes in it.

And then, you know, yeah, yeah, that, that is perfect. Exactly what happened in that movie. And that's what we're starting to see happen in school. Like people are making these parody videos and then people would laugh. And then we started seeing people posting like This is the most positive place I've ever seen on the internet. Like, that's pretty powerful. So people want to go where the energy's good, right? Like, if you scroll your Instagram and you feel bad, and you go to Facebook, bad, Twitter, World War something, then you go like, you know, you go to school and there's some funny videos and someone making a million dollars. That is the ultimate, right? Like People winning and people laughing. Yeah.

We've seen two outstanding ways that you can drive culture, especially if you're trying to pivot.

One of them's categories.

It's super passive. This, like, the thing that's right above your feed where you can sort of— when someone comes in, they get a pretty good idea. This is actually Sam's idea. They get a good idea of what the place is for. So even if you don't actively use them, it's just kind of a good foundation. We've got a lot of good feedback back from that. Even though I hated them at first, they're super useful. In like a level 1 sort of way. And this, then the more important one is your pin post.

Does anyone rotate their post?

Actually, I learned this shit from you. Did you?

Yeah.

All right.

That was the first thing I ever saw.

Who's this dude? Long hair.

I clicked your post and he's like, rotate 2 pin posts a day. I do that with myself and I do that with, uh, with Justin as well. Awesome. Rotating pin posts.

It's overpowered actually.

And so how long until you saw results? Immediately. Awesome. Yeah. Okay.

You rotate pin posts and people, and you, my favorite thing is when you see people typing like, yeah, everyone's like, oh, what are they talking about?

Yeah. So what we, what we did with them is exactly this. Uh, the pin post, when you first start a community, your first, uh, thought is, oh, I need to start here so that everyone knew, knows exactly where to go, which actually kind of fucks you after a little while because the people that are coming back, seeing the shit, see the same shit every single time they come back. And so you kind of want to speak to them more. So you post the pin of the Start Here post in a classroom module or, you know, whatever you need in the Start Here classroom. And then the pin posts are just the stuff that's going on day to day. You've got a crazy idea, or if you can't post that day, you take one of your community members and you post them up there and they're fucking jazzed to be pinned.

Oh yeah, that one's— if you pin your members' stuff, that's key. I think you should always aim to have at least one or two. The ultimate is all of the pin posts from other people that aren't can't you? It just shows the community that if they— they— it is possible for them to make something that you're willing to pin at the top. And then it, it's like creating this incentive for people to do that. Um, the other thing I would say is you should always be just sensing and on the lookout for who the most valuable contributors are in your group. Or in your community. So like, you know, when Ghosts, when Ghosts kind of started to take off, I sent him a DM and I said, now that you've proven yourself school hardcore, like, what do you think of this upcoming feature? Right? So I started to bring him in and give him like access, way more access to me. And, and then, you know, he's been at the office all week. Helping design screens for the next 3 months. That's right. So, I mean, Ted Carr, who's hosting a skill meetup right now in LA with 100 people, um, he has a key to our office, so he can just— in the alarm pin code, he can just walk up whenever he wants, and we just talk about sensitive things in front of him. It's like he's a member of our team. But what I'm trying to say here is, when you see those people You need to reward them because all a group needs to keep it engaged, even when it's big, is 10 true regulars people like. It's like a sitcom, right? Like how many people watch Friends, but it's just like 5 people, right? But it's those people that get everyone else to come because they like the vibe and they like it. So, you know, we've got people like Ted, we've got people like Goose. Um, there's Max Persson, there's Evelyn, right? All of them contribute a different piece. This Ryan guy with GIF is adding a new kind of flavor. Kirby was adding something, now he's on the team. Matthew was adding something, now he's in charge of our podcast. And so, and there's a lot more people, but you've got to find those. When you do see those people, you need to like do something to make them feel like they've they're a part of the leadership in a way of the community?

What I did is I hired one of the best guys to do a weekly call. So I just pay him $100 and he does one of the weekly calls. So he's like a professional software engineer and he just helps with like the technical questions. So he was already posting a bunch, but I asked him, hey, do you want this? Because he already was attending every single call. So might as well get $100 for it. And literally for $400 a month, I get like a professional software developer that just hosts a weekly call in my community.

Yeah, this is how you find your team, by the way. Like, honestly, everyone we've hired that's on the non-software engineering side is from Skill users. Like, when someone applies, I look, I'm like, where's their link? Can I look at their activity chart? And I'm like, this person doesn't use Skill. Like, why? If they don't care about Skill, I don't want to hire them. So like, if someone literally cares about your community and is contributing without getting paid, then they're going to obviously believe in what you're doing, right? This is changing topics from engagement, which I don't know if we should do yet, but that is how you find great people.

Yeah, I want to hit on one thing with engagement. So we've tossed around the word culture and we haven't defined the word culture. And so I'll just share mine. That might be helpful, which is the rules that govern reward and punishment in an organization. And so if you think like we have either spoken rules or unspoken rules, but there are rules of how you act. And so if you're with your buddies, if you say, hey, I got my girlfriend flowers, they just might all of a sudden say like, oh, you like sucking dick too? You know, like, you're like, okay, that's the rule. That's a rule of behavior, right? Like if you do something that's nice for your wife or girlfriend, you're going to get made fun of. But it's because they like you, right? And so, but like if you said that to your parents or your, you know, whatever at the dinner table, they'd be like, oh, that's really sweet. Or that's really nice of you. Right. And so it's different rules. So there's a different culture at the family dinner table than there is when you're out with your buddies. And so fundamentally trying to define what are the rules that govern what gets rewarded and what gets punished within my community will dictate what the quote culture is within it. And so just kind of thinking about that in terms of those terms will probably make it a lot easier. And so to your point, Goose, I actually think this is, uh, the categories piece that you're saying really, really important. And the main reason I say that is because like if people are about to make a post, when you see what the categories are, This signals or this tells them, this is what we want you to post about. And so this is like, this is an innate rule to this community. Like we want you to post about wins. We want you to post about traffic. We want you to post about monetization, we want you to post about whatever. So it might be like, you might have like GIFs, like they'll have, imagine the community, like same identical community, internet marketing, right? Just something like completely generic. And the categories in one are GIFs, memes, right? Like, something that makes money or like money-making, uh, wins and, uh, just for kicks, right? And so like that is one community and the other one is, um, conversion rate, value posts, uh, question, whatever, right? And so when you see the two of those, like you have a very different feel for those communities before you even engage. And so like right off the bat, that's the, that's the banner, literally that the subcategory of all the topics that are going to get discussed. And so like, if you want to shift the conversation that's going to happen within the culture of you or within the, within the community that you have, telling them what you want them to talk about with the categories feels like one of the most important things that you can do to do that. And you also, by, by very nature of having those topics means these are what we reward. Yeah.

And what we actually did is, um, we like gamified the categories as well. So when it's like, um, I think Sam did it with like soan.com is he made people like ring the bell. So we got like a clip from a game like GTA 5 where Trevor says, show me the money. And every time someone gets a win, they post that. But rather than calling it a wins category, you put, haha, show me the money. And every time they got a win, they'd post it and it would just make it way more responsive. Everyone would come, haha, show me the money every time someone gets a win. And it just goes insane.

And you can have it be wins or you can have it be funny the way you have it. It's still accomplishes the same thing. But one of them is like, I'm more inclined to post this if I don't feel like I'm flexing, you know what I mean? So yeah, I think this was like a, I like would double star that personally. And then I think that pinning your members feels very important. Like think about like what's, that's like a jackpot reward. Like this is what we reward in general. And if you pin certain posts, then that's a super reward. This is like, let me put this guy on the, on a literal pedestal and tell everyone in my community, this is what I want you to do. This is me doing a big reward. For somebody who does this. And so it orients the behavior of everyone in the community.

And then I'd say what I do is like pinning is probably the first, or saying this is a great post or this is amazing, right? That's key.

Like, you see me do this, I do it all the time.

Tell people, then pinning them, but also sending them a DM. And then the only people I DM are the people that are like the most school hardcore, basically. And that I talk to them all the time. And then the next level of hardcore is every now and then we'll be on Zoom. And then the next level is they'll be at the office, right? It's literally what I do, not by design or deliberately. This is just how it happened. But bring those people closer and give them more. Because by the way, they also give me the best feedback. They're helping design school, literally. And you can use them to help you shape the future of this, of the thing you're building. And when the community, when a new member comes in and they see that you're really tight with members like that, they're going to be like, oh shit, if I can get my way up there, like I can have that too. Do you get what I'm saying? If you, if you do this, it'll work. It'll work really well. And it's not exhausting at all. It is the least exhausting business I've ever run because I don't have to talk to anyone like everyone. There's no, I'm never promising that. I only talk to the people who I think, who I want to talk to really. Yeah.

There was a point a few days ago, the school games community was really dead.

No one was posting.

I was like, fuck, I'm going to get fired. All I did was I added a category called banter. And I messaged Ryan, who's the GIF guy, who's top of the school community, and I said, made this for you. And immediately he made a post. There's 300 comments in like 2 hours from one post. And also on the reward punishment thing, whenever Evelyn posts, every single time she posts, I'll comment Evelyn overdelivers again, just like reinforce the good behavior. And the DMs, I probably send 10 a day. If there's ever a good comment, I DM and I'm like, this was a great comment. That was a great post. And then bad behavior. If someone posts bad stuff, don't like it, message them and say, here's our rules. Here's what a bad post looks like. Reward good.

Here's what a bad post looks like. Your post.

See screenshot. I got a quick, a quick tactic that's been like working wonders for our culture. Sure. I have all my guys when they join put it like in their bio in school, I put like a 15-minute calendar link and then I'm like always referencing it. So I'm like, I mentioned like, hey guys, like book the 15s. I put it on my roadmap. I have like a little roadmap, like book 3 15s with these guys. And I'm doing all the closing right now. So like, I'll like go on my live calls and I'll notice that 2 guys who are across the country from each other have so much in common. And I like reach out to them like, yo, you should book a guy with— I feel like you should book a call with this guy because of Y, X, Y, Z. And then I follow up with that later, like how'd that call go? And then I get a ton of like insight on like all my members and like what they're communicating outside of me. Because like there's like a little like a power dynamic where like I'm the head coach, I'm the CEO guy, right? So I don't get like a lot of like vulnerability.. But I can get the insight from my community members through each other. And the concept actually came from when I was a frat president, because we would have our top 10 exec guys go on constant 15-minute lunch breaks with all the new members. And then that's how we collected mass information and connected guys, like pledges, together before the recruitment process, so that they would have friends before they even joined the thing. And so like the result of that is like I have like buddies like flying down to like Dallas to meet Gladiators who I didn't even like— like they're doing it on their own now, because the reward is so high.

They're getting like brothers. So I'm gonna, I wanna say back to you, so the users in the community, yeah, you tell them to put like a Calendly link for 15 minutes. So, and then whenever you see people that you think make sense and they already, it becomes an innate rule of the community, which is like, hey, if you like someone, just like click their link and book a call. And they might just segment out, you know, one part of their calendar where they have, you know, opening to just banter or whatever. Maybe they do it for their lunch breaks and they meet new people every day. Yeah.

Whatever it is. I tell 'em like, I too, I do like an hour for 3 days a week that's just open. Yeah.

And it crushes.

So a lot of people do use that almost. Yeah. So I tested it with like 5 or 6 guys and they all loved it.

And so I'm making it mandatory for everybody now.

Who's using the map? Using the map? The map. It's not a school feature. This, this.

Are you using it? We have members meeting up constantly in person that they've met through Music Money and doing like studio sessions and stuff. And that's honestly like, like you guys said, like they, they equate that their connection to being a part of Music Money. And so I feel like they've, you know, people have— I just saw the school games pop up, but they just— people just share their location. Who's in Atlanta?

Who's in Detroit? You know, it was interesting. I was in— I'm in Hamz's group and he did a post like, what's the most valuable part of the community? And he's trying to remove some stuff and emphasize some stuff. And what could we— what's one simple thing we could do to improve it? I was— the most common answer was get more people to plot their location on the map.

I was like, what? We, we actually took that idea just a little bit further. We're not sure if it'll work yet, but it's incredibly popular. It's been our most popular piece so far, which was setting up a system that the community could engage on so that it continued that flywheel sort of perpetually. And what we're calling it is, it's, uh, it's based off the school games and we're just calling it Rainbow Games. And we just have a pile of things at the end that you can win. And the structure is, uh, you'll be assigned teams between 3 to 5. You have one team captain. They coordinate with our community manager. And the objective is to compete based off of 3 metrics: where they are on the leaderboard, from— and these are all based on a 30-day time span, so it'll basically be one-to-one with school games— where they are on the leaderboard, what their own personal score is on how much they've grown in their own relationships and health, and then the last one is how good their offer is based off of where they started from before. So we're using those three different metrics. People were super jazzed about it. And we had, I think like 30 signups to do this thing that we'll probably do this next week. We don't know all the little intricate details, but I think there's a massive opportunity there. Whereas previously, like when you're starting, probably most of us have run into this. You really want to get a few community managers to like lift up from the bottom and help comment and stir up conversation. But at a certain point when it's feeding itself, you can sort of just give that momentum by doing top-down. Where they are in teams or some form of competition and reporting to the community manager. So now the manager's doing less time but having more impact.

Yeah, and the more you reward the top members versus trying to dig up the bottom members, those top members dig up the bottom members. You know, it actually is less—

it's like your model. Yeah, and it could be something super stupid. We— the biggest request that we've had recently is I designed a few profile pictures because they wanted more color in their thing. So I was like, all right, if you're on the leaderboard, I'll go ahead and do it. And now it's one of the things that we offer in there because people really want it.

And it's silly. Didn't you guys design a whole suite of GIFs for Skull?

Yeah, yeah, he made like a library of GIFs.

Forgot about that. Yeah, Sid said he was going to implement them. That'd be a sweet like level 6 unlock. Like if you get to level 6, I'll make your profile thing for you.

One more question for you. And just for the context, right, you said if you go back in time, make Gym Launch $10K a year. So I'm kind of in this new building phase of like, I'm going to make my product $10K a year, honestly, go big head long tail with it. So like, what were like the 2 to 3 like specific things that you would like definitely implement into Gym Launch's model back then, like with your knowledge now to actually make people like renew year over year?

Yeah.

Okay.

Because I got to figure out where my content is going.

Thank you for bringing this up because this is what I— it was something that I wanted to talk about. So what everyone, in my opinion, what you want to do, and school's going to very quickly be able to facilitate this, so I'm really excited about that. You have one-time value and then you have ongoing/consumable value. All right. And I think the big issue, it's my opinion, in the information/education space is that we try, we have one, we have one thing here that we try to build for both.. And so we're like, okay, well I can get someone to say yes to $35,000, whatever. And because they can't pay that today, I'm gonna spread it over a year and I'm gonna deliver all the one-time value up front. And then they're still making payments of $25,000, you know, whatever, $2,500 a month, uh, month 3, month 4, month 5, month 6. But the problem is the value. So think about it like this. Value is going like this, but this is price, and this is where people cancel value. And so when you, when you sell them initially, they're like $2,500, which is my first payment. Look at the difference between price and value. I'm stoked, this is great. But the day after you learn how to run Facebook ads, when you buy something to learn Facebook ads, The value of the content teaching you Facebook ads descends to zero. There's no additional value, right? And so this is why, in my opinion, this is where I think the industry should go or will go. And if I started over again, this is what I would do, is you have one-time value that you need to be really clear about. So this is a lot of times, this is gonna be the education, right? Um, for the most part, this is, this is the entirety of this, right? This is the education, the checklist, the tools, the blueprints, the whatever, right? Now this usually has, a lot of value because you're teaching someone something, a skill that's very important, and they're gonna have that skill forever. It's a one-time payment for an ongoing permanent value increase for them. But all this stuff, so you've got community, right? People consume that on a monthly basis. There's, uh, calls, right, that they consume on a monthly basis. Uh, for us, like for example, we did a Boiler Room, which is something that we did, uh, for gyms, which was, um, we would train their sales staff.. And so we would drill them every day. So we basically run their sales meeting for them every morning to increase the close rates at the gym. They didn't want to do it, nor were they good at it. If we could increase the close rate at the gym, they'd make more money, they'd stay, right? It's consumable. Um, uh, we had ads, which for us was consumable cuz I would spend 50 grand a month testing ads in like 10 representative markets. I would take the winners and then I would give, I would license those winners to 1,000 locations. So there was zero cost in that besides the 50K. Then everything after that was gravy, right? And so that was why it was such a high profit margin business, or still is. And so the idea here is if you put on a, on a sheet, what's the one-time value that I deliver and then what's the ongoing value? And if you were to only do this, only price this in a way that most people are like, wow, just these things alone are worth X, this becomes your ongoing price and this becomes your upfront. And so that is the concept of big headlong tail. But what you want to do is you wanna make sure that what is being built on a regular basis that is ongoing value is ongoing value. The things that you build one time are one-time value. And so then, then you can create that discovery. So rather, so, so probably for most of these quote, you know, the coaching education businesses, instead of saying, okay, I'm gonna sell you something for $30,000, it's $2,500 a month. It might be it's $10K upfront and then $500 a month. But then no one cancels, right? And so then you just play with how do I liquidate, you know, cost to acquire. And the thing is, this is where the patience of like, if I did this all over again, like the, the business model that gets fastest to $20 million isn't necessarily the one that gets fastest to $100 million because you might have this price, the old pricing model, which skyrockets to $20 million a year or whatever. But then like you have a really hard time passing because churn starts eating away at you. And so you're like, shoot, I need to sell more, I need to sell more. But it's really tough. Especially in a niche to sell more, right? Whereas if you're not losing the customers, then the first year you do, you know, 8, the next year you do, you add another 8 on top, you're at 16, third year you're at 24. You're like, oh, actually by year 3, I'm a little bit above what the other one was. But the first one you're at 20 and you think you're hot shit because you're beating the other guy who's lower ticket, right? But year 4, all of a sudden this guy's now at 32 and you're still stuck at 20. You're questioning your life and everybody hates you, right? But this guy's like, man, the price to value for my stuff is through the roof. That makes sense. And when you want to sell something else, you have this massive distribution of people who love you and your brand, your reputation are all great because you delivered something really valuable and you charge for it. And then you deliver something, let's be honest, less valuable, but then you charge appropriately. Does that make sense? Yeah. So this allows you to have basically price here, price. And then it drops to here for your ongoing. And so you still always have the delta. This is how I think about it.

Yeah, that's super helpful. I never had like the discrepancy between the one-time and ongoing value.

I would try to bunch the ongoing with the $6K ticket price, but now I'm going to go, right? And so one thing I think is again a mistake that most people make I mean, myself included, I made this mistake. I think it's the best— it's how most people do this in this business is they take it and they spread the payments over a year or some arbitrary amount of time. I would rather say like, I want to be very clear, you're paying this for this and that for that. And so if you need a payment plan, we're going to front— like, it's— I'm not spreading over a year. Like, you need to pay this off as fast as possible because that's what you're paying for. And I may be doing you a favor, like I'll split pay it, I'll 3-pay it or whatever. And that might mean that the ticket price, like, and here's the funny thing is that everyone here knows this who's in the high-ticket world. You sell something for $30,000, you're not collecting $30,000. You collect however many payments your churn is times 20. It's like, okay, yeah, but we churn at 25% a month and our price point's $2,500. So really it's $10K. That's what you're actually making. So whatever you claim versus what you make are two very different things. And so if that's really what you're making, then maybe you just charge $7,000 and you get way more people to say yes. Because the thing is, is when you have a $30K price point, you still have to make the $30K sale, but you're not even collecting $30K. It's like the worst of both. It's like you have a lower conversion because the price is high, but you're not even collecting on the low conversion. And so it's like sell at $7,000 maybe. And then let's say the churn on the $500K is, I don't know, whatever, 4%, right? And so now all of a sudden it's 25— you're getting 25 months at $500K. So you get $12,500 on the back. $7 on the front, now you're at $19.50 in LTV. And because you charge $7 upfront instead of trying to confront a $30K price point, you might sell 2 or 3 times as many. And now your EPCs go up 6x because you had— you tripled, you doubled LTV, but you might also 1.5x conversion or double conversion. So now you 4x EPCs in terms of your earnings per click or your conversion, what each, each person is worth to you. This is, in my opinion, the better way to run the business. Most people just don't do it.

And maybe in 5 years they'll find this video.

And is that what made Jim Launch sellable? No, what made Jim Launch sellable was that I did nothing in it and it was very consistent and we had multiple forms of acquisition. And so I had to basically paint the picture, which was that, did you know that 30% of gyms go out of business every year? And I mean, they're like, oh, I didn't know that. And I was like, right. So no matter what, structurally, a third of gyms go out of business because it's a tough business in general. And so the good news of that also is that every year another 30% enter the market. And so we can stay at this place and we can sell all the new gyms that come in. And that means that this business will just, you know, continue to maintain. And then the opportunity for growth is going to come from, you know, some of the other things that I had already like planted seeds for that were going to be down the line to increase LTV. Great.

I just want to say that's beautiful. That's like exactly what I needed.

So thank you.

I'm ready to, like, go home and work. So, yeah, see you guys. For real.

Yeah, that was clutch. Thank you. Because with the coaching business, you answered my question that I've been asking for, like, 6 months.

What is the end goal? Yeah, you've been asking me for 6 months.

No, not you.

Check it out. He's like, I have tagged you every single day. Every day. Story post. Yeah. Oh, good. Okay, great. Number 5, we talk about how to build a community within any business, and every single business has a community. They just have bad ones and good ones, but every business has one. And so if you're doing it the bad way, there's nonexistent. The second worst way is when it's just dependent on you having a relationship with every single customer. The ideal way is that every one of these customers has a relationship with one another so that if your break with them breaks, they still stick because they've got 5 other connections to other people in the community and that strengthens the bond. That's what creates a network within a community and then it will always be bigger than you because one person can only have so many relationships and that's what allows your business to grow bigger than you. This is just how I would explain it. It's like each one of these people on the right, this is the traditional way that most people are doing it, which is that they try and become more and more interesting than the self model. That's literally guru model. Yeah.

Yeah. Here, I'll just write it. Guru model doesn't work well for community, by the way. If you just post, it doesn't work. And if everyone wants to talk to you, you're going to be exhausted.

Yeah. Yeah. And so I think about this. So like, this is what it looks like visually. And with your eyes, you can almost immediately see the difference. But the point that I would highlight is look how many tie-ins these people have to the community versus those people. Those people only have one tie. And so likely, like if this breaks, right? This breaks, this guy leaves, right? He gets out. But if all of a sudden this breaks, right? He stops talking to that guy. He's still not, he's not going anywhere. Right? Or this breaks, like nothing happens. And so I think a lot of the things that we're talking about here are trying to get to this, which is like, we're talking about the maps, we're talking about the 15-minute thing. We're talking about encouraging the engagement between them. Like the whole point of all this stuff is to facilitate that. Like, why do we want them to share things about themselves and take a picture of their car, take a picture of their workspace or, or show themselves on the map? It's because then they can start orienting themselves with one another. Like that's, that's how they connect with each other. Cause they can find similar things. And so it's like, how can we create a space that rewards them sharing things that they can find similarities? Cause fundamentally they have a shared interest, but until they know the rules of engagement, they're just gonna be like, okay, well, I don't wanna get punished for doing something. And so by having the categories, by pinning exactly what you want people to do, by DMing those people afterwards, like those are all things that then encourage more and more of this, which then creates this. And then this, I'm actually really pumped that this is the direction that the conversation went in because in a past, you know, uh, probably one or two ago, we went really deep on retention. Right. And so there's lots of like what I would consider like the hard science stuff of retaining the community. And I'm glad that Goose, you're here for like to basically have the other side of the conversation of retention in the community, which is the whole experience. Right. And what are the rules of how this community works and what do we reward and what do we punish? And I think like, I'll bet that the people who are watching this and probably you guys too, you might be able to cut your churn even more by doing this stuff.

Somebody had a hand. Yeah, shoot. Yeah. I have two kind of questions. How do— because I resonate with this a lot. How do you go from guru, like once you already are operating on the right side, How then would you go to the left? You don't decrease you, you increase them. That's good. Yeah.

Okay.

That answers that. The second one is—

for real, it did. Okay. How do you sell? Because I think a lot of the conversation is pre-framing. So I used to work for a lady. She had 4,500 members. And then what she would tell them is if you cancel, you can never come back for a year. Right? Which was awesome because people would never leave, like it decreased churn. And then the second thing was they would have requirements like for them to do.

Um, like what are your thoughts on that? I've seen the, the you can't come back thing have zero effect in some businesses because they're like, yeah, I'd never want to come back anyways. I don't really care. Um, and so like, it's like, it's kind of one of those chicken egg things where like if you have a valuable community, then people fear losing it and so then they don't want to cancel. But at the same time, if you have a valuable community, then you've already won and so it doesn't matter.

Okay. Just one more point on that question. Would you sell an outcome different than you would sell a community?

I wish I could just sell a community. Yeah. Right. People have a hard time ascribing value to community. I mean, like in the gym world, we used to say sell the bikini. They come for the bikini, they stay for the community. And like the way that you, you have the offer in terms of the outcome that they're gonna have is gonna be the thing that, that's gonna bring them in. Right. But then all of this is the stuff that's gonna get them to stay. And so I would say there's different objectives, like to get someone to convert, you talk about the outcome to get them some to stay. They're going to like, you, you wanna reward as many times as you can with that community. And basically it's too arduous for one business owner to reward every single person as many times as they possibly can to get someone to stick.. And it's so much easier to create the system that allows the culture that allows people to reward each other at a way higher frequency than you ever could as a guru.

Cool. And I really wanna like, right, like what's the word? Emphasize like the leverage here on this left side. Like if you have a lot of client knowledge, you can connect guys and it will exponentially increase your leverage on how valuable your community is. Like for example, like, like Justin right here, like you should network, I think. You should network with other Justin over there and maybe Pablo because you guys both have like this commercial construction experience, right? Like, I don't know anything about commercial construction. Because I know like one detail about that, you guys can get like a quick 15, and then you'll like associate that connection with like the value of my community and that connection and build a little like that. So like I can like almost like increase my leverage into like that construction space, for example, even though I don't know much about it, but it'll add so much value to the community as a whole and make you guys level up too.

So it's like a win-win. Yeah, this is huge. I actually sold a few people that way. Somebody asked me if I have something on sales AI agents and I didn't. So I searched up school and it loaded up a few members that specialized in this. So I was like, if you join today, I'll connect you to XYZ who is doing exactly this.

And they join for that and then I connect them. You wore them out. It's great. It's resourceful. No, it's good. It's good. I feel like this is the visual. Like, I feel like this is the main difference. Like, this is what all the tactics that we were talking about earlier, this is the end result of good culture.

Like, what happens is when community members start getting known, like, the leaders of the community kind of get jealous and they like to remove them or like to punish them. So you need to work on your internal side as well and be comfortable with people leading your community as well for you.

Does that make sense? I feel like we have— yeah, we have champions inside of the school. I mean, like all the, all the names that Sam referenced earlier, like you bring the people closer to you who you want to encourage and create distance for the ones who you don't want.

Yeah, I literally never even think about that. Like, we're building you guys up, literally. Like, we're trying to give you guys the fame. And then the more we do that, the better the community is. So like, it— I know what you're saying though. I had this realization all of a sudden. But yeah, the peop— if you have that mindset, you'll never have a good community because the moment there's someone that has anything good to say, you're gonna like kick them out.

Yeah, exactly. I'm not saying I have it, I'm saying don't have it. Yeah, it might happen. It's kind of natural with humans, you know what I mean, to kind of get jealous.

You've got to be mindful of things that might be not what— they don't align with your vision for the community. Like, oh, everyone, this thing is just way too complicated, and I think this is a dumb idea. Even if people like it, I, I'm not a fan of this. It's not for a personal reason, I just— it doesn't align with the vision of of the thing. So you'll— you can't let it just go out of control. You have to shape it a little bit, but that comes in who you reward and who you pull closer.

And yeah, yeah, I mean, when we, we talked about this before, even thinking like when we were coming up with the idea of the school games overall, was we wanted to have as many like school games champ— like, it's the games, like we want school games champions. Like, that was the whole, the whole point was to elevate it because We already, like, already have the clout, you know what I mean? It's like our whole goal is to like get as many other people. So we have lots, 'cause think about it this way is like you want to have as many different walks of life and like avatars within the community that represent success. Like with, obviously within, you know, the wider the box, the more varied the community, the champions can be. But like, like I would love to, like, this isn't planned, this just happens organically, but it's like, I'm glad that Evelyn is a girl who's, you know, really, really awesome inside of the community. And there's also, black guys and white guys and older guys and young— like, we had a grandmother who hit, you know, $1 million. Like, it shows that, like, anybody can do it. Obviously, we're super, super broad in terms of what we're looking at. But even within the subsegment of whatever niche you're going after, you're going to have different psychographics, different demographics that can be represented. And that's— that only increases the amount of people like this guy or this— let's call this a lady, right? These might be lady people, right? And then this might be a dude, right? And these might be dude people, but if this person can't find connection, then there's no, no ties, and then she leaves. Right. So having different people that represent even kind of slightly different flavors, like chocolate and caramel, chocolate and coffee, like it's like you have, you have chocolate as your community, but it's like different type, different flavor, subflavors of chocolate.

Yeah. We can definitely see those circles in school community, like the ads people.

Yeah. The, like, creators.

And there's the creators, guys, all the, like, the YouTubers, right? Yeah. Then there's the, there's definitely the girls, and there's definitely, I call them the Chads, like, we call, we joke around at that about that, like, oh, that's the Chad network. Um, and then there's the, like, the boomers, like, for sure. And by the way, that's a massive population.

Bigger than any other generation. The largest business that we have in the portfolio crushes with Boomers.

So they have all spending power. Was that—

it's the largest generation in the world with the most money, with the most, and spending power.

Like, you have both. Like, sell to them. Um, and yeah, you can start to see these different things. It makes the culture more interesting. Then I'd say the goose and gift people. Like, I honestly, for a period, we were seeing posts like, how do I— how to goose instructions. And like, did you guys see all of these goose posts? It was like goose was taking over at one point. And then when Ryan came in with GIF, I'm not shitting you, the amount of our GIF usage on our— across our platform spiked so much that Giphy called us and said we needed to discuss a paid enterprise plan. And now we have to pay them a grand a month. Because we're using 500 terabytes a month. It's a testament to culture. Yeah, and it's like, but then everyone saw that and they were like, oh, I can use GIFs in my community. I can use polls. I can be more like Goose. And they're learning these different elements that they can play with. In their community. Yeah. The other one I would say is calls. Calls is getting, getting the moment you take someone from just an avatar and some text to being on Zoom. It's like now you've got a voice. Now you can see a face. Now there's some expressions and there's more depth. So if you're not doing calls, this is, I'm sure everyone here is doing calls, but I bet you there's people at home that are thinking they need to make a lot of classroom content. No, I swear all you need to do is have 3 posts that like introduce yourself and share a photo of your workspace. What's your favorite book? What's your favorite movie? What's your favorite GIF? There's 4 posts that are easy. And then 1 call on the calendar that could be just called coffee hour. And there's no agenda. You just hang out on Zoom while you have your morning coffee. Maybe once a week, 3 times a week, whatever. Done. Then let it happen first, right? And then you can figure out, okay, I'm going to make this little module because this is what— then you can start serving your community, but it has to be there before you know what they want, right? And then you start serving and you keep adding things and curating, and then it's more valuable. So now maybe you charge, and now maybe you increase the price over time. And do you see what I'm saying? Like that's all you need to start. We're actually going to hide the classroom tab when you create a new community. Hmm. Well, we looked at retention. Making a course has no correlation to retaining as a customer. In fact, it's one of the reasons why people turn, right? Because they say, I don't have a camera, right? I don't have a lighting setup and I will come back when I've made my content. Yeah, no shit. So it is, and it has no correlation with retention. So we're like, okay, let's just hide that tab and let's just get, encourage people to make a calendar and do 3 simple posts and then bring people in. Down now, the engagement's happening. And then you learn you don't have to write article posts. You don't need to. This isn't Substack. Like, you don't have to sit down and like invent these articles all the time. You're not a writer. You're, you're bringing people together. It's, it's a— there's a difference there, but it's very hard for people to grasp for some reason.

There was something that, that you were mentioning before about, um, I'll take it to take it one step further. It's come up once, but A lot of times the offer that you have, this isn't for everybody, but it's quite easy for an offer to be hard to sell. And the person that needs it can't recognize it when they see it. But fundamentally you can kind of always understand something like a mastermind or a coffee hour. And so if you sell that and you give them what they need, you almost always score. Like I think we have like 98% retention. For across all of them, just because we reversed everything so that we're, we bring them in on what they want, but we give them what they need and it, where it just works every time. And it's something that maybe you guys could, could also run with.

Cuz it's, I mean, it's, it's a showstopper for sure. And by that you mean they come in for the funnels, they stay for the fun? No, they come in for the mastermind, they stay for the funnels.

Okay.

Interesting.

Yeah, it's stickier.

Yeah, we started the other way. Yeah, just worked better. The fun is just kind of like a cherry on top. Like, it's sort of— I mean, you'll see it in kind of like the Captivate branding. I literally analyzed every little fucking pixel and I was like, how can I get more attention from one glance? And so it was colors, it was bizarreness, it was cussing, whatever it had to be. It was just like just be whatever came naturally, not like forcefully. And then from that point, the fun was like a nice introduction and a good tone. Sure, a good cultural tone. But everything else was just, yeah, trying to situate. And that was where our big roadblock was. And when we reversed that, like almost on accident, it completely changed everything else.

Yeah. How many people here are teaching someone how to make money or do something to do with business? What I think you'll find fascinating is that most people don't want to start a business. No, like really. I learned this after talking to big YouTubers. They're like, oh, but now that's a business. And I was like, yeah. And they're like, I don't want that. So like most people don't want a business. What they really want is they want to like feel good and have fun. That explains the whole world. How many people are at the fucking library versus playing computer games or like, you know, watching movies or like going to bars, right? Like how much money gets spent on like going to bars and video games and everything versus everything else. It's, it just, that shows you that's what people want more than anything. But I think once you become an entrepreneur, it's even harder to see once you become a hardcore entrepreneur is you think everyone's kind of like you, but most—

I can tell you most people aren't. And no one is. Yeah, like, I mean, 9% of people have a business, and that, like, that means literally, like, own an LLC. So that includes, like, hairstylists who are solopreneurs. So 9%. So if you cut out solopreneurs and then just go people who have employees, you're looking at, like, 1 out of every— I don't know what the stat is, but I would imagine it's probably 1 out of every 50 people actually has a business with employees.

Like it's not a lot of people. This is why I think the fun element is really important because I've seen a lot of people say this. They were like, I never wanted to start a business or be an entrepreneur until I knew it could be fun. Right? Like it's, I think that's how you make the market bigger for sure. Like if you want to get more people to buy your thing and all of that, I think a lot of it comes from not just training or more like explaining or more like logical concepts and frameworks. I think it's trying to make it more fun and interesting to people. Does that make sense? Yeah, that's why I was excited about these recent breakthroughs that we've had because it's, it directly translates to the actual thing you want, which is retention, sales. Word of mouth, by the way, like all of the things that we dream of, but it comes from tapping into this slightly different thing. I love that we hit classroom.

We haven't done it yet. I think it's a great idea. This next clip is about strategy, which is my fancy word for prioritization. Fundamentally, we all have a certain amount of time, money, effort, people that we can allocate across a million different things. And so the idea is the people who move the fastest in business make the best bets because they choose to allocate those resources to the things that get them the best returns.

And this is how to pick which ones you should. So where we were selling before we built the program. Okay. So as I'm actually using time to create the content and get the program out, there's less time to get more people in. So the revenue goes down as we're building.

So how would you fix that? Aren't you guys partners? You're not solo, are you? Split the responsibilities maybe?

One on growth, one on building? That's a great way.

Yeah, thank you. Nailed it.

And also you're going to work a lot. So just a side note, you're just going to work a lot.

Yeah, we work all day already. Yeah. We also have one more person, Kirby. Who does like community management. So we divided it even more. Like I'll just think about making it better. Kirby will run it operationally and Hormozy will bring people in.

Do you see? That makes sense. So get like potentially more people if needed.

If not, just split the work. Yeah, if revenue is going down because you're like you, the point I was making earlier about the classroom thing is like I would not want you to overproduce content for the classroom since the vast majority of people, they quote want to buy it, but they don't actually consume it. And they consume the community far more than they consume the content. And so I would like try and make it as pared down as you possibly can to increase the likelihood that they do consume it and get value. Because if they see a ton of videos, they just say like, nah. But if you say like, guys, the whole thing you can cover in less than 2 hours, then the likelihood that they're gonna watch it goes way up. Does that make sense? So I would just not, don't kill yourself on it. Try and think what are the actual fewest things they need? In order to be successful, just make that so that you can still focus on basically keeping, keeping the business going.

Yeah.

Perfect.

Thank you.

How to revive a dead community, right? So one of our partners, they got in school very early on and it just grew very massively before we had built out our infrastructure. They have 14,000 members, just dead community, just dead. I think a lot of people on the school community haven't even been in there probably in weeks, months. I think at one time there was a lot of bots and stuff and we hadn't gotten that system in place and that kind of probably wasn't good. And then, so yeah, how to revive that community so it can be more of a nurturer to the paid. So this is your free community into Music Money? No, this is, so yeah, we work with a lot, we have a bunch of different communities. Okay. This is one of our free communities. It's called Kingdom Minds. Okay.

Yeah.

They have like 14,000 members and their paid community is doing well 'cause we do webinars. Right.

And we just sell that, but the free community itself is just, yeah, like 95% of people are like at level 1 essentially. Like, you know, they may do an introduction and then that's all they ever do. So like, just, well, is there anything you guys have in mind like to bring that back to life?

Yeah. If that makes sense. Did you do the same thing that Zane did where like the people went into the free thing, you sold all the engaged people into the—

No, and I think that's definitely part of it, but even the most engaged people in the free group of that one are the people from the paid group. They stayed over there and still were engaged, but it's like we can't elicit more engagement out of people. They're like, oh, I want to join, you know. Yeah, join, make a profile, and then they're like, you know. Yeah, we don't know how to make it like a part of their everyday.

Kirby, do you have anything that you've heard? Yeah, I would like launch with something exciting like a challenge or something that is going to get people excited.

But why reactivate?

Why do you want to reactivate?

What problem does it solve? Well, it's just 14,000 members and I'm just like, you know, I feel like—

Just do a few broadcast posts in there and then move on.

Do you post in that much? So yeah, we have a school manager that's making posts in there. Are they good posts? It's okay posts, you know, about like content. Nothing— honestly, a lot of the game that we've gotten right now about like, you know, making it more funny and entertaining, we'll definitely like, you know, add that in there. It's been more value-based and more like, hey, we got a free training, which is the webinar. So it's probably a lot more CTA. What problem does the group solve?

It's about social media, you know, you know, like why? No, no, not, not, not for them.

Like why does it exist for you? As an upsell, as a funnel to go to the paid community and to— So it's the lead magnet. It's the lead magnet. Well, really the webinar is—

so here's the thing.

So the webinar is the lead magnet, but we have a webhook that takes people to the free community. So people were just getting into the free community after the webinar. So we don't even have their data on like phone numbers and stuff.

So all we have is their emails from school. Let me ask this. If you just didn't have the free community, would everything still work fine? Yeah. So maybe, maybe, maybe you just have a paid community and you just run ads to your webinar, sell people into the paid community, and then that's it.

I just, I think the only reason we'd want to get it better is just for discover, you know, beyond the discover.

Yeah. At one point we were top 20. The community was top 20 because it was growing so fast. And then now it's like, I don't even know. It's like up there. So it's just kind of like we have this, a bunch of members in there.

Like, I mean, we could deactivate it, but it's—

Do you have any super users? No. Yeah. They've, they've already upgraded to paid members essentially. They're still over on the free community, but yeah, it's just, you know, our, our only point of really getting it back alive would be to get on the Discovery. I think, you know, overall, like raising engagement to get on Discovery page would be the ultimate goal. I want to add something when it comes to the post.

So you have a community manager, right? Mm-hmm.

Do they have their own accounts or do they use your accounts? They, they use the, the person's account. The Yeah, the owner's account. Okay.

Yeah, because if somebody else makes a post, but they're a community manager, nobody will pay attention because people join because of you or the artist, right? So yeah, great point though. I mean, I think if you were going to try and engage it, I think basically doing something exciting that is valuable for those people will get them to be excited. And then I would just, I would balance that with Sam's question, which is like, why do you even bother?

Though, if you do re-engage it, one thing that we did that was quite successful when we were doing the Rainbow Games thing was one requirement was you had to tag people that were less active than you that you'd like to compete with.

And it was actually surprisingly successful. Yeah, that's interesting. Sweet. Anything else come up? Questions? Top of mind?

Otherwise I'm going to grab out of this bag of— There was some that were interesting because All the ones left, we've pretty much covered at previous ones, right? Yeah. They're like standard topics, but there was some that were kind of unique this time around. Like, um, and I think this kind of relates somewhat to what you just said, which is what is the next lever to pull? It's like, because you know, there's a million things you could do, like reactivate this dead community, but I swear you, your time would be better spent doing something else.

Yeah, but how do you find that next lever to pull? Yeah, so this is like— so that question fundamentally for everyone here, like, if you could walk away with that being correct, would be, in my opinion, the most valuable thing that you can do to walk away from here. Because you're going to have 2 pages, 3 pages of notes from today, and what's going to happen is you're going to get on a plane and you're going to have a fresh piece of paper and you're going to go through your notes and then you're going to write like a list of like 3 things that you're actually going to do. And then that's actually what you're going to end up doing from today. That will be the output of this day. And so I just wanna make sure that, and then of those 3 things, one of them will have by far a disproportionate impact on how much money you make. And so most small businesses or even, even mid-size businesses don't grow as fast as they could because they spend their time doing the wrong things. This, and the, and the what's, what's deceptive about it is you can make an argument that reactivating this group can make the business more money. There's a lot of things that can make the business more money. The question is just which of these things will make it the most money. And so by doing that, we have to reverse back into— we had those 4 levers that I had earlier. We've got traffic, we've got conversion, we've got price, and then we've got churn. So those are the big 4 things. And so if we want to grow the business, those levers have to change or the business will not grow. And so for many of you, it might just be you need more traffic. Like the business model is fine, the economics are fine, and you need more traffic. And so basically, at least my thought process that I have with this is I try and scale as much as I possibly can until something breaks. And then when it breaks, we fix that thing and then go back to scaling the shit out of it again. I mean, fundamentally, that's what we do. And I mean, I teach this for businesses, but I'll walk you through it. So what is going to go to these 4 levers that we talked about earlier, right? Which is going to be your traffic, your— 2 Fs there— whatever, conversion, which is you tweaking your about page, making a VSL that's better. Adding carousel images, tweaking the bullets that you have on your landing page. Uh, you've got the price, which you can test, and then you've got churn, right? Which has a big list of things that you can do. So these are the 4 levers. The things that you're doing have to ladder up to one of these 4. If it doesn't ladder up to one of these 4 things, why are you doing it? All right. So like if we were to translate your objective with the free group, you would have to say, okay, I think that us reactivating the free group will increase traffic. That's fundamentally what you're doing. You want this traffic source to make you more money from your, to towards your ticket, high ticket thing. And you say, okay, how much work will it take me to reactivate this group? Okay. Is there anything else that could get me more traffic than reactivating the group of the things that I have available? So right now, could me just spending more money on ads or making better ads make us more than me spending the time to reactivate the group? If so, forget reactivating the group, make better ads or spend more money on ads. Does that make sense? Yeah. So once you figure out, And when we're picking which of these 3 things or 4 things that you're doing, the thought process is what, which of these is the biggest constraint in the business? And so if conversion rate, let's say for example, on the, on the landing page is super low, then it might mean like, hey, before getting more traffic, I'm gonna, I think I can double my conversion on this page cuz I haven't really spent any time on it at all. Okay, well then it makes sense to spend a day or 2. Like, can I really clean this up and make it as crisp as humanly possible with the language that I use? Can I grab screenshots that are more meaningful? That like you probably had more testimonials, things like that. You haven't updated. Like, can I put that on there? Can I make an actual 3-minute VSL that, that is more compelling than the one that I just like tossed up there? Okay. That's probably a day of work. Well, it's probably high leverage because I can double the growth of the business by just improving this conversion metric. Pricing, like, well, if everybody just pays you more, we already went through that example over here. Um, this could obviously make you more money. And then you have your big list of things that you're doing for churn. And so Cool. Which of these is the biggest thing that's constraining the business? You pick the one that you're working on. And then for me, I tend to think through this: more, better, new. And I tend to do it in this order most of the time. So like, I will just ask one of our portfolio CEOs, like, why can we not just do more of what we're currently doing? Like, whatever we're doing, why can't we just do more? So you'd have to make an argument to me that we should reactivate this group rather than just spending more money on ads. You have to make an argument that it's easier and it will make us more money than spending more money on ads. And if you came at the argument, I'd be like, well, then forget about it. If we can't do any more, for whatever reason, we have some limitation. Like we can't post more than twice a day on Instagram. Like we just can't, or we can. It just like, we've seen that when we post 3 times, it doesn't, doesn't yield the same performance. So 2 is kind of the sweet spot. Fine. All right. Then what can we do to make it better? Right. Okay. Cuz if we can make those two posts just higher quality overall, can we like really think through the hooks? Can we make sure that they're tight, that they appeal ideally to the audience that we're looking for? If we do better, then the quality of the traffic will go up. The more views will go up. Does that make sense? Now, if we can't do any more, any better, then we need to try something new. And you notice that most of the times you can do more of what you're doing. You can do what you're doing better, which is why I so rarely do new things. Once you have something that works, that's the hard part. Once it works, it's like, how do we scale the living crap out of it? And the reason that most entrepreneurs, in my opinion, especially small ones, get stuck is that they find something that works and then they stop doing it. And then they get distracted by 6 other new things and they get completely spread thin. And it's been like, what's ironic is that the small business owner is the one who has the least amount of leverage. And you have the, basically your, your contribution, your time contribution to the income of the business is more direct than anybody else's, especially at this level. And so like you like saying, okay, I'm going to take a third of my time, that might just be like decreasing your business by a third. And so you have to have a very strong argument for why that's going to make sense. And then for who, once you have a team, then that becomes the next thing. It's like, okay, we know we want to increase traffic. The way that we're going to do that is like we can't do more posts on Instagram, so we're going to make them better. And this is the process that we're going to focus on getting better, which means that once a week I'm going to take 3 hours and I'm going to script out. I'm going to look at other people's content that have really good hooks. I'm going to write down all the hooks. And then I'm going to make content that I think is going to appeal to my demographic in a better way. Cool. Now who's going to be, you know, if it's you, then you're the who in a lot of these. If the business gets bigger, then it's like, okay, Jeremy, you're running this. And then we just measure to make sure Jeremy does the job. That makes sense in terms of thinking through this. And so we just want to make sure that what you are doing is going to map to what's going to drive growth within the business.. And I swear to God, so many times people are just doing shit that does not map to this. Okay. Rant's over.

One quick question on that. The, the first 4, is there like a certain priority that you would recommend for like, I'm a solo operator, I'm doing like 50 a month.

Yeah.

B2C offer.

Is there like one of those big 4 that you would recommend prioritizing first? Start here. Okay. Because this is how you have lifeblood in the business. So you have to promote, you have to acquire customers. Once this is relatively consistent, even at a low level, I then— this is me, how I think through this now, not when I was younger. Normally I would just be like, just do as much of this as you can, forget everything else. Now it's do enough of this so that we can keep working on how do we, how do we find the things that people actually want versus what we think they want? And then are there things that we can remove? Like how can we delete things? How can we make this simpler? How can we make it more elegant? How can we shorten the models that we have. I mean, we're hiding Classroom for new people. Like, think about this. Like, we've removed 3 calls a week. Like, we're trying to take things away, not because we don't want to add value. It's easy for us to add the value. It's— but we want, we want them to consume it. And so consumption should be the highest priority for everybody here in terms of making— like, how do they get value? They have to consume value, right? So consumption should be the highest priority. And so, um, we start here until you have enough flow going through the system. That we can see what they really want. And a lot of times these simple things, like the last mastermind, I think we went through a ton of depth of all the things that you can do to reduce churn, right? It's like, so you experiment with that and this might be months while you're doing this. I mean, for context, Skool didn't hit like a, like let's go hyperscale until like recently. And this was years, right, of getting the product right. Like obviously, like there's people coming in every day and there was enough promotion that we basically, that we could test and keep learning. But it wasn't like we don't want the world to find out about it yet because we want to get all these pieces right. Once these pieces are right enough, then you go back here and you scale the living hell out of it. Boom. Yep.

That's great.

So right now the question for you is if you have really low churn, I don't know if you do, but from what you were saying, it sounds like you have low churn. Then, then yeah, do more traffic. Yeah. Do more, do better at what you're currently doing.

So you're running ads? Yeah. Do you spend more? Spend more, make them better. Top 20% of my best customers, target it towards them. Now that I have that insight and then just keep making that better and then just more, more, better.

And then just spend $400 grand a month on ads. Yeah, sure. I mean, it's like an inside joke in my business. Like he's just going to say more, better. It's like, yep, that's what we're going to do this quarter. Just like we did last quarter, just like we did the quarter before. We're going to do more, we're going to do better. And if we do both those things, we'll probably make more money. And then if there's something that prevents us from doing more or better, then we fix that and then we go back to more better. Does anyone have questions about what they need to do for this? Like, like you need— you're like, okay, am I— should I be spending more money? Well, if you're— if your LTV is good in terms of— and your— and your—

and your CAC is low, then yeah, I just keep spending. I guess for like low ticket communities, you know, recently we had a video where you went like 7 things like handwritten letters, onboarding, exit interviews. For communities on school, like which one of these would you go after at the first?

Kirby, I feel like you have even more insight.

With you, the price sounds like the thing that's moving it.

Say again? The price. Okay. Because you've already experienced what that's doing, right? You know the average is around $20. You probably want to be on the good side of that. So figure out why you're not. Like, man, I would talk to your customers first. Like, why did you cancel? You want to talk to the people that canceled, you want to talk to the people that stayed, and you want to figure out what differences they have. And then if you find the people that stayed did these things, emphasize those things. If you find the people that left did other things, remove those. And so it might not be price. I'm just— yeah, it— but you told us, so, um, maybe it's price. So like balance that. And then, you know, with your traffic, you can drive more of that. And then you can play with about page conversion. You can play with that. And then when you're bored of those, go back to retention.

Yeah. I know I can drive like easily way more traffic. It's just that I have a leaky bucket. Yeah. So I want to fix it. So I'm like wondering if I should add the onboarding or, you know, events. Onboarding, I think for sure is a good idea.

And how would you execute that for low ticket? You do a group onboarding and everybody who signs up gets one group onboarding that you attend.

You do it once a week. I think people throw a lot of shit in their community and then they just keep adding and then they think they need to keep adding to make it better. But it's not true. Like overwhelm is the main cause of churn.

Think about the experience. So how many things in the classroom would you say is like the sweet spot?

'Cause like right now I have like 8 maybe. Honestly, the hardest part I found when improving anything is to figure out what's actually wrong with it. That, well, I've been working on the school games funnel recently, by the way. Homeless will be happy about this. I figured out like what the problem, to try to figure out what the problem was was actually quite difficult. But in the, it was this guy I knew from New Zealand who's a complete stoner. That had texted me when Hormozy launched the games. He couldn't understand what it was. And I was not gonna try to explain it to him. But when we came back to making this, improving it, I was like, it turned out that he was the best signal for it, actually. What the fuck is the school games? I wrote it down. That was the problem. If you didn't know what school was, and you see an ad from Hormozy and he's talking about the school games and some leaderboards and coming to Vegas, People don't know what the fuck that is. So I wrote down, what the fuck is the school games? And I was like, that is the problem. So, but that took me a lot of research to like find, right? I was talking to a lot of people. I was doing this with Kirby. It's quite an interesting process, right? And then we were like, okay, well, how do we describe this damn thing in a way that makes sense to like a stoner dude? Because it helps to use extreme cases, like Steve Jobs tested products on children because like if they could understand it, anyone could understand it, right? So like defining the problem and then coming up with different ways you could solve it. I've been doing this with Goose and Kirby in the office all week. We probably designed, we came up with many different ways to describe what it is, many different landing pages, many different bullets.. And we just kept talking to users, getting feedback, and kept iterating it. We probably made 30 versions. Some of them were so wrong, it was— I wondered what kind of tangent. You'll never see it. But at the end of about 1 week, we landed on something. And now everyone we show it to instantly gets it. It's like we don't actually have to fully launch to find out. When you learn how you can use everyone to get feedback and talk to people and show it to people and get their reactions, you can do a lot of fast iteration cycles without the harshness of reality. Then when you launch it into reality, you have a way better chance, right? So that's how you improve anything. That's not the games, but that's what we were doing to the games recently. We, Kirby was doing interviews with all of the winners. That was overwhelming. Not many people were showing up. So we cut that. We just did one Hormozy Q&A a week, right? Attendance is up. Viewing is up. People are now saying that it's way more valuable. And, you know, so it's, we were unlocking the one-day recordings after you got 3 customers. We were like, why are we making it hard to get the most valuable thing? Now you just need 3 members, they can be free, right? So like, what do people value? How do we make more people experience that? What do people not value? Take it out.

What do people not understand? Re-word it. You see, it's all the same. But I will emphasize what Sam's saying is that there's a, it's so much more work than you expect it to be. And everyone wants like the one silver bullet that you're going to magically fall on it. But if it were obvious, you would have already done it. And so it's like, it's disguised. And that's what I mean. This is literally what makes business hard. And so I'll have a business owner on a Q&A call say like, what should my price be? And I'm like, I don't know. I'll walk you through the process of how I'd figure it out, but I don't know your avatar. I don't know your traffic scores. I don't know the value prop of your community. And even if I did, I would say I'll start here and I'm gonna do the math and I'll move it and I'll do the math. I mean, with a portfolio company, same thing I was telling, it was like we tested 50, 35, 25, 15. We just tested it. I was like, I don't know, we'll find out. And then they were all the same. And then I was like, okay, well, which business would I prefer? And then we go into that, right? And so just, just in terms of thinking through things like the amount of effort that goes into it, that most— I would say that like as I've gone, as I've moved up in business, the— my understanding of the level of effort that's required to solve complex problems has gone up 100x. It's just significantly harder to solve more complex problems. And that's also why The biggest paydays are on the other side of those problems, because if they were really easy to solve, everyone would have already solved it. So it's like 4 hours and a cup of coffee and a bunch of data, and you're like, all right, let's try this.

There's a quote I learned from the software engineers at school. They say you have to make every detail perfect, but the only way you can do that is to limit the amount of details that you have. So inside of the school games, we have 8 videos. All of them together are less than 45 minutes. One course.

We do one call per week and that's it. And once a month you get a download from here, the mastermind. That's it. Very easy to explain to someone.

One call, one course, one mastermind a month.

And there's 13,000 people in there, each paying $99 a month, and they get the school software. I have a question. Yeah. So there's a fine balance between—

because if you're a leader of a big community, right, if you're showing up too much, you kind of almost lose your power, right? And if you do Q&As every single day, nobody wants—

it's not special.

So how would you balance Q&A calls, making posts inside of the community, and just showing up and like giving people attention like that? I'm sure there's a data answer for this rather than me just guessing. We can probably find it out. I'm like, what the, the best, you know, cadence is. I'll tell you, I personally, I think post twice a month in school. That's not planned. I just, I just kind of poke around and I see what people are struggling with. I made that niche post because I was really tired of people being like, what's my niche gonna be about? And I was like, here's how you find your niche. And so it's just like, I just listened to what was the, like, there's, you probably notice this in your communities, probably like a, like a problem du jour. It's like people just kind of glob onto a single problem all of a sudden. And like, I felt like I was seeing more and more of that. So I was like, all right, I'm going to try and answer this. And so then you make that and then it's like, hopefully, and if it does, if you put the thing in and then that problem still exists, then you didn't do it right. So it's like you have to do it again. You have to make it simpler. You have to make it easier, whatever it is. You keep doing it until that one goes away. And then like the next problem will occur. And the good news is that your customers will always have problems.

Yeah. And so you just solve them. I can tell you a good thing that works for me. Um, so I spend a lot of my time reading what people are saying. Like, I'm trying to understand what things people are struggling with. So I'm not in there just posting a lot. I'm in there listening the most, more than anything else. Most would be like 90%. It would be like A lot of time is spent listening, trying to figure out what is going on, what should I improve, what problems is the community facing, right? Then when I'm pretty sure I've got those problems, I'll even talk to some power users and I'll validate, do you think these are actually problems, right? And then I'll make sure I'm clear on the problems first. Okay, now if I spend— now prioritize them. What's the most— what is the most pressing problem? Okay, number one. Now just focus on that. At least I know if I just fix that, I'll add some value, right? Yeah. So now I'll try to fix that and I will try to fix that by research, experimentation, et cetera. And then I'll come back to my community and say, hey, I saw all you guys were facing this. That sucks.

I fixed it.

Here you go.

And that's how I like, that's how you add value. Seriously, no, like I have this little template on my wall for emails, which is, hey, I made this thing for you, here's what it does. Good afternoon. Enjoy, like CTA. Like that's like, that's my email template. Like it just makes it really simple.

Like, hey, you guys were struggling with this thing, I made this for you, here's why it's important, goodbye. The hard part is finding the thing. Yeah. Like I said, how do we make the school games funnel better? Well, what's the problem with it? That's the real question.

And it was some stoner dude who had the answer. Yeah. So you wouldn't have a schedule of like posting daily or second, like every second day?

Definitely not. That's like a Henry Ford production line for community. Like we're not trying to pump out posts fast. That's not what makes it. That's not a good community. A good community is something that understands your pain and experience and delivers solutions and is fun. Yeah. You're right. Yeah. And isn't overwhelming and doesn't make me read 5 articles a day, right? Like value posts. Yeah. Because I don't want to read a bloody article. That's a pain in the ass. I want a solution or I want to laugh. One of them. Yeah.

So I have a question. If you guys had to decide on building like an Adonis School or an Anime Shreds, which would be your choice? I actually don't understand the question. So the model that they have, like you look at Adonis School and he's got loads of delivery in the calendar section, like every day, twice a day, and it's a higher price point. And then you've got Anime Shreds, which is, you know, nothing in the calendar but loads of posts, like just emojis and random stuff. Which is a better model for actually helping more people, getting greater scale, and then eventually making more money with that? Well, I guess we'll find out.

If you guys had to pick one, which would you pick? Well, I've watched both of them. The anime series one's super interesting because it broke a lot of like preconceived ideas. Like it had no classroom when it launched. It was $11 and it grew to $100 grand a month faster than anything and it became number one on Discovery, right? Like real fast. And there wasn't a ton of posting in there from the owners. It was mostly driven by the members, right? Plus I know their about page conversion rate is one of the highest. What I'm really curious about is their churn, but I guess that time will tell, it's new. But I think the fact they started low and then increased higher makes it a good move for churn. And I also know churn is lower when your price is lower. So that will be quite interesting to watch over time. And so can it scale? I know Hamsa is trying to scale higher in a donor school. I think at Animation Reads, guys apparently want to scale more. Both people probably want to do as least work as possible, right? So there's that, and then there's the retention. And it will, like, over time we'll see, like, how those two models differ. I think what Animation Reds wasn't just the price though. I think what they showed us is that if you if you have like something unique, like the fact that it was called Anime Shreds in the artwork. Yeah, that's, that definitely added something. Um, that's kind of what Goose showed us. If you make something a little bit more unique, and that's just like free performance, right? Like if you can make your landing page conversion double by just theming things and making them a little bit more interesting, that for sure is really good. Like, I would encourage everyone to think about that. Um, but I can't say which model was better. Anime Shreds converts way higher, but Adonis School is way more expensive, and they're both making around the same amount per month.

It'll come down to EPCs, earnings per click. So fundamentally, if 100 clicks go to Adonis School and 100 clicks go to And this is, this to be fair, is purely contrasting the business and like the community because traffic sits outside of that. Because if Anime Shreds 10Xs their traffic, they will become 10 times bigger than, than Adonis School, independent of what they did inside of the box. And so if we're just isolating conversion rate, price, and churn, then you look at what's the, if I have 100 clicks, how much are these clicks worth for this business versus this business?. And then that literally just gives you the objective measure of which one of these creates the most dollars. Sure.

Because I'm kind of at a point where I'm like, you guys start the school games and great, you've got that platform for us. And then I said, okay, I'm gonna copy what you guys are doing with the school games and how you run things. And I copied Adonis School and Gang because that was the guys over the top, right? Now Anime Shreds looks like he's going up there and I'm at a point where I'm like, which, which model is better and which one's actually Yeah, because I'm not that good at business.

I just see things that work and I copy it. You're not bad. Well, there's going to be more. There's going to be more.

So if you keep switching, you're going to get in trouble. Yeah, exactly. That's where the sticky— there's the sticky point. Like, even saying it like that, me thinking about it is like, it's probably neither.

It's probably the one that is more like authentic to your team.

Because I've got a feeling as to what it might be, but you know.

All right, what is it? The feeling?

Yeah.

What am I feeling to do with it? Is it goes a bit opposite there because I'm doing 17 lives a week in my paid at the moment. So yeah, but my, my feeling's telling me to put it in the free community. But I mean, that might be stupid because I'm trying to listen to what you guys are saying. You're saying no, we're just doing one now.

And it's like, so I'm a bit the fuck, you know. I think if you want to use all that, like all that. So last, last games, a ton of people, I think it was last games That was like, it was like the lives games. It was like everybody was doing like Instagram lives. It might've been like maybe 2 ago. Um, and that the thing is, is like we have to separate promotion from delivery. So from a promotion perspective, you're doing lots and lots of lives. You're making lots of posts. You're making all this stuff. Oh no, I understand. I got you. And so my point is, is like I would take all that energy and put it into promotion. So you get way more people into your community. And then the thing is, is that. You, if you do 17 lives a week externally, it's okay that people don't consume all of them because if they consume one of them, then they might buy. Whereas if you're inside of the community and you're doing 17, they might be like, oh, I'm missing out on 16 out of the 17. I'm not, I'm not getting the value. If it's free, your cost is time. And so as long as you deliver a return on the time that they spend consuming your content, then they got, they have a positive exchange with you. And so basically it's like you can never promote too much. You can't put too much inside of the community.

And so I would take some of that juju and put it externally to drive more through the box. I think Hamza actually did like the opposite, like when he increased the daily coffee to like nearly every day, his churn like reduced massively.

So I have no idea. Oh, he's messaging me like every day and trying to figure out like all kinds of things around churn at the moment. Um, I have my answer to him. He kept coming up with ideas.

My answer to him was, talk to your customers. I recently was pretty public about this, is that like I widened my content for I think either 3 or 6 months. I had like started sprinkling in some other, other pieces. I talked about how I eat and like, you know, how Layla and I run, you know, being married and things like that. And the, the problem is that you do get positive reinforcement from it. And so it's like he made some stuff on relationships and then people were like, oh, this is awesome. But the thing is, is like the wrong people were saying it was awesome. And so what was happening is my audience was growing, but it was growing with the wrong people. And so I had, I mean, I had this moment where like sometimes you have these, like I had a friend of mine come in, a friend, acquaintance, I'd say, flew in and was like, um, he probably does $10 million a year. And, uh, and he was like, yeah, you know, um, yeah, I don't, I don't listen to too much of your stuff anymore. And he's like, yeah, I was hardcore for like 6 years. Um, and then I, I just kind of, um, I guess it didn't really apply to me anymore. He's like, I guess I'm not really like your avatar. And I was like, you're 100% my fucking avatar. Like you are exactly who I'm going after. And then I was like, oh, I'm a moron. And I just basically, it's like, you, you get, you get, it's a balance. Like you wanna listen to customers, but you also wanna make sure you're listening to the right customers. And so, um, I reoriented all my, my content, which maybe some of you guys have seen. Um, and it's been 100% back to business has been the theme that we have internally. My guys know, um, is that if it's not business, we don't make it just very straightforward. Like it can be business adjacent. So like if I talk about, you know, prioritizing like tasks in my day that can have some element of productivity into it, but it's like all my examples are gonna be business related. And so, but by doing that, when I looked objectively across metrics for site conversion, opt-in, book sales, applications to the portfolio. All of those metrics went up even though the average view per video went down. And so it's like, I'm not in this to get famous.

I'm in this to make money. I have a quick question. I wonder if anybody has— I mean, this might be for everybody, but like, has anybody done anything to when they do have a churned customer to get them back into being a customer?

Or send a funny GIF. We just send a funny GIF in a DM. Ask CreditPannier. Have you seen him? Ask him for his message.

He's apparently got some message he DMs people with a funny GIF and it gets people to reactivate.

He says it's like something like leaving so soon is kind of like the vibe is kind of.

Yeah, but you want to get the funny GIF. Of course. Yeah.

And it's just within school. Yeah.

Okay.

So no email, SMS or anything like that. Our sales team has that for ghosted leads.

They have a Kevin Hart meme that's like.

I think that might be it. Yeah. I think that's what he's using. Yeah. And, uh, yeah, it like, it gets higher response rates than any, any message. This next clip is about growing the business even beyond you, meaning who are you going to bring on your team to help you get to where you're trying to go? And if the people that you're bringing on keep being dumb and making stupid mistakes, it's not their fault, it's yours. And the good news is it's a skill that you can fix. And in this part, I'll break down how I get the best talent, how we recruit them, how I hire them, and how we train them so they can win.

Hiring-related stuff. Hiring. Okay.

Delegating low-leverage stuff.

Just delegating low-leverage tasks so I can focus on my— Be specific. Well, for me, I know that if I spent 100% of my time on just YouTube, making YouTube videos, I can get to like $100K or even $150K a month. But right now it's like 15 to 20% of my time. So just everything else. Well, what is that? Well, building the modules, delivering the product, um, calls, appearing on calls, Just everything, everything about community, because you kind of need to do all of those things. Yeah, yeah. But like, there is a lot of stuff like, you know, maybe emails, like sorting priorities, like calendar, all of those things that could be outsourced. So like, I'm wondering in what order, like, do I hire so I can basically spend 100% of my time on the thing I have the most expertise in?

Well, building out the modules is mostly a one-time thing. And then once that's done, that'll be off your plate. The emails are 100% outsourcable. There are plenty of copywriters who can write emails for you. And I'd recommend taking somebody who's in the community who knows your voice and can give you like a good V1 draft and then you just tweak it and send it. The calls, you want to basically just show up like that's, I mean, more or less that's kind of how we run this. Like, I show up, we do the Q&A, and then I move on with my life and I treat it just like it's a meeting. And I do it on my meetings day because I do meetings on Mondays. And so we do it on that day because it's the least disruption for how I work. And so if you have— so I'm going to have a really big piece about this coming out soon. But basically the difference between maker and manager time. So if you have deep work, that's what I consider maker time. And a lot of people in any organization, you got copywriters, video editors, coders, like they have, they have to just like get really deep into a project and you wanna minimize time on meetings as, as much as possible so that they can work. Basically when they're on a meeting, they're not working. There are managers, which is the opposite, which is for them being on meetings is working, right? Uh, and coordinating between things and talking to vendors and, uh, I mean like sales guys, customer support, like those are, those are people who like when they meet is when they work. And so those are both fine. The problem is when they intersect. And so managers start interrupting makers. From making. And the problem is that makers only have 14 time blocks a week. You've got one morning block and one afternoon block and that's it. Like, I'm sure when you're making a YouTube video, it's not like you can't split it between two meetings, right? Like you need a whole big chunk of time. Managers, though, can spread their time in 15-minute increments. And so they have 20 time slots a day, but a maker only has 2. And if you take one maker slot up, it's like you just killed 1/14 of my week, right? And so there's a disproportionate cost for a manager compared to a maker. When it comes to calendaring. Now you're the entrepreneur, so like, how— why is this relevant for me? Is that you do both. And so what's been like, if I had to bet, like my single greatest return on time habit that I have was that the first 6 hours of my day since I was poor has always been zero meetings. And it was just that, well, shoot, but people start calling because I had brick-and-mortar, you know, gym. People started walking in at 5 a.m., right? So I was able to take, you know, like lock my door to my office. And I just was like, morning sessions, I don't, I don't participate in. But as of 10 a.m., I would then start working and being out there. So from 4 to 10 was my 6 hours every day. And then from then on, I just knew it was just fires, but that still allowed me to move the ball forward. So I only got a maker, like basically 5 maker slots during the week. But then on Saturday, Sunday, I got 4 more. So I got 9. Blocks of time throughout the week that I could do like major big work. And so if you can look at orienting your calendar so that, I mean, now I only have one day, which is Mondays where I do any coordination or any calls or anything. And the rest of my week is truly empty. Like truly, I can show you my calendar. It's empty. And that takes time to get to, but that's because that's like the team knows that if I have an empty calendar, we make more money. And so for you, you have to try and push as much into that one day as you possibly can. And that also means that if someone's like, hey, I've got this person that you should meet and it's on a Wednesday in the afternoon and it's one meeting, you just say no. Yeah, I think I honestly have to do it. That's the only time I can make.

Then you're like, then I guess we're not going to meet. I think I have to do the time study you suggested, like the timer every 50 minutes, because like it's, you know, it's kind of hard to go in retrospect, like where did the entire day go?

It's like, but like you're working all day, but like what was achieved? Right. Maker time. Like when you have a maker block, you know exactly what you're going to be doing. You have the one thing that you're working on and sometimes it takes 5 blocks in a row to get that one thing done. Like what the fuck is the school games? Like I'll bet you it took more than one maker block.

I know it did, but I'm saying. And in terms of the people you're hiring, like especially at a small business scale, like do you, is it better to just hire somebody who can get the job decently done or should I wait like until there's like a Killer.

That's a, that's a tough question. I, it's a, it's a super tough question. I would say that it's going to basically, you can, you can see the arbitrage between how much more you get back for the time, basically. So let's say we take, let's just do an example. Let's say you bring in a mediocre email writer. If the deficiency, the discrepancy between how good your emails are versus their emails, but the time you save not writing the email goes into YouTube, for example, if you can make up the trade then it's worth doing.

Does that make sense? I think you would benefit the most from just a generalist person. So someone who's a hardcore fan of yours, already emerging in the community, is already doing this stuff kind of for free, probably would be stoked to work with you, won't cost you too much money, and will learn everything as you go with you. And they'll just do everything that doesn't make sense for you to do.

Probably like, you probably have a few customer support tickets or emails.

They'll do those. I mean, Mati already does that for me, but—

Oh, you already have someone? The issue is that he's still in school, so it's like part-time basically.

Well, so I probably need one more person. Quit.

Just get him to quit.

Yeah, get him to quit. He's 16. Yeah, get him to quit. Is that legal? Is that legal? Um, yes.

Dude, you're gonna learn so much more doing this shit.

But his mom would kill me, I think.

Yeah, don't say— don't blame it on him.

Yeah, don't blame it on him, that's all. Yeah, why his mom? Yeah, David, y'all definitely need group onboarding though ASAP, bro. That's like the next thing up for y'all. That's, I learned group onboarding from the first day one recordings.

Y'all need those ASAP, bro. Yeah.

Another thing is, uh, you could get an EA. Like if you have some like tedious tasks, like when I got my executive assistant in life, saved so much time on my plate. If it's just like tedious things that are a little bit simple, I don't know if you, you probably have like a bunch of stuff that's like simple stuff that you have to do. That you could just pay somebody like, you know, like offshore talent, like, you know, anywhere from like $6 to $8 an hour to do that.

Yeah, David, do you have a setter? Like anybody in your DMs? No. Bro, you need that ASAP too, bro. A setter in your DMs and on group onboarding calls and your community is about to, your churn will go way down and you'll get a lot of growth. Would I give somebody my school password to go?

I mean, you'd probably set up a ManyChat account or GHO like one of these other people.

You're telling us?

Yeah, we're talking about in your social media. Yeah, yeah.

Really curious about like everything from YouTube to the about page.

Because it's YouTube. Oh, okay. I don't do any sales. Do you not have any following on social media?

Well, everything goes on YouTube basically.

Like no Instagram, no nothing like that?

I mean, not really.

Are you collecting any phone numbers? Oh no.

So even in your free school, you don't ask for—

I'm just trying to have the most simplest funnel possible.

It's younger generation, man. They don't do this shit. I mean, like, People are telling me to add email, right?

And like eventually I probably have to add it, but like I like my simple funnel, you know? So dude, I didn't send emails for 9 years. Jim Launch had no emails. Wow. I say that to point out the extreme of like whenever people are like, you have to, like you don't have to. Did you collect them? Did you collect them? Yeah. I mean, I collected them because I felt like I had to, but like I did nothing with them. Like truly nothing. Then eventually I hired someone and they just sent emails and I just like was like, I don't want to read them.

Like, I'll kill everyone. How many more years do you have in school?

Uh, 2 in high school. And then, I mean, well, he's your bottleneck because he's—

school is your bottleneck. School is my bottleneck for school. Yeah, your constraint. Yeah, for sure. Pick one. If you're gonna get— if you're gonna get into entrepreneurship, then like whatever, you know what I mean? I mean, I, I try not to tell people to quit high school, but like, I just don't think it— like, so you think it's worth it to quit? It's just the system is so— like, what are you learning? Yeah, I mean, right, not much. Yeah, right. You're like, so I want to not learn a lot of stuff so that I can learn not much for most of my time? I get it. Like, I mean, I—

it's very tough, I get that, but it's still like— yeah, if you're gonna go to med school or like be a lawyer or be an investment banker or work at Goldman Sachs or like maybe you were going to do computer science at Stanford, then sure, stay in school.

But if you're not going to do that, it's useless. If you're going, if you're going to entrepreneurship, then like there is no degree that's required. Yeah, just a thought.

Even a business degree is crap. Oh yeah, it's irrelevant. Yeah, I have a, I have a similar— we, well, we have a similar problem with delegation, so For the promos and for all the engagement that Justin has to do in the community, it's hard to find time to like balance most of the, both those two, both of those things. And really the big bottlenecks is deciding if we're going to have a videographer with us all the time or like hire someone on a project per project basis.

What do you think works better out of the two? Um, honestly, I think I think he just needs a videographer that he likes a lot. I got Sam Laska over there. That's right.

And he's with me all the time. Yeah, well, it's been the most difficult part. Like, we've been searching for a videographer for like, I mean, basically years at this point.

Yeah, probably just a year.

Yeah, I mean, it's not that hard of a role. Feels like years.

Feels like years. Yeah.

Yeah.

But, um, but yeah, it's, it's because all of them, they just, they end up dropping off really, really quickly. I don't know, they just They don't like— maybe it's a culture fit thing, could be that. But like, it's been really difficult to find multiple roles for sure. Someone who's gonna stick with us, travel with us.

I feel like anyone in this room would want to do it.

There's so much value just being with Alex every day. There'll be people in your audience.

But does he not want someone following him with a camera?

No, no. I mean, we We definitely would prefer that.

No, but him, it's him who's like— Yeah, he wants someone following us, but like, it's— it would be Thomas, but like, Thomas isn't—

he's not a videographer.

Like, he's a different role entirely. So he wants someone to follow him? He wants someone who like can like have good banter, will push him sometimes, like someone who's like a friend.

Gang.

Yeah.

Has he made a post about it? Oh yeah, we made—

we do do a hiring post basically every single month.

Why doesn't he just learn how to use a camera?

Oh, that, that's actually what I used to do at one point. So why the fuck don't you pull out a camera? I could, yeah. Yeah, you're already friends. If that's the element and you know how to use a camera, I mean, shit.

You do. I mean, the only thing that I'm still like thrown off by is like zillions of people have come in and I'll bet you that many of the people who've applied would have been a fit. So I just, it might just be a weird hiring process you guys have. I mean, when we, when we've run our things. Actually, how did you come in? I applied for Layla's videographer, and I was like, you're with me.

Um, yeah, sure. He had Jason. I agree on the feeling part though. If someone's going to be following you around all the time, like, the vibe is more important than anything. Yeah, the skill is not the thing.

It's just the, like, vibe of having them with you all the time. Daniel asked me on the last question in the interview, he was like, well, what's, what's like his I was telling him about, I was like, listen, I'm gonna be like, hey, we're gonna do this big thing and you're gonna set up. And then I'm gonna be like, nah, just kidding. And it's gonna happen all the time. And then also, uh, they're like, you're gonna have plans and then you're gonna have to cancel them last minute cuz we go late. And like, basically it's just gonna be chaos and I can be in a bad mood and I can be tough sometimes. And I just like painted that picture. He was like, got it. I'm here for it. But, um, he's like, what do you like? I'm really experienced. I think you were like, I'm a really high caliber videographer. What do you need a professional for? Yeah. What do you need a professional for? Is what he asked me. And he's like, what's the most important thing for you to me? And I was like, like, I really thought about it and I was like, that you like me.

That's really it. Did you start off, sorry, what was your name? Daniel.

Daniel.

Did you start off like absolute pro with, with cameras?

No, I had to learn how to use Cameron.

When you started with Alex, I'm referring to when you started with Alex, were you already good? Oh yeah. Okay. No. So I say that because like, I'll bet you that there's like people in that list. If you have had thousands of people apply who are videographers, like there's definitely somebody in there who's an exceptional videographer. And so for me, I honestly like, I am grateful that Daniel has the skill that he has and can like edit bangers and do all sorts of stuff. Like he's a weapon. He can do lots of things. But like for me, if his skill was half of what it was, but, but I like him as much as I like him, that would have been enough. This is just like your skills was bonus for me. But it was just like we have such a sick vibe on the, on the media team. I think we have a sweet— like the team's awesome. And so Like I've had a videographer in the past that I, and nothing wrong with the guy, I just like wasn't, I didn't like look forward to it, you know what I mean? It was just like work. So I'm like, okay, sit down and like, I don't want court stuff. And it came out in the, it came out in the footage. And so like I have to look forward to, there should feel, I should feel no friction or no hesitation to having Daniel around. Like I'm not worried if he's around, if I'm saying, so I don't have to edit myself. Um, and like that is number one, we've got she's gotta like me and I've gotta, cuz it's both, it's both ways. Cuz she, like, if you don't like someone, you can capture it very differently. Like on some level, like you can make someone look very different if you don't like them. And, and so it has to be both directions.

Like both people have to, have to get along with each other. That, that's probably something we haven't really looked at. We, cuz sometimes we want like really, really nice stuff. It's like, like, you know, with the slow motion shots and whatnot.

And obviously when we look at the application, I prioritize liking a person. And it, the thing is, is like, I'll bet you if there was something that were like, hey, can you learn Adobe something? You'd be like, sure. I like, it'll take me a couple weeks, but I'll figure it out. And like, if you have that type of person, it's like, I just, it's so much harder to find somebody you like than it is to find somebody who has the base skill, at least in my opinion, with this role. So I would just, I would prioritize someone that Justin likes and then that's it. And then from there, like the other skills.

I don't remember where you mentioned this. I was watching some of your content and you said you've kind of made a system for how when someone was filming you, they're nodding, they're bringing you your nicotine and all that kind of stuff.

Yeah. So yeah, all this, I mean, Daniel's always got Nicorette, caffeine, water, Gatorade. He's got every, he's a, he's full, full, full service. At all times. He's always ready. I was putting that out there. Yeah, yeah, no, it's super helpful. And like after every, every recording session, it's kind of like on a foul shot for basketball. Like everyone, everyone pounds afterwards. Like it's just like we always do that. Like, well, like you guys can't see it because you guys are looking at me, but I can see them and like they're nodding the whole time while we're filming because they know that, that because when we thought activities, right, what are the things because so Caleb, who runs the whole team, he was obviously higher at one, and so he had the camera first. And, um, that was the first time I had a VRF that I really liked. I was like, oh man, like, Caleb's cool as shit. Like, this, like, this feels— this isn't— this is easy, right? And I was like, what makes it— and then so then Caleb obviously moved up, and then he stopped being at the filming session. So we had, you know, 2 or 3 guys there at the filming sessions, and I was like, man, this feels heavy. Like, what's— like, why does this feel different? And so then we had to backtrack and be like What, what does he do that is different than what other people do? Other people are like, the vibe is like, vibe, fuck, I don't care. What does he do? And what he did was he would nod while I was, while I was going. And after every filming thing, he was like, that was fucking awesome. Like sick. That was so dope. And then he also listened and he had really engaging questions that he'd be like, so how does that relate to this? Or how does that relate? So the follow-up questions were great and they could slice that up and that made for really good content because the, the questions he had was questions that the audience had. And so it's just looking at like, what are all the little micro things? And then you make that into a checklist. And that's why I think most people can't teach anything is cuz they don't get it down to like, what are the behaviors? And so now the team, I mean the whole team knows that when they film, it's like a whole thing. Did you like buy out a bunch of people? Cause, or like they— No, we do. So we do. So I'll tell you the quick process and then we'll, we'll move to a different topic, but Um, we do the big application, gave a big raw file, told everybody they had 48 hours to submit, uh, the raw for that way everybody's working off the same thing. Cuz if everybody can just pull from whatever, then the quality of the content's gonna be a huge factor. Whereas if everyone pulls from the same raw, the quality of the editor is gonna be the thing that shines through. And so, um, this is from the editing perspective. If we're doing videographers, then yeah, it's gonna be way more about vibe, like in terms of our, our dynamic. Um, but for editing, uh, then they would submit. And so from 1,200, we got 60 submissions just to give you an idea. It was like 5% of people actually submitted. Riley, did you come from, from, uh, one of our contests? Uh, no, I was reached out to, but it was pretty similar process, like applied. Yeah. Gave me a raw file, edited. Yeah. And so then they turn it in and then, um, you know, Caleb would look at all of them and be like, these 3 guys are sick. And then I'll interview those guys. And then however many of them are cool, we'll bring on. That's fundamentally how we do it. Like we test for skill for editing, we test for skill and then we test for vibe because it's way easier to go like from 1,200 down to a much smaller with, from skill. From a vibe perspective, what was the process for you for videographer stuff? I did like 4 interviews, actually 5 interviews.

Um, one with Caleb, two with Frank, and then one with you.

Okay.

And then the one with you was intense.

I was like, this is a test. Everything's a test. You had like one really tall chair and one small chair. He's like, pick one. I was like, I'm gonna sit on the small chair.

That wasn't a test.

Yeah, that's funny. Um, so yeah, hopefully that gives you a little bit of insight. Yeah, for sure. Carlson, Seltzer. Yeah, it's really all about the chair sizes is what matters. Yeah. But also, like, I needed somebody who wasn't going to be trying to compete with me, you know what I mean? I just like, I don't, I didn't want that energy. I wanted somebody who's like super laid back and Daniel's as laid back as they get. When you did the gym launch, you said that you don't do emails, like you didn't do emails. How did you nurture your clients then? Or like kept in contact with them? You mean leads? Yeah, I just got more of them. Okay. I'm being dead serious. Like, I mean, like there were, there are many things I probably should have done. I just, every time someone's like, do you wanna start emailing? I was like, ah, no. And I didn't want to give it to somebody else until eventually they were like, can we please hire someone to just do this? And I just didn't look at it. I'm just, I'm so particular with written, with written word. It's the, it's my primary way of communicating. It's like my, like people, despite the fact that everyone on the internet sees me on video, like my books are better in my opinion than anything I create, but it's also 'cause I spend more time on them than anything else. And so when I see someone write, I'm like, this makes no sense.

This is completely unclear. Why do, like, why do you exist? Yeah, but also I think I can't understand your question a bit and I'm kind of like homozygous in this way. Because if you've got something that working, if you've got something that's working that isn't email, and you can just keep increasing the volume of what you're doing, then who cares?

And that was it. We just kept spending more money, kept making more money. So I was like, I could do that or I could make more ads and crush. Yeah. I mean, honestly, I think Sam and I are so aligned with this, which is just like find something that works, do it as much of it as you possibly can and eliminate everything else in your life that's not that. And that also includes all your personal life stuff. Like, like this was a theme of the whole last talk. If you guys all heard it, we talked for like an hour, maybe more on this one topic of like everything that you had, like cooking, cleaning, laundry, getting your car filled up with gas, like all of this stuff. If you know that you can make more money with your time than it, than it costs you to get someone else to do that, then you should do that.

And then you'll be amazed at how much extra time you have. If you're cleaning your house or preparing your meals, that's going to be the best thing you learn from this event. It's just to get someone else to do that.

Cleaning and meal prep and groceries is like the lowest hanging fruit. So I calculated this just based on US averages. So just the big 3, which is laundry, cleaning, and food related, those together are 96 hours a month on average. It's like I just found you 2.5 full work weeks. Of time. But, and also that doesn't include switching costs of like the cost of time of like cleaning up, like cleaning up after you eat and, well, thinking about when you're gonna do it and what you're gonna eat and groceries and what you're gonna buy and putting them back in the shelves and taking the bags out, like all that shit.

I really wanna like emphasize like the whole like personal chef, like housekeeper stuff. Like I haven't been a coach for long. My first 6K paying full, I got like an in-house health team, which is like a housekeeper, a chef, and like a dietician and stuff. It's crazy. But they're not that expensive. Like, I pay my— I had a maid and I pay her $150 twice a week to come over and I have a meal plan and I give it to her and she shops for the food. It's all Whole Foods. They come over, they make it. I have like 20 meals in my fridge at all times. They're like amazing, good, like Latina whipped up food. It's great. And I was able to take like 3 more sales calls a day. That's a big reason why I even won the school games. Like, that was huge. And you also feel amazing about it. It's like it was like it seemed like it's like super luxury investment, like, oh, Shark has a private chef, but it's $1,500 a month.

Like, if you do the math, it's 96 hours. It is $1,500 a month. That's literally like— I have a big presentation on it. It's $15.16 per hour. If you can make more than $15.16 per hour with your time, you should do that. It has nothing to do with luxury. It has everything to do with like, what is my return on time? And like, you can just ignore every poor person who says otherwise.

This is kind of for both of you, probably you Sam as well, definitely Sam, but I guess like when you're building, you know, a startup, obviously, you know, you might have sometimes might have a little bit lack of capital, lack of resources. I guess how do you get A-players to work for you and with you and how do you like structure comp structures and all that so it like, you know. Go for it. When you don't have any money, No, no, no, no, no. Maybe you're trying to get somebody who's, you know, making decent money, you know, already, or you're wanting to get, you know, we're making money, but like you want to get an A player team, but you're still a startup.

You're not, you know. Yeah, well, it's really hard. It will probably take a long time. you'll probably want to quit. But eventually, like, something, you'll just, there'll be a chemistry, I think, and a perfect fit with someone, and you just kind of have to give it enough time until that thing happens. And you also have to offer something unusual. Like, for me, it was offering the, like, co-founder title to Daniel, because I knew when I found him that that was what I needed to use. So, and that programmer, yeah, Mike, yeah. And you know, when I found him, it was like the perfect balance because he just wanted to code. He said, I love to code, I can build anything, all I need is someone who can dream. And he was like, if we've, if you've got some like money and you know what to build, you and you can help us get customers and all I need to do is code, like, then we're good.

And we, we had like a good chemistry.

How'd y'all meet, if you don't mind me asking?

I did 600 interviews.

I was just serious. Did you have like a hedge on it?

It's all I did for a year.

How did you find, how did you get the interviews? Did you work with like a— I worked with many different recruiters, Hacker News, like, I tried honestly a bit of everything. Plus I had to hire 5 of the wrong people too. So it's not like I just got it right.

Like, it was the most brutal thing I ever did. Do you, do you have like, I hear people talking about doing more interviews. Do you feel like there's ever like a sense of uncertainty? Like after you get to a certain point, you're like, damn, option number 1, 2, and 3 are good or whatever.

Like, what do you think? Yeah. Like some people I swore were great and they weren't at all. And I'm sure some people were great and I didn't see it and I missed them, but how can I know about those? But in the end, like Daniel, my co-founder, he was like, there was chemistry. And I think I didn't, I ignored, I was too logical back then, but I think I've come to realize now that the chemistry is really important.

And I pay way more attention to that now.