Transcription
I will show you three things in this video today. First, the three phases on which online business truly works. Second, the absolutely concrete assets that make your business easier, and third, even though many people demonize it, why a subscription model truly brings you the most freedom.
Briefly beforehand, I always have a free workshop where I show you my system in detail, so my funnel, how my AI also controls my funnel, and how I have set up the whole thing. It is always free and you will always find it under the video. I would be happy if you participate. And right at the beginning of this video, I want to ask you a question. Feel free to click pause, because most self-employed people out there won't know. How many hours did you really work last month? And if you dare, also calculate how much revenue you made and what your hourly wage is then. You are welcome to share your hourly wage in the comments if you want to share it publicly, then we might see two or three people. But let's get straight to Phase Number 1. This is the operational trap. This is actually also directly the first phase where most people get stuck and never get out. It's also nicely called "self-employed and constantly busy." Operational simply means that you are doing things at this moment that you think are really necessary right now and that will have to be done again next week, the week after, and the week after that. Content, for example, for today, a story for tomorrow, or the YouTube video for next week. The whole thing eventually feels quite tedious and like a hamster wheel, but it also feels a bit like security. Yes, we know exactly what we have to do. We know exactly what we should do. We can fill our day. So, we have something to do. You produce, you produce, you produce. At the end of the year, however, you have essentially built nothing long-term, but have only ever produced daily current material. And the trick is, this operational work feels incredibly productive. You always have the feeling that you have really accomplished something. And indeed, your brain gives you very good signals back, because you have done really good work today, but most of you have not created anything right now that will still work in six months. Instagram Stories are gone after 24 hours. Your post on Instagram gets overrun, and after a day or two, you no longer have any reach on it. Your newsletter, once sent, is gone, your launch is over, you have now earned a lot of money, but what will you do in the next six months? I was in this trap myself, you know? Don't get me wrong. From 2018 to about 2020, I easily worked 40, 50, sometimes even 60 hours a week, especially during launch times. I made current stories every day, posted every day, posted on every platform, and drove myself completely crazy. I was already making quite good revenue, so I could somehow live off it a bit, but the breakthrough, yes, where you think, wow, now it has really exploded, that didn't happen. And if I went on vacation for two or three weeks and was perhaps sick again, I was really panicked because I had to somehow pull off my launch. I was the complete business, and everything really depended on me. And before you think I'm telling you now that you have to hire 100 employees, no, I still have no employees, and yet my business no longer depends on me. There are three extreme time-wasters for every entrepreneur that I always observe. And if you're thinking while listening, "Oh, I do that too," don't worry, everyone does that at the beginning. It's just about recognizing it as a time-waster first. Number one is constantly producing new content. Today an Instagram post, tomorrow an Instagram story, the day after tomorrow TikTok. Every day you do something new and always look at what the current trends are. Most of this content you have created, you will never use again. Number 2: Every launch is a complete reinvention. You launch a product, ideally even one you have newly developed, with several weeks, if not months, of preparation, a two-week launch phase, and you are easily exhausted for 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 weeks afterward. I have had 26 launches behind me. I know exactly how bad it feels when it's over. And it should actually feel really good because you have accomplished something and done it right. The only problem is that you immediately know you have to do it again soon. Number 3: You are testing new tools every day, especially in the current AI wave. I have the feeling that most online business people are currently trying to automate everything in their online business with AI, and ideally everything at once. That is dangerous. Normally, I would say, do your core business on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and if you feel like it, take care of a single expansion in your company on Thursday. Something that leads to you working less next week or the week after. And the less you have to work, the more you can focus on automation, which eventually leads to you having nothing to do.
Let's move on to Phase Number 2, asset building. Before we dive into these assets, a brief overview. Imagine it visually. There are three phases on which your online business functions. Phase Number 1, I have beautifully written down here for you, is the operational phase. So, the place where you really build content, create stories, work on launches, develop your company, shoot YouTube videos, in short, the phase in which you actively work. The second phase is the asset phase. In the asset phase, you build things that will move your company forward in the long term. This means you build evergreen content, templates, systems, and also new tools and AI. And Phase Number 3 is the phase of your dream business. There you will have a subscription model, scaling, and freedom. Each individual phase, at least Phase 1 and 2, must definitely be gone through once. So, you cannot simply skip the middle phase, but it is precisely in this middle phase, Phase 2, that what people actually never do, building systems, that everyone fails, because building a system, building templates, and then working through them, feels uncreative. For most of you who have a personal brand and work creatively, it feels boring. But do you know any large company that isn't really systematized? What do you think these companies are doing? If you have a system where you can also see very precisely, oh yes, here the conversion has dropped from 3 to 2.8%, or this email isn't working so well. If you have built such a system, you can specifically adjust at that one point, and then your revenue will continue to rise. So, Phase 2 means specifically: in the future, we produce assets instead of just content. This is probably one of the biggest mindset shifts for most of you, but stop producing content. The difference between an asset and content is that an asset keeps running or can be reused. For example, you make an Instagram post about your core topic. Planned once, posted once, and then it's gone. That's classic content. Or you take exactly the same topic and at least build a Canva template from it, so that you can recreate this carousel post with slightly different graphics or slightly different content. However, it would be even better if you also release this core topic as a podcast, YouTube video, or blog article, because that brings long-term reach. Your YouTube video will still be there in two years, your podcast too, and I know that many of you have problems speaking in front of the camera. Well, then just make a podcast. It may be that you are building reach faster on Instagram right now, but this fast reach also always means temporal dependence on you. And if you build a podcast that perhaps only gets 10, 15, or 100 downloads per episode, it is something that will be played repeatedly over years. This means that if someone discovers your podcast, they may well listen to the last 10, 20, 30 episodes. And I'll give you another practical asset tip. I have switched 100% of all my Instagram Stories to evergreen. This means I have a huge folder where my Instagram Stories are ready for the future, forever, actually. I can repost them again and again, and they always bring good reach. I then plan it all using the tool Plan, so PLANN, and can plan it weeks and months in advance. I actually have a collection of stories that now includes over 400 finished individual stories. So, take the time now and then to build at least one or two evergreen stories if you're already doing it. An evergreen story is a story that you can post exactly as it is again. I'm holding it up to the camera now, and this is what it looks like. I have it stored on Google Cloud, and each individual image is, for example, a single story. I don't just have this for stories. I also have it for posts, for carousel posts, for Reels, for everything. This means I always have finished content. You can do this for any platform, of course. You can also do it for LinkedIn, or for TikTok, or for anything else. I've just used Instagram Stories as an example because they can actually be completely automated. Asset Number 3 is then automated freebies. For me, that's my workshop. My workshop is based on Canva slides, and I have of course always saved these Canva slides. This means that when I do the next workshop, I can always recreate these slides individually. I also always do this pitch section where I announce the price at the end or where I really get to the pitch. I record that separately. This means I have the main part of the workshop, and right after that, I do several different pitches. So, if I notice that the thing isn't selling, I might add a bonus or something else. But I don't have to record everything again, but maybe only the last 10 minutes. So, you can already see that if you think about your content, you can automate any content. And this doesn't just apply to content. I've done the exact same thing with emails, with my funnel, with my products. Everything is now evergreen. And that's why we're coming to this fourth asset. Use slides and templates everywhere you possibly can. Whether it's your workshop slides in Canva, whether it's an email structure as a template somewhere, whether it's a content structure where you have a hook database in Notion, I don't care. Always work with templates. Anything you do from scratch twice is not a template. But it could be done much faster. For example, I write my scripts myself, more or less. So, I tell my AI what I envision, and then I have my exact script template for how it should sort it for me. Then I do the fine-tuning myself, and the whole thing is done. This means I need maybe fifteen minutes for a script, where I used to need an hour. Concept Number 5 is using AI as a partner. I don't use AI to generate content. I don't think it's good enough and too impersonal. I use AI to think faster and expand things. For example, when I plan a YouTube video, I don't sit down and say to ChatGPT or Claude or my own AI, which is called Juma, I have developed my own AI, "write my script." Instead, I start by brainstorming a bit beforehand and then usually use the voice function and dictate everything that comes to mind that I would like to talk about. And then I ask, does that fit my target audience? Is anything crucial missing? Does it have a red thread? What examples could fit? What arguments are weak? And then I provide my script template and say, please structure this for me. That saves so much work. Incredible. And as I just mentioned, I built my own AI. It's not a completely independent AI, of course, but it's based on Claude and OpenAI with various vector databases and so on, and I've fed it with all my transcripts, so all YouTube videos, all Instagram posts, all emails, all podcasts, everything I've ever released, and can then ask specific questions within it and get an answer based on myself, and that's pretty awesome for me and of course for my customers.
Let's quickly get to Phase Number 3, your dream business. A dream business, in my opinion, no longer means working 100% less, but rather that we have to work less. That is actually a huge difference that is crucial for your dream business. If you are stuck in the operational trap, in Phase 1, you have to work, you have to post today, you have to be there for your customers today, otherwise nothing happens. But for me, that fundamentally changed at some point when I changed a few things. I've always had my very best ideas when I have a lot of time to think. This means when I leave my phone at home and go for a half-hour walk, I know exactly that I will have one, two, three really good ideas. I used to ride my road bike a lot too. At the moment, I'm somehow constantly catching a cold, but when I ride my road bike and just pedal on the asphalt for two hours, I get the coolest ideas there too. The best strategic decisions of the last few years have always emerged in peace, and you probably know that from yourself too. This means that when we are constantly under pressure, we simply don't function as well and have overall worse ideas. This means it can often be very good to work less in order to achieve more. And the very best idea was the subscription model, actually. It was the culmination of everything. For years, I only sold products that were one-time purchases. There were indeed people who bought via installment payments, and so you had a certain baseline revenue, but a subscription model is something completely different. Imagine you have a product that costs, I don't know, €500. You find 100 customers this month through an extreme launch and earn €50,000 this month. Fantastic. But next month, you have to worry if even €3,000, €4,000, or €5,000 will come in, because you can't launch again already, and you can perhaps do two or three launches a year and make around €100,000 to €150,000. So, and now compare that with a subscription model that costs €100 per month. You have 100 customers and earn €100 per month, always somehow earning your €10,000, and at the end of the year, you have €120,000. So, you're below the one who launches three times, but above the one who only launches twice. But you have it every month. And this constancy, when you build on that, gives you a predictable freedom and peace that you can't imagine. Before, I constantly checked if I had gotten a new customer yesterday or how the month was going. Today, I know how the next few months will go, because 80% or 85% of my customers are on an annual membership. This means I know in advance for a year what I will earn each month. That is simply indescribably beautiful. It's not the extreme number that decides how well you sleep and how good you feel, but the predictability. If you have a launch now, you might earn €20,000, €30,000, €100,000 in the next few months, and that's exciting, that's great, and I know the feeling, I've had launches that were six figures. That was wonderful, really. But if you know, you know 100% that next month you will earn €7,000, that is somehow worth more than if you are desperately hoping to earn €20,000. It's very hard to explain, maybe you have to experience it once, but this predictability is simply wonderful. And if you have automated the whole thing, you have predictable revenue, what do you do then? What is the last piece that really makes your company explode? I've already touched on that a little. We're not building all this to work much less, just to hang out on the couch. That doesn't suit us all. We all like to work somewhere. We are all creative. We build it to have time to take care of brilliant things, for incredibly smart strategic decisions, for the conversion of a program into a subscription model, for example, for that one brilliant contribution that really catapults your business to the next level. We need time for that. I often invest my gained time in the following three things. First is strategic thinking. Once a month, I really have a thinking day. So, it doesn't have to be a whole day, but I try to review the last few months or weeks with a notebook and see where I actually want to go. Then I go for a walk in good weather, sit outside somewhere, and try to find peace and let it all sink in. Second are books. I specifically take time during my working hours, say one to two hours per week, to read. And business books, if you're interested, I can gladly recommend a few that I read and that have really helped me move forward. But books have the advantage, you do a slowdown, you know? And the slower you get, the more your brain has time to think. And third, and this is the most important thing for me, of course, my own freedom, my own free time, my daughter, my partner, my training, my sleep, my hobbies, all those things that you like to do in your free time. That is simply wonderful. Ultimately, I only have to work until Wednesday morning, so Monday, Tuesday, and then Wednesday morning. Monday, Tuesday, about 4 to 5 hours, and Wednesday then only optionally. It is incredibly beautiful to have nothing more to do afterward. I would be incredibly happy if you take these three things from this video with you. First, online business feels hard, but only if you always get stuck in Phase 1, the operational level. Second, try to process everything with templates, and try to build everything evergreen, and use AI in this phase to support you. As I said, if you need an AI based on my knowledge, you have to become my customer, then you can use it. And third, it is, I believe, the ultimate in the future. Build a subscription model. If this video has helped, pleased, or done anything else for you, feel free to share it with your buddies, with your friends, with your, I don't know, I've had people say, I'm sending this to my son now. Feel free to do that, like the video, write me a detailed comment, subscribe to the channel. See you next time. Take care. Until then, your Sebce. Oh, and you might want to watch this video. I think it fits quite well too. Take care.