Alex Hormozi Mastermind february (1-Day Recordings)

Salutations. Hope you guys uh made it all here in one piece. I know Hamza had a little pull in at the airport. Just a little Pakistani touchdown uh or my pat down. Uh, but no, thank you guys for coming across. I know Evelyn came from Austria, so you guys are kind of from all over the world uh coming in for today. And so uh, first off, I'm humbled that you made it here and I appreciate it. And I can think I speak for both of us. Uh, you know, thank you guys for for being huge contributing members to school and um, just providing value to the platform and and to your members and to students and even within the school games community itself. So, I mean, you're what makes the whole thing work. So, really appreciate it. Thank you so much.

Uh, beyond that, uh, there's probably the housekeeping stuff, which is there's food over there. Eat whenever you want. Uh, we wanted to be chill. So, uh, not like corporatey as as Sam would say. Um, and so that's why there are no name tags. We want you guys to get to know each other. Um, go whenever we're going to have food that we'll bring in. Probably going to eat and chill through the food time. Um, but yeah, the main thing is today is for you guys. And so rather than have like keynotes and lectures prepared, we just want to basically allow the agenda to emerge from you guys so that we make it exactly what you want so that you can get the most out of today.

Um, and I want to be very transparent. You guys probably know more about running school communities than I do. Uh, and so I will add wherever I can. Um, but it'll probably be more you guys helping one another. And so rather than thinking about this as like one person comes up and says, "Hey, here's the things that I did to build my community," it's more going to be like, "Let's go around figure out the two or three big problems that you're coming in with, and we can basically put them all up on the board, and then we can go by topic, and that way everyone can kind of brainstorm and solve everyone else's problems together, and I think we'll probably get a lot more good stuff that way." Cool. All right, rocking. Do you want to start or do you have anything else you want to add?

Oh, >> I just like think about what problems you're experiencing right now and what you want to get out of this event today and maybe write them down now. So then when we go around the room, you've already thought about it and written it down so we're very efficient, right? Um, so yeah, just think about your goal, three problems, three things you want to get out of this event today and then we'll go around. We'll start with Ted. So hurry up, Ted. >> Um, and yeah, that way we can together like agree on the agenda and make sure that everything we're talking about is super like applicable to you guys and when you get out of here at the end of the day, you can execute on it. And it's very tactical and exactly what you want instead of us just lecturing. You >> sound good. Cool. >> You're on. If you need to take a second, you're good, man. >> Catch box. >> Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Sorry about that. So, um, for our friends at home, uh, we have these catch boxes here, and that is so that they can hear you. Um, if you've ever watched a recording from like a workshop or something and the audio isn't captured that way, it sucks. And so, don't do it for each other. Do it for people at home that you're trying to help out who just got like their third member in the group and they're like really excited. So, I would ask you to do it for them if you can. But at least it would mean a lot to me. Um, okay. So, can you pass the sketch box? You can pass it around. >> I'm just discussing >> your three three >> three problems. Yeah. >> And so I'll write them all up and then we can agree on the agenda afterwards. >> Cool. Shoot.

>> All right. So for context, our goal for the next couple years is to get to a mill. >> Cool. >> While working with higher net worth individuals because right now we're working with a lot of beginners. >> Okay. >> And so one of our desires, one of our goals or one of our problems I should say is right now working with all beginners. >> Okay. Okay, >> we want to work with advanced clients. >> Okay. >> And then another problem is I think our content's pretty crappy. We want really good content. >> And then another problem is our highest ticket offer right now is like 15K. >> Mhm. >> We normally sell it for like 7500, two payments, and we want to make a 25K offer. We don't know what to offer for 25K. >> Okay. >> We want that to be a 25K a month offer. >> 25K a month. Yeah. >> Okay. >> Not sure what that looks like. >> That way we can get 40 clients a month. 25K equals a mill. >> Okay. Got it. >> I got a list here.

>> All right. Yeah. >> All right. So, so the three, I guess, biggest bottlenecks that I'm facing in my business is finding and hiring top talent without having a brand because I find it takes top talent to build a top brand. So, when you're just starting out, how do you find and hire top talent without that brand? And how do you manage them without especially working with women? We found that we've experienced a lot of >> women tough. Yeah. Yeah, we've experienced a lot of uh a lot of envy that builds up that you don't find out about until maybe a year or two after they're being employed. >> Actually, I don't know what you mean by that. So, uh I get the top talent piece about hiring. What was it about the women thing? >> So, we wanted to know like jealousy or envy with employees. How is that something that you would prevent or recognize maybe earlier on even in the hiring process so that it doesn't come up? >> I would definitely say it's a human thing. Um, but yeah, so and then weeding out bad people early. >> Yeah. And then my second bottleneck is I I thought it was pretty productive. Then the school games happened and I was like this is unreal. How can we keep motivated and have the same level of drive and purpose that we had with the school games now that they're over >> deep-seated insecurity? Go ahead. >> Okay. And then the without without the insecurity or how do we get that insecurity? Is there a way to achieve the insecurity? And then the last thing is what about Reddit or other negativity online? It's so easy for people to make up and it's so hard for to for it to be removed and it's it's also a lot harder to put positivity out there with real customers once they've got results. So, how do you combat that since there's >> just so I'm clear combating negative like reviews or combating negative like just like hate for posting stuff >> like negative hate especially with high ticket when you have a lot of you have a lot of sales calls a lot of people going through your funnel they might call you a scam you know they just because they can't afford it and stuff so how do you how do you avoid that negative reviews I feel like there's that's pretty easy to control but I get the feeling that >> no that works that's great thank you sir Cool.

I guess we'll just share this one because we're from the same business. Um, for context, we worked with Edu with the growth operators behind his community. Um, so the first one I'd say is we're having kind of like issues with retention in terms of how to keep the people on the community for a long period of time because after they've kind of reached their goal, I'd say in a month or two, they're kind of gone. We did try uh put stuff in like weekly cooking videos that his daughter does or a weekly Zoom call with Eddie, but then I think after a while it's like they're not really there for more than I'd say on average 3 months. >> Okay. >> So that's a big thing. Another one is um staff. So like um the previous one is hiring and firing the right people, where to find them, how to qualify them, which key hires we need to make >> and how to um know systemize our done for you process when we partner up with these these creators. When it comes to building the whole plan, we we need like a like a organized system where we can offload it to our team and then we focus on bringing more customers and clients in. >> Clients being like more edies. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yo.

>> Hello. >> So, I'm with Eddie, so I'll just talk through this, but mine's a little bit out of the weeds, but um I would say our goal is a mill, but I've never seen anyone compound growth with low ticket plus high ticket to the middle a month with like school. So, I'm trying to think of like what the highle strategy would look like contentwise and stuff like that to get to a mill compounding with low ticket and high ticket. >> The compounding actually has nothing to do with the price point. Okay, so one of ours is we want to be able to create a larger offer. So right now, um, our inner circle is only three grand. So we're working on what we can do to get bigger offers like 25 grand like they're saying and stuff like that for the upsell. Um, another one of our goals is we want to have incorporate inerson events kind of like this one right here like micro marketing lights stuff like that. And then one that Pier had was um I think we have a hard time like creating FOMO like around our upsell like from our low ticket offers. So I was just wondering about like what are some strategies to like create that FOMO to keep like constant applications coming through to our upsell? >> All right. So inner circle FOMO and then high ticket offer. Yeah.

>> All right. All right. Um, my goal is basically just like how to do slow or how to get slow and steady growth over time. >> Okay. >> And I'm also very curious to hear about everybody's like best organic strategies that can for example is like >> what was it? Sorry, what strategy? >> Uh, just like best organic strategies that people are using. Um, and then also how to convert paid and how to optimize the school about pages and how to transition from like funnels and like move over to purely school. Um, I'm also very interested in like operations and like how do you manage the school community as it grows. >> Okay. Um and then finally also like um how to like gamify the community and like for for stickiness and like churn so to get people to stay. >> Oh you mean around retention. >> Yeah. >> Okay. Okay. Cool. >> And then just a final thing just offers just purely interesting in what people do to like make it like an opener offer and like reduce friction when people sign up and all that. That's it. All right.

>> I think our goal is to try and figure out as school community owners scale like what are some of the biggest challenges that they face and where can service providers step in to help them grow. Particularly like you were saying Ted around content like we were talking to Evelyn yesterday and you guys put out so much value inside your community on your live calls but then like then that value just kind of like disappears into the ether. It's like you might be answering like frequently asked questions. It's like how do you leverage that into some sort of a database that everyone can access inside your community? How do you repurpose that content that you can clip it into shorts? Like because you you put so much effort into your live calls. I'm interested like how do you then repurpose that for other other platforms? So that's what we're interested in. >> I want to make sure I captured what you said. So, kind of like FAQ live call repurposing that content. >> Yeah. >> Did I capture that entirely or is there something else >> high enough as well? Cuz if you just use Zoom >> Uh-huh. and get the quality. >> It's pretty crappy here. >> Sorry. >> Yeah. Kirby eating us. So I would love to figure out how to pivot to school in that sense that my quote unquote flagship program is 777 volts per year. That's the highest price point that I have in my business and it is centered around my medium membership method that works with the selfrediting offer funnel that I shared. >> Go ahead. And I've been so far teaching around 2,000 people in that container. And it's all getting people into Facebook groups because how the funnel is set up, right? And I'm trying to figure out how can I keep my flagship that I'm really passionate about um and transition into school now that I know the advantages and how do I get the transition from my Korean communities. So I have one with 6,400 paying monthly members, one with 2,000 paying monthly members, and one with,500 people that is currently the 777 container. How do I get those people over to schools that can also take advantage of the payment system there? Because that's the the key, right, that sit >> huge pain. Yeah. >> Yeah. Um, so I'm trying to figure that out. uh and also how to further position myself in that direction of low ticket membership queen because I've been known for being coach coach because my mini membership the coach growth club was taking off >> and so I really want to um get out of that um positioning because I'm I'm not feeling aligned with the industry like at all which is why the mini membership became my my model and then um my second pain point is that towards the end of the school gap on the last day I got countless personal messages of people that told me, "Can you up your price? I would love to pay more to have some sort of way to work with you more closely." I didn't want to do it in that moment because I didn't want to sacrifice the message that I tried to send. >> Yeah. >> But I recognize now that I have such a big paying audience uh of, you know, over 11,000 paying monthly members. There is a significant chunk of people that are ready for a more access container. um >> still low like high low ticket not >> yeah so I'm thinking like 999 per month but I I want to be super selective in who I work with so it's also beneficial for me my problem right now is that I'm stuck teaching at the beginning >> right and that I have those uh I have superstars emerging in my community and they ask me for onetoone coaching but up until now I always said like strict no because I want to focus on things that have leverage but I'm also missing out on a lot of like high quality experience if I'm not working with those people. So I'm trying to figure out how to structure that so that I'm setting the right expectation, right? So it's like, okay, we won't go over how to set up your lead ad with your email autoresponder, but it will be really high level strategy so I can also learn from people that are at those stages and and potentially, you know, people that spend more money. >> Do you feel like this captures that high ticket continuity offer? >> Yeah, probably. But it's uh Yeah. So like how can how can I do that but without betraying my values and without making it like I said I I really want want this to be very >> filtered the the room needs to be very quality. Yeah. >> Um and then >> low low high ticket. >> I mean I believe like most high ticket obviously begin at $1,000 >> where it's high ticket for low ticket people. >> Yeah. It's high ticket for low ticket people. There you go. Yeah. High ticket buyer. Yeah. High ticket prices for low ticket people. who who probably want to transition to high ticket. >> Yeah, >> sorry. Go ahead. >> There's a huge chunk of people that feels much more comfortable with the low ticket. I think that um this micro and the last one is that I um I know that I'm leaving a lot of money on the table because I'm not building my brand organically enough. And I also know that I'm not having the capacity to do that myself. So, I'm wondering how to find the right agency that can support me. >> Okay. So earlier I wrote branding as the low ticket queen and kind of like solidifying that position. Um, but I'll I'll add in the agency piece because I can probably have a few words on that on Zoom. The first problem that we're going through is really getting these guys results so we can get them in and really what they wanted to buy is just closer access to me. But the biggest thing I want to get for these boys is real results for their their small businesses, getting them to make their first dollar online, getting them to hit milestone of like 100 subscribers, 1,000. And truthfully, it's it's painfully difficult getting beginners to make progress. It's the the hardest thing that I've done so far is getting like some kid who who won't stop touching himself to like sit down and actually work for 6 hours straight. So that whatever it takes to get these guys results compared to just delivering on the promise of the calls and courses is the first problem. The the second one is attracting and nurturing the kind of audience who would buy. So I've got a massive audience to 2.3 million but many of them are 12 13 14 years old. they subscribed when I was making like cartoon content and stuff. A lot of them won't be ready to buy for the next few years at least. And the the space as well with info products, you know, it's quite controversial. It's got somewhat of a bad reputation. So many of these kids think it's a scam or it's not trustworthy. And the final problem is many of these guys do join, but then they can only afford to stay. >> Just cuz I want to make sure I captured the second one. Is the issue more the um the bad vibes around it is that around it u information is that >> yeah based on the let's say the brand image or the reputation we have and then also just the organic attraction as well of the kinds of people who'd be invested into this. Uh the final problem is that we have a bunch of guys who join but can only afford to stay for one month. So we've got a fairly low LTV. >> Yeah. But I want to make the kind of school community they never want to leave. So when they do leave and they say that, okay, they don't have enough money, the way I see it is if we were giving them a um Ferrari for the same price, they would afford to stay. And so I want to figure out ways that we can make it even more valuable so that they stay longer. Yeah. Thanks. Cool.

>> All right. Um Yeah, this is great. I mean a lot of the same challenges uh finding and hiring the A players it's already been said. Uh so for us one thing maybe hasn't been said is um just around we typically have a high ticket offer but then we brought in a low ticket offer and then getting the pricing right on that so that the one >> doesn't cannibalize >> doesn't cannibalize the other one. Um, >> that's a good u that's a good little topic. >> Um, how to I know nothing about branding. How and when to do that. What? Yeah, curious to learn about that. There's some legends in here. Um, engagement in the community, like actually getting the people to show up and and share. Uh I find like a lot of people are watching the content and are in there but then yeah ways to have more engagement um in the con in the communities and uh and then scaling delivery. So that would be maybe be the last one. So like as we um grow, take on more clients and then navigating these two different levels. Um >> kind of like the op side like the operation side of the business. >> Operation side. Yeah. >> Okay. >> Um yeah, too.

>> Um one that I would add um which is maybe kind of related to what Ted was saying or Evelyn um is this idea that a low or a mid-t offer brings in more beginner type people uh or less advanced type people. Um, so we love our high ticket individuals. We get great results with them. And now that we have this lower ticket, we're just wondering if this is just a belief that the low ticket inherently brings in the beginners or if it is possible to bring in a higher quality client at a low ticket >> and and how to do the marketing if you have that split like how do you >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> I can just break the belief. Yes, there's high ticket buyers in a low ticket community. Just tell you. Yeah, >> that's a key. >> It's just you just have to you have to know the numbers. So, it's not like you're going to get like if you get a 100 low ticket buyers, you're going to be able to ascend 30% of them. Like you might be able to send 5% of them, but you'll be able to get 20 times more of them. >> Go ahead.

>> All right. So, a lot of them have been organic for the most part. Uh but what if I'm going to go ads, what ad strategy to use? Uh which which ad strategy should I use when I start running ads? Uh the next one would be what's the what would be the best strategy to be able to handle decline and turn? So like as soon as someone decline uh their card or as soon as someone turn what strategy should we use to like create a follow-up system or >> to be able to you know uh connect with that client to be able to get more people and then uh the last one will be how to be able to set up an affiliate system so that hundreds and thousands of people who become affiliates and be push the product as much as I can. dig it. Thank you. Those were clear, Blake.

>> Okay. So, hi guys. I'm partners with Cody and uh for context, we're the sports content creators, which is we believe to be first to market on this and the only ones that are teaching people in this niche. We also have a unique model where every single one of our customers if they succeed we take a revshare in their success because they go through a platform and we get about 10 to 15% >> of their revenue as well as all the affiliate money from the apps that they promote. And so we just want to know well one of the big questions I have and I'm sure Cody does is are we growing as fast as we need to be and what do we need to do to really understand our the economics of our model to down to the most quant level? What how much is actually necessary? Do we have to go super deep? And because imagine you have a 100 people that are all making 5k a month recurring. >> Yeah, >> their customers aren't recurring. We have agreements with these percentages at at play. What is that actually worth valuation wise? And what type of unique thing should we be doing because we're in a unique situation with that to grow even faster and such. So there you go. Fast growth. That's one of my questions. And then uh I believe yeah retention's been a big issue like getting guys to take action which Cody can talk more on that. >> Yeah I think well retention just keeping them on long term and then also just instilling the self-belief in these guys and I've done interviews with successful students and for me personally I've always had high belief that this process would work for me. So, I did it for like four years, four or five years before I had my first 10K month doing what I do. >> And I try to tell these guys like took me five years to see results. I didn't give up because it was my end goal to do this, to just make sports picks every day on YouTube. And I see people give up so quick. And I just think that they just have imposter syndrome where they don't believe that it's going to work for them. just instilling that in these guys. Maybe a bit of mindset training so that they so that they think like they have a short-term urgency to get this going as quick as possible. But then also, you know, don't panic if they don't see results right away and they understand, you know, instead of doing a 9 to5 for a decade, >> stop touching yourself, right? Then work for six hours. >> So I think um for us probably like retargeting people who tuned like finding the most optimal way to do that whether we have like setters to go reach out to them but like finding the best way to retarget people who tuned and then potentially like giving them an offer. So like let's just say our community is $97 a month. Can we retarget people for $49 for the if they come join back for the first month and then they go to that kind of tiered pricing with >> having tiered pricing. Okay. Um and then I would also say for us right now like operationally it's difficult and building systems because our high ticket is completely on separate platform. So we use Kajjabi and discode. Um so I think trying to find a way to have a more like coherent sort of place where everything works more more smoothly. Um because with us on our high ticket we do build and release offers and we also take rev share. Um and it's we for that like each client has to have their own private channel with us and our team. So it's like we operate as sort of like a fractionalized team. It's just difficult to do that. Um and then I would say just ways to upsell to the high ticket. Like what is the best way to upsell to a high ticket? Should I have like a value ladder? Because I've had a value ladder in the past where you have a low ticket then a you know a low to high ticket and then a high high ticket. But right now, I've just got a the school community, which is low ticket, and then I've got my high ticket offer. So, those are probably the three issues that we're facing right now.

>> I've lost my voice. So, >> sounds good though. >> The air conditioner in this country is really my life. Um, the only thing I would add for that is, uh, I've got a sort of vision where we ultimately transform the industry that we work in, right? and we want to attract the right kind of people. Um so I would say in terms of how do we because we're bringing in you know a high number of low ticket um it's it's tied to that like how do you get high ticket people through a low ticket offer but then how do you even further inside that how do you get the right kind of people so people that are that are motivated to actually do like so you're saying there how do you get people that are motivated to actually do stuff how do you better target people that are actually going to get in the car and drive rather than just sit in and wait for them up the road. >> Mhm. Got it.

>> Yeah. So, for context, I'm like I'm just an affiliate, so I'm probably the only one here without like a big community working out already. Uh but trying to build one right now. So, uh a lot of it comes down to me like keeping like creating proper incentives for people to join in terms of keeping them engaged because we want to work with founders. So, thesis is sort of that they are busy already. they don't want to engage a ton of in the community. It's more like get in take a bunch of our resources like some plugandplay solutions. We talk with other founders like Alex Leman and like some executives at Meta and Google and that every week. Uh so like they get access to ask their questions there. But the thesis is sort of like how do we get the incentives aligned so like on on the basis of thesis that they won't engage a lot and they won't create a ton of content themselves. uh how do we uh keep people engaged in the community without us needing to create a ton of content every every single week? >> So you have a connection with these reputable CEOs, founders, and you're trying to band them together to add content to a community. >> One of the benefits that people get from joining the community that they get to ask the questions to them every week like some of these different beers because the community itself will consist of of founders. So, >> okay. So, you're attracting founders in that are lower level and then having higher level founders come in as kind of celebrity guests and >> Yeah. So, they get access to to ask these quotequote celebrity CEOs. >> Okay. And the qu the question is how do I build a model that doesn't that provides value to the founders but doesn't take a lot of time from these guys. >> Yeah. And like like because we have some resource already like for example we have like a bunch of like automation solutions ourselves that we offer like marketplace solutions which again from like thesis is that the founders will come in they will just take a bunch of the resources. How do we keep them engaged to stay around for the long haul uh on that model. So essentially building a community around people who are busy they won't create a ton of content themselves. >> You mean like they won't post much like okay not okay that's kind of the engagement thing >> here. Okay, got it. Is there anything that you wanted to know that's not on the board right now? Yeah, go for it.

>> Um, and he's like our creator, he's like a big advocate for giving the value for free. So, when you give the value for free, how do you basically charge them for kind of like the same thing? Is it like I know it's like selling the implementation, but it's like when it comes to you, you can't really do it for them. Yeah. like what's free and what's paid. >> Yeah, >> got it. >> Yeah, sure. >> So, I wanted to kind of learn how to market without being like so salesy, especially in ads, just because Hockey was saying there's a bad stigma around especially paid communities and stuff like that. how you can make ad content that will convert but also not be too salesy. You know what I mean? >> I can help with that. Go ahead. >> How do you keep staff more so they treat it like it's their own business? >> Never will. >> Yeah. >> Okay. >> Uh better conversion rate uh when it comes to people. So so many people coming to see it but then the conversion >> like this stuff the about page conversion. >> Uh well I don't really use the about page but it's similar. >> Okay. >> Yeah. >> So conversion stuff here. Offer/ conversion >> maybe um the model of working with influencers as a agency model. How to best structure that deal? Go for it. >> How to be present with your members without giving so much access that you actually devalue yourself because you're so accessible. >> Yeah. Thanks. >> Uh converting from free to paid like free community to pay. >> Oh the like Got it. Okay. Good one. What are the different types of sales funnels for different niches? Some are high, some are fitness. These are what are the best sales funnels to n some will be cos.

All right. I feel like we have at least one thing that we can talk about today. Um, kidding. Um, so Sam, do you want to recombine these? I know you were taking notes. Do you want to see if we can like put these into into buckets? >> Yeah, I've almost got it. >> All right. [Applause] >> Well, one that's Or do you want them in I guess we can come up with the order second, but one that's definitely here is retention. >> Yeah, retention was talent was a huge one. Retention was >> all these here. So, if you just flip it and I can give you the buckets. Yeah. So, retention for sure um operations. >> Mhm. >> And I think that is followed by hiring, right? Because once you know the structure, you need to fill it. Um, so there's that one, there's that one. It seems like it, when to offer a higher ticket thing, right? Because a lot of people were lower ticket and so when is it time and how do you know when you should do it, right? Um, we can probably start with these and then >> I've got I think Yeah. So like getting people results. >> Yeah. >> Which is like value or whatever. Um, and then there was definitely like organic strategies and ads which I think relates to growth. Organic strategies, ads, offers I would say. Y >> Yeah. And I would I honestly think those are the main buckets. Like everyone said these things in a million ways. >> Different ways. Yeah. >> Yeah. Is that you do you guys agree that that's kind of what we were just talking about? >> The two that I would add is reputation, positioning, not being wanting to be viewed as a scammer, >> branding then. So add branding. >> Yeah. and a couple people or a few wanted to change their niche from beginners getting a audience that has more money. >> That's the high ticket thing I think. >> Yeah, >> I'll just do this. When, who, how >> motivation and drive might be a separate I don't know if it >> Oh, yeah. >> What for you? >> Yeah, I could deep-seated insecurity man. Come on. She father just says you'll never be good enough. Anyways, um >> I have something I have one more. It's probably related to that, but that's not I don't know how relevant it is, but which one of our models is actually exitable. >> Yeah. >> How do we got to build the brand so that way one of these lovely PE guys would write us a big check like they did you? You >> It's all gonna be this. It's >> all it's going to be. >> Different types of funnels for different niches. Um, >> we'll probably Yeah, we'll hit it in here for sure. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, >> that's it, I think. >> Yeah, I think this is a good like >> I'm sorry to be, but I really need to know how to transition people into school. >> Oh, transitioning people in. >> I think that's really important for >> Yeah. >> Well, maybe you can just talk to me about that separately because it's like a a unique edge case kind of thing. >> Okay. Yeah, because it's not like a main topic for like the whole room, you know what I mean? Yeah. But I'll help you with it. >> Yeah, >> we'll for sure help you. Okay, cool. Well, then um let's start with retention at the top. >> Cool. Like I'll put a little number one next to it so we know that it's it's uh important. All right. >> Which one would make sense and stuff? Like is there >> uh if you want to go like in order of the business then it would be like well let's start with promotion and then work our way backwards. Well, I'm curious which one do you which one would you guys want to start with? >> Yes. >> I won't put numbers in your mouth. Here you go. >> Whatever you think is the most important first. >> This is for you guys. >> Start with how someone would go. So like when they join attention and then ads etc. So the order would be >> Yeah. the order of the business like >> journey and >> yeah unless someone knows you exist nothing happens >> maybe high ticket when >> I think it's probably >> it's probably here I would start here >> what is your offer and how do you get traffic >> cuz until you get traffic to an offer >> you don't have any of these other problems >> yeah the reason the first book I wrote was offer is just because so the third book which is coming out um I actually wrote that in 2019 and then I was like shoot I was like if they don't have an offer. No, like no, so if they don't have leads and they don't have advertise, like all this other stuff doesn't really matter. So then I was like, okay, I'm going to do leads stuff. And then I was like, [ __ ] if they have they don't have an offer, then like none of this lead stuff matters. And so started with that, get the offer right. Okay, now you have something to sell. Cool. How do I advertise that thing? So it'll be cool. I think you guys will like it. It'll make it'll make everyone here the most money of the three books. Oh yeah, this for sure. Hold on. I'm just trying to order it. Um, >> there you go. >> Cool. Everyone can read that, right? >> No, no, it's just for you mostly. >> All right, let's start with offers then. All right, let's start with offers then. All right, so big old offers. Okay. So, let's start with um helping one another out. So, who here has had an offer that's just been like gang busters that's worked really really well for you guys? Because I think if we get the different components of the offers because everyone here has the same business, which is like one of the very cool unique things about this room, whereas like if you go to a normal traditional business room, you'd have like a plumber, an electrician, a guy who has a marketing agency, like it'd be all over the place, whereas everyone here has a school community. So, we can get super tactical in terms of value ad. Um, which by the way, this is like my favorite type of room because you can just make so much money from the stuff that we can learn from one another. Um, okay. So, who has like different offer components that have worked exceptionally well? Evelyn, go for it. >> Uh, two offers for membership owners. One is the limited time offer to get people in, especially for low ticket because you can't the price really. So limited offer, >> limited time offers and that tangible bonuses that solve very specific problems um have worked extremely well. >> Is that a second thing or you're saying the limited offer? >> Limited time offers are actually almost like tangible digital products. So very productized limited time offers. >> Okay, >> that has worked extremely well for us. And the other thing that works really well for us is option offers. So, where we offer um we conceptualize a membership content as a standalone offer and we let people know you can get this for anywhere between nine or $27 or for free in our $7 membership. So, it becomes kind of a no-brainer to join the membership and then they see the value. >> So, you price anchor the thing and then you say or you can get it for seven bucks. >> A really small part of this $7 thing that you can cancel anytime. So, they're like saving money by joining the membership. >> Maybe a better question is like What do you guys want to know about offers and what problems do you have with offers first? So, we get like the what do people want to know? What problems do you have? And then let's instead of just grabbing a bunch of stuff. >> Sure. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, we can do problems. But I do like your solution. Go for it.

>> Um, so problem being we have high ticket offer that is great uh great success, great lifetime value, and now we're looking to transition that into low ticket. So kind of the opposite of you know an Evelyn or something like that. >> So high ticket to low ticket offer >> like having both of those exist. >> Okay. >> Yeah. >> The transition and coexisting. >> Yeah. >> Y >> Okay. >> Cool. Yeah, >> I think mainly not to try to sell as many offers as far not to sell as many people as possible, but to attract those really high quality successful clients that you can charge really high ticket and that you can get really amazing results with little tweaks >> or the whales. >> Whales go ahead. >> I would say validating a free trial offer without looking like you're desperate essentially. Does school look desperate? >> I only say that just so you don't worry about it. Like I don't think a free trial like Netflix doesn't look desperate. >> I don't credit card required. >> Yeah. >> I don't think it looks desperate. >> Yeah. >> Because it still kind of feels like paying. You know what I mean? >> Yeah. Don't you see those as like tools though? And it's like because free trial because I just haven't seen like a lot because we're trying to do a free trial funnel. Mhm. >> I haven't seen a lot of like free trials work with info because info is kind of like an instant gratification thing. >> So I'm trying to see >> so that gets into retention. >> No, like we have there's solutions for sure. Um, but okay. So the question is just how to make a free trial offer work. >> Yeah. >> Okay. >> Well, I guess what do we even mean by offers? Like are we talking because we're kind of talking about funnels and like are we talking about what's what things are included in the thing you're buying? Is that what we're talking about? >> I'll take it from the book which is what you literally exchange for money. >> Yeah. Okay. Is that what you guys meant when you were talking about offers? And so around that is how you explain the offer like how you explain the thing that you exchange for money and then the thing itself or things themselves >> which really comes down to what is our product like what are the features of our product those features put put together and communicated becomes the offer. >> One of the things we've been talking about recently is there are a lot of people that offer what we offer and the environment but we know for a fact what we offer is the best. So how do we ultimately create a monopoly over the other offers? How do we write out other offers in our industry in such a way that we're positioning ourselves like you've heard of these guys >> you need to work with us and these are the reasons why >> I would say that's actually into the branding and ads like messaging stuff and I'll definitely hammer that when we get there. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. I guess how would you uh make a more valuable offer without just adding a whole bunch of stuff to list? Yeah. You know what I mean? just not just adding a big list but having a great offer or just course to core things >> like perceived value. >> Yeah. >> Like to add uh examples of risk reversal for monthly recurring. >> Mhm. >> Dude. >> Okay. Do >> you have something nice? >> Uh yeah. So like one thing that worked very well for us like the final days was like exclusive access >> and but it's not really like scalable. So they could get like oneonone VIP like messaging to the owner of the community and people love that. >> Yeah, >> they love it. But I'm kind of torn if that's like a scapable thing that I can continue to do. Uh, and then also just reducing like friction like with the offer and I feel like the free trial is just a no-brainer answer to them. Um, yeah, and then just interested in what other people do in terms of like different scarcity and urgency and kind of how can you bundle all of that together too. >> I know Evelyn's got a great little urgency tactic. I've got a question that might get what we're looking for, which is like you guys have offers that obviously appeal to people because that's how you sold a lot of people and got in this room, right? So, I'm guessing in your offer you have a bunch of different bullets basically, right? So, from your experience, have you not what are the what is that one thing in your like in your bullets that seems to get people to buy? Do you know what I'm saying?

I would say like the price sign and stuff where you explain the value of the of the actual thing that you're giving away. So like where you where you do like the value stack where you say like mastermind calls like four times a week and then the value like worth $4,000 and then when you like stack that and you total value $120,000 for x amount per month like that I think work really well.

Um, and it works really well with high ticket as well. Let me give you a just a quick structure on this. I know I'm gonna I'm gonna get a little bit into answering. It's hard for me not to.

Um, so so Profit Well, I don't know if you've heard of them. They sold the paddle for 250 million. PC Patrick Campbell's the founder. He's a really close friend of mine. And so they ran report across 14,000 different companies that did subscription models. And they found uh so there's something called in the software called willingness to pay which is like what's the thing that gets people to want to buy. And so they plotted everything across this chart in terms of the features like what are the things in the like the offer that had the highest willingness to pay um that people valued the most. So you want to be in this box over here. And the four things that they found were exclusive. One was access. Just so we have buckets to think about this through, exclusive content, exclusive events, and the way they ran this research study, they had newsletter, which to me is content, but I'm assuming that this is basically this is probably video that was written. And so those are the four biggest things that have willingness to pay. And so they also looked at like exclusive merch, discounts that were associated with the community. They looked at um a number like uh priority support like they had a number of different things that they looked at but the thing that had the four that had the highest willingness to pay were these four things. So these are the things that people valued the most within the context of recurring community if I were to build a community. These are the things that I would include.

What with yours Hamza like what what is the one thing that gets that people value the most in your community?

You have my access to calls with me. So when we reduced calls with me to once per week churn was fairly high and when we increased it to three times a week ch d drop dropped by half.

Yeah, I think the calls with the person are like the easiest way to increase the value and it it makes it sexy because you can see Hamza on YouTube but you can get on Zoom with Hamza in the in the community. You know what I mean? That that's probably the easiest way.

Some of you may not want to do this, but when I um started gym launch, one of the things that I was we were able to get a huge boost in conversions was my sales guys were able to say like, "You can talk to Alex every day." And so I hopped on a daily call every single day. And so they knew that. And so I would hop on Zoom for 60 minutes and it was, you know, and same format every I was like, "Hey, here's how you ask a question. Put the questions in the chat. This is the format. If you don't follow the format, I'm not going to answer the question." And so, by doing that, I was also able to like wave rather than hearing everyone's life story. I could just be like, "What's your revenue? What's your, you know, how many new members a month? What's the main constraint that you're dealing with? And like, what have you tried so far?" And so, by getting that at least in that context, I was able to just really quickly hammer, I'd be able to answer 100 plus questions in an hour. And so, um, and even if I couldn't get to someone's question, the likelihood that their question was one of those questions was fairly high. And so, what ended up happening is like a lot of people ended up just like eating lunch with Alex because I did in the middle of the day because at the time for gym owners, the middle of the day is the the the time when they have the most time. Like the peaks are morning and afternoon. And so, I I would agree that if you increase call frequency, you will have more people. And it makes it very sexy from a selling. It's like you can talk to me every day. Didn't you do a coffee hour? Wasn't that your idea?

Yeah. Coffee.

And was it every day? And you to just have coffee and talk to your community?

Yeah. Yeah.

And I think if you if I don't know if you're positioning it that way, but literally just saying like like I mean sometimes copy can like we over complicate it, but you be like five reasons you should join this group. Like bullet number one, you can talk to Hamza every day. Two, you know, like you just like be clear about what it is. It's like I the more I've been doing marketing and stuff over time like clear over clever just tell them what they get. So if we're if we're looking at this from a buckets perspective, this is one of those uh things that we can add to improve any offer you have and it'll be more and more powerful the higher the frequency and obviously the lower the headcount. But if we're looking at very high volume communities, then it'll just be frequencies. That's the only thing that we can really control for. Well, how you how would you make it exclusive from the high ticket by giving them so much access to so many calls?

I would say so that's when you limit number or maybe you don't offer the calls in your low ticket.

Yeah. We're not having that conversation right now. I guess like how do you differentiate?

These are the offer like these are the components of an offer.

But you Alex, you did it like they only write in.

Yeah. Well, because what happened is like I had in the beginning I was just like, "Hey, John, what's going on?" Okay. Talked to you yesterday. What's up? you know, then we'd go through it and then and then I had more and more people where I I couldn't even get through the questions. So then it was way faster to say like I answered them in the order they came in. So they they'd all like get in early to slide their question into the chat so that I could answer it and they'd always be like And if you're if you teach them how to ask a question, they will ask better questions and then you can actually answer and be way more efficient.

Are you doing it like like the full on?

Yeah, we we have a full on step-by-step instructions. Like in the chat, raise your hand. Write it. I get them to write it out on paper and then like show me a piece of paper with their question. Otherwise, they just ramble for ages.

And it fits it on a piece of paper, too, which is nice.

Yeah, that's definitely something that I need to add because when you just let them talk, they'll like tell you about your whole life, their whole life story, stuff like that. You can't get news to everybody. So, that's agreed.

Um, you can also like from a value perspective, you can do highlights. So it's like we pulled the seven best questions that were in the community this week and we're inviting like if you want to get enga sorry engagement it's like you there's a zillion questions in the group and then you find the you have your team find the five or six that you think are the sexiest questions and then if you ask a great question Hamza whoever will hop on and then do one of like if you have five calls a week one of them is dedicated to the people who ask the best questions. So I think gives them a really strong incentive to ask really good questions in the community engage and then you get to answer publicly the biggest most meaty questions that you want to answer. You can also theme the days of like like if you do business stuff for Evelyn it might be like okay here's we're like doing funnel Fridays and we're doing you know uh money money pricing Mondays and whatever you can do that. Um, in my experience, I'll just I'll just say let me let me just share something that didn't work that uh it didn't matter because people just come and they just want have whatever question they have and if if they didn't get it solved on Monday, they come back on Tuesday with the exact same question. So, we just tried to answer as many as we could. So, maybe I can just save you some headache because I tried to theme them to like bucket them and it didn't really work.

Cool. So, that's access. Does anybody else do something that's interesting for access?

Uh, so with our inner circle with our higher ticket uh obviously some people do like you can do payments like 1,000 a month or um or pay to full. So if we have a paid to full customer um you can contact me personally like and I'll give you my number. So the paid to full customers will have my number which is just an incentive to pay all of friends instead of paying monthly.

Do you have two numbers?

Yeah, I have two numbers.

Okay. Tough. Well, I I'll give you a little other tactic here is that we're thinking about calls, right? But access has a lot of different forms. So, you can do DMs as access. Uh, you can do uh email as access if you prefer that that format. And so, it really kind of depends on you. But um, by adding other ways if you're thinking about okay how do I keep my high ticket versus low ticket like you can think about different forms of communication different mediums and then make that the differentiation go for it.

Mini membership. So those are the ones priced below $10. It's Q&A with presubmitted questions and I just read the question and I answer it. So there's nobody on the call and then for the um 49.97 a month they can submit a question and they can record a video up to five minutes so they can really get uh because often you need to see the person what mental state are they in like where are they really. And then they either get a live feedback on a call or I can send them video feedback. So I'm a little bit more flexible with how structuring that and because they have to stick to those five minutes and submit on time. I'm actually out of 2,000 people who can do that or 3,000 people who can do that on a weekly basis in bad weeks it's like 30. So not many people.

No, it's because you they just have to follow the structure right and so the ones that that are really serious they will do that but it's actually still manageable.

And when you do the video feedback you can also refer people who have the same question say I gave this feedback here in this video if that doesn't answer your question then submit right because very often it's the very same question and then you have this video library of your personal feedback.

That's great and you can add those into the the content part of the community.

And that's a good way to give addition value in a hiring computer.

Um, a friend of mine ran a community and uh he offered oneonone calls that were 20 minutes uh to people who made it past a certain month. Uh, and so that was like an unlockable for them. And so that drove a lot of stick. And then I was like, "Dude, how are you handling this?" And he was like, "You know, it's actually not nearly as many people take it up um as you would think." And so I had um a different friend of mine has a life coaching business. She does like 50 million a year and her continuity is $300 a month and it comes with um they can have up to a call per per month but it's not booked. And so they can they can choose to claim it and by doing that the number of calls went dramatically down but from a conversion rate perspective it converted the same as saying you get a call every month or whatever. And so just like tiny tweaks to the point of like what we're talking about tactically that can increase the capacity while still keeping conversion high.

How does that work? So they can so they can book on a link but they get only one call per month that they can do but they self book. So it's not like automatically booked.

So everyone pays and if you want if you need support you get one call per month that you can book with for her it's her team um for that's 20 minutes and it goes over you know whatever their issue is. Ted, how did you guys find boxer for your access?

Took a sample of this. Uh, some people ramble. Like.

I told him, don't do it.

I tried it and he listened to a fiveminute voicemail and I reply back. So, what's the question?

Don't do it.

Yeah. You're encouraging people to use the least efficient version of communication.

I'm done with boxing.

Yeah. Yeah. I' Yeah. Never.

Um, okay. So, these are a lot of different ideas that we can do. Oh, go ahead.

When you have a team that is trained and and really fit and they offer calls instead of you, how do you get people to want to get on a call with your team? Because we have that. And when it's me, everybody is coming. When it's the team, it's.

You mean uh like group calls with the team?

Group calls with the team, but it's qualified coaches. They have been in there for over a year, right? And they interact with the members on a daily basis. Yeah.

Um, but they still don't have the show rate on the call like at all. So, it's almost like I wouldn't need to offer it because they still rather they wait like a couple weeks longer to bring the question to me although the person is giving the exact same answer.

Yeah. So, um, the way that we got around this was by having subject matter experts. So, rather than calling them generic experts.

We call them subject.

No, let me be clear. They're only around a silo. So it's like this is only a salesperson, this is only a retention person and so retention questions go to Steve or whatever. But if you can always answer all of the questions better than your team can then the honest answers, you need a better team.

Because I have the ads person, the copy person, etc.

So that's if you can answer the questions better than they can, then it means that they need to be better. Like if someone comes to me and says, "Hey, Alex, how do you run GDN display Network?" I'm like, "I don't know. Ask Paul. I don't click anything. I I barely I don't even have my login for my bank account. I have no idea. Like you you saying like you you're still very good at that. Not to say you should be bad at it, but it's more like how do I get them to be more in the day-to-day so that they can't answer because customers are blood hounds for value. And so like if they're going to you it's because you're providing more value than your team is. Like that's the big the big principle, you know? Like so I don't think there's like a a quick hit tactic. It's like the only way they will go is either if you just remove yourself entirely and they are the only people they can have access to or cuz I mean I I did this. I had I had my daily call and eventually I went from 5 days a week to four days a week to three days a week to two days a week to one day a week and I would replace them with other people. Now at a certain point the the call uh attendance it I mean it went probably in half but then it stayed there and especially because the frequency they could interact with me was much lower.

Did you ever remove yourself completely then?

Well, yeah. That's how I sold the company.

And how did people take that?

Fine. I mean, the company still makes a ton of money. Yeah. I mean, the things is it doesn't like it took 12 months for me to completely remove myself. So, it's not like, all right, so I'm not doing daily calls anymore. Coffee is with Jame, you know, like it like it won't work. Yeah. It's it's very slow. and then heavy on edification and then also coaching them on how to I mean like on presentation skills. It's like literally teaching them how to present and if have you ever have you ever had like sales teams with phone sales and things like that? Okay. Well, it's a lot like training scripting. And so it's like well this person asked this question and you said this let's play it and you do game like this is ops but like play it pause now say it this way. Okay great say it again. Great. Change your tone like this. Say it again. Okay. next time someone asks this question, what do you say? Like that kind of drilling, but that's what it takes to get yourself out of it. And most people aren't willing to do that, which is why most things aren't sellable.

So, these are access from a content perspective. Did anyone have any like uh and like features, products that were like kind of zesty or had some, you know, zing to it that that you found people were like, "This is the reason I bought."

Yeah. Kenneth, what's the most popular part of your offer?

Uh, the bonuses. Uh, so like the fast action bonus. So like things they can implement fast and do something now. Like the faster that they can get something done is the quicker they want to get in. So like I'm.

Fast results or fast.

Okay.

So um I do credit, right? So like helping people clean their credit. I don't do it for them anymore, but I give them my hacks to be able to get it done fast. And most of the time it's a long process. It takes months sometimes. But some of the things that I've learned to be able to get stuff removed in a day or two days. So that result to become real faster is what makes people buy right now. As soon as I.

And you say the exact number of days.

Uh, yeah. So I like one of my things is to get something removed in 24 to 72 hours. And once I say that, they don't even care about the rest of the stuff. Say like I'm getting it for that, you know? And that's just one of my bonuses. So they they the faster they can get a result seeing that they move the fastest.

From a bonus uh perspective, because I literally just finished the third book on this, um something that I've given a lot of thought to is that each of the bonuses themselves rather than trying to like create like people don't buy because of the aggregate value. They buy because one thing is worth it to them. And so like you like it's more prevalent in like the internet community of like let me make this stack and each of these things worth $10,000 and now it's worth$1,000. like and isn't this a great deal? But they only buy because of one of them. And so rather than trying to make this list that adds up to this thing, it's more about how do I have as many legitimate value things that on their own are worth in excess of the price. And so trying to think about my bonuses for anything that way. So how do I make this just every single bonus has to earn its weight that it has to be worth more than the price. And that'll force you to also get a little bit more consolidated on the bonuses. Um, and really just focus on the sexiest stuff. And usually for different avatars, if you have like different psychographics of people who are coming into your business, like I'm sure there's some people who have like really bad credit from a long time and some people just had like they had a medical bill or something and something happened, right? And so having specific bonuses that are going to speak that in and of themselves for that one avatar is worth it.

Would you still do like a battle cycle or just only like focus on the.

I would still I mean I'd still have multiple. I don't like to have this. I want to have like the punchiest, most distilled. Every one of these if you read it, you you'd want to buy for this alone because it has it's like it's like it's like taking mental rent. It's like every one of them has to pay rent to be there because they only need one reason to buy. So, I don't want them to keep reading like I I want the the first one or the second one to hit them and they're already like over. So fast result stuff. I'll write my own little tit there. Anyone else have any like sex like what was your what was the big thing that everyone like loves about yours? Like when people buy they're like this is the reason this this reason alone is what I bought for.

Uh, so my community is uh usually on the younger side just because I scaled my business to seven figures at 17. So that was a big marketing that I used. So that was basically it like like how he said most people want to join is just for access to me. Ta quick access and then just tips and strategies that I use to grow my business. You know what I mean? I would say like I would say a big thing for for bridges was like a lot of people in this space like sell their manufacturers their designers list like a reputable brand like that for like $50 and we give you all that plus calls plus a fee and all that for like $50 or $75 price. So I think that's like a big thing that people join for like for instance and we kind of um base it around like if you want to start a clothing business or a business at all it's like a one-stop shop for everything. So when you join, you can find your manufacturers, your designers, a US brand shop, a Chinese manufacturer. You can find everything you need in one spot. So you don't got to go through being scammed by some sketchy Instagram manufacturer like that.

So vendors.

Yeah. Any vendors that are associated with whatever the business that you're helping someone do if you are B2B.

Yeah. Yeah, I'm going to join yours next to do our next merch order.

Because when we needed to do merch, the first thing I'm like is vendors.

Yeah.

Yeah. I'm like, "Oh.

See that bonus?"

Yeah.

Like just.

Seriously, I was like, I have it bookmarked. Like, I'm going to join your thing as soon as our merch hits a certain like inventory level.

Yeah.

The hats will do it.

Well, I got that vendor from you.

Oh, yeah. Right.

I was like, who did you use for that hat? And then Yeah. There's always a thing you need in like if you're doing merch, you need vendors.

And so whatever that thing is is probably the the thing that adds the most value in your like offer.

Yeah.

I think just asking yourself what is what is something that if I removed everything else, if I just offered this one thing, people would still buy and then using that as the litmus test for every one of the bonuses that you add. And then I think it will force you to think of better things that you can do to make your overall offer more valuable. And I would also think about that through the different lenses of the avatars. The guy who has a medical emergency, the guy who has 10 years, the person who got in a bad divorce, like each of them for that person, this one thing alone is worth it.

That's a good idea. Like if you removed everything but that one thing, would someone still buy? And if the answer is no, probably don't even offer it.

Yeah. so that you've just got four or five things that on their own are worth the price. Cuz I be I swear like people would join Kenneth's just to remove one negative thing from their credit score. Like they see that they're like I'm in. And if Hams are just offered coffee hour in and the vendors list in like what's yours, Max? I'm curious about yours.

Like the main thing?

Yeah. What's the main thing that would work on its own?

Trading and M results with school I think would be the main thing and then exclusive access has been huge as well. Um, just more help not because they know a lot of people know people say but they just want help.

And you have a school training correct?

Yeah.

So if you I'm assuming the bonuses talk about components of the training rather than the training being the thing.

Yeah.

Okay. Yeah. So if to make the bonuses more um sexy or you know zesty um it's thinking about what one component in the training or five components in the training on their own would be worth the membership.

Yeah, because training is too like okay it's going to teach me how to do school but what does that mean? Because right now I just at school master class and then I have a bunch of other bonuses like media buying and.

Right, it's probably better if I just bring out the key components of the actual.

How to get your first team members. Yeah, I'll just tell you. Yeah, let me just.

So, in copywriting the it's called the benefit of the benefit. So it's like what does a school master class like what is the benefit of this and then what's the benefit of that and then that's what you write like you have school you know school master class media buying benefit of that is that you can get your first 10 members and then you can erase the other two and they leave that it's just a good copywriting process if you're thinking through how do I how do I message these so like on one hand like the offer is both the thing and how you talk about the thing.

People want a step-by-step.

Yeah, like if you said how to get your first 10 members step like the second bullet is like 10 days step by step what you need to do take action every day so by day 10 you have 10 members I'll bet you it would convert.

So how to get results in next month broken down into daily tasks.

Because people are like where do I start? No.

And like the first bullet in your bow can be like exactly where to start to get your first 10 members.

That was what we had in ours was like a 14-day get your first client in 14 days.

Mhm.

Did people like that?

Yeah, they cuz they had like a clear path and.

Yeah.

They would show up and do it. Um, the one other thing that I think we have was um we wrapped a software stat.

Okay. But these are all affiliate links to other softwares kind of thing. Yeah. So then under the resources piece, which by the way, huge hack, especially in low ticket, like sometimes you'll get more. I mean, shoot, if you're if you have a $7 community and you tell people to join school, you have a $40 commission on on the school continuity. Like you can make more from the affiliate revenue than you came from uh the actual membership, like wildly underrated.

That's Max's strategy basically. He's building a community about how to build a community on school.

Yeah. So he gets the the revenue from charging plus the revenue from the affiliate thing.

Yeah. Are your events valuable, Hamza? Like what's your experience been doing the events?

You're just like.

"Oh, he said something interesting to me last night about them."

Yeah. I've been running two in real life events every month recently.

And um interestingly, churn has actually went up, which is so surprising. But it makes sense because look, I do it in real life event. I bring the boys out to like a big park. We wrestle in the mud and then we all dress up and go to like this business mastermind and it's awesome. The guys come in. This is the best part of Adonis school.

But only 100 guys make it. So for the 1,600 guys who can't make it, their value, they basically believe they're not getting the value that they bought in for. So we're going to stop these events or we'll actually be reducing them at least.

Can you record it?

No, we've recorded it, uploaded it, but like 1,600 guys have, you know, they're paying 129. Or they feel like they're that's the most valuable part and they can't use it kind of thing.

So, at least if we we're going to reduce it to once per quarter.

Did you let anyone come?

Sorry.

Did you let anyone come?

Anyone who's inside? Yeah, we were thinking about now locking it behind a 12-month membership first.

Yeah, I mean, that would have been my my first thing is like just move it. So then it's like this big thing if everyone's every because then it goes from I'm missing out on this thing to I can't wait till I get this thing. And I think like I think that that alone would probably solve it. As a second little tidbit for anybody else who does events whenever you do events you want to also announce the next one because churn will always happen like so upsells happen at the point of greatest need not the not the point of greatest satisfaction. It's a big misnomer. Sometimes they happen the same time, often times they don't. So like if I give you a steak dinner and then you eat your steak dinner and then I say, "Hey, do you want a steak?" You're like, "No." Because like the timing is wrong. And so we want to do we want to offer them the steak when they're starving, not when they've just eaten. And so the like after an event, they've just had like this massive feast. And so like I'm good for a while. Like I'm I got I got my value. And so it's like, "Oh, let me open loop the fact that there's going to be another thing that's coming and it's even better than this thing. If you think you're like this, wait until dessert, right? And you just you just keep pushing it out. We learned this because I my my churn spiked at one of these massive events. I spent like two million bucks on the events just making this like wild crazy thing. Everyone's like, "This was awesome. Thank you so much." Like, and I was like, "What?" But churn going into the event went down. So I was like, "Okay, how do I get that to stay?" I was like, "Oh, you just always have one that they know that they can come to."

And then I think put it past the 12 month and you'll be golden. So our pinned post as a pipeline for the next few months of like the new course that's coming out next month on the 19th the next meet up. That was my mentor Dan. He he told me to do that. That reduced our churn significant as well.

So how frequently y'all said that y'all would do it?

Oh, what events?

So I think that's um that's more of a personal thing. But I think I would lock it beyond like I would block it past like once you're at month six you can unlock this this thing this feature.

Because I'm doing one right now. Like I'm doing a tour right now uh for anybody that's in my faith community. I do a free inerson meetup. Uh, I'm just going to different cities and if you're in that city you can pull for free.

And I'm starting to rethink that.

Yeah. Traditionally like three times a year tends to be like a good sweet spot for most um communities. Beyond that it starts to get too frequent. Less than that it starts to be too infrequent.

I have a question for moms. Um, how can you limit 100? Is it like capacity wise or would you want to do a bigger one maybe or.

Oh, no, that's just how many people can show up.

That's just how many people can show up.

Is there like a qualification process or.

No, if they're inside of the the paid community, they get the.

Also, if it's 12 months in advance, you can also tell them to start saving money if they have to travel.

So then they get that benefit too. And you'll be like, "This is actually really important because I want to teach you how to save money and actually plan for a bigger goal." Like you can weave it in. All right. All right. So, um, events I'm going to put two bullets here. Number one is uh have next planned and then lock after 6 to 12 oops months. Make it something people earn. Trying to think of some other um other things from an events perspective. Anyone else from events?

Uh, in person um high value guest speakers intensive um yeah, and typically it's you know drastically increased relationships. Um, so you know, we we now combining it with the kind of the low ticket community hopefully going to reduce churn in LTV, but um, yeah, and the it ties into the content piece, event content, I think is some of the best content that you could be sharing and providing.

Yeah, I'm incorporating a virtual one. So, um, now what I'm offering as a bonus to people who get in my community is a VIP ticket to my fiveday challenge. Um, so a virtual fiveday challenge that I'm giving them my free ticket to and uh ultimately it's going to be being able to um uh send them up. Uh, so I'm going to give them five days to start speaking about the next problem that's going to occur once they clean their credit um or once they understand the value of them cleaning credit, how they can turn into a business model to make money. Um, so my five day challenge is going really to send them up. So it's going to be a virtual event that I'm going to send them to as a free ticket. So, from a from a um from a value perspective of something else to add as a bonus, like conferences, events, things like that tend to have real price tags associated with them. And if you're charging $7, you're like, "Well, normally I would charge $99 for this two-day virtual event or something." You get that. And again, you can you can put it later on so that they they they lean into to staying for it. And then I'm.

They are not an active um member still in group um to be able to attend them.

Yeah, they have to be active.

Yeah, that's good. As an aside and probably an obvious point, but I might as well make it. Um, you can also sell stuff at those events.

Just throw it out there.

Fine line though because you don't want to be spamming too much. So if you have guest speakers, you don't let them sell at all.

No, no, no, no, no, no, like don't like no one sells at your event but you. And if you're going to sell, one of the things I think I think people make a mistake of is these people already like you. You don't need to have a very long pitch. You just need to present the offer and be like, "Hey, by the way, I've had, you know, there's a number of you guys been talking about this stuff, talking 15 minutes if you want. Do it before lunch or do it before like do it before a talking period so that if you have sales guys or whatever, they can help sign people up." Um, having looked at data across our portfolio companies that run events um one really interesting thing has come out which is that if you can segment the audience of the people who are attending based on revenue and income uh I used to think about like what percentage of the audience am I converting and now I just don't care at all. It's just of the qualified people in the room who am I converting. And so, like, for example, if if you have business owners making $100,000 a year in profit and $250,000 a year in profit and then everyone else is making $50,000 or less, like the the offer, like you can structure your offer and look at the conversion percentage on those people. And I think a lot of like internet marketing lore has just basically been a slice of just normal demographics and that's how many people have money more than like you can absolutely go into a room and close 80%. if everyone's qualified. And so a lot of those events from an upsell perspective are going to be about who's in the room. Just something I've learned.

All right. So, um, anyone even do a newsletter here. Well, people value it.

I guess that would be like posts in the community.

Yeah. I would post and then and then uh send email to everyone. I think an easy one is to get your successful students and interview them, right? Because it's it's like a testimonial and content and motivation. I think a lot of you guys were saying, "How do you get your people motivated?" Hearing of people that are like them winning is the best because they always put you on a pedestal and they're like, "Oh, yeah, but Hamza has two million subscribers." Or, you know what I mean? But when they hear of a regular person going through that journey and succeeding that that I found can make good for good content and for good motivation and and and also a little bit of um of training as well like how not just the training but how they applied it in their own life. Is anyone doing that?

Yeah, I do that.

You do it. Do people like it?

Yeah, people love it.

Yeah, I did but I didn't see enough success from them.

What do you mean?

We we ran think about eight interviews. We did them live inside of the three group and then uh uploaded the recording there inside of a course file as well and maybe got a couple extra sales from from that.

Um, this isn't really a sales strategy. I'm meaning it's more of a strategy to keep people motivated that have already purchased.

Oh, you mean to post inside of the.

In your paid group. Interview your paying customers that got that reached some level of success. Do you know what I'm saying?

Right. Okay. No, we've not got them.

Yeah. Cuz they'd probably like to hear of other Adonis gang members that got their first thousand subs or that got their I don't know what your like milestones are, but regular people who are hitting the milestones.

Yeah, I'll try that.

That's what we're doing with the school games, by the way. Like.

That's why we interviewed you guys.

Yeah, I do that. Pierce Pier is actually one of my best selling assets cuz I put him in this stack and it's like I basically it's like he's a bonus and then they buy the bonus and you hold it back.

Basically. So, it's like it's behind multiple funds as well.

Yeah. They're like poster childs kind of like you need a few people that aren't you.

Yeah. There's level five and they get access to his asset.

M. But also I think there's so much you get from this because you personally get to talk to your customer so you're learning a lot. You're getting content for everyone and you're motivating them all at like the same time. Um, I think it's a really good idea for to add to the content.

I think someone who does that really well is Dramsey on his show. He helps people get out of that every single episode. He does something called that free screen. So if you've like finished the journey, you're completely out of debt, they like celebrate that throw a big party for them and it's like hugely hugely.

One of the other things that um to talking about like what makes a company sellable, these success interviews. So uh we do this thing in our portfolio companies called life cycle ads. So there's a lot of different ad types that you can do that are outside of your face. And one of my favorite ones is life cycle ads. You'll see some from school soon. Um, but basically these success interviews, if you're smart about it, you actually walk them through an epiphany bridge. And so what that means is the way that I think about an epiphany bridge is before and after. Uh, so sorry, I'll just draw it. So you've got internal, external, and then before, during, and after. Like I've looked at a zillion testimonial templates, but that's the one that I've been able to teach and my team can do it, which is what was life like before internally before you saw this, did this? What were the external stats that other people would observe about you before you decided to do this thing? What made you like what made you actually take the next step externally and then internally? What were the things that you were most concerned about? And this is like the key question, and I'll explain why in a second. But someone's like, "Yeah, I I uh you know, I I was struggling. I, you know, my my wife didn't respect me anymore cuz I couldn't make money." And then, you know, I could and then external stuff. I was making $3,000 a month. I was behind on payments. I almost lost our house. I had to downgrade our car. External stuff. And so then, you know, I saw an ad from Alex, whatever. and um like it it kind of caught my eye. We're like, "Well, what were your biggest concerns?" "Well, I didn't know if it was legit." Um well, then what made you decide to do it anyways? Well, I saw all the other people that had, you know, had testimonials and they looked like gyms like mine and actually found somebody on the page that had almost the exact same model as me and I was like, "Okay, well, if it work for that guy, maybe I'll give it a shot." And this is why it's so key in the decision-making process because you're literally talking to the prospect from a prospect, not you, walking through them making a decision about why they just they put they allayed their fears and their concerns and took the next step anyways. And then you're on the interview now and you say, "Okay, well, what's life like now externally and internally?" Well, now I had I was able to get back the car. I upgraded. We moved to a better neighborhood. My kids can go to a better school and uh I feel better about myself. Blah blah blah, right? And so this is one part of the life cycle. And so um you can condense that into a 60 or 90 second ad with just the highlight points and it also becomes an ad. And so when you're running these interviews, it's content, it's bonuses, and it's ads. It's not your face.

Go ahead.

I have a question about testimonial ads because I recently took all of mine down. I had a ton of video testimonials, but there's um the FTC is going really hard right now after video testimonials. So I was really unsure like what is a can and what not because I watched this.

YouTube video from an Synindo and he was like even even if the person is saying they make the money and even if they show you a stripe screenshot that they make like I have a student and they went like to $10,000 monthly curing revenue and now I would need them to sign something that they actually made that so I can use their testimonial and then I would need to um disclaim every single testimonial. Is it really this harsh or?

Yeah. So, I'm not a lawyer. This is not legal advice. Um, everything like anything in business has risk period. Like it's just that it's not a binary of like this is right, this well.

Sure, there's that, but it exists on a continuum. And so, it's just how risky is it? And the FTC really only comes after people who are doing, they're trying to save people from giving their life savings to somebody who's not going to do anything. You are selling a very low-ticket community. Um, and so, in our experience, basically removing time has been the biggest thing from this because people don't want, like, if they're fine with "get rich," they're not fine with "get-rich-quick." And so, it's about, like, you can have this amazing thing. And one of the ways that we got around this, um, was I actually did 12 months. I only talked about 12 months. And so, I would, I called them, it was my most successful campaign ever from an ads perspective. I know we're getting into ads, but whatever. Um, I called it the "One Year Later" campaign. And I said, "All these guys on the internet, you're seeing all these, you know, the, this guy made this first, whatever." I was like, "But where are these guys one year later?" I was like, "Well, I'll show you where my people are one year later." And then the just massive changes. And because it wasn't quick, and, um, if you do have quick things, the way to get around that is you just say "first try." It still communicates fast but doesn't put time to it if you want tactics. But anyways, this interview process, and then you can, you cut the pieces to make sure that it's compliant. But yeah, you have to be compliant.

I even put the disclaimer in the ad and on the sales page and worded it super carefully. It actually did not decrease the conversion rate, interestingly enough. So, when you're, um, super careful, I think people almost see it more that you're a serious company.

Yeah. Yeah. It looks like a legitimate business. Like, the even the checkboxes is like, "I agree to give my information," or whatever. Usually doesn't change anything.

Yeah. Okay. So, all of this was about offer stuff. So, these are the different components we can look at from an access perspective, from a content perspective. You want stuff that's very fast, like obviously fast and easy. Um, each individual item is worth more than the price of the total thing. Resources and vendors, like, what are the next steps? The next palm they're going to have when they come in. I think free tickets to future events that you can post-date so that they both get the bonus but then they have to wait for it, right? Um, and then all the things that you can get from success interviews that both make content, encourage people, and you can generate ads from them. And then the events themselves. Um, always posting something later, like always making sure that everybody knows when the next one is, all before they even have that first one. Pushing it after a certain period that you want to extend the LTV off of. And then, um, obviously able to use that as content. Want to say we check this one?

There's one more feature I could teach. Um, we have something we call the Adonis Map. So, easy to set up. It's like a Google Map feature. It's custom, and you can just get your users if you pin it as a post for a little while. Great.

They can submit their location, like their city. It's one of the big reasons why guys from our free community upgrade. They always like ask, comment every day saying like, "Oh, do you guys still have the Adonis Map there?" The way we market it is like, you, you meet a, friend person. Sorry.

You find a local friend. That was huge for him. Everyone talks about the Adonis Map.

Yeah. So, we've got like a custom, some guy coded it for us now. Like, a student did it for us now, but like, we just used the free Google thing and it was fine. You can see it if you go to Adonis-Map.com. It's like pretty cool, actually.

He coded it up. Yeah. So, kids have made friends. Every, every week there's like a post of two guys like flicking or something.

If anybody wants to set it up, I can set it up for you. Just, just message me in school. Some guy built a software out of it. Making, he's making maps for people's communities. He did it for the Socializer School. He did it for Adonis Gang and Adonis School.

Same kid. Yeah. Care. I know, cuz he wants to get a job at school. I told him to apply. He's always, he's always messaging us being like, "I built this. I built that." Like, yeah.

But that's a good way to make your low ticket more valuable. Like, cuz I don't know how long it's going to take us to make that map. It's not a priority at all. So, like, you should probably check out this guy. Yeah. It's like, it cost $100 something. Yeah, it's nothing. If you URLs like Adonis-Map.com, you can just go play.

Definitely look at it. It actually looks like school. So, it feels like it's school.

Yeah. I don't know if this is like in this conversation, but like around offers, the high ticket, ticket cannibalization, pricing also, um, around like the limitations of pricing within school, like membership for high ticket.

Mhm. Yeah. Is that in this piece? Was offer? Yeah, I, you're that's a great observation. There was three things on here that that we didn't hit. Um, well, let me, let me hit a couple, uh, of these. I think I can probably just round them out pretty quickly. Um, attracting the right people comes down to what bonuses you're promoting and what promises go with them. And so, like, most times people like, "I want to get richer people," but when someone poor comes on the phone, I still take their money. Like, if you want to, if you want to attract better customers, you have to be able and willing to turn away worse customers. I'll give you a quick example of this. So, one of the things that, um, allowed us to, all right, I'm going to tell a three-minute story, but that way you'll remember it. Um, I did a consulting day years ago with a guy who was in my space, in the gym space, many years ago, and he had the same sales velocity as me. So, he was selling the same number of people as I was, but we're making 70 times more profit than he was. And, uh, it came down to the fact, and his cost to acquire customer was about the same as mine, selling about the same number of units. But the main difference is that his customers were worth $5,000 and my customers were worth $42,000. And so, the thing is, is that he just ran ads about like, "Hey, if you're in fitness and you want to make money, come to me." And my ads were, "You have to be a gym owner. You have to have a signed lease. You have to have at least one employee, and you have to have at least 30 members at your gym." And the way that we figured that out was that we looked at all of our customers, found the top 20%, said, "What do these people have in common?" And then we made that the qualification, and then that ran through every part of the funnel. So, that was in the ads. We said, "This is who it's for. This is who it's not for. If you're a trainer, if you just want to make money online, if you want to do all these things, this is not for you." And then our people were like, "Thank God. I just wanted to have like a legit place where real gyms, real businesses are here who are dealing with employees and all that stuff." And so, also to that same degree, if you have bonuses and you know that these beginners love that bonus, cross it off because the people who are going to be the better avatars are going to have a very different set of things that will be valuable for them. And so, it's a, it's a big strategic change. Like, your offer changes, your bonuses change, your marketing changes, your funnel changes. Like, you change the business entirely when you, when you decide to attract better customers if you are serious about it. Otherwise, it's just a complaint forever.

Yeah. I guess that's something we didn't talk about is like this whole thing should be designed by thinking about a particular person.

Yeah. Yeah. Which is that right? Like you got to visualize this person and their life and their situation and you should talk to them even too, like really understand them and everything here should be optimized to appeal to that person.

Yeah. Like, for example, a really busy business owner to, um, to your point, um, they might not want calls, but they might love the fact that they can just DM or Slack or something like that. Not Slack, but you know, like DM, um, to get access and have quick responses. That might be more valuable than even having calls.

To like, in terms of how we think through vendors list of like, who are the best recruiters for example, for, that would that would be something that would appeal to them.

Yeah. And if you're dealing with founders, then it's like, founders is very broad. But if it's like tech founders, then it's like, okay, well, then that's now we can get, we can get really juicy on this and make stuff that that they would want. Like, we also have our pitch deck that has already generated over $100 million in fundraising, and you can just copy and paste your logo in and then your benefit and selling points. That alone is worth more than the price of this thing for five years.

Like, what's keeping your company alive worth, right? Like, accountants, lawyers, recruiters.

Yeah. Everyone wants good ones of the host. We're already partnering, partnering with other partners that offer different services than us. They specialize in, for example, developing AI agents or developing GBTs or developing automated solutions for the sales process.

And then you get affiliate revenue from all of them. Great. Love it. Um, so that's about attracting the right people. Uh, we covered what to add. I think free trial is not going to get bad people in necessarily. Doesn't look desperate. That was just me saying that. Um, um, okay, so let's talk, uh, high ticket versus low ticket coexisting and versus the transition. So, um, as long as the price points aren't like too close, then I don't think you're going to have an issue of, uh, cannibalization. Like, and the right type of customer just wants to pay more to have more support, more implementation help, more, etc. Um, fundamentally, like, I like to think of the clear line between the two as implementation versus stuff that's unlimited, has no marginal cost. That's how I would differentiate those things. Um, the things that are not immediately scalable are the things that you charge more for. That's how I think about them.

Maybe the best, a good way to start with this because it seems like a lot of people here are interested in when should I do a high ticket? Is that right? Yeah. So maybe like, when, like, so you're doing your low ticket, when do you, when should you even think about adding a higher ticket thing? Would that be useful? Yeah.

What's your view on this? I'm curious.

I think it's a goal question more than anything because like you can absolutely just, I mean, like I think Taiga has an OnlyFans with 5 million a month he pays with no high ticket. You know what I mean? So, um, you, you're starting a second business. It's significantly more operationally complex. You have a lot more team, a lot more employees. You have more reputation risk that goes, like the amount that people are upset for for $7 a month is very different than $10,000. Just a very different level of upset if something doesn't deliver. Um, and I will hit on this scammer thing because we might as well hit it now. The big reason the information market has the reputation it does is not because of what they teach, it's because of what they promise. Like that's the issue. Like fundamentally, like if I, like we have workshops here. We don't do them for free because we incur costs in order to like put these on. We have caterers. We have all this stuff, right? No one's upset because I don't promise anything. I say I'll share the stuff that has worked well for me, and if it works for you, then great. You get in trouble when you say you will make $10,000 a month in 30 days, and they don't make $10,000 a month in 30 days. And the vast majority don't make $10,000 a month in 30 days. That's like, that is fun. Like Dave Ramsey. So, like, let's zoom all the way out. Like the people that you want to look at from a brand perspective. Dave Ramsey is a guru. He sells courses. He sells events. He sells an app. And he sells coaching. Literally his four products. He sells media too, technically, to advertisers, but those are the four main products that he sells. How does he do it in a way that no one calls Dave Ramsey a scam? Because the promises that he makes are absolutely justifiable. If you save $2,000 a month, you will have $2,000 more dollars a month. No one's gonna fight him on that. If you didn't save the money, you didn't save the money. Right? Now, that's part of the unique thing about his particular business is that everyone makes some amount of money. And he says if you spend less of it, you will have more left over.

Dollar saved, dollar earned.

Yeah. Right. It's the easiest way to make more money is to spend less.

Yeah. It's true. Yeah. And so the claims that he has are, um, and, and if you listen to any of his stuff, he, he doesn't even, he doesn't even make claims. He just provides value. And then enough people, because when you're just providing value, you grow at such a faster rate that then people just want, they just want more. And so I think someone else was early asking questions like, what is free versus what isn't, um, in terms of, uh, content. Honestly, the same stuff. And that's why, and to be fair, I take that more as my free stuff should be just as good as my paid stuff, more than my paid stuff is is now junk because my free stuff is not good. Like, I spend a year on a book that I give away every year. And I just want that to be so exceptional that it spreads on its own. And so I think if you think about, "How do I make my amazing free stuff just as good as my amazing paid stuff?" At some point, you just, you draw a line and you say, "If you want more of that, you can pay for it," and people will be like, "Well, I consumed all this, I want more," and they'll pay for it because this was worth more than the price of free, and it was worth more than the time they gave.

Go for it.

Yeah. So, my question, I guess, is more specific on, not that it's difficult to satisfy customers. We have no issue with that. We have had not a single complaint from people calling us a scam.

Sure. From the program. The issue is because it's high ticket. People want to look it up. People that didn't buy that just went on the sales call. They're the ones that are posting this negativity. A lot of times you can kind of tell these people are crazy just by the way they write.

Sure. But we've had a thread. Yeah. But we've had a thread on Reddit grow when people start shows up at the top. And so it's like, what do you do to combat that to prevent that? I know that there's ways to, you might be able to buy a thread and then delete it, but people will always be an outlet to complain, right?

Let me, let me zoom out for you. One, every single YouTube video that I post, people are like, "He's just trying to sell his course." I don't even have a course for sale. So, like, point one. Point two is that the only way that you combat that is being 10 times louder. So, think about it as like a percentage of mind space that exists. They're this loud. If you're this loud, then they're 50% of the talking about you. So, you drown it out. You shrink them into irrelevance. It's the only way you deal with it because you're not going to change humans. People who don't know you will make an assumption because you teach anything about making money that you automatically have these things that they've seen from other people who teach money. And so they will just make that association on their own, which, by the way, is what branding is. So, like, you're not, like, as long as you do this stuff, that will happen. And so, the question is, what do you do about it? I don't think buying the Reddit thread is the answer because another one will come up. It doesn't really matter. You just need to do this.

Prove them wrong.

Yeah. Would you maybe make it like a content space for you? Like, for example, hire copywriters or start uploading content yourself there and flood it with?

No, definitely not. Ignore it and just get focus on your work. Like, zero attention. Like, and I'm only going to highlight this because you're here because this is important. The fact that like you flew here and like the most pressing question or one of the most pressing questions you had was this. This is them winning because all of that mind space could just go towards making more money, making the business better, making the product better. Like, they get zero. Like, in general, also, if someone like makes a big public blast or they do a hit piece, and I'm sure I will get one in the future at some point, I will never acknowledge it. Why would I? Why would I? Why would I tell my audience about this thing? Like, that's, that's the biggest gift in the world. Now, all these people are telling their audiences about you, and they're doing it for free.

So, you couldn't do like a Tai Lopez and invite them over?

No, I don't even think I'll. No comment. Okay. No, I ignore all of it. Like, no. Yeah.

Okay. So, that was, um, that was about attracting the. Oh, this was this one. Uh, coexisting between the two and the when. Uh, it's, yeah, it's an entirely different business. If you want to do that, like, it'll absolutely be, absolutely be an increase in in income. Uh, the process is, is basically weaving it into the customer journey. So, if you have your, here we go. So, you have your, your journey for the customer who comes in, they, you know, they get an event at month, you know, whatever, three, and they've got their coffee with Hamza every day. Duh. Lots of coffee. This is awesome. We want to make sure that the communication that's going to them during this period of time. We want to have a point that's an activation point, which basically demonstrates that they're ready to, like, you don't want to necessarily pitch because you don't want to pitch everybody in the community because it, it's not for everybody, and everyone wouldn't benefit, and it just won't look good. But if someone has now reached a certain level, like they hit 1,000 subscribers or whatever the metric is for you, say, "Hey, guess what? You won this," and then you have a call. And so, that call, you provide value, and then you just ask them if they want to do next steps. It's just, and all you do in that call is say, "You're here, you want to get here. You will absolutely get there on your own. The question is whether you want to take it five years or you want to have it take five months." It's just the value of your time.

Go ahead. So, could it be for example, when one of my students has their first 100 members in November shifts, then they win a call with me, then it's an opportunity to see if that person is a good?

Yeah. And if you want to do one to many, which I think for your brand might work really well because you have so much volume, you could just invite them to a call alto together and just do a webinar, just do a live. You do once every two weeks or once a month. All the people who qualify go to this webinar, and I know just based on the stuff that I've seen from you, like you'll provide a ton of value on the webinar anyways, and then you just, yeah.

Go ahead. Um, I've got a good one in terms of when do you know if you should offer a high ticket because I think Hamza was kind of talking about this.

Okay. Yeah. It's process. Yeah.

Um, so what I found when I was selling lower ticket info first, cuz that's how I got started, was that a lot of my successful students wanted more. They kept coming to me and they were like, "How, I've already hit the goal that this course was for, and I want, I've got more money, but I want more. I want to go to the next level, and you don't have anything." Like, "I want more." Like, what? They were, they were like basically offering to pay me money for something more. And once there's enough of those happening, that's when you know that there's a need for a second level, basically. Does that make sense?

Yeah. You need, you need the demand.

Yeah. Definitely don't put it in until there's a, you can see a clear need, cuz then all you do is when you see these people hit this level, a lot of them will ask for it, and then you can just message those particular people. That way, you're not like smashing everyone in your community every day about your high ticket thing. It's more just cherry-picking, and you get the best people in without even really promoting it. Does that make sense? That's what I've found works well.

You can engineer the activation point by telling them that as soon as they hit the objective metrics, they win an award. Like for us, we had a sword. So, when a gym hit a million dollars a year, they would get a sword. And so, we do the live event, like when we do our events, we'd have an award ceremony, and everyone would get knighted, whatever they get the sword. But whatever that, that number is for you, they're going to turn in a video. They're going to turn in substantiation. All of that becomes ads, by the way, the second way of getting ads from people. Um, and then you also can then just, they will just lean into you because they want the thing, and then you can then ascend. But I really, I will, I will re-emphasize Sam's point that like, you can, you can never do it too late. You absolutely can do it too early because like, if you waited four years and you have this massive community, it'll just be better. Like, the engine's still going to be the front end. Like, the, the community, the low ticket on the front end is still going to be the main economic engine that drives the demand into the higher ticket. So, when you have those people reaching out, it makes sense to put them in some kind of waiting room where you say, because I keep getting the question and I'm saying, "I'm thinking about it."

Sure. If it's, uh, is it a buy or if it's yet, would it make sense to put them in a waiting room so they could at least interact with each other because they are already at a higher level. And I see that if I'm not available for them because the conversation in the community is below where they are, right? So, they start to look for other things. You want to keep growing. So, maybe I could at least connect them with each other while I'm getting ready to do that.

I would do nothing unless you're going to do it.

Okay. Like, yeah. Cuz otherwise, it's not going to really satisfy it anyway. Do you know what I mean?

And you want to charge for them meeting each other. That's one of the benefits of the bait.

If you give it to them for free. By the way, if you ever do a waiting list, don't do it for free. Side note, just learned that one. Like, waiting list, if you, if you are going to do something and you want to say like, "Okay, I'm not ready yet. I want, I want to have a waiting list six months later." Those people have found other things. So, if you want to retain people on a waiting list, have them put a deposit down to be on the waiting list so that they can get a discount when the thing comes out.

Funnel deposit?

Uh, I mean, that's a you question. For me, it's a no. But, and if someone's like, "I needed it to be refundable," like, "You're not ready for this," and I mean that genuinely. Like, I always try to sell from the back. I don't, I don't need the money, and I, like, I don't like flood money. Obviously, if they actually asked for the refund, I give it to them, but I, I don't sell it that way.

Okay. So, that was the. So, that was both the when and the how. So, when, in my opinion, wait as long as you possibly can. I know you have a massive amount of of community members. You could probably launch one pretty easily. Um, but for many people here, I would recommend like, why don't we just 10x the community that you have? Cuz then it'll make the backend thing that much juicier when you choose to do it, and you can focus now. Cuz I promise you, like, the, I did, you guys see the guy who won the school games this month in March? So, this guy's a high ticket guy selling insurance stuff or whatever, and he sold a $10,000 thing. That was his whole business. He came on school and then he wanted to win the recordings from today. So, by the way, shout out. Um, and so, and so he just got on the phone with his normal customers and instead of selling the 10K thing, he just, uh, sold them $1,000, like $999 for a year, and put them into the school community, and just got three of them on because he wanted to get the free recordings. But then the sales were so easy that he switched his model and sold 50 people into that in the, like, 20-some days. And so, um, I, I mean, Sam and I have talked about this at length, but I think there, there is a movement that's that's moving more from high, like grass is always greener. There's tons of operational challenges that that exist with high ticket, um, in general.

And you also have to factor in profit cuz I know in the info space you hear a lot of numbers thrown around.

It's always revenue. Yeah. Like, million a month, that's everyone's goal, but I've met a many people that make a million a month that actually profit less than Hamza. So, cuz he has no ads and he just employs his siblings and he lives at home. So, like, and the easiest way for Hamza to double is just to do affiliates. So, like, he could get to 400 grand a month. And I know a lot of people that make a mill a month don't make 400 grand a month profit.

Sure. Like, 100%. So, always be more realistic about it. Like, you hear these big numbers, but by the time you pay a sales team and ads, a lot of that money's gone. So, make sure you're realistic about doing it, cuz it is a huge burden. People hate managing sales teams, like most people, at least, and ads suck too, um, in most cases. So, like, make sure you personally want to do it, and then make sure people are ready for it in your community. Um, and you might be able to achieve, if your goal is just to like double, you might be able to do it by just tweaking one thing with your current offer too.

Just double the conversion on the page is like, just keep tweaking the offer. Go ahead. This is super helpful for me because we have right now our high ticket is like four months and it, it's more, um, implementation.

And I'm, I'm, I've been wrestling with, uh, actually yesterday, Sam, when you're like, "I lay out looking at trying to think of problems." I'm, "Oh, yeah, I do that too." But it's this one around, um, just like, I'm used to a certain way we, it's like, 10K four months.

And then looking at like, well, what would like a longer term, more, um, like less hands-on? I like the idea of like, oh, can I create it in a way that's not so one-on-one intensive? Uh, yeah, just any insights around that. I hear like, yeah, just.

If I could go back in time again, we talk about sellability of a business. Um, Gym Launch was by far the most expensive player in the market. So, ours was $4,000 a month, 43 technically, um, per month to gym owners who on average take home $30,000 a year. Tough. There was another guy actually in the UK, and I noticed this price point continued to reappear, but there were guys who were able to get like 36 month, 40 plus month LTVs selling more or less the same thing. Not the same thing obviously, but like at like $800 to $1,200 a month. And so the, what I realized from Gym Launch, and we've, you know, obviously we've since changed the pricing and whatnot, was that we had to price to people's worst month because even though if we made on average, so the average gym for us added an extra $120,000 in profit per year just using the system that we had. And so for me, I was like, "Okay, well, net of us, it was 120. It was 60 with us. Like, if we didn't, if we were free, right? So we made them 160. Net of us is 120 in extra profit." Now, again, these guys are making 30. So, I quadrupled their income. Like, pretty sexy offer. And we did that on average, but they would still cancel if they had a bad month. And so, I saw that these other people were able to maintain customers because they had, they were above their worst month. They still could afford the thing. And so because of that, they knew that if they got one thing a year, it would pay for it. And they were willing to continue to pay at that price point. And so, there's a wild difference between what someone will pay at their searing hot pain point versus what they will pay after they had a steak dinner. Like, "Do you still want to have some steak?" Well, I might want to have some steak tomorrow, so maybe I'll be willing to pay, but significantly less. Like, that price point compared to the value is where people continue to pay.

That's helpful. It's just, it's, I was impatient because I wanted to make the money. But if I had known, like, but for context, if I had 6,000 gyms right now paying a thousand dollars a month, I'd be making six million a month, or that business would be doing six million a month just on that side. We had the supplement side, too. Um, and so that would have also been significantly more profitable.

And then I'll probably have questions deliverability, but the offer stuff is.

Yeah. Yeah. No worries. I think if you really do provide value, you might find that there's an amazing spot at like $700 a month that people just like, you, the thing is, you'll be able to sell like N for selling will go up like 8x.

Right? And so that's where like, this is literally just a pricing graph, and then you just look at max units and LTV. Navigating like the one on the back end delivery side and like, yeah, by the way, for everybody, small group is the most profitable way to do it. Wrong way. Okay. Good on offers.

Is this helpful for you guys? Is this cool? Okay. Dead. Yeah. That helps me out, too. I need affirmation.

All right. So, so we started this guy on offers. Check. All right. Number two, organic strategy. Oh, that'll be a nice change. Okay, let's go organic. Number two, organic strategy. Oh, that'll be a nice change. Okay, let's go organic. Fun stuff. Okay.

You're perfect for this cuz you went from all ads to only organic. So, like, you should share that.

Um, yeah. Yeah. So, I feel like I've, I've spent a lot, like the last two and a half years has been me just going complete 180 off of. I mean, you, I, I know you. I saw you sent the email to your list with, uh, the interview I had with, uh, Graham Stefen. The first interview I did with him, I was like, "If I had your audience, I'd be a billionaire." And like, he was like, "What are you talking about?" I like, "You have no idea." Like, he didn't have an email list. I was like, "Do you have anywhere?" Like, he was like, "No." I was like, "Please, just for the love of God, just make an email list at least for this massive," because he was living on ad revenue. That's like, which is insane. Like, there's this, these two worlds. We talk about this. There's like the world that makes money and just needs traffic, and the world that has so much traffic and has no money. And so, when you learn how to marry those two, you just make absolutely obscene amounts of money. Um, I mean, like Logan Paul merging with Prime, like he had the audience and the traffic, and then he had a way to make money. Mr. Beast with the chocolate, like he had, he had distribution, he just needed a product. Alexi needed a product for the distribution base. School, right? Tons of traffic, where do we send it? Right? And so, um, right now, if you have paid ads, starting organic will immediately make the paid ads more profitable because what will happen is people will look at the ads, then they will look at your organic, and then they will take the next step. Even if they took the next step and booked a call, they will actually show. And if they show, they'll have a higher percentage of closing. Like, don't worry about the views and all of that stuff that happens in the early days. Just keep making it. And just think about it in the beginning as lead nurture rather than like, in the early days, it'll be nurture. As you get bigger and bigger, it'll become acquisition, but just from a value perspective, if you can just make that shift, it'll make your life a lot easier. Um, from a scaling organic perspective, I, I tend to always start with an agency, uh, for every new medium or platform that I want to go on. Now, if you don't want to do that, that's fine. I just prefer to buy lessons and trick my timelines. And so, I started with a guy that I think I was paying like five grand a month. In no way was he special. Basically did nothing. Um, but it kept me accountable to making three videos a week. And so, I would do that, and he would post them. I still don't really know how to post a video on YouTube. Um, and so I say that because, uh, if you just focus on making the content exceptional, like, it will grow. Like, it absolutely will grow. And just my recommendation is, do not promote in the content to the greatest ever. So, think about it like this, is that you want to have this big valuable thing, all this content that you're teaching. The CTAs in my opinion in content are not very effective. Like, they kill reach. It feels weird. No one likes it. Whatever. People will, people will naturally just take the next step. If you put it in the descriptions, you put it in your link, your link in bio. Like, you do those two things, you will get traffic to your stuff by just saying, "This is what I do," rather than, "Hey, by the way, like, I just, I don't think that's the right way to do it." The beautiful merger of these, who here knows how to run ads? Can just like, get a show of hands. Okay, so like, half of you guys. Okay, where the magic happens is where you build all the goodwill for free, and then you use ads to do the CTAs. And so, has anyone here read the Leads book? Okay, so there's a whole content section about the give-ask ratio. The, unfortunately, based on the book and the limitations of the book, I can't get into like more advanced stuff. Where it gets really juicy is that all of your content is only give, and then the ads are the ask. So, then you don't have to balance a give-to-ask ratio. You just only give in content. And then the ads serve to be the CTA. And for whatever reason, it protects the brand. It's a totally different vibe. If I was, if I was like, right hooking in every video, be like, "Hey, go to here, go to here, go to here." People would be like, "Whoop!" And then that, that would be it. Like, no one would watch my stuff anymore. But if I keep providing value, they get value, I deposit goodwill, and then later we could hit them with an advertisement to go do something, and they exist completely separately. And so, we just want to think about the mind space of like, the 3:1 ratio still exists. If you think about someone's newsfeed, so they have like content one from you, content two from you, content three from you, and then they have an ad from you, and so here's the money one, and all this other stuff is free. And so, think about it from a larger perspective. And that's this is, this is where like, this is where the obscene money is. So, if you, I know Hamza has a brand. Who else here is organic? Okay. Oh, great. Okay. Well, then you guys know organic stuff. So, why don't I just open it up? What do you, like, what do you guys have questions about here?

Go for it. It's like, how to make, like, like what type of CTA to use like in an ad to like, just get out.

Okay. So, let's talk about, I'll, I'll hit the ad, the ad side. And sorry, I did kind of frame it this way, but I wanted to give the bigger picture. Go ahead.

So, I think my problem is I have a YouTube channel. It is relatively small, like 13,000 subscribers, and my content is super niche-specific tutorials, and I don't know how to break out of that. Um, yeah, because I don't want to talk about something that is super superficial, if that makes sense.

Yeah, like brutally honest advice to your air-off. Yeah, I agree. Go ahead. Do you go maybe thinking about like, algorithm specifically or like, um, retention rates from a viewer on YouTube and stuff like that that you could share?

I mean, I'll just take algorithm and then I'll go from there. I had plenty of thoughts on it. Go ahead.

Yeah. So, in my content, I do a lot of call to action on all my content.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, right now, that's the only way you get customers, right? So, you have to manage the give-to-ask ratio within that bucket. As soon as you start running ads profitably, I would just turn off all the CTAs in your organic and just make that all give and let the ads do the asks.

Okay. You'll also grow faster.

So, change it when I start running.

Yeah. Once you get them profitable.

Yeah. All right. It's like Alex told me to just stop asking my, like, all of a sudden my business went down. Like, no, like, yeah, get it profitable, then do it. Go ahead. Uh, we have a very small Instagram channel and then the free, uh, school community. Yeah. Some distinction around like, what content on what, uh, like, how to rep, like.

Yeah, just how to best think about, um, what type of content is Instagram just to drive to the free school. Free school is not longer. Uh, yeah.

You have a free school community. They have a free school. Oh, they can be the same thing. Yeah. Yeah. I have, you'd be surp, like, people tend to consume, like, I think the audiences I have on Twitter are completely different than the audience I have on YouTube. And I even think that within YouTube, the people who watch my shorts are different than people who watch my vlogs. So, people have preferences around consumption. And, um, I will tell you a big secret. My podcasts are my YouTube videos just taken out of the video and put on the podcast. I've never had a single person message me saying, "Wait, this is the same thing as the YouTube videos." Not one. We get millions of downloads a month. Not one. Like, it's, if they consume it in a different context. I also think that there's other associations around it that it almost makes it novel. So, I have zero concerns about that.

Go for it. I've been a very short-form focused first reader for the past, but I've realized that like building a big brand long-form has more salvos. So, just like try to find a way to transition cuz I've been doing short open theory for just getting into.

You want to add, like, how to add, go, like, add in longs. Yeah. You definitely don't want to stop the shorts.

I realized that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Don't stop the CTA scenario. Also with YouTube, you post your shorts on YouTube, and have you seen that like affect your audience like?

No, that's to com. Yeah. Go for it. How do you go about building that within your content team? What do you look forward in hiring an editor or a filmer?

What should deal structure you have with them? Or should you even do it? I think is a good question because I chose not to. I chose to just partner, right? So, like, because it's really hard to do both. I think Hamza is a really rare exception where he does both, but I've almost found no one that does both. Oh, you do both. Um, Kenneth, but like, usually people that run the business don't make the content, and people that make the content don't have time to run the business. So, you really want to think about that first. I think like, am I going to do this, and how can it work, and who is making it work, and then, you know, get into all of this, or have you, or are you going to partner up with someone? What do you, what do you think about that?

So, I was going to give you the, the honest answer, which is, um, I hired someone and I was like, "Hey, can you build a content team here?" And so, that's what we did. Um, and we have a great team. Shout out Jason or Trevor. Um, but it, like, to Sam's point, I have, I have, I don't have the time to, I couldn't, I couldn't possibly, uh, manage the team, and Caleb does an awesome job of it, and I would, it's better that way.

Build the team up. Yeah. Zero. It was just Caleb behind the camera in the beginning.

First hire, you build a team.

Yeah. So, one of the things, so there's an investing saying which is, "Hire one to hire 10," which is, you want to, like, we, we prefer having done, like, scaled a lot of businesses now. Find the really smart, like, the smartest person you can in that space, be willing to pay more for them, and then allow them to use their network to bring people in to populate the the team because they're like, "I don't know how to edit video. I don't know how to look at an edit. I don't know, like, we have this joke. I'm like, we got is the focal point, right? Or the color grading?" Like, I don't know what any of that means, but they do. And so, I'm sure it's like, uh, with like developers, like, if I were hiring developers, I wouldn't, I wouldn't even know where to start, right? I would find somebody who's an absolute G and be like, "Cool, please hire the development team and trust them to do that." Now, generic, uh, like operations stuff about like, how to manage team, well, that's just normal, like, cadence of.

communication, expectations, onboarding, training, and whatnot. But um in terms of like team structure, you have to have someone who's going to capture it. Ideally, somebody who also knows how to edit it. Usually, the first hire should be able to do both and ideally, you should have experience on a platform doing something similar in a business like yours. So, like Caleb came from Gary Vee and he was on Gary's team, and so I was like, "Great. So you know how to do this thing. So start." And so, like, one of the big hacks in life is just use someone else's life so you can just strap onto yours.

We actually hired an Interact, uh, creative director. So, um, how would you go about managing an A-player without like fully relying on...

Are you making money?

Yeah.

Okay. So, there's going to be a lot of differences between entertainment and education. Like, a lot of differences.

That's what we're struggling with right now.

Yeah.

Yeah. Um, a lot of differences. A lot.

So, you think his brain? 'Cause what we realize is his brain is like wired towards like 10 or 10.

Of course. It's like...

It's what he did.

How do you like balance that? You know what I mean?

Be tough. It's like, "How do I change a person and get them to live a different life than the one they lived?"

'Cause he understands like the making money stuff, but like he's so tied to entertainment that like it kind of clashes.

Yeah.

It's, I mean, it's a different style of content. And so, let me, let's hit the last few questions and then we'll just cross these out.

Like, how do you find like product-market fit for your content? Like...

Great question. So that's going to be in this one too. So that's good.

Then also, like, volume.

Yeah, volume. Yeah, that's a good one.

And um, and then when you, once you have the product-market fit and you want to do volume, like, how do you have an endless pool of like...

Well, that I can help with. Yeah.

All right. So, I'm going to just rant at you for a second. Try and cross as many of these out as I can. So, um, from a like topics, volume, like these kind of all go together. So, so Evelyn, for you, if you're looking at, "I make this really niche content, I need to go wide." The, in my experience, like, keep making the content that's going to serve your avatar. If you want to have, I would say, like, if you want to sprinkle in, I just consider it further top-of-funnel. And so, like, we have made some of these. Like, I made one video on some meal stuff I did. Um, and I would say that for us, we kind of swing a little bit like a pendulum where I, I only like making business content. The team will urge me to not make business-specific content so that we can appeal to a wider audience from time to time. And usually, like, the more I do this, I'm like, "Ah," and then I swing back over here. And I'm willing to know that the volume drops. And I'll just tell you, let me just share this experience with you. So, we did, um, we did a workshop here. That's why it's set up like this. And I asked the room, I said, "Hey, uh, of the content that I make, which you guys are consuming, like the case study stuff where we like build out a sales team and like we're like, 'How we do onboarding and like all that stuff?' And who here's consuming like 'Lessons to My Younger Self?'" The whole room was this side. And so, even though these got one-third the views of these ones, sometimes this can introduce people. Like, the right people will then just think about it as top-of-funnel. Like, this gets more people in. They'll see other stuff you have, and then they'll go down the longer, niche, more niche videos that's specific to them. Now, the other people who just come for that, well, they'll wait till you have your next one of that, and then YouTube or whatever will display it to them. Um, so that's from a topic perspective. I would say if you do like four, like 3:1, 4:1 in terms of your longs, like one I go a little bit wider and the rest I still stay on topic, you'll probably get the best of both worlds.

Um, from a, what I would tell you though, is that I think your stuff's really good and I, I think you just need to get, you need to learn more presentation skills. And that's okay. That's not, this is me trying to help. Um, and so I think that you could probably take the same content you're currently making and just simply structure it better, and you'd probably get 10 times the views. And, um, a side note for you guys is you'll notice the bigger the creator, usually the less frequent they actually make videos. And it's because they realize just power laws exist, which is that if you spend 10 times more time on one video, it doesn't get 10 times the views. Sometimes they get a hundred times the views. And so, like, especially platforms nowadays are so heavily reliant on quality. You create the quantity to figure out the quality. And so in the beginning, more people make lots of content, and then you start figuring out the stuff that works. Figuring out the stuff that works, and then you'll notice that they're like, "Oh man, well, we did spend more time on that video." Okay, well, if we're going to keep making videos like that, I don't think we can make this money. But it's okay because you make it up on the fact that the total quality of that one. It gets shared more. People watch it longer. And, um, I think Mr. Beast said this, but it was like, if you make 10 videos or you spend 10 times and you make that one video 20% better in terms of AVD or click-through rate, you don't get 10 times the views, you get a 100 times the views. So, you get a disproportionate return for quality. And so, I think it's fine from a, from the niche content perspective, but I would go really deep on the topic and try and keep it, keep it as, um, congruent with the packaging of the video, which is where a lot of people lose off. And you need to obsess about your first 30 seconds.

Obsess.

And from presentation skills, what was the education or coaching that made the biggest difference for you when it comes to leveling up with presentation skills?

First off, my content did pretty well pretty quick. Um, and so I, but I had 10 years plus of presenting. I just wasn't doing it on camera. And so I had that going for me. The obsession around like, I, I started, I started just so I'm just now really going to be diving into content. As silly as this sounds, like, up till this point, pretty much has been the team. So I'm prioritizing it now. Um, but like this last, uh, weekend, I watched my top 35 YouTube videos. I watched the first 3 minutes of all of them. And I wanted to figure out like, what was it that I did in these videos that I didn't do in other videos that had similar average view duration, but I didn't, like, I, I didn't carry as many people through. And, um, I'll just share this with you, the three Ps that I found, at least for us, which is promise, proof, path. And so you want to cover that. And this is where this is for you in terms of the big difference between ed educators and entertainers. They don't think that way. The entertainers are like, and we spent, I mean, um, one of the guys I have is from Mr. Beast's team, so like, like familiar, and I know Jim, um, and maybe I'll find out in two years I'm wrong here, but this is what I think right now, which is that like, there's a huge, there was a huge obsession of like, "Match the exact words of the headline with the first however many seconds of the video. Confirm the thumbnail in the in the background." And that's really because if you say, "Hey, we're going to crush a Lamborghini," and you go, and it's a talking head, there's no Lamborghini. They're like, "Screw this," and they're out, right? But if you're educating, then I think the Lamborghini in our situation is proof. It's how is the big Vegas lights of why should I listen to you? Sure, I want to learn more about guarantees. Okay. But why should I listen to you? And if you can answer that as quickly as possible, like the, the videos that like, when I looked at my top ones, it was just like, "Hey, I sold my company for $46.2 million. A big part of that was that we had a guarantee that beat all of our competitors. And so we did four things that we used that made our guarantee stronger. Done." And if it, if that's what I said the video was about, they're like, "Okay, there's a promise of what he's going to help me do. There's a path, and I have proof of why I should listen to this guy." And so you want to have that.

Can you blend that with entertainment content? Like, kind...

With entertaining content. Yeah.

I see what you're doing with your videos. You're like putting together Lego castles.

That's props. Yeah. So, I just see that to make it more engaging, more than like entertaining, engaging. Sure. I just see those as actually making things more accessible to people. I mean, yeah. I mean, that's work, but I still see that as fundamentally education. Do you think we should keep educating or is it go more towards like entertainment and giving like, kind of like? Are you familiar with Jordan Walsh?

Uh, no.

It's, it's more like content about money, but it's entertaining, essentially.

I, I'm an educator.

Yeah.

Is he more like selling the lifestyle and dream?

It's similar to...

Yeah. So, that can work because I think it's related. You're like, "Here's the lifestyle of being an entrepreneur." Because you have to first sell people on like wanting to be one, and then teach them.

Yeah. 'Cause just education alone can be a bit...

It depends who you cater to. I go to business owners.

So I, like, I want business owners.

You want me. So I would say like the "why" is probably what we, our goal.

Yeah. And I answer questions as I, as I understand it. So, yeah, go for it. Price.

Yeah. 'Cause I feel like I'm kind of in like, when it comes to YouTube, I'm kind of in like a mixed niche where it's a niche of like entertainment and vlog. So, I'll be vlogging, but it's also a mixture of knowledge and like, so one video will be like, "How to start a clothing brand in 2024 to be most profitable," and one video will be like, "I bought an AMG G63."

Sure.

I think that's fine. I think that's the mix that we're talking about where like, you still make sure you deliver the core value, but you also show people who you are. And I think that's the, that's what strength, like, deepens the audience, whatever you want to call it.

And that's the proof to your three Ps thing. The, the Mercedes is proof that you, that your education works.

Do you know what I mean?

Yeah.

What would you guys say, like, the ratio should be? I know you said like 4:1, that's like, it's like in a really like vlog-dependent niche. It's like weird. Like a lot of education. Like, what do you think the ratio of like educational to entertainment?

I, I have no idea. I don't even make videos anymore.

I just can see it like watching. I can, every different channel I see, like, they have their own style. I think you have to develop your own style too.

That's what I was thinking. I was telling him like, "I don't know if I should go down like the business niche or if I go down this niche, but I was kind of like, I should just create my own niche in the middle where it's like a mixture of both that kind of makes it unique to my content."

I think that's what works the best. 'Cause Hamza has his own style. Forosi has his own style. Like, but there's still probably the, I really, I wrote down this promise, proof, path thing because it reminded me a lot of that that hair in my garage ad. Do you remember that one?

So, I, I wondered why that ad works so well for a long time. And it, it was the Lamborghini is the proof.

Yeah.

The books, the knowledge.

And then find a mentor.

Yeah.

Which is like these three things, right? And that crushed. Like, that ad, I just remember it.

Yeah.

Um, and so I think there's definitely something to this for sure.

Spent a whole day on it. Like, that, that's the big thing. It's like, you have to answer the question like, "What's in it for me?" and "Why should I believe you?" And then the, the path, in my opinion, is just to show that there is structure and you can set expectations and meet the expectations. I think that's more about watch time. Uh, the first two are about why should I stay? And then the, that's the what's going to happen. So, um, I will probably write a book on branding at some point. Um, but a lot of effort has been put in for me. Like, I think I have significantly increased my understanding what like what a brand is. And so I think first starting with the term of defining it, which is, it's an association between two things. Like, that's what a brand is. It's between things that people know and people that they don't know. And so branding is also a word for teaching. Like, if I say, if I, I wear a hat in every video, then people start to associate the hat with me, right? And if I provide value, eventually you can take the hat off and people still associate the value with the hat. Fundamentally, that's what branding is. And so if you're trying to make content about a certain topic, they will associate you with that topic. And so if you want to be known for a certain thing, like that, like the background, everything that goes into it, people make associations. That's how we learn, right? And so there are three elements to brand. The first is the strength of the influence, which is if I tell people to do well. More specifically, in a broader sense, does when people see me or see a logo or see something, does it change their behavior? And if we were to go to the etymology of the word, basically where it first began, branding was like, if I branded a cow, right, brand accounted cows. It's got a, it's got a mark on it. The reason for that was because it would change people's behavior. If I saw a cow that didn't have a brand, a cow that did have a brand, I would maybe catch this cow, I would leave it alone, I'd do whatever. But the one that has Rick's logo on it, I might give it back to Rick, or I'd kill Rick if I, or kill the cow if I hate Rick, or I'd steal the cow if, either way, the brand, I would treat this cow differently than the cow that had no brand. And so brands change behavior at scale. That's why they're so valuable. And so the question is, from an influence, is what percentage of people does it change their behavior? If it changes a lot of people's behavior, Donald Trump changes a lot of people's behavior. Now, the next question is, is that behavior going towards or is it going away? For some people, it's very strongly towards, and other people, it's very strongly away, but he changes people's behavior. So he has strong, he has strong brand from an influence perspective. The directionality is going to depend on the person. And then the next piece, the third piece is just the reach, which is how many people in general have this association with you. And so if you're thinking, "I want to build a brand," then you'd think about the hypothetical max of what a brand would be, which is you'd want as many people as humanly possible moving towards you and all changing their behavior at once when they see your thing. That would be the hypothetical max of a brand, right? Like Taylor Swift has a brand that's very close to this. Everyone knows who she is. She has a very strong, uh, a very strong brand in terms of changing people's behavior, and they tend to move in the direction that she wants them to go. So I also kind of relatively reject the concept of "all publicity is good publicity." I would just say all publicity is publicity. It will increase the reach of your brand. It won't increase necessarily these two, but it will increase the reach. More people will know about you. And so it's just being specific about what a brand actually is. And so if you understand that a brand is built through associations, then you're also very careful about who you choose to be, uh, who you choose to appear next to, right? And so there's a reason that, um, I don't speak on stages anymore that I don't own, mostly because the audience will associate me with the other speakers, and I often don't want to be associated with the other speakers. Um, podcasts, even to a certain degree, have the same thing. They spend an hour with me and this other person, and I've become more and more strict about this to the point where I really don't appear. Like, I'm not really trying to appear with anyone anymore. Um, and so we have the, my book launch is going to happen, and, um, I'll be publicly announcing I'm not doing anything besides that. Um, but you are always going to be the purest version of your brand. Like, you are your brand. And so you leaning into more of you is the stuff that's going to accomplish these things. And if some people are turned away from you, that's fine. But what we can do to change that is we try and reach as many people as we can, and we try and provide value to those people so that they change their behavior and ideally go towards us. Hopefully, that made sense. Okay. Well, that's how I think about brand and how to protect brand. Cool. Okay. Um, I just wanted to draw that out for you guys because I thought hopefully that was helpful. Niche versus wide algorithm. Uh, big picture here. Don't worry about it. Like, always just align your objective with the platform. Like, hacks are stupid because if you grow off of a hack, like hashtags work or whatever, as soon as they close the loop, because all platforms do, you'll just go down to zero. It's not a long-term strategy. So, just why do it in the short term if it's not going to work long term? The long-term strategy of every platform is to keep people on the platform. And so, they want you to make content that lots of people click on and that lots of people watch all the way through and ideally watch something else from you. So, everything that they do in the algorithm is just to always optimize for those three things, and that's not going to change. Now, the math that they do to code it might change, but the objective will always be the same. And so if you align your objective with the algorithm's objective, you will never have an issue. And that goes for Shorts, it goes for Longs. Like, that's why the hook is so important because they want to, they will see that a lot more people are making it past the first three seconds. So we will show it to more people. And if a lot of people watch all the way through, they'll show it to even more people. And that's all it is because we're aligning our objective with theirs. That's it.

Okay. Shorts versus Longs. Um, in the beginning, think about a long as just many shorts put together. Just from like, if we have that path that I was talking about, like, think about your path as the seven shorts that you're going to string together. You just don't have necessarily 60 seconds that you have to get in. You can get to 90 seconds, whatever. But you still structure them the same way. And that will be beneficial for you. But in terms of longs, there's only three formats. You've got lists, steps, and stories. And you can intermix all three of them. So you can have a list of things and have steps within the list and then tell stories about each step. But all three can be intermixed because that's fundamentally like what content is, is it's lists, steps, and stories. And you just make the list, steps, and stories longer.

Volume Max. So, from a volume perspective, we put out, if you want to like blow blow your mind, uh, we put out 350 pieces a week. So, put 50 pieces out a day, um, across all platforms.

Well, in what, in what form? Like, like 350 different videos.

Yeah.

Yeah. We put 50 pieces of content out a day.

Side question on that. There's some people who do these fan page accounts where they syndicate content. You know, man does this. Some guys here may even do that. Is that something that you would advise?

You mean get fan pages to post stuff for you?

Yeah, like you'd have multiple accounts and you would have different variations of your account.

We don't do any gamification. I do no hacks. Just personally, it might work. I have no idea. I just never, I just don't play the game that way. Um, but in terms of volume, I would start with something that you can commit to and then basically you just keep ramping up. And the big, the big flex on this is understanding where you get double, triple, quintuple, quintuple dips, um, on content. And so a lot of people don't know this, but the highest leverage thing that I do with my time is I make tweets. Those tweets are actually the like, the life source of everything. So my tweets, which I think you have to have a couple ways that you want to capture, like, you, everyone captures content differently, but for me, if I get an idea, I can tweet it in two seconds. It, it's not, it's not, it's not hard for me to do that. And so by doing that, I capture moments throughout the day. And then when we do record with the team, they'll pull up my tweets and be like, "What was this about?" And then I have content on that. And then when they're like, "What do we capture this Instagram?" They take my tweet. And so I get, and then the tweets themselves become Reels. And I can also say the tweet out loud and make it a video. And so all of these things all stem from one place. And when I had Gym Launch before I was public, this actually was an old habit of mine 'cause I actually had this big email thread to myself, which was like, "Lessons and failures throughout the year." And every year I kept one email thread that whenever I'd learned something, I would just send it to that, that thread so I'd keep it. And I just replaced that with Twitter and I just now word them slightly better. Um, but I think you need to have a repository for where your ideas are going to go as they come up throughout the week. If you don't know topics that you can go on, look at your calendar, look at every single meeting you had that week and what you spent your time on, and that will give you more than enough content to talk about. Yeah, I had this meeting and then this, uh, one of my clients had this issue with her order bump and it wasn't working, and so this is what we did, right? Great content. But like, if unless you look retroactively, you might not think about it when you're on the spot. And so one is that I always, I document in real time through tweets or emails, do whatever you want. You have notes on your phone. Two is I look at my calendar of like, what, what did I do this last week that was interesting or like that I learned or something that came up from a meeting perspective. The third category is far past. So like, what are the, what are the big lessons that have, that changed or shifted my beliefs that are valuable to somebody else. And so an example we had earlier, I was like, "Okay, well, I had themed days, but everyone just ended up asking whatever questions." So that would be a mini story that would add value to somebody so that they don't have to do that because like, "Oh, actually, I'm almost done with that. So don't do the themes." Great. I just saved that guy six months, right? And so you've got far past, you've got recent past, your calendar, you've got real time, which you do your tweet dumps on. And then, um, the kind of like fourth category you can look at is what I call manufactured, which is like, "I lived on $100 for a month." Which is much closer to entertainment. I don't really do much of that, but it is another bucket of like topics of content. "I started a school community from scratch and this is what I did." Like, that would be manufactured, right? And so that's how I think about it from a topical perspective that keeps it both interesting and endless. Um, that like, we never have a lack of content. Like, we always have stuff.

What do you find interesting or do you try to figure out what they find like thinking?

It's a good question. I think you have to do both. If you only do it for them, you'll eventually hate it and not want to do it. If you only do it for you, they'll hate it and not want to watch. And so it's kind of marrying the two together. Like, I would only do business case studies if it were up to me. Um, I guess it is up to me, but I would only do that if there were no audience because I do that stuff anyway. That's what I was doing for years. Um, but I make the brutally honest stuff to myself because it's also not a big lift. The team just says, "All right, let's, let's make the theme today, hard times." And so they just search "hard times" on my tweet thread, and there's 38 tweets, and then they just say like, "What did you mean by this one? What did you mean by this one?" And so that creates the content.

How do you get those frameworks out of yourself? Because I think that's one thing that sets you really apart is that you framework everything. Do you have a method for that?

Yeah. Um, I actually have an answer to this now. I've gotten that question a zillion times, but I do have an answer now. So, like, the framework for making frameworks is that if, even if I'll just use the micro story I had about promise, path, plan, right? If I have to do something repeatedly and I have to do it over and over again, I want to create some sort of templates so I don't have to remake the same decisions or have to resolve the same problems. And so I tend to then drink in a ton of data. So I watch 35 of my YouTube videos, the intros, and then I was like, "Okay, what are, what are all the things that happened in each one of them?" So I wrote them all down, and then I was like, "Okay, well, this one had five things, this one had seven things, this one had two things." Okay. Well, what did they all have in common? Well, they all had these three things. And so then you narrow it down to what are the few factors. Basically, delete everything. And if we only had, these are the three things that they all had. And so this was the same thing when we had, um, Gym Launch. I didn't know how to retain customers. I was really good at selling them. But the gym membership, like, I had industry average churn. And what we did to solve that problem was that I, uh, got my customer base. I said, "Who here has less than 3% monthly churn for six or eight months?" And so there were 20 gyms that had that out of however many thousand. And so I got them on a call and I said, "Okay, tell me every single thing you do to retain customers." And each one of them had 20 plus things that they were doing. But when I interviewed all of them, all of all 20 of them were only doing five things in common. And those became the five horsemen of retention, which is became the framework for how we retain customers in a gym. And so you drink in a ton of data, you get everything, and then you circle where are the commonalities. And then if I want to make it sexy, I try to have them be the same letter. Promise, path, plan, easy to remember, or make it an acronym, something like that. But that's fun. Like, that's the real process. And then the, the naming thing is the, is super easy. So that's, that's how I make frameworks. Go ahead.

Take on controversy for content and branding, build it or reputation? Because I know that can go viral, but if you directly go back.

So, I'll say this, and this should hopefully put a lot of you guys at ease. I actually don't think you can be canceled. I just don't think it's true. You can only be canceled if a platform, if all means of communication that you can't communicate with an audience are removed from you. Like, you are unable to communicate and you stop making content. R. Kelly has been canceled because he also stopped making content. Now, he did, I'm trying to think of like the most hypothetical extreme of terrible scenario, right? I would bet, I mean, you look at Kanye, right? He can say anti-Semitic stuff, whatever, he continues to make content, and people still continue to follow him. Like, you become uncancellable as long as you don't accept that you can be canceled. And I think fundamentally, that's it. Now, from a controversy perspective on that, the sheet that I had earlier about reach, controversy helps you get reach. The other two, maybe, maybe not. And so thinking about like, what, like, it's basically the same as getting on a trending topic. Like, to me, controversy and trends are this, more or less the same thing. Um, like, more people on average will be interested or at least click it. Drives CTR. But what do I want them to like? I would not want to associate with a lot of different controversies, so I don't talk about them. I personally don't talk about that stuff. It's just, I don't, I don't care enough. But yeah, some people do. I don't. Okay. Feel have a good feel on organic in terms of making content where the topics come from. Algorithm stuff. Shorts versus Longs. Find one person to hire 10 people who's really smart. Overpay them. Volume comes from commit to what you can and then slowly ramp up. The volume is really so that you learn the quality more than anything else. What's up?

Oh, for food. Yep.

Oh, dope. Um, and then product-market fit. The customers that you have are going to come from the, the niche content, even if it doesn't get as many views. Sorry, one question.

Sure.

Agency or star that hires people?

I, I did both. Um, so I mean, I first started with the agency and then I was like, "Okay, now we're, we're really serious." Basically, when I sold Gym Launch, I was like, "Okay, now I can really do this." When I had Gym Launch and I was just starting some of the YouTube videos and, uh, podcast, I had a podcast agency that just posted it, and I had a YouTube agency that posted it. And then when we were like, "Okay, we're really doing this," I brought Caleb in. He then started managing the agencies and then he hired people in-house to replace them. And basically, I literally outlined the step in the book on agencies, but there's going to be a period where they work and your team works. So you pay twice. And until your team beats their team, and I tell them, I'm like, "I'm going to beat you. That's all I'm trying to do here." And as soon as our team beats their team, they go away.

Giving them different content to work by him.

They can, I mean, you can do whatever you want. You could have them race and be like, "Both of you make a video." Now, me specifically, I had them both make stuff, so I double my content.

Yeah.

Okay, cool.

Uh, one, one last question on the content on the editing team side. I'm sure a lot of other people here can relate. Uh, what is the number that somebody needs to be making...

To justify hiring somebody to do just the content editing?

Do just content editing?

Yeah. Like for our guys, they're going to make hundreds of thousands during football season. And, uh, but they're one-man businesses editing the content by themselves, doing the DMs by themselves. We help to provide some support for them through vendorless, you know, getting them people.

It's kind of like asking like, "What does a developer make?" It's about how good they are. Now, I do think there's a smaller, there's a higher cap or lower cap on a on a video editor than there is, but like, the best editors in the world can basically charge whatever they want 'cause they can make a really boring moment into a viral clip.

But like, what revenue level, 10K, 20K a month for the business to then justify bringing on somebody assuming they're in the content?

I wish I had like a beautiful answer for you, but it also depends on the goals of the person. If they like want to grow, then you could spend up to 100% of your income on promotion more because you want more money in the future. Like software companies run this way. They just spend all of their money or more.

Don't know what I mean.

Yeah. To It's really just how indexed on growth you are. Like, they could do none of it and take all 10,000 a month home. If they want to make 100 grand a month, then they should, if they spend $1,000, they'll get to 100 grand a month slower than they sp if they spend all 10. So that's the answer. It's about their goal and how fast they want to get there.

I guess the thing I'm scared of to go to like an agency is like, I'm good at spirit of moment, like it's off top of my brain and just making a content thing right there and it's organically doing it like that. But if I feel like I transfer to an agency, it will change.

I definitely wouldn't change what you're doing that's working because making content is hard enough.

It's also time-consuming for me to continue to be able to post, think captions, and DM people. I want to kind of get out of it because I know I can focus on more high revenue-generating things. But...

I think promotion is one of the highest revenue things you can possibly do. So I don't think you're going to get out of it. So I'm going to just pop that balloon. But if you like making, you know, like you want to do spur-of-the-moment stuff, do the spur-of-the-moment stuff and then just send it to them to like edit or whatever, clip and cut. Or if you found a guy that matched your style, like that worked with you 'cause if you were both spur of the moment, that could work.

How do you actually find like a good agency or a good creative director?

Talk to 10. Listen to all of them. You'll quickly see who has their [ __ ] together and who doesn't. You can also bid them against each other if you really want to, but I rarely do that. I usually just quickly see who's good and who isn't. And I try to go off of referrals of people because good, like, I'll say this, the best agencies don't need to run ads. Like, they have more customers than they can handle. Food. Nom nom. Other room. Where is it? Or is it?

It's going to be on the other side, guys. Go ahead. Grab your food. I don't know how long our bridge is.

You guys want to do an hour?

Brand. [Applause] Let's go. Uh, let's go. Blue marker. Second half, the second half of the day will go blue. Okay. So, uh, big picture, I think we covered the when, who, how on high ticket. Talk about organic strategy. We talked about offers. Talked about branding. So, I think now we should go to, uh, retention, results, and value. I feel like that'll be the theme, um, for right now. So, let's, let's talk retention. And what I'd love to know also is who here feels like they're doing a like a pretty good job of retaining, uh, your school members?

Okay.

How many months are you getting on average?

I don't even know.

Okay. A ton though. Like, uh, I got like 2,00, 2,100 members. Um, only like 200 people are turning up like in the crime. So you have 10% churn.

So like, uh, but like, but it's the fun with though. He doesn't, the number you higher.

He's got the second most MR overall.

Right on school. Low sales.

Did you know that?

No, I didn't.

You're doing the second best on school overall.

Yeah. So you're doing something right. I know that. So the people to look at as a, as a, as a pro tip is somebody who has the the ratio of number of sales to how big the community is because if somebody doesn't sell a lot of people and has a very big community, it means they're keeping the people a very long time because every time they sell, they just add more and more. The alternative of that is that they sell a thousand people every month and they have 1,000 total members and every month like 10,000 leave, 10,000 come in, and they do it over and over again. So what are some of the things that you're doing right now that are working well for retention?

Um, weekly calls. Um, I got new courses that I drop and I drop, I drop like, uh, like good value posts every day, once a day.

Okay.

And I take time with my value. I just like think of something, just put it in there.

Yeah.

Uh, it's like drawing out like step-by-step things that people can implement now.

Okay. So value post daily, new course. How often are you doing the courses?

Uh, it's, it's not a set thing, but like I probably do it probably like every 60 days.

Every six days?

60.

Oh, I was, I was like, damn. I was like, that's a lot. Okay. Every 60 days. Every two months. Okay.

I didn't want to do it too frequently.

Yeah. Yeah, that works.

How frequently are your calls?

Uh, well, well, I got a couple things. So, like I got three calls a week with one of our coaches. Uh, but I come in there, uh, bi-weekly, but then I have another coach come in there bi-weekly, too. So every two weeks, gonna be a call for a coaching call. But three times a week I have a call that I have a coach do. So I guess four calls a week.

And you're every other?

Yeah, I'm per, I'm only going there once a month. So every other.

Oh, one.

I go once a month, but the coaching call is every two weeks. So it'll be somebody else on there on the other. That makes sense.

So there's one call per week and coaches take three of them and you take one.

No, no, no.

It's three calls per week.

Got that.

Coach. Dude.

Got that.

Then every other week, there's a coaching call with a seven-figure expert, I would say.

Okay.

Only one of those calls are me, and then one of those would be someone else.

Okay, got it. Okay.

So, like a guest. Like a guest.

Really?

Like a guest. Like a smart guest. Okay. Got it.

So there's 14 calls a month. A month? No, a month. I think. 'Cause 'cause yours is the bi-weekly, which is every two weeks, right?

That's the expert seven-figure expert call.

Yeah.

Once is you.

And then once is who, who does a second one?

Different. It's not the same.

But who, who do you use for that?

Um, my peers, like my friends.

Oh, okay. And they're like at that seven-figure kind of level or something.

Yeah.

Okay. So...

Invite someone here and for example, talk.

So once a month external guest.

Yeah.

Once a month, Kenneth. Yeah.

And then three a week with coaches.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think I want to put more.

I think [Music]

I just want to stay my mindset on.

Yeah. I'd figure out what it is. Like, talk to the, maybe see the people that have stayed the longest.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like Paul, I think Paul Graham says this. He says, "Every single business problem can be solved by talking to your customers." Like, your marketing isn't working, talk to your customers. Your product isn't working, talk to your customer. Like, you really can't do it enough. I like looking at data, too, though. So, if I'm looking at, we have a thousand customers, I want to see what the top 10%, 5% like, what do they have in common compared to the other people? And specifically, like, I want to look at who, like, who are these people? Because sometimes we start optimizing trying to answer the obvious question, which is, "How do I change this thing to get this girl to want to do construction?" And you're like, "Well, that's going to be tough." You know what I mean? Versus like, "Okay, well, all my top users are men." Interesting. Like, it's just as much who is it as what they went through. And so people on the way in, there's like, "What did they immediately experience? What was the most valuable thing that happened earliest?" And so when we look at, at least for me, when I look at behavior stuff, I look at latency. So, how, how quickly did they, that something happened. Like the, it's like the beginning of the video, like the early part, the first 24 hours, for first 48 hours, first 72 hours is crucial to getting like, super long-term retention. Just how it's framed, like what the expectations that are set, what happens that period of time is everything. That you promised already there? Is it better than what they thought? Etc. But okay, these are great. Um, do you do any dripping or unlocking stuff?

I. Cool. Okay, good to know. So, bi-weekly, every, um, so you have, so anybody else have, uh, good retention?

What you just mentioned, uh, certain stuff you have to reach new levels in school obviously to unlock it, so kind of keeps them in there a little bit longer.

Okay. And this is content.

Yes.

Yeah. Yeah, but they have to engage to get that, right? Right.

Yeah. Get add value to the community. That's cool.

So, our other local membership that's $7,400 people, we have turn rate of around 6%. At the school, it's more than double that, but it's higher churn.

Yeah, much higher turn.

Okay. But I believe that it is because a lot of people might have joined during the games because they were just curious. Yeah. I think need to see how it plays out.

Okay. What do you do in the 6% group?

Um, we take the next pay with presubmitted questions. Uh, we have a code offer collection. So, they get the feature um in a it's a Google feed like actually really simple, but I got seriously to it. So, basically I got asked to grow their email list and that worked well for them.

Can you say that last one again? Sorry. My So, you're doing weekly Q&A. What was that thing you just did?

They check off the connection so they can mix their lead magnets so they don't get offered in membership. Uh and it gets added to Google for uh Google sheet and I run ads to their Google sheet and so through that their email list grows. So I'm I'm running a beta. I collect Google first and then I send people to the offer collection and then >> and people can then get any offers that are interesting to them.

Yeah, exactly. It's like a bundle kind of thing. So that's >> and they only get that if they're still a paying member.

Exactly. If they're out then they get delisted. So >> interesting. It's really >> very interesting.

Um but that that is really helpful for attention.

Interesting. Huh.

It's like a made me a discovery.

Yeah. Really interesting. It's kind of like the the Adonis map of like uh you get you get removed if you if you leave. Like less value from that compared to like a business owner. It's like, hey, we have a listing of all the plumbers and we run like you could run a nominal amount of traffic to a list to show that you're running traffic to this thing that's helping them with their business, but you just do all of them at once. I really like that.

And I think I can also let people just pay for that.

Yeah.

Kind of thing as the other thing that has I used to have free Facebook group that I didn't want to entertain anyone, but I had to do tickets. So, I resurfaced it and allowed my coaches to post their offers there. Mhm.

So now they have another platform basically to promote their lead magnet etc. And so that's also quite a few people actually just joined because they organically discovered the Facebook group and then we're like how can I post? So it's like yeah, you're not a good group of member. So that also helps a lot for the retention. And the last thing that we do is u monthly content drops and every third month is like a offer where we tell them hey, there's a new offer out there when you see it on the ads don't buy because as a member you get this for free.

Oh, I like that.

Get reinforced that as long as they're a member, they get >> Yeah.

They they don't have to spend that money.

Yeah. Really good.

Yeah. And you know, if you just keep more content and it's more content they don't use. So if you're like, "Oh, here's a new shiny house that you don't have to spend money on," then >> I really like that. and also posting progress from other members and yourself on social media constantly on the week back in 50 and then they like oh yeah suicide is still over there work and then they >> so results posts really like this one >> which one >> the she comes so Evelyn has new lead magnets that she runs traffic to that people buy and So that's where it's like there is real monetary value. If you sell it for $29 and you have a $7 a month membership, then you're like, "Well, I'm giving it to you and you remind everybody." It's like, "Well, I just bought your next five months with that one thing." Like I think that's really good. Like you don't have to The thing is is like you don't have to run a lot of like as long as they know it's for sale. Like you literally just list something on your site, say it's for sale, which it will be, and you just include it in a membership, and they get that as one of the benefits.

It's also how world is cool, communicating with the optional offers because I can do that from email.

Yeah.

And it has that urgency of >> So how do you do the urgency piece?

Um because it is only available for a limited amount of time.

Uh explain that. So I have front end membership and a back end membership and the content can move from the front end membership to the back end membership. So you have to be in a front end membership at a certain point in time to get the thing before it moves into the back end membership so you can download it. But don't leave an active member at that time.

So you drop this thing into the cheap group >> and then I get it into the more expensive group >> and then you slide it into the more expensive group. And that's fine because that way these guys always have something new that's coming. But then but they want the library, right? So they get the new thing and then as soon as it goes to the library that's the reason for them to ascend into the lifetime.

And that way I can also get them to consume it.

Yeah.

Because otherwise, you know, it's also like delaying on consuming it. And that way because it expires, it becomes more valuable.

It's a really interesting multiple group strategy. Really interesting multiple group strategy. Go ahead. Uh so there's a a core group of people that we've created uh beautiful retention with that are literally lifers. Um and that's comes through like high ticket high relationship lot of value and so those people they literally won't leave that we told them to which is awesome. Uh we have a pretty >> Have you tried telling them to leave?

I'm just messing. Yeah, just >> uh but uh yeah so we're trying to figure out how to do that at scale but the retention on those people has been all yeah >> I don't have any things that they do well let me share a couple so so I talked to you about the five for retention that we do that we did for gyms and we figured that out and so the five horse for these so number one was uh exit interviews I'm just going to give you all of them and you can think about this for your own businesses which means that when someone tries to cancel we would just say like hey can we talk to you first and we just do do this because we want to make things better and so that's part of the upfront we say hey if you are going to choose to leave like we just ask to talk to you because we just always want to keep making this better you just frame it as like this is how we keep improving the community half the time though they just like want to say I thought this sucked and you're like I agree that's a terrible problem I'm more upset about it than you are let me prove it to you um and then they're like, "Okay, I feel better." Actually, it's fine. It's not that bad. And then just go back in. Um like 50% of people will just go back in.

So, number one, uh number two is uh reachouts.

Sorry, did you just say when you did the exit interview, you'd retain 50%.

Yeah. People half of the people who went to exit would not exit. Now, you have to get them to show to the exit interview, but of people went to the exit interview, half of them would stay. That was also the biggest upsell. So they'd go there and be like, I wish I needed more support. And we're like, I've got this this thing with more support. And you then take everything they've paid. This is so listen up. This this is the tactic. You take everything they've paid and say, let me make it up to you. I'll take all of that and I'll credit it towards the next thing. The next one's reachouts. So we realized like you said, man, I don't know how to scale that. Well, there is a way to scale that. you just systematize it. And so we just had uh for us it was obviously trainers as coaches whatever works the same way. You have each trainer or coach get assigned a certain number of people and then they reach out to the customers on a two to three week cadence and the purpose is just like trying to act like somebody who cares about somebody else, right? Like if you actually had a relationship with this person, you'd probably check in with them every two or three weeks. And so by doing that it facilitated having a bond right and so when you have a small membership base so uh anyone here familiar with Dumbar's number so almost all micro gyms get stuck at like aund 100 to 150 members is like where they all get stuck is because they don't have any systems for retaining members. So, it's just the people they know and actually have relations with never cancel and then they keep bringing people in and then those people leave because they just can't refoster that relationship because they can't do it on on purpose. And so, it's just acting as though you treat them like you care more or less.

Does that make click?

It's we used to call the pulse check which is it doesn't have to do anything with the thing that you sell. It's like hey saw you had a kid. Hey, saw you went to Cabo. Hey, saw you whatever. like just saw like two seconds saw the thing thought it was cool otherwise hey saw you hit some results hey I haven't seen you in the group like whatever it's just it's just a reach out they just like it's just the fact that they know that you know that they exist like literally it's acknowledgement.

I guess you can do that in the community too right like it doesn't have to be a DM.

Yeah. And I retrofit this stuff to how you're think like this is the stuff that we found after doing a lot of research on turn. Um, these were the big ones. The third one was attendance tracking. And so we could we could literally watch someone cancel. So you'd see someone come with three days a week, three days a week, two days a week, two days a week, one cancel. Like it's it was just like that. And so when we had a system in place where if someone goes below a certain amount of consumption, we'd immediately ramp up reachout. So it's kind of like the reverse of working a lead. So in a with a lead, you work a lot and fast in the beginning and then you taper off over time. With a customer, it's the reverse. You start slow and less frequent and then you ramp up as they stop being responsive. So, it's like an you escalate the fact that this is a problem that they need that you want to talk to them, right? So, you escalate it. And so, the idea was someone would go three days and they go twice the next week. We escalate and say, "Hey, like where were you? We missed you on the call for our weekly call, whatever it was." And by doing that, they were like, "Oh, someone actually thought they expected me to be there. someone wanted me to be there. And so then they show up the next week, so it would go 3 three 23 and then they're they're saved. Like that effort got them to not turn. The fourth one is handwritten cards. I'm just I'm giving you the stuff that you have if you can think about how you can use this for your business is that we would write handwritten cards every month or so. Um, and again, a lot of this, if you're looking at this, you're like, this is almost what someone who gave a [ __ ] about someone else would do. Like, we just reverse engineered a human relationship. Like, you check in with them. Hey, I missed you. Like, oh, you want to leave? Let me make it up to you. Like, oh, I sent you this card cuz I like you. Whatever. And these things, well, I'll just give you the the tactic that we did is we also had a PS, which is if you take a picture of this and text it to a friend, this card, they can use that to get a free month. And so that also became lead gen for us. Uh the f the fifth one and this was managed the same way as these. So the same number of people who had handwritten cards, sorry the same group of people that a trainer or coach would reach out to for reachouts, we the same people that they would write the cards for. So it's just like they had a cohort that they were responsible for. Um now I bonus coaches off of churn. Like if you keep your people longer then you get paid more. Um, and then the last one was member events. Now, there's something that we did with member events that were really valuable is that we made member events open to the public. So, they would be able to invite their friends. So, they also became lead gen for us. So, they would look forward to these events. They could bring their friends for free. We would sell their friends. Um, but it also retain the customers. And then at that event, like I was saying before, you always announce the next event. And so for these, we had one of these every six weeks. That was the cadence that worked well. Uh, there, go ahead.

I had one thing that I just thought about that might help with it retention wise, and I think he should do it in his community. And um so what I'll do is like once a month, I'll give away, let's say, two grand to someone in my school. But to enter that giveaway, you would have to post on your Instagram story like basically a voucher like, "Hey, I'm in here, this, and that." So like, "Hey, he repaired my credit." Right? And that's how you enter the giveaway. And then that what that does is those people's friends get referred by them and then they join and now they're kind of like in your community together like oh did you see what Caprice posted in his school today? And it kind of just builds more of like communitywise. And then I think the um the calls I did that are always the most like active are they giveaway calls when people are like we spin a wheel obviously and stuff like that and it's super fun. So yeah.

Yeah. I do I do do giveaways too.

Yeah. That's the most engaging part of my >> Yeah. Don't you pay for someone's mortgage?

Yeah. Uh that was I paid someone mortgage uh and card notes one time.

You didn't even mention giveaway.

I forgot.

What? He's like it's the most important part. Like >> all right giveaways.

Um, one of the things that we also did um so I love what you were saying here Kenneth with the um new course every other month. So we thought about it uh similarly as like the events which is not only saying hey this is what's coming out this month but I gave them the the pipeline. So I tell them when the next thing's coming and the thing after that and the thing after that and so even if they were like well I kind of have outbound for credit repair solved. I really want this one. And so it almost served the same purpose as having an event that was coming up because they wouldn't cancel if two months from now there's going to be a big drop that's going to be really relevant to them. And so as long as they can see it on the horizon, they would stay to meet that. And by the time that happens, hopefully I have something one or two or three more months out that they want that too. And so I would put these little zesty zingers. So like when I would do the drop that you're going to do with the the course or whatever, you then say, "Hey, like" and you basically do almost like blind bullets if you know what those are. It's like copy bullets. We don't explain everything entirely. It's just mostly curiosity, which is like, hey, we also have this other way of uh capturing 100% of leads who hit a page. So, we actually get their their name, phone number, or email without them opting in. And so, that release is going to be happening in two months. So, right now, hey, John, how many did you you know, clicks did you get to your landing page for your gym last month? Uh, I don't know, 200. Okay. How many leads you get? 20. Well, wouldn't it be cool if you got another 180? Yeah, that would probably pay for this whole thing for the year, right? Okay, cool. Make sure you stay in for for that one. It's going to be big. That's it. like just just quick hitter of like what that release is kind of about a little bit of curiosity make it relevant and then people are like well shoot that would pay for the whole year instead trying to do that over and over again. Go ahead.

Question um that number I get from casing is overwhelmed >> overwhelmed. Yeah.

So I love the pipeline idea but a fear of mine that people are like I'm behind. dogs how do I think about best still and stuff and I try to reduce overwhelm with like helping them to map out their 90day goals sometimes like smaller step by step but I still >> they're still overwhelmed >> I think you're always going to have that issue if you have because basically what happens you're serving two audiences you're serving the audiences who are up to date and want more stuff and then you're also trying not to disserve the people who like are barely through these things and so um you could make those things unlockable like these things that come out just so that figuratively in their mind it's not an option and then you can serve both. Um, we we did this by actually just pruning. And so we would just look at the releases that we had had in the past that had the least amount of consumption and we would just hide them. And then later on, this is what happened in the future. We would just re-release them.

New packaging.

Yeah. We like we like new packaging like improve it a little bit. Whatever.

I mean a gym only had like there's like there's members there's like there's not a lot of things. So it would be repack, you know, like Big Booty Boot Camp becomes uh, you know, Glutius Maximus, like whatever.

Yeah.

Hamza, have you looked at your members that have stayed the longest? Do you know who those guys are?

They're just my biggest fans. They're like most dedicated guys. We um, so far we haven't had a problem with all for it depends what kind of audience you are, but my guys are all young. They're barely in school or university. They've got time. So with everything there on retention, I do basically everything that just times, I don't know, 3 to 10. So I'll do three calls a week. For example, I'll do a new course every B every two weeks. I found that at least with my audience, I can probably be much much higher.

I'm just trying to see if there's like a pattern with your most engaged people.

Probably seems like the reason people can't afford it. They love it. They should come.

Yeah. Do your most engaged people make some money?

Yeah, many of them are doing like coaching.

I see. I see. Yeah.

I would just bet if you segmented the people who people who make some money stay. The people who don't don't probably.

Yeah. That's why I think for retention for me, the biggest thing I want to get these guys results if they start making brew on 1,000 a month does.

Yeah. Well, for sure. If you I mean if you make them 10 times what they pay you they will keep paying you.

Dan, what's up?

Yeah. Uh one of the things that I did for retention I did the short trainer worked really well was >> kind of going back to what you said about the bullet >> I'm going to turn this Nicole >> right what you said about the bullet points and how each one is worth the program's price in itself.

Yeah.

Well, what I did with the Q&A calls I added a mini like 20 minute lesson and I gave them the calendar for the week. this is everything we're gonna cover. And then each and every title for the lesson was just one bullet point that I thought would be worth fit for the whole month.

And then that way it got them hyped and really excited. So one of them was like how to leverage your time so you only need to work, you know, an hour a day. Another one was how you can optimize your influencer sales. That's all like stuff like that that that's going to then make them want to stick around because they can kind of foresee the value they will receive in the future.

Yeah. So just copy headlines on the stuff that you're I mean I think from a value perspective too like if you have a normal Q&A call simply just calling it like one of the benefits they're going to get while they're there even if it's like a five like if you do a five minute mini training before you do the Q&As's like people will come for that little bit and then they'll stay for the Q&A just something that they know they're going to get. I actually think that's really good. Anyone else have retention tactics? You just don't let them cancel. You're like, "No, I don't I don't let them cancel." Shoot.

Uh the price increasing so that people get stuck. Well, you know, they were there.

Grandfathering. Grandfathering.

Like what's the price at? Something else we've been thinking about is like if you leave, can't come back for trouble.

They'll just make another account. have to be our grandfather.

Yeah, we're going to do a feature that you can release. You know how you can level unlock a course, right? So, we're going to do one where you can unlock a course at a particular time. So, on month one, after one month, you'll unlock this. After two months, you unlock this. It's the most simple thing I can think of that will probably I reckon it will cut Hams's churn in half >> for sure >> because there's there's less overwhelm first of all because you can only see some stuff and then there's a clear reason to stay for the next month and then the next month. Yeah. be interesting if there was also a consumption version of that like if you watch these six videos then the next thing opens like until you do that nothing else then you can also force in webinars and things like that inside of your >> you could just play it though in the background I had to do that for my driving test and I just put the videos played it I left and did whatever I want >> well we'd be smarter than the DMV >> okay >> but there might be easy workarounds I'm just >> yeah I mean if someone's trying to game this like you're like if someone's gaming the system so they can get the free thing, then like they're probably still relatively engaged, right? Like I'd rather just get them to press play the first time, you know?

They that means they want it bad.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You really wanted your driver's license. That made sense, you know. Go ahead.

Um we also have on boarding calls.

Great. Good call. Thank you for that. All right. I'll I'll tell you guys right now. If you were to do like two things, onboarding calls, even if they're group onboarding calls, and dripping out stuff that they're going to get over a period of time, I would bet you that those will be the two strongest things that will cut your churn. This is huge.

Yeah. And even uh rather than just an onboarding call, we have an onboarding email sequence.

Mhm.

That first email exactly what to do. Start here.

Yeah. Yeah, we we talked about this at dinner last night. It seems like people really want an onboarding page. So after someone pays and they instead of landing straight on the community, you can land them on a fully focused page with only one video.

Please watch this video.

That'd be great >> because then you can tell them exactly how to >> like how to go through.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. We need that because everybody get in my group and they just go to ask questions on my top and I you watch them all your questions with me.

They just go drill questions group question.

Yeah. So we'll do both of those things. I'll actually I'll prior because they're very easy. I'll prioritize them.

Sweet.

Yeah. The onboarding call because you can do them in group too. And the fact that they like you if you just like say like John, Jacob, Jeremy, they're all J's for whatever reason. I don't know why they did that but whatever. But they're all uh they're all like they'll be like, "Oh my god, this is like I bet you that that alone like would extend the LTV and then tell them what to be looking forward to and by what month and they're gonna be like well shoot hams and nose. I'm here."

We used to do these and we experimented cutting them off at church shop increases.

So we're going back to do >> Oh, you went back to jump, right?

Yeah. Just think of the calendar like the way that we're setting it up. So easy now instead of having it as like this uh specific calendarly booking or whatever just have it in the work just a normal park group on it all and then just have the auto DM tell people and then just like 24 hours before say so everyone who's joined it the last week come to the call tomorrow >> got it great love it and I'm sure the email or something you fire off can also reiterate that >> do you have any specific structure that you'd run the onboarding calls through I mean >> goal setting >> yeah it's goals and expectation setting for the most part. And I like we think of everything in uh attention, affection, approval. It's like what all humans want. And so we try and hit those. So like how can we make sure every we give someone attention? Like John, Jacob, like cool, awesome. So excited to have you. Like affection, awesome job. Like you're doing amazing for even taking the first step, but the second step's even like if you think this is awesome because you actually took the first step, the second step's going to feel even better. Like just future pacing like what's going to happen when they do the thing. And then hey, one of the big things is is people get overwhelmed. But don't think about it that way. Just think about this. This is a big diamond mine. There's diamonds everywhere. What do you do when you're in a diamond mine? You pick up the first diamond in front of you and then you keep picking them up. You don't walk out the other way because there's too many diamonds. All right. Like you can even like we call it killing zombies in in in sales, but like just try and overcome like if you look at your big list of cancellations when people have like why did I cancel? It's like just read the reasons that people cancel and overcome them ahead of time so you can set the expectations for why they should stay.

Go ahead. We also created an onboarding chatbot and have been released out since January and that was also really really helpful to get people to um understand like all the functionalities and how to get health because the onboarding calls are great but they they can get up to the 40 minutes because you know there's a lot of um things happening in the group and we want to make sure people know all of that. So that's kind of the the short version of that. Um, so they know the most important things where they come in because for some reason the the biggest first challenge is actually to get them even log on to the portal and >> even in school the many people come in and they're like where's the content?

Do you set chatbot for out ongoing support like after on boarding? um we roll in more features with um right now it just that guides them all the way through and lets them have support. The only thing is we don't necessarily plan the team to get too many because it's unfeasible that's transplant. So we try to adapt into the group >> if possible. Um, if you can give them a carrot at the end of the call it'll just reinforce the behavior. people remember more what happens at the very end of a call. And so if you have the onboarding call, you set expectations, you set their goals, you can go over the reasons that people cancel. You wouldn't say them that way, but you go over the reasons people cancel. Overcome those ahead of time, give them a carrot for staying at the end. Hey, by the way, because you did this thing, blah blah blah. Um, I think those and then I think the chatbot thing is really interesting. And the piece that I want to add to this is um is repetition, which is like even if they show up to the the call, they're going to remember 1% of what you said because they're on their phone and they don't know how to focus or do anything else anyways. And so the chatbot, the call, the first post that's pinned, like just it's just has to be everywhere. And the hope is that from the 19 times you said it, like half of it sinks in. Did you give us an example, but carrot? Good. That's where the unlockables is so is so uh useful. Like if you do that, everyone on here like we can like or comment on your own post if we needed to like force it from a level up perspective. But for us, we just man like the way we ran it, we just manually unlock something once they attended the call. And so that was a big carrot for them to to come in and attend. I wonder what would happen if you get them like do a giveaway, a weekly giveaway with $150 Amazon gift card for everybody who takes this like first action and can >> I'm sure it would work great.

Classroom download the thing and submit like a picture of the thing so we know >> I'm sure it would work really well.

Yeah. So you can do that. You can do hers which is the the the just a little bit of money which people will love. We just unlocked like a here's how we do phone scripts. People were like uh it's like just make sure you shut the word.

I kind of have a question that refrains to retention. So like for instance obviously you could have it to where they got to reach a certain level to unlock something. Now for my let's say I have my vendors and manufacturers or whatever right and then let's say some people would join unlock it get the resources they need and then churn. So how would you be able to stop that? obviously like the month thing, but then you can't really have them wait a month because if you're telling them to join if they want to start a business and now you're telling them they got to wait a month to get a manufacturer and a designer like >> they should get more each month.

Yeah.

Right. So like they get something in the first month.

Yeah.

And then they should get something in the second month >> and then the third. Right.

Y >> you can also think about as a category like there's many vendors. You can give some vendors and then more vendor like you can you can drip out the vendors themselves.

I read a book a while ago was really good called for tension point.

It's by Robert Scog or something and he said he studied like thousands of different membership sites and subscription sites and he found like the number one thing that reduced churn the most was having proper onboarding. And he said the number one secret within proper onboarding was getting the member to get a quick win.

ASAP said the quicker they can get a small win, the more likely they were to stick. So for us, what we do, I sound like what's the quickest win we could get for our people. We get some a beta client by sending five or six family members a quick text message that says, "Hey, can I coach you for free and trying to get some practice?"

Boned. they instantly the next day or the same day they're like I've got a beta client and those people don't share.

It's awesome.

So find like a really quick win for your people, something super simple, something worth celebrating. Like in school we got categories, right? One of our categories is called wins and almost every day we get in someone new posting in the win category saying I got to pay the client. Got to pay the client. So it's like genuinely worth celebrating and it's super easy to do. They just text a friend or family. So if you guys can find something like that, those people don't turn very well.

Yeah, 7-day wins are really, really big. I'll give you three examples that we've done in different businesses. So one of the companies we have um very large business. We wanted to drive activation and so we looked at the whole product suite and um this is around helping people write books. And so writing a book obviously takes time to do it the right way, which is what we show people to do. But, uh, we had this 7-day like boot camp that would help people get their first book published. And so, it happened like way later in the process, though. It was like month six or something. And so, when we looked at everything, that was the fastest tangible result we could deliver. And so we actually had them basically write a silly short like 40page book just so they would go through the process and then we would buy the book off of their listing wherever they had it and then they would get a physical copy of the book and then they would take a picture with it and usually within the first seven days they would get it done. And so then we have this like massive wall of people with their first book and then it says I am an author. I'm an author now. Right. which is why getting like for people who do um financial stuff as soon as you buy your first stock you're an investor right so it like shifts someone's identity the label they use with themselves and so if you can associate the short win with some sort of identity or label that then has this new suite of behaviors that happen to be one of them is continuing to stay in pay then they'll be more likely to continue to stay in pay in the weight loss uh space what we did was we we had a different diet for the very beginning which is essentially a crash diet and that was actually research supported that If people lost more weight in the beginning, they actually tended to stick with it long term. Even though the science will show that if you lose very gradually for a long period of time, yes. But from a behavior perspective, no one does it. And so if we got the short win, we got a lot of water weight off, then they'd be willing to stick with it. In the gym world for the gym owners, we had a similar something that we called um the fast cash play. And so it used to be something that was later on in the process for us. And then um we this was something had almost no operational complexity. They didn't need to get new customers. They could go to their existing uh membership base, make the offer, cap it at five members who'd get this. Basically, we showed them this is a really good offer that you can give to your audience, cap it at five, and they'd get like 20 to 30 grand in a week, and that would more than cover any payments they had to make for us for a while. And so, it's the same common theme of like, how can I drive a big fast win to the best degree possible? Ideally, one that is that is aligned with a label that they can attach themselves and double aligned if you can get make make something that's physical. They can have proof. That's where like sometimes like having a t-shirt or a hat or something that goes with that behavior that they're like, "Oh, I'm proud like they earned it." But yes, setting expectations. Yeah,

we do weekly report forms as well. So like all our clients, we send a weekly report form to just so we can collect data on what their bottlenecks are, what they're struggling with. So we can either assign training or get a client success to reach out to them to help maybe book in a chat call or wherever it is just so we can like constantly collect data every week on what people are struggling with and then we can also find like holes in our program. Now >> did you say rapport call?

Uh report form. So like >> report form. Okay, got it.

So it's like a weekly report form that goes out for everyone. They fill out what their bottlenecks are, what they're struggling with. We just collect a bunch of data so we can see maybe there's something if if there's a lot of overlap like people this specific issue or let's add that to the program or let's solve for this. So it we can make a better program that way and also just they stop it feels like the clients feel more cued because we're actually listening to what they're saying and then >> and if you already have the training you're like have you gone through this?

Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.

Cool. Love it.

Any other retention things? We do milestone awards as well. Like 100k is you got to apply a mill. You got to apply 10. You got to apply >> these are scary effective by the way.

Yeah, Yeah.

Like like unfairly effective how good these are. Um, if you have multiple milestones also helpful. Like again, if one of the milestones is just associated with I'm an author. It's like, hey, you're an author, you get this, right? And now that you're you've sold 10 books, you're at this, whatever. And then they have more things. Again, it's like this open loop of continuing to want the next thing. But yeah, really like milestones and they also just manufacture testimonials for you, which is lovely.

Okay, I feel like we've talked a lot about retention. Anything else? Yeah, I like leaderboards.

Cool. If somebody leaves the membership site community, do they stay on the leaderboard?

That's a good question. What? Like you're talking about your leaderboards?

Okay. Um, I think so. You >> think they >> Yeah, but I don't You should test it.

I remove my letters.

No, no, but if you if they join again, they keep their points they had. So >> Oh, really? Okay.

Yeah. So, like if you remove them, just wait and see if it comes off.

Yes. And then cuz yeah, that's a good question. I I don't know.

Yeah, I'm saying if you remove someone, do they go off the leaderboards?

Okay. So, they do go off the leaderboards when they leave. Yeah. Yeah. Sam, did you have any to add to your attention?

Um, I think we we covered it like first video's most important video watches first again and why they bored.

Yeah. And I would say what I really liked about some courses is just like they like the best courses are actually like just they copyrighted like they're selling constantly you. It's like that's the my secret. That's like the best strategy >> only tell my students. So you treating sometimes like the course is just like something you just create and like the stuff on the outside is great like the content is also needs to be like engaging and really salicy constant kill the transformation >> onboarding first first video and drip out bonuses over time for them that they really want. If I had to have like three things that I was going to do, those would be mine.

Yeah, I thought of some features which like unlock courses by time. That's easy. I bet you that would do a lot. Dedic like the dedicated onboarding page so you know for sure everyone's going to watch your onboarding video, right? And then sorting your members list by LTV because if you always just look at your best customers and be like why? Like what happened? like you can then look at their profile and look at what they did cuz then you can figure out how do I get new people like maybe that's what I need to show on my onboarding video, right? And then some kind of metric that you can optimize for like um like a like maybe a metric on the dashboard like average month average membership length or something. It's kind of like churn but it's looking at it in a different way. So if like Hamza says if some the average person stays three months, he can change something like unlock something. Oh, I got it to four. Oh, I got it to five. And that way you're always just trying to like grow it. You know what I mean?

Sure. One thing that ties in maybe back to branding or when you're picking the the the group name um having a way where people identify with being like so someone could identify with being an Adonis versus if someone had the community it's like the simple workout plan you less identify with that. So if you feel like well I'm one of the Adonises then you're less likely to leave your >> Yeah. You've got to do an Adonis ring at month five.

Imagine if you got a ring.

Yeah. No, but you should put it instead of just selling it, you should like use it at different milestones. That would be a really cool experiment.

Is there a milestone they could that we could get someone to earn for just consuming all the content or like finishing a course just for the members?

Um, you know what I'm saying? Like a like a dot or a ring or rather. It's just something it's like, oh, this person actually or they get points for it even because I think some people are so desperate to get like a level and they're like, no one likes my posts.

Oh, they can like because I mean obviously to one level it's dependent on how good the content they you know they post is, but if they can do stuff to like even just a couple basic point things to I don't know.

Yeah,

I know. want to ask um affiliate for the members in the community to get a monthly reoccurring for everyone they refer in.

Yeah,

I've been thinking about you only going to have that option if you stay on the subscription on to get >> okay making that making the affiliate option only if they have earned something or whatever. Yeah.

The last >> Kajjabi does that. Oh,

do they?

The only reason I pay for my subscription still >> is because they'll cancel my commissions.

And my commissions are more than my subscription. So, I keep paying like 1,500 bucks every year >> because I've got like 20 grand in >> I would make this one. This is less about retention but more just like general strategy stuff. If you look at your top 5% of your customers and they have a very different typographic, this is like so when we when we when we buy a company, this is the first thing we do is um something called database marketing, but we run this survey is the first thing we do because usually most businesses don't know their customers that well. You'd be surprised. And so then we segment to grab the 80 or

The 20%, and then we look at the behaviors and the archetype of the person. We look at what traffic source they came in through, what offers they bought.

Um, and if we can, we'll get on the phone with those customers and ask them what are the primary things that that this does for you from a value-adding perspective. And then that then informs the advertising that we do on the front end and the lead magnets. And you'd be amazed at how much more money you can make if you actually just talk their language and how many more people of the right ones you get. Like you can double or triple LTV. I mean, I gave you the story of having, you know, seven whatever times higher LTV than a competitor just because we knew who we're targeting.

Cool. >> And would there also be when people cancel like a exit survey that can probably be like the same for everyone, but um that would give a good idea. This would create fabula >> churn. >> I've found that most I've asked a lot of people about this and they said they just don't look at the data or that the data is always just says the same thing. >> Not enough value >> or like not using it, can't afford it. Yeah. >> And or just a bunch of letters. >> Yeah. Yeah. We did them as interviews. So like if that's not you mean like with a high volume model it'd be tough. But like I know you guys do a little >> I do think we can allow you to put a video there, >> right? Because >> I think that would help for sure. >> Like so that way you can put something there like that they've got to like >> make it harder like not >> just 20 minutes of me. you're not an Adonis anymore. >> I really want to experiment with your group. So, as we roll out these features, I'm going to like cuz we can just look at your baseline metrics and we'll be like, "Oh, this one did that. This one did that." Yeah. >> Yeah. >> So, everyone will guaranteed watch two videos. They will watch your onboarding and they will watch your offboarding. >> What's up? >> That's similar to what Tate did. He puts people in jail. Like, that's all he puts them in jail >> and he yells at them. What about talking a similar sort of reminder of what you're missing out on when you cancel like Amazon Prime does? Like when you go to cancel Amazon Prime, they give you like this nice sales page and they show you everything that you are going to lose. And it's like every time I go to cancel, I'm like, >> you really thought about canceling >> Amazon Prime? >> Yeah. >> Five. >> The most widely adopted product of all time. >> Yeah. What's wrong with you? Yeah, I think we should just talk about this for a minute. No. >> Well, I was doing marketing. >> You like slower shipping, you know? >> The retention system. I You know, it was I had to do it. >> Bases just calls you. You like things slow. You're slow. >> What's What would be better though? Like bullets or video? >> Well, both. I think for Amazon uses pictures. But if Jeff Bezos made a video shirtless talking about why I would I would have stayed. Yeah, but for sure. >> It's with check boxes. Yes. And really want to give up all the content, all the templates. >> Yes. >> And it's just so painful. >> Yeah. But what do you want? Video or check box? >> Both. >> Both. >> Cuz I agree. The surveys it's not good. Every time I go to cancel something and they ask, "Why are you canceling?" I'm like, "I don't I'm canceling. Like, just leave me alone." >> And so I just do something quick and I leave. But with a video like that, it's like, "Oh, shoot. Do I really want to like go? Maybe. >> Yeah. Okay. No, we'll just guinea pig Camza. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. The check box of having to check five boxes that just says like I accept that I will not make money. I'm a terrible person. Like just Yeah. >> When you're when you're deleting unsubscribed like are you sure you want to be private? Like are you sure you're giving up your points? Are you sure you're leaving your peers? Yes. >> Sure. >> Yeah. Kind of interesting. >> All right. So, I'm going to say we covered retention. Great. So, let's just talk about this quickly because I think it's going to be same value and I don't want to I don't want to repeat stuff, but let's just go over um like how to get people results. So, obviously these are going to be tied. If you get people results, they're they're likely to retain. Is there anything that people are doing? I mean, fast cash play, whatever thing you have, highly recommend seeing if that becomes the first module that someone goes through, even if it's not the core curriculum that you want, like just the fast win that they can get. I remember there was a there was a course that was um about buying uh buying businesses and uh the guy who runs it was telling me that he he just gets people to say they're an investor and change it in their profile. He's like that's it. Just go from whatever your thing is to put just add investor into your profile. And so again it was like this I am statement but it's almost like a public declaration but it was so easy. So it might be like a do like I don't know if if they would want to put Adonis in or whatever, but like if there's something like that that people would get status from, I would bet you that it would work and also be like almost a minor win. Now he tied that to like you don't get deals unless you tell people you're an investor. So if you just say you're an investor, people will start messaging you for money and you can start looking at businesses. So like there was a benefit to doing it and it took so little effort. Kind of cool. But so we're doing results and value. >> I got one question. you keep writing that. But um one question about retention before we leave the topic. >> You know how we show you who's cancelling. >> Does anyone try to do anything about that? >> Yeah. >> Does it work at all or not? >> Yeah. >> It's worked for us but we have less cuz it's high ticket so it's easier for us to go through and message them directly. >> But you do that. >> I don't I don't I try. So I tell my community manager now that's her job is to reach out to the people who declined or cancel. So just to uh just do they do these gift you reactivate them? >> Yeah, some people do. We use a funny gift. So we that's been working for us the most. I told her I told her to send them a funny gift like uh something about like oh man you're leaving type of thing and like make them laugh a little bit. Um and then that works and that worked. >> Yeah. Some people some people like, "Oh man, I forgot that my car didn't wasn't working. I got to put it in. I got it today." And then they do it. Yeah. >> So it's worth doing. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Okay. This funny gift thing sounds like a real easy win. Like because we show there's a category like in your members because they have to cancel first before they churn. So cancelling means their cards declined and we're going to keep following up with them and trying their card for 14 days or that they cancelled but they don't churn until the end of their billing cycle, right? So you generally have a window of time to like to save a cancelling customer. That's why we did that list. So, if we sent that funny gift, I'm just thinking, what if we automated it? Like, you know, auto DM when someone joins. What about auto DM when someone declines with funny GIF? Can I see this funny gif? >> Funny funny gifts crush. I mean, Jacob's right there. He runs somewhere with sales stuff. One of the ways that we re-engage leads is like the highest converting like lead re-engager is just sending them like a Kevin Hart like like where have you been you know like hello or whatever and uh high response rate. >> I wonder if something like when they join they can especially for like people in his group um especially since they're young if you could be able to pay for your months in advance. So, let's say it's $50 a month. You can pay 150 right now and that'll pay for your months in advance. But on school, like through the school app itself, I wonder if that would also help with turns. Like maybe someone just got some Christmas money, but next month that's going to be gone. You know what I mean? >> Works the same with adults. >> Yeah. So, they have Christmas money, they would pay in three months and then head in and three months when they don't have money, they have time. I suppose that would be easier. >> Yeah. >> Not just annual payments on on sign up, but imagine there was like a button inside for existing students who have just made more money recently and it's like secure the next 3 months. >> Yeah, >> that could be really nice that cuz you're right. It's like some of these guys will make money within a month. That's all. >> They go to the club. That's it. >> 16 years old. >> Wouldn't it be cleaner if it was just upgrade to annual though? >> What's up? >> It would six months in a year. I do I do I let them do monthly then six month and then a year. >> Yes. >> Wow. >> A potential option in between annual and wherever they're at is just finish like close the year. So they're four months in and so they just pay eight months or seven months or like just fit like cap it off kind of like that way there' be a just one option below annual. >> Yeah. Sorry. >> It's easy. So yeah >> right. Yeah. Just hey you already made it. Just cover the rest of this. Let's see what we can do in 12 months. Whatever. >> Okay. Will the automatic gift message also have a link where when you decide not to cancel, you unlock like a certain course so you can have like a rewarded >> like special surprise. >> All your members are going to start cancelling to you're rewarding people for could have a a Python effect. >> We go on now we go results real quick. Okay. Uh, anyone do anything that's like driving results, like getting people to take action? >> Life goals really mostly. >> We just had a bin post for a 40 royalty to be made his first $1,000 online. And just before that, Y talking about this, that I told him a few things to do. He implemented a development resource. So, just speaking today or speaking to the coaches after that really helps the WS >> go for it. We didn't implement Asia costs. So rather than Q&A, we go on. It's actually on work. >> Oh, like study hall. >> Yeah. You call them on deep um >> interesting >> deep work. Deep work tanks. >> Yeah. Okay. >> That way they're actually working. >> Are are you one of those set? >> Yeah. On me. >> Hey, can someone Is the chat log? >> Just yell at us. >> Go for it. Uh we've got like plugandplay templates. So if they've ever got anything, so for example with the weight loss thing, um we give them everything like we answer every question that they may have. So and if they can't eat a specific thing, we're like, "Okay, you've got this that you can eat." So it's like we give them everything and we try overcome any objections that they may have basically >> with the templates. But like when it comes to weight loss in general like any question they have is that answers in templates already >> don't put in your mouth. >> Yes. I mean I'm assuming everyone's program here works. So the biggest it really comes down to I think retention mainly when it comes to giving people little wins so that they stay motivated to actually follow through. I think the really only the only thing stopping them from getting results is they're not motivated to follow through on the full program. maybe because they're intimidated or maybe because they don't have the time or they procrastinate. So, what we've done is like kind of like the onboarding call to help with retention, but we take it a step further. So, we do a second call kind of like halfway through the regular program cycle with but with monthly reoccurring would probably be like in a month or two and then a third call to kind of like follow up. Okay, now you've achieved the results that you came here to achieve. What's that next level for you? And then that's also an opportunity to either upsell them or maybe get um an idea of something that you could add to the program like as a course. >> And also we've found that increasing the price has also increased the results because people paid more so they commit more so they're more likely to follow through. >> What? No way. No, it's true. I put cohort calls on there um which is basically calls outside of the normal like delivery. It's for the cohort that came in. So if they if they onboarded together then you say cool the next time we're going to talk is in six weeks and so you can have those. Where it gets scary is if half the guys are gone. Uh then you have like the soul the sole remainders. Um you probably speak to those points but uh from an ascension perspective I mean definitely with high ticket like those calls if you know that you're going to make an ascension offer having two or three touch points prior to making the ascension offer the show rights on those calls. the trust with the person who's who's having that conversation goes through the roof. >> Uh we have something that we do every week on a Monday. Uh our regular calls we do like a five minute win the week where just put a timer on and we have one post that's there and we get everybody to write in on that one post. Uh it's always our most engaged post of the week and it's basically just like what are your goals? Uh what were your challenges? Uh yeah, I mean that's the basic idea, but uh then there's like the one post and everybody can see like what everybody else's wins are and it just like forces that acknowledge >> and they get some posts because people like their comment on the post. >> They play the same music during that time too. So it's a trigger every single week. It's the same music, same flow. Yeah. >> I do weekly work. Um, I do like to script the weekly moment. I make them do like a >> homework. >> Yeah. And I make them make post their result of the homework in the comment. Uh, tell them to let me know that you actually did it. >> Oh, that's good. >> And then I do a giveaway, too. Um, I said I'mma pick somebody who posted their result of the homework in comments to give them the giveaway. >> Really good. >> It makes it engaging. They they be doing a homework. >> Really good weekly homework post. They post the result underneath and then they enter into a giveaway. Like that's a complete loop. It's really good. >> We have our client success do um a premotive call with them. So we do the onboarding call and then we do a premotive call where we str like they will strategize with the client that we act like their business already failed, right? And then we work backwards to solve those problems. Um, and so we do the premot process and then we give them tools or resources based on what we the failure scenario is >> I love the concept. >> Um, so yeah >> so they do onboarding and then the next call is like your business is now dead >> why is it dead >> it's like oh you didn't send any emails >> but we plan for failure and then work backwards to figure out like let's make sure that doesn't happen. So on board again first call before we start adding as a pre-order. >> Yeah. >> But just you know the reverse um figure out why the business has fail all the failure scenarios and then let everybody follow those failure scenarios and then give them to thinking in the right direction have different issues. >> Yeah. Mhm. >> It might it might be the business has failed completely because they're just starting or more like imagine the business is failing to get to 100k a month if you're already at 50k a month. So it's going to be different depending where they're at. >> Okay. Interesting. >> I like it because it's a different frame >> just like that. Yeah. >> Something we're going to implement now that he kind of just put us on to is um the result form. So, they're going to have to like what we're going to do is bi-weekly you're going to get sent the Google form and you're going to have to type your goals for the next two weeks. And then what we were thinking about doing is we're going to come back to you with our accountab we have a a coach called Aiden. He his calls are accountability calls. So, and after those two weeks, if you didn't accomplish your goals, we're going to go over them and have you accomplish them. If you didn't, then you would essentially get removed from what you call it. So, it kind of just keeps them accountable. But um >> like you don't get to be on the accountability calls anymore. >> You said what? >> Like you don't get to be on the accountability calls. >> Yeah. Like it basically you get tooken off a bit. Um, yeah. >> Is anyone doing accountability partners? >> Do you do that? >> Does it help people? >> No, not that. >> They'll hop on a call with each other, but then it just diffuses after that. So it's like yeah, you have to force them to be friends more than just like a little post that tells him to message someone. So so far we haven't had like a great success with them. >> We have a quite venture like training with even like cabits. This is how you reach out to partners. Here's how you guys right now but it's for like depend scenarios on how you can work out. Um, but even the the initial contact is is good on the post but then it rise up because we don't know what to do from here. >> Yeah. Well, both of them are like I don't know what to do and they're like I don't know what to do either. Like all right well uh this has been good. Yeah. the whole like flow friends and they also know okay like if you're in this range with range with your audience or email list that you should you can do these kind of things but it I feel like still it's too much uncertainty or insecurity on both sides to take it further. >> We found that all the best businesses are partnerships. So like loads of people join the program and they're individuals and the highest rate of failure is as an individual. So we encourage them then to partner but what we find is is that they don't know how to pick a partner properly. So one of my many unfinished projects at this time is how do we measure them? Don't nod on nod like it's not done but one of my many unfinished projects at the minute is to how do I measure all of the individuals capture their strengths and then pair them off against each other so that I can build partnerships before they get a chance to fail. Good luck. >> I know. I I get really lucky because my my two partners were exactly what I needed them to be like and I like one of them was was malleable and the other one was fixed. So >> if you solve that, take the algorithm and just sell it to match.com and then >> people can find >> I'll come back. >> That'll be a yeah a big one. >> Uh I think a lot of businesses focus heavily on the uh the external results. Uh whereas when we have the biggest shifts with our flights, it's always internal, >> right? So it's like if you gave someone a bunch of money like they won the lottery, they probably get out of Oregon. >> Um and so the people that get the biggest results that feel the best of them, they stick around the longest. It's always a material [ __ ] >> I think we could you could take that just pair it with the win of the week and have on on one level it's like hey I want internal and external like give me both. It's like okay well I sent this email but it was also I overcame my fear of sending emails you know like same thing. Love that. Cool. I'm going to move on from results and value. Is that cool? All right. Sweet. Okay. Um, we've got ads or we've got ops. We're going to save drive for the end. Let's see what number we put on. Uh, >> you have a preference. >> What do you guys want to do first? Ads or operations? >> Cool. Fun. Ads. It is. All right. So right now like half of you guys are running ads. >> Yeah. Who is running ads? And what type of ads? >> Like Facebook ads. >> Yeah, Facebook. >> Okay. Facebook and Instagram. You guys that YouTube? >> Oh, you're doing YouTube. Okay, >> got it. Okay. So, anybody running ads anywhere besides those? >> Google as well. >> Search. Who isn't running ads that wants to run ads? >> You'll murder it. I mean, if you have a big, it's like it will the numbers will be crazy in the beginning. >> Yeah, that's a donor gang to 600k there. >> What's up? >> For a donus, two to four is affiliates. Four to six will be ads. >> Yeah. Well, what you said before was really inspiring about have no calls to actions on the videos and just have a real pitch in the ad because right now I'm I'm I'm like sucks balance of like needing to do calls to actions but also I can do it in a cute way where you're not actually selling but then obviously like I think you said this once you either sell or don't sell. I'm drifting between the two. I'd love to be able to make videos with channel no pitch and then the real itches in some some advert that we were on YouTube. So I did like redoing that [ __ ] Yeah, >> it work. It's it's I think it's if you only do organic, you have to make, you know, you have to make some calls to action. I do think a lot of it is still just bio just like people just look out of curiosity. They want more of whatever you have. >> But yeah, like the the power combo is organic following, run ads. Someday Eddie, you watch this recording, you know, we get him to run some ads, you'll murder it. Because the thing is is you so Eddie's got whatever three million five million you know between all channels right there's like 30 million people who know who he like who recognize his face at least and so the audience size that you can target that's basically warm audience is way bigger than you think it is and like you can pretty much build whatever business you want like once the like the influencer whatever is big enough like you can pretty much just recycle through that warm audience like to give you context like Jim Launch continues to run ads all the time there's only 50,000 gym owners. There's not that many of them. So like if you have a 30 million person audience of people who recognize someone's face that already doubles triples conversion rates and CTRs like you'll be able to it's it'll be stupid profitable. >> If you want to start ads before you need a media buyer the the creative will be easy. I can go through the creative in a second but like creative is very straightforward. You just need someone who just can literally click the buttons and build a simple landing page that drives them over or just run it directly to school now that we have the the ad tracking. >> Do you think it's worth it to have start with the re you already have a bunch of people who cancelled start with the re offer at retarget people who canled? I wouldn't I mean if I were if I was gonna actually start I wouldn't start there just because it's such a small pool like it's a tiny little itty bitty audience like it it's not going to move the needle mater >> if you have an audience you actually target people who have engaged with any of your profiles online. So that would be your initial targeting. So people who visited your about page, people who visited your website and people who visited and engaged with your profiles in the last year. That would be because that's your warmest audience if you think about it. I would start with that. >> Yep. If we were doing that, I'm just thinking because we expect a lot of falloff u between now and football season. So, we want to >> Do you only do football? >> No, but that's the biggest results. You talk about results. I mean, when when he was running the high ticket and working with people during football season, it was so easy, I mean, to get people results. No, it's just there's a little bit of delay >> versus like NBA or other sports leagues. What about fights? Those happen all the time. >> They don't happen that often when you think about UFC >> like enough. >> Like the casual average Joe is only watching like four pay-per-views a year and the serious fans one pay-per-view a month. >> Um, so just not enough volume, I guess. >> Okay. Yeah, >> it's good to know. Okay. So, um, ad structure, you're going to have a call outhook. If you are, if you're in a niche, you're going to probably need a call out. If you're a little bit broader, it's just going to be a more open hook. So, if I'm marketing gym owners, the first words coming out are like gym owners, like just tell them that you're talking to them. If you have a broader thing like if you're talking to 18year-olds or whatever, you can usually imply that with whatever the question is and that'll kind of check both boxes or question statement etc. So the first thing that happens every ad and this is by far the most important thing that's in every ad like just like organic content the first three seconds like by far the most important. And so the process that we run is that we'll make 50 plus hooks and that's where we start. So we make 50 plus hooks when we record ads. Then we transition to the meat which we usually have some sort of three-point pitch very simple like this is you know this is what you get or um it can be something that's like a belief that's broken. You can still use the same thing here which is lists, steps, and stories. Analogies fall into that same same bucket. You have your meat of what are the main things. We usually only do three to five of these when we're think about volume of how many of these meets when we do a recording session for ads. And then third, you have your CTA. And CTA here is uh you're just walking through exactly what happens next. And so I just think about the big questions everyone asks which is what, where, when, why, how. So like you're going to click the link at the bottom of the page right now so that you can get the thing that I just told you about. And when you get to the other side, this is what you're going to say. And so you just make sure that you you do that. And I almost always leave an open loop at the end of every ad. So it's like, hey, uh, when you do that thing, I'll see you on the inside or I'll I'll see you at the next call. And, um, one of the things that had a dramatic improvement on our, uh, just conversion rates overall is I because you don't want to you don't want to unsell your lead magnet, right? But if you want to get someone in, it's like you want them want the thing, but at the same time, you want them to want more than the thing, too. And so what I like to think about this is I'm going to give you the the whole thing, but I'm going to make sure that you implement it in the right order that's specific to you. And so that way I could give away something that's super valuable, but say, "Hey, but if this is super powerful stuff, and if you use it in the wrong order, it could actually hurt you." And so on the inside, we'll show you what order that you can do it that's specific to your business right now. And so that gave them the reason to take the first step, but also to take the second step of conversion, not just like take the free thing and run. Does that make sense? And so, um, from a callouts perspectives and the hooks, what I do, and I I tell everyone to do this, like I don't have premium on any ad platform. So, I still have ads everywhere. Um, because I always like to be consuming advertisements because I like to know and if I see an ad that's been running a while, then I know the hook's good. And so, some of the hooks that I'll take for like, you know, like for school will be something from weight loss. like it doesn't like usually the first question, the first statement doesn't necessarily have to perfectly relate to the two. Um, like the best hook that we have for school ads is also the best hook that I had for my book launch. And so like they they're completely separate like things, but it just shows that like hooks if you can get them right can usually apply across a variety of industries. And if you so raise your hand if you run ads before. So, the way that I that I approach this is I review all of my best ads of all time before I sit down to write hooks. I do it every time because I like drink it all in, keep it in my head, and then I usually have swipe files that I have on my phone, too. So, I have a folder where I save any ad that I think is interesting. And so, then when I sit down, it's like I drink up all the stuff that are my best converting ads of all time. And then I have my kind of inspiration for new ads that I like. And then between those two things, I bang out my hooks. And so then when we when we start recording, we'll sit down, they'll put all my hooks because I'll have a document. We have a big screen. And so we'll put all the hooks there and I'll just rock through hooks. And then what happens is when you have 50 plus hooks, three to five me pieces of meat content, you've got 150 plus ads that come from that process. And you really only have to make three to five of like the meaty ads that that drive kind of like the explanation of whatever the thing is. And for these, I almost always use analogies if I can, especially anything that's visual. If you can add props into an ad, which usually don't cost a lot of money, huge increase in conversion. Like just just try. The the bar is so low for the internet world. Like it's so low. So low to win. You just need to like look like you try and that's it. Just try and you'll probably be fine. Go ahead. One of the things I've noticed because most of the people I advertise are not as well known as you for example and so as a result people have never seen them before. >> So I would typically think adding a story or some credibility helps with you obviously or I'm assuming you don't need that because people already know who you are. But would you recommend for people just starting out or maybe when you were starting out? >> Absolutely. >> Having that. >> Yeah. Proof. Yeah. if you can put it in uh for yourself to edify, especially if you're in the education space, makes sense. I also ran ads as me before I was me. Um, and so that's where all this comes from. So um and as we reach cold audiences, which is the point, um I'll I'll give you a second big big one for those of you who do have audiences who run traffic. One of the big mistakes people make is they run them as though the person already knows who they are. All ads should be going to cold audiences because your warm audience will convert from a cold ad, but your cold cold audiences will also convert. And so they're basically, in my opinion, there's no point in making warm ad stuff like either sell or don't sell. Like no half measures. It's just like lazy selling, like lazy ads. Like you already know that I've got this like that's terri like if you just have a really strong hook, really strong value, they're like, "Dude, this sounds awesome." They're just more likely to click and go in. But yeah, if you want to if you want to embed proof, I mean, like I the meaty points would be probably related to something, some sort of evidence. I mean, I always a big proponent of of data whenever possible. >> And do you find that making an ad because there's the analytical brains that really want to see the data and then there's those people that really just buy into the stories. Do you you how do you balance that? >> You just make two ads. >> Okay. >> And then you just see which one works better. So once you have this, so what'll happen is you'll start to get um a few ads that'll convert. And one of the big things that just as a belief breaker for you guys is that we'll make 50 plus ads a week. And so most people who make ads like they're like, "Man, I can't scale past this amount per day." It's not that your market's tapped, it's that your ads aren't that good. like your ads can get to here. But if you want to go to like if you think about audiences, think about it like this. So it's like a watermelon slice. All right? And you've got seeds, but you've got lots of seeds up top and then fewer seeds here and then even fewer seeds here and then even fewer. And so the ad platforms will start showing your ads to these people first. So they're the highest likelihood that are going to convert. So you're going to get the cheapest conversions. And then you go to the next though. Then it's like, okay, well, they're still spending money. We can go to the next year that has slightly fewer uh seeds per ounce of watermelon. Just go with me. And then if it works there, it'll keep going to here. But basically, to get to these next levels, the quality of the ad has to be that much better. And in my experience, the only way to do that is just through absolute brute force of volume. And so we make 50 plus ads so that we can find one winner. And then when we find that winner, we do something that I call kaleidoscope. So So we have our one winner. me holding money. Yay. All right, that's me. Now, that is the winner. The next thing that I want to do is I want to make a hundred permutations of that ad. And so, first off, I want to re-record the exact same ad four different times in a row. Literally just me saying the same words to the camera, slightly different intonations, maybe a different shirt, different background. I just want to redo the ad multiple times. We'll also take the original footage from the one that was working and then put black and white. I want to run it black and white. I want to run it through sepia. I want to run it through inverted colors. I want to run it with a different background. Like all of these different things that you can run just in terms of per permutating the ad. I want to change the fonts up. I want to change the the meme headlines above and below. Like all of these things will give different look and feels for each of the ads. But you already know that that ad converts. And so you can juice the living hell out of a winner and get instead of getting just 5x on that ad, you can get a hundred or 500x on that ad because you actually ended up running that thing way more. We had an ad at gym launch that's actually of Kale and his wife uh when they were customers and he's in front of his gym. It was like this perfect setting like the sunset's happening. There's people working out behind him but like it doesn't interfere with the audio. He starts the ad and then his wife joins in and she's like, "Oh, hey." And it's super raw and very like I can't believe this is happening. Like we were losing our house and now we just sold this gym and we have it completely outsourced and took us nine months. And if you're on the fence, just like believe me, I get where you were at. I saw these things everywhere. Like these guys are legit. Like they will actually help you. Like just it's worth checking out. And like that ad made us like $15 million. And so, so I I literally we took the ad, we we that thing was so good. We reversed like we changed the order up. We'd have his wife scoop in and then she'd be gone. Like that ad in every version of it just crushed. And so rather than just making something else, like once you find something that works, you keep kaleidoscoping and you still keep doing this thing, which is you still keep making 50 new hooks every week. But eventually what happens is it becomes 8020 where you put 80% of your effort on the kaleidoscope and 20% on creating something brand new, new hook, new meat, new whatever. And then one of those ones will eventually hit two right as your kaleidoscope one is going down. And then that becomes the new main ad that you juice the hell out of. Like that's the process. Cool. >> Evelyn smiled. So I was like, okay. So she uh she thinks that ads are cool. That's great. >> Yeah. >> It's so interesting because I don't run any video ads at all. So I kind >> You've never done video ads? >> I don't run video ads. >> Uh >> it's already working well. So >> that's great. Yeah. Yeah. And to be fair, you can also take freeze frames from ads and and and make those into individual images as well, and those will work. Go ahead. >> For the targeting, even if I have an audience, would you say I should target cold? >> You should still do what Sam was saying. So, think about it in terms of like even though I did a a watermelon there. Actually, I'll keep the watermelon so I don't confuse. So this is person who visited your profile, liked your stuff, did what you know, whatever, retargeted from your email list, visited your web page, like that's here. And then it's okay, maybe it's people who are interested in the same types of things or the same types of people as you. And then it's a broader category, which is just like maybe it's making money overall. And then when you're down here, you're like has a pulse, speaks English, right? And so like the the wider out you go, obviously the TAM gets bigger and bigger. Beyond a certain point though, targeting doesn't matter because the pixel will take care of it and then the spend will determine where you are at on here. Like once the pixel on any of the platforms is trained enough, you just you can pretty much open up targeting. >> I remember you went on a Zoom um last month where you said just get the best performing organic video and run that as an end. >> Yep. >> What's like that about that? What about like a call to action? So, if you have an organic post that for whatever reason just just drove a ton of sales or and this happens a lot too, customers will post something and that will drive a lot of sales, you just take both of them and you just run them straight as ads >> without action. >> They didn't have them before. You just run exactly what worked. It won't always work, but it's like it's free. Like you run it and if it doesn't work, just turn it off. So, that's how I think through paid ads. I would say big picture like the arms race of business from a paid ads perspective is going to be LTV. And so you usually like we we talked about retention before this because just being very honest with you that LTV number is going to be your budget. It's going to be what you can bid at the auction of attention and you're bidding against every other person on the who's bidding for the same eyeballs. And so I'll just give you a quick anecdote to drive this home. um that same uh publishing business that I was talking about, we were able to after a year, we 1.9xed LTV. It's a lot of work to get there. It was a hundred small things that we did to almost double LTV, but us doubling LTV allowed us to 5x our advertising profitably. And so we were able to go two rungs lower on the thing and went from, I think, 2 million a month to 2 million a week. So good more money his meaning uh ads feel good. Go ahead. >> I have a few like detailed questions if you want to go into it. So what we found for what I found for high ticket because mainly what I do >> is when you start to broaden the audience and maybe this just has to do with the pixel needing to be trained more but when I start to broaden the audience the quality of the lead tends to reduce. Sure, they're colder. >> And then I'm also curious what your opinion is on like that household income targeting that Google Ads has where I know you can do it with zip codes on Facebook ads. Do you mess with any of that or do you leave it up to the pixel? >> We're getting into highlevel media buying. Uh not high level, but like I will just give you my opinion. I'm sure the guys who actually run my traffic could give you better insight. I'm almost positive we're open targeting for everything um that we run. I mean Austin >> Austin Austin the less parameters you put on it the better. >> Yeah the CPMs are cheap. Like basically the more things you limit the platform the more they charge you for the eyeballs. And so the goal so I'll put it this this way. The goal is to get the pixel to be seasoned with the absolute highest quality people and then open it up. And once you hit critical mass you just let the platform take care of it. What you have to watch out for is getting false positives that then start to destroy the the pixel. Um, and so that's what that's basically what you protect. >> The only things we really look at is like obviously English >> and countries. Yeah. >> Would you don't mess with age though? >> No. >> Okay. Do you not touch interests either? >> Oh, like Yeah. Like it depends what your audience is. If it's retargeting, you obviously don't. But >> yeah, if you're doing interest based, sure. >> Yeah. But then additional parameters, no. But maybe country and um and language. Yeah. >> But in general though, like the more filters you put on it, the higher the CPMs are. >> I think when you go to Google open targeting right from the beginning, it's also a really good indication for how strong your offer is. >> So, >> yeah, it all come down how much money you make. Like if you made a billion dollars from every customer, it wouldn't really matter. I'm just like as a hypothetical extreme to think through. It's like and that can get like we've been always very strong in acquisition primarily because we can always outspend everyone and that's always been my objective is that I think we're like I get a disproportionate amount of credit for sales and marketing mostly because the stuff that we that I will that I will own I want to make sure that we make a ton of like way more money than any of my competition does. So, I spend a lot of time obsessing about the money model is like, how

Can I make every single one of these people worth so much more money to me than anybody else? That at that point, even if I'm half as efficient as them, I'm still more profitable. And then, and then I kind of think of this as like a reverse monopoly where you, uh, because you can outspend anyone, no one can compete. And so, like, you buy up all the ad space, you drive up the CPMs for the for the same eyeballs, and then they can't buy. You just lock everyone out. Now, that works better if you're in a niche. If you're in America, then, you know, good luck. But yeah, go ahead.

>> What do you think the best money models are for like club ticket communities like this?

>> Well, I mean, I think it's the fundamentally. All right, we're going to go into a little, we're going to go into a little, uh, little, little thingy thing. How about that? You know what? This deserves a new page. What do you say, Jason? New page. New page.

Okay. So, so there's eight ways you can increase lifetime gross profit. You can increase the price. You decrease the cost of goods sold. You can get people to buy again. You can cross-sell. You can upsell quantity. You can upsell quality. And then you can downsell quantity, downsell quality. Okay? So, if you want to make more money in any business, it has to be one of these eight things. Like, that's what you're actually doing.

And so, if we want to drive LTV, if we double the price, we might make more money. So, I'll give you a price test that we just recently ran with 600,000 customers. Uh, we double the price and we decrease sales by, we increased total revenue by 50% by doubling the price. So, we had fewer people buy, but not disproportionately fewer people buy. And so, we still made more money. And that also drove down cost of goods sold because we didn't have to fulfill on the additional customers we didn't sell. So, we made money, more money twice that way. And so, of all of these things, price is the strongest lever by far on how much profit you make in a business. And so, if you think about like this, let's say you have a a 20% margin in a business. If I raise my prices by 20% and I don't do anything else, assuming everything else stays the same, I double the profit of the business. And so, more times than not, when you make those 20%, 50% jumps in price, you don't have accordingly 50% drops in total number of sales. And so, one of the first, like, we do the database thing first when I buy a company, and the second thing I do is I look at pricing. So, one of the companies I bought, um, last year, we bought it, and I did nothing, and I just raised the price by 50%. We added four million in profit to the business, and I was like, "Sick, my work is done." And so, like, there's huge levers there, and it was because the founder was super afraid of raising the price, blah, blah, blah. We did a bunch of research, and I was like, "I think they'll support this." And so, I went to the sales team and just said, "Okay, you know the exact same script, and then instead of this price, you're just going to say this price. Everything else the same." And then conversion rates actually went up. So, that's what was crazy, because and I had a hunch for this because I thought they were underpriced. That's why I bought the company. Um, so people actually had a higher conviction that it would deliver the result that they were promising, and they didn't believe it as much because the price was too low originally. So, we had a higher conversion at a higher price.

So, increase price. You can decrease your cost of goods. Now, in this business, there's not a lot of cost of goods, so you don't have to worry about it. But in other businesses, you can drive this one, and it all drives the bottom line. Um, uh, for us here, this one's probably going to be the, the next biggest one, which is just how do you get people to buy again? And within the context of recurring revenue businesses, it's decreasing churn. And, um, sometimes the math on this is is lost on people. So, I will walk you through this, but if you have a, actually, I'm not going to draw in the big fancy one. We'll go over here. So, if you have a $100 a month customer, okay, and you have 10% churn. So, Kenneth, this is for you. So, 10% churn, $100 a month customer. LTV in terms of revenue is $1,000. So, you put churn below price, that gives you LTV. All right. Now, if I just take this 10% and get it to 3%. All right. So, I have a 7% reduction in churn. Winky face. I have a $3,000 LTV. I might have done, it might be 33, 33, but whatever. You get the idea. It's much higher. All right. And so, driving this churn down is probably the single biggest lever that many of you guys will have in the business to make your customers more valuable. So, if you raise the price and you can decrease churn, you can have a mega effect because if I can even push this to whatever, 150, and I don't see too big of a difference in my, in my take rates, and I can bump churn from 10 to 5%. Whatever. I can't do a five upside down, but 10% to 5%, then that doubles it, and this goes up by 50%. So, I would triple profit. Same with that with those two moves. And so, this is the equation that you guys want to obsess over.

Now, if you guys don't know this little equation, oh god. Oh, I did legs this morning. Okay. So, so let's say, let's say, uh, Hamza signs up a thousand people per month, right? These are new customers. So, he signs up a thousand people per month, and let's say his churn is, uh, 10%. All right. We'll just keep it simple. All right. When he had, like, does anyone tell me how many people, like, where his business will cap at if you just know those two things, where he will stop growing? It's just the math on the board. So, it's a thousand divided by 10%. So, this will give you a hypothetical max for new customers. Which means that when he has 10,000 people in his group, when 10% churn equals his number of customers that he gets, his churn equals his inflow. He will no longer grow. And so, the growth of a group, the growth of a group looks like this. This being the 10,000 number. In the beginning, it'll grow really quickly because he has a lot of sales, but as churn starts to eat up that 10%, it becomes out of a bigger and bigger number. Eventually, it evens out to whatever his sales velocity is. And so, then at that point, so, if for those of you who have maintained your level of revenue and you sell about the same number of customers every month, you've already reached your hypothetical max. Which means that your business will not grow unless until you sell more customers per month or you make them worth more. That's it. There's nothing else that's going to change like that. You will stay there until one of those two things changes. There you go.

Now, these other five, fundamentally, they're just upsells. I just like to delineate these because I think it's easier to think through them. Cross-sells are selling something else. So, this is where all the affiliate revenue that you guys get from having other softwares and vendors and whatnot, like, highly recommend understanding what that is, quantified, so that when you do your customer acquisition, you can say, "Okay, we get, if we get 100 customers, we get on average half of them to take one of these offers, and the LTV of my affiliate commission on that is X. I can add that to my total customer LTV as well." And you just want to make sure that you just multiply by whatever the conversion rate is of the customers who take that. And so, then you have a better, fully baked number of how much money you make per customer. That's what cross-sells are within the context of this business. If you were looking at, uh, these are both upsells, and these are down-sells. So, upsells of quantity or quality. I like delineating them because thinking, "Okay, is there something that I could," to what we were talking about earlier, "How can I get someone to buy eight more months or how can I get someone to buy annual?" Well, that's just increasing the quantity. Average, you know, cart goes from buying one month to buying 12 months. So, that's a way that you can increase LTV. Um, quality would be if you had two groups, like Evelyn does. So, it's like, "Okay, I can acquire people into this group, but I know that 10% of people move on to the next group, and I know what the LTV of that group is. And if 10% go into that, then I add 10% of that LTV to my total acquisition that I can spend on the front end." That's the quality piece. The down-sell piece is just the equal opposite of that. Is well, and I'll give you a simple example of this. This is just a, a huge pro tip for everyone here. So, when we looked at, because we have a lot of metrics in in Gym Launch, we keep very good data. Um, when we started proactively reaching out to customers that weren't consuming portions of the service. So, let's say you have 10 nuggets that you offer, whatever you have, the calls, you have content, whatever it is, right? You have 10 of those nuggets. If we found that people weren't using six of them, unfortunately, because of psychology, uh, human beings will think, "I'm not getting the full value," even if the value of the four things they're using is far in excess of the price. They're just not getting what they're paying for. And so, what we realized is that our second highest LTV of all different customer cohorts, and we have a lot of them, was people that we proactively down-sold. So, we would reach out to people and say, "Hey, it looks like you're not using all 10 of the things that we offer. So, why don't I just go ahead and downgrade you right now to a membership that would uh better suit you?" Now, that would be like Evelyn moving down, like moving the other direction, but by doing that, they're like, "Wow, this guy's awesome." And then also, this is perfectly matched to my needs. And so, those people ended up, I mean, they, they like talk about people who never cancel. Those people just don't leave because you have some goodwill, and you also better fit the product to who they are. I know I'm also talking like business fundamentals overall rather than specifically with school, but I figured you guys would still like benefit from it. Is that cool? Cool.

Okay. So, um, the ways to increase. All right, so that was ads. Got a little segued there, but, uh, did anyone have any last questions on ads before I move on from that? I remember why. That drives how much you can spend. There we go. Okay, linked it. Any other questions on ads? If you're like, "Which platform should I start on?" Start on the one where you have more people who know who you are. And if you don't have people who know who you are on either of them, start with the one that you understand better because then you'll be able to make ads that are more contextual because you've probably consumed ads on the platform, and you'll know what, at least directionally, what a good ad looks like versus a bad one. Okay. Fantastic.

All right. So, we've got operations and managing talent team. Who here? Okay. So, let's just talk about problems and questions around this. So, what are the problems that you guys are coming up with operations?

>> Oh, yeah, sure.

>> Would that be group?

>> Kirby, that's your question. Kirby. Oh. Okay. Why don't you repeat it?

>> Uh, the meta for using the ads with the page community. Yeah. Yeah. If you check on the description, it shows you three different ways you can use it. On the registration.

>> All right, questions for operations.

>> Well, just kind of close from ads because right now we're sending all of our traffic to DMs. Close something there and, uh, talked to a lot of people who managed DM sales teams and wanted to know what the upper limit of that would be until we probably just start running directly sell checkout type thing.

>> I mean, I know guys a 50, 60 person DM teams. One of our, one of our companies has, um, 400.

>> 400 people running DMs?

>> On Instagram specifically. So, how many tin boxes does that have?

>> No idea. I don't run it. It's actually a brick and mortar chain. Till we go local, till we get local, uh, local customers.

>> Best strategy.

>> I mean, I would be, I'd be optimizing the living hell out of my about page. Like, if it were like, if it were me, I just, I would be putting all my effort on ad. I want as few moving parts in a business as humanly possible so that I can run as much through it as I can without something breaking. So, my businesses have been astonishingly simple for the most part, uh, for that for that reason. It's also easier for all of my teams to focus on the few things that matter most. And so, that's that's me. It's like, can we make this ad better? Can we make this offer better? Like, that's why the first book is about offers because if you get, if you nail the offer, nothing else, like, in terms of order of magnitude change in the business, that will matter more than anything else. So, I focus on that the most, bar none, not even close, is going to be the offer. After we know the offer and we know it's right, then, then the ads, it makes doing the ads and everything else much easier because we know the conversion is going to be there. We know we get better click-through rates. We're going to get customers who are going to buy and stay longer, pay higher prices. All of those things stem from that first getting the offer nailed. But I would do that banger ads to a very simplified about page that I know has the absolute things that matter most. And I know some of you guys weren't here during, um, Sam and I were talking about this during lunch, but where we're hoping this goes is that the school about page becomes just incredibly trusted page. So, if you look at like a, a Shopify checkout versus an Amazon checkout, the checkout pages all look the same. They sell a product, and they're structured more or less the same way. And so, we at school are going to do everything we can to just keep optimizing that page to convert for everyone. Um, and as trust continues to build in the platform, like, if I don't know if you know this, but like some Amazon like page, like my book page right now converts at like 35%. Like, one out of three people who goes to the page buys. And so, like, you only get that when you have tremendous trust in a platform, huge amounts of social, social reviews. Um, and that's where like making the best group, the most engaging communities, like where it's ranked, things like that are going to come. Like, it's going to, I will call it, are going to, like, those about pages are going to outperform funnels in the future. Like, I, I will call it. So, if I were to grow it, that's what my focus would be. Ads to that page. Make sure the words on that page and the video that's on that page are built to convert.

>> Yeah, those bullets, right? What we were saying before, it seems like the bullets are the most important thing, like, and then obviously some good images or maybe a video or whatever. What?

>> Is that? Or did you say something earlier about after a possible pop-up page?

>> No. And you? Yeah, I said there'd be a like a onboarding page.

>> You didn't dream that.

>> Very good. What's up?

>> So, like, if you were going to take over a company, right?

>> Sure.

>> Tomorrow. What would be the immediate steps you would take? You're going to need to reform the business, right? And all that, make it how you want it to operate. What would be your immediate steps to take to start that reform process? Why would you look bust for weeks? The first thing I do is I run the survey. I understand the customer base. It's the first thing I do. Also, because you don't want to come in and be like, "Hey, the new man is in charge. We're changing everything." Like, great way to lose trust with everyone in the business. Also, people in the business have been doing things a certain way, and they usually have reasons why. Something that you might have as a first idea, they're like, "Well, that was actually our first idea, and it didn't work, and here's why." And then you'd be like, "Oh, either, wow, I'm glad we did that," or, "Oh, you missed the key point that made it work, and that's why it didn't work." And so, I like to get a big history of the business from the next level of leadership. Not to get too much into M&A, but, um, we do that. We collect the data from the customers. I look at pricing and I look at offer. That's where I like, that's right off the bat where I focus. And then, like, Leila, to be fair, concurrently is looking at team and being like, "This person sucks. This person sucks. This person needs to be promoted." And then we've got three people in our network that we can fill in. That's like the actual process that we look at it. And then, of course, we look at more better new. So, once we get the fundamentals right, then it's like, "How do we 10x what we're currently doing?" So, they're making content, how can we make more of it? They're doing outbound, how can we do more of it? They're running ads, how can we do more? And then, like, I have subject matter experts that go down the funnel and say, "Here's three things we can do that we have high confidence will immediately boost conversions."

>> Sorry about.

>> Well, there's, uh, in the last school games, I think four guys did outbound. Is there at least two for sure, I think. No, they were doing, so some of them were doing, uh, cold email. Um, some were doing cold DM, but yeah. No, I mean, there were people who definitely made it work.

>> I did.

>> Yeah.

>> Just like, just.

>> Yeah.

>> And I'd say there's different out, like levels of this. It's like, you could DM two DM closers who then send straight to buy on the, just straight buy it. If you have a higher ticket group that's, call it $500, $1,000 a month, then it might be a phone sale into the group. Or you can do G triage.

>> Yeah, exactly. It really depends how cold the, how cold the traffic is. Is, um, basically the amount of friction you have to introduce in the funnel is directly proportional to how cold the traffic is. The friction warms them up. So, you add more friction if you need to. Okay. Operations. It's like one more thing on acquisition, right? On paid ads. Um, okay, what questions we have on operations and and talent and talent? What exactly do you mean by operations?

>> Okay, so, uh, running of the business. I can use the words that you guys said. You guys said hiring talent, managing talent, recruiting people. Um, I think that was any of those ringing a bell? You guys said those words.

>> I've got a, I've got a good thing that I find quite helpful for operations, which is higher where it hurts.

>> Where or when?

>> Where it hurts, which kind of means that you're only going to hire when it hurts.

>> Yeah.

>> Right.

>> Um,

>> Yeah.

>> I've noticed most of the mistakes people make is hiring people they don't actually need and then spending all of their time inventing things for them to do.

>> Questions around.

>> How do you retain good talent?

>> Okay. So, talent retention. So, why don't we just go through it? So, you've got acquisition of talent, right? You've got retention of talent. All right. So, I'm going to just give you some stuff that we figured out just on the acquisition of talent because believe it or not, that's probably like the main, like, the primary thing that we do in a business besides the strategy. But in terms of like hours spent of my team on growing companies, it's finding who's not hows. And so, paid ads, for example, like you run Craigslist ads, you run Facebook ads or whatever to get talent. We, we more or less don't do that anymore. Um, now, if you were looking for low-level roles, that's fine. But if you want mid-level and up, like leaders, if you want somebody who's really good, they already have a job. Like, they really do. Like, I've heard that before when I was starting out. I was like, "No, but this guy's really like," no, they, they all have jobs. Um, because no business wants to lose them, and they're the type of people who can't stop working. And so, you want those people. And so, we actually use outbound as our primary way of getting talent into companies. And so, we're like, "Hey, we do the, uh, do you know anybody?" She's like, "Hey, you're a perfect fit for this role that we have. Do you know anyone just like you who would like this thing?" And let me tell you all the benefits of this role. That way you don't seem like you're asking for too much, and then they're like, "Well, screw my friends, I'm interested." Um, and it's just the same outbound metrics. It's like, you put, you do a hundred, 100 messages. And I would say that is the primary value of LinkedIn, at least for us, um, has been that we're able to get exceptional talent that way. And so, that is how we do it.

>> Yeah, I think it'd be interesting to hear what where it actually hurts for you guys, cuz it really differs on who you're trying to hire. For example, if you're looking for a community manager, they're already in your community, right? Because they're a fan. And the fact that they could get paid to actually hang out in the community is like the dream. And there's barely any onboarding, right? Because they already know everything.

>> But sometimes the person you're looking for isn't in your community, right? So, it really differs on the role.

>> Yeah.

>> Like, where does it hurt running your school business at the moment? I'm curious.

>> Yeah, found was, um, people that was asking questions. Uh, since I started to get so many people now, whole questions, the response time on responding to.

>> So, like, support, basically.

>> Is it DMs or is it post?

>> No, post.

>> Okay.

>> Okay. Responding to posts. That's good to know. So, I'm just going to put some of these roles up, and we can maybe hit some of these particularly. So, uh, post responses.

>> Community manager. What was the next one?

>> Where else does it hurt?

>> Yeah.

>> Um, I don't even know if this could really be fixed, but like, so when the admin of the group makes a post, everyone gets a notification. So, like, when I make a post, I get like a 100 comments on my post, for instance. But let's say someone else just wants to make a post on the group, they'll get maybe three or four comments. But I'm guessing that really comes in with the group moderator to like, just keep things active. I'm guessing.

>> Are you emailing everybody like you have that tab? Cuz that's probably the.

>> He's saying that his posts get really good engagement, but.

>> Post since it doesn't get sent out to everybody, like it can get washed down and get mixed up.

>> But posts good or bad?

>> Make sure they can be good.

>> So, you want everyone's post to notify everyone?

>> Oh, yeah. Yeah. They'll know for sure.

>> So, what are you asking for?

>> Like how to make it like, well, maybe just incentives on people being engaged and engaging with people other than just me, obviously. So.

>> I see.

>> I think it's value of the content. To Kirby's point, like that's everything. Like Evelyn gets tons of engagement in the school group because she posts these very long, very valuable posts, and people love it, and she climbs the rankings.

>> And you're giving prizes to people at higher levels, right? Like, so doesn't that incentivize them to help each other?

>> Yeah, but now, obviously, that I think about it, if I'm, if everyone's getting notification when I post, then mine are obviously always going to be more engaged than the average one. Yeah, for sure. If everyone gets notified when you post, absolutely that will happen. What other, what other roles are you guys like? Where does it hurt role-wise? Go ahead.

>> My biggest problem is that I'm, I have division and I have operations manager, and it's really I'm bottlenecking with the vision and I'm trying to communicate with her. Um, and then she tries to communicate with the team, but I feel like we got so big that it's like steering a ship. And so, I have to stir, stir, stir, and it's moving. Everything is moving so slow, and I'm not sure if it's a cool question or if I'm, what I'm missing, but I feel like whenever I have an idea and I want to move, pick it. Often, I think one of my strengths is to react to what the community needs like really quickly. And so, because now that is challenging the team, right? Because they're like, "Now we're moving so quickly again, and we're just adjusting to this." I always get pushback on that, but I know it's needed. So, I, I'm, I'm wondering how can I be quicker with the team? And is it a matter, how they're managed, or am I missing a role? So, I wonder that. I was like.

>> What is the, why is it slow? What's the bottlenecking?

>> It's a, so I feel like when, when I want to do something, like the team finds it really hard to, to change direction like quickly, right? Or to.

>> Are you changing the direction on them all the time?

>> No, I don't think so.

>> Why do they find it hard to change direction?

>> I think because they don't fully understand the mission. Are you communicating what needs to be done to the team, or is it going through a middle like.

>> We have, like, uh, for example, school game, right? I had an emergency meeting with them, and I'm, I, I communicated the vision to them, um, and I feel like, I feel almost like they're so comfortable and so taken care of that they don't understand that it's a necessity for us to stay this agile, right? Because I'm, I'm filtering, I think, a lot of the pressure for them so they don't, don't get a lot of pressure. And so, they're not on their toes with those things, right? So, I feel like I see the necessity to react fast to keep the business in check, but they're like, "Yeah, good. Why are we needing to change things, right?" So, so I believe maybe it's that I'm filtering too many things through, like, because I don't want to worry. Does that make sense? It's like, A players are hungry and ambitious, and maybe they're more B players, but they're kind of like, "Yeah, this is good."

>> I believe it's like, everybody's very nurturing, right? And they, they care deeply. Um, but it's also like, um, yeah, they like to have their routine almost. Yes, that's that's true. And so.

>> Do they have to do day-to-day operations as well as new building projects?

>> Is that e-mixing their? So, they have to maintain stuff, but also build new stuff?

>> Um, they have to maintain stuff, and in launches, we, they also have like a role in launches, but it's not like we're doing this the first time. We always do the same thing in our chest.

>> It's hard for me to say without like digging really into it, but I've always found, I always want one team to only work on one thing at a time. So, if there needs to be like support, support's doing that. If there's ads, the ads person's doing that. For Kirby, he's managing the school games. And then operations is managed. Then the things that we're building, I even break that out into teams, and each person's only working on one thing, and no one's allowed to distract them. Do you know what I mean? So, then, then all of these things are moving in parallel, and the operations are still not, they're not distracting them. Does that make sense?

>> So, almost like I would need a separate team for projects outside of that?

>> Well, how big, you say team? How big is team? We have 13 people.

>> 13. Yes. So, a team shouldn't really be any bigger than four. Four, five.

>> It's because we have like people on a contractor basis as well that just do.

>> Yes. That's the slowness. Yeah.

>> Because they're.

>> I think you'd go much. I've seen this trend happen. It's like, you can sometimes do a lot more with one full-timer than like 10 part-timers. So, at a certain point of every journey, like switching from the contractors to a full-timer is a huge. Maybe that's what the problem is actually, cuz there's a cost of communication with more bodies.

>> Yeah.

>> Yeah. And so, you're probably bleeding all your efficiency out of like.

>> Yeah.

>> Communication and stuff. Um, I mean, I could dig deeper, but like, that's my intuition. So, consolidating to more full-time people.

>> It's amazing what one full-time person can do.

>> Who's good?

>> Yeah. Like, I've seen one person on my team do stuff that I've seen like 15 people, part-timers do on other people's teams.

>> Yes. I will, I will just hit this from a totally different direction, just from like the entrepreneur perspective, which is like the number one thing that I get back from Leila, who basically, it's not basic, she is CEO of all the stuff that we do, um, is, is no meaning. Like, I have more ideas than we have days like in the week. And so, even though something may feel like, "Why is this taking so long?" or like, "Why can't we do this too?" I mean, I would just even use the like, the product pipeline that we have at school as a great like thought experiment of like, there's all these things that we want to put in there. But strategy comes from prioritization of like, "What is the one thing that matters most?" And so, I feel like that is very much the CEO hat is being able to say, "This also would be good, but this is good, and this is goodest." And so, we just do the goodest thing, and we have to wait until we've seen through that project into a complete loop. And unless we have an underlying assumption that has been proven incorrect, there is no reason for us to change course. And so, um, that just, as a, as a, just as a kind of overarching thing that I, I'm just saying personally, I've had to struggle a lot with that. And so, the way that we solve that from a behavior perspective, because it's much harder to change me than it is to orient the business, I get all of my creative juice out in advertising because I can create lots of new things all the time, really quickly, there. And so, I kind of get that creative juice out rather than like looking at the business that we're trying to like make more efficient, scale operations, like, like add just bodies, and like, we already have a training for this, and if we change the product, we have to retrain the whole, like, there's all these other things. And so, I get all my, my juice out on the front end and leave the back end alone to the greatest degree possible. And if we are going to introduce something there, this is like team stuff, but it's asking them, and then like Socratic dialogue to lead them to the answer that you, so that they feel like they came up with it, and that they buy in on it, and then they're like, "Oh, I'm super excited to do our idea," and you're like, "That's great. I'm super pumped, too." So, just, if that is helpful around that.

>> That's helpful. I think that's a problem that they don't come up with it. Yeah.

>> Oh, yeah. If you come down from the hill and say, "Here's the tablet with all the things we're going to do," likely that people will just buck that. So, just having some sort of buy-in helps. Whenever I catch my team getting slower, and I analyze it, they're working on more than one thing at a time. And so, I don't even tell them about what's next until what they're currently working on is completely done. Even though I'm excited about it, I just can't say anything.

>> Super hard.

>> Yeah.

>> It's super hard.

>> Cuz otherwise, think about it. They're trying to do one thing, and they're just getting all of this like, this crazy entrepreneur like yelling at them about all of this random stuff. Like, that will, it makes things slower. You have to be quiet.

>> Seriously though, like it sucks. Like, I, for the most part, the way that we have sped companies up is by moving me off the org chart. I have no, I have no direct reports. Zero. Like, I'm married to Ila, besides that, I have no direct reports. And so, like, it's funny because when Sam and I talk, it's like, we'll have like, it'll be a 30-minute block, and it'll be like a three-hour call because we'll both just jam on all the cool stuff, and we're like, "Okay, so, uh, I guess we can't tell anybody about this, so glad we got that out." So, like, I think maybe you just need some sort of like intellectual sparring partner that you can get excited about that stuff. And I have a document that's called Alex's Big Money Ideas, and I just keep adding it to this document. That way, I feel like, and I completely flesh it out. I put a presentation, I put the slides, I put the data, and all the stuff that I'm looking, like, why this is. And then when the team actually has bandwidth, then I go back to my big money ideas list and say, "Okay, which of these is actually going to make us the most money?" And you will be surprised because sometimes that idea you had last week, you're like, "You know, not as stoked about it now." And they're even less stoked about it because it's not even their idea. So, um, I don't know if this will touch up on because I deleted for a minute, but with the actual talent acquisition, because you're asking like, "What, where, where does it hurt the most or where it needs support the most?"

>> I guess personally, it would be sales reps, a sales rep manager.

>> Sure.

>> And then trainers. And that isn't something that we've been able to find within our community.

>> Got it.

>> Or we have, but we've exhausted that resource. Mhm. All right. So, so oops. Sales, sales reps. I'll just say sales related stuff. Okay. I can help that in a second. Any other roles?

>> Oh, roles, uh, for us would be maybe like operations project management, or I sense the H is probably like an EA or.

>> Uh, I mean, the, what I'm really wondering is in the transition from like a more done-for-you to done-with-you model. Um, what, just some ideas on how to do that without sacrificing the client result and, uh, yeah, how do you maintain the quality while reducing the 101?

>> Well, you will sacrifice the client result because you're not doing it for them. Like, just, but that also comes with a decrease in price, and so they have associated risk that's lower.

>> Okay. Yeah.

>> I'm surprised no one said support tickets. Yeah, I, I was, I was waiting.

>> Like.

>> We've got.

>> Do you guys not get support tickets?

>> You do?

>> They DM me.

>> That doesn't hurt.

>> Yes.

>> Okay, so let's put, let's put that up there. So, post responses, DM support. Okay.

>> I swear the first place to get sore is going to be community management and support.

>> Like,

>> Let me tell you where you guys hurt. Or you maybe they've hurt so long that it's numb.

>> It's here, just numb.

>> It was like Kenneth's giveaways. Oh, yeah, giveaway is the most important thing that I do. Um, yeah. What other roles you guys got?

>> Someone who's super good at, uh, doing the selling and the editing.

>> Yeah. Okay. Like on the content side, like the, like the product side. Go ahead.

>> Definitely. I guess this would still be sales, but it would be like someone to handle refund requests.

>> That's, yeah, that's CS. Okay.

>> Do you have anything on these that you want to hit?

>> Which ones?

>> The post responses, uh, and then like the DM kind of like that, that support.

>> Yeah. So, I think community management and support, we bundle that into one single role.

>> So, we use something called Help Scout for tickets. So, like, when someone sends an email to like help@school.com, it goes to this thing called Help Scout. It's way more efficient than it going to a Gmail address and trying to reply there. Um, it's helpscout.com. It's definitely good. Um, and so that we have these people, we just call them community managers, but they also do support, and they basically do two things throughout the day. They moderate the group. So, they remove spam or low-quality stuff. They answer people's questions. They reply to people in DMs. They, they basically make sure the group runs smoothly. They do everything that that so that you don't have to do that lower level stuff, and when you come in, you just add value and maybe cherry-pick the right things to reply to, right? That that'll remove a lot of burden from you. Um, and then they also handle customer support, and they can do all of that, just one person, right?

>> And you can take those from the community. 100%.

>> 100%. You get them from the community. So, when we want to hire this person, we, we just do a post, and then we do a, we link to a Google, uh, form or a Google survey, and we ask them like, "Why they want to do it?" Just a, and then we ask them for a link to their LinkedIn profile. That's basically all we ask for. But we also look at their school profile and how they've been a member of the community. And we're ideally looking for someone that's got a lot of activity because we want someone that really understands our product and the school interface and literally believes in the vision and mission because they've been paying their own money, right? That person's perfect. You barely have to onboard them. They're very passionate. They already know what to do, and they will support everyone. Um, and they don't even need experience from what I've seen because the experience they've got is from the product and school and the community. You just have to teach them a few things, like how to handle a refund request, how to, how to deal with these different things. Um, and like what posts to delete and what's what comments to delete, and what the rules of the community are. And then that will remove a huge burden from you. Um.

>> It'll make the groups way stronger too. Like, I think about it in terms of like value per, like, second in feed. So, I think deleting low-value posts is one of the highest value things you can do because one, it'll encourage people to actually, like, if you're going to make a post, make it good. And then everyone else is just watching this feed of just high-value stuff going there rather than like, "Help, like, please give money for job, like I am poor, like need, need charity fund," you know, whatever. Like, I mean, we all, we've all seen these, right? Like, you have these crazy people hopped in there. Like, you just want to delete all those, so then it's just super value dense, and I think that translates to retention too.

>> It'll pay for itself is my point. Do you let people know when you delete the post, or do you just?

>> Delete it?

>> Yeah, always.

>> Yeah.

>> I didn't. I saw it the other day. I was like, "This is shit."

>> Yeah, you're supposed to, but it gets exhausting after a while. So, then you end up not. But we're working on a feature to make that better. So, it's deleting, but it will, like, then you can put in a reason why you deleted it, and it will communicate that. Um.

>> Like, on the, when you hit delete, it says like, "Reason why," and then you just hit it, and it automatically sends it to them, kind of thing.

>> Yeah. And we're going to save all of the deleted posts in a log.

>> Yeah.

>> So that the person who posted it can still see their post and why it was deleted.

>> Yeah. They see everyone else's terrible post, too.

>> No.

>> Oh, that would be like a wall of.

>> But the admins can, which is key because you need an audit trail to know if they're doing their job, and they need to know what, what is the threshold for deleting. So, the easiest way to train them is be like, "Look, here's all the things we deleted in white." And then you can check that they're doing their job because you can still see it, right?

>> Oh, sweet.

>> Yeah, that.

>> And they'll see the reason code above each one of them.

>> I can't wait for that feature.

>> Yeah, that'll be sweet.

>> Um, yeah, that, that role, get that off your plate first because that's like, that can really be a burden, and that can suck a lot of time. Yeah.

>> What would you pay a role like that?

>> Depends where they are in the world. Um, and how good you want them to be.

>> Let's say we are good. And.

>> We pay someone, uh, from Brazil. They're just a VA who does community management and all our customer service and some editing stuff, which is some normal VA stuff, and we pay him just $650 a month for dollars.

>> Yeah, it's 650.

>> Yeah, it's full time, 40 hours a week. And he's, he's, he's more than good enough.

>> Yeah.

>> Can I run a structure customer support structure? Sorry.

>> I sure. We've thought of because we're growing and we're about to. It's just Cody right now, um, as a family member, but thought about hiring somebody inside the group. He's a middle school coach that we're helping retire. Great. And, um, VA could bring an Emma on as well, as a like a librarian type VA, you know, virtual assistant that he'd work in tandem with, and then that way it just helps offload some of the maybe repetitive and mundane stuff, but you can still provide expertise. What do you think about that model, that joint, like having an expert that's front-facing, but maybe something on the back end that's like his assistant? I just never want someone to pretend to be someone they're not. That's like my only rule ever is like, don't ever, like, if you ever see a response from me anywhere, it is me. Like, my team does not speak as me.

>> It sounds like you're now thinking about hiring someone where it doesn't hurt yet,

>> Right? Because you're theorizing about the future.

>> Well, we're experiencing churn in part because we're not responding as quick. That's an estimation or it's a hypothesis, right? We respond quicker, they get the solution, and they can move forward without falling off.

>> Response times doesn't change. Um, it did not change our churn at all.

>> What, what is your response time? Do you know, in in hours?

>> We don't, we don't have a support system. It's just DMs.

>> I made a three-minute promise across Gym Launch that we would respond to any question within three minutes. It's a huge initiative because I was like, "Speed always is going to be more valuable." Changed absolutely nothing. And so, we ended up having, we ended up letting go of a 35-person support team that could accommodate that. And nothing changed. It generally has to be under 24 hours, like, because that's when people get all, like, panicky. Um, and maybe move it to a support system. Like, is it, whose DMs is it going to?

>> Yeah, that's the beauty of having a community manager. So, I don't get any DMs, like, they all go to like Kirby, um, and like Sid in the school community, right? So, that they're the point of contact for that. Um, yeah, you shouldn't be dealing with support.

Basically, and then that'll reduce a huge burden from you. You just need one dedicated person that's responsible for being the community manager.

Yeah, he'll be the he'll be that guy basically, like Kirby does in the school groups. And then he's a successful student but not ultra successful, 'cause like my top students are hitting six-figure months.

Deal. Yeah. So he, and also, like I can answer any question that the students ask, but a lot of them view me as so far ahead of them, whereas this guy is like seven months into the process and his best month so far, he made like 15 grand.

So they can relate to him, whereas someone that's like six months ahead of them, then five years ahead, or whatever.

Yeah. People just want a response. They don't necessarily need the owner to respond. Yeah, you should still engage with some things, but you definitely do not need to engage with everything. But someone does, basically, so that's why that person's key.

Yeah, that's perfect. Yeah, they don't need a VA. There's just one full-time person to deal with the whole thing, really, in the school community. Now, who to DM for support? The big onboarding video?

Yeah. I guess. Well, first of all, we have a separate ticketing system for support, help@school.com, right? So, and we use Help Scout. But then generally, the person who's always replying to to things in the community, that tends to be who everyone DMs. So, you know, they they're dealing with posts and comments, DMs and support tickets. That's like kind of their um, landscape.

Yeah. But one person can do all of that.

Just a random idea. I don't know if it's in the product pipeline, but um, basically delineating who's who's on the team versus a customer. Because if someone's brand new, like they'll see that Kirby has posted on a lot of stuff, but they might not know he like wields school authority, you know what I mean? Um, and I don't know if that would be like, I feel like it'd be like a just a little like, I mean, even just a moderator tag or whatever. Just something that shows like, this is my job. I don't know if that'd be hard, but could be helpful.

That helps a lot. The yellow background is what school uses.

Yeah. I should change plane. I think mine's yellow.

Nice. Cool. All right. Um, I'll hit this really quickly since you guys wanted to talk about sales. I'll just like touch on it. Um, best sales people already have jobs. This is for you. Best sales people already have jobs. Uh, so again, we reach out through with outbound for the most part. Um, we will also like historically, I have used my community um to find people who already had experienced the product, enjoyed it, believed in it, but preferred this business to their current business. They just end up falling in love with helping other people do that. Um, and so those those sales reps tend to work fine. But we do. Yeah. So that's that's how we get sales reps. Most people don't know how to train sales reps. I'm like very confident that no one knows how to train sales reps. Um, you train sales reps through role playing. Like there's basic, like everything else is for the most part, like a waste of time. Um, I mean, you want them to consume as many sales calls as they can, and you definitely don't want them to be learning on the job. Like the most expensive thing you can possibly do is give someone who is not prepared to sell your leads and then have them not make sales. So I want them to go through 40 plus hours of uh footage that they'll go through in their onboarding process. They review every day the calls that they went through with the manager, and then the manager will work on one part of the script with them until they have it like memorized. And so like they have to be able to breathe the script because the idea is that someone should be able to do it with absolute unconscious competence so that they can actually focus on the other person, not what they're trying to say. They can focus on what the other person's trying to say. And that comes from role playing. Like say it again. Raise your raise your raise your tone at the end. Say it again. All right. Five more times. Like great, good job. And when we do the fixes, you fix one thing per session. The idea of like, okay, your rapport sucks, you don't know how to close, and you have no idea how the pro like the product works, right? Well, focus on the thing that matters most. And for me, I actually work back to front when I teach sales because I think about it from like a first principles perspective. If someone does not know how to collect a credit card and complete a transaction, I can guarantee they will never sell anyone. So, the first thing you teach them is how to collect money. The next thing that you teach them is how to transition to asking for the money. The next thing before that is you can teach them about the the product for, and then you you work your way to the front of the sale where you start talking about rapport and openers. The other piece that I think is wildly missed on training is training about the prospect even more than the product. Like if I know who the person is, you can sell them anything if you know the person. Like I could sell them a course, I could sell them in training, I could sell them whatever if I know the person. If I spend all my time on a product, I have to then try and match the I have to like force the product onto the person rather than saying, "These are all the things you currently said, and I think this will help you," and it's very easy. So education on the prospect over the product, and then training sales with far more repetitions than you probably expect.

So then you're looking for like a very mobile person with very good social skills, is the idea?

I honestly don't even care about any of that. Can you say the words that I want you to say them? That's it.

And so you just looked on LinkedIn or I guess it sounds like it doesn't really matter. You get?

It doesn't matter. You can get them. I mean, you get them from anywhere. You can get. I mean, big one, Sam talked about this, is just employee referrals. Like sales guys know other sales guys who are good. I'm like, "Go get your best best guy that you know." I don't know. He's really good. Cool. Just bring him in.

Always start with who you know and who you know knows.

Because that makes life way easier if you can pluck someone from there.

Yeah. Yeah. Like in order, I would go employee referrals, community, and then outbound to people who I think have perfect perfectly matched skills to what I want. I almost never. We almost never do ads.

Yeah, we don't even use job boards anymore, like at all, because the quality is so bad that it like seriously, we don't post on any job boards.

Yeah. Yeah. Have a little bit of experience with what you're talking about.

We're just giving you like a big glimpse into the future. Like it might take you five years to like really internalize what we're saying. Like talent is everything and knowing where the smart people are. Like smart people know other smart people. So talk to the smart people first who know them. And then like the community, obviously, has you can see what like you you pay down your risk by already seeing a history. And then the third level of paying down history is just look at their history like on LinkedIn. Look at the stuff they've had, the companies they've worked for. That's still the biggest risk, but it's the lowest of that versus running ads.

But like what if you invest all of that time in training someone?

And I guess that's more of a retention question.

And they suck or they're good.

Uh, well, they suck. I guess that's a different issue. But if they just decide to, I guess, leave or maybe start their own business.

Sure. Yeah. I mean, the alternative is that you don't invest in them, and they suck.

Yeah. So the retaining salespeople in my experience has very little to do with compensation. Uh, attracting salespeople has a lot to do with compensation, but once they're in, it has almost nothing to do with that. It's all of the ancillary benefits they get from working, the the team environment, how good the manager is, how much they feel like they're being invested in. So like, it's kind of this like double-edged sword where I don't want to invest in them too much because I don't want them to leave, but the reason they leave is because you don't invest in them. And that's the job of the sales manager. Like that is literally his job or her is to pour into the sales guys and absolutely hone each element of their skills. And that's what they do every day and maintain and really maintain a standard of excellence. So the character of the sales manager has to be the highest on the team. I'm okay with them not having necessarily the highest skill because sometimes the best closers are just absolute dogs. And I say that with love, not in a bad way. Like just hounds. And like they just need to close all day. Like they can't they don't want to talk to anybody else. They just want to close and get out of their way and that's fine. The sales manager has to be more people oriented. Has to be much more of an operator in terms of like they're leaders and people should look up to them. They should be admired by the team for the values that they represent and they hold the bar. So if people are like, "Well, they're not showing up to training." Like that's not acceptable. And if your best guy doesn't show up to training, then what kind of what kind of culture does that set for everybody else? You know what I'm saying?

Yeah. And then that manager, that silver man because it needs to be a very specific individual. You would look in the same order that.

I like hire one to hire 10. Personally, if I don't have somebody in my network, but I would be like, "Let's find the the baddest sales director of all time."

You good? Yeah, I'm good. Thank you. Um, baddest sales director of all time. And then that guy also has a rolodex of killer sales people they worked out worked through worked with through their whole career and they can bring them and at the very least they'll know how to recognize them.

And if you can afford it, hiring someone that's already amazing at the job, it will save you a lot of time.

It's worth the money.

If you can afford it. Absolutely. It's worth the money, but it's very expensive.

Yeah. So.

Well, sales reps are purely commission, right? A stay deal would have been.

I won't even get it. I'd have a we'd have two hours to talk about sales compensation. Um, but short answer, no. Um, I no, I like to have because what happens if you have somebody who's pure commission, again, this depends on if it's okay, 60 seconds. If you have a business that does self-gen sales, so if you did solar and you knock on doors, then those guys are pure commission because they have to, it's literally like the amount of leads they get, the amount of sales, it's all directly on them. If you feed people leads, then all their success isn't 100% dependent on themselves. And so then part of it is going to be uh base and then certain percentage that is going to be performance based. I prefer to have more a larger team performance incentive to a smaller individual incentive because I don't want I want competition but not against each other. I want competition of our team versus those guys. That way, everyone helps each other and they all want to hit the group goal. So, they will help each other close because they want to get the group commission.

That make sense? If you have guys competing against each other, you will have people. I mean, I've run sales like I've run a lot of sales teams. Um, like you will always have some superstar that comes out of that, but they tend to suppress the rest of the team because they like winning more. All right, I don't want to go too much on sales because I will I will just spin out. Okay. Um, community managers pretty much sounds like what everybody needs and go hire them from within your community. Fantastic. Oh, product media. I think that's that's hiring somebody who has a media experience. If you just need them to record and edit, then that's that. If you need them to come up with product stuff, I think again, the community is where you want to look first.

What do you mean come up with product stuff? Like if they're actually like innovating training or product stuff? Like they're coming up with the idea, making the presentations, and then recording it. That's a different role than just like managing the recordings.

In my communities, I have everything core content and I built it the wrong way because I kind of mixed the principle with the execution. And now Facebook ads, the interface changes like constantly. So there's videos that have evergreen principles and they have execution in there. So I have a plan to kind of re-record it, genuinely evergreen, and then implementation snippets that I can switch out faster.

Yeah. But it's taking me forever.

Yeah. Is that something where you can actually hire help or is it something that always has to genuinely come from the creator of the.

You absolutely can have other people do that.

For sure. And what would I look for? I mean, one of the ways is if you have somebody who does the like media buying in the company, like I'm saying, short-term cheaper fix is that they just do the clicking buttons. Longer term, you have somebody who becomes, I mean, we call it an R&D director. So, they just continue to develop the product and break fix in terms of things that need to be updated with it.

Yeah. Who does your media buying for your company?

Um, I work with an agency that just puts things in, right? But it's.

They're not doing the strategy or something. It's just I I say I need a conversion comp. I need these creatives. I want targeting. So they put it in Ads Manager.

Well, if you had an in-house media buyer, then that person could probably make those training.

Yeah, I would I will um test definitely how far I can scale up with trying this approach. Um, and then we definitely can re-record things. But the media buying is one thing. The way my funnels work is that they're very reliant on the offer first, right? So basically, the the way why why it works for so many people is because the media buying is actually the easier part because we make the offer so strong that you can get away with very mediocre ads, right? So because a lot of the people I help are in a similar position as I am, not the best presentation skills, not really confident on video. So they can actually create a mockup and get away with that and still have profitable ads. So there's a a lot of other components that go into it. But I also see that I'm getting stuck alone and I'm not having the feedback, you know, like this is well explained or it because for me it's kind of obvious, right? And so I wonder what person would I look for.

Do you have people in your community who run ads?

Only the ones based on on the training, right? But you you have people who are doing it.

Yeah. And they're also like.

Yeah. Having success with the method.

I mean, a big part of, you know, the thesis behind school is that you can crowdsource just about everything you need from the community. Not like especially as it relates to the product. And so people who were trained on the old things but were like smart enough to figure out with the new interface, it's the same button in a new place. Those people can often do it. Um, that I would say is a short-term fix is just like basically I use and like, let me give you some special support and hop on a call or whatever in exchange. Um, but I think those people are great. I said product media there, but it's just product people who they're actually using the product. They actually love you. They know how it fits with every everything else because they've been through everything and they can like I think employing those people like one of the one of the steps that we did to take me out of gym lunch so I can make it sellable was hiring somebody to basically run all the I I called it R&D. So he would have a $50,000 month bud budget and then we would test ads. We'd spend 50 grand a month testing ads across a bunch of different markets for gym owners. And then I would hand the winners to the gyms every month. And then he would uh like look at the whole community, look at the biggest constraint of the community and say, "Okay, everyone's struggling with phone phone sales, everyone's struggling with uh upsells, everyone's struggling with retention." And so then he would follow the same process that I outlined with you guys, which is cool. Go to the community, talk to the top 20 people, look for the common factors, put this together, assemble them for me, and then I would put together the deck and do it. And later he put together the deck, then I would do it, and then he put together the deck, and then he would do it. And that was the transition process to eventually I wasn't even in the product that I sold.

And just to understand it correctly, it was a gym owner who had success with your method, and you were able to convince him to also help you out with that. What was the offer for that person?

I think I paid him 150, 180, something like that.

Okay. I mean, everything at some point um just for everyone here, your time will become increasingly valuable and you have to tear the band-aid off of what you're willing to pay to get your time back. And like Kenneth, this is like especially I mean, I'm going to zero in on you, but like um I have this big series that's going to come out about maker versus manager. Paul Graham has an article about this that I kind of expanded on, but managers optimize their day by having every single minute of their day blocked. So like when they're on a meeting or they're talking to people is when they're being productive. Makers, it's literally the exact opposite. A completely empty schedule is the most productive day you can have. And so the problem is that if you have if you have a maker life, you're trying to make stuff, but then people are interrupting you all day. It destroys the productivity. Like switching tasks is just basically impossible to get back into the flow. And so managers have as many tiny small chunks of time that they can do. Whereas makers have like two a day. We have a morning and we have an evening and that's it. And so if someone messes up your morning block, it's shot. And so if you think about what your billable day rate is of like what you would actually sell a day for, what's half of that worth? And every interruption that happens there. And so like this is a training that we put our exe like my executive assistants through. He's like, "You know what my day rate is?" This guy's asking for a meeting at this time. I was like, "Is it worth 150 grand?" They're like, "No." I'm like, "Well, then no." They're like, "Well, when can I reschedule them?" Like, "You can't. That's it. It's all it is, right?" And so, but to the equal opposite, being willing to pay to get that time back because as long as you know that you're working in that time period, you're going to create more value than you're paying someone. Like, I think you're I think you're you're right at that level where you just start need to paying better people, more money to start doing stuff for you.

I swear you could you you're right at the point where you need a full-time person that will consolidate like almost all of your part-time people.

Mhm. Like add their salaries together, you probably f.

Yeah. Because half of your part-time people will be taking the energy of like just communicating. So like if you get if you consolidate with like one key higher, the communication cost is dramatically less. So you need less people. It's so much more efficient. The fewer people the better is always my my rule. Like I don't want to hire people really. Like you no one should want to hire people. You just wait until it really hurts and it makes sense. You're like, "I shouldn't be doing this," or "You shouldn't be doing this," and it's a definitely a full-time job. Okay, let's give it to someone.

It's interesting how much more willing we are to like if I hear a teammate is like spending all their time on this stupid thing, I'm like, "Oh, we need I know what I pay you. I got to get this off your plate." But like you don't treat your time, which arguably is worth more than that, the same way. So sometimes I mean I do this exercise of like pretending I bought myself the business and I'm the CEO and there's somebody above me who's like, if he looked at my schedule, what would he tell me to outsource first? And often it's a very ob like if you were to give yourself advice, it's probably the the right advice. But yeah, there's um there's a a postulate in like the the tech world around why some of the best companies are built during recessions. And uh the postulate is that IQ per square foot like all of the bad people get cut during the recession and so layoffs go away and so then only the smart more capable people are left and then they actually build [ __ ] and then it becomes successful and then they hire a bunch of idiots and so there's basically this wax and Wayne cycle of just like the idiots come back in and then they get cut back out and then things grow again and then the idiots come back in and they come back out and so trying to keep the intelligence density of the company is like paramount. Okay, I feel like we talked about the operations piece pretty heavily. Um, and I feel like we hit the roles here. We talked about sales, community manager. The product media person comes from the community as well. Um, CS, oh, that was the escalations piece, like escalations and refunds. This person can manage that in the beginning.

That's who does it for us.

Yeah. We get that person to handle everything. Refund requests, like customer support, DMs, community, all of it.

For the for high ticket, you just use whoever runs the like the coaching side who deals with escalations.

Cool. So, for us, they suck at sales. Maybe they.

I don't know.

Well, I'll tell you what you don't want to do is you don't want to have your sales team talk to angry customers.

Okay. Great way to like destroy their week.

Yeah. Like fastest way to lose conviction. That guy I sold last week, he tells me I'm a piece of [ __ ] now. I don't want to sell the next 20 customers. That that refund now cost you 10 more sales. So, it's fine to have the coach on there. The coach will probably take it more like a coaching conversation, which is not necessarily a bad thing. And I would use the exit interview perspective of, okay, what's been the problem? And you just have to train them to get more angry than them. Like, they always have to be the angriest person on the call. Seriously. So, but it's not at the person, it's at the problem. So, someone's like, "I didn't get any support." And they're like, "That's unbelievable. It's ridiculous. You didn't get support. Oh my god, I have to solve this right away." Like, they just want to feel validated and then they have to get out of the angry boat 'cause they're like, "Okay, I mean, it wasn't that big of a calm down." You know, like you're like, "No, this is a problem, right?" And then all of a sudden it's like, "Okay, what do you really need? I want to make this up to you." And they're like, "I just think I need more help." It's like, "Cool. How about this? You paid us this many months. Let's take that. We'll credit it forward and that way we can make sure we do right by you." Fair enough. Great. Okay, cool. Okay, so that was the rolls. Um, so that was this one, too, I think. Great. Fantastic. All right, so right now, um, we have like 90 minutes. So, we have drive. I'm going to save that one. Um, save us with something that you wanted to, um, cover. We can go open mic. You can do. I mean, I can hit drive, but.

Yo, what else do you guys want to cover?

Yeah. I'm curious, quick high-level 60-second overview of your book writing process.

Okay, I'll just put miscellaneous here. I don't know if that apply to everyone.

You're writing a book. Hey.

Distraction.

Oh, no. I definitely wouldn't recommend it. It's It's a problem more than like I make less money because I write books. I like writing. I mean, I like people. I I got a writing scholarship in college to TUS, which is a really good university for writing. Full ride. Um, I had I was uh vice editor of the newspaper and editor-in-chief of the literary magazine. Just because you're not allowed to be you weren't allowed to be ahead of both. So it's number two of one, number one or the other. Like I like writing.

Me too. I was a journalism.

Oh, cool. So if you love it, then I mean, then again, you're solving different problems. It's like that's just because you like doing it. But I'll hit on that just I just want to make sure that it applies to everybody. Any other things?

Yeah. I had a question from my community member and that was if you suffered from 12 business knowledge amnesia, would you keep and you could only keep one concept, what was would be one.

Okay. All right. I saw one over here.

You were talking about an intellectual. My bad. Like the sparring partner. What if that's your A player?

Yeah, that's an A player inside of the business. You said not to talk to them.

But like for me, I like always spar with that person. And sometimes we end up in loops almost. When you say loops, you.

It's like we can't think outside of our own box of the convers the sparring sessions. It's so frequent almost.

Okay. So you're endlessly sparring but not building.

Sometimes when when things are going wrong.

Yes. 'Cause we're like throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks because that's how I learn. But the question is how to better manage that relationship because I feel like it might be negatively affecting the business.

Sure. Because like we're sparring in a cycle.

And it's like it feels good and it feels productive or they feel just like it's.

Do both of you prefer to like talk instead of execute?

Yeah. Yeah. So there needs to be a counterbalance of like an executor and an ideas person. Like you can't have all ideas people.

Yeah. I have to speak on that because it kind of affects me. They will spar and then a deal will pop up and then one week we're executing on this and next week.

Yeah. We're just like on that.

It's the same thing we're talking about with Evelyn is that like you have like the the single most important job of CEO is to prioritize. Like that is like strategy is a fancy word for prioritization of resources. It's all it is. And so if you keep changing things, it means you keep changing your strategy. Keep changing your priorities. And that is literally your job is to be able to decide to make a decision and stick with it.

Your point earlier was like it feels good for your brain to get those ideas off. It's kind of like.

Mental clarity. It's like a feels so much better. Like.

I. Right. Yeah. Like I feel like I talked to him and it's like, "Yeah, got it." It feels so much better and it's like good for your brain, but then like your business is like.

Yeah. What feels good versus it is good for your business are two very different things.

Yeah, because like when I brought him on, like we're making good money. Yeah. And he's he's making the mo the most money he's ever made and he's a really good a.

Are you making the most money you've ever made?

No, that's okay. Well.

Everything's like from like an outside perspective. It's like I love him so much that he's dope. Like he's like the coolest person I've ever worked with it. Like in not a weird way, but.

Marry it.

It's just like the coolest thing ever, but like it feels like it's counterfeit benefit. I feel like if I need to walk away from that because it feel because like.

When you guys talk, like we talked for like five hours straight and that's felt good.

And that's how I like learn and grow, but like it's counterproductive when you're doing it with the A player.

Yeah. Well, I talk to the customers all the time. Yeah.

Like I talk to you for.

He was my customer though. He got the 30k a month as a growth operator and I plucked him. I was like, "You're with me now." 'Cause as the CEO, like when I'm trying to this is what I basically do all the time is I talk to the customers to see what they need and then I prioritize it all because there can only ever be one thing you do now. And then you come up with a priority list, but then I validate my priority list. Like how many times do I ping you to get on Zoom and I'm exhausted? So I get Ted to prioritize it for me. I'm like, "What would you do?" Then I go to Max and I'm like, "Max, what do you think the priority should be?" Then I go to Kirby and then 'cause the priorities list, then it comes back to me and then I get it and then I'm like, "Okay, this is it. I'm not going to revisit this again." And now I'm going to flip into execution mode and I'm just going to execute on these things. And then when I get towards the end of that, I go back to the customers, back to the list, and then back to execution. So it's always moving. So you loop it's a system because what we've been doing recently is like I'll talk to him, but I'll also I have a group chat that I showed you where I'll like hop on call with all of my top customers, like 10 people, and I had them build the entire Figma product for me and that was like super productive and we do like when things aren't working, we like talk to each other, we figure it out, and put together prior a priorities list and then we go execute.

So I think I know what your problem is. So like there's too many ideas all the time, right?

So I don't really care for ideas. I just want to see real problems. So if like Hamza has got like a spam issue and I can tell he's in a lot of pain and stuff, I want to really understand that issue. I'm 'cause there's always some things that are real legitimate problems and if you just always focus on solving those, then the it's getting better and you're making progress and you don't like just get lost in this world of ideas.

So you're reframing it, maybe used to been for your brain like ideas, but now it's more just like you reframe ideas and like, "No, let's focus on problems," is what you're saying.

Yeah. So I just solve problems.

Yeah. I'm not solving problems. I'm making my plate like heavy.

Yeah. Instead of like pursuing the opportunity. I mean, the process that Sam basically outlined is how to make a product better over and over and over again. If you think about like the zooming all the way out, the big domino, it's like if I made this thing exceptional, like so good it was the best thing truly because everyone here, I mean, I've heard the amount of the amount of people who are like, "My product's the best." I was like, "No, it's not. It's not. If it were, you'd be number one. It's not, right?" And so the iterative process of just keep making the thing that you have significantly better rather than trying to add more things. And I can tell you like the amount of times it's taken me to learn this is that a lot of times some of the best improvements are through deletion, not addition. Making things sleeker, making things more streamlined, making things easier, making things faster. Those are all things that add value to the customer. And sometimes making things faster, like how do we get shipping from two days to one day? Well, that was like a gazillion dollar problem that Amazon solved. Like very simple to say, very hard to solve.

Yeah, because I feel like I made the most money. Like I actually did make the most money when I was just like talking to my customers. Like I would literally call Pierre and be like, "What do you think about this?" And we made the most money. He was just focused on the sales floor. Because But now he's like seeping in from the sales floor over into like my stuff because I talked to the A player way too much on those.

It. Probably should.

You're. I mean, it's like find a friend.

I'm dead serious. Like person I spar, like you guys met Dr. Cashu who walked through there for a second. Like he's the person I talk to. He does not exist in our business.

Interesting. Yeah, I have that same person. Just the frequencies.

He's just in the business. Okay. Well, then talk to that guy more.

More. And like let Pierre do his job.

Interesting. Yeah.

All right. So, I think we covered sparring partner. But uh any. Go for it. Um.

Super useful hearing from Sam Sam last night over dinner, some of your long-term vision around the platform, how we you might fit in with competitors. Um, I'd be curious to hear your version of that, Alex, of kind of what you see for school long term and your north star for yourself is the billion dollar company. Kind of the north star as it aligns.

What Sam shared is what where we're aligned on it. and just because I don't want to um take too much um time from it, but that's like all of our talks are aligning on that stuff. Um, and that's fundamentally why even why we partnered up. Like we were s like I'm hard to align with in general just because I have super high standards and Sam also has exceptionally high standards and so and he just all he talked about was how he wanted to make the product better, how to make business fun and easy for everyone, and that's like that is my north star. So, we're like everything we do on the platform is to is to accomplish that like actually rather than saying it.

What are you most excited about?

I'm excited about the stuff you guys are excited about.

Are you asking me?

Both.

Oh. Um.

The affiliates then.

Yeah. Me too. Me, too. Yeah, I think everyone is. I joked with I It's actually like we get asked we get a request for it every 20 minutes.

Yeah. Seriously, it's like that's how you know, by the way, what the most important thing to the customer is. You It's not a mystery. They are screaming it at you all the time. That's why you really don't need ideas, by the way, because like.

There's four years of work that we know we need to do just based on what people need.

Yeah. Like you don't need to generate anything. Like they'll generate it for you.

Would you ever think about having an option in settings to change how you could want your payments if someone would want it either weekly, bi-weekly, monthly or is that not really a thing? Is it kind of more with the payment processor?

I mean, this is why I find it why I like priorities, by the way, because we know for a fact we're going to do free trials and we know for a fact we're going to do affiliates. So, let's do that first and then see what you need. Do you know what I mean? Because things might change by then. And so that's the beauty of just doing the thing you know for certain you need everyone needs because what what my biggest fear is is doing something that people don't really need because it's very hard to take things away and you also waste time doing it and it makes things more complicated. So that's my biggest fear is adding something that isn't necessary. And so I always I don't plan that far ahead in terms of like probably only two weeks ahead in terms of what we're actually going to do, but then I might have three years of things that I think we could do, but I know they're not for certain yet. Do you know what I'm saying? Um, because if you know if you just add the thing you know for certain people need, you can't possibly make a mistake and then everything changes when you add that and then you re-evaluate it again 'cause you might people might need five things, but you add the one thing they need the most and then they don't need those other things.

Do you get it?

Yeah. Yeah.

All the variables affect each other and so you have to reassess after every new variable comes in because the dynamic changes.

Yeah. That's a view. That's what no one knows how to do, by the way.

And how how do you set that expectation well with your customers because I.

We don't share a road map.

Yeah. We don't share a road map because we want that flexibility.

And how do you still make them feel heard like.

We say, "I hear you."

Seriously. We're like, "Good feedback, good idea. I like it. I hear." And we we're really listening and we're adding ideas to lists and stuff, but we're not saying we're going to do it.

I guess what would be the since we a lot of us using school as our um core thing that we're doing building our reoccurring, what do you guys think is the top three things to focus on to get to like a $5 million uh you know point or $10 million point? What would be a three thing if that's top priority to focus on to scale up to that point?

You said one thing.

Well, I think there's really only traffic, conversion, retention.

Yeah. Right. Like if you want to make things real simple.

Traffic, conversion, attention. I mean, retention, sorry. So, you know, improve like I said to Hamza, if he does affiliates, he'll probably get a double. If we with some of these churn ideas I've got, I bet you we can cut his churn in half. Those are the only two things he should be thinking about other than and also how he can keep growing his YouTube, his influence, and all of that, right? Um, it's very simple.

Yeah. Number of eyeballs, percentage converted, how much money they're worth. Like that's the whole that's I mean, fundamentally, that's every business. And so I just I mean, I just taught this framework, but I'll just give it to you real quick. So all all business decisions ladder up to getting more customers, increasing lifetime gross profit, or decreasing risk. And so like that's it. Like if you can't figure out what the thing that you're doing is leading up to, then like don't do it. And I also like I like all our team understands this. It's like, "How is it going to do one of these three things?" What you just suggested? And they're like, "Well, it'll do this." I'm like, "Okay, now compared to the other 10 things on this list, is this the one that will do that thing the best?" And if it's not, then cool. We'll leave it on the list and we attack the first one. And once that's done, we reassess. Like the least sexy business topic is decision-making. It's also the most important.

And the big problem I see a lot of people have is they can't focus on those things because they're so distracted by the day-to-day operations.

DMs. So like if I have if I am distracted, I will only work on solving the problem so that I make space. I won't even try to work on the product until I can clear all of the distractions away. So like when Hozi first started promoting school, we got a surge of customer support tickets, right? Obviously, and we had a surge of like bot traffic and, you know, spam kind of stuff. It was all I worked on for like at least two months. I didn't even touch the product because that was so clearly the most important thing. And until I got that under control, it was the only thing I thought about. So like I don't you just have to fix those problems and once they're under control, then there's space and then with that space you work on the future. Does that make sense?

Dan, let me add yours and then we'll hammer these real quick.

Yeah. I was wondering just like 'cause he mentioned me in a real one of your Instagram reels that entrepreneurship can be a lonely journey for I'm curious what because also just listening to Sam and you feel like I'm already getting swore. So what's your take on like the social life or I guess maybe the dating for someone like mainly single business that you're still productive, you're not distracted, maybe even so that it enhances your productivity.

I was going to put dating and then put social and then I was with time management. I'm just going to leave that there. How to find a.

Yeah. Right.

Well, I know you can't predict that, but.

Well, I'm going to zoom out to the the to the operating self per part first. Um, so tactically, I think Sam and I actually work pretty similar calendars. So, right now, I have meetings on Monday and that's it. The rest of my calendar is actually update. like not like to actually update. There's nothing else there. And so that allows me to have the time or the space to work on the things that matter most. If I have a spam bot equivalent issue that becomes like present day red flag, then I deal with that until it's done. And then I get back to I have empty calendar again so that I can start building the train tracks for the future. And so I think understanding the maker manager dynamic of your own schedule. Now, earlier on in my career when I didn't have as many people working for me and the resources and whatnot, um I basically did maker time from 4:00 a.m. until 10:00 and then I started and then I started my day and that was my life. So, I would I get six hours in in the morning and then I would work all day until my day was finished. And I mean, for the most part, honestly, like I worked, that was it. I even moved to a different part of the country that I didn't know anybody. So, that was like I didn't I didn't That was it. So, I mean, it was like it is a lonely path for a while. It's also lonely just because there's not a lot of other people who are going to understand it. And so, they're going to tell you like I've never been told slow down from somebody who is further along in life than me. Like, no one's had bigger dreams for my life than me has told me to take time. So, I don't want their life. So, I don't take their advice fundamentally. And like if you want to be exceptional then you have.

To be an exception, which means by very definition, you will be different than other people, and that's okay. To get around the loneliness thing, I just started hanging out with customers because then I got my friendship, like, stuff.

>> And you can jam on stuff, right?

>> Yeah. And I'm learning about my market, like it's.

>> And it's perfect.

>> Yeah.

>> Huh.

>> You're a maniac. I'm much tried to compete with you.

>> Well, it wasn't really even done by force. It I just truly enjoyed hanging out with them the most anyway. Like, I was talking to you guys till 3:00 a.m. the other night. Like the [ __ ].

>> Cuz I love this industry and I love the game and what we're doing. And so it's actually I came to Vegas a day early because I was bored. Cuz I knew that there was people here and I was like, "Oh [ __ ], if I was here, I would get to hang out with them." So, I changed my flight, got here a day earlier, and then hung out until 3:00 a.m. talking about this industry.

>> I used to do this with YouTube as well. Actually, I think this is why why I grew so fast because I used to just hop on free calls with with my audience, just go on to my Discord server and after doing hundreds of hours, it's like I knew every limiting belief they had, every excuse. So, anytime I'd make a video, I already knew what the response would be after I said a certain sentence. So, I mentioned that in the video, break the limiting belief immediately. And the comments would always be like, "Wow, he read my mind. He knew this. He It feels like he's speaking directly to me." I I've not done that in a while.

>> Even me at this stage, the most valuable time I spend is talking to the customers. Seriously, I do it all the time. Like, I ping you. I probably almost annoy you, Ted and Max.

>> Oh, he's so excited.

>> All I do, this is all I say to them. Zoom question mark. And then he says, "Yes, link." And then I'm like, "What? How are you finding school?" And then we talk for hours. Um, and then we actually get them to come to the office. We hang out in person. Um, that's where the ideas come from and the passion and everything. Yeah. The times that I've actually drifted, like thinking back when I was making courses, is when I wasn't talking to my market and hanging out with them. I'd separated myself. You know what I mean?

>> Yeah.

>> There's this chart that Sahil Bloom, who's a Twitter like influencer, shared from somebody else's blog, but it basically shows how much time you spend with different cohorts of people in your life. So, it's like in the beginning you spend a lot of time with your parents and then that starts to drop off pretty precipitously around 25 and then your friends drop off a lot around like 30 and then your spouse comes up and pretty much stays until you die. And then your your self-time only time pretty much just is a straight line from almost no self-time to lots of self-time. And the one that stays really high basically as your friends plummet is co-workers and the people that you work with, which I would lop customers into that bucket. But I think that's more so because the uh the research people who did it separated people you work with from friends. And I think the reality is that like you just befriend the people that you do business with and that becomes just more normal. Like I don't have a single friend who doesn't. I have one friend from middle school. He's an FBI. Everyone else that I'm friends with is in the game.

>> And then I'm with dating. What would you.

>> You got Hamza here, man. You got him ask.

>> It's 129 a month. You get an event in six months. I just want to um yeah, the business amnesia piece uh to this is I mean, the business concept would be that would be this framework.

>> That LTGP.

>> Lifetime gross profit. So I I specifically say LTGP rather than lifetime value because most people conflate the two. Uh, so most people talk about lifetime revenue as though it's lifetime gross profit. And so like if you run a service business and you run call it 80% gross margins. And so if you don't know how to calculate gross margins, it's like if you have 10 per 10 people that a coach can handle and you pay a coach $5,000 a month, then you it cost you $500 per month. So 5,000 divided by 10 is the cost per customer. And if they pay you $2,500 a month, you have 80% gross margins. And so people talk about their lifetime value with all the revenue that they're collecting, but the problem is that that's actually not what you can base your acquisition costs on. And so an extreme version of this is that I had a meal prep company that was attached to Prestige Labs, which is our supplement company for the gyms. And um, I had my media bar come to me. He's like, "Dude, we're getting five to one on our ads. Like this is awesome. Like let's scale it." But it would cost us $9 to ship, fully deliver, create, package, whatever a meal to a customer. We were selling them for 10. So we had a 10% gross margin. And so even though we're getting five to one, 10 to one was break even. And so I think a lot of people do the math wrong in terms of this, which is why I specifically call it out. And that's because most of the literature around lifetime value comes from the software space, which almost always has virtually 100% gross margins. And so they pretty much just say like most people just translate that in their language, but I like to call it out because a lot of businesses don't have 100% gross margins. And so I say lifetime gross profit.

>> What would be your benchmark for lifetime gross profit to customer acquisition cost? The ratio.

>> Great question. So, if I had one actual metric that I could only know about a business, it would be the LTV to CAC ratio for sure. If I had like one number that I could ask for somebody to to judge a business, that would be it. Um, so I would say that there's the prevailing uh concept and then like what I shoot for. And so the prevailing like quote wisdom around this is you have to have three to one or higher. Um, and that's lifetime gross profit in order to scale. The the third kind of piece of the equation that comes in is payback period. So, if you pay $100 to get a customer that gets you $1,000, you should tra make that trade every day. But if it takes you two years to make the $1,000, then you're going to be losing money for a while before you make money, which is why a lot of software companies lose money up front. And so, um, for me, I have always tried to have obscene LT um, LTV to CAC ratios. And so, like all the wealth in my life has been built on 30 to1 to 100 to1 returns. And so I would say all the quote normal money in my life has been with the normal TVAC numbers. And I pretty much am just always waiting until I find the vein. And then as soon as I find a vein where it's like crazy, then I just smash the money button as hard as I can because you just make wealth in these short windows of time like where you have these huge arbitrage opportunities. And so that's what I that's what I do. So benchmarks it's like it has to be 3 to one or you don't have a profitable business. But for me, like I'm a Lindsay Lohan mean girls. Like the limit does not exist.

>> And uh when when you buy businesses, what kind of trend rate are you looking at?

>> It honestly depends on the industry. So like I was looking at like a water treatment business at 97% inner retention. It's like great. Like the reason like most businesses like the the number one metric they're going to care about is at like revenue retention because they want an asset or I would want an asset that if I want to get credit for work I did last year. And so if every year you have to reload customers because you've lost all the customers, the only way you can grow the business is by increasing acquisition. And that is a tough game because at some point churn just becomes so ridiculous that you hit that hypothetical max and it's really hard to to win. The flip side is if you never lost a customer then you would guarantee that you'd grow forever. And so when I think about that as a hypothesis then I would want all of my effort to be on how do I make the sandwich so good that I never lose the customer. Which is why like when Sam had his obsession on product, I was like this is this is my partner for this. And so I knew that we were going to do everything in our power to make this the absolute best thing so that all of the marketing efforts wouldn't go to waste.

>> When it comes to um building a business, have you ever built a business that had your face strongly attached to it? If so, well, obviously, but if so, was it hard to sell it?

>> Was it hard to sell it since your face was so attached to it?

>> Yeah, absolutely. If I tried to sell it when my face was attached to it. Yeah. But I mean, the that's exactly we spent 18 months in gym launch doing was piece by piece looking at where are all the places where I'm involved in the business and systematically removing them. And we did them all in parallel over a very long period of time. So I I talked about the calls thing. It's like I used to take every call and then I took four calls and three calls and two calls then one call then one call every other week and then one call a month. Um, and then eventually I stopped taking calls. And then at the events I made all the keynotes and then I made half the keynotes and then I made I just spoke both days and then I just spoke the last day and then I stopped speaking. And then um in the ads I was in all the ads and then half the ads and then interviewing the other guy and then I moved away and he was wearing my clothes in my house. Um, like just it just systematically slowly removing yourself. Most people are just in a big rush. It's like you have to do it over like think years not not days or weeks or months but yes you can sell it like but thing is you have to have the vision of what that business is going to look like. It used to be like Alex like Alex the gym guru will help you make money with your gym and then it became gym launch the industry leading kind of licensing company that can help any micro gym owner make more like be more profitable etc. And that was the transition. And so basically like gym launch becomes more important, Alex becomes not necessarily less important but more separate. And so one of the things that I did was I also switched the nature of my content. So I I kept making content but it switched from gyms to general business.

>> Would you recommend all of us to make that move earlier?

>> No, I I wouldn't honestly I wouldn't recommend that. Um, I was I was done with that business and I wanted to do what we're doing now. Um, and I had made a handful of investments that had done really really well and I was like I think I want to do this and so that was why I made the transition like purely and only for that reason. But having a personal brand or building your own reputation is probably one of the highest leverage things you can do. So I think it's I know Kenneth was talking about like how do I remove myself from promotion? I think all of us are having this like this false lie of like there will be someday that I won't work and it's just not true. Like you're going to work and you just want to work on the things that will make you the most money. Like Elon still promotes himself and I see him as a very good template for making money. Yeah, I think that's the highest leverage thing you can do.

>> As an executive, what are the key skills that you feel human should prioritize and earn?

>> I think it's it's dependent on what the role like. So executives is every every aspect of the business. So every I mean every executive has to learn how to manage themselves, have to manage other people, have to learn how to lead, how to communicate like those are basic but also have rungs and ladders of skill levels like you can be a basic communicator, be an exceptional communicator. So there are continuums there but beyond that um the higher up you go the more generalists you get the more multidisciplinary experts. So someone who like for example our current CFO at acquisition.com has been CFO of multiple you know very very large companies also ran M&A and did 200 acquisitions on his own also was uh CEO in a company and also a CRO in a company meaning he had to generate sales run the sales team run the the outbound process and so he has a very holistic view of business which makes him a better sparring partner if we need to make you know a strategic decision. the the lower on the totem pole you go, the more narrow the skill set is going to be. You still want equally high proficiency. They're just going to have they're going to just be much narrower. And so from the like if I'm looking for an executive, I want to make sure that they absolutely have the thing mastered. And then the adjacent experience is going to be things that um add value overall from a decision-making perspective that they'll have higher quality decisions because they'll be able to take the context of the entire business into consideration. Hopefully that answer otherwise I'm going to talk about book writing. So if you have some you have any other questions that you guys had around growing the school community.

>> When I was a beginner I'd always get lost because there's so many things you can learn about.

>> And know. So I would it was so much easier when I just would sit down and actually define a goal like because once you have the goal then you're like what is the highest leverage thing I could do next to get closer towards it that simplified my life a lot. So if you always know your goal, then when you wake up and you're like, "What should I do?" You're like, "That's what keeps you focused." Basically.

>> How do you identify that goal?

>> You're.

>> Cuz we were talking earlier out there about the end goal versus like actual goal. No, it's actually quite interesting because I've found that the problem with people is that they don't actually know what they want.

>> Yeah.

>> Yeah. So, like it's not that they can't get what they want, it's that they don't know what it is. So, like most of like goal attaining I found is like goal setting. So like and it's very important that it's your goal and it's not influenced by somebody else. So you have to really just sit with it and like really just try to like think what you personally want in your life.

>> Are those input goals or those like life overarching like life goals? So for me, I see a picture, a vision like I I like imagine something.

>> And then I'm like yes and then I define the little parts of it. Then I set the goals and so I'm always just imagining that future kind of thing. Do you do that?

>> I go yeah I have a sandwich approach like what's the big thing that I want and then how does that translate into what I consider like my ideal day. And so I know that my ideal day like when I and the the way I came up with this perfect day framework was uh I just looked at a lot of days and was like these days were shitty, these days were good. What did the good days have that the bad days didn't? And then I tried to say like what are the things that they had in common? And most of them were fairly simple. So for me if I work out ideally with people that I like and I eat food with people that I like and I work on meaningful maker projects, I don't enjoy meetings much. Um, then for me that is a good day. And so that is the structure of a day for me. And then the what I'm filling the making portion of my day with just ladders up to the big thing that I want.

>> But what's the purpose behind the projects?

>> But you mean behind like the meat? So it's lading up to like the shared vision of like what you want for your life. Like personally for me, I want to die with nothing left to give.

>> Don't you have a revenue go up though? A billion.

>> Oh no. Be a billionaire. But I mean the thing is like that part is like kind of irrelevant to me because as soon as I hit one I'll make it 10. As soon as I do 10 I'll do 100. Like it'll just it'll just keep moving.

>> Why do you why do you say it so much though?

>> What?

>> Like you want to be if if it doesn't matter to you.

>> What did I do? I associate.

>> That's interesting.

>> I've been influenced. That's that's that's it right there because we were talking about like revenue and I think that's a lot.

>> Yeah. Well, I want to call the shot and I want to have it documented. When I said when I started this I was like I think I can be a billionaire in five years and so I'm going to try and do that.

>> I like it.

>> Also like to the same degree like I had I had one of our teammates actually recently he's like what if you miss it and I was like dare greatly. You know what I mean? Like that's the like man in the arena. That's the game for me. Like I want to work as hard as I possibly can because that like fundamentally work is the goal for me. Like work is the thing that I like doing the most and so I want to do that. And so it's not like work so that I can. It's just work period because the best days of my life are the days that I work the most. And I felt like I had nothing left to give. And so I just try to create paths that allow me to do that. Like I just want to work. I just want no one to bother me and I want to work. And so that's it. Like we work seven days. Me personally, like we work I I had 101 days in a row and then I was like, "Okay, I'm going to take a day off." But like it's because I like it and I don't want other people like I don't care what other people think. Of course I care. But like around that I don't.

>> And you rather just work on projects similar to a does. You get everything done all the past out of your life and you just focus on projects.

>> Yeah.

>> It's making.

>> That's like.

>> Build stuff. It's like meaning because it's actually like perm peaceful.

>> I like work. I mean everything that I build will eventually disappear. So it doesn't really matter. And so the work itself like me actually doing the work, becoming the person capable of doing that work is who I want to become. The goal is just a reflection of the development that I've been able to have.

>> That's my view.

>> Been thinking back.

>> Yeah. I mean it of like you go in and out of these phases, right? Like you get super like external goal driven and then you like think about it for a second. You have a full stomach, a good night's sleep, and you're on a beach and you're like, you know, it doesn't really matter that much. And so you think about it a little bit more and you're like, what are the things that I like like I lose like what do I lose time? Like when do I lose track of time? Like I want to maximize me losing track of time.

>> That's it right there.

>> Right? So that's what I want to maximize. And I lose track of time when I'm lifting and eating with friends and when I'm working on things that I like. And so I ideally want those things that I like to align to something. But I think it gives you a lot of freedom because like the goal is to work as hard as I possibly can. And so for example, at the last book, something that I worked very very hard on for a very long time. When I got up there, the there was a whole team of people who were like the set whatever and they were like I try to say this in a way that doesn't sound self agrandizing. The lady who ran the whole show, she's like, I've literally never seen someone so like chill before this. And I was like, I have done this before. Like I have done this presentation 100 times. Like I know what I'm going to say. And like I like feeling that way in those moments and I know the work that it takes to get there and I'm happy to do it. Even though it may suck in the moment and it can be terrible for the day or a week or whatever when you have to like rewrite a whole section of a book or whatever it is because you know that there's a better version of it but like that's the work worth doing for me because it will eventually disappear anyways.

>> Yeah, because that's like the zone for you like a basketball at Kobe.

>> Yeah, you're you're pretty much Kobe for business.

>> We'll see. Time will tell. Uh, wondering if you have any just personal insight or anything to share around getting the team in person. Obviously you have a head office here. It comes with an expense or cost. School has a head office. Um, just if you see that as a very important thing or if it's okay the team could be remote and best decision I made unexpected. I didn't actually think it was like there we had logistic reason like we have a lot of our portfolio companies run events and so I was spending like four million a year on venues and I was like well shoot well I can just add four million a year to my profit by just owning the owning the venue and so that ROI is the building I don't need to do anything else we'll put some studios in here so we can make it easier to record but and we required we have no no requirements for anyone like they don't have to come there's no clock in time there's no leaving time I don't know if you know there's my whole team's upstairs it's Saturday they're all working because we don't ask them to work. They work because they want to. And we wanted to make a place that was very rewarding. So we try to make it as awesome as like humanly possible to be here. But the amount that you can influence someone in person, the amount of productivity that you get, amount of alignment is um is huge. And I this comes from somebody who ran a remote company for a very long time. And so we got very good at the communication cycles that are associated with that. But in person, there's so much tangential transfer of skills and beliefs and knowledge that like I have such a higher degree of confidence and trust in the team to deploy them to new initiatives and know that they will do the things the way that I want them to be done because they've seen it done by me.

>> Yeah.

>> Yeah. From the drive perspective, if the goal is work, then you can measure yourself every day about how hard you how much out of a hundred you did it. And then that's it. Cuz you're like, what do you do to stay motivated? I like working and that's it. And if work is the goal, then you measure yourself on how hard you work. That actually is the key like to find out what you like doing and then do that because then it's not it's not so much discipline. It's more pleasure.

>> I don't believe in like discipline fundamentally like the most in shape people like working out.

>> That's you make me do something I don't want to do, I'll do it inconsistently and to a poor standard.

>> So you get other people to help you with that so that you can just do the thing you want to do. That took me a long time to understand. That was that gave me the most troubles for the longest period of time. And you know, that's why I'm partnering with Hoi cuz he is naturally good at being a personality in public and [ __ ] and I hate that. So, like that's the most important thing I found is like figure out what you really want to do and just do that and get people around you to help with the other stuff.

>> And try to find people who are like at your like not compromising on quality. Like I know Sam tells a story that he interviewed 600 different engineers before he found the lead engineer at school, Daniel, right? And so like I think you can say the same thing for wives. You can say the same thing for business partners. It's like just don't compromise. Like if there is a a Michael Jordan of of the thing that you want to partner with, then just don't settle and try and find that person who can complement the skill set you have. I fundamentally was not against partnerships, but I had many failed I've had nine failed partnerships. Um, and then I married Ila and then everything's been cool since then and I basically didn't do any partnerships for a very long time and it was because I didn't understand the dynamic. It was basically like all these people were like friends of mine. We all like business and we have the same skills and the same experience and let's go into business together. Which really just means like now I'm doing everything and I get one third as much money. I was like well that sucks, right? And so but if every person is required to make any dollar then everyone still has to work and you want to find people who love doing that thing that they're obsessed with it like they work seven days a week because they can't stop working on it because nothing else in life is more enjoyable to them.

>> When maybe setting up your environment correctly, I guess. So, what what do you recommend for that?

>> I mean, I think the the environment you want to make it easy as possible to work as hard as you can and so think about it from a deletion perspective of like what are all the things that take away from my ability to work and how can I remove all of them. So like right now we have three assistants and then we have two people who manage this building who also kind of act in an assistant capacity. I have my head of security who also who like who also helps out and does things. And so that is like what are all the things that take my time? It's like eating takes my time, cleaning takes my time, errands take my time, fixing things, installing things. Like everything that can possibly take your time. So that every minute of your day is going towards the work that you like doing. And in the beginning, you don't have the money to do that all the time. And that's fine. You just you just keep trading up dollars for time. Like as you make more more dollars per hour, you just buy time back from people who can do it. And like don't feel weird. Like the first time I had an assistant, I was like, I don't know if I feel weird that they're doing this stuff. Now I just like whatever. They can just like spoon feed me for all I care. Seriously, like if someone could if someone could eat for me like and and bathe for me, I would do it. Really? I'm gonna draw something for you guys.

>> So, so motivation comes from deprivation. You're the horniest when you haven't [ __ ] in a while. You're the sleepiest when you haven't slept in a while. You're the hungriest when you haven't eaten in a while. And so it's the lack of something that creates the the deprivation of the thing is what creates the motivation. And so by that logic, you would then assume poor people should then be the most motivated to make money because they have the least of it. But the thing is is that money is a construct. And so you only feel deprived of money if you think you can have a lot more. Which is why the richest people in the world are actually the most deprived of money. I feel very very poor because the guy above me last year took home $935 million in income, not appreciation, income. And so when I see that, like, what am I doing? Like, why am I so poor? Why do I stop?

>> And so the thing is is the difference between like my income and his income is like here, right? But the difference between somebody who's making $5,000 a month and $10,000 a month, even though they make significantly less than I make, the level of deprivation that they experience is far lower. And so from a motivation perspective, it's creating deprivation. And part of that comes from surrounding yourself with people who do better than you.

>> Cuz I feel like, or at least for me, it was the motivation for me was unreal. When I wanted to achieve freedom, not to go to university, have all my needs met. Once that was reached,

>> They should go that next level. I just I guess I was struggling to find a point. I do enjoy working, but it's like like you said, the question is why is that a problem?

>> I don't know. I think I just um Well, I enjoy working, but I just And maybe it's just my environment. I do, you know, I'm still with my parents. I work in my bedroom. So, maybe I need to leave. I mean, I would recommend it. Also, that'll help with the dating thing.

>> Have you ever done Have you ever done like a terrible job though that you have a you what would be classified by everybody in the show as a terrible job?

>> Oh, no. If I have to get things done, I will, but it's just to stay self motivated to start new projects. Like, things are going well and I'm still making good income. But because I have more time in the day that I could be devoting to maybe not looking at cars online and actually.

>> Still spending GT fees.

>> Well, yeah, just looking at you know, it's going down the rabbit all the social media apps block so I'm not wasting my time there but you know going on Google and looking at sports cars and stuff that I might never buy because it gives you gratification for like maybe a week. So yeah, I don't know. I'm just curious to see the mindset behind someone as successful as you or Mosi.

>> I think it's the work thing, man. Like make it easy as possible to work as hard as you can.

>> I joked with Kirby once that I how many Ferraris I could have a year with how many software engineers I employ.

>> One software engineer is five Ferraris a year. So you I could have like 50 Ferraris more more than that a year every year. So like when I was young I thought of oh I can't wait till I can afford a Ferrari. But now I just see software engineers. No [ __ ] Like a genius software engineer. I get the most excited ever cuz I just want to build cool [ __ ] and I need that person to build. The only reason I care about money is to get the software engineers. The only reason I need the soft is to make the thing I want to build. So it's like it's like modern adult Lego kind of.

>> Yeah.

>> Yeah.

>> The guy who owns Sriracha sauce, if you know that, it's a it's a pretty cool story. Um, he's a billionaire. He owns the entire company. And when they were asked like, "So what motivates you uh to make money?" He's like, "So I can make more hot sauce. He's like, I make money so I can make more hot sauce. He started like at the back of his van with like a a tub and he would just like give Sriracha out and that's how he did it. Um, and so I think that like it really comes down to to inverting the formula.

>> It was Mr. Beast too, right? Every amount of money he made, he poured into the next video and he only wanted to make more money to make a better video. He just wanted to make the best videos and I just want to make the best product. And I know that Boeing, the airline company, they used to have the mission statement to make the best airplanes in the world. And they did. And they were one of the most I think they were the most valuable company in the world at one time. Then it changed management and they changed it to produce the most returns for for shareholders and they bomb. So when your goal is sometimes to only make money, you fully miss. And the problem from a strategy perspective, because I've walked through this with some of the founders um of the of the portfolio companies is when the goal is to make money, you have a lack of focus because there's a zillion things that make money. And so it makes it impossible to prioritize. Whereas if you're trying to make the best product, the best school, the best community, the best whatever, then it's very clear the one thing that you need to do. And that's why I can feel like so lost because you're like, there's all these things I could do. It's because the goal is the wrong goal. There was a point when I was in Thailand and I did the maths and I realized that I could never work again and I thought that would be the best feeling ever. I thought I'd be like a cat in the sun just purring and relaxing.

>> What a visual.

>> Depressed I've ever been. It's like if you do nothing the mind gets so anxious and you're like overthinking stuff. But work is like you quiet the mind. It's like if you go skydiving. That's why people love sex. People love skydiving. Get a silent mind. But work gives that feeling and it's productive.

>> So it's like the antidote to depression.

>> Yeah. I guess I mean that's probably more the root of my question because I I am doing well. It's just I feel like I could be more proud of myself but I'm we're just struggling to find the uh.

>> You don't have to be. I'll share one thing and then I I'll loop back to what we were saying. So, I had a a guy that I talked to a few years ago, really brilliant, PhD, developed a software, sold it for 180, and then like truly just hung out with his family. And so, I was like, really excited to talk to him because I knew he was really bright. And so, I was like, so I was like, how do you find how do you create and destroy meaning in your life? That was the question I asked him. And he said, why does life need to be meaningful? And I was like, [ __ ] All right, got it. And so, that basically was the it was just an assumption. It's like, why do I why do you need to be proud of yourself? Why do you like because like dissatisfaction in general comes from deprivation. All right. It's also a great source of fuel. But um, but back to the the piece that you have. If you work as let me ask you this question. If you worked as hard as you could on something and the end of the day you had nothing left to give, would you be proud of yourself for working that hard?

>> Yeah. And that's what I did during the school games for about like towards the end. So, what you do is just zoom in on that and you try and live as many of those days in a row as you can.

>> Yeah, we're giving you all time leaderboards.

>> You know, you know Ted Horosa, you know, these guys are partners. And Ted was hitting me up. He was like, "Man, Daniel's depressed now that the leaderboards are over." He's like, "We need these alltime leader." He's behind the idea for all time leaderboards to motivate.

>> Yeah. Just for him. Yeah. Good. Yeah. Yeah. And then you'll have someone to chase.

>> I felt fine until I got a taste of purpose with the school games. Like I was I was doing great.

>> I had a taste ultimate purpose of the school games. There's meaning in my life. It wasn't even about anymore. It was just about the leaderboard.

>> I saw people like crawling up on us. And then I'm like, shoot, we got to go. And then it was over and I'm like, what am I supposed to do? That the day was over. I think I just Yeah, I was just lost and I didn't even work that day.

>> What's what what's the point to all of it?

>> Yeah.

>> I don't know. It might sound.

>> No, it's fine. It's the when the goal is the outcome, the moment you hit the outcome, then there's nothing. If the goal is the work, you never hit it.

>> It's the sense of progression. That's what it's doing to you. So like in video games for a game to be successful you have to have a sense of progress like clear sense of progress. If you don't get a sense of progress you'll stop playing the game right and so the leaderboards just give you a very clear sense because you can go up and other people are trying to come up and so it's just grinding and making progress. Um, yeah, once you can see it clearly like grinding progress, it it gets easier to to habitualize that. Yeah. Yeah.

>> 19.

>> Got it.

>> Like so you honestly you haven't that many reps like you're like you haven't had that many reps at work and so like you'll get a better taste for like you'll be like a connoisseur of work. You're like this is uh this is a 96 you know this is a wonderful this a great work day. Oh, this there this work day was a little bit different than others. And so you just get better and better at refining how to structure the day so you can do what you want because you I mean you you figured out the the cat the cat purring the sun's ridiculous. Um, that like you know you know that that's not the outcome like you know that that's not going to do anything for you and so then it's like what else is there? And so it gets it just comes down to the work you do.

>> Yeah, that's just how I answer that question. Well, that makes sense. Yeah, because when I realized that that was a little depressing, but I can totally see how that.

>> Could become a game mode of.

>> War and chasing gold like that and that's why you have the billion gold.

>> Sure. Yeah. Just really far. It doesn't matter. I mean, it matters a ton and at the same time doesn't matter.

>> Any other ones to add to this MISK list?

>> Yes.

>> I wanted to ask Sam because you have children too, right? Um, have a little son and we're planning for the second one. Uh, so how do you how do you factor that in? How do you balance that when you actually love work? So that you find like a good balance.

>> Well, my wife wants me home by dinner at 6:30 and I feel like I need to work 12 hours a day. So there's only one way that works. When I wake up at like 5. And there's only way that works by going to bed at 9:00. So if I go to bed at 9, wake up at 5, work 12 hours, I can get home for dinner, then spend the evening with the children, everything works.

>> That took me like a year to figure out. It sounds simple, but.

>> Yeah.

>> What's my question? It's like when that's when you were the mother, right? So.

>> Like roles were reversed. How would you or do you feel like you're spending enough time with your children?

>> I do. Yeah.

>> Yeah.

>> But also.

>> You know their names, right?

>> Huh?

>> I said you know their names.

>> Yeah.

>> I also spend all of Sunday, right? So I work six hour I mean I work like 12 hours a day, six days a week and I'm satisfied with that. I don't feel like I need to do any more than that. But if I don't do that, I do feel like I'm I do feel like I'm sacrificing something and that's when I get like resentful. So I provided I can do that then I don't feel like I guilty about not working more or anything and I can make sure I I my wife is happy and I do spend plenty of time with my children. Um, it it works. What was the best way to balance or to to figure that out for both of you? How did you.

>> How did I What? Sorry.

>> Was that a negotiation or was it just condition.

>> Between her?

>> You and your wife.

>> Oh, well, my wife wants to be a mom and she stays at home and and she that's what that's her dream.

>> So, it's perfect that I just want to work, right? Um, because I pay for both of us, right? So, it works really well. Um, but she has a requirement like she wants to spend time with me and the children. So, I have to be home by 6 and one day on the weekend. Um, that's that works really well. But to find that, yeah, it took like a year because I didn't wake up that early. I woke up later, so I worked later, and then I would miss the dinner. And yeah, it's honestly so funny that it ended up just being that simple. I actually got out a spreadsheet and I was like, okay, I need to be home at 6. I was like, I need 12 hours. And then I was like, [ __ ] I've got to wake up at that time. But then I was like, I need to sleep for 8. Oh, I've got to go to bed at that time. I was like, holy [ __ ] I've never done that. Um, but then you just have to go to bed at that time. And the key to that is to wake up at the early time. So to be tired by that time and then once you get into a like habit of that, it all just flows. Or the other thing is we have a a chef person that prepares our meals. We have a a maid that like washes the laundry, does the cleaning so that my wife doesn't feel a burden there.

>> Okay.

>> So cuz if I cuz I also don't do any chores or anything. Um, and so that's a key to my happiness, by the way, is because if my wife's exhausted, she's going to take it out on me or I'm going to have to do some chores.

>> So, if I come home and Ashley asks me to do chores, I scale up our cleaner one more day a week.

>> I guess that's also like where I probably need to hire some fulltime because I'm still like doing the household as well. And so.

>> Oh, yeah. No, the household. Get that off your plate. That's the biggest time suck.

>> Yeah.

>> It's a solution for your business and your personal life. Full-time employees.

>> Yeah, but probably next to me though, like where I can really say.

>> Food, laundry, and cleaning is like that's like half your day gone.

>> Yeah.

>> Leila had this issue just from a wife perspective where she's like she wanted to make all my meals because she actually has a relatively conservative view on on marriage and whatnot. And so she wanted to be the ideal wife, but also was running like all of our companies. And it was an unspoken expectation she had.

of herself. And, uh, when she was like, she was like getting stressed out of her mind trying to like be on Zoom calls and like cooking meals and courses for me that she would give to me. And then I didn't know that she was struggling with this. And then when she said she just like broke down, she's like, "I'm a bad wife and I'm I'm not doing as good of a job in the CEO thing." I was like, "Oh, make more money." I was like, "I don't care at all who makes my I mean, like, I love that you make it, but it's food. Like, I don't care." And so, like, huge burden. And then she just was like, "Great." She just like made her a satellite. And she was like, "Outsource, outsource, outsource, outsource." And then she just made us more money. And I was like, "Great, that's awesome."

So, yeah, I think I, to be fair, I think there's probably just a conversation worth having of like, "What do you want?" And then, uh, I think Elon was like, "How much, how much time? How many hours does a child really take?" He was like, "10 hours a week." He's like, "18." Like, he's like, "You just come up with the hours and then I think you you do the Excel sheet and you say like, 'How do I make it work?'" And the only problem is when I want 40 hours of your time to be with me and the kids, like that's when you have to have a harder conversation.

>> Yeah. Setting the expectations is really key.

>> Onboarding.

>> And hire, I hired where it hurt, even for my wife. So, like, I could see she was struggling with food because she would she wouldn't eat and I'd come home and then there was no dinner. And so I was like, "Okay, we need to get this problem solved." And then I went to get a t-shirt and there was none clean. My first instinct was to just buy more t-shirts. But it's still there was none clean. I was like, "Okay, this pile's too big. Like, she's never going to do it." So, yeah, it's funny. It's just like operations. I think of home ops and company ops, and they're they're honestly essential.

>> If my home ops broke down, my whole life would fall apart.

>> I actually think it's like an identity problem, what you described, right? So you want to be >> the good wife as well because you >> like have that, but then you just can't do both capacity. It's a prioritization thing, which is you just have to look at it and say, "Which is more important to you?" And then like, I think you just have to live with the answer of which one actually is more important versus what you think.

>> I mean, I know what I'm better at.

>> But sometimes the thing that's like most important is what you think should be most important rather than what is most important to you.

>> And that's a tough one to like identify. And that was kind of what Sam was alluding to earlier, like with Daniel's, like sometimes the goals that we have aren't actually our goals. They're goals that we think we should have.

>> Yeah. Or where you're still so embedded in your family and the expectations where you just live a very different life. And it >> The other thing is, by the way, I don't work from home. And I sometimes do, and it is terrible.

>> Yeah.

>> Yeah. I feel so guilty trying to work when there's like a kid screaming at the door and I can't go to get another LaCroix because I have to walk through the family.

>> It's all the fridge in the room in the office.

>> Yeah. I just honestly, the office is so good for me. And I've also found that family misses you and loves you more when you get home when you're not there all day.

>> Deprivation.

>> Yeah, true.

>> So, it's it's only winning. Honestly, I get no distractions and I come home and everyone's happy to see me. Whereas, I work from home and people start to resent me. And I am like, not productive. Yeah.

>> Where did you guys learn like leadership skills and communication skills from? Like, if you guys say you want to go first on that one, that was the communication skills.

>> I never even cared. Yeah.

>> I just was always trying to build something and solve the problems that popped up and and I never cared about that. Like, yeah, I I don't even think of myself as an executive. Like when you ask like somebody, I like don't find it helpful to think of myself as an executive or to think of I just focus on what I need to build and what I need to do, which is make great stuff, hire great people, don't run out of money. That's basically what I do. It's like very simple.

>> From a leadership perspective, people are often surprised by the fact that like, I I mean, what I said earlier, like Ila runs everything. Like Jason, Trevor, like they roll into Caleb, Caleb rolls into Ila. Like I have no, I have one direct report, which is my father-in-law, and he, we have a 30-minute meeting, partially because he just likes me, which is nice. Um, convenient, and he manages my books. And so he's like, "We translate into Italian." I'm like, "Oh, cool." You know, that like, and that's that's the only person that I actually meet with, uh, that's like a direct report of mine. I actually just recently just got off of all of our leadership meetings as well. Like, I'm not even on those. Like, Ila runs everything. Like, Ila is an exceptional leader. Um, and I think that has to do a lot with deep and genuine care for other human beings. And I tend to struggle with that. Not that I I like humans. I have a harder time with Sarah, if that makes sense. Um, and so I could either try and learn to be more like Ila, and I try, but I'm better at doing what I do. And so we make it easy, as easy as we can to work as hard as possible. And so she does all the stuff she's exceptional at. And she's become an unbelievable leader because she's done more one-on-ones than I think Leila has, like 20 direct reports right now. Like, insane. And >> You need to figure out if you're going to be the manager person or the maker person.

>> Yeah. It's really >> Sure. Because I am not a manager.

>> Yeah.

>> But you need one.

>> Yeah. No, you absolutely like Yeah. I was only I capped at three million bucks a year until I'm LA and then 24 months later I took home 17. So like I I needed some like I knew how to market and sell. Like I knew how to do that. I just like I was like, "All that just, I people would be like, 'You sold me this.'" I was like, "Yeah, just that. Yeah, it's that. Isn't it great?" You know, but like no one would be there. You know what I mean? So, um, you have to find that person. And I will say this, having now because one of the big things we do in companies that we buy is we install an operator, uh, a manager. Um, they actually don't like that term, by the way. But, um, we install the CEO in the company. And the key difference that I learned from earlier in my life to later is that the wrong types of people are like, "I'm good at process and systems and all of like that's not that's not who you need." It's the wrong person. And especially at y'all's level, those are the people who are going to come to you and say that that's what they're going to help you do. And that is not what you need. You need someone who can have hard conversations with other people. You need people who love people, who can like like Leila does this thing where she always puts the human first. Um, and so she starts all the conversations from that perspective of like, "If you didn't work for me, what advice would I give you?" And I think that her character is that she will always give that advice independent of if it affects us negatively in the short term. And I think that and thinking about business that way has helped us a lot in the long term because everyone knows that like if if Trevor comes tomorrow and Trevor's awesome and we need him for so many things, but if he's like, "I have this opportunity to leave," we'd be like, "We're absolutely going to miss you. We want it. We want you to stay, but I also, if I if we were in your position, you should take it, right? I want you to win." Because then long term, Trevor refers to then he'll leave on good notes. He'll be like, "I actually been I've got this other guy who I can bring in to replace me. I'll take extra time out of my calendar, train them up because we're on good terms and all that stuff." And that has paid unbelievable dividends in the business long term. But the like the leaders, I think comes to absolutely down to character. Um, and that you have to be someone that your team admires. I have more external admiration than I do internal because most of the team that I have is like, "Alex just is in a hole most of the day just like coming up with for like the deprivation motivation is is this neat?" I was like, "I'm busy." And I'm like, "All right, fine. I'll I'll >> And this answers your retention question, by the way. People most of the time people leave their job because of their manager.

>> Always.

>> And if and if you like making things and not managing people, you're going to be a terrible manager. And so people will leave. So like having the key to retention is to have a really good people manager and they're constantly checking in with how people feel and to make sure they're happy and heard. That's so important. And they work with them on skills. They're like, "Hey, you know, you've been a little bit short to Amanda and so let's work on how you like show up to Zoom calls." They're like, "Hey, Dan, you've been late three times in a row. Um, this is what you need. Like, let's set up a plan so that you're not late again." And if you are late again, we're going to have to put you on a performance improvement plan, which means that you're going to leave if you don't fix this. Like, you need someone who can do those conversations.

>> What What position?

>> It depends on the title of the business. I mean, in the size, but like oftentimes at a small business, that could be a director of operations. Um, but what you're really looking for is not a manager, but a like we're using maker manager as just general terms, but you want a leader. Like if you just think, "Can this person lead? Will people look up to this person? Did this person like really care about people?" Like that's like that's what it is. Like I think Gary Vee calls this person chief people officer. Other companies are CEOs, some it's COO. The the terminology differs wildly between businesses, but it's a person who just leads and people follow and usually they're very serviented.

>> So, if you don't enjoy that work or feel like it's natural, obviously you want to hire it out, but I also was listening to a video on hiring by Mill said that people think she's the hiring expert, but you guys are both very knowledgeable with every aspect of the business. Do you think it's very valuable for us even if we don't enjoy that work or doesn't necessarily tend to try to master it?

>> More skills will never hurt you, but getting better at the skills you already like will probably serve you better provided you can cover the weak side. So TLDDR, I think finding the person and her point about that is that you should understand every department in the business so that you can have someone pass a smell test. And if someone's like, "We can't do it because of this reason." If you understand marketing or you understand sales, you understand whatever, then you'd be like, "That doesn't smell right." Right? And you can also you can just ward people out in the in the interview process. And what happens is over time you take fewer and fewer interviews and you take in the beginning you just take all the final, you know, you take all of them and then you take only the final interviews and then you take only the final interviews for managers and up and then you take only the final interviews for executives and eventually like I don't take any final interviews. Like Ila does all of them because she's good at it and she's an like unbelievable people picker, like unbelievable. She's never been wrong. But you get that through reps. She's good at recognizing patterns. You know, like for example, um, executive assistants. Like now we've hired a lot of them and we're good at it. Like some of them interview terribly because interviewing itself is a completely different skill than jobs. So like a lot of people put this weight on the interview process. But like executive assistants tend to be very anxious people, very like worried, and especially if they like you or they really want the job, they like they just melt on an interview. They just like and like the more melting there, she's like, "Okay, this is my girl." Like, she's going to freak out if anything's wrong. And that's what you want, right? And so sometimes it's like interviewing itself is a completely different skill from like being a salesman. And some amazing sales people do now that there's probably more generality of skills, but like product guys, I'm sure I'm sure engineers are probably like exceptional engineers are not necessarily the best interviewers, but it has almost nothing to do with how good they are at coding. So find somebody who likes people.

>> What would leaders say to um that are good management practices? Like how often should you meet your teammates? How do you motivate them? How to check they're doing?

>> It depends on how proficient the member is and how long they've been with you. So in the beginning, you you do a lot more front-loaded and training and onboarding and culture stuff and making sure they're up to date, having a 30-60-90 plan for how they're going to get integrated in the business. Quick wins. So, okay, this will be the easiest frame for everyone. All right, here we go. This will be fun. All right. So, you've got marketing, whatever, lead gen, you got nurture, whatever. Nurture, sales, onboarding, and then you've got uh retention and ascension, right? That's a customer journey for the most part. Like you advertise, you nurture, you know, lead gen, sales, you onboard, and you retain and ascend. Talent is the same thing. You acquire them, you market them, then you nurture them, you work the leads. This is just an interview. That's the sales process. The onboarding is the same. And then what do you do to retain and ascend them? So the ascension is what's your career path. The retention is the ongoing management. And so it's parallel internally and externally. And to the same degree that you have a brand to your customers, you also have a brand within the marketplace of employees. And so you can build both those brands. So like the silly things like getting a great place to work award, like we've had it two years in a row and we try to get it whenever we start a new company because it's one of those things that matters to people, right? And so this is how I think about this. And then if you think about this from a from a marketing perspective, you have the marketing that you do to the marketplace of employees. You do the marketing that you do to your internal employees. You do the marketing that you do to prospects. And you have the marketing that you do to customers. And so you that I call the quad marketing calendar. So you're marketing to all four of these people: people who could potentially become employees, people who are employees, people who potentially become customers, people who are customers. And so that promotion happens ongoing the whole time. And you need a process all the way through that's choreographed, just as choreographed for employees as you do for customers. That's what creates a well-oiled machine.

>> The marketing people then be good at building that same funnel because the same with the same philosophy apply.

>> Yeah. If you I mean, it would it would probably be the the way that you promote to get leads would probably be different. Like we do I was all the stuff we said earlier, like we probably do outbound more than we might do because your actual customer, like how how you actually transact will depend largely on how you're going to promote. But at least finding employees is much more about finding individuals. It's much more like enterprise sales. Uh, finding that one unicorn more than it is like now on the flip side, if I had to hire a hundred customer support reps and to get a hundred customers, I might run ads because it might make a lot more sense that way. We use referrals, by the way, which is interesting because we grow with affiliates and it's so they're both parallels. So, like we most of our hires come from internal referrals. They're so much warmer. Like they already know the person.

>> They're and you they've worked with them in the past. It's so much better.

>> And referred people are more likely to refer people. So, like it just keeps propagating.

>> It compounds.

>> Yeah. Like we got one guy from Coinbase, then we had six. He brought his friends, right? We got one guy from Riot Games, then we had six, right? So like, um, so but we incentivized the referral. So at first we're just like, "Oh, do you have any friends?" But then we were like, "Let's let's like offer a bounty kind of." Um, and honestly, this was so successful for us that we, uh, we took all of our job ads publicly down. We just stopped doing all of that. We even stopped working with recruiters. And then we took what we were paying to recruiters and gave it to the team. And it worked so well. Um, that's and it's so much easier, honestly, cuz the the most the hardest part we found with hiring was dealing with the volume of crap.

>> Yeah.

>> That's the most that's the hardest part. It's just immense and terrible, like the quality. And so when when it's a referral, did you get like one every like every week? And the probability that you're going to hire them is so high?

>> Yeah.

>> And the teammate has a huge vested interest in making sure that one, it doesn't waste your time, that the person's good, and they like they want to work with this person. And no one wants to bring someone onto the team who sucks at working. They want somebody who's like, "This guy's a workhorse. He's going to be awesome." And so like, just like advertising externally, like referrals is always the best way to grow. It compounds a business forever. Same thing internally. That's always the ideal. Um, I mean, we have the eight ways in the leads book and I flip those in that chapter on how to do that from an internal perspective. Like recruiters are the same things as agencies, just with it. Like think about it like that. Like all of them have parallels just for getting employees because it's just how do you get people?

>> We got, we got Wicked from Kirby.

>> Yeah. And NASA.

>> And then we got another guy from Wicked.

>> Yeah. And then NAS referred another guy interviewing next week is your most likely co.

>> It's amazing, honestly. Like when we look at how this has spread, it's like this has been amazing for us. Um, it was something innovative instead of just like pounding LinkedIn or like dealing with all of the low-quality applications. We were like, "There's got to be a better way." And >> being willing to pay the cost to acquire to refer, like like the same methodology of like, "Okay, well, if I c my cost to acquire a customer on Facebook is $2,000, giving that exact amount of money to your customers to bring you another customer, they're going to be way more incentivized." And if the cost to like a recruiter to Sam's point is probably for a high-level engineer, typically it's like 50% of their first year salary. And so if those guys make $400,000, it's a $200,000 bounty for bringing someone in. And if you're going to pay that either way, like wouldn't you rather give it to the team? And so just like it's a mindset shift in terms of what you're willing to pay to acquire talent versus a customer. It's the same concept. Nate, we have solved school. Just wait. Otherwise, I'm going to get into book writing. So I can't.

>> If no one says anything, I'm going to get into book writing.

>> I'm saying.

>> All right.

>> Do you oversee the hires even though you have the CTO that makes all the hires? Like do you still because like how I see it is like you do have that main person who makes hires, but do you still talk to that person to make sure it's like >> Yeah, I talk to every hire before we actually give them an offer. I'm the last step, but I trust my team to evaluate their skills. I'm just testing culture and like spidey sense of like of like this person, but I'm also there to con to answer all the questions they've got for the CEO, >> right?

>> Because good people have a lot of questions and they're not fully convinced that they want to work here yet. A lot of the time they are from referrals, but like they've got a bunch of questions and I have to answer those so that they're comfortable working here too. So it's a little bit of sales and me just checking culture. I'm >> You do that for the entire business, like all positions.

>> Yeah.

>> Yeah.

>> But we don't hire a lot of people, remember.

>> Yeah.

>> What's the main question? You lost. So I say like, "Why do you want to work here? What what do you like want in your career?" Like, um, and and then I but I honestly learn the most from their questions for me. So I I I ask barely any questions and then I'm like, "What have you got for me?" And that's where I learn the most about them. If someone doesn't have any questions for me, it's a massive red flag. It means they don't really care. Um, but if someone's got a lot, then they're the best hires, honestly. Like, cuz they've really thought about it. And I learn a lot about their thinking from how they ask me questions. Yeah. But remember, I'm not trying to assess their skills. So, that's an important distinction because other people have done that before me. If I was trying to assess these skills, it would be a very different conversation.

>> We hit our five-minute warning.

>> Perfect for >> So the process that we go through for writing the book is that I will hammer out a first draft. Um, and then from that point going forward, uh, I will basically just keep re-editing the whole thing, draft after draft after draft after draft, um, until I get something that I feel like I can show to other people. Then I get usually five to 10 kind of like beta readers who will go through and when they give me feedback, I typically ignore the feedback but focus on where they were giving feedback. And so if I have an area, for example, where different people say different things, that's just a signal that there's something wrong with it more than that they know how to fix it. And so I think that's been a really big finding for me in terms of editing and making things better is that oftentimes, at least for me, these suggestions that they gave were irrelevant, but just that like there's something wrong here. And um, I got that whole process more or less from Stephen King on his book and on writing and I have more or less followed how he writes. They're just putting notes on every Google Doc, right?

>> So, um, because of the nature of like how valuable the books we have are, um, they'll get a physical copy, uh, yeah, in the in the mail and then they'll they'll mark it up and then they'll send it back.

>> So, to get to use a typewriter but keep it offline.

>> No, no, but books books can make like obscene amounts of money. It's kind of interesting. I was very surprised by how much the books make. Despite being in that sense.

>> Yeah, the books make a million a month.

>> With one employee.

>> But I see you on Instagram sometimes and you're on the computer with this guy and you're like, "Writing session."

>> Yeah, my editor, Dr. Dr. Kay. So, he and I go back and forth. So, it's like I'll write V1 and then um, he will come behind me as I'm writing and start editing. And he takes longer to edit than it takes me to write. And so by the time he gets to like a third of the way through or halfway through, I've finished and then I go back to review his edits and now he's like three-quarters of the way down. And then we finish it together and then we just do that and then we and then we'll usually start back at the top again and then like reread it through out loud, see where there's stumble, where we need to add images.

>> We're editing as you write it. How long the session is, like an hour?

>> I do six hours every day. So we yeah, we we're like my whole day is organized around that stuff. And so like right now, um, I I mean, I have a very much a maker's calendar. I have two work blocks. I work for you know, sixish and then we eat and then I work again and I have no meetings and then that's that's my day. So a lot of it is just orient like each each book is like the the leads book was the hardest book. I'll never write a book that hard. It was it was insane. Trying to cover advertising in general in one book was absolute insanity. Um, leads was 19 drafts. And so it took us cumulatively. We had 3,500 man hours into the book. And so that's why like I get a call from somebody who's like, "Hey, you wrote a book. I'm going to write one, too." And I'm like, "I think it's a terrible idea and you're definitely not going to write as good of a book." Just just they're just not going to put that much time. Like no one will put that much time in. Like I had to learn how to put that much time into something. Like it's very hard to stay that focused for 18 straight months.

>> What's the biggest difference between version one and version lights?

>> How much better it is.

>> Just things are clear. It's nice.

>> Yeah. I mean, why use four words when I could use one. And if it takes, I mean, there'll be times where it'll take an hour to finish like one paragraph. But it's like tight. We took three paragraphs and we took it into one. And it's it's right. It's clean. There's no duplication. There's no extra words. There's no get like I want to vacuum seal every paragraph, every sentence. There's nothing like like that reducing it any more than I have removes a key concept. And so like really thinking about like, "Does each of these sentence deserve to be here?" and just continually packing it and packing it and packing it. So like the uh like the money models book was I think I had like 450 pages, but is now condensed down to almost the same size as offers. And that like cramming process of just keep packing, like the value per word or value density is like that's the work. That's the that's the really hard stuff. And I do think that making like getting becoming a better writer has made me better at making content and communicating and speaking because you just if you spend that many hours every day working on language, you get better at language. And that's why defining terms and things like that has always been so important to me because like unless we define the term, like what are we talking about? And if I say a word and you think something different, then like the rest of what I say doesn't make any sense. And yeah, besides that, it's just making sure that I have a continuous structure for each of the each of the chapters and that there's a through line that ties the narrative of the entire book together. That is significantly harder than just like making a YouTube video or something because you don't have to have a through line. Like writing a chapter is not hard. Writing 30 in a row that all add on each other, that are not duplicative, that all increasingly add value, that are also entertaining, but also teach at a level that both somebody who makes $100 million a year and somebody who has not made a dollar both understand and both get value from. Like that's the that's the challenge. Like this last the last run through I ran with money models, I actually removed all the technical terms. I had LTV and CAC in there and I had like two chapters about explaining CAC and calculations and I was like, and everyone had stuff to say there and I was like, "How much it cost you to get a customer? Like how much you make from them?" And like I basically replaced in the book so that I wouldn't have to define the term. I just define it every time I say it.

>> Well, but it's honestly just the work. Like it's like witnessing the work. It's easy to understand and say, but like the amount of sheer volume of effort it takes to make something exceptional is just wildly under like misunderstood. I remember when I saw you had Airax guy, right? And Arax sent me one of their like pre-production video drafts and it was like 25 pages long for a video. I was like, "Ah, there's a like that's the difference between a million-view video and a 20-million-view video." And the difference between a book that's, you know, number one across business and one that's number 5,000 is that is the difference between 100 hours and 2,000 hours. And so a lot of people write books because they think they're going to be useful for lead gen. I'd highly recommend doing something else. It's still like very bad, like a big waste of time if you're going to do it like that. But part of me for like the like I enjoy that work and when I like if I were to die tomorrow, the things I'd be the most proud of are the books I've written. Um, you've mentioned that your strategy for the books is, you know, long-term goodwill and then having something that could last hundreds of years. If your strategy was, uh, you know, impact, but also leaning into the idea that you could make, you know, a good business out of it, like you said, millions of dollars a month. Just >> What where would you direct someone to look at the the models that would work best today for you know like self-publishing or you know working with existing distribution model?

>> What's the goal?

>> Well, impact and make money.

>> There's just there are better ways to do both of those things than write a book. That's kind of my my point.

>> I write books because I love writing the books and I also think that I can write a top point whatever percent book and I think there's some level of self-awareness if like you've never written, if you're not like absolutely in love with writing and in love with the topic and willing to put like really, when I say 2,000 hours, like willing to put 2,000 hours in to one single project. Um, then I I just don't think it's going to be what you want it to be and then it'll just be like a 500-hour waste of time.

>> So I I do love writing that much.

>> Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I I don't I don't just >> Oh yeah. Yeah.

>> Uh yeah. So, I guess the question is more self-publishing using our marketing skills to do that or um if you know because you're so interested in writing if there's been >> If the book is good enough, you shouldn't have to market it. I run zero ads for the book. Sell 3,000 copies a day.

>> Just get it into some hands and then >> If it is good enough, they will tell their friends. Like that like fundamentally that is what it is. And like actually writing the book was a big breakthrough for me from a business owner perspective because I it was the first time I really had built a product that was good enough that it it could grow on its own.

>> And so that was and that like really solidified and crystallized like why I shifted my whole focus from understanding marketing and sales to product overall because I saw the leverage that an exceptional product gives. And then when you have the best sandwich in the world, marketing it becomes the easiest job ever.

>> That's useful.

>> Yeah. All right. Well, dudes, dudettes. Um, appreciate you guys. Hopefully the day answered the questions that uh that you the burning questions and even some of the less burning questions that you guys had and uh um thank you guys so much. I know um I think Sam's taking you guys out to dinner. I actually have a a date night dinner of my own from Mrs. Mrs. Hermosi that I'm I I must attend to. Um, but uh thank you guys. I mean it. And thank you guys so much for performing school. [Applause] Where you guys going?

>> Tonight.

>> My My EAs were like, "Does he have a plan?" Like, "Does he need reservations?" Like, and I was like, "Sam's going to Sam's going to handle it."

>> Be crowd-sourced.

>> Crowdsourced.

>> Like a Hall of Fame Hall of Fame picture.

>> Yeah, sure.

>> You do it. You want to do it here?

>> Yeah. There is it [Music]

>> In front of the thing right now.

>> Do you like writing?

>> Yeah, I'm in the best.

>> Do you want to do this >> lighting?

>> Here and I'll I'll uh I'll stand in front with Hamz and I'll light it. You can.