Transcription
Today, we're talking about the big topic of how to make money online. And I've picked out three extremely good methods that I would use nowadays with my, let's say, eleven years of online business experience. Because I'm also observing the market very closely right now, observing many launches of mine, of my clients, but also of competitors, and I'm looking very carefully at what they are doing differently currently. And if you are now, for example, let's say under €10,000, I'm pretty sure that each of these paths has the potential to generate €10,000, €20,000, or €30,000 per month. Of course, that always depends on how much reach you have, how much conversion you ultimately have. However, these models are also designed to truly create six or seven-figure revenues. But we have to be realistic first. Yes, so most people who watch these videos or listen to this podcast are not currently at €50,000 or €100,000 per month, otherwise, you have different vehicles that you're turning, so to speak. And I'm showing you three ways today. And the third, so the last way I'm showing you, can be automated and optimized to such an extent without AI, by the way, or rather, almost without AI, that it eventually runs almost without you, and that's also something that one should consider nowadays as a personal brand. Can I sell my company, my personal brand, at some point if necessary? Because if you look at Sebforce now, I mean, the personal brand has existed for so long, there wasn't really the concept of personal branding back then. I started with it in 2015, and today I would actually build it differently again. I would push the claim much more to the forefront so that I could sell this personal brand at some point. Sebforce is extremely branded to one name, and even if I were to bring in a managing director now and share the company with him, for example, and create content with him, it would still always remain Sebforce. And that's, well, as I said, I would do that a bit differently today. But we're going straight in now. I don't want to ramble on too long. But first, it's about three questions. Question number 1 is asset or just time for money? We can do both. So that means we can continue to earn a lot of money by trading time for money. And that's not as bad as some people think. Entrepreneurs always say, or online business people always say, you have to get away from trading time for money. I'd say it depends on how much money you get. So, if someone pays you €1,000 or €5,000 per hour, yes, then trade time for money. Yes, but if you're somewhere around an hourly wage of €30, €40, €50, then better not. So, then trading time for money is, well, not quite ideal to live out, because you can never really achieve such a high total revenue that you can free yourself from it at some point. For example, I still trade time for money. I always have various mentoring sessions running, and the mentoring sessions cost from €3,000 net per month, and that only includes two live calls per month, so 90 minutes, not a whole day or anything. This means these things bring me a very high hourly rate and normally also, of course, significantly more revenue for the customer. But I would never sell these for €50 or €100, because then I would have to work so much that it would ultimately not scale on its own anymore. And question number 2 is knowing what you already have or learning for two years first? Yes, so that's the other big topic. I'll go into that a bit more detail in a moment. These are just the questions you have to ask yourself beforehand. So, question number 1: Asset or just time for money? Um, question number 2 is knowledge that you already have or learning for two years first. And question 3 is actually the most important of all, at least in my world. Can it run without you, or are you always the bottleneck? That correlates with question number 2, of course, but you'll understand it in a moment. And here's a very brief call to action again. If you always want to know how I built my online business, my workshops, which always cost €0, for which I put a lot of effort into, and which come out every 6 to 10 weeks, I always explain how I build my online business, and you can always take the latest versions of it for free. So it's actually worth checking in every quarter, because I always give deep dives on specific topics. They usually last about 60 to 90 minutes, but they are really dedicated. So it's usually knowledge that I often used to sell. That's why you should check it out. But we're moving on directly. We're going to first look at things that are possibly not so good to implement before we go into the individual levels. I've categorized them with Bronze, Silver, and Gold levels, but first, we're going to look at the fact that many people still have programs or are creating programs now that won't work in a few months. And at the very beginning, that's actually the pure online course. There are still buyers for online courses, even though, let's say, AI can now answer a lot, a lot of questions. The thing is, I hear this again and again in the comments. Yes, I just ask the AI, and then I'm sure it spits out the right answers. So, if I sit here and do topic research for YouTube alone, I'm faster if I do it myself than if I use AI for it. However, if I then have a topic that has already done well, meaning I've found an outlier for my channel, then I can quickly create new versions of it with AI. This means the more I know, the better the AI is. And then it's sometimes worth buying a direction. So, if you have an online course or want to create online courses, still, don't just sell the knowledge, but sell a very specific direction. If I wanted to build an online business from scratch now, and I had no idea, I wouldn't know whether to launch, whether to do evergreen, whether to sell small products, whether to sell large products. And with such an online course, you can sell a small direction, and this direction can then be used by that person for their AI. These might still be online courses that work in the future. But there you only buy knowledge, so no idea, some tutorial for something, or even how to use AI, or a Canva tutorial, or a Kenwer tutorial, then it's no longer sensible to build that in the future for several reasons. So, first, as I said, knowledge is available everywhere now, including via AI. And whether what comes out of the AI is correct or not, people don't care. People have an answer first and then feel secure. And it's possible that this will continue for a year or two, that people will always believe they are on the right track. Maybe they'll realize at some point, oh, I haven't become successful through this, and then these online courses will come back. That's possible, but currently, we're in such a crazy hype phase with AI that hardly anyone buys that anymore, or almost no one. The thing is, if you want to sell info products now, then, as I said, sell a direction, so an info product, because you can run this direction with it. The second thing that no longer works so well is classic one-on-one without a system. That means if you do one-on-one coaching with a predefined, defined sequence of steps, so not the customer comes with their questions, that's called mentoring, but you provide the questions, then you have a problem with the target group nowadays, because ultimately you're also just selling knowledge. Sure, you can sell your methodology, but you attract target groups who want that methodology, and you constantly compete with them in AI. This means coaching prices themselves are currently falling. However, mentoring prices are rising at the same time, and I'll get to that later. Therefore, we're only going to look at what's not working so well here. The next thing is to focus on topics like dropshipping or affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is not a real long-term asset. This means even if you build an excellent company and earn money through affiliate marketing, you will never have your own company value. You only have company value if you build a large community or your own reach internally. But if you work like an influencer and work exclusively through affiliate deals, there are many in the nutrition sector, for example, then you are incredibly dependent on this company, and this company can change your price and thus your salary tomorrow. So, if you have contracts, of course, you have a contract for, say, half a year, but if you then generate extremely high revenue or, for example, none at all, you either lose this deal or, well, it gets cut. So, I see this very often, people who generate extremely high revenue, they are allowed to continue to participate, but they get a little less money, you know? And that's, what can you do then? So, you can't rebuild all your advertising and change sponsors just like that, right? I've had many clients who have fallen on their faces with this because they entered into an exclusive deal with too short a term. The second thing is ultimately anything to do with generic AI tips. Um, you can sell something like that as mentoring in theory, but then you really have to be cutting-edge today, I believe, as they say, right? This means AI has no idea, tomorrow there's a new model, then you have to know the model immediately, so immediately. And if you're on vacation for two or three weeks, for example, and your mentee, the person you're coaching, has already heard about the new model and has questions about it, you'll have to deal with it on vacation. AI is currently developing too quickly to build something long-term with it. On the other hand, if you have time, energy, and motivation right now, you can of course earn a lot of money with it. I've seen this in many examples by now. You can earn hundreds of thousands, millions, not exaggerating, currently, if you are the pioneer in the field of AI. But as I said, for me, it's like Bitcoin back then, there are still followers of it, but it has no long-term potential, I don't know, if I were to distinguish, if I had to choose, yes, I invest in Bitcoin or I invest in an ETF, and the biggest component is your savings rate anyway, until you're a multimillionaire, yes, then I would choose something where you know it runs stably. So, that's how I am, right? So, it runs stably for the next, I don't know, 15, 20, 30 years, very likely, and Bitcoin isn't that old yet and doesn't have that history. As I said, I don't want to start any cryptocurrency discussion here. The point is that if you choose a topic that will still be relevant in 10 years, that's definitely better than something that can change tomorrow. For example, you talk about human psychology, that probably won't change in 10 years. Or the topic of nutrition or the topic of sports, that won't change in 10 years. What changes, however, is if you create a course on how to use Canva or how to shoot an Instagram Reel today, I have videos on that too, YouTube videos, but never a course, because it can completely change tomorrow [clears throat], you know? And that's the main problem. If something can change immediately, it's not a long-term business model. So. And what remains, in my opinion, are three ways. And I've declared them with Bronze, Silver, and Gold, as I said. Yes, and Bronze is what I've already touched upon, but as Done for You, specifically Done for You AI Implementation. This means everyone is currently talking about AI, but very few people have already used it for themselves and are currently earning a lot of money with AI. And there I'm really talking about these people earning hundreds of thousands of euros on average per month, and they didn't have a business model six months ago. And I want to present to you the ways that currently exist. One, I've already explained, right? You have AI, you are always up to date with the latest technology. You know everything about AI, so you can now found a paid community, you can now do launches, you can now sell info products through it, but the stronger asset is done for you, because many people currently feel that with AI, it's all too much for them, it's all too fast, etc., etc. This means many people, and also many self-employed individuals, shy away from this topic a bit, and then there's the Done for You. First, you could analyze the company together with the person and really create various skills and co-workings etc. with this person and say, this is your workflow for content creation, this is your workflow for your emails, this is your cloud skill for XYZ, and then people really have a co-working running with, for example, Cloud, and can simply go through various projects. So, that means you don't sell the project, I don't know, co-working, what Cloud can do, but you build it for people either really one-on-one, or you do a session and discuss all the topics with them and then build it for them afterwards, implement it with them again with instructions. So, that works. The second thing, and that's even bigger, I wanted to offer that, for example. I built my own chatbot with my own design and my own knowledge. So, that means my chatbot is included in my program, right? So, I have a program called Zero Hassle System. There I explain how to earn a lot of money with social media with as little work as possible. And in it, I have my own AI, I named it Juma, Juma AI. And this AI is trained exclusively on my knowledge, but always uses the latest forms of Cloud and Open AI. This means if Cloud has now released Opus, for example, then my bot already knows and accesses Opus, so to speak. But to evaluate the knowledge and to evaluate the information of my clients, it exclusively relies on my knowledge. This means you build your own database in the background with your own knowledge, etc. And you can actually build this topic with a bot. Yes, you yourself can build your own bot with a bot. I also had it programmed with AI in part, etc. And once you can do that, you document this process, and then you could also build it for clients. And that's a lot of money, because first, you have the one-time order, and that's worth a lot to self-employed people, really a lot. I assume that if you can do this well, you'll be done with such a bot in one to two days, then there are feedback loops here and there, right? Of course, design adjustments, blablabla, but such an order is expensive. So, it costs a mid-five-figure amount. If I were to build a bot for AI for all your clients now, I would set it at least at €25,000 net plus. And now comes the thing that scales your company long-term, which is a subscription model where you always add the latest things, where you fix errors, where you always adjust the limits, and that costs between €99 and €199 per month. This means the coach who buys it from you pays a large one-time fee and pays you ongoing. And now you can say, well, but then they'll build it themselves. Definitely not. So many people don't build it themselves. This is something where you can generate brutal cash flow initially, and on the other hand, you build up an MRR. Monthly Revonthly, I don't know anymore [laughter] what MR stands for. So, a monthly recurring income. MRR is what it's called in English. But I don't know right now, Monthly Revenue Reshare, I don't know. Um, and you build that up because you have this subscription part, and most people will probably never cancel this subscription because they don't even know how much the maintenance in the background costs. This is the same model as people used to build websites. It's exactly the same model. And there are agencies that earn millions or have earned millions by building websites and still earn a lot of money from it today. And you might need an affiliated designer there too. Yes, if any clients have any extra wishes, you can perhaps hire them as freelancers and can really build a large done-for-you agency from this, and yes, now you might be thinking, wow, okay, that's already, that's already a huge thing. Yes, this skill, by the way, you can acquire in about two to four weeks. Then you have to write the offer, make a website for yourself, of course, build reach for that topic again, and then you can earn a lot of money very quickly. So, I even believe that if you implement this now, implement it optimally, and can really do it, you will earn more in half a year than I do. So, I'm too lazy, and that's also the only criticism I have here for now. The thing is, it ties up an extreme amount of your time at the beginning. [sniffle] Um, and it's also a job that you have to do all the time if you don't outsource it to employees and freelancers. That's one of the reasons why I don't want to do it. I work very little, always about 12 to 15 hours a week. I have almost no freelancers. So, I have one freelancer who takes care of various things like crossposting and stuff for me, reading comments here and there, because sometimes there are just too many. My freelancer takes care of that. I do everything else myself. And if I wanted to build this now, I would have to get into customer contact, actively sell it to people. I have the feedback loops. I might also have people who call me on Sundays and say, the bot isn't working anymore or something like that. For that, you need a freelancer who offers a support package. This means this revenue that you bring in monthly, part of it goes to the freelancer, and you have to make sure that something is left for you and something is left for the freelancer. Um, and then you can both scale it together quite well, make employees, blablabla. So, anyway, that's the Bronze level, and you can already earn a tremendous amount of money with it. But with the Silver level, I'm pretty sure you can earn even more money. And I want to present that to you now. We've already said that courses are a dime a dozen. That's why the opposite is booming right now, because info, well, is more or less free. At least people believe that info is free. Very brief discussion, so a very brief topic on that. You are probably also someone who at least partially believes that info from AI is enough to be successful. So, maybe not entirely, you're not 100% convinced, otherwise you wouldn't be watching this video. First, AI makes a lot of mistakes, and second, AI has no experience of its own. This means it looks on the internet, researches blog articles, researches something, and from that, it gives you your information. You can definitely learn basic things with it. Insights are not free on the internet. AI can't know that. If you now have someone who really has a new method to make money, no matter what, and they do it through workshops or webinars, and they have the perfect script for it, they wouldn't put that online. And AI can't know that. This means AI normally accesses basic information. It can improvise a bit, but I've tried so many times to analyze companies in various areas, to let myself be roasted, etc. It just can't. The results are never that good, and I can only say that because I've been doing nothing else for over 10 years. This means for research, for multiplication, AI is really good, but for building a serious company, yes, difficult. So, what is paid for nowadays in this Silver, I'll call it luxury mentoring. I already hinted at that. Luxury mentoring is now for people who are already earning good money and who are no longer making progress with AI. They've looked everywhere, they've optimized something here and something there, but they can't increase their conversion in the workshop. And then you come and look at the funnel of that person, for example. You look at the funnel and realize, ah, they don't have a cross-sell here, they don't have an upsell here, they only have one offer instead of two offers. The emails, the email series is perhaps too long or comes too often or is simply not well-branded, the common thread is missing, and so on. An AI can't see all of that. For that, the person entering it into the AI would have to know it. They would have to ask targeted questions and say, am I missing an offer here? Is the copywriting good enough? Have I built the top of the funnel well enough? Do I have an upsell and cross-sell here? Maybe they don't even know the terms. This means they can't ask the AI that. And that's where someone comes into play who is hired, who is further along than you, and who, of course, does something similar to what you do. This means if I now say, okay, my workshop performs on average over 2 years with 2.8% evergreen. So, those are roughly my figures. Yes, I have a 2.8% conversion on over 20 or 22,000 registrations. My participant rate is around 65 to 70%. That's one of the best rates you can achieve. But why isn't the conversion high enough? And there are hundreds of small adjustments you can make. And if I myself can't get any further, but I'm of the opinion that more can be extracted, then I would book an expert who does nothing else but optimize webinars and workshops, only that. And that's then direct luxury mentoring, because this person has the specific skill that I need now and that I assume will help me a lot, expertise. Extremely deep expertise. Perhaps hundreds of clients already, where they have case studies, where they know exactly, ah yes, here and there, we just need to adjust these points, and then I might go from 2.8% conversion to 3.2% conversion. But with 10,000 people who watch this workshop, that means €10,000 or €100,000 for me. Well, rather €100,000, right? With that many people. And that's the thing. First, this luxury mentoring attracts people who have money. It attracts people who have a specific problem right now, and it attracts people where your maximum expertise lies. So, you can actually charge a lot of money for something where you are an absolute professional. And that's the trend where things are heading. This whole general topic, I'll build an online business with you. It's super difficult. Nowadays, the most successful people are super specific. With me, for example, in my program, I target people who are already earning money. I do that through my price. Yes, my program starts at around €299 net per month. You can't necessarily afford that if you've never earned money. So. And secondly, I target people who want to work less in the future, because I'm targeting an evergreen system. Yes, I teach you how to automate social media as much as possible through various techniques. I teach you how to build an automated workshop or webinar funnel or a general freebie funnel, and how to only create content at the end of the day, and always send people to this workshop or to the freebie. There are various tactics. That's my version. With that, I exclude people. So, but I have all the people in there who currently feel like they are working too much and earning too little. So, that's the topic. And then there are also people who are only specialized in just the workshop. And maybe that would even be better to earn even more money. Look, if you have 100 people in a program that generates €300 net per month, then you're doing well. And you can find 100 people for any topic. So, even if I, I always used to have the example, I'm a sock influencer, right? I'm a shoelace, shoelace influencer, I always said that. There are definitely 100 people per month who want to make their own shoelaces. So, whether they pay €300 for it is not a business context, let's leave that aside, but there are 100, 200, 500, or 1000 people in every smallest niche who will pay for it. So, and then we are far ahead in this luxury mentoring. So, with me, for example, if someone buys mentoring from me, it's either, I want to optimize my launch, because I've launched a lot before. I want to optimize my social media, and then I usually help with Instagram, things like carousel post strategies, reel post strategies, and everything that contributes to gaining more reach and more customers. Or I build and review the funnel. These are the three things in mentoring that you can actually ask me. If I sell this, I can set a high price because the people who buy from me are already partially successful. So, exactly. So, the positive side effect of this luxury mentoring, every time you do a mentoring session, you increase your value again. First, if you do it well, you get a very good testimonial. Second, you gain experience yourself and stay up to date in the topic. And if you have all of that, then you might ask yourself, okay, that sounds intense, right? At €3,000 per month, at least €3,000 per month, and only about 3 hours of work, I could do 10 people and then I'd have €30k net per month. True. And exactly here is again the limitation with the topic. Depending on the price category you have, you can also earn six figures per month. But you can only scale, and that's the biggest disadvantage, purely through your working hours. That's why I only have one to two mentorings per month. For me, it's just extra income. For me, it's always about staying current in my topic and teaching individual people how to become brutally good in very small areas. And now comes the big clue. The golden topic currently in today's world is communities plus self-course, self-study course plus live calls. And depending on how you design it, it's a bit complicated, a bit tricky, because then it's subject to licensing due to this ZFU regulation. However, if you design it in such a way that you have a community for pure exchange for members, so you don't sell your help, you have a self-study course, and the calls are purely about updates or getting to know each other, connecting, etc., then this thing, and I don't want to give legal advice, but then this thing is legally safe. You can also have it certified by the ZFU, of course. But, I've spoken with many lawyers, it's relatively safe, because the latest court rulings on this topic indicate that the Federal Court of Justice and the courts are mainly evaluating what is stated in the contracts. And that's logical, because we have tens of thousands of cases on the topic. And if a court has to review it, and they have thousands of cases, they have to focus on some area that they can actually monitor. So, in order for this to be processed at a certain speed, it's smart to regulate it only through the contract. So, what has the person actually bought? And if it says, I'll help you one-on-one, and at the same time you have asynchronous learning, then it's out. But if nothing of that is included, and you don't promise anything contractually, then it's a cover for the courts at first. But as I said, I'm not a lawyer. This is just what I've heard, just my own opinion on it. If you need more information on this topic, get advice. Nevertheless, we're talking about this gold topic now. It's not the online course, it's not the mentoring, it's basically a small exclusive community and not a mass product. We want to have a connection here and a commitment. This means we have our community, which creates a connection. We have these update calls, and we also provide news regularly, and that creates a certain commitment and keeps it alive. That's much better than a pure online course. People simply have the feeling that they are part of something. They are part of the community, they are part of the movement, they are part of this one product or this one direction they are currently going in. And then it feels better for people to implement it, because, and this is super important, online courses have a brutally bad completion rate. So, people just don't finish them. And you might think, yes, well, I don't give a damn whether my customers finish the course, they've bought it. That's not good for you. If a course isn't watched, people won't be successful. Then people won't recommend you. Then people won't be truly satisfied. And that's also a trend right now with info products, I'm also changing that. Courses need to be a bit more snackable. Previously, you said you had videos of one hour, two hours, three hours.
And you make as many of those as possible. People don't want that anymore today. People want to be presented with information very quickly, and there, 10 to 20-minute videos are usually absolutely sufficient for a topic, and then they want to implement it. That's just how it is these days. And the reason why this is the gold standard is due to the pricing. Since it is constantly being updated, also through the calls, through the news, through the community, it is usually a subscription model or a membership model, no matter what you want to call it. And I have, until 2024, even mid-2025, if I take everything out completely, mainly or rather, 80% are still sold as courses, meaning knowledge courses or coaching for a one-time price. Today, there are only subscriptions from me. So, there is still a lifetime deal, yes, but it costs significantly more than the subscription. I think you can stay in the subscription for at least almost two years, or even two and a half. So, it's not worth it for everyone, but the lifetime deal for one or the other is interesting. That's why I introduced it. But a subscription model that generates your income reliably and predictably every month, no matter how much, no matter where you want to go. Yes, let's say you want to earn €10,000 per month at all costs, then you can achieve that very easily with such a subscription model if you get 100 to 150 people in for, I don't know, €70 to €100, and then you never have the problem that, for example, 40 people cancel at once. Yes, with me, the churn is maybe one or two members per month, no more, because most people buy an annual license from me, some buy a monthly subscription, and many of those switch to the annual license, and with the annual license, you don't have monthly churn, but annual churn, and when the annual license expires, you naturally have to look at how to do churn reduction in some way. Churn reduction means, so to speak, preventing cancellations. So, you try to make ongoing offers more attractive for these people so that as many of them as possible stay, even if the price is lower or whatever. There are different models for that. With an annual membership, you can either say you get the next annual membership for the same price, but then you are committed for two years, so you don't lose any revenue, or you offer them, you offer them, you can continue your annual membership. From now on, you can cancel monthly, or you say from now on there's a great lifetime deal for you, or a reduced subscription fee, whatever. Yes, there are 100 different design possibilities. The important thing is that you can carry out predictable actions. If you build a subscription model, it takes a while until you earn as much money as you want to earn. But once you reach that point, you will always move around that point. And with me, it was really like this back then, I launched, then nothing came. Then launched, then nothing came. And nothing doesn't mean I had no income at all, but I launched at least three times a year. As an example, let's take, I don't know, January, June, and September. Then I also offered installment payments in those launches. This means there was a lot of cash flow at once because many people bought the thing immediately. But there were also installment payments, and with that, I always bridged the launches, so to speak. Nevertheless, there was a peak upwards and then a very steep drop downwards. Yes, so you might have, let's say, €50,000 in January, in February you still had something like €20,000, in March you only had €12, and in April you only had €8, and then it went up again. I still achieved a great annual turnover, yes, but I had months where it kept going down, and I knew that if I didn't launch something new and cool, the whole thing would collapse. And then at some point, I introduced the subscription model. I was lucky. 55 people joined right at the beginning. This means I immediately had a certain baseline, and I never fell below it again. So, my subscription has always grown since then, right? Slowly and steadily. That's normal for subscriptions, but it keeps growing. And at some point, such a subscription model can generate €30,000, €50,000, €100,000 continuously every month, predictably. And that's the thing why it stands as the gold standard for me. So. But there are other reasons why it's considered the gold standard. Because it's not only a huge advantage for you in the membership model, but also for people who, for example, buy an annual subscription from you, they won't be looking for the next model after two months. And if they find your model so good that they actually implement it and achieve success with it, then a) they stay longer, but b) what's more important, they have become successful, and then they become multipliers, then people will recommend you. My [unintelligible] is always recommended outwards from within my members, and I always get new buyers in. This is called word-of-mouth. Yes, it's so powerful that if members are successful, they will talk about you. It's inevitable, if I bring someone up a level in mentoring or somewhere else, and they can suddenly do something, and someone asks at some point, "Wow, how did you manage that?" And that person answers honestly in a one-on-one and says, "I also had help." Yes, I'm not saying I'm solely responsible for it, but I had help or also help. Sebforce helped me with this and that. Then you can be almost sure that if a business owner asked, they will become your customer afterwards. And that's a snowball effect that multiplies over years. The more people you satisfy and retain through community, through update calls, and through all this other hype, yes, if you enhance that, then it's something that never really explodes, but also doesn't shrink anymore. So, I haven't had a single month yet that was worse than the month before. Not a single one. And that's pretty intense, right? With me, on top of that, there's my own AI that members can use as long as they are customers. This naturally elevates it even further because people are eventually very satisfied with this AI and work with it a lot. But that's the topic, that's the current gold standard, and you see it with almost everyone. Now you say, "But it's always been like that." No, it hasn't always been like this. This way of selling a community, self-paced courses, and live calls has been around for a long time. The difference, however, is that due to the subscription model and the current times, as information products are increasingly devalued, this type of model becomes even stronger. And yes, what has changed compared to before? Basically, mainly in the gold standard, the way of billing, meaning that you have a subscription and that you also give people the feeling that there are regular updates. With me, for example, these are regularly new workshops, or within the community itself, if something new comes up, some new hype on the market, or if a big creator, for example, has a completely new strategy for, I don't know, advertising, for their funnel, and I notice it, I post it there after I've tested it. And all these updates, it just feels alive, and it no longer feels like I'm buying an online course, that's the thing, and you can do this on a large and small scale. I've told you about the large program, but there are also business people who use it as a lower funnel, meaning they have a community. So, this whole thing costs them only €14.90. They have a live call every week, they have this, they have that, they have that. Then you can be sure that it's a funnel and that it's an entry-level product to a high-priced product. This means you can combine gold and silver, but in a different order. You build up gold so that you have predictable revenue with all the memberships, with the subscription model, and then you sell the expensive membership to these people. Within this community, you launch, and these two combinations, that's the platinum model, so to speak. And the platinum model means we have a funnel within our individual models that we build, just in reverse. This means we build our predictable income with gold. We combine it with bronze because we incorporate upsells, cross-sells, and downsells into the funnel. This would go beyond the scope here, how to do all that. But just very briefly. For the gold model, you use, for example, a workshop funnel, and on the thank you page, you can buy a small info product, a small tripwire. So, and then you combine it like that. But the big lever is, you have your gold as predictable income, and then you sell a membership within this one community. And this works fantastically. This is the platinum model. This means you have trust, you have commitment, you already have the people in your community. Either it's already a predictably high income, yes, through a few individual members, for example, you have 100 people in there who pay you €100, or and some people do it that way too. The thing costs only €15 or €20 or €30 per month. You get hundreds or thousands of people in there and then sell either a gold product or the silver product, meaning the mentoring. I hope that was clear enough, but I think most of you will have understood it. Otherwise, please comment, I can only remind you of that anyway. Please like my video. Give the podcast a five-star rating if you listen on Spotify or something. And if you're on YouTube, then definitely give the video a like, leave a comment. I really appreciate engagement. Every day, when someone rates my podcast, I get a notification about it. I really appreciate that, and I also appreciate every like on this video, every comment from you. I know that the longer I make the videos, the more comments I get, because more and more people can identify with it. But this is really for the creator themselves. For me, it's very important. I have my subscription model, I already earn well. I'm happy about everyone who joins. It's not like that. But I primarily see myself as a creator who also makes money with it because he built a very good funnel. So, I really appreciate your feedback. So, and now you basically just have to evaluate for yourself what is best for you. So, bronze can generate quick cash flow. Silver brings depth and absolute premium customers, and gold, as I said at the beginning, you can build it so that it runs without you in the long term. You can also build gold as a complete self-runner. I once had a program where I had my community, the live calls, meaning the community itself was maintained by a moderator. The live calls were done by external experts, and I only created content, and you could theoretically also outsource content creation if you have someone who can do it really well. This means you would have a paid community, and a moderator takes care of it. You have live calls, and they come, no, you have live calls with four different experts, you have to set that up once, or a freelancer coordinates it for you. The third is, you build reach, and either you do it organically, like I do, or you hire an agency to run the ads, then you have nothing more to do with the whole business once you've optimized all the levers. People always say that easily. Of course, it takes one or two years to build something like that, but once you've built it and documented it for yourself, then after one or two years, you can build a second one and a third one, and then you have three, four paid businesses, paid subscription communities. It's a lot of work, and it's not easy at all, but it's just a perspective, and they all bring you money. So, I could now, without any problems, if I wanted to and had more time, start a second YouTube channel with shorter videos. Yes, on topics like, I don't know, finance or something else, maybe still with business, but dedicated, for example, only on the topic of social media, as I used to, or only on the topic of email marketing, or only on the topic of workshops, and with a paid community that I don't have to take care of at all, I could build all that. You could also build that, and that's how it is, right? Depending on how much time you want to invest. Many people also ask me, "Why don't you do that then?" And I know, I know that many people don't get it, but I actively stop scaling because a) I've been financially free for the last few years. So, I've earned enough money that I don't have to work anymore, and b) I love my free time above all else. And c) perhaps one of the biggest and most important points. I've realized there's a sweet spot where it stops being effective in terms of working hours. This means if I work 40 hours a week, I don't achieve much more than if I only do 20 hours, because especially in the creative field, and I count online business as part of that, especially as a solopreneur, you need incredibly good ideas, and incredibly good ideas never arise from stress and working hours, but from quiet moments. This means I have to go cycling, I have to exercise, I have to go for walks, I have to go to the swimming pool, ideally alone, yes, without anyone distracting me, to develop these ideas. And if I allow myself this free time, the best ideas come out in the end. So, my sweet spot, which I've tracked over the years, is between 15 and 20 hours, and currently, I only do about 12 to 15 because I've just become a father and simply don't want to work more. And yet, it's enough for my company to continue scaling. Look at YouTube alone, I know the views are currently in the basement, but look at my Instagram channels. Yes, in one week, I create carousel and single posts for 3 weeks. This means I work maybe, I don't know, 10 hours a month for Instagram and get 1.8 million views on average per month. Yes, with all my posts and the strategy I'm using there. It's simply, it's simply great, and I'm not saying it's no work at all. Yes, you have to build a funnel, you have to build all that first. You have to build this whole evergreen thing once, but once you've built it, then it runs really well. That's it. Yes, if you liked the video, the podcast, wherever you're listening, feel free to send it to a friend, maybe also a self-employed person who needs to hear this, who might still be struggling with this topic, and we'll see and hear each other in the next podcast video. Take care, until then, eufort. Ciao.