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We’re Jason and Caroline Zook, a husband and wife team running two businesses together and trying to live out our version of a good life in the process. In this business podcast, we share with you our lessons learned about how to run a calm, sustainable business—one that is predictable, profitable AND peaceful. Join us every Thursday if you’re an online creator who wants to reach your goals without sacrificing your well-being in the process.
[00:00:00] Caroline: Welcome to Growing Steady, the show where we help online creators like you build a calm business. One that's predictable, profitable, and peaceful. We're your hosts, Jason and Caroline Zook, and we run Wandering Aimfully, an un-boring business coaching program, and Teachery, an online course platform for designers. Join us each week as we help you reach your business goals without sacrificing your well being in the process. Slow and steady is the way we do things around here, baby.
[00:00:29] Jason: Alright cinnamon rollers, that's you, let's get into the show.
[00:00:37] Caroline: Hi.
[00:00:38] Jason: Hello and welcome back to the podcast.
[00:00:40] Caroline: It's the podcast.
[00:00:41] Jason: Two things I'd like to cover here before we get started.
[00:00:43] Caroline: Please share.
[00:00:44] Jason: First of all, what's happening over there?
[00:00:47] Caroline: We have moved on from the Creami craze of early 2024 and we have...
[00:00:51] Jason: That's not true though.
[00:00:52] Caroline: Okay.
[00:00:52] Jason: I'm still getting Creami multiple days a week.
Okay.
[00:00:56] Caroline: Yeah. And we have now transitioned into the pizza phase, the sourdough pizza phase.
[00:01:01] Jason: We're now a pizza studio.
[00:01:02] Caroline: Jason is just like... listen. A couple years from now, we're going to retire from this whole online business game and just, it's going to be Jason's bakery and pizza extravaganza.
[00:01:12] Jason: But aren't you going to have fun like designing my sign and then my little like, my little character of me like holding a loaf of bread?
[00:01:18] Caroline: Your little branding with your like chef hat?
[00:01:19] Jason: I have been, I've been making sourdough for quite a while now, many years, but I like very regularly make it every single week. And not that I was getting tired of it because it is delicious and I love it and it's some of the best bread I've ever had and I'm not just trying to toot my own horn, it's very good.
[00:01:33] Caroline: I'll toot your horn.
[00:01:34] Jason: But I, I have been, we had this favorite pizza place that we've talked about on the podcast before here in Portugal. That's just down the road.
[00:01:39] Caroline: A Janela.
[00:01:39] Jason: It's called A Janela, which is just the window. It is literally a window in the side of... Yeah. In the side of like a building and there's these little benches and it's just fantastic pizza. Honestly, I think it's the best pizza I've ever had. And that's, I'm not trying to use hyperbole, a lot of hyperbole to start here. But anyway we love going there. But if like, if it's a little too windy, they close. If there's like a rain cloud, they're like, ah, we're probably not showing up. And we love that about them.
[00:02:04] Caroline: The owners love to surf, so they take off to Mexico a couple times a year, and then it's closed.
[00:02:08] Jason: So a couple times we've gone, and they're not there. And so, not that we don't want to go, because we will go, because we love going there. But I'm like, I think I can make some sourdough at home.
[00:02:16] Caroline: You want to scratch the sourdough pizza itch at home.
[00:02:19] Jason: So, bought a pizza stone, because I couldn't find a pizza steel, although I know people like pizza steel.
[00:02:23] Caroline: What's a pizza steel?
[00:02:23] Jason: It's a piece of steel instead of the stone that I have in the oven.
[00:02:26] Caroline: Okay, it's a... It's a...
[00:02:28] Jason: It's a piece of steel. I know, I got... Go ahead.
[00:02:30] Caroline: It's a piece of steel.
[00:02:31] Jason: Yeah, this is gonna get to my second point.
[00:02:32] Caroline: It's a pizza steel.
[00:02:32] Jason: This is gonna get to my second point.
[00:02:34] Caroline: Are...? Nobody has called one a pizza steel.
[00:02:37] Jason: Pizza steel?
[00:02:38] Caroline: A pizza steel. There's something there.
[00:02:40] Jason: Yeah, I can see why no one's called it that. But anyway, so right now in the oven we got the pizza stone preheating for the entire time we're podcasting. And then after we get done, I will have a delicious pizza.
[00:02:50] Caroline: Post podcast pizza.
[00:02:51] Jason: How was the first one? We literally had the first one a couple days ago. Compared to A Janela. If A Janela is a 10...
[00:02:56] Caroline: It's a nine.
[00:02:57] Jason: Wow.
[00:02:58] Caroline: Yeah. I'm not being hyperbolic as well.
[00:03:00] Jason: Yeah.
[00:03:01] Caroline: It is incredible pizza.
[00:03:02] Jason: It's really good. I mean...
[00:03:03] Caroline: I think it's because your dough is incredible.
[00:03:05] Jason: It's the sourdough, it really is.
[00:03:05] Caroline: Yeah, exactly.
[00:03:06] Jason: But I will say that the difference in, like, a home oven, and we don't have a very big or powerful oven, but like, it takes 15 minutes to cook. When we're at A Janela, it takes like 2 minutes because they've got like the 900 degree oven that they just like pop a pizza in. So I don't know, I might be upgrading our next kitchen appliance is one of those like fancy pizza ovens.
[00:03:23] Caroline: Our running joke in our house is like, my hobbies are like 2 euro paints.
[00:03:27] Jason: Yep.
[00:03:28] Caroline: And Jason's hobbies are like, piece of steel, pizza oven for a billion dollars.
[00:03:33] Jason: 3,500 euros is a good pizza oven.
[00:03:35] Caroline: 3,500 euros, Jason. Why do you have such expensive hobbies?
[00:03:40] Jason: I don't know, but aren't they, isn't this one delicious? Isn't this one delicious?
[00:03:43] Caroline: Actually, Lego is pretty expensive and that's my new hobby, so.
[00:03:45] Jason: This is true. Okay, my second thing, I just wanted to share this with everybody because.
[00:03:49] Caroline: We're not, I just want to be clear. We're not buying a 3,500 pizza...
[00:03:52] Jason: Oh, no, absolutely not. I just wanted to, I did some shopping and I just wanted to share with you.
[00:03:56] Caroline: Okay.
[00:03:57] Jason: That's how much it was. I might be able to get 10 percent off.
[00:03:59] Caroline: You should block some of those websites.
[00:04:01] Jason: Also, like, where are we going to put it? Like, I don't know where to place it. Anyway, I wanted to share the second, which is just a silly thing, which I love hearing about in other people's podcasts. This is a bit that we do, that we have done for years. And it's called the Stan Stand Bit. And so we just did it before recording this podcast. And so I wanted to share it with everybody.
[00:04:20] Caroline: So the origin of this was I was watching a YouTube video and it's this CEO of like a venture backed startup. You may have heard of it. It's called Stan.
[00:04:29] Jason: Right.
[00:04:29] Caroline: As in...
[00:04:30] Jason: Stand.
[00:04:31] Caroline: No, Jason! Like Stan, like S T A N, Stan. Okay.
[00:04:35] Jason: Yeah.
[00:04:36] Caroline: And that's what it's called. And so I was telling Jason, I was like, Hey, you might like, cause you know, we love entrepreneurial content and behind the scenes and whatever. I was like, Jason, you might like this YouTube video. It's this CEO of a company called Stan. And he was like, Stand?
[00:04:49] Jason: Stand?
[00:04:49] Caroline: And then I was like, no, Stan. And he was like, and then he kept saying Stand, the actual thing, but saying it like a question, and then I couldn't tell if he was saying Stand or Stan.
[00:04:58] Jason: Now, do you remember where this originated from before that? Like what the beginning of this was?
[00:05:02] Caroline: No, what was the very...?
[00:05:03] Jason: Pop star never stop popping?
[00:05:04] Caroline: Oh yeah, yeah.
[00:05:04] Jason: The Andy Sandberg movie where his agent is like, Andy, I've got a gig for you and you are gonna like it. And he was like, I'm sorry, what? I... Did you say are or aren't?
[00:05:14] Caroline: You're saying it like it's, I'm not gonna like it.
[00:05:16] Jason: I'm not gonna like it.
[00:05:17] Caroline: But the words you're saying.
[00:05:18] Jason: But I think you are gonna like it. And so like that just carried on. So now we do that with lots of little things.
[00:05:23] Caroline: Yes. So our running bit is...
[00:05:26] Jason: Stan and stand.
[00:05:26] Caroline: If you say a word anywhere close to the word stand, Jason and I will for three minutes go back and forth going, Stan?
[00:05:32] Jason: Stan?
[00:05:33] Caroline: Stand? Stan?
[00:05:35] Jason: It's also the Pan Pam from Step Brothers. I'm now realizing like this is a layer to this.
[00:05:38] Caroline: Yeah, so anyway, feel free to use that bit.
[00:05:40] Jason: All right. So that's a stupid thing that we wanted to share with you for no reason whatsoever. Now let's get into the reason why you probably clicked open to this podcast.
[00:05:46] Caroline: Let's actually talk about some useful things here, Jason. So we thought it would be fun to do an entire episode just based on the idea of running a coaching program and or community. That is the core of our business now, that is what WAIM Unlimited is, and you were doing some thinking about it, and you were like, I really think it kind of boils down to these four things.
[00:06:08] Jason: Yeah, and also coming off of last week's episode, talking about our lifetime pricing, also thank you to those of you who sent through questions, and if anybody, if you send through questions afterwards, you know, we're not really going to be able to answer those based on the lifetime pricing, but if you do go to podcast.wanderingaimfully.com and you submit a question, we will try to find episodes that they fit for.
[00:06:26] Caroline: About anything.
[00:06:27] Jason: Any, any business topics pizza topics, life topics, you know, whatever you want. If there's a pizza oven that you can find that's, you know, not 3,500 euros, let me know if it's great. But yeah, for this, there are kind of four pieces of running a paid coaching community. And I think this could really be any paid community, but because we run a paid coaching community, just wanted to highlight that for our coaching listeners, if there are those of you who do that.
[00:06:50] Caroline: Yeah. And as the chief caveat officer, I wanted to, at the top say, of course, there are a million different ways to run a business, run a coaching business. We're not saying this is the only way. We just know that a lot of you listening are curious about the inner workings of our business and how we kind of have it set up. So if you're a listener and you are not a. So if you're a WAIM Unlimited member and you haven't seen the inside of the business, this is our chance to kind of describe to you what are the kind of the key pillars that keep a sustainable, thriving business that continues to actually grow without us doing much intentional additional marketing. And I think a lot of that has to do with kind of going back to this idea of one offer, just very, you know, basic pillars and just trying to repeat, create repeatable systems.
[00:07:37] Jason: So the four pillars of this, and if you do want to go much deeper on these four pillars, we have a coaching session within our WAIM Unlimited program called Masterfully Managing Memberships, where we actually do, I think it's like a two hour deep dive into like everything that we do. And so the, the kind of, this is the shorter version of that. And if this is something that's really important to you, you can join WAIM Unlimited and learn more at wanderingaimfully.com/join, but our four pillars that we're going to go over here are, and these are the four crucial parts that we talked about in the title of this episode, your audience, the offer, the community, and then biannual launches. And so whatever launching would look like for you, but we kind of just wanted to break down how our coaching business works. And again, coming off of the lifetime episode, I really believe that this is a good idea for if you run a coaching business or a paid community is to think about lifetime pricing as an easier way to sell your product, because I think people are so much more inclined these days to not have one more subscription and coming to their credit card and to instead of have something they know they're going to eventually pay off and continue to get value from. And again, go back and listen to that episode last week if you want to just hear us talk more about the numbers of that coming up with your customer lifetime value equations and actually thinking through like, Oh, the lifetime scary, because I'm only ever going to get this much money from the customer. It's like, yeah, but you're always going to be on the treadmill of trying to keep a customer. So.
[00:08:55] Caroline: Yeah.
[00:08:55] Jason: Anyway, that episode talks more about that.
[00:08:57] Caroline: So let's dive into the first pillar, shall we?
[00:08:59] Jason: Let's go into audience.
[00:09:01] Caroline: Audience is crucial. And you know, this encompasses, obviously you, you are going to need to amass a group of people to add value to deliver value to in order for them to even think about upgrading to a paid offer.
[00:09:18] Jason: Absolutely. And I think for us, starting with kind of the funnel, I put it in quotes in our notes here. So our funnels.
[00:09:24] Caroline: Can be icky, but like, that's what they really are, but it's just like some people have co opted that term into like manipulation, which is not our vibe.
[00:09:32] Jason: Something. Stand?
[00:09:34] Caroline: What's my brain doing?
[00:09:35] Jason: Stand? The, I want to give kind of like our version of the funnel of how we do it, but then I also want to give a version of if we were starting tomorrow, what we would do? Because I think it's actually you know, two different pieces of, of ways of thinking about this. So our funnel is we, for the past 10 years, have written helpful content in the form of blog posts and those posts, some of them have ranked very high in Google for certain keywords, which helps us build traffic to our website, which then we have lead magnets on our site, whether that's the form of a quiz or an email signup form. And people then get on our email list. Then we send helpful emails every single week with jam packed value and then we sell our coaching program twice a year to our email list.
[00:10:17] Caroline: So when we say audience, what we're really talking about primarily is our email list.
[00:10:21] Jason: Exactly. And so I want to share that, but I know that some of you listeners are rolling your eyes because you're like, well, great. I didn't write content for 10 years. I don't have blog posts that are ranking for anything. Totally get it. And also I think we have an episode we want to record about this in the future is I think we're all seeing the shift in like, is SEO based written content actually the game anymore, or is it something else? And I think the way that we're thinking about this right now is, and again, I'm now I'm transitioning to like, what would we do if we were starting a coaching program today? You have got to choose a discovery platform.
[00:10:53] Caroline: Right.
[00:10:53] Jason: And what I mean by that is you have to create content to attract people, but that content does need to be discoverable to do a little bit of work for you because, yes, you can get on Instagram. Yes, you can get on TikTok. And those things are valuable to a degree, but I also believe that having a foundation of content that's helpful around your niche, whatever your topic is, it should be able for someone to search for that and find it.
[00:11:15] Caroline: Right. And so in your example, our discoverability tactic for many years that worked well for us was SEO, right? Because people were going to Google and they were searching for things and they were finding our helpful articles. But that's not the only pathway, right? You have YouTube search, so creating content on YouTube. We know several WAIMers who are using this as an effective method of finding new people to bring into your audience.
[00:11:39] Jason: I'll leave a link in the show notes, but also just a shout out to a WAIMer. His name is Wayne, which whenever we're doing transcripts, it always, WAIM always gets replaced with Wayne, so I see his name, but you can go to his YouTube channel, Created by Wayne. Not created by WAIM which is confusing, but he is a great example of, and I've been working with him, you know, very closely to help build this foundation of YouTube content to build his creator business. So he doesn't have any foundation articles, but his route is what we would do if we were going this route forward, which is create helpful YouTube videos every single week, having a lead magnet to get people on your email list and continuing to email every single week so that you can build up an audience. And we've watched him in the past, I think it's like six months now, get to almost 6,000 subscribers on YouTube and over a thousand subscribers on email, which to me is the best part because it's basically like saying, Hey, you got 6,000 people subscribed to you on YouTube, which is fine, but they're going to be in an ecosystem of so much stuff and algorithm based content. But you got a thousand people from just that effort to now be in a like cultivated space of the inbox, which is what we think is the most important kind of marketing vehicle you can have.
[00:12:47] Caroline: Right. So the, the real question is whether it's blog posts or it is social media content, or it is YouTube content, where are you publishing content in a place where people who are not familiar with you can find you? Right. That's like the big first question. And then the second piece that we have talked about kind of interspersed throughout this is, are you creating consistent content in order to nurture those people who come into your orbit? And how are you doing that? So is it in Wayne's case, creating the regular videos and then the email newsletter on top of that? For us, it's just been a newsletter forever. And a podcast is like an additional arm of that. We talk about this inside WAIM Unlimited in our marketing bridge session and in our content strategy session. Which is really all about how do you, you know, gather that audience in an organic way if you're not someone who wants to do paid ads?
[00:13:34] Jason: Yeah, and I do think that some of you will hear this and you'll be scared of, Oh, I don't want to start a YouTube channel. I don't want, you know, I don't want to be on camera doing those things. It's like, I totally hear you, but do you want to write blog posts that AI is not going to care about in the future? Because that's where we're going. So you kind of have to adapt to the times in some way. So you can pick a discovery platform, but I would also just say as a caveat here, a podcast is not the answer. In the beginning, if you're getting started, it can't be a podcast because podcasts are not discoverable. It is very difficult to build an audience on a podcast. So you have to go somewhere where you're, you know, essentially showing up for people. And now I would also say maybe another version of this would be to kind of become a little bit of a, just an easy way to describe this, it'd be like a micro influencer in like a subreddit, like a popular subreddit.
[00:14:20] Caroline: Sure. That could be a discover platform, but just on your point about podcasts, again, I just want to really hit this point home. That's for you creating your own podcast because people are going to have a hard time finding that as a like podcast discovery is just very limited, right? Unless you're a top podcast and you're on the homepage of the, all the apps, but a different tactic could be a podcast speaking tour, where you go get interviewed on other people's podcasts because remember, it's about discoverability, right? So you are creating content on their shows. You are getting exposed to their audience. Their audience doesn't currently know about you. They're now getting exposure to you. So I just really want to solidify that in our listeners heads. There's a difference. You need a discovery place where people can find you who have never heard about you. And then a nurture place.
[00:15:05] Jason: And I know a lot of you are going to be thinking like, Yeah, but isn't TikTok or Instagram faster? And I believe that in some respects, yes, with a huge caveat that like, but you're fighting an incredible uphill battle that every piece of content you create is basically gone in seconds. Like there's not a lot of discoverability for those platforms that lasts.
[00:15:26] Caroline: I mean, I think there is to the, like, yeah, you're kind of, there is, but you're taking a big risk because you're putting the discoverability into the hands of the algorithm. And that's, that's hit or miss, but I think what keeps people coming back to those platforms is the, the kind of slot machine idea of like, well, maybe my next piece will be viral. And then that's a huge like element of discoverability, right? But what you do is you end up getting on this hamster wheel of content creation for those platforms and every new piece that you create is like a pull of the slot machine, right? And I'm not saying that can't work. There are people who win at slot machines all the time, but it's about weighing, especially if you are a solo person, especially if you are doing a side hustle and trying to grow this creator business while balancing a full time job, you always have to be asking yourself, What is the input versus what is the output? And so I think that trying to be a little bit more strategic in some of these other discoverability platforms, is a smarter move. But I'm not saying that I wouldn't be on, you know, the social platforms, but I would be sending people back to something that is more substantial, like a newsletter.
[00:16:37] Jason: I just, I, I also, this is just my firm stance on this. And, other people will disagree. My stance is that, if I was to choose, I would choose YouTube first over a TikTok or an Instagram. I want to be a quote unquote authority in whatever the topic is that I'm coaching people on, and I want to have videos that are like slightly longer, more in depth, more helpful that build trust with people as opposed to short form, swipeable, easily to navigate past. And again, that's just my personal opinion, what I would do. That's totally up for anybody else.
[00:17:09] Caroline: I agree with you. I would create a foundation on YouTube. I would experiment with micro content and seeding clips out into the other social spaces, but I would definitely build it on a foundation of longer form.
[00:17:20] Jason: Alright, so the last thing to talk about here in the audience building part is just like the idea of your newsletter and I think where a lot of people go astray with this is they think of a newsletter as like, oh, let me just like send some thoughts out every single week and like, you know, whatever comes to mind. And if you're trying to build a paid coaching program or a paid community, it needs to be value packed and it needs to be helpful. And it also needs to be a different differentiated in some way.
[00:17:44] Caroline: So that's where I think we're, that's how I have seen the landscape shift in the past, like two to three years is, and even in our minds, I used to think of a newsletter as sort of this, .
[00:17:56] Jason: Like a diary.
[00:17:56] Caroline: Like, not even a diary, but like, yeah, this like, ancillary, kind of like, nurturing, like a, a friend who pops back in as, for, a text and says like, Hey, how you doing? Like, here's some valuable tips, you know, that type of thing. But the more that I've seen newsletters really take off, and also the media landscape getting so crowded, and people having so many options of where to get their information and their knowledge and expertise. I'm seeing that you really do have to stand out because people are not just giving away their... You really do have to stand out because people aren't just giving away their email addresses anymore. So the question there is, you know, our big shift has been treating our newsletter like a product. So we told you we did an entire episode about renaming the newsletter, Growing Steady. Now it, you know, kind of is a companion to the podcast, really thinking through what the format is going to be, making the content sort of bite sized and scannable because As much as we don't want to believe this, people's attention spans are waning. And so that's a balance, because you don't just want to like feed them candy, but at the same time, you have to accept that people are, you know, limited for time. So how are you going to combat that? And so far we've seen that effort. You know, in just anecdotal evidence really pay off. So I would be thinking about those things.
[00:19:13] Jason: And I think in, in sharing, like, what do you guys mean an anecdotally paid off? I think it's in the replies. So we haven't seen like a huge growth in subscribers because we haven't done anything to increase subscribers. So what we've seen though, is people are, more people are replying every week saying like, This is so great. The, you know, we do a predictable, profitable, peaceful, three sections breakdown and almost always now every single week, we've only been doing it for a month now, but there's like five people that will reply and be like, Oh, this section was great for me. You know, this section was great for me. And so I think like, that's a really helpful thing to think about with your newsletter is maybe there's something you can think about that again, differentiates from other people in your industry that are doing things a certain way. And make it bite sized enough for people that doesn't feel like, Oh, I'm just sharing 140 character message in here, but like something of value. I think the other thing that we have really leaned on for years to help nurture our audience and also know what they want to hear from us is surveys. And I think this is a really underutilized thing, especially in the like paid coaching, paid community space that people think about surveys as like kind of a throwaway, like, oh, like I'll just do one, like once a year or whatever. And we're pretty methodical about our surveys. I think we do two to three a year to our audience to really get engaged with like something that they're might be dealing with so that that could inform a new product that we're creating. So like when we did the Client Off-Ramp OS, we did a survey that was last year, right? Where we asked people who ran client businesses, like what were their biggest struggles of, of moving into running digital product based businesses and that info that helped inform the exact content and also like the verbiage that we used in it for the problems that they were saying that they were having. So I think surveys are really important. I think they're really important right after purchases as well. You know, we have a post purchase survey that is embedded right on the thank you page, right after someone buys. And that thing has like a 95 percent fill out rate, which is incredible in the survey world. And it gives us so much important information. If you want to go deeper, another shameless plug to our WAIM Unlimited program, we have a full coaching surveys session that breaks down our exact surveys, the questions that we have in them. And if people wanted to kind of have a robust knowledge of surveys, they could learn that.
[00:21:17] Caroline: Cool. So I think that pretty much wraps up audience. Let's move on to the second pillar, which is the offer. So what is your coaching program? What is the benefit of it? What is the outcome you're trying to get for someone? And then what are all the features and kind of how are you delivering that in different aspects?
[00:21:36] Jason: Yeah. I just want to start off by saying here, give yourself the permission. If you're getting started or you're like coaching business or your paid community business isn't like taking off right now, it took us a while to get it right. And it takes a while to figure out the positioning. It takes a while to figure out the exact thing that you're doing. But I think at the core, the most important thing that you can do is give someone a reliable thing to look forward to that makes the decision easy for them to buy. So for us, that is. un-boring monthly coaching for one thing to focus on in your business. Yep. That is the baseline of what someone can expect.
[00:22:07] Caroline: Exactly. And I think a good way to start to figure this out is to reverse engineer, what is the problem that my audience is having? What is the outcome that I want to get them to? And then what are some different, tactics and things that I feel like would help them And then balance that with the things that you actually can do sustainably, right? So, like, to kind of walk through that framework for what we did for WAIM, we thought about, like, what is the problem that we're actually trying to solve? Okay, people are really overwhelmed because creators know that they're, like, basically a jack of all trades and there's a million things to focus on in order to grow your business when you're a small or solo team. So they're overwhelmed, right? They are often burned out because they're trying to keep up with this messaging that is 99 percent of the coaching messaging out there, which is like, you got to hit these six figure milestones. You got to compare yourself to everybody else. You got to keep going harder in order to be successful. And just kind of what's, what we all know is the pace of business. You know, most business advice out there. So we were like, okay, they're burnt out. Like, how can we be an antithesis to that? And so those are the main problems. So then we reverse engineer. Okay. What are some things that we feel like would be a solution to that problem? Well, if we gave someone a really good in depth training once a month, that gave them permission to just improve one aspect of their business, what could that look like? It's like we're just focusing on marketing this month. We're just focusing on surveying your audience this month. Like it takes the overwhelm and it kind of reduces it. And meanwhile, among all of that, we're going to do it in our differentiated way. So what is your unique selling proposition? We're going to do it in a way that is un-boring. We're going to use fun stories. We're going to use gifs. We're going to make it like not some corporate training vibe.
[00:23:53] Jason: We're certainly not going to use PowerPoint. I can tell you that much.
[00:23:56] Caroline: And so that's what I want you to be thinking through is like, who's my audience? What are they struggling with? And then what are some different configurations of, because maybe it's not monthly coaching. Maybe it's, you know, Voxer support, or maybe it is co working sessions, or maybe it is one on one coaching in DMs of some sort. Like, I don't know what the answer for your specific business is. Write down a list of all these different solutions that you might be able to provide, and then ask yourself, which of these do I feel like I could do that is sustainable on a monthly basis? Because for us, we've done 50 plus coaching sessions and it doesn't feel like I'm on some hamster wheel that I can't get off of because it's something that I could do every month for the rest of my life if I really had to.
[00:24:42] Jason: Yeah, and if 50 doesn't like equate quickly to you in your mind, that's four years straight of monthly coaching sessions is what we've done.
[00:24:50] Caroline: And that's how you know that it is something that is in our kind of zone of genius because and that we enjoy doing because we can do it for that long.
[00:24:57] Jason: And I think like the big part there is like when you're trying to, again, create a paid coaching program or a paid community, you need something that someone can see as a reliable, like value that they're getting every month for the thing that they're paying for. And so for us, that is that monthly coaching session, but for you, it's really important to just find the little Vennie, little Venn diagram of what's the thing that you can create every single month that's not going to burn you out.
And then what's the thing that someone wants that they understand in their mind, that's willing, they're willing to pay for. And so it's the examples that you just gave. And so for us, it's just that, that coaching call every month, it tends to, tends to be about three hours. One hour is basically like jam packed value of learning. Another hour is kind of like, community stuff, Q& A and then behind the scenes of like what we're working on in our business so we can just share some stuff that we're not sharing anywhere else. And then typically there's just something really silly or fun just to like, again, un-boring and trying to...
[00:25:51] Caroline: And really, again, attaching that to a benefit, right, of community and not feeling alone on this business journey, and all of that.
[00:25:58] Jason: Yeah, I also just wanted to, it came to my mind while you were talking about the steps. I just wanted to give an example because, again, I think it's helpful for people to hear things that maybe just aren't ours. But like Imagine you're a designer who has worked with clients for years. You want to build this like designer community where you're coaching young designers to build their own design businesses. All I would do in that business is go, okay, great. What are the 12 steps to building a design business and career that someone needs to learn? Awesome. Those 12 steps are now a monthly co... a class that I run and I can break that down from start to finish. And then at the end of that, I now have like a 12 step roadmap that someone could go through, which kind of leads me into the next thing, which is like, what are the goodies that someone also gets in this program? Because for us, it's not just enough to just sell a monthly Zoom call, essentially, like there has to be more to it. So, you know, we have our different products that we're creating for people. We have our Notion Starter Pack, our Client Off-Ramp system.
[00:26:53] Caroline: We're not saying that you also have to include goodies for depending on the price point that you want to sell this program for, but what Jason I think is alluding to is for us selling, you know, our program sells at the moment of recording this for 2,800. And so it's like, yeah, you really want to add, you want to make sure someone's getting their money's worth even though they... we know they will because it's a lifetime pricing.
[00:27:15] Jason: Yeah. And then the last thing is to think about in the kind of offer pillar here is. Kind of the dashboard, like where is someone, a customer logging in? Where are they getting access to things? What does that look like? You know, you could use Teachery, our course platform to kind of run your own community or membership site. Shameless plug. You just literally create a course and then you have a recurring payment page and someone, a student gets access to that and every month you just add a new lesson and now that's all of your content. You could add other lessons, you could add sub lessons. It's a really easy way to do that, but there are lots of other platforms to do it. We don't actually even use Teachery for our own coaching program. And the reason is because we wanted to build a dashboard that felt unlike anything else in a coaching program. And we have built that because it has taken us a long time and nothing else looks like it, and our members tell that constantly, tell us that constantly. So these are just some of the things to think about when it comes to the off offer. Obviously, you don't have to have a super fancy dashboard, a lot of goodies, et cetera, to start. You just need a reliable thing that someone sees as valuable that they can look forward to getting every single month from you so that they know it's worth paying for.
[00:28:14] Caroline: That solves a specific problem.
[00:28:16] Jason: Exactly.
[00:28:16] Caroline: Great. Let's move on to pillar number three, which is probably obvious at this point, but let's talk about the community specifically and managing a community and some things that we've learned about that.
[00:28:27] Jason: Yeah. The question that I see most often from our own Wandering Aimfully members. Who are starting to run their own communities is what platform should I use? And my answer to this is choose the platform where you want to hang out all day. And like, I know that Discord has been on the uptrend for many years. I don't want to be in it. Every time I get into a Discord, I'm like, no, I don't like this. I don't like the term server. I just, it's like, it makes me feel weird. I don't want to be there. Like, it just...
[00:28:54] Caroline: You feel like you're on like the dark web or something.
[00:28:56] Jason: Like all the Discords I ever get into are all dark themed and I know you can change the theme, but it's all I ever see. I just don't like it. And so for us, that was Slack and Slack became this really easy thing to. You're, you're most likely going to be in a Slack community or two. And so it was a really easy choice for us because we knew we didn't want to be in a Facebook group all day long and being in that application. Something like Circle didn't exist when, when we started this, I think if we were choosing right now, if I had to choose, I would really weigh the two options of Slack versus Circle. Those would kind of be the two for me. And, and I would just kind of weigh out what makes the most sense for that. But I think Slack for us has worked out perfectly. We've been on the free plan since the beginning. The one caveat is that you lose data after 90 days. There was a year where we literally paid a developer to build an archive so that we could keep a running archive. No one ever used it. It is not worth it to pay for Slack in my mind. So that's what we use for our community. I think. In the beginning, it, it's very important for the people running the community to be in constant communication in some way, shape, or form with the people who are paying. So what that means in very specific terms is like, think about two posts you could create every week for the first year so that you're teeing up 104 questions to your community members to keep them engaged. What are thoughtful things? And if you don't know what those things are, run to ChatGPT right now and say, I'm a designer trying to help other designers learn how to grow their design business. Can you give me 104 questions to ask them? And guess what ChatGPT will do. It'll give you about 67 horrible questions and about 30 to 40 good ones that you can, you can start from. And that's really what I did in the beginning cause I'm the one who manages the community the most in Slack is I just created a list of questions that I wanted to ask and I would just put these little broadcast messages, messages out twice a week. And I would encourage people to share, you know, their thoughts or their feedback. Some of them were fun as well. Like it wasn't all just like, you know, online business question stuff. It was like, Hey, like what's a crappy thing that happened in your life this week and what's a great thing that happened? So like we can all feel like we're in a safe space together and like sharing the ups and downs.
[00:31:02] Caroline: Yeah, I think. I think as an overarching theme, the biggest thing that we've learned about running a community is, listen, if, if nobody's in there chatting, if nobody's answering questions, if it's just a ghost town and it's a bunch of spam links, people are not going to find value in that.
[00:31:18] Jason: And I think many of you listening to this have probably bought into programs and gone into a community.
[00:31:22] Caroline: Yep.
[00:31:22] Jason: And that's exactly what's happening.
[00:31:23] Caroline: Exactly. And so the overarching thing that I want to hit home is, if you go into this creating some type of coaching program or anything with a community element, you have to go into it knowing that you are going to put resources and intention behind the community. If you put that burden on your members, it's not going to happen. You have to kind of take the responsibility. And thankfully Jason has, he's like in our roles and responsibilities, he's the community manager. But if you, if you know that you can't be that person, it's worth hiring a part time community manager.
[00:31:57] Jason: I was just going to say this, you know, I think if we were starting over and maybe I was not a part of the community aspect of this, the thing that you would do is you would find a community manager.
[00:32:06] Caroline: Exactly.
[00:32:07] Jason: You would find a person who likes interacting with people all day long. Get them up to speed, build them a Notion doc of like, again, 104 questions you can ask, common answers to questions in our industry, like a survey result of all the things you've done. And like that person can kind of become a mini expert on the business and they can be there. And then the, I think the really important thing is. You set the stage of that at the beginning. So it's like, Hey, when you sign into our Slack program, you're going to see that Mildred is here and Mildred is our go to person. She's our community expert. And I'm going to be in there for the office hours that I do once a month at this time. But Mildred is your go to. And if you have any questions, ask Mildred, she'll, she'll get to me, but I need to be in my zone of genius, which is creating coaching content for you all every month. And you know, yada, yada.
[00:32:48] Caroline: Yeah. I wanted to bring that up because, again, I'm more of an introvert. And so I can't be in Slack all day long because I... It's very overwhelming for me energetically. I won't be able to do a lot of the deep work like in our business. Jason does a ton of the operational work.
[00:33:02] Jason: I'm skimming the surface all day long. I'm just skipping rocks. You're throwing a rock with a chain attached to your leg.
[00:33:11] Caroline: And I'm going down.
[00:33:12] Jason: But you're going all the way down.
[00:33:13] Caroline: All the way down. And so I can't be bobbing up to the surface every five seconds. I gotta be down there just like...
[00:33:18] Jason: Also, we're not chained. I'm just saying the chain helps to tether you to the stone.
[00:33:22] Caroline: Oh, I was with you. Okay, great. No, I think that's great.
[00:33:23] Jason: And you can unclip it at any time.
[00:33:25] Caroline: Anytime.
[00:33:25] Jason: Super easy.
[00:33:26] Caroline: It's like one of those magical chains where you just...
[00:33:27] Jason: Stand?
[00:33:28] Caroline: Stand. Stand.
[00:33:29] Jason: Stand.
[00:33:30] Caroline: Stan?
[00:33:31] Jason: Okay.
[00:33:32] Caroline: Okay. And so, but the big caveat there is we just communicate that to our community members. And also when, when we're on live coaching sessions, I am like fully present. I'm in the zone. I'm answering questions. I'm chatting. People are always welcome to DM me. Jason will be like, Hey, so and so sent you a DM. Can you look at it? Like that's, I'm never inaccessible.
[00:33:53] Jason: I think it's also become a way that if you're honest about that upfront, like we tell our members that Caroline is bad at Slack.
[00:33:59] Caroline: Yeah.
[00:34:00] Jason: And so they're like, they'll send me a message like, Hey, I know Caroline's bad at Slack. So it's like, you could do the same thing in your community. Like you could say like, Hey. I know that you know, Caroline's not good at this, but Mildred, could you pass this along to Caroline? And it just becomes a thing that like you're setting the stage for those people and it's no like bait and switch where they think you're going to be in.
[00:34:17] Caroline: Exactly. So that's what I was going to say. So the big difference too, is we all know those, like, business owners out there who sell a big game of like, get access to me and it's this big community and blah, blah, blah. And they're not in there. So it's all about setting expectations. And what I will say is if you are going to do the like, okay, Carol's bad at Slack thing, you do need a Jason or you do need a Mildred. Like what you don't want to do is be like, I'm not good at this, but I'm selling it as a value. And there's nobody there to really make it valuable. So you just, you have to treat the community aspect as something that is a core part of the value and you have to nurture it. And you have to come with a content calendar of how to keep people calm, you know, conversational. And this is another thing that I really think is an added benefit. Jason is a real Slack tidier.
[00:35:05] Jason: Yeah, yeah. Okay.
[00:35:05] Caroline: You gotta, you gotta have some tidying rules.
[00:35:07] Jason: Yeah, I also do want to, I'm just going to make a note here. What if you don't want a community? I want to come back to this question. But...
[00:35:15] Caroline: You just keyworded.
[00:35:15] Jason: I keyworded myself in our notes. Yes, keeping it tidy. I have joined multiple Slack communities over the years, and it's very clear the ones that are thriving and the ones that are dying, and the ones that just are like, there's 12 active people, even though there's a thousand people in the Slack, and when a Slack community or just any type of community isn't tidy, people don't want to be there because it gets very noisy very quickly and I have found myself leaving a Slack after like a week when someone will ask a question and then no one replies in like a threaded organization and it's just like seven replies and then the whole that whole channel is now ruined like I'm like wait what what question is being answered here? And I know it sounds so simple and like this isn't important. Like it doesn't matter. It does matter. We've had this community for five years and it is very organized because I take a lot of time to keep it organized and I just encourage people to, and I explained to them why you don't want to reply and like the main channel, you want to reply in the thread and people learn and I'm very nice about it. And then they start to realize like, Oh, that actually was really helpful because then I read all these other replies, whatever. And I know this sounds so simple, but this is stuff that people are not inherently good at when it comes to being in a community as being a good community kind of steward for everybody else. So it's my job to help say, Hey, we keep this community tidy so that everyone can have a good experience reading threads and being a part of things. Also, I'm encouraging everyone to post all the time, but just make sure that you're doing a quick scan to be like, Oh, am I, am I posting something someone's already posted? Do a quick search for that. And then also my other tip that I always give to people, and we put this in our like mini Slack guide that we've created and other things, is if you post right after you're done, scroll up, and at least in like the two posts above yours, be involved in those posts.
[00:37:01] Caroline: Yes.
[00:37:02] Jason: And because that really encourages people to not just use it as a broadcast channel, to be like, Oh, here's the thing I need. Here's the thing I need. It's like, no, I'm a part of this community. I'm also participating in this party. I'm not just showing up screaming about what I want and then leaving.
[00:37:15] Caroline: Yeah. A couple of things that you mentioned that I really want to hit home. The first one is the Slack guide. So one of the first things that people, when they get into Slack after joining our program, they get a little PDF that's like a Slack guide of like, here are the kind of like, it's nothing, you know, complicated. It's just like...
[00:37:32] Jason: Slack just does such a bad job of onboarding users. So it's helpful for us to be like, here's how you set your profile photo. Here's where you add your pronouns if you want them. Here's how you write your first post. Here's how replies work. These are the channels you can opt in or out of.
[00:37:44] Caroline: So we're helping people kind of do that. And then we're also setting the intentions for why we do certain things and kind of what the posting rules are and everything. And then on top of that, every coaching session. So another point that I really wanted to hit home that we don't have in our notes here is just about creating a culture inside your own community so that people know what is the behavior standard. And so every single coaching session, we always mentioned like our four community values before every coaching session so that all of our members know, like this, you know, we stand for inclusivity. We stand for vulnerability, like not be, you know, pretending that you have it all together. We stand for, you know, listening and also giving tactful feedback and not just like dropping into a Slack channel and being like blah blah blah that we also we do have a shameless asks channel where you can be shamelessly promotional which is great but for the most part it's about kind of giving feedback it's about receiving feedback so you're setting these intentions and expectations for your community In these different touch points throughout your program.
[00:38:46] Jason: Yeah.
[00:38:46] Caroline: And because I know that can be overwhelming for some people is like how, I mean, your job as a community, kind of like Jason was saying, steward is not to control people's behavior, but it is to guide the behavior in such a way that members feel safe and members feel like it's a good place that they want to hang out and they want to get value and they want to learn about their business.
[00:39:05] Jason: Yeah. The last thing I want to talk about in community before the question of what if you don't want a community is I, after running this community for five years, I got a little bit bored, just full transparency, of just like posting new topics for people to talk about. Again, it's been five years, so I've probably posted 500 things and it's, and I don't want to repeat them. I don't want to go back in time and just like cycle them through, even though we're getting new members twice a year and like, they've never seen those things, but I was just really bored with that. So we came up with an accountability game last year, and this was something I was kind of already doing with like a one on one thing in Slack, direct messages with people, but it just became unsustainable and also like, it just wasn't enjoyable for me after doing it for a year. And I just had, I think it was actually like two years.
[00:39:47] Caroline: Three years.
[00:39:48] Jason: For a long time, but anyway, like you, you find these things that you're just like, I don't want to do that anymore. That's what it's time. And like, you're not going to do the same thing forever, I think, in...
[00:39:56] Caroline: Which is one of our core commandments. You're like, allow yourself to evolve.
[00:39:59] Jason: Yeah. And so we came up with this accountability game and the whole idea was. I kind of believe in this simple system of set a goal for a month. Every Monday, say three things you're going to do to accomplish that goal. And then every Monday after the first Monday, reflect on the previous three, set three new ones. And we were like, okay, that's a simple thing, but like, how can we make it fun?
[00:40:18] Caroline: I'm like, yeah, the beginning of the idea, you could see very easily. Someone's like. I'll set up like a Google Sheet where everyone can check in, which is like, that's fine. That's great. That's V1. But like, can we do V un-boring?
[00:40:31] Jason: Yeah. So we kind of sat down and we just came up with like this silly way of, using like keynote slides to build game boards and using AI to help us build some images. I think even the first one, we didn't use AI. You just bought some off Creative Market.
[00:40:46] Caroline: From the... oh yeah, that's right. There's an AI.
[00:40:48] Jason: And you bought some like creative assets off of Creative Market. You built these keynote game boards essentially. And you know, we would post these things and we would kind of name the game boards every single month. Anyway, long story short, WAIM of Stones became this real big hit in our community where hundreds of people are participating. And it is, people have told us, like, it's the best thing they've ever done for accountability.
[00:41:10] Caroline: People are so excited to get these fictional gemstones. So the first year we did different stones, obviously WAIM of Stones, every month with a different theme.
[00:41:19] Jason: And they're just like, it's, you know, based on like the Marvel, like Infinity Gauntlet. Like think of those stones.
[00:41:23] Caroline: Yeah, WAIMfinity Stones is what they're collecting. And I'm telling you the way that people were just like...
[00:41:29] Jason: We even had some people trying to sling some stones.
[00:41:31] Caroline: They were trying to sling some, some you know, under the table stones because maybe they forgot to check in on the last week and they didn't get their, their stone. And so they were trying to get some like off market stones.
[00:41:43] Jason: Yeah, yeah.
[00:41:43] Caroline: And it just became this like really fun thing. So All of that is to say, by the way, there's a new theme this year. So it's, it's...
[00:41:49] Jason: Movie related. It's very fun. We're just finishing the first month and we, we did like a movie poll along with it. People really enjoyed it. We had the most participation in the first month.
[00:41:59] Caroline: It was, it was romcom stone. So that is just to say, how can you make your community different? How can you make it fun? How can you really think about how to bring people together? And maybe something as absurd as WAIM of Stones doesn't work for your brand and your culture. And that's totally fine. Think about your people. What do they want? What again, always going back to: Who is your audience and what are their problems? And what is the ultimate goal of your coaching program existing? What are you trying to help people do? And how can you create systems and programming that supports that overall goal?
[00:42:33] Jason: All right, so my final question here in the community part is: What if you don't want a community? And I think for a paid coaching program or a paid community, it's very difficult to not have this part of it and to continue to have people pay you. I think if you're charging a lower amount of money for people just to get access to the thing you create every month, then you probably don't need a community where people interact and do that. But I think if you're starting to charge, you know, 50, 100, whatever it is a month for your program, or like us, if you're charging 2,800 in total for the program, I think a community is really, really helpful. And I, I think even like the WAIM of Stones accountability game has really leapt up in value across the board of like our whole program. So it's like number one in our program is definitely the un-boring coaching. Number two is a Teachery account included. And then I think number three is our WAIM accountability game, because I think people see that as like, Oh. I'm, I'm here with a group of a hundred other people every single week. And I'm, I'm talking about the things that are going well and not well in my business and I'm seeing other people do the same. And so you actually feel like you're a part of something where it's not just a bunch of people winning on YouTube or Twitter or whatever, and it looks like, Oh, I am comparing myself to all these people who are making six and seven figures per month. No, this is just a lot of normal people who are trying to like, make work happen around having kids and a family and difficult life stuff. And it's just very normalized. And I think that's a really important part. So I just say that if you don't want a community, by all means, you don't have to have one, but I think you can create a space where a lot of people with like minded values and ideas can hang out and it becomes a really powerful part of keeping them engaged and paid and happy.
[00:44:11] Caroline: I also think if a big community of everyone overwhelms you and the idea of like keeping up with Slack and whatever, maybe consider doing small cohorts, right? Like when someone joins, you get put into a small group. You kind of have like a more mastermind set up. Think about some different ways to configure things so that your individual needs get met where you know, maybe that you're like me and you think like trying to manage a community of hundreds is going to be energy depleting, but like managing, you know, popping into these small groups of eight people or whatever is something that I know I can do sustainably. So just, yeah, we're always encouraging you. Think about, again, what you're trying to offer for your customer and then the Venny of what you feel like you can sustainably do and then try to remix as many configurations as you can come up with to try to like solve that, that puzzle.
[00:44:59] Jason: Yeah. And also again, like this is probably another shout out to doing lifetime pricing for a coaching program or a community is by doing lifetime pricing, you don't really have to like set yourself up to always do a thing a certain way. You say like, Hey, this is lifetime and like. Our community is going to adapt over time. So like it may not exist. It may change. It may be an accountability system. It may be a cohort base. Like it's not something that people have to feel like, Oh, well, this is what I'm paying for, so this is what I have to get. All right. So recapping, we have done audience, we've done your offer. We've talked about the community. And now let's finish out with the fourth crucial part, which is, biannual launches, which we could just call selling your community.
[00:45:35] Caroline: Right, because you can come up with whatever sales strategy you want. You could do, you know, evergreen all the time it's open. And you do more of like a funnel thing. You can do open and closed launches. But for us, the twice a year launches has been the most sustainable thing and then configuring it with the lifetime pricing.
[00:45:53] Jason: Yeah. I, if I, if someone was going to ask me like, Hey, what is the one way that you would recommend to sell a paid coaching program or paid community? I would say biannual launches is the way to do it.
[00:46:01] Caroline: Obviously, cause it works so well for us.
[00:46:02] Jason: Yeah. And I'm just saying that because a couple of different things. Number one, it keeps you off the constantly thinking about selling. And I think this is the thing about evergreen funnels when it relates to this stuff. It's great in theory, but show me someone who's doing it without being stressed out about it all the time. And thinking about like their paid ads and their this and that. And like, is this lead bank converting enough? And are people getting through my, you know free email course to then sign up and I'm constantly looking at the stats. It's like, we don't look at any of that stuff. We also have never done paid ads for WAIM. So we don't even have an experience with it. But what we have done are these biannual launches. So it's a Spring and a Fall enrollment. And all we have to do is provide value all year long. Consistently for both our members and for our email list. And then in the weeks leading up to our launches, we basically warm our audience up for, you know, four to six weeks leading up to a launch. Then we do a two week launch, which includes nine emails that are dedicated to the launch. You can opt out of the launch series easily in the emails. And then we close the doors and we have made enough money through that for the past couple of years. And it has been so sustainable and so effortless as we've gotten through it. And like, you have great templates now for our like launch plan in Notion where we just go, Hey, guess what? A launch is coming up next month. Click, click, click, duplicate template. And now we have like all the to dos that we need to do for the launch.
[00:47:22] Caroline: That is the best part. You want to talk about...?
[00:47:24] Jason: And we did not have that a couple of years ago. We had, Hey isn't it? Oh yeah. Our launch is coming up next week. Shouldn't we do some stuff?
[00:47:29] Caroline: Let's go dust off that Google doc somewhere in my archive and try to rewrite the sales emails. Like that was honestly how we operated for many years. I remember the first launch where we decided we're going to add some tasks in Asana, that's going to be a new thing. And then, you know, our kind of, we grew up into Notion where now it's just the most magical thing when, as Jason said, I can duplicate a launch template and I have. These are my tasks. These are the sales emails. This is the sales dashboard. This is, these are the affiliate emails that we want to send. Like everything that has to be done is already there waiting for us. We just have to schedule every task on the calendar.
[00:48:08] Jason: Yeah. So yeah, I would say that coming up with a launch plan that works for you just like picking any of these other things that are best for you is important. But again, we love kind of the twice a year thing. The most important part, though, is not necessarily setting up the project plan. It's knowing your messaging, which is the benefits that your program provides, your unique selling proposition, like why yours is different than somebody else's, and then whatever the storytelling points are. And I think whether you want to buy WAIM Unlimited or not, feel free to go to our sales page, WanderingAimfully.com/join, and I think we have really done a good job because we've experimented with so many different sales pages to really hone in on a great mix of those things. The benefits, the selling proposition, the storytelling, and then just what sets us apart, and then a little bit of social proof throughout with our mess, our members sharing testimonials, and if you're curious of like, oh well how do you get those? You ask for them in the surveys, when you send out surveys. And that's how we've always gotten new testimonials, because we survey our audience often.
[00:49:03] Caroline: Yeah, and I think, too, if I was starting over, and maybe, you know, it's easy for us to say, we've been doing this for years now, and so, as we just told you, like, we have an entire repeatable system. There's no, like, pressure for us when we're doing these twice a year launches. I can see how, when, if someone was starting out, they would go, well, If I'm comparing that to like a, an evergreen model, it feels like a lot of pressure because you're putting all of your eggs in these like two week windows twice a year, right? And so I don't know what my messaging is yet. I don't know what's going to resonate yet. So maybe you start small and that's okay too. Maybe you start with a one week window. You do your best job at writing the sales emails for what you think are going to be the benefits of your program. You even kind of do, you know, you position it as like a, a beta launch of your program, right? And you say, I'm only going to take this amount of spots. It's only going to be for one week. Here are the, the sales emails.
[00:49:55] Jason: Which is exactly what we did at the very beginning of WAIM. We said 30 spots. Only 15 people signed up, but no one knew that we didn't hit that number.
[00:50:02] Caroline: Exactly. And so you learn and you talk to those people and you survey those people and you go, what was it that really, you know, puts you over the edge to join? You start to get to know those people. Those people join your program. They get results. You use those results for social proof on your sales page the next time around. And it sort of is this flywheel of evolution and optimizing over time until you get to the place where you can confidently do biannual or however many launches you want to do a year and there's not that pressure anymore.
[00:50:29] Jason: Yeah, and I think, you know, again, these, these types of like paid community businesses, it is so much about experimenting to find what works for you. Because all of the information that we've given you just in this short less than an hour, it skims the surface of everything that we've done to build Wandering Aimfully to be a sustainable paid coaching program.
[00:50:49] Caroline: And it's 100 percent tailored to us, our personalities, our skill sets, what we like to do, what we don't like to do. And so I think that's another thing that hopefully you get about Wandering Aimfully on all of these podcast episodes is business is not one size fits all. So we hope that listening to this episode gave you a four part framework to kind of like buckets to think about and then a bunch of tactical ideas where you can be like, liked that, didn't like that, that would work for me, that would definitely not work for me, I hate that, I love that, you know, it's like, put it through the lens of your own filter and your own experience as with every single thing that comes out of our mouths.
[00:51:26] Jason: Yes, absolutely. So, Hope this was helpful for you. I hope you got some value out of it. If you are running a coaching program or a community, and you got some little nuggets of wisdom, feel free to let us know that it was helpful. Send us an email hello@WanderingAimfully.com. We always love hearing from you. And if you're looking to start your own program or community, we have a ton of resources in our WAIM Unlimited program that can help you, wanderingaimfully.com/join. Shameless plug, but there are tons of coaching sessions that can walk you through every step of this process. And I think we have a lot of experience in building a business like this, that feels sustainable. It feels easeful. It feels predictable, which is not what we could have said five years ago, but it has gotten us here and we're super happy to be running this business.
[00:52:07] Caroline: It's a calm business.
[00:52:09] Jason: All right. That's it, everybody. Thanks for tuning in.
[00:52:10] Caroline: We're going to have some post podcast pizza.
[00:52:13] Jason: Also, just to set your expectations, I have to set the dough out for an hour for it to rest.
[00:52:16] Caroline: Jason.
[00:52:17] Jason: I know, I know, but it's...
[00:52:18] Caroline: What happened?
[00:52:19] Jason: No, that was part of the plan. I'm, I've been heating up the stone.
[00:52:22] Caroline: I just heard myself, like, who's that character in Willy Wonka where she's like spoiled and she's like, I want my pizza! That's what I just heard myself as.
[00:52:29] Jason: You're gonna turn into a blueberry.
[00:52:30] Caroline: I blame you because you spoil me.
[00:52:32] Jason: Okay. Alright, bye everybody!
[00:52:33] Caroline: Bye.