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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: All right, cinnamon rollers, that's you. Let's get into the show. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. Pretty excited to talk about making a thing. Ooh, can I have that power cord real quick?
[00:00:46] Caroline: This one?
[00:00:46] Jason: This is just real time logistics here.
[00:00:49] Caroline: I was wondering where you were going with that.
[00:00:51] Jason: Oh, just taking everybody right behind the scenes as we get the podcast going.
[00:00:55] Caroline: You're excited, I'm excited.
[00:00:57] Jason: You're excited.
[00:00:58] Caroline: Because I'm doing most of the talking over here. You know what I mean?
[00:01:02] Jason: Like in this episode, you're going to do most talking?
[00:01:03] Caroline: I mean, you have a lot of thoughts. I just mean like I'm in the trenches, I can't wait to share.
[00:01:07] Jason: All right, I'm going to step away from the podcast and let Caroline take over.
[00:01:11] Caroline: No.
[00:01:11] Jason: This is now a solo podcast.
[00:01:12] Caroline: Hey, I never
[00:01:13] Jason: It's called Growing Lonely, and it's just our friend Caroline walking us through a nature trail.
[00:01:22] Caroline: How would I do it by myself? You know I can't even do an intro by myself.
[00:01:26] Jason: You can. And it has been a fan...
[00:01:30] Caroline: Podcasts are cool. Dot, dot, dot.
[00:01:32] Jason: Podcasts are cool. Dot, dot, dot.
[00:01:32] Caroline: Dot, dot, dot. That's right.
[00:01:33] Jason: All right.
[00:01:33] Caroline: Actually, I do have a banger of an intro.
[00:01:35] Jason: Nice. Let's just get right into it. No preamble needed
[00:01:39] Caroline: Wow.
[00:01:39] Jason: in this one, because we're making a new thing.
[00:01:41] Caroline: Let's get down to business.
[00:01:42] Jason: We haven't made a new thing in a while that's been worth sharing. And so, it's fun to talk about how we're doing that.
[00:01:48] Caroline: I know. I mean, as of, okay, we're recording this on a, what's today? Thursday?
[00:01:53] Jason: Yes.
[00:01:54] Caroline: As of previous Monday. So, a week and a half ago.
[00:01:58] Jason: A week and a half, there we go. Yeah.
[00:01:59] Caroline: This thing only existed in our minds.
[00:02:02] Jason: Right.
[00:02:03] Caroline: Okay. And so, we have made so much progress in a week and a half on what I think is going to be an incredible product that I was like, "Jas, I think we should hop on the mics."
[00:02:15] Jason: Mm, nice.
[00:02:16] Caroline: And just talk about our process of going from idea to offer, new offer. And in case anyone out there listening is like, "I've had this idea for a product, an e-book, a template, a course, a program." And I just have been noodling on it and it's been building up in my mind, and I'm feeling resistance and I'm feeling procrastination. And I just want this episode to be the final thing that makes them go, "Okay, you know what? It's not that hard."
[00:02:45] Jason: No.
[00:02:46] Caroline: Speaking of our last week's episode about just breaking the seal and getting on the horse or whatever all the metaphors are.
[00:02:52] Jason: Sure. Yeah.
[00:02:53] Caroline: And then also, I love sharing behind the scenes stuff. Everyone's process is different
[00:02:57] Jason: Cool.
[00:02:58] Caroline: but I love a juicy tactical, "Tell me what you're doing every day. Tell me how you approach this task of building something from nothing." So that's what I wanted to do in today's episode.
[00:03:08] Jason: Fantastic. So just to give you a little bit of an overview.
[00:03:13] Caroline: Mm-hmm.
[00:03:13] Jason: So, we are building a, what is, at its core an online course.
[00:03:17] Caroline: Yes.
[00:03:18] Jason: It is called Calm Launch Formula. And the idea is that by the end of going through the course, you will walk away with a plan of action to do your next digital product launch.
[00:03:29] Caroline: Yes.
[00:03:29] Jason: That is the simplest way to describe what's going on. Now, there are a lot of other things involved with this.
[00:03:35] Caroline: Yeah.
[00:03:36] Jason: So, we're actually going to do a live cohort, which is going to be two to three calls per week for two weeks with a group of people who join WAIM Unlimited here in two months. We open the doors. We'll talk about that later. But that's going to be the first time we've ever really gone through live with a group of people of a program. But the idea is that it'll also be just something you can go through self-paced as well if you don't want to do that part. So, I just wanted to set the stage for what the whole thing is.
[00:04:01] Caroline: Yes.
[00:04:02] Jason: And then, yeah, I think
[00:04:04] Caroline: Yeah. And then the part that you didn't mention is when we launch it, like you said, in two months inside of WAIM Unlimited and do the live cohort, it'll be wrapped into WAIM Unlimited, but we will also be selling it, like it will be available after that separately as a standalone course.
[00:04:21] Jason: This is the first thing we've had for sale.
[00:04:23] Caroline: Which is the first additional standalone course that we will have sold outside of WAIM Unlimited in years, many years.
[00:04:29] Jason: For many years. And so, it's also fun for us to go, okay, what does that look like? What does it look like to set up a sales page and some type of "evergreen funnel" for this thing so that people can find it and get in and all that stuff. So, we'll share all of that in a later episode, getting all that stuff set up
[00:04:48] Caroline: Yes.
[00:04:48] Jason: because that's its own topic in general.
[00:04:49] Caroline: And also, just a quick aside, you might be wondering why you haven't done this in years, why? And a lot of this was born out of, if you listened to our follow up episodes to the spring launch, we've made a couple of strategic shifts in our business over the past year. One of those is WAIM Unlimited is now at a price point and at a sort of messaging standpoint of targeting someone who is a little bit further along on their digital products business journey. So, solopreneur creators who have already sold a digital product, and they just want bigger launches with less stress, they want a more simple business. They want a sustainable content system. They want to run a Calm business. But it's at a price point where we know that not everyone in our audience can, yet. It's not at an accessible price point for them, right? And so, we were putting our heads together and going, okay, now we're to the point where it makes sense, where we can, we feel calm enough that we can add an additional simple product that is a standalone product that's at a lower price point. So, we're not exactly landed on what that number will be, but it will be much more accessible than the full WAIM Unlimited lifetime program. Okay?
[00:06:00] Jason: Yeah.
[00:06:01] Caroline: And so that's the strategic reasoning so that you can understand why we're making decisions we're making in our business. And then the other strategic reasoning behind it is, it makes a lot of sense, because when we sit down and we go, "What is our advice to someone who is looking to build a Calm business?" The number one keystone, if you get this right, everything else can start to be built around it is a repeatable launch of an irresistible digital product. Right?
[00:06:25] Jason: Yeah.
[00:06:25] Caroline: So, if you have the right offer, you're selling it to the right people and you're doing a launch that is formulated to be successful, that is where you can get leverage in your business to build a Calm business from there, that's where you can start to add on. Okay. The growth tactics for my audience and my content system and all of these other, my newsletter, my things like that. Right? But it all starts with, "Do I have a thing that people want? Can I open the doors for a specific amount of time? And can I make sales?" And so, we really believe that's the starting point, and that's why we want to sell this as a standalone thing to really get someone starting out on their journey that leverage to then they can graduate into WAIM Unlimited.
[00:07:02] Jason: And I think, just like the topic of this, let's just call it a course because I think it's going to be the easiest way to describe it for the rest of this episode. The topic of the course, I think, is differentiated enough where there's plenty of advice out there on how to have a six-figure launch, how to have a seven-figure launch, how to use Facebook Ads for launch? It's all of this stuff that's a little bit more reaching for the stars, and it's just
[00:07:26] Caroline: All the tactics.
[00:07:26] Jason: And it's all the things. And I remember I was listening to a podcast episode a couple weeks ago, and I was telling you, just listening to the things that someone did in their launch and how stressed out they were and all this stuff, and I'm like, this is the perfect reason why I believe the Calm Launch Formula needs to exist, is for the rest of us who, A, don't want to use Facebook Ads. There's nothing wrong with it. If you want to use Facebook Ads, please go ahead. But for those of us who don't want to play in that game, there is another option, and it may take a little bit longer to build up an audience that can bring those results. But like a good example is we have a Wandering Aimfully member who you're actually going to hear from here probably in the next month or two, who just did a $30,000 launch of their product, and it was $150 product. And that was amazing for them. That was like
[00:08:08] Caroline: Life changing.
[00:08:09] Jason: Life changing money for their business that they had just gotten started about a year ago. And that, to me, is exactly who we want to help. And that's not saying you can't have bigger launches using the Calm Launch Formula. You absolutely can. We use this exact formula and a half for years to have made millions of dollars with our businesses. And so I share all that to say, I think we've found a nice, little place that we've carved out with what this course is going to help you do as it relates to having a launch that feels repeatable, that feels calm, and doesn't feel like I have to do all the tactics under the sun to succeed.
[00:08:38] Caroline: Yup. You're not scrambling the week before launch. I wrote down what I wanted to be, what I call my, the champagne moment of the transformation you're trying to get for someone. And when someone goes through this course, the champagne moment is that moment where they realize, I've done it. I've gone through the transformation, like what would that be.
[00:08:56] Jason: Yeah.
[00:08:56] Caroline: And what I envision for someone is the week leading up to their launch, they're not scrambling, they're not anxious, they're not working into the night, and they wake up to sales on day one. That's the champagne moment that I'm trying to get somebody, because they entered the launch season calm, in control, everything's planned out. They know what they're doing. They're confident in their offer, and then it actually translates to sales, and they have never been able to see that in such a repeatable way before. So I'm so excited about this. And, of course, I'm in the trenches right now, so I'm
[00:09:32] Jason: Yeah.
[00:09:32] Caroline: Some of the evolution of some of the frameworks that we've been talking about for years, I really challenged us to take things that we have workshopped in coaching sessions before in even Build Without Burnout, which we built many years ago to this point, and elevate all of those concepts into things that are uniquely our frameworks and things that we've learned over launching twice a year for the past many, many, many years. And I finally have carved out the brain space to, you know I love building curriculums.
[00:10:04] Jason: Of course.
[00:10:05] Caroline: So I've carved out the brain space to be like, okay, what would we teach someone? How would I lead someone into how to do this effectively, whether it's writing copy for a sales page or how to think about their pre-launch content lead up? All these things, I finally have given myself permission to have the space to really hone what our unique perspective is. And pouring that into a course has been so fun.
[00:10:28] Jason: And I do want to say, before we get any further, we're 10 minutes in this episode, and the thing we have not said yet that we will talk a lot more about is, this is not just a course.
[00:10:37] Caroline: Yup.
[00:10:37] Jason: This is a done-for-you launch system
[00:10:40] Caroline: Yup.
[00:10:41] Jason: where we're going to time it, but this is just the estimation. Basically, in 10 minutes, using AI prompts, you could essentially have an entire launch plan.
[00:10:51] Caroline: Okay, you're burying the lead. You're burying the lead.
[00:10:54] Jason: I'm just saying, I want to give people a preview of, "Oh, I'm going to listen to these people talk about building a course like", "It's just 2024. What are we talking about?" Hold on a second. There's a whole twist to this. It's very interesting.
[00:11:04] Caroline: Yes.
[00:11:04] Jason: So, I want to talk more about that, but I just wanted to give people a little bit of a preview of.
[00:11:08] Caroline: A teaser.
[00:11:08] Jason: There's so much more to this course
[00:11:10] Caroline: well, actually, let's dive into that. So, before we talk about our process and how we went from nothing to where we are in the process right now.
[00:11:17] Jason: The pre-process?
[00:11:17] Caroline: The, what?
[00:11:19] Jason: The pre-process. Before we get into the process, let's talk about the pre-process.
[00:11:20] Caroline: Yeah, let's talk about the pre-process. Okay. Let's do a side tangent, which is based on what you just said, when Jason, I came up with this idea, which had been rattling around for many, many years, we were like, we got to do a thing that's just exclusively launching. We got to do a thing that's exclusively launching. And I give you a lot of credit for at the top of this year being like, I really think that it's time to double down on, we take it for granted because it's just like it's so predictable and so repeatable, our system, and we've been doing it for so long that I forget that what it was like before we did it that way, if that makes sense.
[00:11:53] Jason: And I also think a big ding, aha moment for me was
[00:11:58] Caroline: A aha moment.
[00:11:58] Jason: we've now, lol. We've now helped enough other people have their own launches where it's not just like, it works for us, which I think a lot of people, this is fine if you want to run a business that works this way, but if it only works for you, that doesn't necessarily mean it's going to work for everybody. And so we've now helped other people do these launches with our exact plan, and it has worked really well for them at various sizes and businesses. And so it's like, okay, this system does work for many other people. It doesn't just work for us.
[00:12:27] Caroline: Yeah. It's like, it's battle tested. Right? But you and I sat down, and we were like, if we're going to do this, it can't just be information. It can't just be telling people in an online course, doing videos with slides and saying, "Here's how we structure our pre-launch content. Here's how we do." And you can speak more about this, but I think we're reaching a point in the online course kind of industry maturation where there's so much free information and there's so many courses and info products and things like that, it's no longer enough to have the information. People are busy, people are exhausted, people are stressed. They need something that is going to help them make a process easier, faster or more fun.
[00:13:13] Jason: Yeah.
[00:13:14] Caroline: And thankfully, with the AI revolution that has now been more, never been like easier to deliver to a customer.
[00:13:23] Jason: Yeah. Listen, we own a course platform called Teachery. We do have access to a lot of data. It's not as big as the other course platforms, but it's plenty of data to see some trend lines. And we don't even dive deep enough to really get a clear picture, but it does just show a couple of interesting things, which is what we all already know, which is you buy a course, you go through a little bit of it, and then you don't finish it. Right? And this is, I like to think about it as like courses are the modern-day books. So, you buy a book, you're like, "Oh, I'm going to read this book." And then it just ends up going in a shelf or it stays in your Kindle or whatever. And you had intentions to read it, but you didn't get into it and something else distracted you. And I think this is, as courses have become so prevalent in our lives, and especially with the surge in course sales in the 2020, 2022 era where just everybody saw a big spike in purchases, it has now just become this thing where it's like people are collecting courses like they're collecting books, which is okay, you're going to get to it, when you get to it. But I strongly believe that we're getting to this place where it's not enough to just teach information.
[00:14:24] Caroline: Yup.
[00:14:25] Jason: And there has to be some element of, I believe this in my heart, and I don't have any supporting data to show this, I think the, again, AI surging onto the scene, it is going to be a part of our lives whether we like it or not, the ethical things of it or not. We can discuss that in a whole other time. But I think the important thing to realize is this is where consumer behavior is going, though, is people want things done for them. They don't want to have to do all the work for all the reasons that you just said. So, as we were doing our pre-process about this course, I was really on this kick of, I think we just need a more done-for-you element of this.
[00:15:00] Caroline: Yup.
[00:15:00] Jason: And the other thing that I want to say, and I think this is a big tip for anybody who's about to make any type of product that I really wanted to lean on for this one specifically is, let's be really opinionated. I don't mean to be a jerk. I just mean to say do it this way because I think in a lot of the things that we teach, we leave it open-ended for a lot of variation. And I think there's good and bad to that.
[00:15:22] Caroline: Yeah. And I think that that is well suited for WAIM Unlimited because part of the promise of WAIM Unlimited is, hey, you're going to step into, part of the differentiator of joining a business community like WAIM Unlimited is you have the space and freedom to be who you are and to run your business your way. And so I do intentionally, in our curriculums, leave a lot of space for people to adapt our methods to how they like to work their productivity, how their brain works, what their values are. We do leave it very broad in some respects so that people can, we call it unicorn power engage. You're a special unicorn. And so, you have to engage that little filter in your own brain that says, "Okay, this may not work for me in exactly this way. I'm going to adapt it to my own business." And you have to have the wisdom to be able to do that. However, in a situation that that's a community, right? That's an ongoing, we're evolving our businesses together. We're learning together. In the Calm Launch Formula, it is so much more tactical about me as the teacher, I need you to walk away with a launch plan and all of these outcomes. Right? I need you to have your sales emails written. I need you to have your sales copy on your sales page written. I need you to know what your compelling sales messaging is. I need to get you to all those outcomes or else you're not going to get the result that I sort of "promise you in this course", the transformation I'm trying to get for you. And so in order to do that, I can't leave a lot of room for indecision. And someone is coming to this course because they're already indecisive.
[00:16:59] Jason: Yeah.
[00:16:59] Caroline: They're like, "I don't know what to do. There's so many different ways I could run a launch. How many emails do I do? Do I do a live webinar? Do I not?" And so, to Jason's point, I'm so much more like, gray area Gertrude, where I'm just like, "Yes, do whatever feels right, blah, blah." And you're like
[00:17:16] Jason: I'm black and white Wilbert.
[00:17:16] Caroline: I love that, I love that.
[00:17:18] Jason: Yeah.
[00:17:18] Caroline: But we need to be black and white Wilbur.
[00:17:20] Jason: Yeah.
[00:17:20] Caroline: Did you say Wilbur?
[00:17:21] Jason: Wilbert.
[00:17:23] Caroline: Okay. Black and white Wilbert. Okay. And so, we're very clear about that in the beginning of the course is like, this is the blueprint. The reason we're giving it to you like this is not to be rigid. It's to remove the indecision so you can move forward. And, of course, we're not jerks. If you have the mental space to be like, "I want to do it this way, not that way." More power to you.
[00:17:44] Jason: Yeah.
[00:17:44] Caroline: But just so you know, when we say pick three launch events during your thing, make them this. Do these sections on your sales page. When we say that it's to remove indecision from you so that you can move forward.
[00:17:56] Jason: Great. All right. So that's our pre-process. So that's kind of like, as we were talking about the Calm Launch Formula
[00:18:01] Caroline: Wait, can I say one more thing about that?
[00:18:02] Jason: Okay, sure.
[00:18:03] Caroline: And we'll talk about this in a second. But I just wasn't explicit. So every single lesson of this course comes with a done-for-you resource and a AI prompt.
[00:18:16] Jason: Yeah, I figured we were going to talk about the whole Yeah.
[00:18:16] Caroline: We are going to get in that, but I just wanted to be clear so that is how we're doing this, which is normally in a lesson, you would get the information and then usually there's some type of action step or worksheet to implement what you learned. Right? We have that. So if you don't want to use AI and you're against it or you don't like it or it scares you or any of those things, you can totally do this course without using AI whatsoever. It's not a mandatory thing. However, if you are using ChatGPT for your business and you're using it to do more and less time, every single lesson comes with an AI prompt that I, who
[00:18:56] Jason: Prompt engineer Carol.
[00:18:57] Caroline: I love prompt engineering
[00:18:58] Jason: Yeah.
[00:18:58] Caroline: have specifically written and tested on several different business ideas to basically, when you get to the point where it's like, "Hey, now, fill out this worksheet." You can have ChatGPT do that for you. And when Jason says that I'm trying to engineer this course so that all of these AI prompts, you could go from start to finish within 10 minutes, starting from just a vague idea of...
[00:19:19] Jason: To having your full launch plan, sales page written, sales emails written, knowing when you're supposed to do everything, 10 minutes.
[00:19:27] Caroline: 10 minutes.
[00:19:27] Jason: And completely customized to you business.
[00:19:29] Caroline: We'll see if I can do it. I mean, I feel very confident that I can.
[00:19:31] Jason: I mean, it might take 15 minutes.
[00:19:32] Caroline: Okay.
[00:19:33] Jason: I think you could definitely do it. I've already seen it. We're going to talk more about that in a minute.
[00:19:35] Caroline: Okay.
[00:19:35] Jason: So that's our pre-process. Calm Launch Formula is a course with a big done-for-you element to it. It's going to be opinionated in following the exact steps so that you can walk away having a Calm Launch that's repeatable for your business. And we want you to be able to get through this course pretty quickly. So that's kind of the idea of it. We don't want to go too deep, but we are covering a lot of things. Now, let's get into the actual vision for the course and our process for making the course.
[00:20:03] Caroline: Yes. So, like I said, a week and a half ago, all we have is an idea. How do you go from idea to now? I would say I've had to put a percentage on it. We are 65%...
[00:20:16] Jason: Done.
[00:20:17] Caroline: done.
[00:20:18] Jason: Yeah.
[00:20:19] Caroline: And we can have that's pretty phenomenal.
[00:20:21] Jason: Yeah.
[00:20:21] Caroline: So here's what we did. And so again, if you have an idea right now, I want this to be the thing that you listen to, where you go, "I'm doing it next week." Or whatever, whenever you have time on your calendar, but I want you to get that idea out of your head so that you can get it out into the world and start using it to transform your business. So our process, the first thing we did, we sit down and we go, what's the vision for the course? In general, how in-depth are we going? So all those things that Jason talked about had already been in our minds, so we decided we want it to be, because we knew also the price point was going to be a more accessible price point. We're not talking in multi thousand-dollar program.
[00:21:00] Jason: No, we're talking like $200 to $300 somewhere in there.
[00:21:02] Caroline: Yes. So bite sized, that means bite sized lessons. Meaning, I didn't want someone to be like, "Oh, I have to sit down." Jason and I are naturally long winded. No, I want it to be, I'm talking five-minute lessons at most.
[00:21:14] Jason: Yeah. This is also just like a general, again, don't have so much data to back it up, but I just believe that people's attention spans are so much shorter. So five minutes or less in our lesson videos, that is a mandatory for this.
[00:21:26] Caroline: Yeah, exactly. Teach just enough information that it can shift someone's view of how they do the thing, but also
[00:21:37] Jason: Brevity.
[00:21:37] Caroline: Brevity, and all they would need to know in order to get the action step done. Very actionable. Like Jason said, opinionated blueprint. And then we wrote down what are the outcomes? And we decided within two weeks you'd be able to go through all of the lessons in the Calm Launch Formula and you would walk away with your week-by-week launch plan leading up to your launch dates. You'd have your dates picked for your launch. You would have your sales page done, from everything from the features of your offer to the benefits of your offer, the transformation. I'm telling you everything. The price of your offer that's included, everything.
[00:22:14] Jason: Yeah.
[00:22:14] Caroline: Your pre-launch content planned and some created, your during launch content created and all of that at the end of two weeks.
[00:22:22] Jason: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:22:23] Caroline: Is like the outcome that you would get.
[00:22:24] Jason: And again, it's a course. So it has, let's say 40 videos that are five minutes each. So that'll take you a couple hours to go through. Right? But it's also the dumb for you side of it. So, you could skim through all the things and then you could just use all the prompts, answer all the questions specifically for your business and your offer, and it'll build out a full plan for you. So that's where I think the magic is, it's like, yes, I can go through and get all these outcomes on my own and like learn all the principles and learn all the theory, but I could also, then this is like where we would be very different. You would watch every single video, you would take notes on every single thing. I would say, give me straight to the dessert. I'm going to copy and paste. I'm going to do the thing, I'm going to walk away and be done in like a half hour.
[00:23:03] Caroline: Totally.
[00:23:03] Jason: Which is that, I think is like a great promise for any product that's being created in 2024 and beyond, is like have a way to go through it in the theoretical, and like if someone wants to dive deep, but then also give them the, "I have a shorter attention span, please do this for me. How can you make that happen?"
[00:23:20] Caroline: Yes. So, that was kind of our vision. So we sit down, we carve out, I think it was like two hours on our calendar. We sit down and we do a big brainstorm.
[00:23:29] Jason: Yup.
[00:23:29] Caroline: I'm talking empty Notion page, blank screen. And all we start doing is doing bullets.
[00:23:34] Jason: Yup.
[00:23:34] Caroline: And luckily, we have taught our sales formula in a couple of different ways. Like, we've done a coaching session about it. We've done a couple of coaching sessions about various launching in things.
[00:23:45] Jason: Yeah. And we have the, like six years of doing it with Wandering Aimfully. We have the years before of doing it ourselves. We also have the multiple people that we've helped walk through their own launches. So we know all of the bullets. It's just, there's no organization. So it's just like dump all the bullets into this Notion page and then start to group them together.
[00:24:02] Caroline: Exactly. And that's my biggest piece of advice for someone, because if you have been experiencing resistance or procrastination, and it's all just floating around in your head, I think a huge first step is just writing down bullets that do not have to make sense, but it just gets all of those floating thoughts down.
[00:24:21] Jason: Yeah.
[00:24:21] Caroline: And then what I do love about Notion that I think is a little bit easier than like a Google Doc, is once you get those bullets, you can reorganize the blocks very easily. So Jason and I, after that initial brain dump, we thought, okay, what is the natural order of these things and how do you group them together in a way that makes sense? And that's where your modules start coming together. Right? So we were grouping things into lessons and modules, and even that organization process took probably an hour because you're really thinking through what information goes together. Sequentially, you're thinking what needs to be figured out here before you do X, Y, and Z. Right?
[00:24:59] Jason: Yeah.
[00:24:59] Caroline: So, that initial brainstorm meeting, we walked away with a organized list of the final modules and lessons.
[00:25:08] Jason: Yeah. And you basically have like a couple loose bullet points of things you want to talk about. Then it's my job as captain first drafter to come back through and basically just create what would be, "Okay, there should be a slide about this in this module." And so just write down like a thought or a bullet point. And you actually did a good amount of work for this. But then I went back through and just like, gave every thought I could think about in every single part of this.
[00:25:32] Caroline: Imagine our first meeting was like you're doing a painting and you're just sketching with a pencil the outline of everything. And Jason's coming back behind and he's blocking out the color.
[00:25:41] Jason: Just big colors. I'm blocking trees.
[00:25:42] Caroline: Just a wash of color, like, okay, here's the background color.
[00:25:45] Jason: There's no beautiful lake.
[00:25:45] Caroline: The foreground is going to be this color.
[00:25:47] Jason: There's not a happy little squirrel.
[00:25:48] Caroline: Right.
[00:25:48] Jason: None of that. I'm just like, boom, there's going to be sky. Boom, there's going to be a mountain. Boom, there's going to be grass. Maybe there's like a shape of a tree over here. That's my job.
[00:25:56] Caroline: Yup, yup, yup.
[00:25:56] Jason: So we do that, then it goes back to Caroline.
[00:25:59] Caroline: And again, if you're just one person, you can do all of this, but just do it at different times because I think it's a different mindset. Right?
[00:26:06] Jason: Yeah.
[00:26:06] Caroline: So, first little chunk of time is going to be the brain dump and the organization. Cool. Second chunk is going to be, let me flesh out the ideas a little bit more. Third chunk of then is going to be, I just went straight from, I didn't have like this slide with these bullet points or anything. That's not how I work personally. I'm a visual person. So just from the general bullet points, like top line for each lesson, then I go to slides, and this is where I live.
[00:26:32] Jason: Yes.
[00:26:33] Caroline: And on Monday of last week, we had zero slides, no design, no look and feel of the course. Luckily, it's going to fit in a lot with our new design of our website. So, I didn't have to do much thinking of what is the look of the course going to look like. And I wouldn't spend too much time on that anyway because you can always go back and design the slides. So I opted to use Canva slides this time instead of Keynote. We used Keynote for all of our coaching curriculums.
[00:27:01] Jason: I mean, we've only done 60, like super in-depth Keynote presentations in the past five years. So to move to Canva is actually a big change for us.
[00:27:11] Caroline: And the reason I did that is because, first of all, I've spent a lot of time in there recently and I have a lot of assets already in Canva. So, for our Calm Creator whiteboard, which by the way, you can get at wanderingaimfully.com/
[00:27:22] Jason: Canva.
[00:27:23] Caroline: canva.
[00:27:23] Jason: Yeah.
[00:27:23] Caroline: You can download it for free. That is our big whiteboard of planning out your Calm Creator business. I had a bunch of design assets in there, things like graphics that I use in Canva for our new branding. And so I was like, okay, just the ease of having my graphics that I can pull between Canva projects and the animations.
[00:27:41] Jason: Yeah. I think watching you work in Canva, it's also like, man, the library of illustrations and doodads and GIF stickers and like all these things are right there. And the fact that it does, it doesn't do as granular of animations that Keynote does.
[00:27:56] Caroline: Right.
[00:27:57] Jason: But this is a great example of what does someone care about? Do they care about that everything animated individually? Or do they care about the
[00:28:03] Caroline: Just movement.
[00:28:04] Jason: this looked and felt interesting, and it moved slightly.
[00:28:06] Caroline: Exactly. And so I just went right in and I created lesson by lesson based off of my Notion outline. And then I started from the very beginning, and I'm just filling in rough slides with my thoughts of what needs to be on each slide. So this is just how I personally work. I work very much like a sculptor would, where it's like, you get clay on the table, okay, and we're mixing our
[00:28:31] Jason: Then we had a painting.
[00:28:32] Caroline: Okay, okay, we'll do
[00:28:34] Jason: It's a 3D painting.
[00:28:36] Caroline: No, we'll do painting.
[00:28:36] Jason: It's a 3D painting.
[00:28:37] Caroline: No, we'll do painting. So then Jason puts color on it. So then I'm like, "Oh, I need to add my shadows and my light, whatever." Again, it's rough. It's rough. It's rough. Then my next pass is, okay, I add a little bit more detail. Then my next pass is I add leaves on the trees. Like, I'm very much that way where I need to get more and more granular each pass I go through. I'm not the person who starts at slide one and goes, let me perfect this slide and then move on to the next one. I know some people are like that, so you have to work in the way that makes sense to you. But before I knew it, I think by the end of last week, I went from zero slides to 334 slides.
[00:29:12] Jason: Which is also a nice feature of Canva that just tells you at the bottom how many slides you've created.
[00:29:14] Caroline: And you're like, "Ooh."
[00:29:15] Jason: "Ooh, that feels good."
[00:29:16] Caroline: Yeah.
[00:29:16] Jason: Yeah.
[00:29:17] Caroline: And that sounds like a lot because they're like, "Wait, guys, didn't you make this bite size, it's not so big." And totally it is. It's just I leaned on more slides than less because Jason and I both like the rapid pace of, here's a thought, here's a thought. Things are moving, things are happening just to keep people's attention. And we've always been like that in our coaching curriculums. But I am really excited. And then what happened was Jason and I sat down and said, going back to our done-for-you element, and said, okay, now we know what the lessons are. So we challenged ourselves to say every single lesson, what would be the resource, the template, the worksheet? What would be the thing that would make this lesson done for you?
[00:30:04] Jason: Yeah.
[00:30:05] Caroline: So it's like if it's a lesson about your sales email sequence, it's the email scripts that you don't have to write that you can just fill in the blanks, right?
[00:30:11] Jason: Yeah.
[00:30:11] Caroline: On top of that, we have the AI prompts that does it all for you.
[00:30:15] Jason: Yeah.
[00:30:17] Caroline: So that was really exciting to sit down and say what if it could be all of these resources and we're challenging ourselves to create all of those alongside the information.
[00:30:27] Jason: Yeah, this is where I think both of us are just so excited to, once this is finished. And so I think we're trying to have the Calm Launch Formula completely done in two weeks.
[00:30:38] Caroline: Mm-hmm.
[00:30:39] Jason: I think it's like a fair guess as of recording this, we're like the first week in July. And once it's finished, we're going to give it to our Wandering Aimfully members because they get everything that we create and we're going to have them go through it and really like put it to the test. So what I want to see is test all these done-for-you resources, see how where people get stuck and whatever. But I'm really excited is that's such a more interesting and compelling thing to put in front of "beta testers" of a course, to go, "Hey, go and do this stuff."
[00:31:06] Caroline: I know.
[00:31:06] Jason: Don't go and sit for two hours and watch a bunch of videos, and then see if something good comes out of it. It's like, go watch the videos. I want to make sure the videos are good, but I want you to go and use these done-for-you resources and tell us if at a very minimum just you getting your sales emails done through these prompts or your sales page copy written and like the design pretty much kind of decided for you. It's not going to be a design done-for-you, but it tells you like where to put things on the page. That, in itself is going to be worth every penny that this course will cost on top of everything else that's included. So I think that's where like we're both super excited about really focusing on done-for-you resources in a course. And for you listening to this, yes, it does take extra effort to think those things through. It does take extra effort to have those things actually work and be created. And I think that for some people, like if I was doing this course by myself, I would have a hard time because I'm not a prompt engineer like Caroline is. I literally just asked ChatGPT dumb questions. I'm like, "Oh, how much earwax does the human body create in a month?" Like that's what I use it for.
[00:32:08] Caroline: Mm-hmm.
[00:32:09] Jason: But you are really good at saying, "Okay, do these things and help me figure this out." And I think that's where our two brains then come together, because I'm constantly trying to push in this course to be like, well, and I was in the beginning, but I think you've fully taken over doing it all. But it's like, how can we get someone to have this thing that we're teaching done for them so that they don't have to do the hard work of doing it?
[00:32:30] Caroline: Yeah, because it's not even about doing the hard work. It's like, where do you want to use that human capital? This is the way that I see AI is I don't want AI to take over. I don't want all these prompts to take you out of your business. I don't want you to spit out some soulless website copy that you hate that just feels like a robot did it. Okay? My goal with engineering all these prompts is that I want it to take all of that mental effort and indecision and self-discipline that you used to have to use doing the thing where you go, "What even should I write in this email? What even should sections do I need on my sales page?" You're spending all of your creativity and your beautiful brain on that stuff. And so then by the time that you spend all of your self-discipline on that, you don't have enough bandwidth left to add your personality to make it really special. Right? Because you're just trying to get the thing done. So, my goal in engineering all these prompts is to allow you to use the AI to do all of the sort of bare bones thinking so you can get the clay on the table in a really strategic way, but that you can bring your humanness, your specialness, your soul, your passion, your mission for helping your customers, and you can bring that to everything because you already did sort of the grunt work.
[00:33:53] Jason: Yeah. And I think a really interesting way, at least in my brain, to illustrate the point of why creating this course as being like our first AI-powered course is so exciting for us, is if you have ever done a launch before, I can almost guarantee you have fallen into this trap where you get to the launch day and you go, "Okay, I just realized I have not posted on Instagram for two weeks. I have not emailed my list about this, I'm all over the place and today is launch day and I feel like I haven't even talked to my audience. I've been so focused on all the things." Our hope for this course is that you get to that launch day and AI has helped you do all of the mundane parts of what it takes to have a Calm launch. Then you look back and you go, "Wow. I've posted consistently on Instagram for the past few weeks. I've sent an email newsletter to my list. I have a whole bunch of real ideas that are ready to be created in the next two weeks and I have the time to do it because everything else is already done."
[00:34:48] Caroline: Yup.
[00:34:49] Jason: And I think that's the huge shift that we're trying to hopefully create for people once you get through this course. And again, it's going to be like anything else where the first time you go through this, especially if you've only done one launch before, it's not going to make everything perfect for you, but I think it's going to show you, especially if you're okay with using AI and you can see the potential of how it can save you all the time of doing the tasks that you don't need all of your creative brain to do. It then frees you up, like Caroline was saying to then go, great. Now, I have all this extra energy and time to put into the stuff that matters, where I can make it all interesting and unique and someone can be like, "Wow, I haven't seen you create so much content in such a long time and you're doing a launch, wow, this is really interesting."
[00:35:28] Caroline: Exactly. So my goal is to finesse the slides and have them done so that Monday we're ready to record all the lessons. That'll be a lot of recording for us.
[00:35:39] Jason: Yeah.
[00:35:40] Caroline: But I think we can do it. And, yeah, I just haven't been excited like this to create something in a long time because I finally feel like with this format, I'm not just taking all of our hard-earned wisdom and putting it into a slide presentation that someone may or may not go through. I feel like I'm putting all of our hard-earned wisdom into resources that it will be impossible for someone not to use this to get things done.
[00:36:05] Jason: Yeah. Can you give just a very quick, like three minutes or less imagine someone is going through the prompts that you have created right now. Just take them through start to finish like how the prompts will work. Do you understand what I'm asking for?
[00:36:21] Caroline: I don't.
[00:36:21] Jason: So it's like, okay, I'm in the offer lesson of this. And I have this prompt that basically says like I want to answer all these questions. So I have all the talk I think it's the sales dictionary that comes out of it.
[00:36:33] Caroline: Oh. No, I can tell you from start to finish to where I am.
[00:36:36] Jason: Yeah. But again, in three minutes. So don't spend too much time on it, but I just want to give people a preview of what that's going to be like and how it's going to work.
[00:36:44] Caroline: Okay, so in the module, the first module is all about defining your irresistible offer. And so quite literally from, like literally you could, in theory, you're probably going to come to this course having an idea
[00:36:56] Jason: Hopefully you will, yeah.
[00:36:57] Caroline: of who your customer is and all these things. But if you didn't, if you just said, "I want to create a photography course." You could theoretically do this entire launch plan just with that one piece of information. Okay? Because in the offer module, you start with a vague idea of what your offer is going to be. I want it to be an online course about launching. I want it to be a Notion template on how to create a content system, like whatever the thing is. And from there, we work on your offer details. So the general outline of what is the offer, what's the format, how long, et cetera, what is the outcome? From there we build out who's the perfect audience? What's the transformation you want to take them? We build out what's the point A?
[00:37:35] Jason: And when you say we build out, what you're meaning is you're copying a prompt.
[00:37:38] Caroline: Yes.
[00:37:38] Jason: You're pasting into GPT. You're literally customizing one piece of text in it.
[00:37:41] Caroline: One piece of text.
[00:37:42] Jason: And then GPT is then spitting out like, "Okay, here are all the sections of all the things. Here's your ideal audience.
[00:37:47] Caroline: Yes. And the prompts are compounding, they're generative. So when you start with your vague idea of your offer, the prompt spits out your offer details. You take the output of your offer details. And in the next lesson we build out your audience in transformation. So you paste in the offer details that build out your audience in transformation. Once we build out your audience in transformation, that output from ChatGPT, we take that and we put that into building out your offer features and benefits.
[00:38:14] Jason: Yeah.
[00:38:15] Caroline: It matches benefits to features. We take your features of your offer.
[00:38:18] Jason: Let me cut in for one second.
[00:38:19] Caroline: Yes.
[00:38:19] Jason: Just for those of you who don't live in GPT like I don't, Caroline is like, she's becoming half robot. You have a prompt, you paste it in, it outputs an answer for you that gives you a tailored thing. There's a small piece of that answer. You copy, you take the next prompt, you paste it in, then you copy what you got from the previous one and you paste it in. And then it just keeps building and it keeps learning, and it keeps evolving.
[00:38:41] Caroline: Exactly, because
[00:38:41] Jason: So I just want to make that clear because
[00:38:42] Caroline: Yes.
[00:38:42] Jason: the way that you described it, I'm like, "Wait, what's going on?"
[00:38:44] Caroline: Yes.
[00:38:44] Jason: But it's literally just copying, pasting snippets of text that are being done for you to keep evolving forward.
[00:38:50] Caroline: Because for, again, for those of you who are not familiar, the thing that you have to know about how to use GPT effectively is I, and the funny part is I think this mental shift is it's not a robot. You think of it like a person.
[00:39:03] Jason: Right.
[00:39:03] Caroline: A person, if you hired an assistant or a launch strategist to help you, you would have to give it context. You would have to train it on what your business is, what your tone of voice is, who you are, all these things, right? And so when we say we're taking the output, we're copying that, we're putting it into the new prompt, you're constantly training it on what your offer is and who it helps and why it's different and why it's unique. And you're building this knowledge base about this offer that is then getting smarter and smarter and more tailored with context to give you better and better output. So anyway, you told me three minutes, but you gave me like a... So you start with your vague idea of your offer and you go all the way to your features, your benefits, naming your offer, your value proposition, pricing your offer. The pricing prompt is, I showed it yesterday.
[00:39:54] Jason: It's very cool. It also does a really good job of setting low and high goals, which are the thing we talked about all the time.
[00:39:58] Caroline: Your low and high goals for your offer. A beta test from start to finish, your launch window, your weekly plan by plan leading up to your launch, your launch events. Then it bases based on what launch events you choose. It's not just like all robot, like there is input from you. So that it's like, I don't like to do lives or
[00:40:17] Jason: Exactly.
[00:40:18] Caroline: I really like this type of launch event. I really like this type of sales email, et cetera. Your sales copy, your sales emails. Your pre-launch content.
[00:40:27] Jason: Yeah. So anyway, that's the preview. Excited for you all to learn more about that as it comes. Again, we'll do another full episode here, probably talking about this in the next month. The other thing that I'm really excited about, and this is we sent out a survey to our list and we were asking people like what's one thing you would love to have from a launch? And one of the things we were thinking about creating, but we weren't sure if people saw it as important as we did, was this like one click launch plan where it could basically say here's the date of when I want to do my next launch. It's six months from now or whatever, or three months from now, build out a plan for me. And so you literally just tell, you put a date in and then this will spit out a full like, okay, on this exact date, you're going to do this, on this exact date, you start working on the product. On this exact date, you give it to your beta testers. This date you write your sales emails. So you see a full plan that you could just copy and paste and put on your calendar. And now you know, okay, now I know exactly when I need to do things and I can block off time to do them.
[00:41:23] Caroline: Exactly. Like I said, I think one of the most overwhelming things about launching and why people don't have effective launches is because there's so many decisions to be made and there's so much gray area in terms of, I could do it this way or that way or whatever. That is what we're trying to solve with this course is a way to give you the blueprint, but also make it feel calm, make you feel in control. Do it the way that you want to do it. Have it all done beforehand so you're not feeling in chaos and complexity as you roll into your launch window. And you just have to focus on having a really great offer and serving your customers. That's it.
[00:41:58] Jason: Yeah. All right. That is the overview of our Calm Launch Formula program that will be coming out first unveiled in our WAIM Unlimited launch, which is the end of August, will be when we open the doors for that. And just a reminder, if you are working on an offer, a thing, you can do it.
[00:42:13] Caroline: You can do it.
[00:42:13] Jason: You absolutely can. You just have to carve out time to get it done. And we know for a lot of you, time is very scarce, but the thing is only going to get made if you give it time to have it be created. Like, you can't just keep dreaming that something is going to exist. You actually have to carve out the time and make it happen.
[00:42:30] Caroline: And you got to break the seal.
[00:42:31] Jason: Yeah.
[00:42:31] Caroline: You got to take that fear of the blank page and just say, I'm going to set a timer for 30 minutes, and whatever bullets I can get on this page in 30 minutes, that's going to be so much further than where I started.
[00:42:43] Jason: Yeah. And this is the good enough era for us. And let it be the good enough era for you, too. I know that in two weeks, when we're done with this course and we look back at it, we're going to go, "This could have been better. We could have recorded this better. Oh, that video could have looked better. This prompt probably could have been tweaked." But you know what? It's good enough to get started and get it out into the world, get people using it, and six months from now or 12 months from now, then have time on the calendar to come back and tweak and redo things. But don't count yourself out of a thing existing before it even has a chance to exist and to help people and get them 95% of the way of what you want the outcomes to get for them.
[00:43:18] Caroline: Exactly.
[00:43:19] Jason: All right, that's it for this episode. I hope you enjoyed hearing about this new Calm Launch Formula. We'll be back
[00:43:24] Caroline: Behind the scenes.
[00:43:25] Jason: next week.
[00:43:26] Caroline: See you.
[00:43:26] Jason: Bye.