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We all love a success story, but behind every success story is a ton of hard work and effort. Now, we’re not saying building a business has to be excruciatingly difficult, however it’s important to acknowledge there are challenges and it’s not easy.
This week, we share a bit of a roadblock we’re running into while focusing more on our online course software Teachery. And it’s not just one roadblock, it’s multiple, very technical, confusing, and difficult roadblocks 😂😂. Which is especially tough for us because our main business (WAIM) has become such a smooth operator over the course of 5 years.
While this episode may not be full of actionable tips and takeaways, we hope it’s a relatable conversation about what it actually takes when you’re at a starting point or pivot point in your biz!
Also, when things get challenging in your business, just remember: "You get to do this."
📜 Find our 5-step business checklist at wanderingaimfully.com/checklist
***
⚙️ Give Teachery a try today for free! Looking to create online courses with a platform that lets you customize everything? Give our course software a 14-day free trial at teachery.co
💌 Want to get a weekly jolt of business inspiration and learn tactics and strategies that can help you increase profit, save time, and enjoy your work more? Sign up for our weekly email at wanderingaimfully.com/newsletter
✳️ Are you a freelancer looking to transition to digital products (selling online courses, etc)? Check out our free coaching session created just for you at wanderingaimfully.com
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 What Is It All For?, a podcast designed to help you grow your online business and pursue a spacious, satisfying life at the same time. We are your hosts, Jason and Caroline Zook, and we run, Wandering Aimfully, an unboring business coaching program. Every week, we bring you advice and conversations to return you to your most intentional self and to help you examine every aspect of your life and business by asking, What Is It All For? Thanks for listening. And now let's get into the show.
[00:00:28] Jason: And I'm here, too.
[00:00:34] Caroline: Welcome to the podcast.
[00:00:36] Jason: Hello!
[00:00:37] Caroline: It's Caroline speaking first. This never happens. Jason just told me right before we started, you're going to kick it off this week. And I absolutely flailed.
[00:00:45] Jason: No, actually, you didn't. You didn't. You know, a Carol flail would be like, hey, frienders, what are you all eating later on? Is it food? It's like that famous Mark Zuckerberg clip.
[00:01:00] Caroline: Hey, frienders.
[00:01:00] Jason: It's that famous Mark Zuckerberg clip where it's like, what's everybody doing this weekend? Hope you're making some great brisket. All right, Carol, two preamble tops here off the top for you.
[00:01:10] Caroline: What preamble tops?
[00:01:11] Jason: Number one. I have a guess that I would like you to do public here, which is very fun.
[00:01:18] Caroline: This is a surprise.
[00:01:19] Jason: Apple, the arguably the largest and most financially successful company of all time, has released a new product which, you know, it's called the Vision OS. Vision Pro runs on Vision OS. They have been doing pre orders.
[00:01:34] Caroline: Yeah.
[00:01:36] Jason: What are the total amount of orders that you think have been done so far for that product?
[00:01:40] Caroline: Oh, how many orders they've gotten so far? Oh, I'm so bad at this.
[00:01:45] Jason: I know. That's why it's fun. This is the jar of marbles guess here.
[00:01:48] Caroline: What's that game that we love to play with your grandparents? It's called...
[00:01:50] Jason: Telestration?
[00:01:52] Caroline: No, the game that we have to guess numbers.
[00:01:53] Jason: The other one. I forget what it's called. We only played it, like, twice, and we loved it, and we didn't play it again.
[00:01:58] Caroline: That was such a good cross the generations game.
[00:01:59] Jason: Anyway, don't distract here.
[00:02:02] Caroline: How many orders do I think they've had? I think that they have had.
[00:02:06] Jason: As a reminder, it's a, like, $3,200 product.
[00:02:09] Caroline: I do know that. But they also have a lot of customers.
[00:02:13] Jason: Fantastic.
[00:02:13] Caroline: 100,000 orders.
[00:02:14] Jason: Good guess.
[00:02:15] Caroline: Thank you.
[00:02:16] Jason: 200,000 orders.
[00:02:19] Caroline: I was so close in the grand scheme of things, that could have gone so off the rails for me.
[00:02:23] Jason: Basically, that's been up for, like, a month. $6.4 billion in revenue is what that amounts to.
[00:02:30] Caroline: Oh, gee.
[00:02:31] Jason: $6.4 billion.
[00:02:34] Caroline: Okay.
[00:02:34] Jason: For a big clunky thing, that is not going to be that way.
[00:02:38] Caroline: You say that but you know you're interested.
[00:02:39] Jason: Oh, no, I'm very interested. But I'm just saying, we all know this is not the version that... This is the first version of the iPhone. We're looking at the original iPhone. And in ten years, we'll look back and be like, you remember when we had these scuba goggles that we had to wear that were this?
[00:02:52] Caroline: Totally.
[00:02:53] Jason: And then like ten years from now, it's like, it's just a drop you put in your eye and then you have the whole world in your thing.
[00:02:57] Caroline: The world is scary.
[00:02:59] Jason: That's preamble top number one.
[00:03:00] Caroline: Okay.
[00:03:00] Jason: Preamble top number two is I need you to share with everybody your now top favorite zombie movie of all time.
[00:03:07] Caroline: I will share, everyone. Jason this weekend told me about a movie called Train...
[00:03:14] Jason: No.
[00:03:14] Caroline: What?
[00:03:14] Jason: That's an absolute bold faced lie.
[00:03:16] Caroline: What do you mean?
[00:03:17] Jason: I told you about this.
[00:03:18] Caroline: Sure, sure, sure. Yeah. The lie part was that he didn't just tell me about it. That was... You're right. That's a total fabrication.
[00:03:25] Jason: Because this movie has been out for seven years.
[00:03:26] Caroline: He did tell me about it a long time ago. But what I meant was this weekend you told me... You started talking about it again because we won't spoil it, but we're doing a whole thing for our accountability program. And so it was top of mind for that. And it's the movie Train to Busan, which is a South Korean zombie film that came out in 2016.
[00:03:48] Jason: Yes.
[00:03:48] Caroline: Okay. And so we watched it for classic movie night and it is a ten out of ten for me.
[00:03:53] Jason: Ten out of ten. If you love zombie movies. Honestly, I would put it up there, like, top three zombie movies of all time.
[00:03:58] Caroline: It's incredible.
[00:03:59] Jason: Also, we looked it up. There really aren't that many great zombie movies.
[00:04:03] Caroline: No. You think it's such a genre. I think because Walking Dead is a tv show and it was so popular that it kind of fills in the gaps. There's only like a real handful. And also because I had never seen this movie, another zombie movie... When did World War Z come out?
[00:04:18] Jason: I think a couple of years. I don't know.
[00:04:20] Caroline: Okay. Well, I remember distinctly watching World War Z and some of the cinematography and camera tricks that they had in that movie felt very...
[00:04:29] Jason: 2013, three years prior.
[00:04:31] Caroline: Wait, World War Z came out in 2013?
[00:04:34] Jason: Yeah.
[00:04:34] Caroline: No.
[00:04:35] Jason: Yeah.
[00:04:36] Caroline: No.
[00:04:36] Jason: Yeah.
[00:04:39] Caroline: Oh no. This is one of those time warp things where I feel like I'm 24, but I'm not. Are you sure?
[00:04:44] Jason: Yeah.
[00:04:44] Caroline: Look it up again.
[00:04:46] Jason: Refresh it. Ask Google.
[00:04:47] Caroline: Okay, well, that totally reverses what I was going to say.
[00:04:49] Jason: Because you thought that Train to Busan influenced..
[00:04:51] Caroline: I thought that Train to Busan influenced World War Z. But now I'm realizing that some of the pile up situations were very...
[00:04:57] Jason: Anyway, highly recommend. If you're a zombie movie fan, it is just a gem. It is fantastic. And you mentioned we were going through the trivia and they're remaking it and it's like...
[00:05:09] Caroline: They're basically remaking it the American version.
[00:05:11] Jason: Right.
[00:05:11] Caroline: It's going to be like Train to New York.
[00:05:12] Jason: Train to New York. That's what it was. I was trying to remember the name of it. Anyway, those are our two preamble tops. Just to share at the top here, preamble being the beginning of this, it's at the top of the episode.
[00:05:20] Caroline: I highly doubt that people meet me for the first time. This girl loves the zombie movie.
[00:05:24] Jason: Loves the disaster movie. Give her a Gerard Butler saving the world from something, she will be content.
[00:05:30] Caroline: I don't know. I have a hypothesis that something about people who are naturally prone to anxiety like things like disaster movies because it allows them to externalize their anxiety into something.
[00:05:43] Jason: Yeah, for sure.
[00:05:43] Caroline: Does that make sense?
[00:05:44] Jason: And it's also way worse than what you're going through.
[00:05:46] Caroline: Which this goes... Exactly. And this actually, maybe, this feeds into the hypothesis that I mentioned on a couple of episodes ago that talks about the interview I watched about the theory that anxiety and people who struggle with anxiety is the reason they struggle with it is because our fear senses were adapted for acute, momentary... You're getting chased by a tiger and then you're supposed to like, there's no more threat or whatever. And so people who experience anxiety, it's this unfocused threat kind of thing which we have tons of in this day and age, which makes sense that if you watch like a zombie movie, you go from this level of unfocused spidey senses to now I can just put all of my spidey senses into this thing that's happening.
[00:06:29] Jason: True.
[00:06:29] Caroline: This one focused place that's causing my anxiety and somehow that's soothing to my brain.
[00:06:34] Jason: Fantastic.
[00:06:35] Caroline: That's my theory.
[00:06:35] Jason: All right, let's move into the actual topic of this episode. Talking about things that are eased, easeful. And then the movie Easy A, which we love. It's a great movie.
[00:06:44] Caroline: That's not the title of the episode that someone worked hard on. That's not the setup for the episode that someone worked hard on.
[00:06:48] Jason: Right. But don't you agree the movie Easy A is great?
[00:06:51] Caroline: It's so great. Okay. I do love you so much sometimes. But sometimes you...
[00:06:58] Jason: Are just a big pain in the ass?
[00:06:59] Caroline: You are. But also I love you a lot because of that. Okay, let's set people up with some actual context for this episode, which is... This is, first of all, it's going to be a more of a cash episode.
[00:07:09] Jason: Yeah, let's do it.
[00:07:10] Caroline: So rather than like your tips, which was like last week, we are going to give you a little bit of just updates of what we've been up to. And the biggest theme that has emerged over the past week or so is just that, boy, you go back to the beginning of growing a business and it's just a reminder that things are hard and that's okay. And I think a lot of times we are the people who we talk a lot about bringing more ease to your business. Right. And I feel like in a lot of ways we have figured that out. But just because you're bringing more ease into your business, that doesn't necessarily mean that it should be easy all the time. And I never want people to hear us or consume our content and think that if they're encountering challenges or they feel like it's hard or it's a slog to get their business off the ground, that they're somehow doing something wrong. And so that's why I wanted to share now that we are working more on Teachery, our other business. And Teachery is kind of life cycle is much more at the beginning, even though it's been around for quite some time. But truly, and it's like...
[00:08:12] Jason: Since World War Z.
[00:08:13] Caroline: World War Z. It's been around since World War Z, which we all know was ten years ago. Definitely have a good handle on time. And it's much more in its early stages. And in those early stages, you're trying to basically get this gigantic boulder that has been stagnant to move and get momentum and you don't yet have it. And so of course that's going to feel challenging. So we wanted to just kind of share where we are with business things and remind you that it's okay if things feel effortful.
[00:08:42] Jason: Yeah. And I'm thinking about Teachery has been this side project business for the past ten years and it has only gotten like a fraction of our time. And now that it's getting, like, if the pie chart had a small sliver out of it, and that was all the time the Teachery was getting was a small sliver. And now if you reverse it, it's like Teachery is getting the big part of the pie, like, all of the goodness of the pie in our time. You forget what that's like to be in that area of, like, oh, but this thing isn't just, like, humming along nicely. And it takes me back to the beginning of WAIM, when we started WAIM in 2018, which was two years after Train to Busan, and... really everything's just going to be based on zombie movies. Yeah, go ahead.
[00:09:25] Caroline: It's ATB.
[00:09:25] Jason: Okay.
[00:09:26] Caroline: After Train to Busan.
[00:09:27] Jason: Fantastic.
[00:09:27] Caroline: So it's year two. ATB.
[00:09:28] Jason: ATTB. ATTB, as they all say. Anyway, when we were back starting WAIM, it's not that long ago, but it feels so long in the amount of time and energy that we've invested into that business that we do a little bit forget what it feels like to be in the starting ugly phase and not knowing what you're doing and you're just trying everything. Like, you're throwing all the ideas at the wall to see what sticks because you don't know exactly what you want to do. And you have ideas, you have visions, you have goals, you have other companies that look like yours, but even if you try the exact same tactics, it may not work for you. And so I think as it relates to Teachery, it's putting us back in that mindset that we were in in the 2018, 2019. Especially for me as the person who I've been working on Teachery for ten years, but it has always been just that small sliver of that pie. And now that we're trying to make that pie slice larger, I'm finding myself being like, okay there's a million things to do. Whereas before, when I only had a small pie slice of time, I'd be like, well, I mean, I'm going to work on the few things I can get done, and I just move on after. Like, that's all I'm doing.
[00:10:35] Caroline: That is a really good point. It's the more you pay attention...
[00:10:38] Jason: You could say that again, louder, into the microphone.
[00:10:41] Caroline: Babe. Light of my life. What a good point. What a good point.
[00:10:44] Jason: You heard it here first. ATTB. Caroline said I made a good point.
[00:10:49] Caroline: Your great point that you just made is once you start paying attention to something, of course you're going to start to see much more of the imperfections. I think we actually did talk about this on a previous episode where when you're painting in broad strokes, you're just like, well, that looks nice. You got some color on the canvas, but once you start kind of painting with, like, a fine, detailed brush, you start going like, oh, this doesn't really look how it's supposed to. So you start paying attention more. So I think that is a natural part of this was in our episode about making your side project your main project. I think that's a natural thing that's going to happen. But what I have come to realize this week that I think is really helpful, and I just have to keep reminding myself of it, is every time we run into these challenges, and they're plentiful, right? So whether it is our data infrastructure and our tagging system that is an absolute mess that we have to deal with on a daily basis.
[00:11:41] Jason: We didn't do it though.
[00:11:42] Caroline: We didn't do it. Uncle Jhery did it.
[00:11:43] Jason: Uncle Jhery did it.
[00:11:43] Caroline: And if you listen to our last week's episode, you'll know who Uncle Jhery is. And bless him, he did not have a strong handle on Intercom's tagging system.
[00:11:50] Jason: No, in his defense, it didn't start out as a CRM platform. It started out as a support platform.
[00:11:56] Caroline: So whether it's that or whether it's just like kind of customer issues that pop up or...
[00:12:02] Jason: Inconsistencies between data, so it's like we have data from CloudFlare, we have data from our own application, we have data from Fathom Analytics. Like, none of them match up properly.
[00:12:11] Caroline: Or whether it's every day we're having discussions about marketing ideas and strategic initiatives that we want to start this year, but then always, inevitably coming back to this idea of our ideal customer and really needing to understand who that is. So realizing gaps, like in our understanding about who Teachery serves best, and then inevitably, once we decide who that person is, we start looking at the product and going, well, does the product match up with that person? And then we start to see the cracks where we want to make the product better. And these are always going to be the issues that we're confronting. But going back to where I started in this statement, something that is helping me is reminding me this is the fun part. And I know it sounds wild because again, if you're someone who's in the thick of the beginning and you're also experiencing a lot of these challenges where you're like, who's my customer? And I'm posting content and no one's consuming it, and I have no idea what I'm doing or whatever those challenges are, it's a little bit rich to hear someone be like, trust me, this is the fun part. But I am telling you, as someone who now has gone through a business phase where I've made it to the smooth seas. I don't know. There's something about this beginning stage where everything is just sort of a Rubik's cube of what's going on. And if you can approach it, I guess, with a mentality of embracing the challenge, embracing the puzzle, I think you can just make for, like we said at the top of this episode, an easeful journey, but not an easy journey.
[00:13:36] Jason: Yeah, business is hard. It is hard to build a thing that people will buy from you on a consistent basis that doesn't suck all the hours out of your time and all of the effort out of your soul. And so I think the challenge that you have to find is, like, how do you not make that terrible? How do you make that easier and how do you make it better? And before we recorded this, we were having our weekly meeting about Teachery, and we're talking about something, and we're getting a little bit frustrated because we both have different opinions and we're opinionated people, but we have a lot of ideas and we're creative people, and we have big visions for this product. And we want you all to love it if you use it. And there's all these things that are going on. And then you have to take a moment to be like, but we get to do this.
[00:14:16] Caroline: Exactly.
[00:14:16] Jason: And I think if you're listening to this episode and you run your own business, you're doing your own thing, even if it's a side project or if it's a full time thing. And inevitably you get frustrated at certain parts of it. Something's not working right. Something broke in your tech stack. Something changed. This whole Google, Yahoo email is a little bit of a wrinkle, but these things come up all the time. You get to work on that. You get to fix those things. You get to have those challenges, as opposed to what could be the other thing, which is like working a soul sucking job that you absolutely hate that doesn't provide enough money, and it's just terrible.
[00:14:49] Caroline: Definitely.
[00:14:49] Jason: And I think that it's just a good perspective to have, especially for us. Anytime that we're starting to get into the weeds of Teachery. And boy, did Uncle Jhery leave a lot of dirty landmines around for us to step on. And they're not even, like, exploding, blow your leg off type of landmines. They're just you stepping. It's like a big pile of poop. It's just like, that's the landmine. It's like, oh, Jhery, come on, bud. You just left this like that person signed up a year ago. But how'd you know? Like, you have no data for us there.
[00:15:17] Caroline: That's a highly specific scenario that happened earlier.
[00:15:19] Jason: Exactly. My point is that it's very difficult to be in the thick of all of this. And we know that because we're now seeing it with Teachery just how hard it is to get back into the beginning of something. But if you just remind yourself that, yeah, but you could be working on something else, just absolutely that sucks the soul out of your life. Just try and reframe all of these things that you're working on that're difficult as like, okay, this is just a Rubik's cube that I have to keep flipping around to solve and figure out.
[00:15:47] Caroline: We said it wasn't going to be a tip episode, but just as the resident tip extractor.
[00:15:52] Jason: The tipper?
[00:15:52] Caroline: I do think there's some interesting and helpful things in there. So if we could extract some wisdom out of this.
[00:15:57] Jason: You want to extract some tips? That's what you said. That's what I heard in my head. I think everybody know...
[00:16:03] Caroline: I'll extract your tip.
[00:16:04] Jason: What's up? Hey, bro. Hey, my guy. I need you to back off the mic a little bit. I need you to stop doing that hand motion that you're doing. She's not doing any hand motion, but I just thought it'd be funny for everybody who's looking at this. We may have lost her.
[00:16:22] Caroline: It came out of my mouth before it...
[00:16:25] Jason: The tip? No, the tip hasn't come out yet.
[00:16:30] Caroline: No, the tips are not coming out. Okay, back to the tips.
[00:16:31] Jason: Can you please deliver this tip to our listeners?
[00:16:33] Caroline: I have multiple tips.
[00:16:34] Jason: Okay, great. We either had an immediate drop off of listeners there, or we had just like a boost. Like 1000 more people subscribed. There's only 33 of you that listen to podcast.
[00:16:45] Caroline: Some people have that Google alert...
[00:16:47] Jason: Maybe up to 40. I don't know. Could be getting crazy. I know I'm talking wild stuff.
[00:16:51] Caroline: Okay, first of all, I have to wipe the tears out of my eyes because that was very funny.
[00:16:54] Jason: Yeah, that was a good one.
[00:16:55] Caroline: And back to the tips. So the first tip would be trying to reframe the challenges as something that's fun and the feeling that you get when you're doing a puzzle. Great. Tip number two would be, like you said, adding some perspective and realizing that even though you might be encountering problems and challenges, you're going to encounter problems and challenges no matter what in your life. Aren't these the better problems and challenges that you get to do rather than something that is soul sucking? Great. I would say on top of that, I think also another thing that I find helpful, and maybe I'll write this in our newsletter coming up here soon. But something that's been helping me is reminding myself that we are on a point in Teachery's journey that has yet to unfold, and that if I can fast forward to, like, a year from now, imagine we actually do hit our Teachery goals. It'll be so fun to look back and be like, remember the beginning where it was just such a slog? What I'm saying is sometimes it is helpful to me to realize that the challenge that I'm encountering only makes the final story better.
[00:18:05] Jason: Of course.
[00:18:05] Caroline: Because the story without any adversity is not a good story.
[00:18:08] Jason: And also show me a business that we have all read about. It doesn't have to be a huge business, but that has reached a version of success that didn't have this part of the journey.
[00:18:17] Caroline: Exactly.
[00:18:18] Jason: And it doesn't happen. Anybody that you know that looks wildly successful has a track record ten years before that of a bunch of ups and downs and failures and things you don't necessarily see or they shared but you just forget about because we have the recency bias and that's all we're paying attention to.
[00:18:34] Caroline: Exactly. And I think that's what I want to be the biggest takeaway from this episode is just kind of the normalization of anyone listening who is either at the beginning of their journey and they're finding it harder than maybe they anticipated or at some sort of crucial inflection point, and they're finding it difficult as well. And just that normalization of, like, just because it's hard doesn't mean that you're doing it wrong.
[00:18:53] Jason: Yeah, I think one of the things for us that we get to cheat and use at our disposal is a thing that we have been creating for years that's helping us with the kind of roadblock of when you have so much to do, what the heck do you focus on next?
[00:19:09] Caroline: Right.
[00:19:09] Jason: So we basically took our years of figuring this out and then kind of built out what we call the unboring business roadmap that all of our WAIM members have access to. So we're basically just, like, leaning on this for ourselves.
[00:19:19] Caroline: Yeah. It's like I've never felt more connected to the pain point that WAIM Unlimited solves than I am right now.
[00:19:25] Jason: Exactly.
[00:19:25] Caroline: Because it reminds me of that feeling in online business where you see all these different puzzle pieces played out before you, where you're like, is it my marketing? Is it my website? Is it my messaging? Am I targeting the wrong person? Is it my pricing? Am I not competitive enough with my other competitors? Do I not have a unique enough approach to this process that I'm trying to teach? Is my content not...? Like, all these different things. Am I not on the right social platforms? Blah, blah, blah. And you just suddenly go, okay, there's a million different things that I could be doing and spending my time on to boost my business. What in the world do I focus on that's going to give me the best results for the least amount of effort, the highest lift, or whatever they say?
[00:20:11] Jason: Yeah, sure.
[00:20:11] Caroline: And we're experiencing that ourselves. And it's great to be able to go back to the unboring business roadmap and go, oh, yeah, okay. It actually does apply here, starting with the foundation, starting with your audience, making sure you have goals, making sure you have processes, then tightening up your product to match that ideal audience. Then once you figure out your offer and you're testing your pricing, we've laid it out already. And so it's kind of fun to be able to almost feel like we're being coached by our former selves.
[00:20:40] Jason: Yeah. And if you are not a WAIM member, you don't have access to that. We have a simplified version of it that's still pretty in-depth at wanderingaimfully.com/checklist, which is basically a version of the roadmap without all of the coaching sessions, all of the workbooks, all of the resources. But it's a version of kind of the five steps that the roadmap goes through in intimate detail. This is kind of like a surface level. We call this like a little snorkel. And then the roadmap is our scuba for our members. But you can find that at wanderingaimfully.com/checklist. I'll be sure to put a note in the description with a link to that so you can check that out.
[00:21:14] Caroline: Yeah. And I think kind of on that point, something that I did realize in our meeting today, for example, is what happens when you are confronted with things that feel challenging. I feel like you often default back to your most comfortable thing in order to kind of create a salve for that discomfort. So we're in this meeting. We're talking about marketing and who we want to target and how we want to do outreach. And then suddenly the conversation turns to, well, in order to really meet those people where they are, we need to improve the product in this, that and the other ways. And I just knew the second we started talking about it, I was like, this is our biggest booby trap that we always fall into. And we even set the intention this year. We said to ourselves, we're not going to focus on product. We're going to focus on marketing. Like, the product is solid. It does what it needs to do.
[00:22:08] Jason: Yeah, clearly it's making $10,000 a month.
[00:22:11] Caroline: Exactly.
[00:22:12] Jason: It's not doing nothing. And it's easy for you to maybe hear that and be like, well, guys, why are you complaining? The problem is because the revenue is going down and people are canceling at a higher rate than they ever have before. So we're going in the wrong direction. And I think that that's just like with the times and the positioning of the product, who the product has been for, how we've been marketing it, which has been nonexistent. All of those things are kind of wearing off. And so that is to share that it is nice, it's making $10,000 a month, but the revenue and the customers are going in the wrong direction at a trajectory that would leave us not in a good place a year from now. So we already like, okay, we have to do something to...
[00:22:46] Caroline: Exactly.
[00:22:46] Jason: Right the ship.
[00:22:47] Caroline: And that's what we're doing. But we were having this conversation and we're sitting there and we're talking about, and we're like, okay, well, we need to do X, Y and Z to the product in order to make sure that it has these bells and whistles so that it's really attractive to this ideal customer. And I kind of caught us and was like, we're doing the thing. We're doing the thing we always do where we're uncomfortable about marketing because we haven't done it for so long with this business and we're just not sure what it looks like yet. And so rather than try to figure that out, we go back to what we know, which is product development and design and building a product and just creating. Right. Because that is where we're so comfortable. And I share that because I know a lot of you listening can probably relate to whatever the piece of your business is that you're the least comfortable with. You're going to encounter moments where you know, you need to spend time on that thing, and I bet you you're going to fall back and default to the thing that you find most comfortable. So whether it's, you know, you need to improve your product, but maybe the tech and the creation isn't your most comfortable. So instead you just start writing blog posts, right? Or you know that you need to go work on your email marketing structure and your tagging and make sure all your forms are right, but you don't know how to use it. And so that's really uncomfortable. So you're just going to create social media graphics. And I think it's worth being aware of those areas that you tend to default back to when you encounter some type of resistance or difficulty in your business.
[00:24:16] Jason: Yeah, I think the creator's dilemma is always looking for the known outcomes when we're presented with unknown problems. So it's like, well, I know I need to get more customers in the door and I know the ways there are to do that, but I don't know how those are going to work out and I don't know if that effort is going to be worth it. So that's unknown. I'm going to go to the things that I know how to do, which is like, well, I know my course videos need to be improved. I haven't done those in like five years. They're the same. I should go rerecord all of those.
[00:24:45] Caroline: Right.
[00:24:45] Jason: And it's like, yeah, but is anybody really complaining about those? Is anybody actually saying those things? And I think there is a little bit of a small caveat here. When it comes to a piece of software versus a digital product, it's easier to update a digital product. It's very simple to know that, yeah, if this is built around a platform so you have a Canva course, Canva is going to make interface changes that you need to update what your videos look like to reflect those things. But for software, it is a little bit of like you have opinions as the software creators that you want to put into the software. So it stands out from other pieces of software, but then you also have natural upgrades that need to happen to stay with the times of how things are being built. I just say all that because I think as a creator, whether it's software, whether it's digital products, whatever the thing is, it's easy to fall back on the like, well, but I know if we spend time on the product, I'll see new features come out and that'll make me feel good. I don't know if we spend time on marketing, if actually we will have people sign up and we will make money.
[00:25:43] Caroline: Yeah, I think that's a good point. It's a control thing too, right? Where it's like you are spending time on something you can control versus something you can't control, which oftentimes marketing, you can't. It's an experiment. And just to close the loop on that. What we came to, we recognized that this was happening where we were like, okay, we're doing it again, where we're deciding that all of our problems are going to be solved if we could just get the product perfect, and we don't want to fall into that trap again. So what do we do? And we decided that we have this new direction that we want to take for targeting a specific segment of customers. Some might call that a niche. And we want to reach out to 50 to 100 of those types of business owners and hopefully get them into a free trial or just have their feedback or we don't know what that looks like yet, but basically being able to get opinions from those people, and if enough people are telling us, hey, it doesn't have X, Y, and Z, or, hey, this is what I didn't like about the product. And those things align with where we want to take the product in the future, then we will shift from marketing back to product.
[00:26:51] Jason: Right.
[00:26:51] Caroline: And so the idea with that, setting that parameter for ourselves is to not just make assumptions that give us permission to default back to what's easier for us, but to actually go out there into the wild unknown of marketing and to really talk to potential customers and hear it from them. Now, going back to what Jason was saying, that is a caveat, which is that we know we do want to take the platform there eventually, but it's just a matter of prioritization and going. We can't spend six months focusing on making the product better. As our user base continues to dwindle, we really have to make an effort to focus on marketing and building back up our customer base so that we will have the resources to then pour energy into the product.
[00:27:34] Jason: Yeah. The last thing I wanted to share in this episode was just this idea of, like, from the outside looking in, projects, businesses, things can look easy, but you may not actually see the effort behind it. And for those of you who maybe have never heard me talk about, I wrote my first book called Creativity For Sale that Caroline came up with the title with. And the idea was I wanted to get sponsors on every page of the book. And so this was coming off of my IWearYourShirt project and my Buy My Last Name project. And I was like, okay, I want to write a book with a little sponsor, 140 character message. This is World War Z. Time is where we are right now, 2013.
[00:28:09] Caroline: So that's.
[00:28:10] Jason: ATTB. No, BTTB.
[00:28:12] Caroline: Three BTTB.
[00:28:16] Jason: Three BTTB.
[00:28:17] Caroline: The year three BTTB.
[00:28:18] Jason: Wow. It's confusing.
[00:28:19] Caroline: I just thought that was the joke. That's what I was trying to do all those before.
[00:28:22] Jason: No, I got it. Okay, I'm with you. Are you bringing your tips out again? So anyway, I have this idea and if you just fast forward like six months, what you see is I made $75,000 with this project. I landed a front cover sponsor in a company called Treehouse, which was an online learning platform at the time. I don't know if they're still around or not, but it was very popular at the time. Over 200 sponsors of the book. And it just looks absolutely successful because the book wasn't even written yet. I finished this project, but what it took in those six months was so much effort. Like, I filmed two videos, one for Mailchimp and one for Treehouse. That took me 8 hours each. And I did little stop motion things and I did like voiceover things to pitch them to buy the front cover sponsor the book. That was just for one sponsor of the book. I spent, I think...
[00:29:14] Caroline: And you did a third one. You did it for Moocards.
[00:29:16] Jason: Oh, yeah, Moocards. Yeah. I just like blanked that. Just black that out of my mind.
[00:29:21] Caroline: We should have not mentioned them because they didn't buy the sponsorship.
[00:29:23] Jason: Treehouse, Treehouse, Treehouse . And then, not to mention, I sent 2500 emails, 2500 emails directly to companies that I had had some interaction with before or that I wanted.
[00:29:36] Caroline: Those aren't spam emails and copy. Those are like personal...
[00:29:38] Jason: I knew people. Yeah. And those emails included like follow ups and other things. But that's how I was able to land 200 sponsors for this book. And so I bring that up just to say it looked so easy at the end, because it was so easy at the end of that project just to put it out on a platter. Like, I made $75,000 with this book. I haven't written a single word. Also, now I have to go write the book. That's not an easy process, but it looks easy, but it wasn't easy at all. And I think the point of this is just to remind you, if you're listening to this, you might be in the difficult, messy middle, start ugly somewhere before you getting to the place where you feel like your business has made it. And whatever that means for you. That doesn't mean like some huge revenue goal. That just means like, you feel like your business runs smoothly and predictably and profitably, but you will get there. And I think the point is that you're just going to have to go through some harder times in your journey that require more effort because business just takes experimentation, and it takes trying things, and it takes doing the marketing work when the product work feels easier because it's known. It takes doing the hard foundational fixing, all the analytics that Uncle Jhery set up wrong with all of his poop landmines to figure out how customers are actually interacting with your product. It takes a lot of those things. And if anybody's out here telling you that they can just skip all those and get you right to the ease, it's not possible. And I think we're some of the people who scream the loudest about trying to build calm businesses and having enough number and just make your life easier when it comes to business. But that doesn't necessarily mean that it's an extremely simple path to get there.
[00:31:13] Caroline: Exactly.
[00:31:13] Jason: It just means that you can get there. The reality is that there is going to be work along the way. And as we've mentioned a couple of times in one of Caroline's eloquent tips is that you get to do this work. You could be doing other things that are soul sucking or just not fun or that you absolutely hate, but the majority of the work that you're doing, hopefully you really enjoy, and it outweighs the difficultness that you feel.
[00:31:34] Caroline: Yeah. And I hope that listening to this episode, that if you're there and you consider yourself at one of those more challenging parts of your journey, that you will join us in being excited by that.
[00:31:45] Jason: For sure.
[00:31:47] Caroline: It's been a while since I was this excited about business, and I think it's just because I do like the beginning where it's all such a kind of fun puzzle to figure out. I enjoy the challenge of it, and I hope that inspires you just a little bit to maybe look at this difficulty or look at the obstacles with a new lens and find a way to maybe just enjoy.
[00:32:12] Jason: Way to bring it back to the vision.
[00:32:14] Caroline: The Vision Pro.
[00:32:15] Jason: Nice. Really. You brought it right full circle. Lens.
[00:32:18] Caroline: Lens.
[00:32:18] Jason: Nicely done.
[00:32:19] Caroline: Thank you.
[00:32:20] Jason: This podcast is not sponsored by Apple because Apple doesn't sponsor anything. But maybe we'll buy those. I don't think we will. They're too expensive. We'll wait till they're smaller.
[00:32:28] Caroline: Really?
[00:32:28] Jason: I don't know. Maybe we will. I don't know, maybe we won't. Teachery's revenue is going the wrong direction.
[00:32:33] Caroline: That's true. Yeah, maybe if we reach our revenue goal by the end of the year. How about that?
[00:32:38] Jason: Yeah, that's a lot of delayed gratification. I don't know if I can wait that long, but I might have to. So we'll see.
[00:32:42] Caroline: The ultimate marshmallow test.
[00:32:43] Jason: All right, that's it for this episode. A little bit of a shorter one, a little bit less structure. But we hope you enjoyed it and maybe it inspired you, depending on where you are on your journey.
[00:32:52] Caroline: Thanks for listening.
[00:32:53] Jason: Okay, goodbye.
[00:32:54] Caroline: Bye.