Minisode - Watch us build a project LIVE in one day!

It’s a little bonus episode in your podcast feed! We’re coming atcha at an irregular time because we have an irregular project we want to share with you (and be part of!)

Show Notes

As you’ll hear in the minisode, we’re doing a 1-day challenge to redesign our Wandering Aimfully homepage and lead magnet. We will be sharing this entire day of work LIVE for you to watch. We hope this inspires you to do a 1-day project sprint, while also giving you a template and checklist if you want to accomplish a similar task for your biz!

If nothing else, we hope you’ll join us live on Feb 16 just to be part of something different and unique in the online business space.

🔗 Join the LIVE fun on Feb 16 at wanderingaimfully.com/behind

(If the linked page doesn't load, give it a refresh and it should load!)

What is Growing Steady | Intentional Creative Business Podcast?

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.

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.

Jason: And I'm here, too. It's a minisode. Hello. Welcome. How's it going?

Caroline: Did you think it was Thursday? It's not Thursday. It's Tuesday.

Jason: Tuesday. We're going to experiment with some minisodes here and there throughout this year.

Caroline: Maybe here. Maybe there.

Jason: Definitely here, though, because this is a minisode.

Caroline: It's definitely here.

Jason: And it's definitely something to do. We have actually done a minisode before. You were saying? I think we have a bonusode. So it's actually this is a minisode because we're going to keep the sucker under 15 minutes, guaranteed. At the 15 minutes mark, I will hit stop. It doesn't matter if we are mid sentence. Yeah, it will cut off. So there's no preamble. There's no glitz and glamour. We are just putting on our leg chafing cream and getting after. You haven't listened to our previous episodes.

Caroline: Why all the leg chafing? Quick shout out. Happy Valentine's Day.

Jason: Oh, yeah. What's up?

Caroline: We love you.

Jason: And also, if you don't celebrate Valentine's Day, happy February 14. What a great day.

Caroline: Exactly. No matter. Any way you look at it, it's a great day.

Jason: What have I always called Valentine's Day for the entire time of our marriage?

Caroline: I don't know.

Jason: Valentimes.

Caroline: Valentimes.

Jason: That's really sad that you didn't get that.

Caroline: You love this bit where you intentionally mispronounced it.

Jason: Lisbond. Dublind.

Caroline: When he calls it Dublind, I cannot emphasize how.

Jason: It's just to be dumb. It's just to be dumb.

Caroline: Yeah. I know.

Jason: Happy Valentimes.

Caroline: Happy Valentimes. That's why you do it.

Jason: That's it.

Caroline: Because it bothers me.

Jason: It feels great. Yeah. In the relationship. Anyway, that's not what we're here to talk about. We are here to talk about a silly idea that popped into my weird brain about four days ago.

Caroline: I just want to let everybody know, in the history of our relationship, it's usually meant bad news for me when Jason comes and says, I have an an idea. It's not. I like to give you a hard time. It's always good news eventually, but it means we have to do something weird or different or interesting.

Jason: Something that wasn't on the schedule.

Caroline: Of course, I and everyone listening loves that about you. It's one of your best qualities.

Jason: I appreciate that.

Caroline: But we can also make fun of it. Stop doing that. It's really hard. So, Jason, as of recording this, this is like three days ago, Saturday morning. I'm just enjoying the day. I'm intentionally trying not to work because we've been working more than usual. So I'm trying to take an intentional rest day. And Jason goes to the gym. He goes to our little gym in our neighborhood. And I just get a text that goes, Idea. And I'm like, Shit, okay, what's the idea? And so you can feel free to share everyone where tell them where, how the wheels were cranking.

Jason: I know how this works. Okay, so I was born May 15, 1982. This is the backstory you want to write.

Caroline: This is where we get cut in fifteen minutes.

Jason: In Phoenix, Arizona. And I was a regular sized baby, and I just had great large feet, though. Anyway, we have had a full list of things to do this year. And if you listen to the previous two episodes, you will have heard that. If you have not listened to those, feel free to go put us on 2.5x. We sound like Chipmunks and you can hear all the things we're working on. But in having all these things that we want to work on, we have to prioritize. And so we have started to kind of push things around and move things around. And we have two launches of our Wandering Aimfully Unlimited program that we do every year in the Spring and in the Fall. And our goals this year were to increase the amount of customers because last year we were going to keep the business going, not grow. This year we want to grow a little because we have some new goals again, which we talked about in those episodes. So anyway, one of the things that we had talked about doing was trying to increase the traffic or the conversion on our Wandering Aimfully site to our email list. But that was a project amongst all the other projects that we're working on that we were like, we can't really fit that in right now and we already have traffic, so let's just push that till later on down the road.

Caroline: If you want to know how we made those decisions on what projects to prioritize, we go into that in our newsletter series Invest right now. You can sign up for that. That part is free at wanderingaimfully.com/newsletter.

Jason: Yeah. And that's going on for eight weeks. So as of recording this, you still have like five more weeks. So you could join the newsletter and get all the previous issues.

Caroline: Of what we're working on and how we prioritize.

Jason: Anyway, so I'm in the gym. I'm starting to listen to business podcasts again. I don't think I listen to a single business podcast in 2022.

Caroline: Probably because it would be dangerous because this is what happens when you do that.

Jason: Well, yeah. And also just like I think my brain was so tired from full time travel that I was like, that's why I don't read nonfiction before bed.

Caroline: It's a little bit of in my case, protecting yourself. Because if I know that I'm not in a place where I can fully execute on ideas or create things while we were traveling, all it's going to make me feel is like FOMO if I listen to business podcast. So that's a little bit of, like, titrating your media diet based on where you are in your life.

Jason: So anyway, I'm starting to listen to a couple of business podcasts and nothing in particular. And then it just in the gym, and I'm listening, and all of a sudden I'm like, wait a second, there's something we can do here with this idea of increasing our traffic/ conversion on our website that doesn't have to be like a big project. Everything that we're doing is like a big project.

Caroline: I know. Let me add context.

Jason: Sure. So again, again, we have ten minutes left.

Caroline: What Jason is referring to is we have a couple of big things we want to do in this first quarter. Number one, redesign our WAIM dashboard for a better experience. So all of the things resources inside of WAIM are easily.

Jason: These are for our paying members.

Caroline: For our paying members of Wandering Aimfully Unlimited. Okay? That's project number one. Project number two, we want to increase our traffic by creating some new high quality articles. That's our project that we call Narticles. New Articles. Project number three is increase our conversion of our home page. We've had a Quiz forever, which has worked really well for us, but we want a really much more highly targeted and specific lead magnet. Okay? So one, two, three, and unfortunately, the last one in our minds of the redesigning the home page and creating this lead magnet, in our mind, it was equally as big as the other two projects. Right? It's going to be a month long project. We want to do it well because we have a high standard for ourselves. Shout out to Thursday's episode, which will talk about that. And so in our minds, we're like, great, we just have to push it off. We can't do three things at one time really well, so let's just, that'll be the third thing in line. Jason, what he's referring to is as he's listening to this podcast, he's going like, what if it didn't have to be...?

Jason: Doesn't have to be a big project?

Caroline: What if it didn't have to be a big project? Are we making it more complicated than that?

Jason: And our perfectionists, who listen to the show are over deliverers who listen to this show, you work with a client, and they paid you for 40 hours, and you work for 433 hours.

Caroline: I'm raising my hand.

Jason: Exactly. All of you are with us, and those of you who don't, congratulations. You're great, and we appreciate you.

Caroline: Can you bottle that and sell it to us?

Jason: That's not us. So my idea as I'm in the gym was, what if we constrained this, creating new lead magnet, creating a new homepage, switching up the third project into one day? We can literally only work on it one day. Now, we do have an advantage. We're two people.

Caroline: Yes.

Jason: So whenever we talk about these things, we always like to give the context of, if you're comparing yourself to us, just remember.

Caroline: Don't do that.

Jason: Two of us. And most of the time, there's only one of you who's working on something. So maybe one day is not realistic in a project you might want to work on. But for us, it does feel realistic. And so I sent this text message to Carol. I said, what if we just, like, force the lead magnet project in one day that we can squeeze in before the Spring enrollment period so we can actually have this going?

Caroline: And then he said.

Jason: Like 15 seconds later. I was like, well, let's make it even more fun. Let's do it publicly and let people be able to watch and then ask them to pay to watch as just like a fun experiment for us.

Caroline: Like a live workshop but you're not going to learn someone, like, go through a slide deck. You're paying to go to a workshop where the person is actually doing the thing that they're teaching you how to do. So I thought that was a really cool idea at first. I was like, first of all, it's Saturday. That's rude of you to come home with an idea like that. And I just said, that's one more thing. And then finally I said to myself, like, again, I did the same thing again to myself where I said, what if this doesn't have to be such a big deal?

Jason: Exactly.

Caroline: What can we create in it? So literally, from Saturday to Sunday evening, because we had a newsletter going out on Monday, we created a product on Gumroad. We fleshed out, what would this be? How would we deliver it to people? Well, we figured out the pricing. We're doing a pay what you want pricing starting at a $25 minimum. So hopefully that's an accessible price point for people. And so the idea is that with this behind the build live, which is what we're calling it, Lead Magnet edition, for one day as Jason and I, from 09:00 a.m. in the morning until probably roughly 07:00 p.m. at night, which again is a long day, but for something like this.

Jason: Yeah, it's going to be one of the long days of our year. Like, we're not going to work those hours.

Caroline: It's intentionally a sprint, right? So from 09:00 a.m. to 07:00 p.m., we are going to update a live access page. Now, when we say live, you're not going to be like, we're not live streaming it because we would not get anything done. We would talk to people. So the idea is the live part is that you're watching us update this page in real time with what we're working on. And we're intentionally not coming to this with a lot of forethought because we know that a lot of you listening. If you do something like this for yourself, you're not going to be able to do all this prep work. Yeah, you're busy. It's going to be like, this is my day. I start in the morning with a literal blank page. What do I do? Where do I go? You'll see us go from brainstorming. You'll see us go from breaking things down into tasks. You'll see us track our time. You'll see us accomplish things as we create things. Outlines, designs, PDFs, wireframes for the website. You'll see us update that on the page so you can literally just understand, like, see inside and behind the scenes, behind the build of how this big project that was going to take us a month can get the quickest, best version in one day and how that actually breaks down.

Jason: Yeah. And so the idea is if you want to join this little one day party, we hope that you get a couple of benefits from this. Number one, it's that it motivates you so you can see like, oh, okay, I have a big project that I've been putting off for a while. What can I get done in just one day? And you can watch us do it. And the second benefit of that motivation is we're going to create basically like a little template from this, especially related to changing up your home page and changing up your lead magnet for your home page so that you can have a checklist that you can go through exactly like we did on this day. So you get that as well. And the third is that we just want to bring something fun to the online business space. Like, we've all attended paid workshops. We've all attended courses. Like all these other things. You bought an ebook, but very rarely do you buy access to a one day watch this thing happen and then it's kind of gone. It's kind of an ephemeral thing.

Caroline: Will we even be able?

Jason: I know. It'll be fun.

Caroline: To do it.

Jason: You can just watch this crash and burn. Like, that could be the fun thing. So if you're interested, we have a couple of more minutes to talk about it. We can give you more details, but I just wanted to drop the URL. It's also in the show notes. It's wanderingaimfully.com/behind. And also we're embedding a product on there. So if you just see like this weird little loading message, just hit refresh on your browser and it should pop up, especially if you're on mobile. But you can buy it there. And we're doing a pay what you want model starting at $25.

Caroline: Yes.

Jason: So you can name your price. If you feel like, wow, since those Zooks are worth it, here's some more money. You can do that. If you feel like $25 is fair, just pay $25.

Caroline: Yeah. And the other thing I want to mention is our Live Build day is February 16. So that's two days from when you're hopefully listening to this. If you're listening to this after the 16th.

Jason: It's gone.

Caroline: 17th, and that's okay. But you might be thinking like, oh, I already had stuff to do on the 16th. That's absolutely okay. First of all, you could just keep it in a background tab and check in on it every couple of. We're going to do four update videos throughout the day so you'll see, like, our kickoff meeting and then updates through our work blocks to see how did what we get done actually how does what we get done actually compare to what we set out to do? And then we'll do a wrap up video at the end of the day. So you could just check in four times throughout the day.

Jason: You keep access to that page.

Caroline: Exactly. So if you buy access, you'll always have access. You can go back and rewatch it. So if you're busy on that day and you can't watch it until the following week, that's absolutely fine. The live element of it is you just know that it happened in real time, which is fine. And same with any concerns about time zones because we'll be starting 09:00 a.m. GMT. For those of you who don't know, we live in Portugal now, so we understand that, especially if you are in the States, for example, that might be early for you.

Jason: Yeah, and I think this another kind of, like, thing that we hope this project does, is just shows you there are different ways to make money, there are different ways to get projects done, there are different ways to bring your audience into a thing that you're working on. And I think that's one of the things that we just really love doing is creating an idea like this and spinning it up. We have no idea how many people buy it. We've never done anything specifically like this. Like, I did a book writing project where I let people watch me write, and it was a public thing in 2017, but that was like a whole different journey that people went on to be a part of that. And so this is very different, where it's like it's going to be one day, you buy access for that one day you can't pay for it afterwards. And if you bought before, then you can have access to all the things and you can watch it at your leisure and come back to it. Which is why we think the little templated checklist will be helpful for people because you can kind of come back to that. But yeah, I think it's just a fun example of doing things differently. Our audience, our Wandering Aimfully email list, we're mentioning to them three times, and I will say in the first mention that has already happened, there wasn't an enormous response. And I think for a lot of people, they would stop right there. They would go, no one wants this. And we set the intention around. We're like, no one's going to buy on the first day because.

Caroline: You can't just throw something totally new.

Jason: It's weird.

Caroline: At people that they don't know what it is and you haven't mentioned it before. And so it's a little bit of a meta experiment as well, to just go, yeah, this is what experimenting is like in your business. We talk about it all the time on this podcast. But I think as the years go on and we hone in our offer selling Wandering Aimfully twice a year. That's a well oiled machine. We know it works, but to continue to practice what we preach, which is experimentation, we're always experimenting, marketing wise. But we haven't had the opportunity in the past few years to experiment, offer wise. And so we hope that will definitely be bringing back these insights to our Wandering Aimfully members and just showing.

Jason: Yeah. And if you're a WAIMer, you should know if you haven't already heard, you get this for free.

Caroline: Exactly.

Jason: You don't have to pay for this, which is just another advantage of being a WAIMer is whenever we come up with these ideas, they're just included in the cost of the thing.

Caroline: Again, going back to what I really want people to take away, not just from if you decide to join us, which would be wonderful, but if you don't, what I hope you take away from this minisode is a couple of things. Number one, are you overthinking something in your head to the point where you're putting it off because you've decided that it has to be so big and so perfect and so all of these things, is there a way for you to rethink what that version needs to be? And then also I just like this idea of coming at things from a more creative perspective and experimenting a little bit more and kind of stepping outside the box. And that phrase what if? Has become a very powerful phrase for us because Jason comes home and he says, but what if it didn't have to be a month long? What if it was just a day? And then it was what if people could watch us? What would that look like?

Jason: What if we don't wear jammies all day? Like we actually have to wear like adult clothes from the waist up so we look professional. Also, we have 4 seconds left. Anything you want to say before I stop?

Caroline: I love you. I love them.

Jason: Valentine.

Caroline: Happy Valentine's.

Jason: I am going to keep going here just to remind everybody. Wanderingaimfully.com/build, you have up until.

Caroline: Behind.

Jason: Sorry, wanderingaimfully.com/behind. My bad. You have until the end of the day on February 16 to purchase. After that, the ability to purchase will be gone. But as long as you purchase before you will get access to that private page with all the videos and everything that we're going to do live. Feel free to join us. Feel free to pass it along to a friend if you're if you want. Wanderingaimfully.com/behind. And we hope you have fun watching us build our lead magnet, our new homepage in one day.

Caroline: Will we crash and burn?

Jason: So you can see you can do.

Caroline: I don't know.

Jason: Okay. Happy Valentimes. Bye.

Caroline: Bye.