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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 there, and welcome to the podcast. Who's ready?
[00:00:41] Caroline: Welcome to the podcast. I'm ready. What the viewers/listeners cannot see is that behind your head...
[00:00:48] Jason: Right.
[00:00:48] Caroline: ...there is some cat action in the neighborhood.
[00:00:51] Jason: Some cation.
[00:00:53] Caroline: Some cation. Jason and I, we really enjoy observing nature from the comfort of our home.
[00:00:58] Jason: We like to call it pay per view.
[00:00:59] Caroline: We call it pay per view. We call it the nature channel.
[00:01:01] Jason: Yeah.
[00:01:01] Caroline: It's very exciting. Thankfully, the last few places we've lived, there's been some animal activity, always.
[00:01:07] Jason: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:01:07] Caroline: And so, there are... I wish I could describe to you the drama of the different cat factions that live in our neighborhood.
[00:01:15] Jason: There's a lot of cat. It's not like overrun and there's nothing...
[00:01:17] Caroline: Oh, no, it's not overrun.
[00:01:18] Jason: Yeah.
[00:01:18] Caroline: But you definitely have factions. You have the wild cats that are of the area of just the hills of Portugal, hoards of cats.
[00:01:26] Jason: Yeah. But also, when I think wild, feral cats, I'm like, "Well, be careful when you're going outside."
[00:01:29] Caroline: No, no, no, no, no.
[00:01:30] Jason: Not at all.
[00:01:30] Caroline: Not at all.
[00:01:30] Jason: They're skittish. They run away.
[00:01:31] Caroline: So you have a couple of those. Then you have a faction of cats that our next-door neighbor has adopted into his backyard. Has a full cat tower.
[00:01:40] Jason: He's a cat daddy, as we call him.
[00:01:41] Caroline: He's a very reserved German gentleman, but with just the most large, open heart for animals.
[00:01:50] Jason: Yeah.
[00:01:50] Caroline: And so, he has adopted these cats in his backyard. Then we have the across the street neighbors. They have a very, very domesticated kind of, I would say princess cat.
[00:02:01] Jason: Yeah. But it's an indoor-outdoor cat.
[00:02:03] Caroline: She's indoor outdoor. She sits on this little perch, and she sort of like reigns over the neighborhood.
[00:02:08] Jason: Yeah.
[00:02:08] Caroline: And so, it's just truly makes me so happy.
[00:02:11] Jason: There's a lot of cativity.
[00:02:12] Caroline: Like, I would rather not, I do have a very curious, nosy nature. I think people know that.
[00:02:17] Jason: Yeah.
[00:02:18] Caroline: I don't want to use that character flaw to spy on my neighbors. I'm not about that.
[00:02:23] Jason: Right.
[00:02:23] Caroline: It's like, do your own thing. I direct that character flaw towards the nosiness of what is the cat activity? The cativity.
[00:02:30] Jason: What are the animals? What's the animal activity going on?
[00:02:32] Caroline: So anyway, I just want to share that with everyone. And so, I told Jason right before we started, there's some cativity going on.
[00:02:38] Jason: Which cat was it?
[00:02:39] Caroline: It was hard to tell from here, but it was two cats, one in the carport and another with the floofy tail. So maybe...
[00:02:44] Jason: So that's Moe.
[00:02:45] Caroline: Moe.
[00:02:45] Jason: Yeah.
[00:02:46] Caroline: Maybe it was Moe.
[00:02:47] Jason: And then probably Mew-Mew, because Mew-Mew is always in the carport.
[00:02:49] Caroline: And I think it was a Mew-Mew, and Mew-Mew is the princess, and Moe is the next-door neighbor cat. And so...
[00:02:53] Jason: Cat daddy's son.
[00:02:54] Caroline: ...it's like is that a meeting of the minds, or is it a standoff? I don't know.
[00:02:57] Jason: Yeah, it could be a meeting of the he-hoo. Anyway, that's our cat preamble for this episode, and we hope you enjoyed it, but we do have actually, a fun preamble to share that is something we have been working on behind the scenes for six months.
[00:03:12] Caroline: No.
[00:03:13] Jason: I think we started the process six months ago.
[00:03:17] Caroline: I guess that's true. I guess you're right.
[00:03:17] Jason: But it wasn't the project that we were dedicating all of our time to. So it was really a like chipping away at the giant ice block of this project to whittle it down into a wonderful swan, ice swan.
[00:03:30] Caroline: Beautiful sculpture. Mm-hmm. Yes. Yes.
[00:03:31] Jason: And the ice swan has emerged.
[00:03:33] Caroline: Do you want to tell them what the ice swan is?
[00:03:34] Jason: The ice swam is...
[00:03:36] Caroline: What... [makes noise]
[00:03:36] Jason: The ice swan...
[00:03:38] Caroline: I swam across the ocean.
[00:03:40] Jason: ...is our brand-new website.
[00:03:41] Caroline: We have a new website.
[00:03:42] Jason: At wanderingaimfully.com built on Framer.
[00:03:45] Caroline: Yes.
[00:03:45] Jason: So we did talk about this a couple episodes ago. We were talking that we were working on it, but we have finally released it.
[00:03:51] Caroline: Yes.
[00:03:51] Jason: It is out into the wild. It is not perfect.
[00:03:54] Caroline: It is not perfect. There are bugs, and that's okay.
[00:03:56] Jason: And this is, we were on a coaching call yesterday with our WAIMers, and we were talking about, "Hey, this has just gone live. You want to check it out? Please let us know if you find anything." And I love how Caroline positioned this. She said there are 4% to 7% bugs on the site right now. That is how fried her brain was. It's just she couldn't figure out how to articulate.
[00:04:12] Caroline: It made so much sense to me.
[00:04:14] Jason: Yeah.
[00:04:14] Caroline: It still makes sense to me.
[00:04:16] Jason: Yeah.
[00:04:16] Caroline: I would say 4% to 7%...
[00:04:19] Jason: Bugs.
[00:04:19] Caroline: ...of the site are bugs.
[00:04:21] Jason: Yeah.
[00:04:21] Caroline: What?
[00:04:21] Jason: So if you see anything weird, feel free to send us an email.
[00:04:23] Caroline: Sure.
[00:04:23] Jason: I always love to know... Like I know that some people send us emails.
[00:04:26] Caroline: You want to go bug hunting? You want to not do whatever you had planned for today...
[00:04:29] Jason: Yeah, sure.
[00:04:30] Caroline: ...and go bug hunting on our website? Please do that.
[00:04:31] Jason: There are some of you who will send an email and be like, "Hey, I'm so sorry. I don't know. You probably got a hundred emails about this."
[00:04:37] Caroline: No, we haven't.
[00:04:38] Jason: Hey, FYI, have not.
[00:04:39] Caroline: Have not.
[00:04:39] Jason: Unless it's like our site is completely gone.
[00:04:41] Caroline: Nope.
[00:04:42] Jason: Gee, you.
[00:04:43] Caroline: What world?
[00:04:44] Jason: Oh, sorry, I have a meeting I have to get to. I just had a calendar reminder pop up.
[00:04:49] Caroline: Yeah, we know.
[00:04:49] Jason: The amount of podcasts that I listen to where I hear that sound...
[00:04:53] Caroline: It's true.
[00:04:53] Jason: ...and it's immediately like, "Whoa, what am I missing?"
[00:04:55] Caroline: You just did that to someone.
[00:04:56] Jason: I know.
[00:04:57] Caroline: You inflicted that on someone.
[00:04:57] Jason: Well, hey, go do that thing. You need to do that thing. What's that thing?
[00:05:00] Caroline: That's true.
[00:05:00] Jason: You don't know. So anyway, we have a brand-new website, wanderingaimfully.com. So excited for Framer.
[00:05:04] Caroline: We are so excited for Framer. I cannot tell you if you are someone, especially listening to this who is on WordPress and it's driving you mad and you just haven't made the switch and you have some design skills, please check out Framer.
[00:05:16] Jason: Yeah. There's a huge caveat there.
[00:05:17] Caroline: I know.
[00:05:17] Jason: You have to know how to use like Figma or auto layout. It is not intuitive. It is not like Squarespace. It's not like using a drag and drop folder.
[00:05:26] Caroline: It's not like Squarespace. It's not a drag and drop. It is a very like from scratch design tool. But if you have any experience using a design tool, I'm telling you, Framer is the future.
[00:05:37] Jason: Yeah, but you can't even say that...
[00:05:38] Caroline: Okay.
[00:05:38] Jason: ...because like, "Oh, I use Canva, or I use Affinity."
[00:05:40] Caroline: Okay. Here's what I'll say.
[00:05:41] Jason: It's what I just said. You don't have to repeat. I already said it.
[00:05:43] Caroline: I want to say it.
[00:05:44] Jason: If you use Figma...
[00:05:45] Caroline: Yeah.
[00:05:46] Jason: ...you can use Framer, and you will excel, and you will build beautiful websites.
[00:05:50] Caroline: Okay.
[00:05:50] Jason: If you can't use Figma, it is not going to be a fun adventure for you.
[00:05:53] Caroline: Okay. You're saying that, but you hadn't really used Figma and...
[00:05:56] Jason: And I still can't build.
[00:05:57] Caroline: Yes, you can. You built a beautiful coffee website.
[00:05:59] Jason: Off of a template.
[00:06:00] Caroline: So what?
[00:06:01] Jason: So there are templates you can start.
[00:06:02] Caroline: Exactly.
[00:06:02] Jason: I will say that. That's the thing I should say.
[00:06:04] Caroline: Oh, you should. Oh, yes, you should.
[00:06:06] Jason: You can go, just Google Framer templates. You will find most of them are designed by Cedric...
[00:06:10] Caroline: Cedric, he's out there.
[00:06:12] Jason: ...who is like the main Framer template builder.
[00:06:14] Caroline: Same.
[00:06:14] Jason: He does a great job. But yeah, there are a bunch of free templates you can use too. I would play around with it, but the most important thing is we're not here touting Framer. We want you to check out the new wanderingaimfully.com so you can see all the fun, magic and un-boring that Caroline has put into our entire website.
[00:06:27] Caroline: Yes. And the thing I was going to say is it makes such a difference because this is just the beginning. There's so much I want to do at the site. There's so many things I want to make more efficient in our web experience that I just have gone neglected because I didn't, it was such a time investment to try to make WordPress work. We were using Beaver Builder, which is like a visual interface to add designs.
[00:06:49] Jason: Yeah.
[00:06:49] Caroline: And it just...
[00:06:50] Jason: It's a great name, though.
[00:06:51] Caroline: Beaver Builder.
[00:06:51] Jason: Yeah.
[00:06:52] Caroline: And it's fine. It did what it needed to do for a long time. But the difference between how quickly I can spin up designs with Framer is wild.
[00:07:00] Jason: Can I share? This is the most important thing I want someone listening to this takeaway. The preamble is not normally the place for takeaways and lessons, but I think this is important.
[00:07:08] Caroline: Okay.
[00:07:08] Jason: When we released the Wandering Aimfully website built on WordPress with developers, a ton of custom work in 2018, the day that we released it, we did not like that website. The day that we released it, we were like, WordPress sucks and we hate that we have to use it. But for six years, we used that website...
[00:07:27] Caroline: Yeah.
[00:07:27] Jason: ...and our business generated almost $2 million in that time. And it was perfectly good enough.
[00:07:34] Caroline: Totally.
[00:07:34] Jason: And I just say that for all of you who are the tinkerers and...
[00:07:37] Caroline: I know.
[00:07:38] Jason: ...the, "Ooh, here's the new thing." And "Ooh, here's the new thing."
[00:07:38] Caroline: I hesitate sharing how much I love Framer because I don't want you to go jump ship if you don't... If you are the type of person who will very easily get lost down that rabbit hole...
[00:07:48] Jason: Yeah, but...
[00:07:49] Caroline: ...you got to know yourself. You got to be honest with yourself.
[00:07:51] Jason: Just I really want to make this point clear that even a website builder or an email platform or any of these other tools that you're just like, "Oh, there's got to be a better one out here." But is it distracting you from just getting the thing done? You need to get done and focusing on what's most important.
[00:08:05] Caroline: Yeah.
[00:08:05] Jason: Because if your website is up and people can pay you money for something...
[00:08:08] Caroline: Yup.
[00:08:08] Jason: ...that is enough. Having all the little animations and little whiz bangs and all the things, those are fun. But do those six years from now.
[00:08:13] Caroline: Exactly, do that once you have the foundation set and we're going to talk a little bit about having the foundation set. The past few episodes, we have been talking about launching. We have been talking about Calm launching and how we believe that if you can get a calm, repeatable launch under your belt, that is the linchpin in on your way to a Calm business. We've already been talking about that, but today we wanted to do a little bit more of a conversational episode about a conversation we've been having off the mics for a while now, for months now, about the state of online courses and this pattern and shift that we're seeing of, I think course buyers expecting more out of the info products that they purchase now. Namely they want things that are going to make systems and processes easier for them.
[00:09:05] Jason: Yeah.
[00:09:05] Caroline: So we call these like done for you resources.
[00:09:07] Jason: Yeah, this is definitely something that I have been paying a lot of attention to and it's something that I think is we will see a huge shift in, in the infopreneur. We all make things on the internet that we're just making up out of nowhere is 10 years ago, yeah, when you assimilated a lot of information into one place and created an online course or an e-book or a template, that was very helpful because that did not exist. There was not a lot of that going on. And that worked really well for many years. But what has happened is the technology of everything else has gotten better, faster, easier to use. So it's no longer good enough to just present someone with a 15 lesson course. Here's a 40-minute video, here's some text, here is a PDF to fill it out. Yes, that absolutely can work. But I'm just saying, for those of you who want to be on the forefront of where we see the entire zeitgeist of online information entrepreneurship going, you have to have some done for you stuff in there. And I think that what really accelerated all this was obviously OpenAI and ChatGPT coming to life and making a lot of the things that are just very mundane parts of our work very easy to get done by a robot and a language learning model. And I know that there are some of you listening this, that you do not like AI, and that's totally fine. And we can have a whole episode where we talk about the good and the bad of AI and the big picture. But the importance of, I think of this conversation is if you are a person selling information on the internet, you really have to start thinking about someone is used to a certain experience of getting things done with all these other softwares that they use.
[00:10:46] Caroline: Mm-hmm.
[00:10:46] Jason: If the thing that they buy from me feels archaic and like it takes a long time to get to...
[00:10:52] Caroline: It takes a lot of effort.
[00:10:53] Jason: ...helping me get the result...
[00:10:54] Caroline: Yeah.
[00:10:55] Jason: ...that you're going to set yourself up for being behind. Now, again, I'm just saying this as I have not seen a lot of courses. I've seen plenty of courses already in the past year or two. As you know, the person who manages Teachery and sees a lot of the courses that get created. I think I have a good gauge on...
[00:11:12] Caroline: Finger on the pulse.
[00:11:13] Jason: ...some stuff that's going on. Granted, we don't have as many customers as a Teachable or Kajabi or whatever...
[00:11:17] Caroline: Sure.
[00:11:17] Jason: ...but we have plenty who are making courses. There have been a bunch of courses on how to use AI. So how to use ChatGPT, how to use Claude, how to write chat AI prompts.
[00:11:29] Caroline: Prompts.
[00:11:30] Jason: There have been very few courses that have said, "I'm going to teach you how to do branding. Here are some AI prompts to help you do that."
[00:11:37] Caroline: With prompts. Exactly. Exactly. And so, you and I, in the spring of this year, when we were starting to come up with this idea of Calm Launch Formula, we knew that we wanted to create a program that was going to help people launch with a simple system that was repeatable, that could change the course of their business. You had this very simple directive, which was...
[00:11:57] Jason: Would you say prescient idea. Is that more of the words you were looking for?
[00:12:01] Caroline: Wow. Took it right out of my mouth. Precious.
[00:12:03] Jason: Genius moment.
[00:12:05] Caroline: Okay, hey, we need to calm it down a little bit.
[00:12:07] Jason: I'm just curious. I'm spitballing...
[00:12:08] Caroline: Spitballing. I'm just saying like is this what you were thinking? Genius.
[00:12:12] Jason: You know how we always finish each other's pasta.
[00:12:13] Carolinne: Sandwiches.
[00:12:13] Jason: Exactly.
[00:12:13] Caroline: Pasta.
[00:12:14] Jason: Yeah.
[00:12:16] Caroline: Pasta sandwiches. Really. And you said to me, because I'm usually like head of curriculum, so I'm coming up with what are we teaching people? How are we structuring it, et cetera. And you said, "Okay, here's my directive." At any moment, however, the curriculum shapes up, let's write it down together. But at any part of this, when we're teaching information, we need it to be actionable. And then on top of that, let's try to create every done for you resource we can at every single step of this process. So whenever we get to an action step, we ask ourselves, what resource, AI prompt, et cetera, could we give someone that would make taking this action easier? And I loved that because I think you're right. I think we're getting to this place where the expectation of a consumer or a customer or a person acting on a thing is they want it to feel a little bit like magic, like we've just arrived at that place in technology where things do kind of feel magical sometimes. And as an infopreneur, it's hard to ask yourself, how can I make that magical experience for someone taking a course? Right?
[00:13:18] Jason: Yeah.
[00:13:18] Caroline: But I think these done for you resources are the bridge to that. And so, I just loved that directive from you. And it is a very fine line because on the one hand, there's this thing happening that we all see happening, which is people's attention spans are getting smaller and smaller and smaller. And as an educator, as someone who's trying to get someone to ingest information and make a change in their life, you're fighting an uphill battle because you're like, this can't change your life if you don't sit down and watch the videos. Do you know what I mean? Or consume the resources. And so, it's difficult because on the one hand, I need to recognize that your attention span is smaller and create my course in a way that is digestible for that reason. But on the flip side of that, you also don't want to cater to someone's small attention span, because if that's the case, if they can't sit down and watch a video, then they're not going to be able to do the hard work of making the change. Right? And so, I don't know. I just think that's a really hard line to walk. And you and I try to have conversations about this all the time where it's like, yes, I want to make it easier for someone. I want to get them done for you resources. And also, I don't want to sacrifice the hard work of like, no, you are going to have to sit down and watch the information. You are going to have to... There were many times during this, I made this massive workbook that goes along with the course. Right? And because I wanted you to be able to take action steps, we did it in Notion, and it's a big workbook, but it's only because we've broken everything down into actionable steps. And we had this conversation where I was like, "Man, is someone going to be able to work their way through this, or are they going to get overwhelmed?" And we were like, listen, we designed this course in such a way that it is broken down and digestible. If someone doesn't make their way through this there's nothing more I can do to help them get this transformation, right?
[00:15:08] Jason: Yeah.
[00:15:09] Caroline: And as course creators, that's really hard to accept.
[00:15:10] Jason: For sure. But it's the same thing, and this has been the big shift when you see like, the thing that people always used to buy and not finish were books.
[00:15:20] Caroline: True.
[00:15:20] Jason: And so, you would buy a book, and you would have the intentions to read it. You get 20 to 30 pages in, you get distracted. That book goes on your shelf. You never read the full book. We all know this. Tons of people have so many books in their houses. We used to have a ton of books, and the majority of them unread, completely unread. And this is just the nature of humans and consuming information.
[00:15:40] Caroline: Mm-hmm.
[00:15:40] Jason: And especially information that is not longer than six to 30 seconds, which is why short form video exploded and is like the perfect little bit of brain candy for all of us, because it just keeps that dopamine cycle going. When you read a book, the dopamine cycle is very long.
[00:15:55] Caroline: Very long.
[00:15:56] Jason: When you take an online course, the dopamine cycle is very long. And I think that's what done for you resources and courses can help shift, and that's what we are already seeing. So we released our Calm Launch Formula course to our existing Wandering Aimfully members. And within the first two hours of it going live, which this never happens in an online course, people were replying and saying, "The first AI prompt that I use is blowing my mind."
[00:16:19] Caroline: Yeah.
[00:16:19] Jason: And I'm not even someone who uses AI, much like it confuses me. I don't know how to ask. And that's how I view it. I'm just like, I'm very bad at asking a question than prompting it. And these prompts that Caroline wrote that you just copy and paste and fill in a couple little details about yourself and your business.
[00:16:33] Caroline: It's like Mad Libs, I love that.
[00:16:33] Jason: People were getting incredibly helpful information back to shape what their offer for their business looks like, that they weren't getting just in like banging their head against their computer. And so, I think the whole point here and why just we really believe that done for you courses are a thing that people should be thinking about, how can you do this, is it's shortening that time to value and what someone wants out of the thing.
[00:16:57] Caroline: Yes. And can I just say something about your metaphor of the book?
[00:17:01] Jason: Let me think about it. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I would love to hear that.
[00:17:08] Caroline: Oh, you're silly.
[00:17:09] Jason: Thank you.
[00:17:10] Caroline: When you were talking about the book, I was thinking, yes, that's so true. A lot of times we'll buy books, they'll sit on the shelf, but I was thinking, what is it that helps the process along for someone to actually read a book? And usually it's they've heard enough times that somebody has raved about it some, it's changed somebody's life. And so, the motivation is higher to read a book. Like they didn't just pick it up from an airport and think, "Oh, I'll read it." It's like someone told them, trust me, what is in this is worth your time, right? That's the only thing that gets them to be like, "Okay, I'm going to sit down and read a book." And for those of you who read books all the time, we get it, but the most of us out here, out here with rotting brains And so, it's hard to sit down and read a book, but if you have that word of mouth, that's what raises the motivation. And so, with the done for you resources, to me, that is the word of mouth key because exactly what you described happened. We were hoping this would happen, but we obviously didn't know. Within launching it just to our WAIMers, people started posting. I just used the prompt. It was so low effort to just copy this thing, fill in my details and get something back that was instantly valuable. This is the power to me of AI for solopreneurs, instantly valuable. You can't get that anywhere else. And so, when someone comes across something where their attention span is low, their time feels more scarce than ever, and they find something that is instantly valuable, they're going to talk about it. And as a course creator, that's what you want, because then that's their gateway into, now, I will sit down and carve out the two hours to watch these videos because I've already gotten value. I believe in the value that exists in this thing. My friends have told me, other customers have told me that this is valuable. And so, my motivation is higher to do it.
[00:18:55] Jason: I think the entire done for you idea that we're discussing here is also for everybody listening to this who feels like the topic that you teach or talk about, there isn't a lot of differentiation between you and everybody else out there who's already doing this. The done for you element is your way to differentiate.
[00:19:13] Caroline: Totally.
[00:19:14] Jason: Because a lot of people are, they've been doing a thing for a long time. Let's just take branding, for example. So someone's been doing branding a certain way for a long time. They have their process, they have their system, it's what they teach, and it can be very involved. It can be very in depth, but it's also a little bit old. And you can come along as someone who's newer in the space and you can say, okay, that's a great system, and that has gotten a lot of people to success. But I see an opportunity as someone who is a little bit more well-versed in the current technologies, that this is a way that I can help you get clarity in your brand or to a nicely designed logo or whatever else, using these three things, that it actually does all that for you. And you don't have to fill out an entire worksheet to discover what your brand differentiators are. And again, I'm not saying that one is better than the other. I'm just saying as an example, it's a way to create a differentiator for yourself...
[00:20:03] Caroline: Totally.
[00:20:03] Jason: ...where you see that you're in a crowded space. And I think about this, I love thinking about the technology changes that we've seen in our time as entrepreneurs. I think a lot of people listening this are around our age. And I think back to when I started in design, I used Photoshop. Now, I know I still use Photoshop, but very rarely.
[00:20:23] Caroline: It's upsetting.
[00:20:24] Jason: I know it's upsetting to you, but I remember it was so difficult to use, but it was the only tool that you could use.
[00:20:31] Caroline: Yeah.
[00:20:32] Jason: Fast forward to today. If you sit two people side by side and you say, use Photoshop to create a branding slide for a presentation with a masked image and an animated GIF, and like, whatever, and you say, do this in Photoshop... GIF. Sorry. Do this in Photoshop or do this in Canva, you time somebody. Canva is going to kick ass. It is going to be so much faster because it is a modern tool built for a modern day, and Photoshop is not. It is a legacy tool built for a previous time. And so, I think...
[00:21:03] Caroline: For a different application, by the way, right? Like photo editing.
[00:21:05] Jason: Exactly. And I think that the important thing to note is just that where are the consumers going? What are they striving to get done faster with what tools they're using? And those things, to me, we're seeing them all change everything. Like Squarespace changed the entire game of how we build websites. So this like drag and drop thing. Yes, there were other people who were doing that before them, but they were the ones who basically literally shifted the entire website building ecosystem into this drag and drop, easy to shape things. And I think just you as a person listening this is a moment in the online course, the digital products, like all this stuff to figure out ways to do things for people where they can say, "Oh, I'm no longer just buying a Notion template, I'm buying a Notion template that I can actually get out of what it's doing because there's a resource within that that's helping me do that, whether it's an AI prompt or something else."
[00:21:55] Caroline: Totally. And it doesn't have to be AI prompts, right? I think even a Notion template itself is a good example of done for you because you're not just saying, "Hey, go build a tasks database." You're saying, "Here's the template. I built the database for you." Right? That, in a way, is done for you. But I wanted to point out something that you said. I've been thinking about this a lot lately. We just had a coaching session, and during the Q&A someone was talking about applying some of the launching techniques that we had been teaching to their service offering. It was a one-on-one coaching offering and they were asking about, "Hey, can I apply some of this even if I have a service offering?" And we were saying, yes, of course. Like if there's anything we've learned about over the past three to four years, it's that service providers can learn a lot from product people, right? We're seeing this like productization of services, the Designjoys of the world. The people who are doing the unlimited design...
[00:22:49] Jason: If you don't know what Designjoy is, just very quickly.
[00:22:51] Caroline: Explain it.
[00:22:53] Jason: It's this guy who basically said, "I'm going to offer my design services. You can have an unlimited amount of to-dos and tasks for $3,000 a month." So basically is...
[00:23:03] Caroline: Right. It's kind of like turning your design services into a SaaS models...
[00:23:07] Jason: Yeah.
[00:23:07] Caroline: ...software as a service where you pay a monthly fee and then you get your request into a queue, and you get your design things done from him. But people have seen that that model adopts some of these best practices from the product world of you're taking something that is a service, but you're turning it into this container that someone can pay for monthly with very defined features. You get unlimited things, or you get 20 revisions or whatever the features are of it. And that has worked really well for people because it's repeatable and it's just you're not having to go out and get clients all the time and they're finding you. It's an interesting approach. I think the same is true. Some of these things about like, okay, have a product launch for your new service offering. Like if you're doing a new one-on-one coaching thing, define it in terms of how much is it? What are the features of it? And we've told people this all the time, too. Don't just say I do everything from wedding invitation design to logo design to website design and just tell people to inquire and then you give them a custom proposal. That's too many options for people. Tell them, this is my logo package, this is my full branding package, et cetera. That's stealing from the product world into the service world. But I think what we're saying is there's an equal amount to be learned in stealing from the service world into the product world. And that's what we're saying with done for you, you're taking the best of both worlds.
[00:24:30] Jason: Mm-hmm.
[00:24:30] Caroline: So where the product world shines is in having clearly defined offers that people can very clearly pay for, right? Which is different in the service world. Where the service world shines is the promise of using someone else's time, energy and expertise to do something for you. And so, the question becomes can you borrow a little bit of that?
[00:24:54] Jason: Yeah.
[00:24:54] Caroline: Because it's like the world swings so far into the scalable category, which is what products are, where it becomes so devoid of any done for you-ness, and that's what the online course world was. Business owners discovered this way of scalability, which was products. I will do an online course, I create at one time. I can scale it to infinite numbers of customers. I can't scale my design time to infinite numbers of clients. And so, us included found the product world to be a more scalable, more a higher ceiling option. Right? But when so many people move to that scalable option, customers and in the market start to go... I mean, I don't want to do this all myself. I am also busy.
[00:25:40] Jason: It's also the confluence of technology changing.
[00:25:43] Caroline: Absolutely.
[00:25:43] Jason: So it's everything Right?
[00:25:44] Caroline: And that's to your point of...
[00:25:44] Jason: Yeah.
[00:25:44] Caroline: ...what you were saying about the evolution of technology meeting this moment. But the point I was trying to make is that there's also some forces in the market that are leaving people feeling like, I don't want to just do it all myself.
[00:25:58] Jason: Yeah, for sure. And I think that's why you can take a course on branding to figure it out yourself or you can pay a brand designer to design your brand for you. That has always existed. And now I think what we're trying to really show people that what the future looks like is you can blend the two and you can figure out, okay, here's the scalable offer in the course because the brand design package is not that scalable. And yes, the guy, Brett from Designjoy, makes over a million dollars a year, but if you've ever seen that guy in interviews, he looks damn tired all the time. He's a one man show who works. He's he admits it 12 to 14 hours a day. And like most of us don't want to work those hours, that's not fun.
[00:26:38] Caroline: Definitely.
[00:26:39] Jason: And yeah, it's great on paper to see how much money he makes, but like the lifestyle is not fantastic. So I think the point here is trying to figure out how do you take the unscalable done for you stuff and in whatever way you can, templates, AI, et cetera, add it into a scalable product that gets someone to the result faster. And so, as we were talking about this many months ago, and we were coming up with the Calm Launch Formula course, and I was really trying to push to can every resource in it be as done for you as possible?
[00:27:09] Caroline: Mm-hmm.
[00:27:09] Jason: And I give you a ton of credit for being like, "I think I can write a prompt for this." I'm like, "Great. I don't even know how we could possibly do that. So this is going to be fun to watch." And if you just look at the course from a holistic perspective, if you don't use any of the AI prompts, I think the total amount of time for all the videos, I think we have like 40 videos, it's about two hours of video content.
[00:27:29] Caroline: Yeah, 40 videos sounds like a lot, but it's because we made them short.
[00:27:32] Jason: They're five minutes long.
[00:27:33] Caroline: See, previous mention of attention span.
[00:27:35] Jason: Exactly. So these five minute videos, you could get through all of them in a total of two hours, which is not a ton of time. But then to apply all of that, it's going to take you 10, 20 hours of work, just realistically, because it's a lot of stuff that we're having you go through.
[00:27:49] Caroline: You're designing a sales page, you're writing sales emails. Yeah.
[00:27:50] Jason: Exactly. It's a lot of things. And so, you can do that. And so, that's like the crux of what we all know in a course. It's probably going to take about 20 hours, but that 20 hours is going to save you a ton of stress and time. It's going to get you set up for your next launch, you're going to have all this stuff ready. The other way of doing it is go through the AI prompts one by one. And I did it and timed it myself. I made up an offer out of nowhere, so I had to even think of something new. I didn't have existing resources, and I got every single to do done in two hours.
[00:28:21] Caroline: Yeah.
[00:28:21] Jason: Now granted, the last thing that I would have had to do was like design my sales page. Design my sales emails.
[00:28:24] Caroline: Right. But you wrote the copy for the...
[00:28:26] Jason: But everything.
[00:28:27] Caroline: Yeah.
[00:28:27] Jason: I figured out my offer, I figured out the price, I figured out my audience, I figured out my pre-launch strategy, I figured out all my sales emails, all my sales copy, my copy catalog. So I had all these little phrases, my value proposition, every single thing, my during launch content schedule, all of it done in two hours. And I was copying and pasting for 97% of that.
[00:28:46] Caroline: Yeah.
[00:28:46] Jason: And I just say that to illustrate the point. Our own course that we are extremely excited about people going through, we know it will take 20 hours to get a good result out of it, but that good result is going to set you up for profit, peace, calm in your next launch. Would you like to shave 18 hours off of that? There's also this route that you can take in there.
[00:29:06] Caroline: And this is why I have the biggest smile on my face when I hear you say that because I know it's easy to get hung up on the AI of it all and the attention span of it all. And I know there's probably some people listening now and they're like, "Is this really the future we all want for ourselves?" And I'm like, listen, I get it. Sometimes things are evolving in a place where I miss the days where we all had attention spans and weren't on four different screens at one time. For sure, for sure. But this is the reality, and I don't like to focus on that part of it. The part that I personally like to focus on is I remember why I do what I do, why we do what we do, which is as business coaches, I see the absolute transformation that can happen in a person's life when they get an online business where they have location freedom, financial freedom, creative freedom, time freedom. That is what I want for people because we have that. And I feel so lucky and grateful that I get to live the life that I do that it feels irresponsible to not want that for other people and to not teach them how to get that if they want it. But the second you become an educator, a business coach, someone teaching someone something, one of the frustrations that you run up against is that you feel like you have the secret to the universe, but you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink kind of thing. And I see people constantly get in their own way and I don't blame them for it. They have their own limiting beliefs, they have their own trauma, they have their own time constraints, they have circumstances in life. They're trying to work their corporate job and do this on the side. They are taking care of ailing parents. Like, we all have things in our lives that are barriers to transformation. And so, I see that over and over again. And the reason I have such a smile on my face when I hear you talk about you being able to do that in two hours is I think to myself, oh, my gosh, this transformation that I want so desperately for people is now more attainable because of AI.
[00:31:06] Jason: Yeah.
[00:31:06] Caroline: That's the beauty of it. I know there's downsides of it, but the beauty of it is they're using their own inputs. These prompts, it's not like we're just typing in like, come up with any offer, come up with...
[00:31:22] Jason: Yeah.
[00:31:22] Caroline: No, no, no. You're formulating it, you're telling it. Here's what I want to do, here's what my business does, here's what I'm good at, here's...
[00:31:29] Jason: What I want to feel like.
[00:31:30] Caroline: ...what I want it to feel like, you're telling it all of that and you're just outsourcing a little bit of that time and effort to these models that can give you back something. And so, that's the part that I focus on is I just go to myself at the end of the day, do I think that transformations are more possible thanks to this resource? And the answer is 100% yes. And that excites me.
[00:31:53] Jason: Yeah. And again, I think we'll probably have an episode at some point in the future. We've said it many times, but just this idea of discussing AI and where it fits into everything and all of that. But I do think in this moment it is a tool to be used and you can use it for good, you can use it for bad, just like so many other things that we have at our disposal. And for right now, it is a tool that will save you a ton of time to get to a result. And if you can take your things that you're already selling, your scalable assets, and you can find a way to use those tools for your customers to get to the value faster, that's just a smart business move and that is just a good thing not to ignore. And it's a little bit of like the, "Well, I've advertised my business in the Yellow Pages for a long time. I'm not going to put up a website on the internet. I don't like the way that this feels." You would have been left behind and that is just the nature of...
[00:32:47] Caroline: Technology.
[00:32:47] Jason: ...technology changing and shifts happening. And yes, it's scary. And yes, there's a lot of unknowns and yes, there's a lot of bad things, but there's also a lot of good that can come out of this. There's a lot of time saving, there's a lot of, again, just getting people to a result faster and having their life be changed because you're smart enough to figure out how to use these tools.
[00:33:02] Caroline: Yeah. And I just, you and I are both very practical people, and I think to be an entrepreneur, it requires a level of practicality and going, I can want things to be a certain way, but what is the actual way that they are? And being an entrepreneur requires a level of adaptation and resilience and curiosity. And you and I both have made a commitment to try to lead with curiosity on a lot of things.
[00:33:27] Jason: Yeah.
[00:33:27] Caroline: And if you are curious about AI and you decide it's not for you, good for you, that is...
[00:33:31] Jason: Yeah, sure.
[00:33:34] Caroline: ...that is up to every person to decide for themselves. But as of now, I do think that this done for you trend is something we're going to continue to see with all of the ability to make templates. I mean, pretty much every creative tool that I can think of now offers the ability to sell something as a template. And I think that's indicative of the fact that done for you is a thing that's here to stay. People are always looking for ways to save time, effort and... Time and effort really. So I guess my main takeaway is just thinking to yourself, if you are someone who is selling, offers digital products that are trying to get someone to a transformation and they're mainly info products, how can you include some type of done for you element? Is it a spreadsheet you can add with it? Is it a Notion template? Is it a website template? Is it a template of any kind? Is it an AI prompt? What is going to save someone time and effort?
[00:34:27] Jason: Exactly. All right, well, we hope you enjoyed this little jaunt down the done for you lane that we have been exploring and are super excited about. And if you are very interested in the Calm Launch Formula, you've obviously been hearing us talk about WAIM Unlimited, and as of recording this, the doors are about to be open so you can feel free to check it out at wanderingaimfully.com/join. As I mentioned in the beginning of the episode, you also get to see our brand-new website, brand new sales page that Caroline built based off of the prompts that we give you in the Calm Launch Formula to build your own sales page.
[00:34:59] Caroline: It's very meta.
[00:34:59] Jason: You can use the prompt to literally have your sales page written in like 12 minutes, which is incredible. So feel free to check out more on Calm Launch Formula and WAIM Unlimited at wanderingaimfully.com/join and we hope you enjoyed this little combo.
[00:35:11] Caroline: Thanks for listening.