(Real) Strategies For Paid Communities

Key Takeaways

um [Music] every single time we sit down and record this show i always find myself wishing that the recording just automatically turned out because everybody who's now listening to this you just missed like a total gem from tim on how he manages his energy and like in projects and in sports which you'll have to wonder about forever because we can't yeah because now you're never gonna know because i can't repeat it or it's just awkward yeah but that was uh that was that was funny we'll have to we'll have to set this call up so that it automatically records hey everybody where i can do it i'm just nervous to do it because like i never know what the [ __ ] i'm gonna say it's always like we start this with a deep conversation of any crimes that we've committed in the last yeah exactly yeah before before hit and record uh what's going on man nothing dude it's really it's really great to be here we missed you last week i had a solo interview and i was even talking to my dad this morning because i wake up super early and my dad's a paramedic in philly and he's always up at like four in the morning so anytime my phone rings at 4 30. you texted me at like five in the morning this morning and i thought it was my dad which is why i was up but right after you texted me and he said uh well how's the podcast been going how's the interviews been going and i kind of told him the whole story about the rebirth about what we're doing and i even said it's like yeah i had my first like one-on-one interview for the first time last week and i just i missed hanging out with ethan so much like i think the style that we have right now is a lot more fun it's a lot more enjoyable for me i don't feel like pressure to be all prepared and to like have a backup plan in case my interviewee gets like stumped or something like that so uh all that to say is i'm really really happy that you're back and let's let's do this thanks man that means a lot and uh for what it's worth i definitely missed being here last week too uh and i think that's kind of a unique point in any project when you get to the you get to the point where like even when you have a day off all of a sudden it feels like something's not right you know which i actually to be honest don't get to with a lot of like i'm that i'm i'm there with writing and it's actually kind of a problem because i currently work seven days a week yeah because what else are you going to do right yeah just also just like hey i don't feel good if i don't do it for at least a little too and then now our podcast is that way so it's it's great to be back and thanks for everybody who's listening i think we're gonna we should dive straight into your article thing and i'll i'll set it up real quick just to let people know what let's just dive straight in we we did have a plan and ethan texted me literally 15 minutes ago and he said scratch everything i just read this article that you wrote and we need to talk about it so i'm an open book brother let's go so for everybody listening tim just published an article this week and well actually why don't you take us through the article rather than me setting it up sure high level what's the big change that's going on in your business right now i wrote an article on my own blog on timstots.com and i didn't know how to open it because as the copywriter it's always like i need a hook i got to get them hooked in somehow and so i basically wrote out everything that i was thinking and i came back to the opening line last and after sitting there again at 4 30 in the morning this morning like how do i open this thing i basically realized that there's no way to open it because this article isn't for anybody but for me it was just sort of like some journaling that i mean you and i are both notebook people like the article is already in this notebook over the course of the last three weeks i just had to organize it and type it out and put headers in it and so i said like warning this article is not for you it's for me and sometimes i need to do that right like writing is an emotional process and i personally am best when i'm writing like emotionally from my heart you know telling stories that have manifested themselves through my own life and i talked about some big changes going on in a nutshell the changes are as follows copyblogger which you all know is is not changing at all everything is only improving the website itself is crushing it with all the seo work we've been doing the membership community that we've built continues to to do really really well both like as a business internally but more importantly with the feedback i get just from the the help that people feel like they're getting from our content and from our education and all of that is staying the same what we're doing is i partnered with another company called awai who um they've had a big impact on my life as well similar to copy vlogger not just over the last like couple years but like i've just learned a ton about writing they're more like hardcore publishers and uh not so much bloggers and they they are very good at like more of the science of long form copy pages and it's so cool when when you see it all broken down so i'm meandering a bit let me just get right to the point the point is that we have partnered with them and have combined forces to create a new membership product called digital copywriter you can go to it at digitalcopywriter.com that's just sort of the the main page like you know how trends if you go to trends.co it's just an email sign up and then like through the email signup you get uh introduction to the product itself if you want to see the benefits of the product itself you just go to my.copyblogger.com i just published all of the new landing page copy uh last week i think it was wednesday and can i just confirm that's my dot copy blogger or is it my digital copywriter no my.copyblogger.com is still where the uh the pages are i kept all the urls the same because i have all my email sequences and and the deadline funnels through those urls so i just figured why rebuild all that it's pain in the butt but yeah i am personally no longer managing the copyblogger academy and in fact all of the content on the copyblogger academy has been absorbed into digital copywriter and not just absorbed like it's a two for one basically because now everybody that signed up for digital copywriter now has all the access to the content that was on the academy and now everybody who is an academy member now also has all the access to digital copywriters so we record this on friday i did all the landing pages and all the sequences basically yesterday i hit the final publish button and then when this gets released on wednesday on monday so monday the 16th is when like all the announcement emails go out and so everybody will will know what has happened wow big news so basically i mean again to just sum it up for people listening this is almost it's not it's not an acquisition but in in an emotional sense it it's similar in that you're stepping away from one aspect of a product that you've been very close to over the last couple of years and what i really like about the article that you wrote is it takes people inside the mind of somebody who's going like who's building something like that and potentially having to make these decisions so there were a couple of things that you wrote about in the article that i wanted to spend some more time digging into for for listeners here because we talk and the reason is because we talk about this we talk about the model for building businesses is like cash flow first then you build your audience then you build products on the back end and what i thought was really interesting about this example is that it shows how i think it shows two things one you need to basically try stuff to figure out if it's going to be a fit for the type of like business that you want to build and in this case and i think like the flip side of that is like sometimes it's not so in this case uh what you said in the article was like i love everything about this community i love this space but i don't like running membership products because it's it's like uh 24 7 you have to be on the ball and it just doesn't jive with the type of business or lifestyle that you're trying to build so i liked the fact that you were very open about that because it i think it shows people reading and listening that like yes we can lay out the model for what these businesses look like but not it's not one size fits all in terms of what the back end product is that you build and sometimes you're gonna hate stuff or not hate it's not the right word i wanna say that you hate it but like sometimes you're not gonna like running a certain product type and you have to figure out how to extricate yourself from that in a way that continues to serve the audience so talk us through that a little bit more some of your thinking i'm like how how did you come to realize that this was something that you didn't want to continue managing and how did you go about finding the solution because i think this is one that i wouldn't like i think a lot of people might just shut down the community and try to figure out a way to do that so what was your actual process there i'll start with the second part of that question because you and i have hinted at this a couple times and i've explained my struggle to like articulate exactly what i mean by this because i think it's a philosophy i have that i really really think other people could use i just don't know how to like productize it into a cozy little message you know like i don't know how to put a tagline behind this but if you go to the one course i've ever created called agency clarity is basically all about this idea of starting with a service business taking this concept of leverage that we all talk about and is like the new buzzword and applying that to people because all the the twitter maxies think that like digital is the ultimate leverage and i suppose in a way it is but for me people are still the best form of leverage and i know that sounds like uh unemotional to a sense like you're commoditizing people and then maybe i am to an extent but obviously like i'm not like i have relationships with my team and the reason why is because you can build a system of information that can only work with people like robots no matter how sophisticated just aren't going to be able to like process information at least not yet in the same way so through through this idea of agency clarity the idea is you take an agency you build systems of people you do build digital leverage through the court through distribution like we always talk about and then the way to scale an agency is to more or less turn your agency into like a production company where you use the revenue that comes in from your clients and you use the profits to like build other digital companies because what's the hardest part about building a company like it's not actually the leverage it's the the time it's the work right it's the waking up it for in the morning to send the newsletter that's due at 7am like that's the hard part that's what makes people quit and so if you build the people first then all of a sudden you have this resource you can tap into to build the other things which becomes scale and so i i say that first because realistically in my mind the entire time i always knew that the end result for me is to get out of it i've talked about this book before i talked about it many times on the academy the e-myth revisited by robert gerber it just totally totally punched me in the face because i grew up in like a like a lower income blue-collar neighborhood you know and i just thought that was life i thought you woke up early and you came home late and you kicked your boots off and and when i discovered that like oh my god there's another way to do this it it really gave me like a like a shining light to look forward to so so i always knew that getting out of the day-to-day was part of the process but the specificity to copy blogger with the membership community was something totally totally totally different to me and it was a can of worms that i really really really really underestimated so i'm i'm happy to continue going about that but you as somebody who's involved in that as well i almost want to hear your your feedback on it for sure let me i'll take a brief second to just shout out stan and john from my team who are the backbone of the support system at trends and you know our names go on all the articles but like they're what really keep the ship running in terms of the the just the questions the support all those things that come in they don't get enough credit for what they do or they don't get enough attention for their role in the product so quick shout out to them because they they kill it yeah man it's tough like you said a couple of things that are resonating with me one is that the support component to any product is huge and often i think underestimated when people are kind of going in i also think it's interesting to say that human or that people are like the biggest form of leverage because i i think i agree with you actually and i don't think that this idea that technology is leveraged or the biggest leverage gets questioned enough i hadn't thought about that until you just mentioned it but you're right because it's like people are if technology let's say hypothetically technology was a high form of leverage but it is it is high form of leverage but the fact that people are what uh direct the attention and the like energy of technology is an instant trump card and so i had never thought about that before i think it's a really interesting take exactly i wanted to divert briefly just to give people listening a couple of other examples of how this plays out in other companies because again one of the key takeaways for me in learning and reading your piece was that there are different ways to build businesses and you kind of gotta experiment with a lot in order to find the one that you like so your concept of turning an agency into a production company brilliant way of encapsulating it interestingly enough this is are you familiar with rob your deck actually of course you are yeah of course he okay so sorry to cut you off real quick think he was the entire inspiration behind sober nation because i grew up a skater and skating was always like a low-life thing to do like my whole childhood was getting kicked out of parking lots and you know just told to go away by security guards and then rob dierda came around and he built like a brand around skating and like they looked a certain way and they talked a certain way and so i remember seeing that with uh robin big way back in the day and thinking like oh my god i could do this with sobriety and i could build like a a culture around sobriety so rob dierdick has been a huge influence to me for years and years and years like most of my adult adolescents and my adulthood because i'm 36 now which i don't know how that happened well he was on sam's podcast recently and he broke down how he actually structures his business which is really cool it was it ended up being a fascinating interview and i think even sam went into it with like some confused expectations like why are we talking to a skater well it turns out rob is like he's brilliant at business and that was very much on purpose he wasn't always that way and he went out to educate himself because he built that whole robbed deer deck brand then tried to sell it in like a 360 deal and these people basically told them like we can't buy this you've basically built this in a way where there's there's no value here so he had this huge brand they were doing like multi-million dollar tv shows and it had the appearance that he was making money and he was in his you know mid to late 30s by the time he tried to sell it and they're like not gonna fly and so he had to start from scratch well as as close to scratch as you can get is like a yeah world famous skater and stuff and completely rebuilt and here's he in that episode he actually talked through how he structures the company and i thought it was really interesting so similar to what you said he has this like holding company which is deer deck machine and that is the production company that owns the rights on like all of his tv stuff which is by the way is like a third of mtv's content ridiculousness you mean yeah 24 7. yeah and it was so funny too because when they were interviewing him they like opened the show with like they were like joking with him they're like hey have you ever heard the joke that like you know ridiculousness is just always on mtv and he goes well yeah it's forty percent of the content and like just like like they've definitely agreed on that but underneath that holding company it money gets funneled into two uh arenas one is launching brands and they've launched several brands under your deck machine that have gone on to exit for like multiple millions of dollars and the second is cash flowing real estate so that's how his whole business is structured is like you use your content machine to launch new brands that make money eventually like exit then everything that you get paid gets funneled back into the holding company yep where you split it between launching new brands and then buying real estate and then he says this is what he does he runs his lifestyle off the cash flow from the real estate so i just thought that was really interesting it's interesting to hear the overlap between how both of you approach these things and i think that model definitely has legs you reminded me of something else related to community building but it's slipping my mind right now so the other thing i'll i'll put a pin in it and if i think of it i'll we'll come back to it but the other thing that you had talked about is you said you want to kind of take a break before doing something that's next was there some financial component to this that allows you to take a break or is it just because the businesses are still kind of running in the background it was both as somebody that needs to finish things that i start i knew i just needed like i i couldn't let leave my customers hanging and so really if if i'm being honest financially the entity of copyblogger media does better than i expected it to and a lot of that has to do with just because i'm like i'm a good lead gen guy like i really am i i can i can just like crush it and so when we started digital commerce and i knew i had like a awesome seo entity behind me and i saw what i could do a copy blogger like we've just closed a ton of business over the last couple months because of that so financially yes there was like a benchmark that i felt like i needed to hit before i could just kind of take a deep breath really i don't even know if that benchmark made any sense it was just sort of like a spot where i could look at and be like okay let me get there and i don't even know if that's like a positive thing in my life it's just i don't sleep really unless i i hit that benchmark so i i did hit the benchmark but you know truth be told and i suppose this is like some of the emotional aspects of the article is i i hit that benchmark a little while ago like i i've been there for some time i felt like i would be letting people down if like i wasn't front and center in the way that i envisioned i would be and so i was wrestling with that for a while got it and you're open about some of these numbers like you said i forget which is which but like one of them is doing 40k a month right now in business the other one's doing like 80k a month and then stats he's doing several multiples of that yeah so i just had this fascinating conversation with this guy i won't say his name yet because i'm not sure he'd want me to share his name but he's a member in the trent group he had a life-changing exit from a company they had built an eight-figure business and sold it so like many millions of dollars uh in his account and then ended up in his own words kind of out over his skis overextended because and it was really fascinating to talk to him i he shared this fact inside the community he's like hey somebody had asked hey i have like 35 grand sitting in cash how would you guys invest this and he says first thing to ask yourself is do you like do you have an emergency fund do you have 12 months of expenses liquid yeah or like you know quickly liquefiable liquidatable and he said because if you don't don't even think about putting this anywhere eliquid and he says take it from me i like had a life-changing exit and then got way out overextended spread too thin and it's a real problem so when i saw that i reached out to him and we had this conversation and he ended up breaking down this framework for how people should think about what to do next after an acquisition and again this is not an acquisition but it is kind of similar in that like a project is coming to a close you've hit this kind of financial benchmark and now you're like looking at what to do next so i wanted to just share some of the things that he talked about in case anybody listening to this feels like they're either approaching or maybe in the similar position where they're like going through an acquisition or maybe they've just gone through one the problem is can be summarized like this there are two different mindsets that come into play when it comes to wealth building there's wealth accumulation and there's wealth preservation yeah and there's a there's a trick that nobody tells you about which is that the type of person you need to be in order to preserve your wealth is different than the type of person that you need to be in order to acquire it and the problem is that there's a slight lag usually it's especially in an acquisition right where there's like an earn out or something like that so that your financial position actually changes slower than your mindset needs to change and nobody realizes it until all of a sudden you have continued living like somebody who's in acquisition mode well into when you should be in your preservation mode and then you like very easily can end up in this situation where you're screwed and i had never heard of it put that way because like obviously everybody listening to this knows about earn out periods and stuff like that but i never thought of like how dangerous that lag really can be to your overall wealth if you're not prepared up front to change your mindset about how you're handling money so in his situation he went through this period where you know they had the acquisition and then he was flush so he was he continued to live like somebody who was pulling in you know millions of dollars a year from a business like from a sellable asset and he bought companies and he invested in friends companies and he like on paper all a lot of those investments are still doing great but they're very very illiquid and he can't touch them so here's what he said this is what you should think about for for anybody listening to this who's kind of going through this preparing to go through this prepare yourself now because the earlier you think about this the better he says there's basically like three steps to the equation to kind of nailing the acquisition and making sure you don't overextend yourself the first is related to the stories we tell ourselves about money like what stories are you telling yourself about whether you're in like an abundance or scarcity mindset and like what stories are you telling yourself about what kind of spender you are that's really important like to just before you do anything just park your money for a while and really get in touch with the stories that you've internalized as an entrepreneur related to money the second step is developing like a really detailed understanding of risk-adjusted portfolio theory like how do you build how do you build a portfolio with this money that's gonna actually protect you in the long run and then the third step you was talking about like social accountability so you have to get people a group of people around you who are there he said their purpose is not to double check your investments right it's not to do that it's a group of people that you can tell them hey this is what i want out of my life this is my plan and then when you come to the table you say this is the decision that i'm going to make their job is to check the proposed action against your stated goal and say it's not is this a good investment it's a bad investment it's is this in line with what you said you want or not and he said like that could be so helpful because if anybody had just kind of got checked one or two of these long-term investments it would have very easily shown so that was a little bit of a side tangent but i wanted to get into it because you had said you know you're getting into this phase where you just kind of want to take time and think about what's next and it occurred to me that a lot of people go through that and not everybody has been through it enough times to really know how to navigate it so how are you thinking about it right now when you're thinking about like what's next what's what's kind of on your mind well first off i think what he said was very smart a lot of that has to do with i don't know if you've ever read the psychology of money by morgan housel the first law of human psychology of money is that nobody is crazy it's just like everybody has a mental framework around money built on how they grew up with money so like you might look at somebody and think like oh i can't believe that person spends money like that or like come on live a little bit like why are you saving and like both of them will look at each other and think that they're crazy but no one's actually crazy you just have like a personal understanding and so yeah that's a really great book um the psychology of money is a super simple read to a very conversational i love what we're doing with this pod i have every intention to keep doing this i have every intention to keep seo and the copy blogger website the whole reason copyblogger was exciting to me in the first place is because of the backlink profile you know like what an idiot i was to buy a website but a certain amount of equity in the website obviously brian clark is is still my partner and very grateful to to be partnered with him but to buy into this website that had no cash flow attached to it if i didn't see some kind of like intrinsic long-term value and so the game i love to play is long-form writing and long-form content and i have every intention of going head-to-head with neil patel and going head-to-head with some of the other big blogs out there to try to gobble up some of these keywords i'm going to do it a little bit different though because i like copyblogger is not an internet marketing website where we're writing website like digital marketing digital marketing via long form writing by proxy type deal so i'm going to keep doing that you know man like i've never been in this experience in my life because i've always had so much nervous energy always and i don't even know where it comes from sometimes i feel like it's a good thing sometimes i wish it would just leave me alone and just for the first time in my life you know i'm like i am chilling i love the work that we're doing i i'm like excited to be a little bit creative i'm really excited about some of these things that i wrote about in the article some of these ideas that i had especially this uh this sas product so to to summarize you know two things i relate to rob burdick in that my wife and i both completely live off of my stadzi salary you know it's it's about 10 grand a month like i don't spend any more than 10 grand a month and that includes all the traveling that we do that's my wife and i and and our kid and it's actually like a lot of money but i don't go without you know what i mean so i don't ever want it to seem like i only spent 10 grand a month like that's a significant amount and i'm very lucky for that but the point i'm trying to make is i'm like by no means tapping into a nest egg and i want to keep doubling down on like what we started here what we did with copyblogger just because i'm leaving the day-to-day operations of the product doesn't mean by any means they're like oh wiping my hands with copyblogger throw that in the portfolio like not at all now now i think i'm like more dangerous because i just get to focus on the stuff that i really love to do and then yeah the the alumni assistant i know the treatment space really really really well and i always am a little i always do double takes with sas products sometimes because i think a lot of them are like solutions to problems that don't exist right but this is a real problem that exists in a like in an enterprise market by the way it's not direct to consumer which is another thing about sas that i don't like if it's an enterprise sash you can charge way more money and deal with a lot less hassle and uh and i'm pumped about that man so i'm i'm chilling i'm drinking coffee i'm journaling i'm kicking and punching the bag i'm going to the gym every morning with my wife i'm i'm good bro fighting fighting time yeah it's it's tough man i was thinking about the same thing today uh on a drive home i was thinking to myself because you know i'm chipping away at this journal project in the background and uh currently i'm working with a freelance editor to finish kind of editing the book and i have not been as responsive to her as i should have been and it's mostly just like what i realized on the drive today was it's because this is not my first priority it's not even my second priority and i started just kind of mulling over should it be a priority at all in that case because it's like i mean i go days without responding and i'm not sure that's a good thing and i was thinking like well this isn't what i'm going to spend my time on what would i spend my time on you know i think there is a skill that entrepreneurial type people need to develop which is like satisfaction or something related to maybe outside your comfort zone yeah it's like dude there's like a whole life out there to live that's not involved with building businesses i don't know i guess i'm kind of in this place where i'm thinking well maybe the time and money that i'm investing into this would actually be better just spent on like a cool ski trip you know like can i just burn cash on things that would be fun i don't know so it's definitely something i'm thinking about i think it's something that a lot of people struggle with i mentioned this this thought about communities that i wanted to come back to i think it speaks to the bigger challenge here that you ran into which is you know there's a community that you don't necessarily like sort of the day-to-day the the the nitty-gritty behind the scenes the stuff that you never see about running communities yeah for people who don't necessarily have the option of a partnership right out of the gate or who are maybe thinking of experimenting with a community i wanted to lay out one or two other ideas that i've seen implemented that have been really helpful for people and this is like especially practical i think there's a few areas where this is gonna be really important ones for newsletters because there's a lot of people who try to build paid newsletters and there's some community component and they're just launching the newsletter and so to like launch a newsletter and a community at the exact same time is a big deal that's not an easy thing to do yeah and like when that when trends did it we did it with you know our daily email was generating millions of dollars a year in revenue that makes it a lot easier to do a project like that than if you're you know just if you're writing it a free email and it's making like 200 a month or something like that so these are heavy heavy lifts they're not it's not easy to do but if you're going to try and do it one thing that you can do which is really effective is to bill in quarterly segments and the reason for that is first of all i see a lot of people build monthly out there for newsletters and stuff like that i actually recommend billing yearly and the reason yeah it i mean it just gives you a lot more working capital plus you know avoid some issues with credit card processing that we want to get into here but if you are going to build on a shorter term than annually you should look at quarterly and the reason for that is because you're never more than three months from shutting down the community and so if you yeah you get into this situation where maybe and like again this is even more pertinent for people who are building their own thing for the first time maybe they don't know yet if it's like real passion you get into it you don't like it you can grit through anything for three months and then you let the thing down easily and you haven't disappointed any of the people that have given you money for something um the other thing that i wanted to call out is that i've actually seen so this was interesting to me i took sam's copywriting course recently and it's kind of cool it's just like a 10-day course where he sends you like each each morning you get an email with an example of a cool copy written page and some notes from him on why it's cool and then you're supposed to hand write it 10 days in and out and the very last day he starts the email by saying like a lot of you are asking we're going to have a community for copy that which is of course and he goes uh the answer is absolutely not he's like and he says why and this is the kind of the cool thing that he does he goes uh because like frankly there are other communities out there that are way better and i don't want to run a community like i know that i can't come close to what these other communities are doing in this space so if you like them just go check them out that's what you're looking for like you came here for the course go there for the community and i don't think a lot of people are making that distinction these days everybody thinks you have to do everything and you just you don't i am so relieved to hear that there's two things that come to mind and i'm glad that we're talking about this i was hoping that this was going to be a question because it's always the go-to for people that are building an audience you know like well i'm going to get an email list and then i'm going to launch a community and i'm supportive of that because it's a great model obviously i'm having success with that i'm not knocking the community i just think that people look at digital monthly membership and they think that it doesn't mean working with people and so i'm always kind of confused when people say like well why would you start an agency when you could build a sas and it's like well an agency i have like 30 people i have to deal with with the sas i got like 30 000 people i have to deal with you know like where did we come up with this idea that one of them was like less labor intensive than the other and it reminds me there's a really really talented woman out there her name is emily mills and i don't know if she listens to the show or not i hope she does she used to live in nashville she was one of my bird my bird friends we would always send pictures of birds she moved recently to uh to oregon but she's an illustrator and she reached out to me once saying like tim i just want to ask you a question i launched this community with my illustrating brand and she's got like 12 000 followers it's really cool what she does she goes to um conferences and as the conference this is her business like as the conference is is going on she's up front with like a big white board and she just illustrates the story so it's kind of like a live verse you know those whiteboard youtube videos that you see right and then she rips it out it's one of those like big big paper things and so when i say rips it out she's literally ripping off a big piece of paper and like sticking it at the front of the conference afterwards and so like everybody can gather around and it's like a visual representation of what they learned and that's a really cool thing she had great business and she reached out to me she's like man i i'm struggling with this community i thought people were going to buy it more like what advice do you have and i without a single hesitation i said don't do it i can shut it down this is hard this is so grueling and you know there's there's like a a cost per hour average that i think people don't look at that much and if you were to take it without the community because you know people say okay i can do a newsletter maybe i got 19 bucks a month on like a high-end newsletter where i could do a community and i can charge like maybe 49 bucks a month if you want to get like real real top level most likely 29 i'd say so that extra 10 a month per member you know let's say you got 100 members that's what a thousand extra dollars a month but you're gonna be working way more than a thousand dollars worth and so people just don't fail to recognize these nuances where it's it's not like some free monthly cash flow machine like the work you have to do to make people happy answer people questions answer people's questions it is very very very significant and so and so the best part about it is that awai like they have this down already they have a whole team of people that do it you know and so like i just i feel so relieved that i would be devastated if i got to this place and how do i pull the plug for myself for like the customers you know for all the work we put in and i'd be so so crushed and so i was like really blessed to be able to make this relationship with rebecca and i know that it's gonna be even better than it was because you know got some idiot like me like you know being the anchor on this ship dragging this thing down so i'm thrilled yeah i think finding the right team for a soft landing is definitely yeah definitely key and and also like if there's another lesson there too which this is actually i learned this when i stepped away from my last job so i was in this hyper growth startup doing community work by the way which you know anybody knows it's hard but it's also crazy that it's a real job it's a total privilege because my job was to like fly around the world hosting crazy events for smart interesting people and at that point i just had decided that i really wanted to be a writer and i was you know 29 or something i was getting up there and just hadn't made real progress toward that goal and i just had this moment where i was like i gotta i gotta make a change and i was very nervous to step away from the project this is the this is kind of the point i was nervous to step away and it was actually my boss who sort of taught me he's like well i think a lot of people are afraid to step away from a project because we create this false duality in our mind where it's like we either stay and it succeeds or we leave and it's a failure yeah he's like the actual the reality is you can leave and how's he sucking yes you can leave as a success but he was talking about like specifically finding the next job because i was like well i don't know if i'm gonna be able to find a job as a writer and he goes well you may leave here and find a job that pays you more than you get paid here like the point is not that uh like don't fear walking away because in walking away or changing your focus or whatever you can actually create an outcome that's better for everybody involved and that was an important lesson for me and now that's one of the ways that i sort of battle test any decision that i'm making is like am i being fearful here because i'm assuming it's not going to work out this change you know and in some way like you find the right partner it can totally work out so that's a great lesson me too and i guess to summarize this thing this this sort of brings us back around i didn't want to harp on this too much because i i i felt like digging into community would be a really valuable topic for people who listen to this podcast to hear because i'm sure there's there's people listening thinking that that that was my goal i want to build a community but in the gentleman that you interviewed he said that the third thing was to have people around him that can bounce his idea and correlate that in the direction of like what his goal is that really stuck out to me because i had an executive coach for a while and she really really helped me and basically every single conversation came down to the same exact thing and she called it the ultimate outcome she was like is what you're doing going to get you closer to or further away to your ultimate outcome and i think that's like i'm getting a little heady here i've spent a lot of time thinking about this as you can see from my journal that we're talking about before but i think the people go to community because it's it's like an easy thing to put in there you know like yeah i'm going to build an audience and i'm going to build a community but i don't think a lot of people take the time to ask themselves like is this getting me closer to or further away from my ultimate outcome and for a lot of people i think they say my ultimate outcome is going to be to write and to create a newsletter and then i can do that anywhere in the world believe me if you have a community you are not going to be able to work on your own time you are just not you're gonna have to immediately stop for urgent refunds people that didn't know they were getting charged again and i'm not again like i'm not complaining these are just things to pop up in this kind of business yeah and so to bring this whole thing back around like my ultimate outcome has always been to build a production company that can essentially manage a lot of the work for me so that i can write in my blog it's like that's really what i want to do with my life like i want to write books and i want to write in my blog and like hang out with my family and work out you know that's that's really what makes me happiest and what takes me out of my myself and so i i it was it was it was when i was in portland or again i came over the exact moment when i looked over to my wife when i was working and like i was holding up the hike that we were going for and she understands because it's an urgent thing i was like look i cannot go right now i have to figure out how to fix this problem and i just knew i was like this is not in line with my ultimate outcome and it was the very next day that i reached out to rebecca with awai and i was like hey i got this idea you know like let's let's make this better for all of us and uh and i i think we did i feel i know we did i feel super super confident that like what we did is even better than it was before and so like everybody wins yeah well i think part of the evidence of that is that you're still holding the company right so it's got to perform otherwise yeah you're just losing money well thanks for being so open about this stuff man i think i think it's really cool to talk through this because people don't alway people don't often get a window into what this looks like especially in a six-figure business that's just that it's operating at a high level uh so hopefully this was interesting to people listening anything else you want to say before we wrap this up no ma'am great to see you i'm happy that we're doing this i have a i know that this is going to be the kind of episode that is really really going to speak to people and i i i suppose to wrap it up is i'm very very grateful that uh when people here are because it's hard to be like vulnerable in such a public setting sometimes you know but every time you and i have had these conversations about like what's really going on behind the scenes like this is the reality and these are some of the fears and you're not the only one thinking this i promise you you know we've always gotten such really really positive feedback so i i hope that we were able to give some positive insight to anybody that may be toying with some of these ideas and and if we have reach out to me reach out to evening we're both here to like to chat through some of this [ __ ] with you so so thank you second there thanks for listening everybody this was great we'll catch you next week [Music] you