Stacking the Bricks

3 big ways a brutal job market paves the way for people like you

Fri, 10 Jan 2025 16:22:48 -0000

Between continued tech layoffs and a lot of ugly (borderline pathological?) hiring conditions, you might be thinking that now is the worst possible time to start a business. Maybe even straight up irresponsible.

Or is it?

When the 2000s dotcom crash happened, I was young, Extremely Online, and self employed. I paid rapt attention to the fallout, hungrily analyzing and learning from all the details I could find.

And then, I used what I learned to launch three businesses – yes three – during the initial crush of the Great Recession of 2008/09.

The kinds of businesses I started – and exactly how I started them – will be very relevant to you and your future.

Because more than 15 years later, while many of my contemporaries have come and gone, I’m proud to still be in business!

Through multiple major life changes, a freakin' pandemic, and my chronic health issues, I'm still here. Making my living with my products.

(Sadly, you can't say the same for a lot of people who teach entrepreneurship. I preach what I practice.)

Here's the cold hard truth:

If you understand the conditions we're living through, and how this recession compares to recent economic history; and most of all, if you are smart about the ways you invest your time into building products that people want, 2025 might be one of the best times to start a business!

I’m not blowing sunshine up your ass. It all comes down to three key factors that are true in basically every kind of economic uncertainty:

Factor #1: The weak, bloated businesses die first

I am not an economist. I just read what a lot of experts say.

And there’s a whoooooooole lotta data and theory on what happens in times like these.

There's really only a few things that everyone agrees on, and one of them is that economic pressure kills the walking dead.

And boy, are we living through it today!

Businesses that are “inefficient” — over-extended, over-staffed, over-complicated, over-priced and under-capitalized — they die first. If you spend like there’s no tomorrow, there will eventually be no tomorrow!

Look no further than the widespread tech layoffs of the last couple of years, which broadly fall into two buckets:

Bucket 1 are the companies who are legitimately in a financial crush, at least in part due to over-hiring during years of unsustainable growth.
Bucket 2 are the companies that are still doing okay financially, but their stakeholders are spooked and want to see some moves towards efficiency. So they use the air cover of “tough times” to make cuts. Fuck that, I say.

At any rate, inefficient firms can and do survive, but they do so by tightening their belts. They reduce staff, close offices, change prices, kill products, and make other short-term changes to make ends meet.

And when people lose their jobs, they have less money to spend, which causes other inefficient firms to cut or die… and so on.

This cascade hurts a lot of people, but it also creates opportunity for you because of Factor #2….

Factor #2: Core needs remain (even under pressure)

Life goes on. People still have needs and wants.

And critically for your future success, everyone from professionals to solopreneurs to enterprises has non-negotiable needs:

They need to protect and grow their income
They need to stay competitive and relevant
They need to deliver more value more efficiently
They need to reduce risks and uncertainty
They need to maximize every resource they have

Yes, they may have less money to throw around. They’re scrutinizing every expense. But the money doesn’t just “vanish” - it gets reallocated to what actually works.

Economic pressure turns everyone into maximizers. They’re looking to:

Invest in skills that make them irreplaceable
Cut tools and subscriptions that don’t deliver clear ROI
Replace expensive solutions with simpler, focused alternatives
Learn ways to do more with less time and fewer resources
Build security through better skills, systems, and results

And for the aspiring entrepreneur like you 👆 this is your chance to shine. These pain points aren’t going away - they’re getting sharper.

Which leads to the final fact about what happens during times of economic pressure…

Factor #3: Pressure creates gaps in the market

Have you stopped to consider that some kinds of businesses actually grow during economic shakeups? It’s true!

Even when money is tight, regular folks spend on affordable luxuries like fancy soap, chocolates, and movie tickets.

Sometimes they even spend more than before, because it’s a way to cut spending elsewhere: e.g. instead of going to a spa, they buy fancy soap to use at home. Instead of spending gas on commuting to work, they buy things to make their home office more comfortable.

Folks also invest in things that will improve their economic situation, or lower their financial risks. They might stock up on stuff that they can get cheaper in bulks. Or pay for training that helps them get a better job, so they can earn more and save more money.

The same is true for businesses.

No matter the climate, businesses and professionals alike will keep buying things that reliably promise to:

save them money
make them more money

Good investments can include reaching more customers, keeping more customers, training and retaining valuable staff, earning more per sale or customer, getting more done with the same number of hours or people, etc.

Smart savings can come in the form of buying cheaper, more effective, or more durable alternatives to the things they already spend money on.

They cut waste, and maximize what they can squirrel away.

And even if a business is healthy, they’re not immune to a supplier going out of business or shutting down a critical product.

Do you hear that? It’s opportunity knocking for you.

So what have we learned?

Economic pressure comes down hardest on the businesses that have been running bloated, risky, and fragile…
…but even when spending slows, it doesn’t stop…
which creates unique advantages for NEW businesses, if you understand how to make the right moves.

These three factors sum up what I understood about recessions and entrepreneurship when I started my businesses during the 2008 crisis, and why I still believe entrepreneurship is a smart choice in 2025.

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2025 Tech Stack for Bootstrappers

Wed, 12 Apr 2023 16:22:48 -0000

“What’s in your tech stack?”

For a long time, Amy and I have resisted publishing tech and tool reviews or even sharing our “preferred” tech stack for running our business.

Our #1 priority is our readers and our students, and for the most part, they don’t care what tools we use so long as we’re helping them get where they want to go.

However, for the last 12 months or so, I’ve spent a TON of time on the tools-side of our business. And for the first time, I feel like I have some specific and concrete lessons learned, ranging from:

which tools we use, and how we chose them
the most valuable features of those tools, and how we use them
the most frustrating problems we have with our toolchain of choice

As you read, you’ll quickly notice that these review aren’t sugar coated, most including a few items I love and a few items things that drive me batty.

Some of our tools downright suck and have even cost us customers! 😡

In all of these cases, it’s a great example of how often we have succeeded in spite of our tools.

Cuz when you operate a business, you’ve gotta get used to operating in imperfect conditions. Good tools can improve your and your customers’ experience, but perfect tools - if such a thing even exists - aren’t going to be the deciding factor between your success or your failure.

Our business runs on about a dozen tools. Most are paid, but several are free (or have free options). Total monthly costs vary, but our software related expenses are pretty consistently under $1000, and always under $1500/month.

Here they are!

_Note: in just three of these products we have included a clearly indicated affiliate link. We LOVE these products, and recommend using them regardless of the commission we might earn if you sign up using our link. But hey, the kickback is nice too, so thanks in advance!

Website Generator - Nanoc
Static Site Hosting - Netlify
Email Marketing & Automation - Convertkit
Customer Support - Helpscout
Email - G Suite
Digital “Storefront” - Podia
Courseware - Teachable
Webinar Hosting - Crowdcast
Podcast Hosting - Simplecast
Automation - Zapier
Team Chat - Slack
Video Calls - Zoom
Forms & Surveys - Typeform
Student/Customer CRM - Airtable
Segmentation - RightMessage

Website Generator - Nanoc

🔗 Nanoc

In the spring of 2017 we flipped the switch on Stacking the Bricks (dotcom) and said goodbye to our old brand and website.

With that change came some “new” technology to replace the Wordpress-powered site that we’d used to generate millions of dollars of revenue over the previous 8-9 years.

We chose Nanoc because it was built in Ruby and would be easy for Thomas to help us customize and improve (thank you, Thomas!). Our new posts are easily composed in Markdown, and publish/track changes with git.

👍 Fast pageload, easy drafting

Serving pure static HTML means our website is fast, secure, and relatively unbreakable. This is probably the biggest benefit of going this direction.

I really like most things about this workflow, and especially like being able to work locally and without distractions.

👎 Adding images is clumsy, Compile times can be slooooowwwww.

I only have two complaints about Nanoc: compile speed, and adding an image to an article.

Previewing changes to formatting or text requires recompiling the site, and we learned that Nanoc loads ALL of the content files to check them for changes. With our sizable back catalog of content, this has gotten slow.
Adding a new image is a multi-step process of copying that image into the /content/assets/images/ directory (which means I have to find it, or have it handy) and then manually typing out one of a few different image tags.

The compile speed issues are not show-stoppers (and can possibly still be optimized), just increasingly annoying when I’m making tiny tweaks and want to quickly see the change in a browser. It’d be amazing if Nanoc had a way to specify a single file to compile and skipped loading/scanning the rest of the repository.

Static Site Hosting - Netlify

🔗 Netlify

We chose Netlify when we relaunched our Nanoc-powered site in 2015. It has lots of nice bells and whistles like using a single text file to define all of the redirects from our old URLs. They also support a simple method of password protecting pages or directories, handy for sharing exclusive content.

👍 Fast and easy

Static sites are fast, and Netlify delivers on that front as well.

Early on, their technical support was notably good, and we were very happy customers. They even helped me debug compile errors a couple of times - totally above-and-beyond type stuff.

👎 Crappy customer support experiences

Sadly, Netlify lost points with us after a few nasty run-ins with their support & CTO and, when they raised a giant pile of VC money in late 2018, things have only seemed to get worse. 🙄

Thankfully, one of the nice things about running our site with static HTML is that the host matters a lot less than with other platforms, so I can see us finding a new host in the future but it’s far from urgent.

Email Marketing & Automation - Convertkit

🔗 ConvertKit 👈 affiliate link

We made the decision to switch to ConvertKit in October 2018.

I am working on a much larger, comprehensive write-up about how we evaluated the options, why we were motivated to change providers at all, specifics about how I planned and executed the migration, and the strengths/weaknesses that I’ve found in ConvertKit.

The short version is this: I grew our business by 150% YoY in 2018 using advanced email marketing automation, but the platform we were running on (Drip) had become a raging dumpster fire.

Our biggest priority with switching to ConvertKit was our delivery and open/click rates - it doesn’t matter how powerful the automation tools are if the emails don’t get to the inbox!

Here’s how things look since the switch:

👍 Email delivery is up, and ConvertKit seems to have found the right balance of power and simplicity

At the time of writing, we have less than a month with ConvertKit as our primary sending infrastructure but so far the results look good. Open and click rates have increased back to our previous baselines (in some cases, a difference of 10% or more).

I also really like using their form embeds - they’re very easy to customize AND the built-in statistics are something we’ve never really had. Finally, we know what our opt-in conversion rates are and where to focus our efforts to improve!

ConvertKit’s support and migration teams are great. The platform is simple but powerful once you understand some of it’s “philosophy” which I was able to do within a couple of weeks of active use.

👎 Stats seem like they are always out of sync.

Right now my #1 complaint about ConvertKit isn’t a lack of power (though it did take me a couple of weeks to unlearn my expectations from Drip and get used to how CK handles things). My REAL complaint is how often their stats are inaccurate.

This might seem like a small thing, but I regularly do something (e.g. import a CSV of subscribers into a new tag, or add a list of subscribers to a new sequence) and for HOURS ConvertKit tells me that the number is still zero. The problem is that at first glance, I’m not sure if the import or action was done correctly, or if I made a mistake, or if there was an error. I second guess myself often (even though nothing bad has happened yet).

ConvertKit’s support assures me that this is “normal” because they batch these updates, which doesn’t make it okay. The simple fix isn’t even making the batches run faster, though that would be nice. The best solution would be to tell me the last time a stat was updated, so I can quickly see “oh, the stat I’m seeing is just outdated,” instead of wondering if it’s outdated or if I made a mistake.

But really, that’s my biggest complaint.

If you’ve made the leap into advanced email marketing automation, or are considering it, I think that ConvertKit is the best option on the market today.

Disclosure: Yes, we are friends with ConverKit founder Nathan Barry. Amy even played a role in coaching Nathan in the direction that would eventually become ConvertKit. Personally knowing Nathan (and a number of his team members) did play a role in the decision, but it’s not a factor in why I’m giving it a solid review.

What DOES matter is how Nathan leads his company with integrity and transparency as priorities.

Everybody makes mistakes, lord knows we’ve made them. It’s about how you respond to them, that matters most.

Customer Support - Helpscout

🔗 Helpscout

We’ve been using Helpscout as our shared helpdesk inbox thingie since the summer of 2015. It’s fine.

I don’t know anybody who LOVES their helpdesk tool, to be honest. We don’t really use most of the “advanced” features or integrations.

For us, it’s a shared inbox with the ability to view the shared record of customer conversations.

👍 Custom “Meta”

There’s a small, simple feature that lets you inject HTML into the sidebar to show outside information about the customer you’re communicating with - this is super valuable, even if it requires some custom coding.

The simplest version is something I use often - it’s simply a quick-link to search ConvertKit for a subscriber that matches the email of the person attached to the support thread.

👎 Search sucks

My biggest complaint about Helpscout is that their Search is super flaky. I can almost never find the thing I’m looking for with their search, even if I know the terms/phrases exist.

Email - G Suite

🔗 G Suite

Behind the scenes of Helpscout, we use Google Apps or “G Suite” as they call it these days.

👍 Just works. Best inbox search.

The only time we log in is when I’m trying to find an email that Helpscout’s search won’t turn up.

👎 Google

If you’re (rightfully) worried about the scale and breadth of the Google surveillance machine, you might want to opt for a more privacy-oriented email host. I could see us switching away in the future, but it’s not a huge priority.

Digital “Storefront” - Podia

🔗 Podia 👈 affiliate link

In a lot of ways, it’s amazing that anybody ever bought our products. 😅

We (unintentionally) made it extraordinarily difficult to find the things we have for sale unless we are actively promoting them to our email list.

You might find that one of many random links to various different sales platforms have been scattered across our site and emails. Webinar replays were able to be purchased directly from Crowdcast, which was a pretty lousy customer experience.

JFS and consulting packages were purchased through an old DPD account, which worked but had one of the clumsiest checkout workflows ever, so I’m sure we simply lost people to cart abandonment. We used Samcart for our Holiday Bundle sales (their one page checkout template is AMAZING for tiered bundles, but everything else is pretty bad). We even had Gumroad in the mix when we first launched JFS in 2015, and have a sale or two come through there every month.

LOL. What a beautiful mess. But somehow…still profitable!

Earlier in 2018 I had been eying up a new-ish platform called Podia for a while. I even did a personal demo with the founder, Spencer Fry, shortly after a relaunch and rebrand of the platform.

I enjoyed Spencer’s outlook for the product as a long-term business (vs one being built for acquisition). The checkout experience was very elegant, especially in comparison to our janky-ass DPD cart.

But the feature set was still pretty limited at the time, so I put Podia in the “promising, keep an eye on this for the future” category.

Flash forward to October 2018 - I came back to Podia for an update and was very impressed with the continued progress!

I spent an afternoon setting up our JFS products, and a week later, decided to move ALL of our smaller digital products under one Podia roof.

Update: WHY DIDN’T WE SWITCH TO PODIA SOONER!?

Year to date, sales from our tiny products (everything outside of our flagship course 30x500) are up by 2x. That’s DOUBLE the sales just for moving our products under a single digital storefront powered by Podia.

Are we happy customers? Yes, definitely.

👍 A unified “store” experience for our customers

One of my favorite parts about switching to Podia is how easy it was to go from “products scattered all over the damn internet” to having one place to find everything.

Another thing I love is offering our customers a single login where they can access EVERYTHING they have ever bought from us.

Note: this “unified login” is in place for new customers going forward, and I’m planning to import our entire customer history in Q1. When this happens, we’ll be able to send an link to every past customer to create a login and access everything regardless of where and when they bought it. I am very excited!

👎 No real stats

Right now my #1 complaint about Podia is the lack of a way to “snapshot” my sales data. There is a very basic way to see total sales on a per-product basis, but you can’t scope that to a specific period of time.

Basically my only option is to export our sales data into a CSV and muck around in spreadsheet filters.

On the other hand, NO reports also means that our reports are never showing inaccurate numbers. 😂

👎 Weak Courseware

My other major complaint is that their courseware is… very limited, and just not robust enough to power our flagship course 30x500. Moving 30x500 is going to be an undertaking, so when it happens I really would only like to do it once if I can.

Podia’s courseware might be good enough for a beginner, but it’s basically just static pages organized by a table of contents.

With that said, I have a lot of confidence in Spencer and his team upgrading their courseware to support things like assessments and real progress tracking/student analytics. I’ll be patient!

Podia charges a very affordable flat monthly fee (plus your payment processor fees) - we’re currently running on the $39/month version.

If you’re making $1000+/month in digital product and ready to upgrade from Gumroad or another digital product delivery platform, I’m a big fan of what’s happening with Podia.

Courseware - Teachable

🔗 Teachable

The courseware industry is notoriously full of bad, ugly, difficult/confusing software. We’ve tried most of the platforms out there, and keep an eye on new/emerging options as well as ongoing developments of the existing players.

When we set out to build 30x500 as a self-guided course in 2015, we narrowed it down to just a few real contenders.

At the time, Teachable was still fairly young (and still called Fedora), but was the only option we could find that didn’t look like it was designed in 2004.

Since that launch, we’ve had more than 700 students enroll in 30x500 and processed around $1.4M in sales on the platform.

👍 Nice looking student experience

I think the Teachable student experience is generally pretty good (especially compared to most of the other options). It has a built-in progress tracker, and a decent mobile experience.

If you’re comfortable in HTML/CSS and code, you can customize it quite a bit.

👎 Everything else

Unfortunately, I don’t have a lot of other nice things to say about Teachable.

We had technical issues that directly impact people’s ability to purchase our course
The purchase workflow is very clumsy, and often confuses our students
The course analytics - which had us very excited at the start - turned out to be useless in terms of understanding where our students are succeeding or struggling.
The sales analytics are not useful at all (especially once you add payment plans into the mix). There’s so much useful business intelligence that COULD be shown, but instead I get unfiltered gross sales. Show me per-product sales! Show me student progress! Show me churned payments that need recovering!
Speaking of churned payment plans: there is no way to restart a payment plan that failed due to credit card failures. The only option is to create a separate “product” that contains the number of payments left, and ask the student to re-enroll. Thankfully our payment plan churn rate is extremely low, but even then I’m frustrated every time I have to jump through these hoops.
Teachable’s support routinely deflects our student’s problems back to us, even when the problem is with Teachable’s software. Unless I copy the CEO in on my support emails, it’s common for problems to go unresolved or deflected.

These are just some of the most egregious complaints. The list goes on and on.

To his credit, Ankur (the CEO) has always responded when I’ve asked him directly for help, but the problem is that I shouldn’t need to personally email the CEO to get decent customer support.

Webinar Hosting - Crowdcast

🔗 Crowdcast

The word “webinar” still makes me gag, but I’d by lying if I said we didn’t enjoy doing them!

That said, one of the most common experiences with webinars is unreliable audio and video. Technical issues are stressful for the presenter, and frustrating for attendees. Almost every ‘new skool’ webinar I’ve attended in the last 2-3 years has started with the “can you hear me?” dance, followed by the hope that the recording will work.

👍 Most reliable audio and video

Thankfully, this is where Crowdcast shines.

The performance is most reliable in Google Chrome (for presenters AND attendees), which isn’t great, but at least we can send out an email before hand that tells people, “If you don’t use Chrome, you may experience technical difficulties.

Crowdcast’s live broadcast “just works” like you’d want it to, and the instantly-available recording afterwards is a huge win.

👎 Confusing UI

Thankfully it does the ONE THING it needs to do well, because the rest of the app is confusing as hell.

Everything from event setup, to hiding important navigation/features at the bottom of the screen for viewers, causes some kind of confusion. The UI is too busy trying to be clever.

👎 Don’t talk for more than 2 hours

There is a technical limitation in the otherwise rock-solid streaming system that recordings are limited to 2 hours.

That, in itself, isn’t really a big problem. The problem is that as you approach the 2 hour mark the application provides a warning about this limitation, but it DOES NOT SAY that the broadcast is going to end at 2 hours.

It’s an avoidable problem if you’re running a multi-hour workshop (as we tend to do). The fix is to break the event into sessions, a native feature that Crowdcast handles pretty well, with just a few annoyances.

But we’ve been bitten by this “limitation” more than once, and it’s not a good look.

Podcast Hosting - Simplecast

🔗 Simplecast

Simplecast was an early mover in the “new generation” of podcast hosting platforms, and when we started using it I found it to be the most user-friendly option on the market.

👍 Easy to understand, straightforward stats at a glance

If you can publish a blog post, you can publish a podcast with Simplecast. It’s still stupidly easy.

I also like how Simplecast shows the listener statistics. Due to the nature of podcasts, stats still are limited, but at least Simplecast makes it easy to understand them.

👎 Simplecast 2.0 is coming

For 18 months or so, the Simplecast team has been warning of a complete overhaul of the app. Tons of new, groundbreaking features. A bold, new design.

As of a few weeks ago, I finally got a demo of the new platform. I’m…not as excited about it as the Simplecast team is. I appreciate all of the work that’s gone into it, and maybe my opinion will change once I’ve had a chance to be hands on. But for now, I’m eying up alternatives that are adding high-value features (like built-in transcription services) rather than a new coat of paint on old statistics.

Automation - Zapier

I freaking love Zapier. I actually don’t know how I lived (or ran businesses) before Zapier. It’s the best.

As you’ve noticed, we use a number of different tools, and our business depends on those tools being able to reliably talk to each other.

In the past, we would have had two options:

Choose a single monolithic tool that claims to do everything under the sun (but almost certainly sucks at everything it does), OR
Write and maintain custom code that connects our pantheon of tools together with their APIs…assuming they have APIs. And those APIs are well documented. And that these integrations are logged completely and comprehensively, in case of edge cases that break things.

Both of these options are awful, and both of these options are completely obliterated from existence thanks to Zapier.

Maybe I should do a more in-depth screencast of how we wire all of these tools together with Zapier? @me on twitter (@alexhillman) or email team@stackingthebricks.com if that’s something you’d be interested in!

I can’t think of something that I dislike about Zapier. It rules. 👍👍👍👍👍

A friend pointed out that while he’s also a huge fan of Zapier, he does worry about how much he relies on them. “if Zapier goes away, or gets bought, I’m fucked.” This is a good point!

The good news is (and why I don’t worry as much) is because Zapier isn’t the only option on the market. Others like Tray.io (which supports the rest of our tools, including new additions like Convertkit) already exist.

Given how many businesses DO rely on tools like Zapier, including companies that have higher security and compliance requirements than we do, I confidently predict that we will see more and more options being available to choose from (and migrate to, in an emergency).

Team Chat - Slack

🔗 Slack

For many, the de-facto chat option.

We use Slack for our daily team interactions, as well as our 30x500 alumni chat room.

Lots has been said elsewhere on the Internet about Slack. We use it. The end.

Video Calls - Zoom

🔗 Zoom

Remember when Google Hangouts came out and it felt amazing to instantly get 2-5 people on a screen and then spend a few mins doing the usual conference call “can you hear me?” dance?

👍 Great video quality, works out of the box, built-in recording

Zoom is like that, but without the dance. Zoom is one of those tools that Just Works 99.9% of the time.

Built-in recording is also a useful bonus for referring to conversations later.

Huge fan. A++++ would zoom again.

👎👍 Native client

I have a firm suspicion that part of why Zoom works so well is because it requires downloading and installing a native client. I don’t actually have a problem with this, but it is notable because “guests” will need to download and install zoom to participate in a call with you.

Zoom makes this process about as fast and painless as possible, and I haven’t really run into an issue with this. I consider it a positive, but I could see it being an undesirable “extra step” in certain situations.

👎 Why we aren’t using Zoom Webinars

“Wait, doesn’t Zoom do webinars too? Why do you use Crowdcast for webinars instead of Zoom?”

I’ve used Zoom’s webinar tools. They’re okay.

And I’m not just talking about “I did a quick test” - I ran a multi-day virtual conference using Zoom’s webinar tools.

The best part about Zoom is their audio and video reliability. But the other best part about Zoom’s meeting feature is that it has an essentially zero-step setup. Click a button and go. Their webinar setup, on the other hand, is a hot mess by comparison. Their built-in registration tools are ugly and difficult to configure, with a zillion confusing settings in a poorly designed web admin (yes, more confusing and more poorly designed than Crowdcast).

I’m also not a fan of forcing our webinar viewers to download and install a client to participate in the event, especially a client that feels like an afterthought compared to their meeting client.

Forms & Surveys - Typeform

🔗 Typeform

Truth be told, we don’t survey our readers as much as some other people do!

But that’s started to change, as we use a mix of Typeform and Rightmessage (which I’ll talk about below) to get a better picture for who is reading and subscribing, and what they’re working towards.

In the last 12 months, we’ve collected survey responses from around 15% of our total subscriber base using a single, simple form. Typeform made it easy to create, design, and distribute that form.

👍 Easy to personalize, customize, and create “advanced” logic in surveys

If you’re already using Google Forms or something similar, you’re going to be familiar with the basic workflow that Typeform offers for creating surveys. If anything, I think it’s a little bit easier because they separate the “construction” of the form from its presentation.

But the real power of Typeform is in what they call “logic jumps” that allows you to show and hide different questions or options depending on how the survey taker answered a previous question. It even generates a handy map of how questions link to each other, and the potential paths someone might take.

Here’s what that looks like with our relatively simple form. There are 7 questions total, but each person will only be asked certain questions depending on how they answer the 2nd question.

Another thing I really like is being able to pass variables into hidden fields. This means that since everyone getting this survey is coming from our email list, we don’t need to prompt them for their name and email again since we already have that!

Typeform makes it super easy to pass the subscriber’s email directly into the URL of the form and store their email address along with the answer.

Then, we use Zapier to save those answers back into custom fields in Convertkit, closing the loop!

👎 Pay extra for additional logins

This is really a small thing, more of an annoyance than a complaint (and with an easy enough workaround).

Typeform has a couple of reasonably priced plans, but only allows for additional logins on their top plan (starting at double the price) AND they charge per additional user.

I almost never complain about pricing, but it’s one of those scenarios where additional seats isn’t really creating more value, just charging me more so I can give my teammate their own login credentials.

Student/Customer CRM - Airtable

I’m the kind of person who defaults to Google Docs spreadsheets as a low-fi database that I can quickly filter, sort, tally, and track. The trouble comes when the thing you’re tracking starts getting messy and complicated, or when multiple people are working in that spreadsheet.

Last year I ran into exactly this kind of project while doing a big revamp to our hiring process at Indy Hall. Our spreadsheet of applicant data was quickly becoming a mess, and my team and I were struggling to come up with any way to manage nearly 100 job applicants in a brand new hiring process.

That’s where Airtable saved our butts.

My favorite way to describe Airtable is mixing the relative ease of tossing data into a spreadsheet with the power and flexibility of a true database. But that’s abstract, and still somewhat confusing.

👍 Finally, the CRM we’ve been dying for.

Thanks to Airtable, I FINALLY have a way to wrangle our students’ progress, milestones, and successes.

Using a set of linked tables, I can quickly and easily add notes about updates from students, and specific personal advice that we’ve given them along the way. When we’re racking our brains for examples in workshops talks, we can filter/organize those updates by the types of products our students have shipped.

We can track when and where this data gets used and shared in case studies and articles, and (soon) keep an eye on “freshness” of our updates so we can remember to check in with students we haven’t heard from a while.

And, for the first time, we can start to keep a running tally of our students’ revenue! Student revenue is all self reported, and we always ask for permission to share that data publicly.

But even without personally identifying our students annual revenue figures, or the total lifetime revenue they attribute to what they learned in 30x500.

I’m really just getting started with what’s possible with Airtable and how it fits into the systems we’re building for our business.

👎 The “It Can Be Anything” problem.

In one specific way, Airtable reminds me of Trello. And it’s not that Airtable has a Kanban view for entering/sorting your data.

Trello and Airtable are both tools based around YOUR data and YOUR workflow. That makes them infinite flexible.

That’s why I was able to build the CRM of my dreams, one that actually helped me manage the minutiae and details of relationship over time, rather than focus on where someone was in a pipeline.

The problem is that starting from a blank Airtable Base or Trello board is difficult and daunting. Even the wide world of pre-configured templates available for Airtable didn’t help me because I really didn’t understand how the templates were set up in the first place.

What I discovered is that the trick to learning Airtable, like learning Trello before it, is to watch someone actually use it.

What ended up working for me was spending a few hours on Youtube watching people build different kinds of Airtable demos before I understood how it really worked.

And now that I really understand it, Airtable is one of my favorite tools in our toolchain.

Segmentation - RightMessage

🔗 Right Message 👈 affiliate link

The newest addition to our arsenal, and the latest SaaS from our friend and 30x500 Alumni Brennan Dunn!

RightMessage includes a growing suite of tools that include two main parts:

RightAsk, which helps us understand our audience better.
Campaigns and Funnels that help us show the most appropriate information and offers to our readers and customers.

RightMessage synchronizes with ConvertKit and lets us apply a layer of personalization to our entire site. As one example, once we know that you’re interested in a certain topic, we can introduce “recommended reading” that’s tailored to helping YOU solve the problems in your business that you’re facing right now, instead of having to spelunk through our entire archives (and sometimes cryptic post titles) to find the best resources.

Another example (and one that we are still working to deploy) will be applied to our CTAs across Stacking the Bricks. Currently, we manually choose from one of a half-dozen different free offerings that could be associated with a given post, everything from courses that help with productivity or marketing, to a relatively generic newsletter signup.

But once you’ve signed up for, let’s say, our Year of Hustle Roadmap and email course, it doesn’t make sense to KEEP showing you those opt-ins. RightMessage makes it easy for us to adjust those CTAs sitewide based on what you’ve already signed up for.

We’re really just getting started with RightMessage…I look forward to being able to report back our own success stories!

Whew! For someone who really didn’t want to talk about our tools, I guess I had a few things to say 😅

As our toolkit continues to evolve, our #1 priority in almost every tool is how quickly we can use it to get a result, either for ourselves or our students. We need to be able to learn and start using the tool quickly.

Our 2nd most important factor is Quality Customer Support, but sometimes that changes over time or it’s impossible to tell early on. In some cases, I’m even willing to use an inferior product (within bounds of reason) that has measurably better customer support.

Just remember, there’s a bunch of things that will cause you to fail before your tools do, including spending too much time worrying about your tools. Your tools are likely to change over time, and not always for the better. You’ll probably migrate between competing tools more than once during the lifteime of your business, that’s just part of the process.

But if it helps, pick something from our list. If it’s good enough for us to generate thousands of sales and millions of dollars, it’s good enough for you to do the same!

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Don't take this advice.

Mon, 28 Feb 2022 16:22:48 -0000

Confident decision making is one of the hardest lessons to learn. In part, I think this is because we spend so much of our lives outsourcing decisions to other people.

It’s also why the “advice industry” is so freakin’ huge – and I say that knowing that Amy and I are a part of that industry!

I wanted to share an exchange with one of our students where the best advice I had was: “Don’t take this advice.”

“Halp!” they shared in our student chat room. “I need a reminder why I’m in here. I’ve been offered a job that is really really cool, but I have fear around being an employee again after 10 years of doing my own thing the 30x500 way.”

After a few fellow students offered encouraging words, I asked how we could help, and if there was anything specific they were hoping to hear from us.

They responded: “To keep charging ahead.”

I paused to think. Here’s what I said.

I don’t want to tell you to keep charging ahead, nor do I want someone else to tell you that, because I think it would be irresponsible for you to listen to advice given with near-zero context.

“Ahead” is relative to the direction you’re pointed.

Someone can easily tell you “charge ahead” when you’re pointed in the wrong direction, and not know it.

So context matters a lot for a decision like this!

Is this a job you want, or a job you need?
What are the upsides to this potential job that would be extremely difficult or impossible to get on your own?
What are the downsides of this potential job, outside of taking you away from your 30x500 work?
Would this job force you to halt your 30x500 work completely?
Could you negotiate an arrangement that let you have the best of both worlds? the upsides of the job, but retain whatever parts of your 30x500 work you care about most?

There isn’t a single right answer here, or even a single meaning to “keep charging ahead.”

Instead of thinking about a job as a step backwards (which you haven’t said but your comments do imply), is there a way you could use this job as a tool or leverage…instead of feeling like it’s using you?

I’d take a step back and think “what does ‘ahead’ even look like?” Where do you want to get to, and what are your options for getting there?

Evaluate your decisions against the goal, instead of the arbitrary divide of “30x500” vs “cool job alert.”

If you decide the job is just ‘cool’ but doesn’t really add to the direction you want to go, then I’d feel great telling you to stick to your guns and stay focused on the long game of 30x500 work.

But if the job adds to your long game in some meaningful way, charging ahead can mean something totally different! You can make decisions based on downsides you’re aware of. You can minimize those downsides through negotiation. And so on.

I hope this is encouraging, as it’s intended.

The next day, they replied again: “That is such a good response… I can’t really say more than that’s what I need to do, and thank you.”

Be wary of advice that promises a single universal answer, and instead, seek advice that helps you to ask better questions.

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4 things nobody tells you about preselling your product

Thu, 11 Nov 2021 16:22:48 -0000

So, you’re thinking about pre-selling your product, eh?

There’s a good chance you’ve experienced pre-selling one way or another. Maybe you backed a Kickstarter, or ordered a new book you were excited about. If you’ve ever bought tickets to a live event – a conference, workshop, or even a concert – you might consider that a kind of pre-selling as well!

In all cases, you’ve paid in advance, and without any way to try before you buy.

But now you’re gearing up to be the seller. On this side of the transaction, it feels a little different! This time it’s you asking people for their money before you’ve finished your product, with the promise that you’ll deliver it when it’s ready.

If you’ve already done the work to earn your audience’s trust and attention, and you’ve done the research to make a thing you’re pretty confident they’d want to buy, presales can be a great way to build momentum and excitement!

A few of the most popular upsides of pre-selling a product include:

evidence that people want the thing you’re making, and the confidence you won’t launch something that nobody buys
cash upfront that you can use to invest in producing the product itself, covering hard costs or simply buying more of your own time to work on delivering the product
early feedback from your most motivated buyers that can help you improve your product before you stamp it as “done” and ready to ship
social proof that you can use in your primary launch, from raw sales numbers to buyer testimonials, etc. your early buyers might even help spread the word about your product

These are some pretty big upsides, honestly! No surprise that pre-selling is a popular choice.

But it’s far less common to hear about the downsides of pre-selling.

Over in the 30x500 community chat, alumni Dave Ceddia (Pure React, Recut) opened up about some of his experiences with pre-sales…including the gnarlier parts.

“There are a few downsides that I saw, pretty much all emotional. In my opinion they’re worth weighing for yourself because if I’m feeling awful, I have a very hard time getting myself to do the work.”

Dave went on to share four counterintuitive lessons and tips from his hard-earned pre-sale experiences:

Tip #1. Have a plan in place for if you pre-sell and don’t make many sales.

Dave says:

“Decide ahead of time if you have a minimum number of pre-sales in mind, and whether you want to refund the orders if you don’t reach that number, or press ahead making the thing with the hopes that enough people will buy it when it’s actually done and ready.

For me, building a product knowing that not many people want it would squash my motivation, and also might not be the best business decision.”

Remember that pre-sales require MUCH more trust and desire from your prospective customer. They’re betting that you deliver what they want, and that they will still want it at some point in the future.

While high pre-sales numbers can be a positive indicator of future success (though not always, more on that in a second), low pre-sales numbers are NOT necessarily an indicator of future failure. Pre-sale success depends on trust and desire, but it also depends on the audience’s buying habits, the kind of product, the price point…there are lots of variables!

Will low pre-sales numbers hurt your motivation? If so, plan ahead.

The questions to ask yourself are:

What numbers do you need to hit to feel like you’re on the right path?
What will you do if you don’t hit those numbers? Refund, press forward, or something else?

Tip #2. Consider how you deal with working under pressure.

Dave says:

“The pressure to deliver on your promise is very real…and I don’t do well with that sort of pressure. The launch itself is exciting, the work… less so.

I think it might be a bit like buying a domain name for a new idea – takes the wind out of my sails. The fun part is over, only the work remains.”

Personally, this is the one that gets me every time. It is a lesson in truly knowing yourself, and adjusting or planning accordingly.

The pressure that comes with pre-sales is pretty different from any other kind of pressure I’ve experienced. As Dave mentions, the work of pre-selling a product is exciting. Especially when it goes well!

But as more time passes after the last dollar hits your bank account, and you’re still working to deliver the product people paid for, that excitement wears off and is replaced with a sense of pressure to deliver on the promise you made.

For some people, that pressure can be motivating, but for almost everyone I’ve talked to (including myself) it does the opposite!

Delivering your pre-sales to paying customers is not the same as sprinting to hit a deadline, or pulling an all-nighter to finish a school project. This brand of pressure tends to come with feelings of guilt or dread. It can lead to burnout, demotivation, & ultimately giving up.

How you handle presale pressure is more like the head game of running a marathon or any other endurance activity. You have to remind yourself of the goal and persist, even on the days when you don’t feel like it.

This is a great time to practice professionalism, in a business sense.

Tip #3. Recognize that it’s harder (though not impossible) to make changes to your product & scope.

Dave says:

“Before launch, everything is malleable. You can rewrite the sales page, even after having people sign up. You can totally change your mind about what will be included, and ruthlessly cut scope to hit a deadline. That’s harder if you’ve pre-sold.

Those buyers bought a promise, whatever the words on the page (and the emails) promised them. It’s harder to walk that back.”

The bigger and more complex your product is – especially the “first” version that you launch to paying customers – the bigger and more painful this lesson can bite you in the ass.

You’ve probably experienced the temptation to tell your prospective customers about all of the things your product will do…in the future. We hope to win over early adopters with these promises of features they’ll want and need. And when you pre-sell a product, it’s ALL promises.

Once you’ve taken a customer’s money based on a promise, you’re on the hook to deliver. As Dave mentions, changes to the promise are possible! But it’s also very common to feel like you’ve painted yourself into a corner. The fear of customers demanding refunds is real.

This might be one of the best reasons to keep the first version of your product as TINY as possible. In addition to shortening the path from pitching customers to shipping the first usable version of the product, pre-selling a tiny product will naturally reduce the number of things you can promise to make a sale.

Tip #4. Be aware that presale success can warp your expectations of a “normal” launch.

Dave says:

“Nobody really talks about this, but if the presale goes really well, there’s a nonzero chance the actual launch won’t do as well, depending on how it’s structured. The presale is usually an open/closed launch (doors close after X days) and often a one-time discount, too. These are stronger incentives to buy than the typical “20% discount expires soon” sort of thing.

This leads to a sort of perfect storm where you can get a big swell of interest in the presale that can set high expectations for the real launch that don’t end up materializing. Just something to be aware of! It’s happened to me and a couple other course creators I know.”

Think about who’s most likely to purchase during a pre-sale:

People who you’ve helped in the past, and trust you to deliver again
People who really want your product to exist
Your biggest supporters who want you to succeed

People who are already most likely to buy.

Depending on the size of your reach and the degree of pain that a product solves for your audience, it’s possible for these highly motivated pre-sales to cannibalize some full-priced sales.

But don’t worry: if you use pre-sales strategically, you should be able to more than compensate for this outside possibility!

How to Do Your Pre-Sale Right

When pre-launching a new product, I might use a warm subset of my entire email list – usually a product-specific opt-in waiting list – to do a dry run of a launch or promotion before launching to our entire list.

In addition to making sure that our launch strategy works as expected with the most motivated people we can reach, those sales turn into social proof to our wider list! Depending on the context, our full public launch may include how customers have already bought during pre-sales, along with quotes & testimonials from those early adopters if we give them any form of early access.

Even if those early customers paid a little less, we can use their early adoption to strategically generate things other than revenue in the form of social proof, positive feedback, or testimonials, all of which will help us make more sales during a “full” launch.

Pre-sale Strategy #2: Treat your pre-sales like a VIP list, cap your pre-sale offers.

When done poorly, artificial scarcity feels bad for everybody involved. But done for an honest reason that benefits the customer, it can feel like a VIP seat to a special experience!

If you treat your pre-sale like “VIP Access” and strategically limit the number of people who can buy, you can include relevant bonuses that might not make sense as your customer base gets bigger. Free consulting, concierge onboarding, and other things that “don’t scale” are perfect offers for the kind of people who’d be most likely to buy a pre-sale.

And since those special offers are limited you can naturally cap the offer with a certain number of seats, making it a distinct offer compared to your “main” launch.

Pre-sale Strategy #3: Combine Strategies 1 and 2!

You can use your smaller, warmer waiting list to build momentum and social proof and ultimately sell out your “VIP Offers” more easily. Stack your smaller wins to create bigger wins!

Pre-sale Strategy #4: Use an extended pre-sale as a “beta” period

When Dave launched his video editing app Recut, it only did one thing: remove silence from videos. He was pretty sure that people would want it – based on evidence from his Sales Safari research and his own experience creating video courses – but because the tool was so limited he wasn’t sure whether it would be useful enough.

This “how valuable is it?” uncertainty made it hard to confidently set a price, so Dave launched Recut with a lower price to test the waters and get feedback.

A few months later, having gotten a ton of positive feedback and even some advice to “charge more!”, he redesigned and relaunched the app with a higher price, and was even able to use some of the feedback as social proof.

Just remember that regardless of using any of these strategies, pre-sales numbers aren’t a reliable indicator of “normal” sales numbers.

So, should you pre-sell your product?

Well that all depends! On your situation, on how well you know yourself, and on what you’re willing to do to prepare for a successful pre-sale campaign.

If… - …you know that leaving someone (or a bunch of someones) waiting on something fills you with anxiety and makes you less likely to do it - …your projects tend to grow out of control - …you have no idea who you’re gonna sell this thing to

…then pre-selling might not be the best fit for you/your biz/this product/right now. That’s not to say you should never do a pre-sale, but these signs suggest you might be playing on hard mode and you’re better off setting yourself up for a win through other means.

On the other hand, if you: - Have or can build good habits for finishing projects and shipping by a deadline… Invest in doing your research to make a product that people actually want… Ruthlessly keep your product’s release scope extremely tight and small (with a well-designed Backwards Plan)… Have a reliable way to reach an audience who trusts you…

…then pre-selling can be a powerful tool for growing your confidence and bringing in early revenue.

Looking for more Pre-sales Tips?

In this podcast episode hosted by Janelle Allen, Amy shared some of her hard won lessons and advice, along with many of the pre-sales mistakes we’ve seen (and committed ourselves!) over our years. Janelle’s audience is course creators, but most of the lessons Amy shares can be applied to pre-selling all sorts of products.

Give it a listen, you won’t be disappointed.

Just keep Dave and Amy’s lessons and tips in mind, and have a great launch day!

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Give your past emails new life with Content Mixtapes! aka Success with ConvertKit, Part II

Fri, 30 Apr 2021 16:22:48 -0000

This post is the second in a two-part series.

Go back and read the first one here!

When’s the last time you looked back at your old newsletter emails?

Not the stats, the emails themselves, to read ‘em again with fresh eyes.

Given enough time – which in my experience can be as little as 2 or 3 months – re-reading your old emails with fresh eyes can feel like you’re reading someone else’s writing instead of your own.

It’s actually pretty magical!

You’ve probably noticed how much easier it is to spot surface level stuff like typos, errors, and grammatical issues that mysteriously go invisible until after you’ve pressed send.

But if you’ve never gone back to revisit your old newsletter emails, you might not realize that it’s also easier to restructure, improve, even add to your own writing to make it clearer, more detailed, and more useful to the reader.

If you’ve shipped that email and got responses, you may even be able to work in reader feedback, questions, even examples that you couldn’t have had before you sent it!

The passage of time after your first send is powerful. And yet, 99.9% of the time, we don’t use it to our advantage.

Once you have the foundation of your newsletter in good shape (see part 1 of this series), your next power-move is changing the way you send emails.

Have you sent at least 7-10+ useful broadcast articles to your list?

If so, you might not realize that you can use ConvertKit “Sequences” to level up your email game, get off the content treadmill, and give your readers a better learning experience.

ConvertKit “Sequences” have become the most valuable piece of software in our business.

I’m not speaking hyperbolically when I say that the ConvertKit [ref link] techniques I’m sharing in this article have completely transformed our business for the better.

During the first 2 years we implemented them, we sent more than a million emails to satisfied subscribers, and grew our business by 40% two years in a row. All while creating almost no new marketing content.

The biggest change has been our approach to sending emails that ensures that our subscribers get fresh articles regularly delivered to their inboxes, even if we’re working on something else, or otherwise unable to ship something new!

One of the first small ways you can “level up” is to graduate from thinking about individual articles (or videos, podcasts, etc…whatever your medium) and instead thinking about the virtuous cycle that your content makes possible.

When you create and share articles, people discover you (aka traffic or visitors). Some of those people want more, and sign up for your newsletter.

Next time you publish something relevant to them, it reinforces that you are a trustworthy source. Some of those subscribers choose to share the new article they received via email.

That sharing leads to new people (traffic) discovering you, completing and perpetuating the cycle.

Before we get further into the weeds, let’s make sure we’re talking about the same thing when we’re talking about the business value of sharing content via a newsletter.

Content we are NOT not talking about:

“Breaking news” or updates about your product or service
Digest emails or link/article roundups
Content created exclusively for SEO

Content we are talking about:

Helpful, insightful, useful essays and stories
How to guides
Compiled research

Generally, we’re talking about stuff (articles, guides, videos, podcasts, etc) that is for the audience, rather than about you.

The difference between this kind of content, and the vast majority of “content” out there on the internet, is that it’s designed to earn trust.

And if your articles, guides, etc are each individual opportunities to earn trust, then your email newsletter is a tool for stringing those moments together into a series of events that earn the sale before you ask for the sale.

Technical sidenote: sending regular emails that actually get opened also impacts the ability for your emails to get to your readers’ inboxes. If you send emails regularly but those emails get ignored, there’s a chance the rest of your emails aren’t delivered or go to spam.

So in addition to the psychological benefits, there’s a technical reason to consistently send things that people actually open!

So keeping your email list “warm” aka getting people used to hearing from us is a good idea.

But as we’ve discussed, that’s almost never how things really happen!

Reality tends to look a bit more like:

We send out emails on a rigid schedule, sometimes sacrificing quality (or sleep) for an arbitrary deadline.

ORRRRR we send an email when something is going on in our world, like we’ve published a new article or sale or a discount or an event or something like that.

Basically anytime we want something (that starts with their attention).

It’s not about optimizing conversion rates.

I don’t know about you, but Amy and I want to deliver as much as we can for our customers.

Sure, we want better open rates, and better conversion rates. But we’re here to create things that people use, that help people.

Our free stuff doesn’t just generate sales, it genuinely helps people, so we want to be able to keep creating more of it.

Trouble is, that Standard Newsletter Lifecycle is a constant treadmill of creating free resources also takes away energy that could be going into creating new, really valuable products and services.

It’s a difficult balance to create.

Most people learn to live with it. We certainly did.

Until something is bad enough happened to push you us make a change.

What do you do when the face of the business can’t work?

Amy’s chronic illness has been a factor in our business and partnership for a long time. It informs the kinds of products and services that she delivers her customers (e.g. no high-uptime or infrastructure products). It’s shaped parts of how we collaborate and communicate.

In short, we design for it. You might have a similar constraint in your life and business.

In late 2017, Amy had taken some time off from work to recover from a combination of illness and burnout. I had things covered with student support and a few small projects.

Which was fine, right up until the moment it wasn’t fine anymore.

January was around the corner, making it time for our first 30x500 enrollment of the year. Also, historically, our biggest enrollment period of the year.

But as January inched closer and Amy wasn’t feeling well enough to work, we had a problem.

The truth is that, at this point in our history, most people had signed up for our email list because of Amy’s writing.

Then we had conditioned our subscribers to expect emails from Amy.

Many people didn’t know I existed until they took one of our classes or workshops!

So when Amy got too sick to write our next batch of launch emails I had a couple of obvious options:

Option A: we could postpone our January launch until Amy was feeling better.
Option B: I could try to write a new launch myself, and hope our subscribers weren’t startled or confused by the emails being written by someone they didn’t know as well, or at all.

Neither of these options were ideal, leading me to consider Hidden Option C.

I love me a good Hidden Option C!

Our first “Just The Hits” Email Sequence

I went back to Amy and said:

“Don’t worry, you focus on getting better. I’m still going to run a launch in January.

But instead of creating something new from scratch, I’m going to go back through our back catalog of launches and pull out the best stuff you’ve written.

I’m going to treat our back catalog like the building blocks. I’m going to edit & assemble those past emails into a cohesive narrative. And I’m going to send that to our subscribers.”

We had the emails. We had data like open and click rates. We had list-to-sale conversion rates.

We had a structure and a framework and a format that we’d proven works.

I took it all “into the studio” and got to work.

I pulled our most effective emails from past launches. I found the themes that resonated most with our audience. I spotted gaps that had generated confusion in the past.

I stepped off the treadmill of creating, creating, creating, and started thinking like a producer where my job was to polish and assemble the parts, mixing and mastering them into the best finished product possible.

And wow, it worked better than I could have ever expected!

At the end of my first “Just The Hits” Sequence we had smashed our previous best sales records by more than 60%.

With near-zero brand new writing, while my business partner and the face of the business was physically unable to work.

In the years since this initial success, I’ve gone on to build several more sequences like this one.

Some parts and components get reused each time. Others get updated and adapted based on the core theme of the sequence.

Unexpected benefit: lower stress!

In addition to smashing our sales records, our launches went from being the most stressful and time consuming events in our business to a total cakewalk.

Nowadays, instead of sweating through our just-in-time email creation, I work like a producer and develop our entire launch events ahead of time. This lets me relax through the launch and focus on supporting our prospective and new students who write in with questions.

It’s so much better than doing everything just-in-time!

The problem with Evergreen Launches

Now, you might be wondering “isn’t this just an evergreen sales funnel, Alex?”

Yes, and no. Speaking personally, we’ve had mixed experiences with evergreen launches ourselves. And I’ve consulted with a number of businesses who spent loads of time building evergreen launches only to see them create a small, erratic trickle of sales, rather than the steady stream they had hoped for.

Obviously, Evergreen sales funnels can work! But I’ve never seen them work as well as our “live” launches.

Which raises the question…why?

I’ve come to believe that the real problem with a lot of evergreen launches isn’t the fact that they’re automated. The problem stems from the fact that they’re usually written to be evergreen from the start, which makes them feel a lot more robotic and “on rails.”

Try thinking about the difference between sitting down in Gmail or Outlook to write an email to a friend or coworker.

It’s a relatively natural process to write an email to a single person. To the recipient, the writing feels like it was written for them.

Now compare that experience to sitting down to write an email for your newsletter.

Writing for a newsletter, or any sizable audience, is a lot more effort than writing for one person. You have to consider the range of information they might (or might not) already have; it’s harder to know what’s going to resonate when you’re trying to resonate with a group.

The more “imaginary” the reader becomes to you, the less “real” your emails tend to feel to them.

It’s not that I think we’re tricking anybody into believing that an automated email or a marketing email is “real” but the overall feel of a mass email is just different when you’re reading it.

It doesn’t feel like it was written for you.

I think this is where most evergreen email sequences go wrong. Evergreen emails often feel like they’re designed for the convenience of the sender, rather than the experience of the receiver.

Contrast that artificial evergreen experience with what I call…The Mixtape Mindset.

Mixtapes are usually made with a person in mind, often a friend or a loved one or someone who you know something about. Mixtapes are created to connect with the listener in a certain way.

When you treat your email like a mixtape, you’re thinking about the readers point of view. That’s what a mix tapes all about.

Remixing your content mixtapes around different themes of your audience’s problems and pains and concerns and interests can make a series of emails feel like you made it just for them.

The other thing about mixtapes is that most people listen to their favorite mixtapes over and over. Each listen takes you to a place, and helps you in a moment.

Similarly, a helpful email can land differently for the reader at a different time in their life or at a different stage of the business. And that’s not even accounting for people who missed the email the first time you sent it!

That’s why I call my version of marketing automation a Content Mixtape.

After seeing the success of this approach on a launch I realized that I could do the same thing for our newsletter – and get the same kinds of benefits and results!

Just think about all of the newsletter emails you’ve sent up until now. Some were better than others, I’m sure!

Now think about some of the best emails you’ve sent to your list, emails that really resonated with your readers. Posts that got shared, quoted, and responded to.

Now go find out: How many people have joined your newsletter since the day you sent that broadcast?

That’s how many people have missed out on your best emails!

With Special Thanks to Brennan Dunn: We believe in giving credit to our sources, so this article wouldn’t be complete without a mention of what we learned about newsletter automation from Brennan Dunn.

If you’ve been around the Stacking the Bricks universe for a while you will almost certainly recognize Brennan’s name. He’s a star 30x500 alumni, creator of the Double your Freelancing empire, and half of the duo behind RightMessage.

Brennan is an absolute wizard when it comes to email automation, and he deserves a ton of credit for planting the seeds of what’s possible using ConvertKit email sequences.

His course, Mastering Convertkit [ref link], is not cheap at $1000+ but if you sell products over email, is worth every penny and I’ve recommended it for years without a kickback.

Long before I started creating Content Mixtapes, Brennan shared his own approach to creating a “shadow newsletter” in which you could pre-program a newsletter. With a shadow newsletter in place, every subscriber would get consistent, fresh emails via sequences rather than broadcasts.

In my experience, the real magic of a Shadow Newsletter – and subsequently a Content Mixtape – is less the technical ability to automate sending email, and more the power that it gives you to create an amazing and consistent reader experience.

Even once I learned the technical aspects of using ConvertKit in this way from Brennan, I always struggled with the process of sitting down to populate those email sequences.

Because once again again, the process of creating emails is distinctly different and separate from the process of producing those emails into a great experience for the reader.

That process of producing a Content Mixtape is a mix of:

curating the pace and order of the emails
strategically “tuning up” emails so they feel natural no matter when they are sent
finding and focusing on your reader’s point of view

So you should definitely go check out Brennan’s work to dig into the technical and high-level strategies for using ConvertKit.

But my hunch is that you will find Brennan’s work a LOT more useful if you start with the lessons in this article first, learning the production process I’ve developed to prepare our just-in-time written articles and emails for our Content Mixtapes.

Let’s get into the nitty gritty.

Stage 1. Curate your reader’s experience

One of the things that I have learned as a writer is that nobody has ideas in the linear order.

Stuff comes out of our brains in a myriad of different orders based on the context, our personal biases, and more.

That’s why it’s so valuable to start your writing process with an outline! With an outline, it’s cheap to re-organize and reorder the pieces of an idea before you invest time into fleshing it out.

Starting with an outline even makes it easier to “murder your darlings” aka trim ideas that aren’t inherently bad, but are extraneous to the goal of the thing your working on.

Doing this sort of self-curation early in the writing process helps you have clearer ideas, and more importantly ensures that you’ll present the information in the most useful way rather than the way it happened to come out of your brain.

Start putting your ideas in order

If you’ve been creating things for your audience over the course of years, months, or even weeks, it’s likely that you’ve built up a nice little “back catalog” of individual articles, essays, guides, screencasts, podcasts and public speaking appearances…

You’ve probably repeated some topics, themes, and lessons. Each individual piece represents a time where you practiced saying certain things, conveying certain messages, delivering some kind of result or outcome.

And once again, ideas don’t happen in linear order.

Your earliest writing probably isn’t the best “first impression” for brand new readers. Your most action-oriented writing might not make sense for a total beginner. Your most challenging concepts might be rejected by a reader who is not ready to read them.

Now imagine reordering your entire back catalog, with the reader in mind. Like a Mixtape!

You can introduce foundational concepts early on, and reliably call back to them later because you know you already shared them.

You can balance stories, examples, and how-to guides intentionally, introducing variety.

You can even control the pace! You can build momentum towards concepts or action, or offer breathing room for the reader to process or implement your ideas.

Start your first Content Mixtape with 10 emails

If you have a sizable back catalog, this process can get really overwhelming.

To curb that overwhelm, my advice is that you don’t try to create the perfect order for your entire back catalog at once. Instead, focus on the first 10 to 12 emails that your new subscribers should receive.

If you’re sending weekly, that translates to nearly 3 months of a fully automated newsletter experience.

Imagine 3 whole months where every new subscriber is having an amazing first run experience with your newsletter, completely on autopilot, leaving you to work on other parts of your business.

While ConvertKit’s sequence interface is really nice, it’s easy to get distracted by all of the features and options when all you REALLY need is to know which day of the week you’re sending which email.

Here’s an example of how I built a Content Mixtape for a product launch in Google Sheets. Here I’m just noting the day of the week and the draft subject line, but you could also include a short description of the email, the lesson, or anything else notable about the contents of that email.

You can even see how the pacing varies through this Content Mixtape:

it opens with two weeks of single emails on Wednesdays to establish momentum
then sending ramps up a bit more in the third week as we get close to launch day
then sends a single email almost every day during the active launch week
and at the peak of the email crescendo, we send a whopping 3 emails at the very last day (the last two are only sent to people who’ve actively engaged with the sequence at that point, but that’s some fancy moves for another day)

This specific sequence not only generated a TON of sales, it’s a pattern that we use across most of our product launches. The individual emails change, but follow the same basic pattern!

For your first Content Mixtape, I recommend keeping things really simple before you get fancy:

10-12 emails total
Sent on a consistent schedule (same day of the week, every week)
Open with 2-3 resources that are optimized to connect with the reader: stories, examples, etc to help them feel certain that you understand their problem from their point of view.
Then once you’ve helped them feel comfortable, up the intensity a bit! Mix in how-tos and guides that they can take action on. This is also a great time to introduce other formats, like cheat sheets, podcast interviews, screencasts, etc.
After those action-oriented emails, give them a bit of a cool down with some reading to help them reflect on their situation, notice changes, get unstuck, etc.

You can factor in the popularity of stuff you’ve created in the past, too. This includes open and click rates, sure. But those numbers only tell you so much! When building our Content Mixtapes, I factor articles that are likely to be shared, quoted, or linked to by new readers since that contributes to that virtuous content cycle:

Like the musical mixtapes that inspired this approach, this curation can be a bit more of an art than a science. I give you permission to experiment! There’s no single RIGHT way to do this, as long as you’re considering the recipient.

Plus, you can always change up the order later. ConvertKit’s Sequence Builder makes it really easy to rearrange your sequence in the future.

Once you have the rough order of your Content Mixtape curated, it’s time for you to get into tuning up the individual emails to make sure they make sense no matter when they’re sent.

Stage 2. Evergreen Editing

“How will it feel to read this a year from now?”

Like I said before, my biggest peeve about most evergreen newsletters is that they’re written in a way that feels stilted, awkward, and obviously automated.

They just feel different. And I think I know why.

When we write naturally, we can’t help ourselves but to refer to time. It’s a tool for relating.

Time is a biiiiiiig part of how we understand the world around us, and the context for what has happened, is happening, or will happen in the future.

But when we write something that’s intended to be “evergreen” we almost can’t help but change the way we write to exclude those bits of context.

While proactively avoiding a situation where our writing becomes outdated, we inadvertently kill off the context clues that make writing feel natural. Baby, bathwater, etc.

Instead, I propose the following…

Write for today, edit for the future.

It’s a little bit obvious in hindsight, but a conclusion I wouldn’t have probably come up with if it wasn’t for my experience building Content Mixtapes for Stacking the Bricks!

In addition to these time-based context clues, the evergreen editing process is a grand opportunity to improve each piece of content to make sure it’s in tip top shape.

When every new subscriber gets amazing emails from you every week, like clockwork, you can be sure that you’ll be one of the few newsletters that they always open.

Plus, in my experience, writing is SO MUCH easier when you separate the writing from the editing. This is doubly true of evergreen editing!

After the last few years of building and improving our Content Mixtapes, here are the four parts of the evergreen editing process I’ve developed.

1. Remove Time Fingerprints

This one is the most obvious, but also can be the most subtle to spot.

Your mileage may vary, but I can say that I was shocked at how often Amy and I both introduce “Time Fingerprints” to our writing.

These errant Time Fingerprints tend to show up in a few different ways:

First, we regularly reference recent experiences or stories as points of reference to share a concept or a lesson.

But as time passes, that “recency” fades. During Evergreen Editing, it became clear that the “recency” was never really that important to begin with.

The fix is pretty easy once you know how to spot it!

“A few days ago…” can easily be edited to “One day…” like in the example below. This simple storytelling language still feels very natural, and removes the external references that break the reader’s sense of time.

Another unnecessary Time Fingerprint I noticed was a byproduct of creating articles that are part of a series.

When writing them just in time, it’s totally natural to write things like “In last week’s article…” that can raise disorienting questions like “wait, did I read that last week?”

So I would edit something like “In last week’s article” to show the direction of time without specifying an amount of time. A simple “I’ve previously written about…” does the trick!

The last common kind of Time Fingerprint I noticed were seasonal references to things that aren’t specifically bound by the season.

Seasons aren’t all bad – e.g. if you were talking about snowy weather, it’d make sense to mention winter. I would avoid saying when winter is relative to now, since “now’ will be the variable from the reader’s point of view. If you’re sending a Halloween themed message in March, your readers are likely to be confused.

But if the seasonality isn’t relevant to the story or context, I try to remove it!

When I’m looking for Time Fingerprints, I’m looking for:

Specific dates, like the mention of an actual calendar date, unless it’s something that happened in the past and that date is somehow relevant to the reader.
Mentions of a launch or a sale that have since ended
Unnecessary Seasonal references (Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter)
Unnecessary Holiday references
Unnecessary references to the current year
Cultural experiences that happen at a certain time of year (e.g. Football season)
References to how much time has passed, e.g. since past articles or past milestones
Stories, revenue numbers, and examples that are already outdated, and/or will continue to become outdated

Overall my Evergreen editing strategy boils down to one key question:

“How can I say this so that if I read it in a year, it’d still make sense?”

2. Remove Introwaffle

The term “Introwaffle” (or less subtly, Introwank” is an Amy-ism to describe the introductory sentences, paragraphs, sometimes even pages of writing that comes out of our brains before we get to our real point.

Note that this is different from opening an article or resource with a story to connect or resonate with the reader. That’s a strategic intro.

Introwaffle is the stuff that comes out of your brain, but does nothing to draw the reader in, or build momentum.

To practice spotting your own Introwaffle, try reading your articles with the question “when does the action really begin?” Highlight that sentence or paragraph where your article REALLY starts.

Then look at everything you wrote before that point.

Could you remove that intro entirely? Or parts of it?

If you can get the reader to the action faster or more effectively without it, cut it!

3. Find the Fix

At the literal other end of the article from your intro, is the takeaway.

There is a reason your article exists in the first place. In some cases, the takeaway is implied. In other cases, it’s more explicit. Neither is right or wrong…but unless you have a specific strategic reason to be opaque about the takeaway, it’s better to not leave them guessing!

I try to avoid making a reader waste their intellectual resources trying to figure out what we meant, and put those resources into applying what I meant to their own work.

So during my Evergreen Editing, I’ve started looking for what we call “the fix.” The fix is the outcome you’re giving the reader.

Fixes can take a number of forms, but some of the most common ones include:

A clearer understanding of something specific
Specific next action steps
A question or prompt to think about or reflect on
Permission or confidence to do or try something
Additional recommended resources (links, books, downloads, etc)

This list is by no means exhaustive, but should give you a solid idea of what you’re looking for.

My ultimate goal is to make the reader feel like every time they get an email from us, it’ll be worth opening, so I often use the sheer existence of a Fix as a baseline for whether or not an article even makes the cut to be added to a Content Mixtape.

That’s not to say that writing without a Fix isn’t valuable. Sometimes it’s really important! In fact, I’ve found that some of my “best” writing doesn’t have a Fix, because the writing was really me working out my ideas on the page. I usually stick the raw material of those Fix-less articles into a swipe file when I’m exploring new and better ways to say something.

Other times, a Fix-less article (or podcast, or anything really the format doesn’t matter) needs a few new sentences or a bulleted list at the end to drive the point home.

At the very least, it’s helpful to be aware of when you have a Fix, and when you don’t!

4. Call your audience by name

It’s safe to assume that your readers are unimaginably distracted, especially when they’re on the internet or in their inboxes.

Which means the second someone has a moment to question “is this really meant for me?” you’ve lost them. So when I say “call your audience by name” I don’t mean their first name, like those hokey (and obviously fake) mail merges.

I mean to intentionally use the language they use to describe themselves, their interests, their goals, their concerns…and to use it early. When possible, in the first sentence or two!

Is it for beginners, or more experienced readers? Is it best suited for people with a certain role? Don’t be shy, say that up front! Sure, some folks who it could help might skip it, but the readers you want are more likely to start reading in the first place.

Check out this example where within a couple of sentences I’ve mentioned SaaS founders, trial signups, and small independent software businesses. All clues to a prospective reader that if those terms mean anything to them, there’s a good chance they are in the right place!

5. Headlines, graphics, quotes, examples

Finally, we’re getting close to the end of the Evergreen Editing stage! Before we wrap up, a final bit of polish.

Most commonly, I’ll add a few headlines to help give the article some structural meaning.

The one thing to be mindful of is that headlines (like everything else in writing) have a job: to make it easy for the reader to scan a large amount of information, glean context, and get a sense of where the article is headed.

Using clever turns of phrase, and other quips might make you feel proud of yourself, but if they don’t help move the reader forward, they’re not the right headline.

My favorite trick is to write two headlines: the headline you want to write, and then write the headline that would help the reader know what they’re about to read.

Then throw away the first one.

Once I’ve added some headlines, I might add a graphic or two, especially to break up a long bit of text. I might pull out a quote that seems tweetable, and put that in it’s own little content block.

The most intensive thing I might do in this final phase is to see if I have any concrete examples to reference that weren’t in the original piece. Sometimes those examples come from readers writing in. Other times they’re just stories or examples from times when I’ve referenced the article since originally writing it.

I definitely don’t add examples to every piece of writing, but I will at least pause to think if I have any that I might use!

WHEW! Evergreen editing is a lot of work.

Thing is, this work pays off BIG over time.

The nature of Content Mixtapes is that your work updating every piece pays for itself a little bit with every single new subscriber you earn.

If you start with a relatively small collection of ~10 emails like I suggest, you will start to get the hang of things by the time you’ve edited your 3rd or 4th email using this process. And it keeps getting faster and faster.

Also, you don’t need to get it perfect the first time! Do your best to hit the marks, and get subscribers flowing through the Content Mixtape as soon as you can.

My early edits weren’t nearly as good as the edits I made after doing this process on more than 80 emails. I’ve even gone back a second time to tune them up further.

Incremental improvements are easy, and effective.

All that is to say, don’t wait for your emails to be “perfect” to ship them!

Stage 3. Assembling and Launching Your Mixtape

Like I said, I’m a fan of doing all of this work outside of ConvertKit itself. It’s a fairly intensive mise-en-place, but doing the setup first makes the assembly go oh-so-much smoother.

In this final stage, you’re going to:

Refresh your public links
Configure your ConvertKit sequence
Load the content into ConvertKit
Start sending new subscribers through the sequence
And finally, add your existing subscribers to the sequence too!

There’s plenty of tutorials on how to configure Convertkit Sequences and automations, including ConvertKit’s own help articles, but I do have a few more strategic tips to share as you wrap up this process.

Update your public links

This one’s pretty straightforward: assuming the articles and resources that you’ve been refreshing throughout this process to be evergreen already exist on your blog or website, make sure the latest version is live!

If your blog shows articles in reverse-chronological order (like most do), you might even decide to update the publish dates to be more recent, or reflect “last updated” in some way.

With all of this time and effort invested into making your articles evergreen, you definitely want to make sure those articles are publicly available for linking, sharing, and of course search engine indexing.

If you’re thinking, “but…those articles are in my mixtape now. Do I want them publicly visible, too? Won’t that mean people can end up seeing them more than once?”

To which the answers are yes, and yes.

You know how you listen to your favorite mixtapes over and over? Repetition is NOT a bad thing when it comes to educational marketing content, either.

The same article can land differently for the same person at different times in their journey. And sometimes, people just need to see something again to be reminded of how helpful it was the first time they saw it.

And remember, that’s what we want: people finding your stuff to be helpful, so they share it, bringing new people into the cycle. Each individual article in your mixtape is part of the whole, AND a potential onramp for new readers.

You will also want updated and current public links for each article when you load them into your email sequence.

The simple way to avoid sending multiple emails on the same day

One of the challenges of using newsletter automation is trying to avoid a situation where you have overlapping automations, and start sending someone emails from across multiple sequences on the same day.

There are some complex automation solutions for this that involve setting flags and triggers that only allow one sequence to send at a time, but I’ve found them to be overwhelming and difficult to keep track of.

I strongly recommend this much simpler technique instead!

Our mixtapes are configured in ConvertKit to send on a single specific day of the week, and then avoid that day of the week when designing other scheduled email sequences.

For example, we send our core Content Mixtape emails on Wednesdays.

In addition to helping get readers used to receiving our emails on the same day of the week, this choice makes it really easy to schedule other email activity around those regular emails.

Loading your Mixtape into ConvertKit

Finally! 😅 With all of these pieces in place, you are good to begin pasting your newly Evergreen Edited content into the brand new Sequence.

ConvertKit’s editor has gotten a lot better, to the point where I mostly trust it to paste formatting copied from a Google Doc, or similar. It’ll even detect markdown and attempt formatting it for you. But it’s definitely not perfect. Sometimes it’s downright frustrating.

So definitely proof your work after pasting it into ConvertKit. Make sure headlines are formatted as headlines, and all of your links & images work as expected.

Full Article or Teaser?

If you’re wondering: “Should I put each entire article in the email, so the reader doesn’t have to leave their inbox? Or should I write a teaser that links to the article?”

Honestly….I do both. I like mixing it up.

When I post the entire article’s contents in the body of an email, I include a line at the bottom linking to the article on our site. Something like:

“Here’s a share-able link to this article if you want to save it for later or share it with a friend.”

Other times, I post the first couple of paragraphs – just enough to hook the reader – and then provide the link to read the rest on the site.

And other times still, we’ll write a totally standalone teaser or “tee-up” email. We use this most often to introduce a topic that the reader might not realize they’re interested in, but would find valuable. So that tee-up acts a bit like a pitch to persuade the reader to click the link.

Nothing tricky, overly clever, or click-bait-y. Remember, the goal of this newsletter is NOT to maximize clicks, but to maximize trust. The worst thing you can do besides not send emails, is to send emails that undermine the trust you’ve built with your reader up to that point.

Once you’ve added your 10ish articles to the ConvertKit sequence (and made sure that they’re flipped to published), you can start sending new and existing subscribers through the Mixtape!

All Roads can lead to your Content Mixtape

This last piece of advice is a bit more advanced. You definitely DO NOT need to worry about it to launch your Content Mixtape and start seeing the results. But as it might help you see the road ahead, I thought it’d be useful to share the strategy.

As our business has grown, so has our email “ecosystem”:

We have multiple email courses, like Year of Hustle and Ship in Six
We have a library of small products that people can buy directly from our store, and of course my book The Tiny MBA. Many of these small products include simple follow-up email sequences to either guide implementation, request feedback/reviews, or both.
We occasionally run a special event that people can sign up to attend, or be reminded of

In all of these cases, we use ConvertKit automations and sequences to deliver these emails.

But also, when someone is done with one of those sequences, we use ConvertKit automations to send them into our core Content Mixtape (with an easy way to opt out, of course).

The result feels a bit like magic! Each email course, or product, or special event is an onramp to a guided, curated experience through our entire catalog of articles, essays, podcasts, and more.

It happens no matter what we’ve created recently. It happens even if we’re busy working on other parts of the business, or simply taking a break. 52 weeks a year. Forever!

This is why the work of curating, editing, and assembling Content Mixtapes is worth it.

Our list never goes cold, which has also helped us grow our email list by, on average, 30% annually. Our open rates hold steady around 40-45%.

Our Content Mixtapes were integral to growing our revenue by 60% year over year for 2 years in a row pre-COVID, and keeping our sales revenue steady during COVID even when we paused our sales emails for half of the year.

Speaking of sales emails, applying the Content Mixtape strategy to our product launches and sales emails has turned stressful, time consuming launches into an easy breezy experience that takes 1-2 days to prep instead of weeks.

Treating “old” content like an asset has helped our business grow, but it’s made the business easier to run. Even while Amy was too sick to work, I was able to run and grow our business solo with just a few hours of work most weeks. I even had time to create new products like The Tiny MBA on my own!

If you’ve sent 10+ articles to your list, don’t wait to make a Content Mixtape!

Start with taking inventory and curating. Think about the experience you want a reader to have, and let that guide the order of the articles you send them.

If you have more than 10 articles, start with a small mixtape. Doing it all at once is a fast track to getting overwhelmed. And it’s much easier to add emails to a mixtape, once you’ve started.

Invest time in evergreen editing. It’ll feel slow at first, but gets faster with practice. Every version better.

Don’t worry about getting it perfect to launch. The beauty of the internet is that edits are free!

Enjoy the confidence of knowing that your list is always getting useful stuff from you, and let yourself finally step off the constant content hamster wheel.

p.s. if you’ve gotten this far and still don’t have a ConvertKit account, consider using our referral link.

We’d still share these tips without the kickback…these strategies have made us way more money than we’ll ever see from commissions, but a few extra bucks is nice!

Oh, and if you want to experience a Content Mixtape first hand, drop your email in the box below. 😎

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How to Succeed with ConvertKit (Part I)

Fri, 30 Apr 2021 16:22:48 -0000

Amy and I have quite a colorful history of newsletter tools that we’ve used over the years. We have a similarly colorful range of feelings about those tools. 😬

I could tell you about the highs and lows of that list of tools, but instead, let me tell you a brief story about sending email (lol).

We’ve been sending essays, articles, guides, etc to email lists for a lonnnnnnng time. At least since the mid-2000’s when we started working together, but we also both had email lists long before that, too.

And like most people, our sending schedules have historically been…shall we say irregular.

We’d (maybe) send an email when we had written a new article. If we remembered. We’d (definitely) send email when we had something for people to take action on, aka something to try or something to buy.

But during the first 8-ish years of our business, neither of us have ever kept a consistent essay writing schedule.

And our subscribers suffered the inconsistency. (thanks)

Our business suffered, too.

Not the “pure failure” kind of suffering, where nothing works and you have to pack it up and quit; but in that low-grade headache kind of suffering that doesn’t totally knock you out but you know things aren’t quite right.

Two kinds of headaches to deal with.

Headache #1: It’s hard to earn trust when you’re inconsistent

This problem is pretty obvious, and odds are, it’s a familiar problem if you have done any amount of email marketing.

Every time we’d get busy working on a new project or product, we’d neglect our email list.

Weeks, sometimes months could pass. People would forget they were even on our list. Then we’d email out of the blue and have to spend the first however many paragraphs apologizing for the silence and warming them up to whatever we had to send that day.

Whoops.

And if we were showing up in their inbox with something for sale, it was 10x worse.

“You only call me when you want something from me” is NOT at all our vibe, but our actions sure made it feel that way to our readers.

But the alternative seemed impossible. A treadmill of always creating new stuff to keep your email list warm and relevant just wasn’t a game we could play forever.

Continually delivering useful and valuable stuff to your readers is a fast path to creator burnout…even it’s also the most reliable way to grow an audience and generate sales.

Headache #2: The passing of time

Existential, right? I promise that this has something very important to do with email, and specifically, ConvertKit.

But you’re going to have to keep reading to learn more! 😉

As I said before, it’s not the tools we use that have made our business successful, it’s how we use them. So I want to share some of the ways that we’ve used ConvertKit to:

grow our list past 12,000 subscribers
create an extremely high value per subscriber
get off the hamster wheel of having to write something new every week

Thing is, ConvertKit has LOTS of bells and whistles. This can be really overwhelming at first, but even worse, it’s easy to get distracted by the fancy tools.

In the second part of this guide, I’m going to get into my favorite of those fancy tools.

But first, we’re gonna get some fundamentals ironed out, and show how ConvertKit makes getting that done easy.

Ready? Here we go.

#1 - We quit fiddling with forms and let ConvertKit do the heavy lifting

It’s almost embarrassing how hard we’ve made people work to find and sign up for our email list.

We don’t do this on purpose, of course. It’s an email list, not a speakeasy.

But the truth is that CTAs (calls to action) are one of those “cobbler’s children have no shoes” situations for us.

When they’re good, our CTAs are really good, and can convert in the 5-20% range.

But good CTAs don’t just fall out of our brains. Maybe you can relate.

The first versions of our CTAs are basically always bad, and then we go back and make them better. JFS principle #10, every version better.

But sometimes, the bad CTAs stick around for a lot longer than we intended. Sometimes…forever.

And if I’m totally honest, one of the reasons we often never got around to making our CTAs better (and sometimes, kept us from shipping the mediocre-to-terrible version) is because fiddling with HTML forms…sucks.

Now, given that Amy and I are both perfectly capable of coding HTML and CSS, this might be confusing to read, but hear me out!

Just because you can add some form code to a web page doesn’t mean it’s easy, or fast, to make it look nice and work as expected.

Adding a form to a page sounds like one step but there’s actually a bunch of steps and decisions along the way.

You have write copy that will entice someone to sign up
You have to style the CTA in a way that is eye-catching, but fits the theme of your website
You have to make sure that styling works on both desktop and mobile layouts
You have to set up a confirmation message or thank you page
You have to handle anti-spam protection
You have to handle GDPR and other compliance issues
If you’re offering some sort of downloadable or series of emails, you have to create that and figure out the delivery
Even if you’re not offering a downloadable or series, you probably want some kind of welcome email sent out automatically.

And really, that’s just the basics. Every single time you add an email form to your website.

Damn that’s a lot.

The thing is, Amy and I aren’t the types to spend lots of time fiddling with our opt-ins, either.

Actually that’s not true. We are those types, but we know better.

Instead, we choose to focus as much energy as possible prioritizing the things that directly serve our readers and our audience. We suck at so many things, but our success tracks directly with that priority,

So all of that friction of adding and maintaining our email opt-ins meant that, well, they kinda sucked!

We didn’t even have an opt-in on our home page until sometime in late 2019, almost 5 years after we launched the current website. 😬

With that in mind, you can understand why one of my absolute favorite features about ConvertKit is the ability to quickly add very nice looking, eye-catching, mobile-friendly, spammer-proof, and self-contained email opt-in forms to any web page with a single line of code. And with basic conversion analytics built right in!

You can even make it so the same visitor won’t be shown a CTA they already signed up for (we do this on our homepage), or offer a paid offer in place of the email opt in on future visits.

They offer a lot of the same features in some schmancy email capture options too, like pop-ups and exit-intent windows.

But we keep it simple on Stacking the Bricks: inline CTAs with a clear reason to sign up.

I can create a custom CTA in less than 5 minutes with 4 of those minutes spent on button copywriting and none of it fiddling with HTML, custom confirmation pages, etc.

As a result, we’ve added more opt-ins to our website, and increasingly, more relevant opt-ins tailored specifically to the article or resources you’re reading.

This might seem like an overly obvious “win” to highlight, but I know that I’m not alone in having neglected, underperforming email opt-ins scattered across my website. So if that’s you, you’re not alone, and ConvertKit’s form embeds are one of the quickest ways to start tuning them up.

On our side this is still a work in progress (and probably will be forever!) but not because the forms are a pain in the butt. Success!

#2 - Relevant subscribers = more sales

When you ask someone for their email address, you’re asking for a kind of sale. Not with money, of course, but with permission and trust.

Hitting someone with an email opt-in before they’ve had a chance to read your page isn’t just annoying, it just doesn’t work.

“But I read that if you ask people right away you’ll get a higher conversion rate on that page!”

Those results will vary depending on your audience, but more importantly, remember what you’re optimizing for and it’s not simply “more emails.”

Try thinking about it this way:

Assuming the same value per customer, would you rather have 1000 subscribers that convert to customers at 1% or less, or 500 subscribers that convert to customers at 5% or better?

Clearly a smaller list that converts higher is more valuable, in this case 2.5x more valuable. When you EARN your readers’ email address, instead of badgering them (or worse, tricking them) to opt-in, what you’re really earning at that point is their trust.

And trust is a critical prerequisite for making sales.

So as you’re adding opt-ins to your site, instead of plastering them everywhere, put ‘em where it counts.

ConvertKit does let you choose a wide range of opt-in styles, including fancy pop-ups and exit intents (the opt-ins that automatically cover your screen when you move your cursor towards the back button).

We don’t use them.

Could we collect more emails if we did? Maybe! But we’d rather earn our email addresses.

And our very high list customer conversion rates and value per subscriber speak volumes to that approach. You DO NOT need a massive list to make lots of money.

So how do YOU use this knowledge?

When you’re working on improving your opt-in rates, start with your most valuable articles and landing pages.

Those would be the ones that get the most traffic, that get shared the most on social media, the ones that people write to you about and say “that thing you created so helpful, thank you!”

Make sure you have a ConvertKit email opt-in on that page. “Sign up to get my next post” is better than nothing, but leaves the reader unsure what that post is going to be about, if it’s going to be useful, or even when it might arrive.

Vague offers kill the desire to take action!

Instead, try offering something specific, related, and immediate.

You could offer a checklist or cheat sheet that helps them put the article into action. A workflow or a template that saves them time. A brief email course that guides them through the actions step by step. Something relatively small but useful to help them even more.

This opt-in offer is fine.

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It nets us plenty of subscribers. Notice how we’re still more specific than about the topics and timing!

👇 But THIS one works literally 2x better 👇

Scope, chunk, motivate, execute, and finally launch your project!

Join our challenge to get 6 weeks of rules and tricks from our personal playbook, along with personal stories and case studies to help you get that thing you've been wanting to finish, shipped.

When you subscribe, you’ll also get biz advice, design rants, and stories from the trenches once a week (or so). We respect your email privacy.

When you EARN their email, it’s step one to earning future sales.

So that “Get my next article sent directly to your inbox” at the end of an article they loved is better than nothing. And let’s be honest, you’ll find that kind of opt-in all over stackingthebricks.com

But email opt-ins convert MUCH higher when you can offer something specific, now, vs something theoretical, later. ConvertKit makes this easy - forms can be configured specifically to deliver a download, or to kick off a multi-email sequence.

Which brings me to my third and final way to succeed with ConvertKit…

Success #3: Getting off the content treadmill by making “mixtapes”

Most people (including us!) default to sending marketing emails the same way we send “normal” emails:

We write the email, sharing a story or information or a link or something else.
We press send. The end.

An email marketing tool lets you easily (and reliably) send that message to a lot of people, but after you’ve sent the email…then what?

Odds are, you spend a day or so obsessing over the open rates, and then you forget about it forever 😉

This is what I was referring to in the beginning of my email. That existential challenge of…the passing of time! 🔮

There is another way to send emails that multiplies your efforts: Sequence automation!

Marketing automation has become one of those things that everybody talks about, but very few people actually do well, so it gets a bad wrap.

Especially when it looks like this:

And with apologies to this well-meaning founder…this email is all about themselves and their product. None of it is about the reader.

Nobody thinks this email is real, or a truly personal email from the founder.

This kind of automation is the most common, and it sucks.

GOOD email automation serves the reader… and helps you bend time to your will!

Okay, maybe not exactly to your will but it sure does feel powerful once you get the hang of it.

Let’s try a quick thought experiment:

On Monday, you had 1000 subscribers.
You sent out your most recent essay to those 1000 subscribers.
On Tuesday, I joined your email list, excited to get new articles from you.

❓ When would I, a brand new subscriber, get the article you just sent less than 24 hours before?

Most likely answer is…never. That’s a bummer!

That’s a lot of time and effort to put into something that you only use once, isn’t it? No wonder writers get burnt out.

There is a better way…

You can’t avoid doing the work, but you CAN begin treating your work like an asset that works for you, and ConvertKit Sequences is one of the best ways to start in that direction.

If you’ve sent at least 7-10+ broadcasts to your list, you can level up your email game to get off the content treadmill and give your readers a better experience.

Best of all, you can turn it into a repeatable process that feels more like creating mixtapes (remember that!) than grinding out content.

And once you’ve learned the steps to create your own content mixtapes, it can feel a bit like magic bringing your old emails back to life….without the worries that come with traditional necromancy.

Part 2 of this guide includes the process, step by step, so drop your email in the box below and we’ll let you know when it’s live!

p.s. if you’ve gotten this far and still don’t have a ConvertKit account, consider using our referral link. We’d still share these tips without the kickback…these strategies have made us way more money than we’ll ever see from commissions, but a few extra bucks is nice!

9 rapid-fire notes about the "Fear of Success"

Sun, 07 Mar 2021 16:22:48 -0000

Alone in my car, I screamed “no!” out loud as Colleen told Michele that, just as she was approaching the milestone of 100 trial signups for her new SaaS app, she considered quitting altogether.

Colleen Schnettler and Michele Hansen are the hosts of Software Social Podcast, a weekly show that’s become one of my favorite glimpses into the reality of starting and running a small, independent software business.

During the episode in question, Colleen – a software consultant working on her first paid app of her own – confides in her friend and cohost Michele that she kept thinking her app was a “terrible idea”…even though she was well on her way to the milestone of 100 trial signups.

The cognitive dissonance was real, and palpable!

My overly reactive outburst wasn’t just for Colleen (who couldn’t hear me, clearly, podcasts are a one way medium, audio-wise).

But the truth is that Amy and I see our business students fall into this very particular form of self-sabotage ALL. THE. DAMN. TIME.

It’s not just A trap. It’s THE trap.

As Michele begins to confidently talk her friend away from the ledge of premature quitting, Colleen mentions an article that “perfectly described” what she was going through. Almost perfectly accurate, in fact.

That deeply resonant article happened to be one of Amy’s most famous screeds, titled “Why women entrepreneurs fail.”

Colleen notes how truly seen she felt as she read it. Slightly called out, and not wanting to fall into this particular trope.

But also motivated, knowing that her feelings were not only normal but rather common. She finished the article confident, and back on track.

Moments later, she mentions that there was another article that helped her understand the source of her anxiety. That second article, to my pleasant surprise, was my own piece on “The Fear of Beginning again.”

From her perspective, it was like we’d written these pieces with Colleen specifically in mind, which she knew was technically impossible without time travel and/or mind reading.

After finishing their podcast episode, I couldn’t help but want to unpack the layerrssssss of lessons at play here.

So I’m gonna go rapid fire here, and share the 9 key lessons that you can take away from the episode, and my meta-response!

Lesson 1:

Colleen begins by mentioning a “fear of failure,” but in my experience, people that hit a milestone and then consider bailing actually experience “fear of success.”

On the surface, “fear of success” sounds like it makes NO sense at all, but it typically tracks to a feeling of “well shit, if this works I’m on the hook.”

Lesson 2:

The entire world of childhood, school, & corporate life shows us that when we hit milestones, a) everyone celebrates you and b) someone appears to show you the next step.

Meanwhile, in entrepreneurship – and honestly, most of real life – neither of these are likely to happen. You have to choose your own next steps, and find your own ways to celebrate.

Lesson 3:

Self doubt is normal. It’s your brain protecting you from yourself.

This is not a bug, it’s a feature! The trick is to ask yourself what your brain protecting you from. Is that thing actually dangerous?

99% of the time…it’s not. Which means you can safely ignore that voice.

Lesson 4:

Amy and I didn’t write our articles for Colleen. But at the same time, we did. Think about that for a minute.

This is the power of writing online, especially the ebomb format driven by Sales Safari research. Your words today, if you share them publicly, can help unknowable numbers of people in the future. That’s true power.

Lesson 5:

There are many factors that lead to success and failure. Neither are 100% predictable.

However, 100% of the people who achieve a tiny level of success and then stop, do not succeed.

If this is a pattern you recognize in yourself, and changing it is within your control.

Lesson 6:

“I have to throw this away and start from scratch” is an reaction that creators have often, mostly when they don’t know what to do next.

It’s probably the most common form of self sabotage.

Better choice? “Change one thing and try again.”

Lesson 7:

Uncertainty is not danger. Uncertainty isn’t even always risk! Your brain thinks it is, but it’s not.

In fact, uncertainty is guaranteed, because certainty is a lie that we tell ourselves to feel like we’re in control.

Lesson 8:

It’s endlessly valuable to surround yourself with people who will talk you out of your own bullshit. They can save your income, your career, maybe even your life.

If you’re doing this alone, it’s like playing a game on the hardest mode, for no extra points awarded.

Lesson 9:

Everyone says “business is hard,” but business is pretty straightforward to learn and do in the grand scheme of things. I know this because I see people way dumber than you and me doing just fine.

Managing yourself, your emotions, and your decisions? THAT is hard.

So go listen to the Software Social podcast and subscribe.

Do the work and be kind to yourself. Til next time. ✌️

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How To: Very high quality transcripts and captions for under $1.50/minute.

Sat, 30 Jan 2021 16:22:48 -0000

Amy and I have been teaching online for over a decade, and for more than half of that time, pre-recorded video lessons have been one of our cornerstone teaching tools of choice.

While we’ve helped thousands of students learn to build and launch products that sell, I’m a bit embarrassed to say that our favored format was leaving a large audience behind: without transcripts or closed captions, our courses have excluded a wide range of learners, most of all those who are deaf or hard of hearing.

This unintended exclusion is something we’ve been wanting to solve for a long time. For every one person who emailed us asking about captions or transcripts, we can assume there were many more who didn’t even bother asking.

Friend and 30x500 alumni Joel Hooks from egghead.io has also been prodding and reminding us (in a friendly way) to add transcripts for a long time too!

We’d set out to solve this problem in the past, but never took it across the finish line.

The biggest barrier was that every experience I’d had ordering production-quality transcripts online had yielded very disappointing results.

Naturally, price and quality are the two biggest factors, but even at top dollar the quality was variable at best. We could spend $2-3+ per minute and still need to hire an editor to clean them up. Frustrating!

But in 2020, a mix of new technology and our refreshed focus on investing in access finally converged…and we finally came up with a workable solution!

As of January, all 732 minutes of video in our flagship business course 30x500 are now fully transcribed and captioned!

And we didn’t stop there…every episode of our podcast Stacking the Bricks is also transcribed, with an interactive transcript embedded right on the episode page.

If you take a look at any of those podcast transcripts, you’ll see that the quality is top notch. These aren’t simply literal word-for-word transcriptions, they’ve been cleaned by a human editor to remove speech tics and other language patterns that don’t map well from spoken to written word.

Since launching the podcast transcripts, and subsequently the captions and transcripts for 30x500 lessons, lots of people have asked how we did this and exactly how much it cost with hopes that they could make their course videos and podcasts more accessible too!

By using a combination of Automated Transcription by Descript with a freelance transcript editor, we were able to create thousands of minutes worth of extremely high quality transcripts and captions for less than $1.50 per minute, all in!

Lemme show you how we did it, step by step.

This guide includes the step-by-step process for finding and training a freelance editor, and the total cost per minute breakdown of the final product. Here we go!

Step 1: Rough Transcripts for Pennies per Minute
Step 2: Finding the right editor
Step 3: Training to my tastes
Step 4: Scale to Mass Production!
Step 5: Re-sync the clean transcripts to the videos
Don’t wait like we did.

Step 1: Rough Transcripts for Pennies per Minute

I (re)discovered Descript when I made the decision to bring back our Stacking the Bricks podcast for a season of new episodes based on my Tiny MBA Podcast Tour.

Descript is a piece of software that slurps in audio and video files, uses AI to auto-generate a transcript. The true magic of Descript is that it lets you use that transcript to edit your audio and video. Remove text from the transcript, it’s removed from the audio. Move text around the doc, and the corresponding audio or video move around the timeline to match. It’s truly magical, and saved me 3-4 hours of editing time per podcast episode.

The auto-generated transcripts are not perfect. Descript struggles most noticeably with transcribing proper nouns. For laughs I really should have saved a list of the many ways it’s transcribed Alex Hillman 😂.

That said…the auto-generated transcripts were surprisingly good, maybe 80-85%+ as good as the rough draft transcripts I’d gotten from various human transcription marketplaces even after paying upwards of $2 per minute.

And for just $30 per month, my Descript plan included 30 hours of transcribing per month.

Plus, Descript has the built-in capability of exporting .srt files for synced closed captions on our videos. That’s a two-for-one.

Once I realized I could get my rough transcripts for $1 per hour vs $1-2 per minute…hiring that human editor suddenly made way more sense!

Step 2: Finding the right editor

Even removing price from the equation, finding and hiring great people for any kind of work is one of the hardest tasks on the planet.

My go-to is tapping my network, so I started by asking around if anybody had a great transcript editor they’d worked with in the past. Unfortunately most people I talked to had run into the same challenges I had…and the one person who had a great person was hesitant to give ‘em up and risk losing their secret weapon.

So I went to the open market for freelancers of all kinds: Upwork!

Now, Upwork has a…shall we say “variable” reputation among technical and creative people. It tends to be highly competitive, with a focus on cheap labor rather than quality work.

Anecdotally, I personally know people who managed to escape the “pricing race to the bottom” by offering highly specialized services. I had a feeling that as long as I wasn’t optimizing for the cheapest, and positioned my project correctly, I’d find the person I was looking for.

I did a little bit of research to see what the price range I might expect for transcript cleanup, and saw prices ranging from as little a $7 to as much as $20/hour. Even at the top end of that price range, this was looking affordable.

So I created a project description

Since I was working on the Stacking the Bricks podcast at the time, I had podcast episodes and their rough transcripts from Descript ready and waiting. I picked one and put together a job posting.

Clean up Audio Transcriptions - 40-60 mins each

Back catalog of ~35 podcasts with transcripts generated by Descript. Average length 40-60 mins each.

Looking for an independent freelancer to clean up the transcripts so they are clear to read and error free. Example visible at https://stackingthebricks.com/podcast/ep35-debugging-humans-with-michele-hansen-and-colleen-schnettler/

New episodes shipping weekly, happy to continue working with someone consistently every week once we see quality work.

I priced our project “high” on purpose

Knowing that the range of transcriptionists on the platform ranged widely, I specifically listed this project as paying $15-20/hr hoping to signal that I was prioritizing quality over price and attract higher quality candidates.

Within an hour I had a bunch of people applying to the project! Many quickly ruled themselves out with spelling errors, and several offered extremely low rates attempting to stand out by being cheaper.

I turned off new applications for the project, and plucked a few of the better applications.

I offered each freelancer a short, paid test project

Ultimately I was optimizing for quality over speed or price, so I wanted to see how a few different people would approach the project with relatively limited instructions.

I ended up picking 5 people whose messages were clearly not a copy/paste, and who had at least a few positive reviews from past projects.

Each of the 5 candidates were offered full rate to “clean up the first 15 minutes worth of transcript text so that it could easily be read and understood without the accompanying text.”

I compared the results

Of the 5 candidates results, 3 had only cleaned up the most obvious typos, leaving in words and phrases that Descript had transcribed incorrectly.

The other two freelancers covered the vast majority of the language errors, and only one of the candidates responded noting that some of the run-on sentences could be made easier to read if they were broken up into multiple sentences, adding words and punctuation to smooth readability.

She offered specific improvements in service of the goal, which was transcripts that were easy and pleasant to read.

She also happened to be the most specific candidate, but given the outstanding performance on the test, she was the obvious freelancer to move forward.

“Congrats, you’re hired!”

I paid everyone else, plus a small bonus.

Since I promised everyone that this was a paid test, I told them nicely that we had chosen another freelancer and paid for their time. Upwork even gave me the chance to pay a small bonus, so I gave the other 4 candidates a small additional bonus as a thank you for their effort.

Step 3: Training to my tastes

I had decided to use the Podcast transcripts, which are decidedly lower stakes than our tightly edited video lessons, as the “training wheels” for the editing style I wanted.

Our freelancer had done a great job with the short test, so I asked her to finish that episode.

I specifically told her that I had appreciated her noticing opportunities to actually fix the text to make it easier to understand instead of just fixing spelling and grammatical errors, and that she should continue that way.

I said: “if you see ways to make this better, go ahead and ask, or even better just do it and make a note of what you did and why”

A few hours later I got back a near perfect transcript! She told me what she chose to fix and why, and I confirmed each of her decisions. I spotted a few small structural things, like how often I wanted her to add line breaks to break up long monologues.

She took notes on my preferences, and we decided to have her apply them to another 2 episodes of the podcast.

Once done, we reviewed those transcripts. Made a few more stylistic notes. Repeat.

Each time, I gave her a Dropbox folder with the original audio file + the rough transcript exported from Descript as a .rtf file. She sent back a fresh .rtf file with her initials in the filename.

Within 3 rounds, I felt extremely confident in her delivering the rest of the podcast transcripts that were exactly what I wanted or damn close to it!

A few weeks later, she wrapped up our entire podcast back catalog and we even came up with a publishing workflow for our new episodes going forward.

Bonus: Pull interesting quotes while you’re in there!

One of the notes I got from our freelancer was that she was really enjoying the podcast itself, and learning from the topics and discussion.

Given that she was both interested and curious, I realized that she might be able to pull out interesting quotes that could be turned into social media sharing clips while she was working through the transcript cleanup.

Step 4: Scale to Mass Production!

Unlike the podcast episodes, which were typically 30-40 minutes each, our lessons tend to be much shorter…there are just a lot of them. So I prepped a Dropbox folder that mirrored our lesson structure and started filling ‘em up with the video files. I batched using Descript to generate the rough transcripts, and uploaded each one next to the accompanying video.

But the best part was that at this point I had a ton of confidence in our freelancer’s process, so I told her to start using everything we’d learned up to that point and that she didn’t need to stop unless she ran into a question or challenge.

And thanks to front-loading the training process, she pulled it off without a hitch! More than 60 videos later, I had a big ‘ol library of fine-tuned transcripts for every video in our course.

Step 5: Re-sync the clean transcripts to the videos

If I’m 100% honest, I hadn’t thought about this step in my original plan and for a moment, thought I’d made a huge mistake!

My plan was to use Descript’s built in subtitle exporter to generate .srt files that work with basically any video player that supports captions. But…our freelance editor had been doing the transcript cleanup outside of Descript. Whoops.

Thankfully, Descript had a fix built right in!

When you add a new video or audio file to Descript, by default it offers the option to auto-generate a transcript. But if you click the drop-down, you can also import an existing transcript.

Follow the steps, which includes pasting in your cleaned up transcript, and within 60 seconds it automatically syncs your manually cleaned transcript to the original audio or video file.

Note: as far as I can tell this sync doesn’t count against your limited transcription minutes on your Descript plan.

With the cleaned up transcripts re-synced to the video, my .srt files were just a few clicks away and I could upload them directly to our courseware!

Total Cost

In total, 30x500 had approximately 732 minutes, or 12.2 hours, of video lessons total.

The complete 30x500 transcript cleanup project took approximately 43 billable hours, at $20 per hour, for a total cleanup cost of $870.20.

Descript cost $30/month, and this project spanned about 3 months, so let’s call that cost $90.

The podcast project that we essentially used as training worked out to almost the exact same price-per-minute, so if I generously extract the first 5 hours from that and add it to this project, the standards training “cost” about $100 of billable time, though we benefit greatly from the output of that training since all of our podcasts have transcripts now too.

That brings our total hard cost to $1060.20, or $1.44 per minute of media ALL IN!

Best of all, we now have a direct relationship with our transcription freelancer so when we want more transcripts cleaned up, I don’t have to worry about finding a new freelancer and starting the training process all over again.

The next level will be having our editor document her process into a standards and style guide that other freelancers can follow, in the event she’s no longer available.

Since this project we’ve also hired someone whose expertise is making sure that PDFs and other documents are fully accessible, and she’s helping us deliver our transcripts that play nice with screen readers too.

Don’t wait like we did.

You can and should improve your own course or podcast’s accessibility!

Last year, we invested in the financial accessibility of 30x500 by creating programs to offer adjusted prices for a global population of students, and access scholarships for BIPOC entrepreneurs.

Within the first 6 months of these programs alone, we saw an increase of more than 20x increase in participation from the communities they were designed to support. We still have a ways to go, and the real success will be seen in years not months as those students build their businesses into product empires. But we’re encouraged by these results!

The addition of captions and transcripts is the next small step in the journey of improving access around 30x500 and other Stacking the Bricks programs and properties. Early response in our community has been very positive, and we’re going to keep going.

And we hope that sharing the behind-the-scenes encourages more online educators to do the same!

If you teach a video course online, popular platforms like Teachable and Podia both support adding captions produced by this process. The effort and cost can be front-loaded, and once things are moving it’s a fairly straightforward process.

Amy and I hope this guide helps you invest in improved accessibility for your students, too!

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11 timeless lessons Mário learned selling his first product

Wed, 27 Jan 2021 16:22:48 -0000

Please enjoy this guest post from one of our 30x500 alumnus, Mário Nzualo!

I’ve wanted to sell something on the Internet for ages.

I “grew up” on the Internet and felt like there were plenty of opportunities to build a profitable product. I saw others doing it, and I wanted to do it myself. I have had many side projects over the years, so I knew how to build stuff.

But I didn’t know how to make something people would buy.

Despite consuming a lot of content around startups and entrepreneurship, I still didn’t get it.

In October 2018, I started a project called indexfundinvestor.eu. About 18 months later, in April 2020, I published a book - the Introduction to Investing in Index Funds and ETFs.

Just over 2 years later, in January 2021, I sold the 300th copy of that book, making it a nice little side business for me!

Enrolling in Amy and Alex’s business course 30x500 is what changed everything for me. Now I get it.

30x500 isn’t cheap, but it was one of the best investments I have ever made in myself. My tiny business wouldn’t be where it is if it weren’t for what I learned in the course.

So I want to share 11 of the lessons I’ve learned while growing this project into a tiny business.

1. Identifying pain is easier said than done…but it can be learned!

The keys to any profitable product sounds simple: “Step 1: Identify a pain people have and are willing to pay to solve. Step 2: Sell something that fixes that pain.”

But these two steps contain a lot of meaning. Deeply understanding these sentences was the most valuable learning for me. 30x500 included a few techniques to put these critical insights into practice:

How to identify pains people have by observing what they do/write/say. This taught me what having empathy for the customer means.
How to translate those pains into potential products
How to build trust with the target audience of the product through teaching
How to write persuasive copy when pitching a product

2. Creating something for yourself is a common pitfall.

People with a similar background as mine, engineering, tend to focus on creating something for themselves. That is usually a terrible idea because a product is meant to address a customer’s problem instead of the creator’s problem.

For example, my initial idea was to build an app to manage investments. I was going to solve a problem I had. However, once I spent time listening to others, I realized that they actually struggled with understanding how index investing in Europe works. Their problems were confusion and lack of confidence. They didn’t need an app!

I know some talk about “Make something people want,” but I never got what it truly means until I started putting 30x500’s techniques into practice. Concise statements that compress a lot of knowledge are not useful for beginners like I was.

Deeply understanding the pain points of a customer is a superpower for making sales.

3. Building an audience takes time.

Even if your work is good, it will take time for people to find and recommend it. It took me nine months (!) to get 100 email subscribers. I was writing for nobody to read for months. But I kept going, and now I have ~3,000 email subscribers and more than 8% of my list has bought my book!

It sucks to feel like you are shipping great content, yet it isn’t recognized. Additionally, in the beginning, you can’t really tell if your work is good or not because there is so little feedback. What kept me going was the conviction that I was on the right path because I understood the user’s pain points.

There are overnight successes out there, but I am not one of them. And that is OK with me. I just trusted the process. I had faith that the process I used was sound, and eventually, results would show. I had to be patient.

4. Practice improves understanding.

I had a fairly solid understanding of the customers I was serving. However, it took me 12 months to try multiple things to deeply understand their issues and create content that resonated with them.

I could not have gotten there without the learnings from the previous months. The most meaningful understandings come from doing.

5. Numbers didn’t make me happy.

Not surprisingly, there is a certain degree of hedonic adaptation to growing a website and selling products like I have.

There were milestones that I thought would make me happy: reaching a certain number of subscribers or sales. However, when I finally got there, I didn’t feel happier.

I’ve been focusing more on enjoying the journey ever since. There isn’t a particular destination I want to get to. I mostly just want to keep having a good time and having a meaningful impact on my customers. I don’t fret as much about numbers as I did before. Numbers are only useful if they can help me improve my process or increase my impact.

I haven’t set audacious goals. My expectations are pretty low. Maybe that is why I’m happy. I feel fortunate to be able to sell a couple of books every week and get the opportunity to keep doing it.

6. So many things are out of your control.

Running a business isn’t like school, where hard work is rewarded with good grades. You can work very hard and still not get the results you want.

I see running a business as running a set of experiments. You have multiple hypotheses, and you test them. Some work, some don’t.

You try to learn from each experiment and apply those learnings to future experiments. Having a good process and knowledge increases your likelihood of success but does not guarantee it: they are a necessary but not sufficient conditions.

7. Don’t get hung up on the mechanics.

Amy and Alex teach a lot of important techniques in 30x500. However, the goals behind those techniques are more important than the mechanics of the techniques.

If you understand the goals, you can use different techniques to reach those goals.

There are multiple ways to get to Rome. Applying the techniques without understanding the goals leads to missing the forest for the trees.

The corollary of this is that you may learn different techniques elsewhere and arrive at the same result. 30x500 was what lit the light for me, and something else may work for you.

8. Your pricing has to make sense for you.

I will never be a New York Times bestseller, so I shouldn’t price my product like one. Famous authors can price books at $10 because they sell millions of copies. I will never sell that many copies of my books.

I need an entirely different business model. I need to price my book in a way that is sustainable for a lower number of sales. And I need to provide a lot of value to make it work.

The pricing of the product should match the specifics of your business.

I already alluded to this earlier, but it is super important you learn the playbook from folks doing a comparable thing. I shouldn’t take business lessons from Steve Jobs on how to self-publish my tiny book. Adam Wathan has a summary of the playbook for launching a book like mine.

9. You won’t find time. You have to make time.

There are so many things competing for my time: work, family, hobbies, series/movies, social media, etc. I don’t have time to run my tiny business. I make time for it.

I am productive whenever I set aside time for the work:

During weekdays (Mon-Fri), I work on this business for 1-2h before heading to work.
I plan the focus for the week on Sunday evening
I do minor stuff for the business on weekends so I can spend time on my hobbies, family, movies, etc.

Creating this habit of working on the business was very impactful.

I do get sloppy now and then and don’t make time for the work. I don’t get much done in those weeks.

5-10h a week isn’t much time, but that is what I have. It means stuff takes a while to get done, and that is OK. I also only tackle one issue at a time instead of trying to do many things.

Having a limited amount of time also means I had to accept that the business will never be “perfect.” I am building a house, slowly, brick by brick.

10. Know Your Phase.

Every phase of a project or business has a different bottleneck. Focusing on anything other than the specific bottleneck for a particular phase is a distraction.

For example, A website with 10 views per month has entirely different needs than a website with 100,000 views per month.

When I started out, I didn’t have any content to establish trust with my readers. Focusing on anything other than writing blog posts would have been a waste of time. There was no point in thinking about conversion rates, SEO, and social media at that stage.

Many beginners fall into traps where they focus on things that won’t move the needle for their stage in their journey. It takes experience to build good judgment about what matters. This also means that you have to be selective about the advice you consume. Some advice may be great for others but not for you.

11. You can design a business that fits your life.

I was very intentional about making choices that wouldn’t make me feel miserable.

For example, I knew I didn’t want to write on a specific schedule. I used to have a side project that required me to publish an article every Thursday, which was very draining. I enjoy writing, but I like the freedom of unplugging for weeks or months while the product still provides value for customers.

There are lots of ways to make money. Not all of them work for how I want to live my life.

Running a business is a skill

Seeing my work on indexfundinvestor.eu help others solve their problems brings me immense joy.

I got there by learning from others that took a similar path, listening to my potential customers and showing up with my work.

Running a business is a skill and I’m still learning. You can learn it too!

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Is your content too long? Not long enough?

Fri, 04 Dec 2020 16:22:48 -0000

From time to time, one of our students or readers will share a draft of an email or article or sales page and ask, innocently: “Is this too long?”

And I smile.

For one, consider who you’re asking. I once wrote an article about why I removed my book, The Tiny MBA, that is multiple times longer than the book itself.

I do tend to go long with my words. But it’s not because I’m going for a new high score or something.

I also love short form. Some of my best writing is on Twitter.

The thing to remember is that words have a job.

A single tweet can be better than an entire book, depending on the job.

A 4000 word essay can be better than a one-pager, depending on the job. Both can be right!

So how do you know if you’ve written enough, or too much?

Try asking a different way.

Ask: How do you know if a piece of string is too long?

Or if a piece of string is too short, for that matter?

Like a piece of string, your writing is only too short or too long if it isn’t doing its job.

Similarly, your both a piece of string and your writing are only too long if there’s so much after doing the job that the extra gets in the way.

So instead of asking if it’s too long or too short, ask yourself: what is the job of the words you are writing?

Does the reader know that the piece is for them?
Does the reader have a reason to believe you are trustworthy?
Does the reader feel a sense of progress, or momentum?
Does the structure make it easy for them to skim ahead and see where it’s going?
Does the reader leave with a fix for their problem, or a salve for their interest?
Does the reader know what they can do next, if they want more?

Remember that it’s not the word count that matters, it’s if the words are doing their job.

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Marooned At Work

Mon, 26 Oct 2020 16:22:48 -0000

I’ve spent the last decade feeling pretty sure of myself.

Myself — not necessarily my ideas, or that everything I’d try would work, but sure of me. I earned that self-confidence the hard way: by dealing with terrible situations and picking myself up, and making so many mistakes that I knew I could survive them, even benefit from them.

Even when I wasn’t sure of whether my idea would work or not, I would throw myself into it with the confidence that I’d learn a lot, and do my best, either way.

It was a great place to be.

And I took it for granted.

That was then.

This year, not so much.

Near the end of February, somehow, I caught the coronavirus. And I spent the next 3 months sick as a dog, brain foggy, gasping, in pain, while my software-as-a-service business crashed around me — and I was too sick to stop it.

If this hemorrhaging had happened only to me, I probably would’ve been ok. But it wasn’t just me. It was the whole damn world.

Customers weren’t leaving because of anything I did wrong, but because their own economic prospects dimmed as the initial panic about the pandemic rippled across the globe.

That’s something I could not fix or change, even if I could lift a finger to try. Which I couldn’t.

I haven’t felt so helpless, for so long, in a long, long time.

The enormity of it broke me.

(And the coronavirus itself altered my mental state, which made everything much worse.)

And as this was going down, so was the sale of our old house back in PA — which was fraught and dramatic, and extremely difficult to manage from 2,500 miles away, and also urgent and necessary due to the change in our income.

What little energy I had left, I poured into trying to help others. A few days of work wasn’t going to reverse the course of an entire industry, for me, but it might save someone else.

I couldn’t catch a break

Finally, in June, I started to recover. The fever left. My oxygen levels climbed. I began to pick myself up and do things again. I’ve learned from the pain of overdoing it so I began slowly, with organizing my workspace and setting things up for success.

But the hits just wouldn’t stop coming: I had just one or two good weeks before shit hit the fan. I had multi-month crisis trying to get thyroid meds I wasn’t allergic to (you know, just a thing I require to live, no big), I also become very anemic, and then I had a serious allergic reaction to the iron infusion, then a short course of prednisone which screwed me up so bad I could barely sit up for nearly 8 weeks straight. I was dizzy even in a recliner. Simple physical activity (like walking up the stairs) triggered emotional meltdowns.

I wasn’t sick, as such, but I was definitely Not OK.

It felt like my body, rather than being disabled by invading illness or circumstance, had actively turned against me. The call was coming from inside the house.

My overall sense of helplessness turned into outright panic. I couldn’t deal with the decision of whether to return a pair of sneakers, much less what to do about my business. My body was screaming at me to stop. So I did. It’s not like I had any choice.

Thankfully, finally — now, in the end of October, after endless doctors appointments and trials and MRIs and reckless experimentation and days spent flat on my back doing absolutely nothing — I can sit up, walk, and think for at least some part of the day, every day.

I can make decisions and even contemplate the state of my business without utter overwhelm and panic. (Although I haven’t looked at the SaaS revenue yet. It still makes my heart pound.)

And the question is: Now what?

I’ve spent 8 months utterly out of touch with everything because I simply could. not. even. look.

It feels like I’ve been marooned on another planet.

It feels like I can’t even get my hands around what I have to do.

Even if it feels like nothing will work… I will.

I will work.

That’s the littlest flame of confidence burning again.

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Amy Hoy's Totally and Completely Biased Review of The Tiny MBA

Tue, 20 Oct 2020 16:22:48 -0000

I’m holding, in my fat little fist, an actual hard copy book written by my friend and biz partner, Alex Hillman. Words cannot express how simultaneously strange and awesome this is… but this is a review so I’m gonna do my damnedest to make it work!

First off: It’s an object. A real, physical object! One you can flip through, write in, and shove in the back pocket of your jeans.

This is a first for our business, and I fucking LOVE it. I had not expected to be so moved by concrete evidence I could hold in my hand.

The Physical

Physical stats: It measures just a touch under 5” by 7”. It has 133 pages. It weighs less than 10 ounces.

It’s… mustard, or as I prefer to think of it, goldenrod.

It’s the platonic ideal size for the jean-back-pocketing or shoving in a bag or tucking under your monitor so it can live at-hand. The pages are a good thickness, not too thin like you’d expect a print-on-demand book to be. The cover has that sort of luxurious, touchable, almost silicone-y coating. It’s a comfortable size and weight to hold open. I do wish the gutters were a little wider.

As a reader, I value this meatspace presence. You all know I love me some ebooks, especially for research — but there’s something magical about holding a physical book you can rifle through, land at a page by random happenstance, catch a sentence that speaks to you. Almost like… a divining rod.

Aside from the introduction, which is typeset as a regular book, each page has a short mantra or thought-provoking question or idea set into a little box… with plenty of room to write notes or ideas in, which I highly recommend!

This is a book designed for that ritual.

The Use Case

Tiny MBA is a short, pithy book that evolved from a Twitter thread — obvious, if you follow Alex on Twitter — but less obviously, it also stems from Alex’s love of insight tools, like Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies deck. (An obscure love we share!)

There’s an essay introduction by the ineffable Nilofer Merchant, and then every subsquent page is a short, sharp thought to chew on.

These little tidbits are in a logical order; you can read the book end to end, and it works well that way.

But Tiny MBA can also serve another, much more powerful purpose: like a non-mystical tarot, you can pick a card, any card, and extrapolate from that randomness a lens to sharpen your thinking in any given situation.

Like Phone-a-Friend, but the friend is inside you all along; you just need the right surprise to lure them out. You just need, as Roger von Oech — my other fave insight tool maker — put it, “a whack on the side of the head.”

And that’s why I can use The Tiny MBA myself, even though Alex and I have collaborated in business for the last decade and know each other’s opinions inside and out.

My Personal Experience

You see, I’ve been having a really rough time this year.

I spent March through June totally debilitated with coronavirus, back when there were no answers, and my software business was freefalling due to the shock to the economy for freelancers and agencies, and I could do nothing but watch it happen.

As has only ever once ever happened to me before, my body and mind hit their limit simultaneously. I’m still not fully recovered.

Consequently, I had absolutely nothing to do with this book. Nothing! Alex occasionally told me what he was doing but it wasn’t for my input, just to make me feel included.

So, for once, I get to enjoy something of ours like a customer.

The Contents

Here are a few of the “cards” from Tiny MBA that are speaking to me right now:

Because right now, I’m still traumatized by watching my business crater and being too sick to do anything about it.

And as I’m slowly crawling back to physical health, I find myself overwhelmed by the size of the task before me.

These pages have reminded me that it’s easy to get fixated on the wrong things, and suggested ways I can let go of that wrong thinking and see what I really need to see.

These pages aren’t the ones I’ve seen other folks quoting in their reviews — and that’s the magic of it. You find the bits that speak to you. Every page is gold, and it’s right there on the surface, too.

In short, I love this book, and I think you will, too.

📙 Get your own copy!

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Get your business out of a rut...using time travel

Sat, 10 Oct 2020 16:22:48 -0000

A few weeks ago I got an email from a 30x500 graduate.

We’ll call them….Discouraged D.

Here’s what they wrote:

“I’m currently at the bottom of a rut with my biz (and life). I sit lots of days at my computer trying to force myself to work.

Not sure what’s up with me.

I think it boils down to wondering at what point does grit become sunk cost? It feels increasingly difficult to work on my business.

I find I’m discouraged that it’s not where I wanted it to be yet by this point (almost 4 years of working on it). There’s always this constant stress every time I try to work on the marketing and my hope of things getting better is diminished.

Every time I sit down to work I feel the overwhelm and discouragement kick in…so I’m making very little progress on fixing the problem.

I feel stuck.”

Ouch.

Truth is, this specific flavor of stuckness is very common among creative people who start a business.

You start making sales. That’s exciting.

But when your initial excitement of launch wears off…the line goes flat and you’re left wondering what you got yourself into in the first place.

If this feels familiar, breathe deep because you are so so SO not alone.

Of course, everyone’s situation is a little bit different, so your “reasons” for this stuckness may feel different. But the root causes are often pretty similar!

With D’s consent, I asked a few pointed questions.

Debugging Discouraged D’s Distress

I asked: “Where does that stress about the marketing come from?”

“I think it stems partly from a comparison of my biz/progress with other people/businesses that appear much more successful, and the thinking that I’m somehow getting more and more behind.”

**I asked: “Are you doing Sales Safari?”**

“Not in the last year or so.”

I asked: “Are you active in any of your audience watering holes?”

“No. 😕”

I asked: “Are you sending new ebombs to your email list regularly?”

“It’s been sporadic. I’ve only sent 5 emails in the last 9 months.”

I asked: “Do your new subscribers get sent any “old” but evergreen ebombs from before they discovered you?”

“My welcome sequence just has two evergreen articles in it.”

Right. I don’t need a sports almanac from the future to tell me what happened here.

And the Root Cause is….

9x out of 10 when someone writes us about their stuckness, they’re simply not doing something they know they should:

Research. Marketing. Sales.

Often, these critical pieces to repeatable business success get ignored or forgotten while someone goes into “build mode” to create their product…and never come back to the surface for air.

But almost 10x out of 10, the root cause for this particular kind of stuckness is a more subtle mental block.

Ready for the Realtalk?

Discouraged D was paying attention to:

other people and their “successes”
their flimsy sales graphs
decisions about their next product

But they were paying ZERO attention to their audience.

No Sales Safari research. No watering hole participation. No regular ebomb delivery. No strategic nurturing of subscribers over time.

All of Discouraged D’s hangups - and the most common mistakes in business - all track back to one thing:

They spent more time paying attention to literally anything other than their audience/customers.

Lightning Strikes the Clock Tower

D wrote back:

“Gosh dang Alex you’re right, it rings true. I know what I need to do now.

I’m feeling super hopeful and unstuck. THANK YOU Alex.”

While still vibing in their moment of clarity, I gave now-Delighted D one more assignment.

It’s easy to feel good in a moment like this, and then weeks or days or moments later, forget all about it.

So asked D to write a letter to their past self - their discouraged self - from this fresh new perspective.

With this letter (and without a time traveling DeLorean) they can come back to this moment next time they’re stuck in the muck and need to remember how they got out last time.

…and bonus, you can too. Read what they wrote below.

Dear Discouraged D,

You feel like you’re at the very bottom of a rut. You feel hopeless and stuck. You’re trying to claw your way out of it but every time you sit down to work you feel even more discouraged and overwhelmed.

You’re wondering: “at what point does grit become sunk cost?”. You’re considering giving up.

Every business (and every thing worth doing) faces obstacles. You are fortunate in that the obstacles you’re facing are ones you chose.

The entrepreneur life is the kind of life you were made for. You’re happier and more fulfilled than you ever were at any job. Your problem isn’t your challenges, it’s your perspective.

You’re focusing on everything except the people you serve. You’re in your own head instead of your customers’. You’re paying attention to other people’s success instead of creating it in your own people.

Your business isn’t about you. It’s about them. It’s about using your gifts and talents and sweat and time to help them in a way that only you can.

Start every day by researching and interacting with your audience.

Having a regular system of doing this will help you keep focused on them. Solve their problems, and your own problems will be solved along the way.

Delighted D

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Vote

Mon, 05 Oct 2020 16:22:48 -0000

Hi, folks.

Eligible American voters, this one’s for you.

I’m sure I don’t need to tell why it’s so crucial that we all vote this election — but just in case: This election is the last major off-ramp we have before the United States becomes an authoritarian regime. Right now, we still have power to stop it.

It’s absurdly stressful to even think about, which is why I want to help make sure you’re organized and ready.

Checklist, resources, and pep talk below!!

I’ve broken it down into three easily digestible sections:

First: Making sure you’re (still, correctly) registered to vote and requesting a paper ballot where possible.

Second: Preparing to vote, voting securely, tracking your ballot.

Third: What can you do to help? Science says this is the most impactful thing

If you’ve skimmed this list and thought, “Ok, but I’m not excited to vote for Biden, so I don’t know if I’m going to bother”… please read to the end.

Here’s a great page with the deadlines, absentee ballot request, ballot drop box and and overview info for every state.

First: Making sure you’re (still) registered to vote.

Already registered? Be sure you’re up-to-date (not purged!!) and all correct. Check your registration. http://www.vote411.org/check-registration

Not registered yet? Paperwork is a bitch, I know. But the deadline to register is coming up — in many states, today, October 5. You still have time! Registration takes an average of 3 minutes. http://www.vote411.org/register

Overwhelmed? TurboVote is a simpler interface that takes it step by step. https://turbovote.org/

Second: Preparing to vote, and voting securely.

If you can vote in person — especially early — this is a great option to ensure everything goes through with no hiccups. Check if your area has early voting. https://www.vote.org/early-voting-calendar/

If you want to vote by completing your ballot at home, great! The ideal way to do that is to skip the post office and drop your ballot directly in a ballot dropbox.

Learn how dropboxes work. (Note: some states don’t allow someone else to drop your ballot off; this is important!)

Find out if your area has dropboxes, and where: search for your state and county! Again, note that different jurisdictions have different rules.

If you’re mailing the traditional way, ensure you have carefully followed the instructions regarding signing, sealing, privacy envelopes, deadlines and so on.

Google your state rules for mail-in ballots or use DemocracyWorks’ comprehensive state pages for info. https://howto.vote/

Also doesn’t hurt to search twitter for any ballot warnings (like about the right number of stamps) because there is no single page for this info.

Learn how to track your ballot along its journey to ensure your vote is counted.

Here are guides to voting in every state. http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/how-to-vote-2020/

Hesitating because you’re not sure what to fill out for the local stuff? It’s easy to miss in a year like this.

Check out what’s on your ballot. http://www.vote411.org/

Many local organizations put out voting guides, too!

Third: The most impactful things you can do.

While it’s fantastic and rewarding to phone or text bank for candidates — not all of us are physically or emotionally equipped to call or text strangers for hours at a time. (cough me cough)

But can you text your friends?

A recent study has shown that texting your friends & family — aka, people you already enjoy talking to — is the most impactful thing you can possibly do. No brainer, when you think about it: trust and respect and love is powerful.

Even so, it can be daunting.

That’s why the new crop of apps are such perfect tools: they give you the power and support of a professional text banking tool, but with the comfort of texting folks you already know.

The best two options are:

Vote With Me https://votewithme.us/
Outvote https://www.outvote.io/

If you are a friend of mine, well… prepare to hear from me soon. Sorry not sorry.

Why I’m excited to vote for Joe

Aka let’s give up on self-indulgent fatalism

Joe Biden was not my first or even second choice — and that doesn’t matter, because a Biden administration won’t try to mass murder minorities and shut down elections in the future, and that alone secures my vote.

But, contrary to irony-poisoned Twitter talking heads or perhaps your own self-destructive inner voice, Biden is not “the lesser evil.”

Biden’s people — remember, you’re not electing just the man, but his entire team — have put forth a tremendous amount of really good policies. They’re bringing the right people on board. They’re consulting with real, experienced experts in policy, like my friend Matthew Cortland. They’re not allowing lobbyists through the door.

Biden-Harris are listening, and they’re changing in response to what they hear.

REMEMBER: Picking a president isn’t like picking a friend. You are choosing your adversary. All politicians must be held accountable by the people… but only some of them show willing to listen.

That said, we’re actually starting from a pretty good place…

Here are just a few of the Biden-Harris policies I’m excited for:

restore and expanding the ACA and creating a public option (crucial for everyone, and especially small business owners like us)
ending enforced poverty and ensuring marriage equality for disabled folks
free college for households under $125k/yr

Plus, you know, a couple little things like ending the horror of family separation and indefinite detention of innocent migrants and their children, actually fighting the pandemic, providing aid to those devastated by Trump’s mismanagement of the pandemic, working to repair the egregious harm decades of anti-Black policies have created, sweeping white supremacists out of our institutions, mandating a turn to clean energy, and addressing the student debt and housing crises. You know. As a treat.

If I sound sarcastic, it’s not because I think these things are minor, but because I’m frustrated to no end with folks who act like getting these things is the same as not getting these things.

Seriously, check out the Biden-Harris plans. There are a lot; each page is tons and tons of stuff I couldn’t possibly list here. Their platform is more progressive and far-reaching than Obama’s. That’s a foundation we can build on.

Plus, again, you know Biden won’t try to install himself as an autocrat or bribe and corrupt every single government office he can reach… and that is genuinely thrilling in 2020.

If you’re still feeling bitter, believe me, I understand. But think of it this way: It’s well worth your time to vote for local candidates to make change in your area, your state, your state’s representation in Congress. It costs nothing and hurts no one to vote for Biden, but it could help a lot of folks less fortunate than you, whose very lives hinge on this election.

Voting for them, if not for yourself, is an act of love.

Did you know that I’m one of those people? If the ACA is destroyed — if Trump succeeds — then in a few years, when I hit the lifetime caps on insurance that the ACA had outlawed, I’m fucked. If I’m lucky, I’ll spend the rest of my life shivering in bed, unable to stand long enough to do simple things like wash my hair and do the dishes. If I’m less lucky, I’ll die of an infection that my current (very expensive) treatment would have protected me from.

So, if you still don’t want to vote for yourself, please vote for me.

Amy

Two high-impact changes to our flagship, 30x500

Fri, 11 Sep 2020 16:22:48 -0000

In a recent email to our newsletter, we promised ~*changes*~ were coming to our flagship business course, 30x500 Academy.

And it’s true! Over the last few years we’ve quietly added new lessons, resources and improvements to the 30x500 course and curriculum.

Most recently, Amy designed a brand new planner to help you squeeze every drop of value from the coursework while also helping you map out how you will invest your time.

These changes are for you, if you sign up for 30x500. They’re great.

But the BIG changes we’ve made are more systemic to how we offer 30x500, and the foundation of our business helping creative folks like you start businesses of your own.

These systemic changes expand on two specific efforts we’ve been working on behind the scenes:

Designing the 30x500 business model to have an ongoing positive impact on people who are most impacted by systemic racism, inequity, and inequality.
Making 30x500 financially accessible to more aspiring entrepreneurs.

It’s worth noting that these changes do not take anything away from 30x500, especially for our existing students. The good stuff stays good.

Now lets talk about how what we’re doing better!

1 - Expanding our Commitment to Charity

Charitable giving has long been a part of our work, most often through DonorsChoose.org where we help teachers buy supplies and resources for their classrooms.

We LOVE finding and closing out projects so teachers wake up to their classroom needs being fully funded.

That won’t change.

What’s new to our charitable giving was first outlined in this post about our plans to use our platform to fight systemic racism, inequity, and inequalty and support those who are most harmed by it.

…we will re-design the financial side of our business around generous and ongoing donations to programs with a proven track record of empowering Black creatives and entrepreneurs.

Retroactivly to June of 2020 and for the forseeable future, we’ve decided to donate 5% of all 30x500 sales to this cause.

I did the math, and that means we have $3,974.67 already allocated to our donation pool.

This is an uncapped percentage based donation, which means that as our business grows and succeeds, we have more resources to contribute to these causes.

We don’t have to decide “how much do we want to donate?” at the end of the year. More people in 30x500 = more money to charity.

The current numbers puts us on track for to donate tens of thousands of dollars over the next 12 months. This is an ongoing effort that we will continue under this model until or unless we replace it with something even more impactful.

And all you need to do to make it happen is sign up for 30x500 and learn how to launch your own products that sell!

We are currently vetting a few choices for the best options for our charitable giving, but our priorities are charities with honest leadership, proven track records of empowering Black entreprenuers, and transparent reporting of their impact in the communities they serve.

As soon as we’ve made our first donation, we’ll report back to tell you more all about the organizations that YOU helped support!

2 - Improving Financial Access

We’re confident that, if anything, 30x500 is underpriced given how consistently people who follow the steps and apply the lessons are able to earn back multiples of the price of admission.

Remember, it only takes 127 sales of a $79 product to generate $10k (which is 5x ROI on 30x500). On the whole internet!

But that doesn’t change the fact that investing a couple thousand dollars is out of reach for many people, often the very people who are systematically excluded from business and entreprenuership.

We first introduced a payment plan option a few years back, which immediately made 30x500 more accessible to many more people.

Next week, we’re introducing two additional efforts to get more people enrolled in 30x500:

💰 BIPOC Financial Assistance and 💰 Parity Purchasing Power.

Over the last 3 months we’ve been experimenting with both of these “tools”, and the response has been extremely positive!

Here’s how each one works.

💰 BIPOC FINANCIAL ASSISTANCE

First, we’re committed to growing the percentage of our students who come from backgrounds facing structural disadvantages due to systemic discrimination.

Predominantly this means Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (PoC). These challenges are especially prevalent in America where we live, but they occur everywhere around the world.

There’s no sense sugar coating it: our population of student entrepreneurs is woefully white, historically speaking. Bias and white supremacy in the tech and business world are only amplified in entrepreneurship.

We have more we can do, but one of the most obvious opportunities is to lower financial barriers where they exist because of these very systems of inequality.

We’re still figuring out all of the details for how we provide this resource, but for now, we’re keeping it simple and offering BIPOC students a way to enroll in 30x500 at a significantly reduced out-of-pocket price.

When we offered this financial assistance in back in July, enrollment shifted dramatically. Previously a low single digit percentage, our latest cohort of 30x500 students included nearly 20% Black and brown creatives!

We still have a long way to go, but we’re chuffed by the response so far, hearing things like this:

“Thanks for setting this up, it’s a dream come true to finally be a part of the 30x500 course, I’ve been following it up for up to three years now.”

“I really appreciate the fact that you are so committed to making this work.”

“Thank you for helping to mold Black entrepreneurs who don’t need to be beholden to institutional capital.”

So during our next 30x500 enrollment, we are making 30 additional spots available at this reduced price for BIPOC students.

If you are BIPOC and interested in claiming one of these spots in our next enrollment, especially if the price was the #1 barrier for you joining 30x500, please email team@stackingthebricks.com and we will share enrollment details with you directly.

If this continues to go well, we will work to expand this program even for even further impact!

💰 PARITY PURCHASING POWER

Another challenge we’ve heard over the years is from students who live in parts of the world where – usually due to exchange rates and local economics – joining 30x500 would mean spending one or more months of their entire income.

Since the mission of our work is to help people create economic power for themselves, that ability should also be accessible anywhere you have an internet connection.

“Parity Purchasing Power” is an equation that helps us calculate an appropriate discount to offer people in countries where average income levels create systemic disadvantages in global commerce.

Effective immediately 30x500 enrollment, we are offering Parity Purchasing Power discounts to a long list of countries around the world!

For now, these discounts are by request (we don’t have a way to automate this with our current courseware just yet) but we’re happy to do the extra work if it means more people can learn how to build businesses in more parts of the world.

You can check this page to see if your country is included, and email team@stackingthebricks.com to learn how to apply the appropriate discount for your country if you need it.

This work will continue

These efforts are first, in part, because they are foundational.

We’re still learning. We’re still listening. And we’re still committed to the core goal of enabling more entrepreneurs to own their time, energy, resources, and successes around the world.

If you have ideas for ways we can help, we’re happy to hear them. Drop us an email.

And if you’re inspired by any of these efforts to make similar changes in your business – or have questions about how to pull it off – we’d love to hear about that too!

30x500 is currently closed.

Find out how to get started along with our next batch of students

Why we removed The Tiny MBA from Amazon's Kindle store.

Thu, 27 Aug 2020 16:22:48 -0000

A quick message for our customers

If you pre-ordered The Tiny MBA on Amazon's Kindle Store, and were unable to read it on your preferred Kindle device, we're very sorry about that experience!

Please forward your Amazon receipt to alex@tiny.mba.

We'll send you with DRM free files that you can own forever and instructions on how to load onto your own favorite Kindle.

30 days ago, I launched sales for my book, The Tiny MBA.

On launch day, people could choose between pre-ordering the book in paperback or ebook, or via the Kindle store for instant delivery to their favorite Amazon reader.

Today – exactly 30 days later – I’m removing The Tiny MBA from the Kindle Store and Amazon completely, and for the foreseeable future. This article explains why.

Why sell on Amazon to begin with?

Amazon has one advantage, and it’s a big one: reach.

Amy and I have launched around a dozen digital products, always independently produced and distributed. We almost exclusively sell those products through our own platform - a combination of modern ecommerce tools and our email list.

This has served us quite well. We know how to reach and serve our core audience. But with The Tiny MBA, I thought there might be an opportunity to reach further. Between rankings and recommendation algorithms, Amazon’s platform seems like the most obvious way to get a book that people already like, in the hands of more people who might like it.

But these benefits come with tradeoffs.

The Tradeoff of Selling on Amazon

Most people think about the tradeoffs in terms of the financial side of selling books - especially ebooks - on Amazon. You might make less per book, but the potential to reach LOTS of customers…more overall reach and revenue.

Amazon makes it clear that this is their priority, too. While it’s common for independently published ebooks to be $20-$50 depending on the audience and the material inside, the Amazon ebook ecosystem is all about volume volume volume.

The Kindle platform heavily incentives authors to sell their ebooks for under $10, offering a 70% royalty if your book is $9.99 or less.

Sell your book for $10 or more? Take home a much smaller 30% royalty instead of 70%.

That is a BIG penalty for charging what your book may actually be “worth.” But if you want to play the Amazon game and reach a wider audience, pricing your ebook as an impulse buy is clearly the better option.

But the real issue isn’t the % of revenue you’re going to take home. It’s that you’re being paid a royalty.

Royalties vs Sales

When you sell your books through Amazon’s “Kindle Direct Publishing” (KDP) Platform, you aren’t really selling your books. Amazon is selling your books, and you are earning a royalty.

The key difference between earning a royalty and selling a book? The people who buy your book on Amazon’s platform are Amazon’s customers, not your customers.

This might seem like a matter of semantics, but it matters a lot, and you’ll see why in a second.

Climbing the Amazon Charts with a pre-sale

In the case of The Tiny MBA, we launched with a pre-sale. Amazon pre-sales are great because it gives you the ability to get your book “live” in the store, register sales (and recommendation data) in the Amazon system early, even before anybody has bought the book.

And in terms of using launch momentum, this can show the real power of Amazon.

By sending a single email, some % of our customers would choose to buy The Tiny MBA on Kindle. The reasons? The convenience of Amazon’s click checkout, and knowing that the ebook would show up on their favorite Kindle device on launch day.

The first few days were especially exciting. Within the first 24 hours, our first ~100 sales placed The Tiny MBA at the top of the Amazon “bestseller” and “featured new” charts for multiple categories.

Turns out that you don’t need that many sales to be an Amazon bestseller 🤔.

We ended up climbing to the top 10 of several categories, and held the number one spoit in a few others, including Small Business and Startup, putting The Tiny MBA next to popular titles like “The Lean Startup” and “The EMyth Revisited.” I’d be lying if I said this didn’t feel awesome.

But the sales numbers were less exciting than the vanity metrics.

In our first 30 days, barely 24% of our pre-orders were bought through Amazon.

Not nothing (though an even smaller % of the spread revenue wise) but…from the feedback I was receiving from many of those pre-sales customers via email and on Twitter, I felt pretty comfortable that a large portion of that 24% came from our list and marketing efforts and not from Amazon’s rankings.

But either way, I was looking forward to seeing people able to enjoy the book on their favorite ebook readers on launch day.

Across all platforms, 1600 books sold before launch day. By almost every measure, a setup for a very successful independent book launch.

Then Launch Day Happened

I should start this section with the fact that this isn’t my first launch.

I expect things to go wrong on launch day, including things I can’t plan for. The best I can do is research and test to the best of my ability.

As such, leading up to launch day, I did about as much testing as I could figure out how to do. I’d generated test runs of our print books with our paperback fulfillment partner. I’d tested out our own digital fulfillment workflows with our customer portal.

Amazon’s KDP platform was the wildcard leading up to launch day, always leaving me feeling a little bit uncertain that I’d done things right. I did a lot of research, and as best as I could figure out from talking to multiple successful Kindle authors and publishers, everything seemed ready to go.

Everything looked good on the morning of August 26th. My birthday (yes, I launched my book on my birthday). People were posting images of The Tiny MBA on their iPhones and tablets, as well as their paperback copies.

But then the first message came in: “I tried to download The Tiny MBA to my Kindle Paperwhite, and it gave me an error. Do you know what’s up?”

Uh oh. After a bit of research, I found the problem.

You could’ve stopped this, Amazon

When I set up The Tiny MBA in Amazon, I used an official Amazon tool called “Kindle Create.” It’s promoted prominently right on the dashboard of the KDP portal.

Later, I would find out that using this official tool was a mistake.

Further, I noticed an option in KDP to convert my beautifully designed PDF book files into a KPF file, one of the options that prepped the book for sale on the Kindle store.

I was a little skeptical, but with a bit of research, found that I could email the PDF files directly to my kindle device to make sure the PDF would display as expected. And it looked perfect!

So I continued setting up my book for pre-sale in the KDP portal. I uploaded my KPF file, generated by Kindle Create. I wrote my title, description, and other metadata. I set categories and pricing. I clicked “preview” and everything looked great.

I pressed “submit” and waited for my book to be reviewed. A few hours later, my book was approved. Ready for sale on the Amazon Kindle Store.

People bought (pre-ordered) books.

Fast forward to launch day, on August 26th.

I found out that the KPF file that was created by Amazon’s own Kindle Create software will only be available on Kindle Fire devices and the Kindle App.

What?!

The biggest and best selling Kindle devices - their standalone e-ink readers by the same “Kindle” name, would NOT download and display the KPF file. Even though the PDF embedded in the KPF works perfectly when manually sent to the exact same devices.

WHAT!?

I’ve gone back to the Amazon Kindle Create app to see if this was avoidable.

See that green box? It probably should have been RED.

It also could have said “WARNING: This ebook will NOT be compatible with Kindle e-reader devices like the Kindle Paperwhite, etc.Choose this format wisely!” or something like that. Because when I read it, I see that it will work on Fire Tablets and Kindle Reading apps, maybe enabling certain special capabilities IF you are using a Fire tablet or the Kindle app.

I do NOT see that it will exclude a massive portion of the Kindle buyer market!

So yes, I made a mistake in this step. But Amazon could have easily helped prevent this mistake.

And worse, unlike most choices, it turns out this particular one was also permanent.

Quick, update the files!

My first thought is that this fancy KPF/PDF file is the problem. I called Amazon and confirmed, it is.

Thankfully, I had already invested in converting the book into a set of .mobi and .epub files. They don’t look nearly as nice as the carefully designed PDF, but part of the Kindle experience is being able to change your font and font size, so I’m okay with that.

But when I attempt to upload the .mobi files in the place of the KPF file, Amazon throws a new roadblock.

It turns out that when you upload the files to create a book for the first time, if you upload that KPF file, the book is stuck in what is known as a fixed layout or “print replica” format.

Basically, the thing that (apparently) their own e-readers can’t handle.

Stuck.

I called Amazon Kindle support again, who to their credit, were nice. At least the first few times I called. They explained that this is a known issue, and that once you create a book using a fixed layout file, you can’t just switch it to an epub to make it compatible with all of their devices.

Stuck.

Meanwhile, I get my first review, and it’s a 4 star review that’s just about their inability to read the book on their Kindle device!!

Now we have two problems

At the recommendation of Kindle support, I tried creating a brand new second book in the KDP dashboard. All of the same meta, descriptions, pricing, etc. The only difference is the first file I upload, which is the .mobi file.

After a short waiting period for approval. My book is approved. I buy a copy. I send it to my Kindle e-reader device. It works as expected, unlike the previous variation.

But now…I have two problems.

Yes, new Amazon customers can buy a version of the book that will work on all Kindle devices.

What about the 400 people who bought the previous version, and the unknown % of them who were struggling and confused to download the book they purchased to the e-reader they expected to read it on?

Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos is famous for saying that Amazon is successful, not because of its monopolistic power or anti-competitive behavior, but because of its relentless focus on the customer experience.

Meanwhile, at this moment, they have a bunch of customers in a completely avoidable situation, who are unable to access a book they paid for USING THE KINDLE STORE to read on their favorite KINDLE DEVICE.

This is uniquely anti-customer, and in my opinion, further cements the idea that Amazon only acts in its own self interest.

I try to explain this entire experience to KDP support.

But instead of trying to understand the problem, I am met with a broken record of policies repeated by rude support agents who insist on talking over my concerns about the customer experience.

One support agent suggests that once I’ve published the new, widely compatible ebook, to unpublish the old one. This takes it out of the store to avoid further confusion.

Selfishly, it also means losing my Kindle category rankings earned from the pre-sales. But I can live with that. The real problem is that there are 400 customers that I can’t reach to say “Hey, there’s a weird technical limitation on the Kindle store. If you’re getting an error downloading the book to your e-reader, your Kindle isn’t broken! Here’s what you can do to fix it.”

And even if I could message every one of those 400 customers (which I can’t because they aren’t my customers, they’re Amazon’s customers), many won’t have an option for resolution.

Because it turns out that people who bought early in the presale are ineligible to request a refund on their original purchase. LOL. Even though the book was only “available” today, on August 26th, their pre-sale started the refund clock, and prevented them from getting a refund on a book that they could not access as expected on launch day.

So even if I wanted to, and was able to, tell the 400 Kindle customers_ “buy the new book at this link and cancel the old one”_ many would not be allowed to because of this refund policy.

Let’s recap

400 people bought a book through the Kindle store, but some % of them are unable to read that book on their official Kindle device because of a file format issue created by official Amazon Kindle Create software
Amazon also does not allow for files to be updated from this incompatible format (KPF) to a format that will work on all devices, even if the file itself works perfectly.
And even if I create a new book and unpublish the original one it loses all metadata including rankings (and presumably reviews).
Amazon also does not provide a way to communicate with customers about this problem to let them know that it’s not their fault.
And Amazon also does not allow all pre-order customers to request a refund, even if they only “received” the on launch day to find out that it will not work on their expected device.

🤔🤔🤔🤔

This situation sucks.

So what are my options?

The most frustrating part of this process at this point is KDP support, who (often rudely, talking over me) tells me that the problem is with my manuscript, which was generated using their official software.

They also tell me, in no uncertain terms, that there is literally nothing I can do.

If a customer can’t access the book on their device, they have the option to contact Kindle support and request a refund (which I repeat is not actually possible for everybody, and KDP support says that refund policy isn’t within their jurisdiction cuz of course it’s not.)

They repeat that there is NO way to update a fixed layout/print replica book into a reflowable, widely compatible book. This is apparently a technical limitation, no senior supervisor can override.

They repeat that I can unpublish my old book and new customers can buy the reflowable one, but “if a customer bought the old version, there is absolutely nothing we can do.”

Their words. Not mine.

At this point, I’m trying to understand my finite options. Based on my conversations, I narrow them down to the following three:

Option 1: Keep both versions, rename product titles, hope for the best.

This is basically KDP’s first suggestion, and it’s pretty terrible. This is only going to create confusion, almost certainly undermining any upside gained by having either book on Amazon.

This option quickly ruled itself out.

Option 2: Unpublish KPF version, Leave .mobi version, hope for the best

This was KDP’s second suggestion, it’s also pretty terrible.

Unpublishing the version that doesn’t work on all Kindle devices won’t impact people who bought already, as they’ll be able to access the book indefinitely (in theory). New customers just won’t be able to buy it.

And besides giving up the Kindle store rankings, this option still doesn’t solve for the reality that 400 people bought the original book, can’t get a refund, and will need to buy it again to access it on their preferred device.

Option 3: Unpublish all versions of The Tiny MBA from the Kindle store, entirely

The nuclear option. I don’t like it, but at the end of the day, maybe the #1 reason to own your distribution platform is so you can tell marketplaces like Amazon “sorry bub, this just isn’t worth it.”

According to Amazon, if we choose to unpublish, existing customers will be able to access the files (insomuch as they already can/cannot), we just won’t get any new customers through the Amazon Kindle Store.

Which, at this point of the story, I think I’m okay with.

After careful consideration, we’re going with option 3

As of today, The Tiny MBA will no longer be available in the Amazon Kindle store.

We’re not willing to trade the potential of Amazon’s distribution, and having my book show up alongside books by other incredible authors, for an overall better customer experience where we have the power to help our customers when something goes wrong.

It’s not about the money or the royalty structure, it’s about the value of the customer relationship, which Amazon clearly does not value the same way we do.

If you pre-ordered The Tiny MBA and were unable to read it on your preferred device, please forward your Amazon receipt to alex@tiny.mba.

Instead of wasting time fighting with Amazon for a refund, we’ll simply and quickly provide you with DRM free files that you can own forever and instructions on how to load onto your own favorite reading device.

Going forward, The Tiny MBA will continue to be available in file formats that work on all devices, including Kindle e-ink devices. We’ll include step-by-step instructions to make it as easy as possible to load the files onto your favorite device.

Maybe someday in the future The Tiny MBA will be available on an improved version of the Amazon Kindle store. I don’t know if I’d go back even if they changed. We’ll see.

In the meantime, I’m deeply sorry to the people who enthusiastically pre-ordered The Tiny MBA on Amazon and had a disappointing experience on launch day. I promise that we’re working to make this experience better for this and all future products, even though Amazon has made it clear that they won’t help resolve this totally avoidable issue.

The moral(s) of the story?

In spite of this particular mess, self publishing is an amazing experience in 2020. We’re sending thousands of books around the world within 30 days of opening sales. I highly recommend it.
Amazon claims to care about “relentless customer satisfaction” but the KDP store experience says otherwise. This should not surprise anybody, myself included.
If you’re considering publishing on KDP, consider the alternatives. Ebook distribution through the Kindle store is…a game. Bestseller rankings are much easier to score than you probably think. Either way, if you’re playing, know the rules, and understand that the house almost always wins. Consider an email list tool like ConvertKit plus a digital commerce tool like Podia.
Our paperback publishing of The Tiny MBA is being done on-demand by Lulu Express, directly integrated with Shopify. The experience has been wonderful, the book quality is exceptional, and Lulu’s customer support has been top notch. With Lulu, there are no big upfront book orders or shipping from your basement/garage, but also no reliance on Amazon’s KDP print-on-demand option (which is technically susceptible to the core issues I’ve encountered on the digital side, since on-demand fulfillment is also a royalty model not a sales model).
Something will always go wrong on launch day, but if you don’t have control over the part that goes wrong, your options for resolution are severely limited.
Always. Own. Your. Platform. If you don’t have a platform of your own yet (e.g. an email list where you can reach people who know your work and are interested in more), today is a great day to get started.

New Book Pre-order Sale: The Tiny MBA

Mon, 03 Aug 2020 16:22:48 -0000

The “Stacking-the-Bricks-a-verse” just got a tiny bit bigger!

Our newest product, a pocket sized book called The Tiny MBA, is on sale for pre-orders RIGHT NOW through August 26th. 🎉

This is our smallest product, ever!

Once in your hands, you can read it in about 30 minutes. That is not a typo! Which means unlike many other books and courses, you can buy this one and actually read it. Hopefully more than once. That is by design!

“I’ve read a bunch of business books. And by ‘read,' I mean I usually get about half way through – get distracted – and never go back. I’m really not the best at finishing books.”

Dave Ceddia
Author, Pure React

This is our most affordable product, ever!

You can pre-order the pocket-sized paperback book and have it shipped just about anywhere in the world for under $20, all in! Or you can pre-order the digital Ebook for less than the price of a burrito.

But don’t let the tiny size (and price tag) fool you

Here are some more choice quotes from early reviewers:

“Wherever you are in the process of starting a business—regardless of size or industry—stop. Read this book.”

Katel LeDû
CEO, A Book Apart

“This is the best modern business book I’ve read this year.”

Andrew Kamphey
Founder, Influence Weekly

“This is one of those books that give you the perspective you need to grow, no matter where you are on your journey.”

Nick DeJesus
Software Engineer + Tech Educator

And game designer Nadya Primak said in her full review: “The Tiny MBA gave me a different perspective on what it means to start a business.”

What I really want to drive home about this book is something that most experienced business people don’t say:

There is no single right way to do things in business.

Instead, I’m offering 100 tiny pieces of guidance on how to think like someone who has run a business for 15 years, and intends to keep running it for a long time.

Each page offers prompts and clues and suggestions and reflections about navigating business that most people only learn the hard way. Some pages include additional articles and books that I recommend reading, too!

My promise is this: if you dip into this book once every few months (easy since it’s just 30 minutes to read), or even once a year, you’ll find something new to chew on every single time.

Pre-order your own copy now and get it a week before everybody else

Since opening pre-sales a few days ago, more than 500 people have already ordered, and The Tiny MBA even ranked as #1 as a New Release and a Bestseller on Amazon!

The Tiny MBA officially ships in paperback and ebook editions on August 26th, but if you pre-order, you will get the book a full week early!

Here’s the important details about pricing, shipping, and digital bonuses included that are included.

Available Formats:

This is our first physical book! If you love a physical book, this pocket-size paperback that feels absolutely great to hold.

Paperback is $9.99 + shipping during presale.

If you live a minimalist lifestyle (or try to avoid shipping costs), you can choose high resolution and DRM free PDF Ebook that loads beautifully on tablets and Kindles.

Both ebook options are $7.99 during presale. Or buy direct on the Kindle store!

Shipping:

Paperback books are shipping anywhere in the US for just $4.99, or worldwide for just $7.99. Expedited shipping options are available in the United States, too!

Digital Extras:

The paperback version of The Tiny MBA automatically comes with a digital copy in high resolution PDF Ebook, so you can read and reference it anywhere at anytime.

As an extra thanks for being an early supporter of the book, all pre-orders ALSO will get access to a collection of digital desktop and lockscreen backgrounds based on quotes from the book that you can use to keep some of the most valuable lessons right in front of you at all times.

👉 Pre-order The Tiny MBA now

Can you help spread the word?

We are really hoping this book can impact people far and wide, so after you get your copy, we would very much appreciate your help spreading the word about the book being available!

You can forward this email or share https://tiny.mba on social media. Of course, there’s absolutely no pressure.

If you’ve already bought your copy, THANK YOU and we hope you love the book when it’s in your hands!

How to overcome the fear of putting yourself out there

Wed, 22 Jul 2020 16:22:48 -0000

It’s a cruel, cruel joke of the universe that among the most common fears that so many creators share, is the act of sharing itself.

“I hate putting myself out in public.”

“The idea of building an audience gives me the willies.”

“What could I have to offer that hasn’t already been said?”

“I don’t want to do or say something wrong!”

This mental chaos monkey of fear shows up in lots of ways:

For some, it’s a feeling of subtle discomfort when talking about their work in social settings.
For others, it’s a feeling of deep anxiety that they’ll be scolded for doing or saying something unoriginal.
For others still, it’s a feeling of panic associated of pressing “publish” to put their creative work or opinions on a digital stage.

Yours might feel different from these, but if it’s ever stood in your way, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

Where does this fear come from?

Nearly 100% of the time any of our students or readers is hesitating to take action, a very specific pair of words inevitably show up:

“I feel…”

Now, I’m not here to tell you that your feelings aren’t real - you are 100% in the clear to feel however you feel.

But your feelings are just that. Feelings.

When there’s actual danger present, your feelings are typically there to keep you safe and protected. And thank goodness for ‘em.

But what about when you’re not in danger, yet you feel feelings of fear? What in the chaos monkey is up with your feelings, then?

Your exact same feelings of fear, panic, and anxiety can show up without any actual danger. Sometimes even with the same intensity!

All it takes is an unfamiliar experience.

That unfamiliar experience makes your pattern-matching brain basically zero out, shout “I don’t know!” and dump a bunch of chemicals that make your heart race and your armpits sweat.

But it doesn’t stop there. It gets even worse when our imagination kicks in and starts inventing reasons for our body to be reacting negatively.

Your imagination perks up and says: “Wow, we typically don’t feel this terrible unless something is really bad. I wonder what could be bad? Let me count the ways…“

…and now you’re in a spiral where sometimes, the intense negative feelings end up lasting MUCH longer than the initial moment of uncertainty.

Brains, I tell ya. Jerks.

Naturally, all of this is happening within split seconds. And for most of us, it happens out of our conscious band of understanding. Fast, and invisible.

It takes real practice to start noticing the difference between when something presents an actual danger or risk, and when it’s just your feelings doing their swirly anxiety dance.

Quick note: If you have access to it, therapy can be a very big help with this kind of work. But even without a professional, you can learn to notice this pattern in your behavior and replace it with something more productive.

How to hijack your brain and get your feelings under control

When you start putting yourself out there, one of the most common sources of anxiety stems from a feeling of “all eyes are on me, I better not fuck this up!”

That’s how it feels, anyway.

In reality, odds are more likely that nobody is watching or noticing. Or, if somebody is watching or noticing, they likely have their own shit going on and will probably forget quicker than you can finish reading this article.

The thing to remember about putting yourself out there is that the MOST LIKELY outcome is…nothing.

That might not sound like it’s a good thing, but let’s put it in perspective.

The first 15-20 times you put yourself “out there” your brain is imagining all kinds of good things that might happen. Maybe, your brain is imagining all kinds of bad things that might happen.

But the most likely thing is that NOTHING happens.

And therein lies the opportunity.

If you calibrate yourself to expect nothing (instead of the worst), you can then allow yourself to be pleasantly surprised when a stranger on the internet thanks you for your comment, or shares your link, or recommends your work.

If you calibrate yourself to appreciate feedback but do the work even if you don’t get any, you can show up to do the work now matter how it “feels.”

And doing the work more than 15-20 times is when the good feelings start to show up, because that’s when you start to build a bit of confidence. You learn what works and what doesn’t, and each time you show up, you improve a bit.

It gets better…kind of?

You might be surprised that even after hundreds of launches, I still feel pangs of anxiousness right before it’s go time.

I know - from the evidence of my own lived experience - that there are lots of people who can benefit from my work and plenty of people who will appreciate it. I know that no past launch has ever created actual harm to me or to others. I know that I can handle a random jerk sending a snarky or rude message, and move on with my day.

But I also know that that the feelings are just feelings, a chemical reaction in my body, and that uncertainty is perfectly normal and safe.

Confidence isn't something you start with when you sit down to do something new.

Confidence is the result of doing something enough times to shift from feeling uncertain, to feeling like you know at least kinda what to expect (even without certainty).

So what actually happens?

Everything we teach in 30x500 challenges you to examine the evidence that’s present, and sometimes, right in front of you.

The hard facts. What’s actually happening right on the page or in the room. What people are saying and doing, not what you think they would say or do.

So lets examine the evidence around putting yourself out there:

What actually happens when you allow yourself to feel fear…but you do it anyway?
What actually happens when you put publish a comment or an article, even though you feel like everything has already been said?

Yes, you might lose time writing that article or tweet, or creating that video. And losing time doesn’t feel good, but how many hours have you “lost” (or wasted) refreshing Hacker News, watching your favorite TV series for the 11th time, or doomscrolling on Twitter?

Yes, someone might saying something mean on the Internet, but why does their opinion matter? If their criticism is valid (though you don’t have to assume that it is), you can use their critique to make your work better.

But as the great prophet Taylor Swift has said, Haters gonna hate hate hate hate hate. Haters use a predictable playbook, and so can you.

And once again, the actual worst case scenario is that you put yourself out there and nobody says anything at all. That’s a pretty okay scenario in the grand scheme of worst case scenarios!

Try to “Self Safari”

So when you notice yourself starting to feel a certain way (fear, anxious, worry), try doing a little bit of “situational” Self-Safari.

What’s the actual cause of the pain you’re feeling? Is it worry about something that might happen, or has happened in the past, or is something truly happening right now?

If the answer is “oh, it’s just my feelings” then ask yourself what you stand to lose for NOT taking action in spite of your feelings?

If you start using this line of self-inquiry, you’ll likely start to notice that the answer is almost never going to be “oh shit something bad is actually happening here” unless you’re fundamentally a TERRIBLE person doing terrible things.

And even then, consider the world has its fair share of actually terrible people doing actually terrible things that nobody notices. 😂

Four more inoculations for putting ourselves out there

We want to look and sound good, which too often means that we overvalue new and novel ideas compared to tried and true. It also means we assume that if it’s been done before, and we’re going to be laughed out of the room for being unoriginal.

When YOU know something, when it’s OBVIOUS to you, and when you’ve seen it talked about over and over and over, everyone who isn’t a total idiot must already know it too, right?

Except there is no evidence for this, and TONS of evidence to the contrary!

New newbies are minted every day

New people enter the field every day. Many of those people are likely hearing things for the first time, and their first time could be from you!

Lots of resources may exist, but don’t assume they are effective

Lots of people are pretty ineffective at communicating what they know. Even if they technically know more, or are more experienced, the way they communicate can turn readers off (or makes them feel dumb for not knowing) which makes room for you to do a better, more compassionate job at making the reader feel understood.

Your POV is unique enough

You will always have YOUR point of view and lived experience! Is it 100% perfectly unique in the whole world? Maybe, maybe not. But the odds of that point of view being identical to someone else with the same knowledge in the same moment and being in front of the same person are vanishingly low.

Originality is overrated

Also…why do we overvalue being “unique” and original anyway? If the recipient needs it, and you provide it, do they care that someone else out there has done or said the same thing?

Now ask yourself this: how many people do you think are living with problems of all kinds, big and small, that feel like nobody out there understands them or is even trying to help them?

Imagine if you found those people, and just…helped them. Or flip it around. What if you found them…and then didn’t help them. You left them to suffer, even though you could help them.

Through this lens, it starts to become clear that NOT putting yourself out there is actually the worst choice of all.

Not just for you, but for anyone who you might be able to help.

Still stuck in your head?

When all else fails - when you catch yourself spending too much time in your own head - I do have one final “trick” for you.

Spend some time trying to understand how someone else is feeling.

Sales Safari is great for this, especially if you’re more introverted. Good old fashioned conversations work, too.

So for now, forget “building an audience” for the moment. Just listen to someone who wants help, and see if you can help them.

Audience building sounds so heavy. Try thinking of it as ‘earning trust at scale’ instead.

Whenever I’m stuck in my head, I try to get inside someone else’s head for a while. I put my effort into understanding their situation, really listening and empathizing.

It’s almost meditatively calming, and comes with lots of added side-benefits of earning trust.

If you can do it in public, that’s ideal. If you can’t work in public, treat it as practice for when you can or at the end, ask them for permission to share excerpts and scale your advice by turning it into an ebomb).

Then do it again. And again. And again.

Because remember that confidence isn’t binary. It’s not something you have or you don’t, it’s a spectrum or a range that you move along with more of this practice.

And you certainly won’t build confidence by continuing to avoid it.

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Realtalk: list size, conversion rates, and ACTUAL subscribers

Sun, 19 Jul 2020 16:22:48 -0000

Given our number of students (1200 in 30x500 alone), their number and range of product successes, and our overall business size, people often think @amyhoy and I must have a HUGE email list for Stacking the Bricks.

You need to have a huge list to generate this much success, right!?

Nope. I wanted to share a peek behind the curtain and help people better understand email lists, and more importantly list size.

While migrating to ConvertKit last spring, we decided to do some list hygiene.

The good news is that since leaving Drip, our open rates ARE back up. But the CK team recommended we consider cleaning out some of our cold subscribers to improve overall deliverability (not just raw % numbers).

So, how big is our list?

As of Spring 2019, our list was just shy of 14,000 subscribers. Respectable for sure (and maybe eye-popping for someone just getting started) but remember that everybody starts somewhere, and we definitely started wayyyyy below 1000 subscribers.

What’s interesting (at least to me) is that many people – including our peers! – assume we have at least double this size. Also notable, we have several 30x500 alums with lists MUCH bigger than ours. They also make more $$.

Not all subscribers are still tuned in.

Here’s where things get interesting, though.

According to ConvertKit data, several months after switching to ConvertKit, over 6000 of our subscribers still haven’t opened or clicked an email in the last 2 months. Given that we send email every week, that’s…a lot of people tuned out.

42.8% cold.

The thing to remember here is that this is not necessarily a BAD thing. It was surprising to me, and not a great thing for sure, but it’s not exactly alarming.

Subs go cold for lots of reasons.

Could be us (email subjects aren’t good, for instance).

Could be them (busy, no longer interested).

So what do you do with cold subscribers?

For the first time in a decade, we ran a “re-engagement sequence.”

Essentially, those 6000 cold subscribers received up to 4 emails over the course of a week.

Each of these emails offers value, a way to reconnect, and a way to indicate “I’m still interested!”

Now, this concept isn’t novel or anything, but a lot of the examples out there are pushy or needy or passive aggressive.

“We miss you!”

“Hey did you die?”

“Did I do something wrong?”

“Don’t you want VALUE?”

“Don’t you want to SUCCEED!?!”

No no no. None of that.

Everything in our sequence is friendly and direct.

You can read the exact emails below, but I’ve also created a shared visual automation for ConvertKit! Go here to see it and add it to your account, and then modify it for your own purposes.

1 Email #1 - Direct Ask

This first email asks the direct question and gives a good reason for sticking around.

Clicking any of the links explicitly adds the same tag that we’ll use to indicate someone wants to remain on the list.

2 Email #2 - Update Email

People have all kinds of weird email habits so the second email comes 2 days later and offers an easy way for them to update their email address.

While this one doesn’t register the specific tag (this is a ConvertKit limitation) they’ll be automatically removed from the “cold subscriber” segment by clicking that link and taking action.

3 Email #3 - Q&A

In email #3 I wanted to do something bold: give people permission to ask us for direct advice.

Now we’re not offering 1-1 video calls or anything….but we are inviting people to ask a specific question.

Some might be anxious about opening the floodgates to questions, but here’s why I’m not worried:

First, this is the 3rd email, which people will only get if they didn’t act on either of the first two.
Second, this is a list of COLD subscribers. I’m not expecting most of them to open this email at all.

But for the ones who get the email, and open it, we can offer a VERY valuable opportunity to ask us a question directly.

(You’ll see why this is magical later.)

4 Email #4 - Last Call

The last one cuts right to the chase. Click the link.

I heard from a few people that they’d be worried about a sequence like that due to people who might miss the sequence entirely due to one of their weird email habits/coping mechanisms, or simply being on vacation.

That’s why I added this line to the very last email we send:

Change your mind (or miss the deadline)? You can always re-subscribe from our homepage: https://stackingthebricks.com

If they realize we stopped sending to them, they’re likely to search their inbox for us, or look in the folder where they hide our goodies. When they do, the last email will make it pretty clear what happened and how to get back on the list.

So that’s the sequence. Nothing too fancy, nothing whiny, nothing passive aggressive.

And by George, it worked! Here are the stats from the first email after the first ~48 hours:

The final stage: preparing mentally to DELETE YOUR SUBSCRIBERS.

At the end of this sequence, if a subscriber has not clicked or opened, we delete them from ConvertKit.

Seems scary, right? All of those hard-earned email addresses….

Amy and I have talked about how this feels so weird for us, too. It almost feels wrong. But we’ve also talked about how that’s not rational at all.

These subscribers aren’t reading anyway. Why would we keep sending?

Wanna talk ACTUAL numbers? I thought you might.

So. Back to list size, cuz that’s why I started this article.

I expected a fairly small % of our cold list to re-engage, but after just a few days, we were already at 6.6%. That’s close to 500 people!

At the end of the series (ignoring new subscribers and normal churn) we had around 8500 actual subscribers.

Actual Subscribers is a much better statistic to keep track of, since these are the people who actually reads what we send.

Now, let’s put that number into some perspective:

- As time of writing this article, JFS has sold around 4500 copies. That’s over half the list.

- Our holiday bundle sells 400-500 units every year. That’s 5% list to sale conversion.

- Also at the time of writing, 30x500 has had over 1200 students enrolled between our bootcamp and our self guided academy.

That means 30x500 currently has a 14.1% list to sale conversion rate on a VERY premium product. 14.1% of our list has already bought our most valuable (and most expensive) product.

WHAT SORCERY IS THIS!?

You’re probably used to seeing low single digit percent conversion rates, or even partial %. These are considered “normal” in most online marketing circles.

But “normal” is relative.

Our subscriber count is low-ish, but our subscriber quality is VERY high.

The source?

We grow our list the with ebombs - aka fix-delivering educational content (and not just blog posts!).

We focus relentlessly on understanding our audience and their problems. We offer fixes. We communicate in their language.

BTW: those questions we’re letting people ask us in email #3? Those are all ebomb fodder. Anything that can be answered over email (or with a video, or with a re-usable template/kit/checklist/etc) can be an ebomb.

Helping one person turns into helping many. Sneaky? Nah. Scalable? Absolutely.

So do you need a big list to be a success? Hell no.

What you DO need are people who trust you.

People who you have actually helped, and believe you can help them again and again.

You need to understand them, deeply and clearly. Maybe better than they understand themselves.

Let’s run some more numbers. Cuz you like numbers.

Maybe you don’t have a list at all, or just your first few dozen subscribers. And you’re sitting there thinking “whatever Alex this doesn’t apply to me, my list is NOWHERE near the size of yours and Amy’s.”

And I’ll tell you “yes, you’re right, but it doesn’t have to be.”

With similar list-to-sale conversion rates (which our students routinely achieve), a 500 subscriber list built this way can easily generate 50-70 sales.

This means a mid-tier product ($140-$200) could break the $10k revenue mark with just 500 subs.

Grow your list a little bigger, around 1000 subscribers? A tiny product ($50-$70) can make $10k with the same math.

Small lists can make real sales.

And that’s just from one product!

Customers who love one product are likely to buy the next thing (if you understand their pains and that next thing is based on them).

Once you start to factor in list growth and multiple products and you can start to see with simple math how tiny empires can be built from even tinier lists.

And this is without recurring revenue.

Big lists are nice, but most of them are bullshit.

So next time you see someone touting a giant email list, or you think you need a huge list to start selling products, STOP.

With the former, big lists are top line numbers that don’t really mean much if you don’t know their conversion rates.

With the latter, start selling now.

When you can make $1000 in sales this way, you can make $10k.

When you can make $10k this way, you can make $100k.

1.5x-2x-5x or more year over year growth ACTUALLY can happen when you are consistent and use an effective process.

The key isn’t precisely what you sell, or even the exact model you sell with.

The key is who you sell to, and how well you understand them.

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Why an Unknowable Future is So Hard

Sat, 11 Jul 2020 16:22:48 -0000

Over the last few months I’ve been thinking a lot about uncertainty, and related, the illusion of certainty.

A lot of things are hard right now, and much harder for some than others, but many people I’ve talked to in the last few weeks agrees on one thing:

If you’re healthy and alive, one of the hardest parts about “these times” is having no knowable concept of the future.

I’m not talking about predicting the future. Nobody can really do that.

I’m talking about having a sense of what comes next, and how long it’s gonna take to get there.

We’re stuck not knowing how long we’ll be in this awkward and uncomfortable state of transition. If it’ll get worse before it gets better.

Where we are on the ride, so to speak.

It’s about expectations. It’s nearly impossible to hold expectations right now, and worse, when we cling to expectations we set ourselves up for a lot of pain.

And we are really, really bad at living without expectations

I just watched this very short video by Hank Green that explains why we’re so bad at living without expectations.

Hank compares parts of our current experience with the experience of breaking a broken bone or receiving a medical diagnosis.

In this 11 minute clip, Hank explains that in situations like the broken bone, there’s two kinds of pain:

there’s the physical pain
and then there’s a mental pain of knowing “life is not gonna be the same for a while.”

In those experiences, and now, part of how we cope with painful experiences (small and large) is by seeking the comfort of knowable expectations.

The doctor tells us how long we’re going to be in a cast, or what symptoms we’ll need to learn how to manage going forward.

But in 2020, a lot of those “answers” we’re seeking are either very vague or moving targets. We want to know how things are going to turn out and how long it’ll take to be over, but we literally can’t know until we get there.

And that’s hard.

The Problem with Making Choices in an Unknowable Future

You can also look at this through the lens of running a business.

Amy has this quote that’s repeated across our material:

“Starting a business is basically picking a fight with entropy”

I love this quote for so many reasons, but the biggest one is that it frames choice as a companion, even an ally, of chaos.

Part of the reason we’ve gotten good at business is because (thanks to a lot of practice) we’ve gotten good at making educated decisions in otherwise unknowable environments.

In fact, the core of what we teach in 30x500 is how to evaluate the facts you DO have and trusting yourself to make an educated guess that fills in the facts you can’t have because they haven’t happened yet.

It’s how you can launch products that people predictably want and buy. You can’t actually make them buy. But you can stack the deck in your favor.

Trouble is, during the chaos of 2020, those skills are being tested in new ways.

Time and certainty are intertwined in new ways. Specifically, the amount of time I can be certain of anything is small.

I used to think long term (6-12+ months), plan medium term (4-8 weeks), and work on that plan daily.

Now the furthest ahead I can reasonably think is 30 days, and I’m lucky if I can plan for next Tuesday.

And that is…scary.

It’s not all bad of course.

Money is still being spent in lots of industries. People and businesses still have problems and spend money to solve those problems.

Commerce, uh, finds a way.

But if you’re used to making plans by reacting to outside influences like OPPORTUNITY and COMPETITION, you’re gonna get super fucked up in these times.

If you define yourself and your choices by the outside world, and the outside world is deeply unstable, you inherently become unstable.

So how do we keep going?

For a lot of people - myself included - the last few months have been like a rollercoaster ride designed to disorient and confuse and flip you upside down.

Except we don’t know how long the ride is. We don’t even really know when we got on, or what the exit looks like.

My theory right now is that focusing on an unseeable exit is a very painful distraction from seeing what is right in front of us.

So no, I don’t have a magic fix. That’s not the point of this post.

My point is this:

If you spend your time staring at the exit (eg “when will this all be over/go back to normal”) you will undoubtedly miss many of your best opportunities to soothe and find calm now, and to begin building the things we need to live a better future.

There might not be an exit, unless you play an active role in creating it.

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What we believe, and what we’re doing about it

Thu, 11 Jun 2020 16:22:48 -0000

Hi, all.

Forgive me the delay, Alex and I wanted to make this clear and unequivocal. It still isn’t perfect, but it’s honest.

If you follow us on Twitter you’ve seen firsthand how we’ve been involved over the past few weeks, but of course, not everyone uses Twitter or follows us (especially me!) but we wanted to say something more specific and concrete here, and directly to you.

Here’s what we believe:

Black Lives Matter.
Our country is founded on systems of structural inequality, and structural racism.
Police violence is state-sponsored violence.
Mass incarceration and the prison-industrial system — aka Jim Crow laws under another name — have wrought incredible harm to Black Americans.
Systematic under- and de-funding of local schools, social services, health systems, etc., is intentional.
Voter suppression is intentional.
People matter more than property.

But we didn’t want to insert ourselves into your inboxes - especially when the focus should be on the protesters and Black voices - without also being about actions and accountability.

So today I want to talk with you about

how we’ve been trying to fight these systems, and support those harmed by them, and
what we can and will do going forward

First: putting our money where our mouth is.

Before the protests began, our belief in structural racism is the reason we raised and donated $2,000 to the Navajo Nation Covid-19 Relief Fund.

During the past two weeks, Alex and I have both donated to bail funds, Black mental health charities, and I donated to a program to support Black trans women. Alex ran a matching campaign to Philly’s bail fund.

Historically, we’ve donated heavily to Donors Choose in Philadelphia, to support local (predominantly Black and brown) kids who deserve the same furnishings, paper, pencils and supplies, books, and technology access as white kids in wealthier districts. I’ve personally donated to the fight for felon re-enfranchisement in Florida and similar programs. (The over-policing of Black people, especially Black men, is a post-Jim-Crow system for denying them the vote.)

Giving money is easy, relatively, which is that’s been my main course of action. My health sucks and I’m not an expert, so I try to fund experts.

Another thing we’ve been doing quietly for the past few years is widening our network.

Racism isn’t just blatant mistreatment, it’s also quiet exclusion. Highly skilled, experienced, insightful people who are simply… missing from the conversation, because somewhere along the line, they’ve been shut out, overlooked, ignored, or erased. This is especially true for Black men and women.

I’d like to be clear, here: I reject the idea of “token representation.” The idea communicates that the non-white people in a lineup aren’t there because they’re excellent, but just to fill a spot. The real fact is that there are Black people kicking ass in all areas but, due to structural racism, they aren’t “top of mind” to white people who have predominantly white networks.

Case in point: My covid-19 interview series was 13 entrepreneurs (not counting me). Five of my interviewees are people of color, two are Black. I’m not telling you this to pat myself on the back. I didn’t do my interviewees a favor. I’m lucky to know these creative and hard-working folks, and extremely glad they agreed to be interviewed, which is kind of a pain for them, and a real favor to me and to you. I didn’t pick these entrepreneurs because they were “diverse,” I picked them because they had valuable insights to share.

Coincidentally, all their businesses are currently going much better than my own SaaS right now, ha. And I knew that because I’d had the pleasure of connecting with them, getting to know them, and learn from them over time.

The other fact is that just five or six years ago, my network was extremely white. It wasn’t on purpose — and that’s why it is insidious.

Still, though, the things I’ve talked about above aren’t enough compared to the scale of the problem.

Alex and I know we need to and can do more.

So, in terms of our business going forward…

Alex and I want to use what we’ve already got (our skills, connections, and audience) to its best purpose.

First off, we are going to use our platform to promote more Black entrepreneurs — as the experts they are.

Second, we will re-design the financial side of our business around generous and ongoing donations to programs with a proven track record of empowering Black creatives and entrepreneurs.

Third, we want to help more Black entrepreneurs build businesses that match their goals, and without the gatekeepers or broken incentives of venture capital.

We’re still talking about what form that takes, and we are going to engage a consultant for advice. We are wary of what is apparently a common trap of incorrectly treating Black people as “in need of extra help” or as “mentees” even when they’re already established and experienced; on the other hand, mentoring and training is our business, and we want to ensure that those who want it can get it, and — more importantly — achieve their goals with it.

You see, the whole reason we set out to teach business, and bootstrapping products specifically, is because it’s the path to economic freedom and personal sovereignty. There are no gatekeepers. Or at least, far fewer once you are self sufficient.

Nobody checks your credentials at the door before they buy your product. Nobody can tell you “next year, maybe, if you play your cards right.” Nobody can fire you but you. Customers pay you if you solve their problems.

And when this customer or that customer is a terrible person, well, you’re not relying on any individual asshole to survive — you’ve got the whole internet to find more.

After all, our founding idea is that you need only to find 500 people, across the entire internet, to pay you just $30 a month to gross $180,000 a year. It’s right there in the name: 30x500.

This freedom is also why Alex and I are free to write you an email like this. Will some people hate it? I’m sure. Are we bothered? Only by the fact that those people felt comfortable here to begin with.

Fourth, we will use our position to push back against structural racism — in entrepreneur and tech circles, wherever we see it, explicitly and in public.

Fifth, we will continue to expand our networks. And that includes for hiring, if/when we do any.

Finally, we will listen. Comments, criticism, or general internalized screaming… we are here for you.

That’s our business.

On a personal level, I will increase my donations to, and promotion of, activists and organizations that fight for structural justice in our country in housing, voting, economic access, health and mental health… and legal justice, too. That includes organizations that fight against the carceral state and for police abolition.

Alex doing much of the same, while also working intently with the Indy Hall community and adjacent allies to invest time and resources into anti-racism efforts internally and in their wider community of freelancers and remote workers.

That’s us. What about you?

Wherever you are in your journey towards economic freedom, you can choose to play an active role too.

If you have built a business that gives you the freedom to speak out or speak up, but haven’t chosen to do so yet, take this moment to personally investigate that choice (yep, inaction is a choice too). If you want to to do something, but haven’t yet, hit reply and tell us what’s stopping you.
If you haven’t built a business yet, consider using your drive to make things better to stoke a fire. Remember that your business doesn’t need to directly serve a cause you care about if it gives you the freedom to invest your time and resources into the cause.
You can also educate yourself on anti-racism, anti-Blackness, and white supremecy. This guide is one of Alex’s favorites.

In closing…

When I was much younger, I used to view structural racism as an issue of fairness. “It’s unfair — it shouldn’t exist.” And that’s certainly true, it is deeply un-fucking-fair, and we should smash it until it’s gone.

What I’ve come to learn is that anti-Black racism also robs the entire world of the genius, creativity, and experience of the people it tramples, ignores, and discards.

Have you heard of Garrett Morgan? He invented the gas mask. When his customers learned that he was Black, many canceled their orders. How did they find out? He used his own invention to rescue people, to great fanfare. And then they canceled.

For too long, our world has chosen to choke on toxic fumes out of spite.

It’s long past time to put the fire out.

Garrett Morgan invented the gas mask. Due to racism, he pretended to be a Native American to get fire departments to buy, but his identity was revealed when he personally rescued people using his invention from a smoke-filled tunnel causing Southerners to cancel their orders. 2/2 pic.twitter.com/1vH9CsXG5c
— Ethan Mollick (@emollick) June 3, 2020

14 bootstrappers talk COVID-19: Loss? Growth? Change?

Mon, 18 May 2020 16:22:48 -0000

Welcome back to our recession series. If you’re new here, check out the previous articles and recordings including:

For everyone else - welcome back. Hope you’re hanging in there.

Today’s topic? It’s a spicy one: how to make more sales. Yes, more. Of course, you know me, I’ll never bullshit you — this comes with qualifiers:

Can you make more than you’re making now?
Can you make more than… before waves hand all this?
If you’ve already been hit hard with a revenue drop, can you make that back up?

Yes… it’s all possible. I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m not saying you’ll be able to do without making a lot of changes. And I’m definitely not claiming it won’t be more work than the beforetimes.

But I’ve talked to bunch (>14) of entrepreneurs across a variety of business types: training, subscription content, service/platform, consulting, marketplace, technical product (framework/downloadable), personal/consumer product,and SaaS. I even talked to an expert in direct-to-consumer ecommerce.

Some of them have seen little or no change. (I’m jealous.)

Some — including me! — have seen a big initial drop, although they (and I) are now beginning to see improvements again.

Others have seen growth. (I’m even more jealous.)

I’m going to share the complete interviews with you down below… and I’m going to give you some questions to ask yourself to figure out things you can try in your business.

But first, I want to give you the broadest of broad brushstrokes on what I’ve learned:

audience — who you sell to — matters most; if your audience is totally screwed, well, so are your chances of making more sales without dramatic repurposing, probably; but if your audience continues to do well or even fairly well, you stand a good chance of staying the same, recovering, or even doing better;
pain — why they buy — matters second most; an audience that continues to do very well will continue to spend on things that are nice-to-have; an audience that does fairly well or ok will continue to spend on things that are urgent and money-producing; an audience that is doing badly will either spend on money-producing products and services, or nothing
creative repurposing is the name of the game: whether that’s switching up your sales pitch, getting your product closer to the money, increasing your product’s urgency/power, offering more value than the competition, going higher or lower in your positioning — or perhaps even targeting a different audience altogether

These interviews got to be so juicy (and so many) that I couldn’t reasonably fit them into a single page. But I also didn’t want to add 14+ pages to our site just so you could read them.

So I turned them into a baby book, a booklet if you will, 42 pages and 8,500 words that you can download, print, scribble on, or read on your screen or iPad.

This report took me many days to produce and, if your business is struggling or you’re worried, I’m delighted to offer it to you for free. You can pay $0.

But if you choose to pay $5, $10 or more — I will donate 100% of the proceeds to the COVID-19 relief fund for the Navajo Nation, our neighbors in the Southwest who are being hit hard by the systemic defunding of their health system.

No product displayed? Click here to get it.

Having trouble checking out? Click here to continue.

All interviews by Amy Hoy, including:

Michele Hansen, Geocodio
Kurt Elster, Ethercycle
Peter Nguyen, The Essential Man
Erika Hall, Mule Design
Stephanie Morillo, The Developer’s Guide to Content Creation
Richard Felix, Stunning
Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Ness Labs
Dan Shipper, Superorganizers
Jordan Munson, Wistia
Adam Wathan, Tailwind CSS
Alison “Snipe” Gianotto, Snipe-IT
Lynne Tye, Key Values
Channing Allen, IndieHackers
And of course me! about Noko and 30x500

Podcast: How to be resourceful in uncertain times

Wed, 22 Apr 2020 16:22:48 -0000

A few weeks back I recorded a new, live podcast and Q&A with our friend Janelle Allen.

Today, it’s live for you to listen!

NB: Janelle is one of our faaaaaavorite podcast interviewers out there, and we’ve both been on her show in the past: Amy, talking about preselling courses, and me, talking about how we designed our flagship course 30x500)

This new episode is different. Instead of a retrospective, it’s more of a snapshot of how we’re making decisions in our businesses right now.

“Finding a ‘Hidden Option C’ seems hard when the world isn’t coming apart at the seams - doing it now seems even harder. But it’s exactly what many of us need to do most.”

Me, on Janelle latest podcast episode.

While talking with Janelle, I shared concrete examples from our internet-based businesses and what we’re currently working on; I also adds some examples from my brick-and-mortar coworking business.

Also unusual for a podcast is a Q&A with some audience members at the end, since this episode was recorded live! There’s no pitch at the end, just more helpful answers and examples.

If you like this conversation, we recommend checking out more from Janelle’s podcast archives. She’s one of us!

Enjoy, and stay safe.

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Recession Realtalk with Courtland Allen and Amy Hoy.

Fri, 03 Apr 2020 16:22:48 -0000

If you aren’t already subscribed to the IndieHackers podcast, Courtland Allen is one of the best interviewers around and has built a massive archive of stories and lessons from bootstrappers like you and me.

Soon after the initial crest of the COVID19 crisis, I sat down with Courtland for a session of realtalk about my experience starting my business(es) in the last recession and some of my key survival tips for getting through the latest mess without losing your shirt.

Would you like more “realtalk” sessions like this? Let me know on Twitter!

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Outlast the Recession with Amy's Financial Survival Guide

Thu, 02 Apr 2020 16:22:48 -0000

OK, we’ve talked about how to handle your feelings during a crisis.

Now let’s talk finances and survival for your business.

And yes, potentially, opportunities for growth, too… but that’s in a further essay. Survival first!

I don’t talk about it all that often, but I moved out of an abusive and financially precarious home at 16, and have been paying my way ever since. It sucked a lot of the time and I was broke a lot.

But that does mean I’ve got a lot of hard-scrabble financial survival skills that solidly-middle-class, educated people don’t.

So I’m going to deploy them today to show you how to survive when things go to shit. First things first:

1 If your government is offering financial resources, you should absolutely use them!

There are no medals for “toughing it out.”

The economy relies on everyone participating… so even if you aren’t in dire straits, take advantage of the resources your government is offering now.

Because that will help you continue spending, supporting the businesses you patronize, which helps them pay their salaries, and so on, so forth, making the wheel go ‘round.

So if you are already self-employed or run your own business, avail yourself of the resources your government is offering (if any):

In the US, if your business is at all affected, you will probably qualify for the new Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). It applies to self-employed businesses as well!

PPP offers up to 2.5 months of payroll for yourself and your team, office rent/mortgage, health insurance, and interest on business debt. It’s designed to be easy to apply, with an interest rate of 1%, and most of the loan is forgivable if you spend it on payroll (including yourself) — so gather your tax and payroll docs and check out this guide ASAP.

If your business has a greater need and a decline that you can prove, you may qualify for the Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL). The terms aren’t as favorable (they’ll check your credit and it comes with a low interest rate), but you can potentially borrow much more money.

Even if they don’t approve you for an EIDL loan, you’ll be able to receive a $10,000 grant. That’s right… a grant, you don’t have to pay back. (Note: if you get both PPP and the EIDL grant, the $10k will be deducted from the “forgiveable” amount of your PPP and it will need to be repaid.)

Other countries programs differ; I know many EU states are offering the equivalent of unemployment or other cash assurance for self-employed people and employers.

If you are newly unemployed, avail yourself of unemployment:

Many countries are treating self-employed people who lose clients as if they are “regular” unemployed people, so definitely don’t give up on this before you try.

If you’re in the US and lost your job, that’s a “qualifying event” so you can enroll in the ACA marketplace for health insurance right away.

2 Reduce your spending

It’s better to keep cash in your pockets right now, but where possible, don’t hamstring your own productivity & potential.

Debt and obligations:

Lenders, landlords, mortgage companies, car loan companies, etc are offering payment deferral, reduced penalties, etc. In some countries or localities, it may be required by law.

Pause your student loans, if you have them. You can get forbearance (no payments) until September, with no penalties and no interest accrual. US folks, look here. Outside the US? I would figure your country is doing something similar, so be sure to check.

If you have credit card debt, call your credit card company and be sure to explain that your request for lower interest rates etc. is due to financial difficulties caused by COVID-19. Be specific. Mention COVID-19 by name. Tell them, “my revenue has dropped significantly” or “I’ve been laid off.”

If you use credit cards for your monthly expenses but pay them off in full, now might be the time to negotiate a lower rate and let at least some of that float until the uncertainty is past. Many credit card companies are allowing you to skip payments with no penalties for some period of time.

If you have a couple credit cards but don’t normally carry a balance, and therefore don’t typically pay attention to terms and offers, check out the balance transfer options… you may be able to float expenses on one card and then transfer it to another for a drastically reduced rate. Some are even 0% for a year.

Bottom line: Nobody likes debt, but it beats a real crisis. Better to have some debt, even to declare bankruptcy later on, than need cash to keep a roof over your head and food in your belly now, and not have it.

Taxes, the self-employed person’s bane

The IRS has extended the tax filing and payment deadline with no penalties to July 15, 2020.

If you will owe federal taxes, but paying would put you in a precarious situation, keep the cash — the IRS offers low interest payment plans (3-4% APR) for tax debt under $50,000 pretty much instantly over the phone; in normal times, this is what I call “the cheapest money around” — better than any loan you can normally get, and infinitely better than a credit card.

Many states and localities are also extending tax deadlines with no penalty…

Countries with social insurance typically offer reduced or suspended payments in times of hardship. Austria, for example, offers a multi-year benefit if you are laid off and then decide to start your own business.

Ongoing expenses:

We all have services we don’t use, and now is a great time to cancel them.

If at all possible, I recommend not canceling services you do use, because 1. research has shown that businesses who keep investing in the things that create value for them are more likely to survive a recession, and 2. if you value the product or service, you’ll want them to stay in business.

Contact services you love & value to ask for a discount if you need to.

If shit really hits the fan on services you need, look for substitutions — for example, do you have a storage unit? Can you haul that stuff home and just live with it? (Or get rid of it?)

I’m sure you don’t need a lecture from me about how to cut your spending on food and entertainment (if you can even get pickup or delivery food in these times).

Note: if you’re financially comfortable, go ahead and spend on your local businesses if you can & want to. But I wrote this for those of you who aren’t financially comfortable. Don’t set yourself on fire to keep somebody else warm for a hot second.

Money transfers:

If you have automated investments, retirement account deductions, etc., now is a good time to stop those automatic transfers before it makes that cash harder & more expensive to get to. Again, this is my advice if you are facing a real and immediate financial hardship: Cash now > growth later.

Employees and contractors:

Sometimes it’s not possible to avoid laying people off, but people are the economic engine of your business and firms that retain their talent do better in the long run. Let people go as a last resort. Talk about other options (such as global paycuts) with them before you make any decisions. If worst comes to worst, do your absolute best to help them find other jobs or clients.

3 Assess your financial assets

Generally speaking, my strategy in a time of turmoil is maximize cash. Even if it’s “expensive” (interest rates), it’s better to have the flexibility. And once you’ve done that, maximize your options, by ensuring you have as much credit available as possible.

Cash:

Need I say more?

Government assistance:

Don’t need to repeat myself, I think

Business and professional assets:

I’m going to cover these in my next essay about making money. Drop your email in the box at the end to make sure you don’t miss that!

Outstanding invoices:

Nobody loves to work collections when things are good, but if a recalcitrant client owes you money, now’s a good time to put in the effort to collect. If they continue to not pay, look into whether it makes sense to file a claim with your local small claims court, or potentially sell the debt to a collection agency.

Business credit and loans:

If you’ve got an established business but don’t have a credit card or line of credit, now is a good time to apply. Don’t wait for things to get worse.

If you use Stripe and they offer you one of their advances/loans, that might make sense — people have criticized their repayment terms, but the back-of-the-napkin math I did indicates it may be a reasonable deal especially if you expect a decline in your revenue. The cost of the loan itself is a fixed dollar amount, so if you pay it back “fast” it’s got a high “APR”; the payments are made on a monthly percentage of your revenue, however,so if your revenue goes down, you pay less, and take more time to pay it back, making the effective APR lower. Yeah… it’s complicated.

Unclaimed property:

It sounds like a scammy infomercial thing, but my husband (who didn’t grow up in the land of infomercials) filled out the forms for me and actually found hundreds of dollars in refund checks etc. that never made it to me somehow.

Learn how to find US unclaimed property from this Twitter thread.

Retirement accounts:

If you’ve hopped around jobs and never bothered to consolidate your various small retirement accounts, now is a great time to put in that effort.

If you’re in the US and you have a retirement account, like a 401k, you may able to give yourself a pretty good-sized personal loan using those funds, with the low interest rate that you will pay back to yourself. I did this recently for something else (a real estate purchase) and the interest rate was under 4%. Read about 401k borrowing here

If things go really sour, you can cash out your 401k. A “hardship withdrawal” is less favorable in the long run, although more flexible — in normal circumstances, you’d pay a tax penalty to simply pull out your own cash. But the US is deferring that tax penalty for 3 years, and if you pay back the money during that time, you will pay no penalty. Read about 401k hardship withdrawal here

I can’t speak to other countries, but most are better than the US on this sort of thing in general, so I’d definitely look into whatever the local equivalent is.

Credit cards and personal loans:

If you don’t have a lot of available credit but you’re still employed/making money and your finances have been heretofore pretty orderly, now is a good time to apply for more credit. Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it.

Some credit cards offer 0% balance transfer offers for 6, 18, even 24+ months. This gives you a lot of options to float necessary expenses until times are better.

Some credit cards offer cash advances or fixed financing (aka a loan) at a better rate (8-11%) than credit purchases, or other personal loans.

Personal loans are a tolerable option if you’ve got good credit, especially from platforms like Lending Club.

Home equity:

I’ve put this near last because while home equity loans are a pretty standard tool for consolidating high-interest debt, you may find difficulty in getting a home equity loan or line of credit in these times due to 1. banks’ general willingness to lend (or not), and 2. the current market value of real estate; but it can’t hurt to try.

Possessions:

I’ve lived through a lot of rough times, and I’ve often sold my stuff to make rent.

While now is probably not the best time to sell general stuff (viz: everybody’s going through it), and hopefully with all the other options it won’t come to this, if you have collectibles, equipment, or other valuable items that might bring a pretty penny… make a list. Older computers, phones, camera equipment, games, artwork, collectibles…? And if it’s sitting around because you’ve been meaning too get rid of it, accelerate those plans.

This is a particularly worthwhile activity if the target market is typically wealthy-ish people, who are insulated from the job market — eBay or specialty dealers, consignment shops (including online ones like The Real Real for fashion and art), and auction houses can be your friend.

Note: if you’re reading this from a comfortable perspective & expect that to remain, consider if you can donate any used computer equipment to those less well-off but forced into remote work or school, like poor neighborhood kids.

4 Create a decision tree…

Not all monthly payments are made equal; some are far more crucial to make than others. It’s best to decide in advance what you’ll skip if things get really tough…

What will you use credit for, and what do you have to use cash for?

What services can you absolutely do without, and what can you hobble along without?

Credit cards are unsecured debt, so they literally can’t do anything to you but put a mark on your credit report, and during these times probably offer programs specifically to help you avoid this.

In a truly worst case scenario, you can often skip your utility payments for 2-3 months before they shut you off, and even longer if you call and negotiate a payment plan. Lots of localities are making it illegal to do shut-offs at this time.

Decide in advance what you’ll cancel if things get bad, and how soon you have to do it to avoid paying the next month.

5 Look for ways you can help people. You can even make money doing it.

Because even in a recession — even in a depression! — there’s still a potential to make sales if you can deliver real value to people who will pay for it.

And that’s what we’ll focus on in my next article.

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Just a reminder, or in case you’re new here…

I’m not a starry-eyed optimist, I won’t tell you comforting lies for your benefit or mine, and I won’t blow sunshine up your ass; people consistently (to my chagrin) call me “brutally honest” for a reason. It’s brass tacks time.

Stacking the Bricks

3 big ways a brutal job market paves the way for people like you

Factor #1: The weak, bloated businesses die first

Factor #2: Core needs remain (even under pressure)

Factor #3: Pressure creates gaps in the market

So what have we learned?

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2025 Tech Stack for Bootstrappers

Website Generator - Nanoc

👍 Fast pageload, easy drafting

👎 Adding images is clumsy, Compile times can be slooooowwwww.

Static Site Hosting - Netlify

👍 Fast and easy

👎 Crappy customer support experiences

Email Marketing & Automation - Convertkit

👍 Email delivery is up, and ConvertKit seems to have found the right balance of power and simplicity

👎 Stats seem like they are always out of sync.

Customer Support - Helpscout

👍 Custom “Meta”

👎 Search sucks

Email - G Suite

👍 Just works. Best inbox search.

👎 Google

Digital “Storefront” - Podia

👍 A unified “store” experience for our customers

👎 No real stats

👎 Weak Courseware

Courseware - Teachable

👍 Nice looking student experience

👎 Everything else

Webinar Hosting - Crowdcast

👍 Most reliable audio and video

👎 Confusing UI

👎 Don’t talk for more than 2 hours

Podcast Hosting - Simplecast

👍 Easy to understand, straightforward stats at a glance

👎 Simplecast 2.0 is coming

Automation - Zapier

Team Chat - Slack

Video Calls - Zoom

👍 Great video quality, works out of the box, built-in recording

👎👍 Native client

👎 Why we aren’t using Zoom Webinars

Forms & Surveys - Typeform

👍 Easy to personalize, customize, and create “advanced” logic in surveys

👎 Pay extra for additional logins

Student/Customer CRM - Airtable

👍 Finally, the CRM we’ve been dying for.

👎 The “It Can Be Anything” problem.

Segmentation - RightMessage

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Don't take this advice.

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4 things nobody tells you about preselling your product

Tip #1. Have a plan in place for if you pre-sell and don’t make many sales.

Tip #2. Consider how you deal with working under pressure.

Tip #3. Recognize that it’s harder (though not impossible) to make changes to your product & scope.

Tip #4. Be aware that presale success can warp your expectations of a “normal” launch.

How to Do Your Pre-Sale Right

Pre-sale Strategy #1: Use Presales for Social Proof & Momentum.

Pre-sale Strategy #2: Treat your pre-sales like a VIP list, cap your pre-sale offers.

Pre-sale Strategy #3: Combine Strategies 1 and 2!

Pre-sale Strategy #4: Use an extended pre-sale as a “beta” period

So, should you pre-sell your product?

Looking for more Pre-sales Tips?

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Give your past emails new life with Content Mixtapes! aka Success with ConvertKit, Part II

ConvertKit “Sequences” have become the most valuable piece of software in our business.

The Standard Newsletter Lifecycle

Content we are NOT not talking about:

Content we are talking about:

It’s not about optimizing conversion rates.

What do you do when the face of the business can’t work?

But as January inched closer and Amy wasn’t feeling well enough to work, we had a problem.

Our first “Just The Hits” Email Sequence

Unexpected benefit: lower stress!

The problem with Evergreen Launches

That’s why I call my version of marketing automation a Content Mixtape.

How to Mixtape your Newsletter

Stage 1. Curate your reader’s experience