I
Got this gigantic
omnidirectional treadmill for my meta quest
like this like virtual reality
Treadmill like oh, yeah
Yeah, so you like walk on it and then you walk in whatever game you're playing too. Yeah
Yeah, you basically people should look it up. It's called it's called catwalk c2 plus. I mean, it's like
What's that ready player one movie? I've never actually seen it. Yeah, but apparently people say that it's like the ready player one
Hey, what's up, Justin? I guess tanning is just telling me about uh
His omnidirectional VR treadmill that he just bought it takes up half of my room
I have a gym and it like basically I can't use anything in my gym. You put it down. It's like this
360 degree
Tiny little bowl and it's got these shoes that you are these special shoes that are that are effectively mouse pads on
Your shoes and it connects to your meta quest like the the VR headset in a way where when you walk on it
It's basically like moving the joystick forward and back
So well in games the whole the whole idea is if you want to do VR is like to be in this immersive situation
But it's obviously not very immersive if you know
You have like the glasses on you you have the visuals around you have the sound you're just standing there and yet to like move
You have to move your thumb up and down right like that. So how is it?
Like how does it feel like what's your review of this treadmill thing?
I don't like twice all the reviews say like your brain has to adjust to it
So for me, it's it's it's extremely difficult you
Like everyone's right now have like three big fans pointing at you
It sucks, but it's also crazy and interesting and good
but the one interesting thing I'll say about VR and like part of the reason why I would buy some crazy shit like this is
For the most part people that get virtual reality headsets get them to play games like it's like this fun
Oh, I want to go and like do do a shoot-em-up or I want to do like a role-playing game
but for me
the reason why I'm really interested in it is because I'm really interested in like the innovative grown-up shit that VR can help me do
So for example, I had an idea and I was like, well, it'll be really cool
If there was some VR app that helps you with public speaking, right?
I know a lot of people before they give speeches like they go and stand in front of a mirror
They don't talk into a closet and they rehearse but that's like super
You know separated from what the actual experience is
Like I'm like, it'll be cool if you could like stand on a VR stage and have like a VR audience and then practice your speech
Or whatever it is there turns out that exists. It's called virtual speech
That's cool. There's other stuff too. I'm not gonna get too much into it. Like I'm into meditation
They have this app called trip
Which like just completely immerses you and to this weird like, you know, basically sort of made for meditation app. That's really dope
They have like I'm into these things called memory palaces where you sort of mentally simulate walking through an environment
And it helps you to remember things better. I think there's some
There's some show where that was like kind of popularized and I'm kind of in the home like they had
Yeah, Sherlock Holmes whole power was memory palaces. There's an app called librarian and it's like literally a memory palace game for VR
So like there's all these kind of things and that's kind of like what I use it for for the most. Yeah, I play ping-pong. I
Play table tennis I play
regular tennis, I'm like I I got one last year and I
Haven't figured out all of its capabilities yet. I was spending a lot of time playing it just as like I
We have a gym in our house
So I go to the gym here and we have a gym that we belong to where we live
So I don't need any more exercise stuff
But I do like like the saber game that gets you moving around and that's a lot of fun. Yeah
Yeah, I'm like, I'm like the most simplistic user of VR
But I can't wait to see how I learn to use it more in the coming I guess months and years
So I'm glad I have one tell you that much. I'm gonna get your username and we can we can ping-pong it up
I'm pretty good at game
Alright cool spectator mode so I can just watch I should probably introduce you we're already live and recording
You are Justin Welsh. You are a very popular solopreneur very inspirational as well
on your Twitter bio actually you say
You're tweeting about the process of building a portfolio of one person businesses to five million dollars
Which is an awesome goal and you're not just tweeting about it, but you're doing it like last November
I think you you cross the line the three million dollar mark
So I have a ton of questions about this first why five million dollars like how did you pick that that number?
Yeah, it's it's a really great question. I have a really poor answer which is just like at when I got started it seemed
very out of reach it seemed like extremely improbable to me at the time that I decided on that and I I sort of come
From the SAS world. I was a former executive at a SAS company couple SAS companies and did 16 years
I think in technology and so I was used to like creating okrs and so I was used to saying ok
You know shoot for a big goal and if you get 70% of the way there as an okr you you've you've done
Well, and so I thought well if I do five million, that's probably never gonna happen
So 70% of the way there would be three and a half million. That would be pretty cool
So that was that was like the science behind picking that and I feel like you know, it's it's more achievable than I thought
Yeah aim for the stars and if you fall short, you'll hit the moon at least sort of whatever whichever order that goes in
I can never remember which one's further away. So yeah, exactly aim for the moon. And if you miss you'll be it
So I'm lost among the stars
Is that five million dollars like do you imagine that as being cumulative like in total you want to hit that or is that?
Like you want that every year and no no when I when I started
It was cumulative that that's how I was thinking about it because when I started I never had the intention of working for myself forever
I thought of it is like a cool proving ground because unlike a lot of people that do this
I don't know how to code and I don't know how to build
products
In the traditional sense of how you might think about products
So I thought that this was not going to be something that I would do for a long time
so I was like if I can go out and just
Cumulatively earn this money
Again, money doesn't mean everything but it's like it's a good indicator that I'm doing something, right?
But as my business is growing
I think there's an opportunity for me to do that on an annual basis based on some of the things that I'm doing
Um, I don't really want to shoot for a monetary goal
My my goals are more like a work to income ratio that I'm trying to achieve
Is a much more important goal than I think total income or revenue. Yeah, I think most people
When they're thinking about making money or really thinking about like making time for themselves
Yes, totally
It's some degree of like I want my financial freedom which means I want to have enough money to support me doing
Whatever the hell I want in life
That's hanging out with my family more or going on vacations or even just making more time to do other work. That's more interesting
I think that's a pretty common approach. And so if you have like this this ratio in your mind of like work
To income, you know, and it's high enough and come to work and I think that's it's pretty awesome
What the public often sees is someone putting a revenue number up. There's a guy who's really I'm stuck
I mentioned his name, but he's making a killing financially
He does some consulting work, but he works like 24-7 around the clock high stress in the situation
Where you see the number you see the revenue and a lot of people are like, you know
They go wide-eyed and they go I want that too
But if they saw what that was attached to they would be like hell no
Are you talking about Brett from design joy?
I had him on the wall last year he's like I'm doing two million and revenue of my you know
My agency and it was like I'm also working 18 hours a day seven days a week to drive myself insane
I have friends like that and their businesses are booming three million dollar businesses four million dollar businesses mostly service-based
so tons of time tons of projects like
Marriages are suffering physical and mental health are suffering and like I get this thing and I wrote about this the other day
You know a traditional word is shiny object syndrome
I get like shiny outcome syndrome where I see like the outcomes of other people and immediately I get wide-eyed
I'm like, oh shit if that guy can do it I can do it and then it's like wait a minute. Hold on
What is that person?
Sacrificing and doing to get that thing and if I don't want to do that
Then don't make that the outcome that you're shooting for like you can't you can't get tied into that
It's super hard. You don't people don't broadcast what they're paying to get the revenue numbers are getting
No one's like I made six million dollars this year and also got a divorce, you know
First part. Yeah. Yeah, totally totally so you are
You're doing a lot of things right? You've got a huge email list of 70,000 people on it
You do coaching do you do consulting and you've got product businesses that are generating recurring revenue?
Which is really cool because you'd like you're not a software engineer. So it's like pretty right to have that
What's like your breakdown in terms of revenue? Like how much of that is coming from different sources? Yeah
I have to to sort of flagship products that are information products. So I'm like an I'm a knowledge entrepreneur
That's what I am. Like I have knowledge based products
70% of my revenue comes from those products another 15% comes from recurring revenue from a
What I would call like a subscription email that you pay for
and then there's a smattering of
Coaching and consulting which I've stopped doing completely actually as of about three months ago
cool, because
Thank you one to reinvest that time into something else. There's newsletter sponsorships. There's affiliates
there's all these other like little things but the bulk of my business comes from
My information products and the way that my subscriptions work is I think of my information products as Trojan horses for subscriptions
So it's you know
Get a lower cost high quality information product put it in front of people that want to learn how to do something
Get them into the product and use the product to sell the subscription
So put them put them through modules that are interesting and then say hey, like we can go advanced on this module
I actually send a monthly email that'll take you a little bit deeper and then roll those folks into a recurring revenue email
Subscription which is like doesn't matter if one person subscribes to it or 20,000 people subscribe to it
I just work right in one email. It's just the same amount of work
I mean it scales pretty well just like a sass product without all the exactly
There's this there's this concept of the ladders of wealth creation. It's this blog post written by Nathan bear
Have you read it? I I have not read it even though I know Nathan quite well, but I should yeah
It's a good it's a good one
You're kind of doing exactly what he talks about in that and that poster you sort of start off
Trading time for money, right? You were an exec at a couple of high-growth startups
I think one of them you helped take from like zero to 50 million dollars and annual recurring revenue
But like that's your time you go to work every day
If you stop going to work
You get fired and you're no longer making any money and then you eventually build up to like the higher and higher ladders where you're
Selling, you know a service business like you did consulting and coaching
It's still time for money
But at least you're not working for somebody else and now you've stopped doing that and used like, you know
The money and the connections you got through that to like basically sell these info products and sell a newsletter
Which is much more scalable
I want to walk through like all these steps because I think a lot of other people sure want to emulate what you've done
Maybe we start at the very beginning you had this this awesome job. Yeah, it was going well
At the end of it you were burned out so badly that you had like a massive panic attack
I think is the way you described it on the Andy hackers forum and you wrote about this and you had to call 9-1-1
What led to that level of burnout? Like is that like how do you even get to that to that place?
I think a lot of people think that's like my founder story and a load of a load of crap
It's actually like the most true story
Like I'll kind of give you the background which was when I when I got hired at patient pop
I had done a five-year stint at Zoc Doc, which was a big New York City company kind of back 2009 2014
I was a real early hire there ended up working for the CEO over five years and
That was a tough place to work. And so you kind of like forged a good work ethic and high performance
And I turned that into my first executive job at 32. I was the VP of sales at a company called patient pop in LA
Pre-revenue got him 0 to 50 and what happened was
Someone wrote a tweet about this and I can never remember who but I always remember what he wrote
What happened was every day?
like I thought I was gonna be there for 1 million 3 million 5 million in recurring revenue and then they'd go get some of
The older more experience better and higher over me and I'd like take on some other role that didn't happen
I kept going and going and going and going and I got to a point where like
Every day was a new dollar every day was a new employee number. That was like unforeseen
I had never done it before so every day was a new challenge and
Burnout doesn't come from working really hard because I can work really hard forever
At least I probably I'm less so as I get older
but what burnout comes from in my opinion is loss of control where it's like this stacking of
Problems that I could not figure out. I know how to solve them
I didn't know how to solve the problems that were happening in the business and
When you start to work on one problem and then another one stacks and then another one stacks and another one stacks pretty soon
You start coping in ways that are pretty common, right? So and that's what I did. I coped in ways such as
overeating
Over-drinking no sleep lack of exercise. I was 225 or 230 pounds drinking a bottle of wine every night eating a ton of you know
Halal brothers takeout in LA and like
Everything just came crashing down at one point. It was December 16th 2018. I woke up
My fingers got real numb
We were going to get some food me and my wife my fingers got real numb and I started having this really weird feeling
And that went into a full-blown panic panic attack
Hallucinating didn't like screaming screaming bloody murder for like two hours had to have the EMTs come thought
I was dying like they hooked up all the wires told me I wasn't dying and that's when it started to kind of go
Down, but that's what started it all honestly
Yeah, it sucked. Yes
That's reminds me of something
you can see it here Justin, but I just bought this book called stress without distress and
It's by a guy named Hans Selye. No one knows who he is, but the word stress comes from him
he's the guy that coined that term and
The other thing that people don't know is he coined actually two terms
Distress which is obviously negative or bad stress and then you stress EU stress which means good stress and whatever we have
Negativity bias so we've kind of let that second term fall like out of use
But he specifically goes into the differences and like and it pretty much maps directly onto what you just said
I mean if you don't have feel that you have control if you don't feel that you have like
Autonomy over the situation that you're in then like I mean it was a totally different set of like
neurotransmitters and stress hormones that that go into your your your nervous system and
If anything it's so funny because like that's exactly what changes if you start to work for yourself
As opposed to you know
You find yourself in this situation where you're you're constantly trying to meet the demands of something outside of yourself that you know
You can't anticipate, you know, you you aren't pressing like the the you know next
Challenge button you're just kind of getting yanked around
Yeah, it culminated in in that right like that's that's how my my body reacted and to answer Courtland's question
Not to kind of push aside. How did this all start and kind of what were some of the steps but it was that
Point in time that I realized it was cool that that happened not obviously not because it happened, but I was forced
Like I didn't have a choice
Like I couldn't just keep doing it and I think a lot of people are afraid to like jump into their own thing
I really didn't have a choice. So like I got on a program I saw a therapist
I started eating healthy drinking. I cut out alcohol for like 90 straight days. I lost like 30 pounds
It was pretty crazy and like I knew that I was leaving my job. I left August 1st of 2019
Negotiated that with my CEOs
but this is where all this journey started where I was gonna have to go out on my own and I was like
I don't know how to do that
And I don't know who's gonna pay attention to me and I have a decent network
But like why don't I get some attention and I saw everyone using Twitter and Twitter to me was like how I got my news
I didn't think of it as like a promotional channel
And so I was like what if I did what everyone does on Twitter, but I do that on LinkedIn
Where all of my customers for like a consulting business would be or an advising business would be and no one used it like that
At the time I like I like to think that I was one of the first few guys to use it that way
Yeah, and so I started like writing promotional stories. How do you build a team? How do you build SDR programs?
How do you you know bifurcate your leads? How do you do all these things that I had done at the startup and
because no one was using it like that I got 20,000 followers right away and
When I announced that I was leaving the business on August 1st. I had a pipeline filled
With people who wanted to hire me as a consultant and advisor for their business
that was how I like that the idea that you had an exit date for when you were gonna quit your job and
But it was set, you know exactly what date it's gonna be
But before that you're already building an audience on LinkedIn because I think a lot of people when they go into that audience building phase
People who want to take that step feel a lot of pressure because they're like well
I'm burning a hole in my pocket. I'm like spending money just to survive
I don't have a job because they start audience building like after they've quit but you had that sort of buffer period which is really cool
Yeah, I'm fortunate to not come from a product background
Like I think it comes from a sales background in marketing mentality where it's like I know my weakness
I know my weakness is like I don't know how to code and build but I do know that I'm pretty good at
Selling and marketing and talking about myself without making it hopefully, you know
too nauseating
So I was like, I'm gonna go out and use use that that that thing that I do well and start doing that
Because I knew that I couldn't just rely on like building some great product that everyone was gonna suddenly find and start buying
Why did you think this would work? Like did you have people you looked up to her inspirational?
Do you have some sort of path and your head of like, you know?
I'm gonna go on LinkedIn and start building an audience and then there's gonna be a step two and three and four after that
Like did you have a master plan? No master plan. I had a short-term plan
My short-term plan was like go work for myself
Keep getting back into better shape get a mental health break. Hang out with my wife
Like we lived in LA we had a house in LA
So it's like spend some time in the Sun relax and then my plan was to go back to work
Find another I love early stage startups. I like like seed series a I hate like series C series D. It's too late for me
so like I was like, oh, I'll go find another series a and then I
started consulting and advising and I was like
Oh, I'm kind of making the same money that I was making as an executive and I was like
I don't think I'm charging enough
Maybe I could charge twice as much that I'm charging now and instead of working the same and making twice as much
What if I just charged twice as much and I worked half?
And then I like made the same amount of money, but I had more free time and this really weird thing happened
which is like I started doing that and as I had more free time, I started spending more time on social media and
And the questions that I got on LinkedIn
became different
Instead of being like, how do you build an SDR program?
Or what would you do with this outbound lead or how do you hire sales managers?
I would go through my DMS and all the questions were like, how do you write? How do you get attention?
I see you're getting a lot of engagement
How did you learn how to write copy you like all these different like interesting questions about LinkedIn?
And I didn't want to be like a LinkedIn guy
I still don't but I was like, oh what if I put together like a little product that teaches people how to use LinkedIn?
So I built a $50 course back in 2019 and sold 75 grand worth of it
And that was like the start of knowledge based products for me
You obviously had a terrible situation with the job that you're you're at with burnout and whatnot
So you needed to get out of that, but it still has to be scary
jumping out of that and into something else if you don't have a
precedent in your mind that that can work or that there are examples and something that you mentioned that I pick up picked up is
You saw something happening on Twitter and you were like, well, maybe I can do that on LinkedIn
And I have to ask is like number one. Did you see people who were
Succeeding at whatever it is, right?
like, you know sort of being copy gurus or marketing gurus on Twitter and and and then you wanted to sort of replicate that because
Immediately what I think of is the trend over the last couple of years where you know
There's someone who in their Twitter username has like the copy guy, right? And then there's like the marketing guy
There's the mental models guy. Is that sort of what you were copy pasting over?
No, I think what would have happened is two things were happening at once
Someone gave me and I don't remember who so I apologize if it was whomever is listening to this
But somebody gave me one of Russell Brunson's books and I was like, oh this is like crazy
Amazing that you can build all these automated funnels and webinars and like, you know
Make money like I thought that was pretty crazy that number one and then number two on Twitter
there was a guy named Chris Johnson who was like
making it goes by like wealth squad Chris or something now and like I had met with
the CEO of Gumroad Sahil
Lavinia in LA just randomly he he had moved there when I lived there and I sat down with him and got coffee
and I was like
Is this guy make as much money as he says he makes on this platform because there's a lot of money and he was like
yeah, he's like really successful and I was like man between this book that I'm reading and this guy that I'm following like I
think that I can figure out how to weave that into my
Consulting business with the idea that someday like Channing Courtland
Maybe that someday I might have an information product
But doing what I'm doing right now was nowhere in the plan
and so I just started learning about how to
translate knowledge into
Information and then attention into purchases and that took a really long time and there's still an ongoing sort of education if you will
Yeah, I like this this process that you first started doing you've got on LinkedIn and you're just like sharing as much knowledge as you can
So there's like kicking up sand and seeing like if any treasure any gold coins float out and if they don't they don't but if
They do maybe they do and I think that contrasts with how a lot of people
Start a lot of people start and they say crap. I'm on a clock. I've got six months to make a profit
I need like a strategy
This is what I'm gonna do and I'm gonna build something and they don't have as much of an exploratory like period where they're just
Playing around and the good thing about just playing around and just seeing what happens is like a lot of opportunities that would never have
occurred to you just show up like you tweeted about this and your thread about getting to three million dollars a year where you
Said that you created a lot of noise and you look at it attention is kind of your friend you wrote content every single day
On LinkedIn and you honed in on signals
What were those signals that you found that allows you to start consulting like what what kind of treasure did you kick up?
pretty simple ones right like there's this analogy between content creators and farmers where it's like
When farmers don't grow good crops, they don't yell at the crops. They're like these crops suck
it's like no you suck as a farmer and so
Like when I create content, I would create it and if it didn't do well, I you know
The the inclination for most people's are the algorithm. Oh, it's not fair
Twitter sucks LinkedIn sucks. It's all game. It doesn't work. And so I was like, okay
I'm gonna write a bunch of things and then whatever doesn't work. I'm gonna stop writing and whatever does work
I'm gonna write more of that. That was that was an easy one
So it's like impressions likes, you know
All that all those things that are not people call them vanity metrics and maybe in some way shape and form
They are vanity metrics
But they're also indicators of attention and whether or not you're resonating with people and I don't think we should throw them in the trash
So that's number one
But number two what was really interesting for me was when CEOs would reach out from my sort of ideal customer profile
early stage healthcare specific
CEOs would say like you wrote something about
getting through to a doctor on an outbound phone call and that is a huge problem that we have in our company and I'd love
To talk to you about coming in and working with our outbound team to start refining our messaging. I'm like, okay cool
I should expect that if I write something like that, that is a pain point
Amongst founders of healthcare SaaS companies. So keep writing about that if you like those assignments
Then write about something different and see if that resonates you get DMS from that
So it's mostly like impressions likes things like that
It was web traffic and then it was like straight-up DMS
In my inbox that were the biggest indicator of whether or not I was writing things that resonated
I used to work as sort of a consulting software engineer
I've just write software for companies who needed somebody like me sort of a specialist to come in and build a particular app or something
And I had a very similar process, but also very different. I never
Really wrote content. I wasn't on social media
I would just build things that I liked and then I would try to get press about the things that I'd built
So I'd build these little gmail widgets and all sorts of things and reliably the same thing would happen
I would get emails from CEOs or people who were like, hey, I saw what you created. That's really cool
We have that same problem in our company
You know, can we talk to you about coming in and building the same thing for us?
And then I was able to negotiate like really high rates because they needed like not just anybody they needed me to do this exact
Particular job and that sounds like exactly what happened to you. You got started consulting
totally and it's it one part you said there is uh, especially true, which is
I wasn't like, um
Hey sass is hard need help with your sass sales
It was like getting through to doctors when you're selling a product like a marketing solution. So it's like
Folks came to me and said we also sell to doctors
We also sell like a marketing solution and you've worked at zoc doc and patient pop two of the biggest sort of giants in this
specific niche so
Okay, what are you gonna do? You're gonna hire a guy who charges 250 bucks an hour who has general sass experience
Or are you gonna pay me two thousand bucks an hour because I know exactly the problems you deal with and exactly how to solve
Them in a quick amount of time with the right solution
So that's why I targeted
Part of that tweet thread that you're reading is I whittled down over time
I started with like hey sass sales marketing and then over time I got really specific around healthcare customers. I could help them
They wanted my specific help. I could charge a premium and I knew how to do all the work
I loved the intersection of like I know how to do this and you very desperately need this specific help
And that was what made my consulting business a high-rate business
I also love the the focus you had on just being so consistent with your content like I had a friend the other day who's
Asking in a group chat like hey wants to work out put on some muscle like what can he do?
And like the first thing that me and a couple other friends said to him is like are you going to the gym consistent?
Because there's a million articles about like you need to perform this lift and exactly this motion and
This exact supplement and do all these different like tricks same with social media
You need to tweet at this time of day and with using these words and do these types of threads
But like if you aren't actually doing it daily then none of these tricks matter and somehow you knew that like I don't know how that
Occurred to you, but like the very first thing you did was just start posting
Consistently and constantly and then you focused on on strategy. Yeah, I'm lucky
to come from that background like part of being an early stage executive in the sales and marketing side for companies
Is you try a lot of things?
You go out and you have to be you have to have some framework for experimentation
You have to understand, you know fail fast metrics
You got to understand how to try a bunch of experiments without
Figuring out without losing sight of which sort of thing that you're doing is actually making the impact
So I took a lot of what I learned at my SaaS companies that I was working at and just applied those to content creation
which to me seems
Like common sense, but I also recognize that a lot of folks don't come from that same background
So like the idea of getting out and creating non-stop and then sort of analyzing what happens doubling down on what works cutting?
What doesn't may not seem?
Like common sense, but it's the easiest way
To do almost anything right? I I always say like especially with building knowledge businesses
Everyone wants to learn everything they can about knowledge businesses. They'll do anything to learn about a knowledge business other than start one
And so if you really want to learn how to build one start one
And you learn a lot. Yeah, exactly
This audience and I mean Cortland and I specifically have a lot of experience on twitter
Cortland and I specifically have a lot of experience on twitter
You can just pop open twitter and look in
Look look at like, you know startup twitter and indie hackers twitter and see people's formula
Uh for writing viral threads or threads that get sometimes it's really just looking at it's really obvious
It's very formulaic
But I don't have the first clue
How to do anything and get engagements on on linkedin and that seems to be where your mastery is at this point
So what are some of your learnings from that? Like what? Yeah, like teach us how to use linkedin. We don't use
LinkedIn for indie hackers. It's it's not that hard. So i'll teach i'll teach you how to use it
Um, the first thing that I did was something that a lot of people do which was I bought a book
I bought a book called
The copywriter's bible by josh fector. He's commonly referred to as the guy who started like linkedin broetry, right?
But I didn't know what else to do
So I just bought a book that someone recommended to me and instead of buying that book and then 30 other books
I just read it and then did what it said in the book, which is a very uncommon thing to do nowadays
Which is like crazy reading and applying versus like look at me. I read 100 books this year
So I got the book and I I read it and then I started
Copying how he wrote because I didn't know how to write and as I did that
Some things felt authentic some things felt inauthentic
And as I started to get a little more traction, I started to become more and more authentic. I was more comfortable being myself
But I figured out that that linkedin is a little bit different than twitter. First of all, it is a safer space to write
It's more empathetic, you know, people aren't there trashing one another because it has a professional lean to it
Right, your company name is generally attached to your profile. So it's it's a safer place to get started and each post
Because there are 3 000 characters in a post
Is similar to a twitter thread when you go into twitter
You read a whole as you scroll your timeline you read whole tweets
And then you come to a thread and what do you get you get the first?
Part of the thread which is commonly referred to as the hook right the thread hook
Every linkedin post is like a twitter thread because there is a certain amount of characters above the fold before the see more button
And then you have to hook them to get them to click the see more button and when you do
You are rewarded with their attention through the full post
And so I often think about writing posts on linkedin and kind of everyone does this now because i've got 12 000 students in the course
And so it it goes across linkedin, but I think of the the post in three
Parts the first part is the meat which is just like what do you want to teach someone? What's the stuff?
Like what are you what are you teaching today? What are the steps right? What's the information?
It's like I always write that first. What's the stuff I want to get across?
Then I go and I write the hook and the hook is generally less than 300 characters and it's very similar to a twitter hook
How do I get people into the meat right and then the end is just normal ctc called a conversation?
Like why should somebody participate in this but the easiest way to write a good call to conversation on linkedin since posts are longer
Is instead of just saying participate or what do you think it's quick recap?
So they don't have to scroll back up reread before they can engage give them something that they can engage on
Right away. So it's like hook meet call to conversation summary engage
and um, I started doing that and
That worked really really effectively and then I started weaving in some other things which are helpful. Um,
Typical copywriting formulas pain agitate solution right is is a common one i've i've edited that to be pain agitation
Intrigue positive future and solution. So I do have some formulas for how I tell stories and things like that
but the real thing is
Learn how to write a good twitter thread. It translates very well to linkedin and just show up show up every day. You're
Treating it like a job. You're a professional. You're not just like fooling around on linkedin
You are reading books about copywriting reading articles about copywriting and experimenting and taking it very seriously. It is my job
Yeah, I tell people that all the time. Like i'm good at it because it's my job
There's something that I want to unpack there which is you said the simple thing called a call to conversation
And anyone who builds a website has a landing page or I mean often even writes like a twitter thread
You know about cta is a call to action, but that's really interesting
It sounds like you're trying to get people to engage with a comment. Do you have
Like an ultimate place in the funnel that you want them to go or are you ultimately looking to get them to like?
You know sort of join a course or to go somewhere else or do you see them?
Like writing a comment as a like a fundamental first step that you want to get people to take
Yeah, the latter I want I think of linkedin and twitter as discovery
So my game is moneyball. I want to be out there every single day same face same name same style of content
I want you to see me every day and I want you to start to get a flavor for
Or feel for the flavor of my content. What do I talk about every day? What can you come to expect?
Each morning when you see my face i'm like I want it to be relatively predictable. Um
My one of my very good friends is an 80 year old new york times best-selling author and he said people love
Shows because of the predictable emotional experience they get with the characters
It's not necessarily each episode. It's just a predictable emotional experience
And so I want to give a predictable emotional experience to my audience every morning
And that's why they come back and so that's discovery
And discovery to me does nothing more than widen my top funnel
And then 20 of the time when i'm normally being discovered i'm actively de-platforming into trust authority and expertise
So to me
I want people to trust in me not trust me like i'll watch their house when they're gone but trust that I know what i'm
Talking about that I am going to have expertise and authority in my specific niche
And what I do there is i'll bring them from linkedin or twitter or whatever
To my website, but I won't ask them to buy a course. I won't ask them to do it
It's just like here's an issue that you should read if you want to know more about this
Here's a free guide that I wrote if you want to learn how to stop procrastinating here
Here's an article that I wrote about it and I just want to get people in the habit of discovery trust discovery trust
I almost never sell scroll through my linkedin scroll through my twitter. No buy my course. No, here's what someone said about it
To me after 90 days. There's a big huge improvement in the number of people who will buy something from you because trust has been built
So my goal is to get them to come back every day and finally go. Oh, man
This guy's courses are only 150 bucks. Like
I have enough trust in this guy. I've learned a lot enough. He's shown me enough where I can pull that trigger
Versus charging twenty five hundred dollars for something. That's amazing. I mean you're I mean directly
Living up to a couple of ideals that Seth Godin this marketing guru frequently talks about the first one is
He says that you want to write content or you want to have a presence that rhymes
And that's kind of what you're mentioning with, you know, sort of you want you want to be recognizable
You want yourself to be familiar?
Like you want your brand to kind of stick in people's minds so that they they understand what you're associated to
Associated with and then he has something else that he's kind of like
Understand what you're associated to associated with and then he has something else that he that he says that what you just said resonates with
me, which is
you're not like, you know pulling and like you don't have like a muscular approach where like every time you see someone you're trying to
like sort of
Force them into the next step and then force them into the next step
you just you kind of have all the stuff there and if you ring the bell with any given person like they know where to
Click down and go and find the next thing and they know where to find the course
And the analogy that he uses Seth Godin uses for that that I love is
That you're constantly just blowing on a dandelion
right, you're you're putting stuff out there and
It's just there's there's way too much noise and there's way too much complexity with like how you might resonate with any individual person
Among like the thousands that you're reaching right? But if again
The content that you're putting out rhymes and it's high quality
You can feel assured by just sticking to the the inputs and being consistent with the inputs
Like you're just blowing in the dandelion and the pedals are going to land wherever they wherever they land
What does he mean by rhymes like not literally rhymes?
Like what does it mean to put out content that rhymes?
It's just like thematic right what we would do to rhyme is we run indie hackers, right?
We deal with you know startup content people trying to attain their freedom from
Being tethered to some company that they work for right? I also in a second life. I'm working on a novel
And yeah, like if if my twitter feed is like a random idea from a fiction story that i'm writing and then
Then I write something about like startups over here and then I like say something about politics on like, you know, Saturdays
Then people who come across my content
They're going to be far less likely to see my face see my name and think ah, right
I do have to go pick up that like, you know good guide on how to get my business started
Yeah, so you're talking about like that predictable emotional experience that justin was talking about which it rings so true in like everything
Like I love anime
Uh, there's a predictable emotional experience that I want when I watch anime
I want to see the main character grow from nothing to become a badass and have everybody respect and admire them
And that happens over and over and over and show after show and I never get tired of it and I know that's what I want
And so I guess your readers justin have a similar thing. They want from you like a dose of inspiration
A dose of education, like there's something that they know they can get from you after a while
That's right. And it's never like hey, here's something you can do if you're building a one-person knowledge business
And then like tomorrow's like my favorite pizza is margarita
Never I never and like some people are like, oh you're very robotic like you don't really show behind the scenes of your life and everything
It's like it's just not not what I do
I just every day I try and I try and add a little value to somebody who has come for that predictable emotional experience
My favorite creator on the internet is harry mack. He's a freestyle rapper on youtube who I love and like he's got
bazillion, you know followers, I love him yeah every friday he comes out with a
new video and I like
patiently wait for it and I watch it because
I know that the people who aren't expecting him to be any good are going to be blown away and that's a cool experience that
I can't stop watching and so that's how I think about
Providing my audience with an experience
So let's get into the the details of like your your info products because
Getting good on on social media is a whole skill in and of itself
But then like actually creating something that's valuable to people is not easy to do
And then like selling it to them
Even if you have a big audience like that conversion you said you sort of
Deplatform people into trust expertise and authority you're sort of a slow drip from your social media into
You know signing up for your newsletter and maybe eventually buying your products
How did you think about that process? Once you hit on this signal that like, hey, this is a particular thing that i'm talking about
That's a pain point for others. I can write a guide to linkedin. I can write a guide to a particular something
how did you strategize going through that and being successful because
There's a lot of ways to fail if you're trying to build a product and sell it. Yeah, I think I was cognizant about how I buy
So just because I buy a certain way doesn't mean everyone else does but I like to think i'm a decent proxy for like
How people who are motivated buy on the internet and i've entered 500 plus
Email funnels where you download a lead magnet and then you daily drips trying to get you to buy a product
I don't think i've ever bought a single
Product that way and so I didn't want to do that. I didn't want to like here's my free guide now
I'm going to just bang emails in your inbox until you unsubscribe or buy my product. I just didn't think about it that way
I bought a product one of my first products was from daniel vasallo when he did his
How to build a twitter audience course and I I said like why did I buy that?
So I was like kind of deconstructing why I bought it and I thought well
I show up every day and I like what he writes. I think he has a generally decent viewpoint. Um, I said, okay
He gives me a predictable emotional experience. He never really wavers from what he talked about at least not at that point in time
And when he positioned the course, he told me exactly what i'd get how to grow a twitter following he made it affordable
It was like 90 bucks and it was like, okay. I like his stuff. I trust him
I've read a bunch of his things i've been following for a long time
He told me what i'm going to get for it something I want to get and it was affordable those things are like
My marketing strategy to a t so my thought was like no drips no email campaigns. I don't do any no email campaigns
No email automation, nothing. It's just like come to my site and if you want to buy my course great and go out there and replicate that
But when you build the course
Make it affordable. So as many people as possible can buy it because it's a quantity game
I want everyone saying great things about my course every day online. I want people talking about it on twitter and linkedin
So much so that I use purchase power parity. So if you're in india or pakistan, it's 35 dollars, right?
If you're in mexico, it's 35 dollars
So if you're in india or pakistan, it's 35 dollars right if you're in mexico, it's like 40 bucks
So it's like I want the whole world talking about it and I want them saying great things about it somewhere online every day
so it's like
Make it affordable and then blow their socks off like have them
Boot it up and think 150 course probably going to be nothing
Give them fifteen thousand dollars worth of value and have them be so surprised by the value they get inside of it
That as part of your install base, they are highly likely down the road to buy something else
Even if it's twice as or three times more expensive. It's like give them that 100x experience
And that just comes from being a consumer. I hate when I buy things and they let me down
When I build products, I want them to be perfection. I want them to be so good that people
Can't give it anything except for a five star. I know that's not like a really complex model, but it's just how I think about it
There's a really good book
Written by Rob Fitzpatrick. He's the author of another great book called the mom test
He writes these like very short books that are like, you know, like 90 pages 100 pages
And it's like this is what this book is going to teach you to do
That's it and it's short and to the point and they're great and with the mom test
He basically wrote the book and most books like you write them you do like this sort of media blitz
The sales peak, you know in the first six months to a year and then they go down
Over time whereas the mom test has been the opposite, you know
there was no huge peak and every year just made more and more and more and more and more money because people just keep
Recommending it kind of the same way that you're talking about you want your courses to be perceived
And so then he wrote another book about how he did that called write useful books and one of his
Have you have you read through it yet? It's great. It's down. It's down on my on my literally on my coffee table right now
And i've read through about half of it
It's great. It's awesome. And I love the the sort of point he makes early on that's really counterintuitive
It's not how I have thought about things and it's not how i've done things but i'm trying to get more in this mindset
Which is that if you want people to recommend what you do to others?
It's not only about the quality. Well, the quality is huge, right? But there's all these psychological factors, right?
How are they going to look to their friends when they recommend you to others?
How is it going to make them and their friends and their colleagues feel right? Is it specific enough that they
That there will be problems they encounter where they can recommend what you're saying
And so I think this this process of you writing this course with the goal in mind of making sure that not only can people afford
It but they'll talk about it is its own like sort of tricky strategy like strategy to sort of think through
And like be successful at and clearly it's worked. I mean your courses have been I think you said you made 75 000 from your very first
Info product and I think 10 000 of that was in the first week or two. Yeah, that's a pretty huge reception
Yeah that and that that product made maybe 75 k over like 18 months
So it wasn't like I was going to live off of it, but my newer courses have been growing month over month every single month
There might have been a drop maybe one one month or so. I don't know but they they're consistently growing and part of that is
Everyone online will say oh, it's just as easy to sell a 2500 product as it is a 250 product
Bullshit, it's not
It's it sounds great, but it's not true and even if it was true
It's a lot harder to recommend a 2500 product to a friend who's going around to their friends be like, hey bud
You should buy this thing. It's 2500 bucks. It's like no it's easier to say. Hey, you should buy this thing
I got a lot of value out of it was 150 dollars. Like yeah still not
I know not everyone can afford that but it's more affordable
And so that that was my thought process is I already created I created 18 months ago. What do I care?
Every person who buys it is a win for me. Is there
A strategy to how you like lay out your product offering on your site so that you know
People are more likely to start by finding the like cheaper products that are going to be quick courses
Or do you kind of just have everything there and then whatever people are interested in they can go and they can find whatever solves
Their problem the latter I I kind of leave it open and say like here are the things that I offer
Now I could probably do that better and I think as I rebuild my my next website
I'll probably guide people to what I think is the right product based on
Something they've clicked on or something like that, right? I don't have any of that today. I have no automation like that
The only thing I do is when people buy the course
there is a module in each course that corresponds to
a subscription email
So it's most relevant to the value they get in the subscription email
So for example, when you go into my content operating system, which is just like how do you write a newsletter?
And 15 pieces of content every week in less than 90 minutes
And so they go through that course and they learn a little bit about basic copywriting and then at the end of that module
This is the only email automation I I have today
They'll just get an email from me after the module is marked as complete that said hi
I saw that you completed this module
You just learned a lot about copywriting
Did you know that I also have a subscription email that goes out that shows you how to structure high quality social media posts?
Using five examples each month. Would you like to sign up for that for nine dollars?
That's it
And so I let them come to my site shop around buy the course and the course
Is the trojan horse for the subscription business and since I have about fifteen thousand or sixteen thousand students between the two courses
Two thousand of them have opted in to my course
Between the two courses two thousand of them have opted into the nine dollar a month subscription
So it's an 18k mr business of sending one email
How many of these subscription newsletters do you have?
Just one
Just the one. Okay. Yeah, just one plus it corresponds to a module each
Yeah, it corresponds to a module in each of the courses and then I have a free newsletter that goes out to about 71,000
People that's totally free
Right. Gotcha. You've got what two different video courses. So yeah linkedin and about content. You've got
four
Free guides it looks like how to choose a profitable niche how to grow and monetize on linkedin
Etc. Those are awesome. We should put some of those on nd hackers actually and get those out. Appreciate it
Um, you're doing so many things. What do you what do you like the most about what you're doing?
And what do you not like is there something that you're like, you know, I can't wait like you stopped consulting and coaching
For example, that was like a sort of temporary step to get you to this other stuff
What's your favorite part of what you're doing? Yeah. Well, there are two sides to my favorite part
My favorite part for my customers is access. So
in a world of master classes
that are generally out of reach for folks who are
Developed in developed countries who don't come from a household that has a lot of extra money
Who are in a difficult situation who have lost their job?
I like the fact that they can get what I think is premium information that I think will help their their situation
At a cost that doesn't break the bank. I was raised by
very philanthropic parents and
Part of what I love is like I love to go to mexico
So I did a lot of mentoring of like latin american startups through 500 startups
I like hearing from people in small towns in villages in mexico. They're like, dr. LinkedIn operating course. I'm starting to write linkedin content
I'm, like that's super dope like not a lot of people can say that so I love that part
That's that's on the customer side
I think that's a lot of fun and getting all those messages because I have so many students is really cool
It's it's good when you're having a shitty day
A shitty day. Um, and then on my side, I like the fact that it's relatively automated
It's i'm getting a lot of time to spend with my wife in my 40s, right?
I'm 41 years old and and I want to use this prime of my life
Which I hope it is to spend time with my family before you know
My my parents are here and you know hanging out with my wife. I love that part of my business
things I don't like are
There are two ways. There are many ways to grow traffic, but two primary ways
There's social media, which is like up down up down up down and organic which like grows over time search engine optimization things like that
i'm mostly tethered to the the the former so
having to always have fresh new content is difficult and
You know, sometimes you feel like a slave to social media and yeah, that sucks
I know that feeling so, you know that that sucks sometimes but every time that I feel that sucking
I try and build a new system that like makes it easier
Mm-hmm. You sound like chanting chanting the king of systems to keep himself going even when the going gets tough. That's how I am
Yeah, totally
Do you have like a roadmap of the next you know copywriting module that you want to do or the next you know?
Is there a long list of like all the topics you want to cover or do you kind of have to go back to the drawing?
Board and more broadly. How do you grow from here? Right? You've got these courses. They're killing it
Do you just charge ever more money for those courses? Do you make new courses? Like what's
What's next? I think if anything? No, i'll never charge more money for those courses. I won't raise the prices
I used to consider it and I had thought about it and I even wrote an email saying I I might do that
So I hope it didn't come across as like some urgency grab but I I had I had thought about that at one point
But I don't think I will um, if anything i'll reduce them in price
I think for me it's starting to build more specific courses
One thing that i've learned over time is people don't want to learn everything about a specific topic generally
They want to learn to get from point A to point B
And so it's really starting to hone in on what those point A's are across my audience and ecosystem and say
Who's struggling to get to point B where and how can I solve that that problem in a fast and efficient and affordable way?
So I think it's almost building like a marketplace of of information products could could be a step in the right direction for for me
But I also like
Have this
Theme in my life where at about five years. I stop doing whatever I do. So like five years at zoc doc five years at patient pop
I'm going on my fourth year here as a creator like I might burn the boats and you know
Build like an air like a bed and breakfast like I have no idea right like I I I think it's really fun
I have a lot of confidence in myself and um, I think one of the most fun things in life is like
Doing things you don't know how to do. Yeah
And so who knows but I don't have like a really good long-term plan other than I woke up
Yesterday morning and had a really cool idea for a new micro business
So I started building it yesterday and like i'll test that out and if that works, maybe I go down that rabbit hole
As someone who has um lived a life doing sort of tech stuff online and running, you know being a solopreneur
And then transitioned a little bit and started an airbnb. I could highly recommend it. It's really fun. It's really cool
It's a totally different business and I think with your mind you would absolutely crush it because you're going to be competing
Mostly locally with people who aren't going to be that thoughtful and it's very different
So I like the the variety approach to to doing things just to wrap up here for a bit and we'll let you go
Obviously he's got a there's a ton of indie hackers listening to this a lot of aspiring indie hackers who haven't done anything yet
Who have trouble, you know taking the leap from wanting to do this to actually doing it and here you are
You know just divulging a ton of knowledge and stuff. That's like
Helpful in theory, but not necessarily helpful until people get to a certain point
What do you think people who are listening in who are in that situation can take away from your journey?
Is there anything you've learned any helpful advice that could help people get going who are kind of kind of stuck and kind of just waiting
To get started. Yeah, i'll kind of paint this picture a very true picture. Um
I've been reading indie hackers for a long time. Like I come on and
Browse the articles i've read like all my favorite heroes like
Are on the website right like and i'm very envious of people who can build things using code
So those are like my heroes the the guys and gals that I want to be like and so for many years
i've been sort of somebody who just
Read from afar and looked up at indie hackers and in other other forums and thought never ever will I?
Be featured on something like that
In four years of just like doing small incremental steps every day the aggregate total
of that action now i'm on the podcast like that's that's cool and
What I would tell them is the easiest way to get started is just putting their thoughts into the ecosystem on a regular basis
When I started writing in 2018
I sucked I cringe at everything that I look at from 2018 2019 and 2020 and so like if you can get started
Anyway, if you're like me and you have knowledge
Just talk about it. If you want here are three steps improve yourself
Take notes share them
That's it. If you do though, if you do those three things you're off to a good start
Love it improve yourself take notes and share the notes. Justin Welsh. Thanks a ton for coming on the podcast
I'm glad you finally got here to your reading about your heroes
Where can people go to find you online and to find out about your courses and your work?
Where can people go to find you online and to find out about your courses and your writings and your guides?
Yep, they can go and look around at my website, which is justinwelsh.me. It's justin w e l s h dot m e
Awesome. All right. Thanks again Justin for coming on the show. Thanks guys. I appreciate it
You