Do you consider yourself a
creator? I read a newsletter. I'm trying to create an online course. I've done a couple of things where it took a project from a rough idea to actually finish product. Yeah, I would say I'm a creator.
So let's dig in on what you create. I see. In your Twitter profile, you created a remote company and. Built it up from idea to exit, and then you're working on some courses now. And is that you deejaying as well? Let's start with the company. Give me the three-minute story on that since you're already start to finish and then talk about the other two, since they are the more interesting stuff.
So in the past 10 years I've been working primarily in an early stage startup environment. And initially I used to build companies for a venture fund. So they would give me business plan and say, just get it started from zero to one, meaning guy getting initial operations, running, setting the initial product up and hiring the first few employees. And then every three months kind of did that for around two years. At which time I thought to myself, why not do it on my own?
And right around that time I got laid off. So it was pretty good timing. And I got lucky enough to meet a couple of very good people that I ended up just working on a couple of ideas initially. So kind of like white boarding sessions, helping people out on their crazy startup ideas. And that eventually turned into four of us working every single day at night.
On this projects where we were planning on building a Tinder app for recruitment, you open your mobile phone, you look like what kind of jobs are available in your radius. And then you just like swipe through. Yes, I'm interested. I'm not interested. After a year, we realized that's not. A good idea for a host of reasons, but we stuck in the recruiting field and we ended up building an advertising technology solution for recruiters like FedEx.
So any type of company that would be hiring at large scale. And yeah, this does turn into a company that we grew to 15 employees. With profitability. And then in 2019, we got acquired by a larger business. And so when I usually talk about this story, I think the most interesting aspect of it was that we ran it remotely back when that was not cool free COVID yet. And so very different.
Yeah, eh, things really have changed for sure. So you built up a company in, did you start creating music after the company or before
music was something that I started with very early on. So my dad is a conductor and composer. Of classical music and other things came hand-in-hand with that. I had to play violin. I had to apply for the concert abattoir when I was five, started playing it's a conservatory like at age six.
And that meant dad wanted me to go into professional classical music, but I. Clearly not it's either not talented enough or didn't have the passion for it because in my chord, there are crazy good musicians, but I just couldn't see myself going down that route for life and yeah. Rebelled against that. So quit music and quit violin. When it's 14 years old, didn't do it for a bunch of years.
But then when I was in college, I caught the electronic music bug started creating mixed tapes, started deejaying, and then music production follows in 2020 during the lockdown. Yeah.
So tell me about the course. I know you went through on-deck and I'm guessing it might be something about remote operations just judging by the
Twitter profile. Yeah. So the course business ideas started early. So after building our company, I stayed with the acquire until end of last year. And in January, Michael was to take a sabbatical, lean back, just have time to read books, to explore other things and to let my mind wander. And so my goal was to learn something while I was taking time off. And so I took a course on Gumroad about programmatic SMS.
And it was a two hour workshop where a guy from India would talk through what kind of plugins he would use in Chrome and how he would use those in conjunction with Google sheets to create a content strategy that has SEO optimized, tremendous value. And so then after watching the session. I thought to myself. Okay. So number one, I paid number two, it's brought me tremendous value.
And number three, I think I can do something similar in terms of quality and potentially in terms of sales that got me started in thinking around the business model of online courses. And in the past, I've usually evaluated industries or business ideas from the perspective of an organization. So it takes just a lot of revenue.
To become profitable with an organization yet on the other hand, if you are a solo founder, and if you wants to become profitable, the revenue threshold is much, much lower.
You're creating this course. You're building it to be profitable for you at the individual level and having that goal in mind of about a thousand euros a month and you're two organizations.
So that would be, let's say the final step. So I don't know how familiar you are with the online education space, but. Different types of audiences, you can sell B to C, which would be similar to what is done by a Gumroad grant. So like an individual sees a PDF, an ebook, a online course, they spent $29, whatever, but it's still selling to one individual. And then the organizational level is selling into learning and development departments in larger organizations, which is interesting because.
Sell multiple licenses. But my assumption is that it's very different, difficult to go zero to a hundred. So with the topic that I'm covering, which is everything around running remote, or it is an important topic for a lot of businesses, which. To move from co-location to a completely remote setup or companies that decide that in the future is going to be hybrid. Or even if it's just a small startup that wants to run remote from day one.
Yes. In that respect, I'm selling to organizations because like topically, it is aligned with their professional context. Yeah. So
you're solving an organizational problem and selling to the individual. Would that be
another way to put it? Yeah, exactly. My goal is to help organizations. More smoothly. It would be more effective.
How do you go about building your
audience? Now, this is constantly evolving. So for now, at the beginning of the year, I had a blog where I was publishing, I would say semi-regularly so long form blog posts. I had an email newsletter on MailChimp, which I used sporadically to send emails out every other week. And I had a dormant Twitter accounts, which I haven't used in two years or so, and in February.
So when I committed to doing online education, I went back to Twitter because that was how I used the platform in the past year. So every single time we would build a business in a new industry, I found that Twitter was a very useful tool to figure out who the smart people in that particular industry. Follow them listen and read what they think and what they share. And then roughly after a couple of weeks, you will have a pretty good foundational understanding of that industry.
So then you can start attracting with them. And this time around, I actually opened up the Twitter analytics page and it just blew my mind. How many impressions? You could get via Twitter. So I would then just have Twitter on one hand where I had, I dunno, 500 tweets and 160,000 impressions. And then on the other hand, a lot of long form blog posts, which got me thousand visitors with 3000 impressions a month.
And I just thought to myself, maybe it would make sense to flip it around and then just use the different channels as different parts of the funnel. And Twitter seemed like a really. Top of the funnel channel, because you could reach people quickly. There's obviously different advantages with Twitter by reaching outs on DMS. But yeah, currently I have a three step funnel, so like a top it's Twitter and LinkedIn, where at Twitter I'm more active in the way I use Twitter.
Either to engage with other people that I find interesting or as a public notebook. So this is something I started doing back in March and you know, how people write threads. I would just literally try to write down every single idea, every single observation I have in a tweet. And there's a couple of things you can do to structure the information. So Twitter has this function called moments, which I think initially. Built to collect a curated list of tweets around a topic.
So for example, you host south by Southwest the Conor prince, and then some people are tweeting and the user conference organizer can create the south by Southwest 2021 moment where you just collect the best tweets instead of a full thread of people who have the hashtag. And so what you can do with moments is you can just create a moment. My best threads or I created them. It's my thread collection.
And I just put everything that I tried to document into the thread collection that comes in pretty handy because the second step of the funnel as my newsletter and my blog and what I do when I write my newsletters, I just go through the tweets of the past week. See what has gotten the most engagement or what was most interesting. And then I just use the tweets themselves. It's building blocks for my newsletter.
And that saves me a lot of time because it's already, but content building block that I can repurpose the third step would be any type of paid products. And so in my case, that would be the online courses. And one of the things that I just try to remind myself every single time, three years ago, I had some sort of hesitation of pulling out my credit card, putting in all the information and paying for it on a monthly basis for a newsletter. I was thinking. That's so out there.
And I think nowadays there is already a group of people who already have developed his appreciation for paying directly to the creator of the content via some sort of payment gateway, whether it's like sub stacked or review or something else. And now it comes like this entire movement of productizing, your knowledge and charging via online courses. And once you're in. Bubble.
It feels like everyone's doing it, but once you step out of the bubble, you just realized that it's fairly poorly understood that this is like a viable way of making a living. So it's a very interesting time to explore. Okay.
Are you monetizing now? Have you started selling the course?
Yes. So I did one kind of like experiments where I put some of my thinking around brand strategy into a video course and sold it by a Gumroad. I made a couple of a hundred of bucks in revenue, so yeah. I started making money with it, but it's nowhere near like a steady income stream where I can say, yes, this is good trajectory that I want to have. The good thing about it is it's showed me a couple of shortcomings in my approach.
And so my entire thinking about online courses back in February, Since I'm coming from the remote work world. I appreciate it. And, uh, try to create a lot of assets that can be consumed asynchronously and online education that's usually referred to as self-serve or evergreen courses. And I created one of those started selling it and what I saw as people bought it, but they didn't take it. So they didn't consume the information.
I think the average cost is under 10% completion rate.
Yeah, and it's abysmal, right? If you just want to make a quick buck, or even if you want to make big bucks, that's fine. You can capture value. But the problem is that on a product level, you don't get any type of feedback or data points that can help you to improve the product, which makes it very difficult to then capture even more value. If your goal is to do that.
And secondly, as an educator, if you really go into it with the intention, Transforming someone's understanding of a topical area socket. So then I started doing on-deck and also ship 30 at the same time in all of those, they revolve around the community, which kind of like drives this point. Home work or effort is being done. If there is accountability, this is like the main argument for court based courses or any type, like where you. Alive and a community type of experience.
And so what I am right now building is a course about remote team communication and the formats which I'm working towards is a two day workshop. Why today, usually cohort based courses are somewhere between. And eight weeks. I personally think it's long specifically if you're selling to B2B audiences and where it's a very tactical, you might get through the entire content in fewer days, and you would have actionable insights in a weekend.
The second thing why I wants to experiment with live workshops versus two, they recorded evergreen stuff is because the main transformation happens. Hi the knowledge. And you can do that very well in zoom, by a breakout sessions and via breakout exercises. And you just can't do that in an evergreen format because you still depend on people to do. And the third interesting aspects about live. Yes. As an educator, you have a certain level of understanding.
You're a few steps removed from the beginning where you don't know about the topics as everything makes sense to you. And that's a problem, right? Because as a student, you still have to assistance. And then if you have. Participation from the participants. It is like a brain trust where you can and gets to better results as if you could have on your own.
And so that's very interesting from a product development perspective, because all the learnings that you generate in a live session, and let's say iteration, number one, they could then bake into iteration number two. And so hopefully right, the product becomes better and better and better. Currently my thinking around online courses. So my goal is to do like a two day workshop, but in order to get there, I am doing public office hours.
So the public office hours are 60 minute sessions where I just take one small topic. The goal is to go through the contents with a smaller group of people. See what resonates with dozens, what doesn't make sense, improve on the content, but also while preparing for the session, create all the assets, all the documentation, all the tools that I will need for the actual workshop, escalate it up until we have all the content already with one dry run at least, and then do the full shebang.
And ideally also generate a small audience while.
What's your north star for success. How do you know you're on the
right track? I guess the answer probably changes frequently. Overall. I would still say being happy and being healthy because 10 years ago I burned out and I was in a state where I did not believe that I could get healthy again. So it was a 10 month long psychosomatically induced bronchitis, which was just like triggered. Working too much or not having personal toolkits to deal with internal, external pressure, which I think by now I have improved on.
But since then, the value of just being healthy is number one. So I don't think I want to go down a route where I'm going to grind myself to death. Yeah. It's more. Guiding sentence, which is leading a creative and recreative life. And it just means working on projects that are creative and the status of coming up with something new, because that's what I'm interested in. And then recreative in terms of just like also enjoying,
I know you mentioned a thousand dollars a month as the goal with the course. Yeah. Your current creator goal, so
to speak. Yes, but I don't have kind of like a goal wall in front of me where it happened, mapped out. So instead there's this one great article by Scott Adams school writes about systems over goals. And so instead I try to focus just to put in the reps and that's what I've seen with the newsletter and main learning for me was it just started changing. I committed to a regular cadence and started churning out one newsletter every week on the same day, which is committed to a cadence.
Maybe it's like once a quarter, once a month and due to work. And I tried to do that with the newsletter, with Twitter, with developing the course curriculum. And I just hope that the money doesn't run out before I become profitable.
So my last question for you today, if you could send a tweet back to your start, what would it be? And when,
so, along the lines of the mental health conversation, I guess it would be something along the lines of, yeah, just take it easy. But I think, I don't know if it would have been good advice because I, I wouldn't be here today if I wouldn't have gone through the shit. Secondly, I don't think I would've listened to it, sweetie. If I didn't listen to my mom, even one mental model that I really like is the concept of tension and release, which is ICU everywhere.
So it's like in computer science is like the zero or one states. It's either on premise. I think like mental states, it's either you're focused or wandering in muscles. It's like after you have your muscle flexed or it's relaxed and understanding those concepts a little bit earlier, I think could have improved some of the aspects. So even the. Health aspects around. I know that I have to go hard, but if I do, then at least I need to relax a little bit more.
And I guess that would have been the tweets as to when maybe 10 years ago, anything before about my mental capacity. Wouldn't have been there to even consume that.