#193 Justin Welsh – How to Build a Thriving Creator Business

I don't think people recognize the amount of trust that you have to build in order to sell something really expensive . Oh , $1,500 bucks . For most people that is a massive purchase . That's their mortgage , that's five times , six times their car payment . Like that is a huge purchase .

He's over 490,000 followers on LinkedIn , 450,000 followers on Twitter and he's generated over 600 million impressions in the last four years . Now he's on kickoff sessions live from Manhattan , showing you exactly how you can do it , too . What's up , people ?

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kick off . Let's do it . Where I want to start is to quote yourself . I've put out some great quotes for this conversation , but when I start with , quitting your job , when not in the fall back on is risky , but building a safety net with your skills and knowledge , that's the safest thing you can do for your family . I've taken this advice personally .

I'm the first product of your work right and I built this into leaving my 9-5 , which wasn't something basic . I was working in finance and I took your advice of getting up to 70% of how much I was making my job .

I remember the day distinctly when I made about 70% roughly of my 9-5 , and I was like time to go and it wasn't a factor of just you know something , quick it was . I'd learned the skills and knowledge and ability to not be too , I guess , worried that I wasn't going to be able to make it on my own .

When did you come to this realization yourself and how did it kind of come to be ?

I needed just some time off . So I , like I had to go two feet in . What happened and where I kind of got that from is over the last four and a half years I've worked with probably 100 plus people who have wanted to do exactly what I did and exactly what you did .

And what I've found is that the easiest way from a from a comfortability perspective and for someone's family and to have the runway they need to , you know , really effectively make the leap is if you can get to that 60% and again , that's just like a random number , right , like doesn't have to be 60 , it could be 65 , right .

But if you can get to 60 , 65 , 70% of your current take home earnings doing your side job , if you get another 40 hours a week back to work on it , the likelihood that you're able to take what you've done and scale it up to 100 is much more likely than starting at zero .

So I it didn't necessarily come from my personal experience it came from my experience after going through what I would call like my sort of debacle and seeing 100 people plus try and do it in an effective way , and I found it's great . I think it's great . Advice doesn't mean it's going to work for everyone .

I know people who have been like I threw it in , I threw the towel in , just went for it , right , great Works . For some people I generally think those are outliers and that's why I caution against just kind of jumping in .

Right , and I think that's what's important here is the fact that everyone has different nuance life circumstances . And it's quite interesting , right , because you know you were much kind of further on your career and you made these handbrake turns , which is quite interesting we're going to get into .

You mentioned solar plenorship is about embracing passions , spending more time with family and doing less of what you hate .

Now , the biggest challenge I've had with something like this is the fact that when I'm personally responsible for everything that I do , I feel like I get caught in the loop of having to work harder , and I spoke to Sahab about this recently as well , about the fact that I feel that even when I reach an inch of success , I feel like I might all fall down if

I don't keep it up . How have you been able to , I guess , embrace it and enjoy it and kind of enjoy the moment while you're growing ?

They're like if I reached 100% of , like , everything that I wanted to do with my business , that's how it would feel . So it's like this constant reminder to myself . It doesn't mean that I live a life where , like , I don't do anything that I dislike .

There are things I do that I dislike all the time , less so today than when I was working a job , you know , in corporate America or for startups or things like that but to me it's like it's front loaded .

So when you get started with , even if it's a passion project , the idea that , like , you're going to do something that you love so much that there's nothing you're going to hate is false . But a lot of that stuff , in my opinion , can be front loaded . So the hard work comes in the beginning , where you're really getting the system set up .

You're getting the processes set up . If you're hiring people , you're getting those first really important or crucial hires in the door . You're figuring out your pitch , you're figuring out your go to market . You're doing all the things that any business would do to get started .

During those times , you're going to try a lot of things and a lot of things aren't going to work , and you're going to do a lot of things that you don't love doing . What happens when you get traction is you start to see opportunities to do things that you don't like , or take the things you don't like and give them to somebody else , right .

So outsource those , delegate them , automate them using technology . So my whole goal is not been to recreate my corporate work structure , to recreate working at a startup so that I'm making the money and growing the business , but my life feels the same To me . Well , I didn't see a purpose in that .

So it's always reminded myself that the goal is not to grow the business quarter over quarter or year over year or month over month . It's to make sure that every month , every week , every day , my life is getting a small percentage point better , and if I can keep reminding myself of that , it stays top of mind . So that's why I wrote that .

you could have maybe slowed down , but now you're going to go back around with the Creator MBA . So was there ever an inflection point in your mind saying am I getting myself back into not necessarily too much work , but am I going into a space I don't necessarily need to ?

I've been trying to build like what I would call an internet business , for lack of a better description , since like 2014 . So it's really been nine , almost 10 years . It's just people didn't see the first six years because I was scrambling and flailing and I didn't know what I was doing . So it's kind of hidden right .

There's like a YouTube series out there that doesn't exist anymore . There's like an Instagram . There's like a million things out there that , like people don't see . I had this thing like Tales of the Whiteboard , like I was . It was more related to like growing your SaaS platform or growing your business .

I had this other thing on Instagram that I did that had like a lot of Canva designs . It was really , really lame when I think about it , but I didn't know what I was doing right . Like most people , so it looks short , but it's been long , I think . The other thing that I really like to think about is hold on this watch threw me off , sorry guys .

Sticker time that threw me off from we am I re-asking the question ?

Justin's working on his business , working on his business , which is true , by the way , but from a product perspective , I actually haven't released anything in quite a long time . And the Creator MBA came to me because I get this constant feedback from people saying , like when's the next thing coming ? I'd really like to take it to the next step .

We did your LinkedIn course , your content course or whatever it was , and we were able to grow our audience , but now , like , how do I monetize this ? How do I put a business around this ? How do I market this business ?

And so , based on what I heard from the people that follow me , that seemed like a real ripe opportunity and I didn't necessarily want to go at something super hard that made my lifestyle less attractive to me and my family , so I announced it , I think , just 90 days ago or so , maybe even less .

I've been working on it for about eight months , so it's been slow and steady , taking my time making sure that it's working well and that it works inside of my lifestyle , and I also think it'll be a service to the people that follow me . So the thing that makes me excited about my business is when people come back to me .

Like I shared something on Twitter today and it was a message from a girl who said I never thought I would do it . And then , like I read your stuff for a year and then I did it and now I have an agency , and like it was an awesome message to read . I think this next product will help fuel more stories like that .

So that's sort of my end goal to begin with

.

You're going to have people who went from like $0 to $100,000 because they're taking these frameworks . Now , that feedback process is something I really want to work in on , because you went from , you know , just using Twitter and LinkedIn and nailing that , like that's .

It's not just that , you've been doing it consistently and then you started this new newsletter , which was really interesting . So , for context , you didn't just use your existing newsletter , you create a new newsletter which is another question .

I want to get into why you did that , but that feedback process is like building a startup right , and you come from that space as well , so it's interesting to see how they develop . What was the idea to build this kind of build up courses , pent up course and build a second newsletter ?

to call it . I would get them and they'd be like 15 minute long reads , felt like I was reading two chapters . It was very philosophical or very like 30,000 feet in the air , whereas , like , you know , something to think through or an observation , but there wasn't a lot of tactical stuff .

And so I thought to myself most of the people that I talked to online are at the beginning point of their journey . Like , if you look at my audience , 79.9% of my audience , based on the data that I collect from them , either haven't started a business or have started something part-time and aren't making enough money . That's eight out of 10 .

Right , so what do they need ? They don't need inspiration , they don't need pie in the sky strategy , they don't need 30,000 foot view . They need , like , how do I do this thing ? This very specific thing . What button do I press , what ? How do I , what time do I do this thing ? What's the best step by step instruction for this very specific marketing funnel ?

So the whole idea before behind the newsletter was to provide that kind of actionable advice . So the Saturday solarpreneur it's on its 101st issue tomorrow and it provides actionable , tactical , practical advice for solarpreneurs and creators and entrepreneurs on the internet in less than four minutes per issue .

So people can open it up Saturday morning over a cup of coffee . They can read it , be done with it in less than 250 seconds and have something they can go out and do . Right , and the feedback that I collected from that on a regular basis is like this is so awesome . Can you also tell me how to do this other thing ?

And so every time that somebody makes a suggestion , it's obviously an opportunity for me to write a new newsletter . But after doing it for 101 issues , I've got I don't know 1000 pieces of feedback from people that I want this , I want this . You haven't written about this . And I thought to myself well , cool , I can continue to write about that .

Seven day break , seven day break , seven day break . What if I just took all that stuff , put it together , didn't just base it on my journey , but what I see from thousands of people that I know on the internet .

It made it affordable , accessible , easy to get through and easy to act on , and that's why I decided to launch the new course and it's been a lot of work but , you know , balancing those two things has been , has been fun , because I enjoy it .

I wasted many years doing this , making it all up as a lot as I go , so I put everything together in a very seamless and easy to follow course for you guys to follow and just learn exactly how to do it .

So if you want to bypass a lot of the mess with your podcast , check out the links down below the podcast university and we'll show you exactly how to launch and scale your own podcast . And that's

been the basis of the new product right , because it's all the feedback and I think the feedback loop that you discuss as well is very it's very helpful because it shows like expectations for us reality .

So when I go through a lot of your work , it was what you wanted to build was creating great offers , pricing , getting people to the website , setting up lead magnets , business systems and more . The feedback you got was fundamentals systems , email marketing , content creation , distribution , turning interest into buyers , packaging and pricing .

So , if you imagine a Venn diagram , it's like what you expected , what people want , and in the middle is where the opportunity and offers . What were some of the realizations you've had with this ? Because , like , your approach is a tech startup approach .

When I was working tech startups , we would do this with an NPS score , we'd send it out , we'd use some like tagging to be able to see what the issues are and then just bind it up and build it .

Where I can pull from those . I can bring it into my business now and I can start to use some of that experience . It's interesting because people write back to me and they tell me and I've asked them to write back and each email leading up to the course launch and saying like what else are you looking for ? What's missing in this agenda ?

Like , you know , what am I thinking about in this course that you think is a miss right ? There's all these different questions that I've been asking them and I've also been collecting data as they sign up for my newsletter and for the course . People want certain things that I know they don't need .

They want certain things that I know they need , but they also want certain things that I don't think they need . So I'll give you an example . Some people will write back and say I just wanna know what's the best time to write a long form Twitter post . There's no right answer it doesn't matter .

In the grand scheme of things , it doesn't matter if it's nine o'clock in the morning or nine o'clock in the morning . That's not important , and the people who have built big businesses aren't thinking about these tiny little tactical things . They might ask me about what's the best software to start a newsletter on , doesn't matter .

All that matters is you start it and you continue it . That's the thing that matters . It doesn't matter what software it is .

So I have to balance this idea of collecting the information that they want , going through it line by line , trying to pull out the things that actually matter , and then bringing a bunch of what I call the unsexy stuff , the stuff that nobody asks for , that they're forgetting . So I'll give you an example .

I often ask people okay , you're a coach in the executive space , what's your unique value proposition ? I've got 10 executive coaches here . Why you Give me your best pitch . It's like oh , I've got 10 years of experience . So does seven other people in the 10 , like , now what ?

And most people can't really get down to the very specific thing that they're good at what's the specific reason that someone should choose you to overcome their specific challenge ? And the person that chooses you , who are they specifically ? And people really struggle to answer that .

So there's a lot of that kind of stuff inside of the course as well , which I think people skip over because they wanna do tools , tech , software , time content . I wanna make sure that they have the fundamentals , the foundation , the thing that they can build the house upon .

So I've also haven't heard a lot of that stuff , but I'm putting it in there because they need it .

Going back to that USP , because that's very interesting , because even you're testing me on this and the way I think about our business we do B2B podcasting and it's trying to position that and see my USP within . That is mainly my experience , but it can't be just justified , or not ?

So how do you walk someone through that process to identify what makes them unique ?

They might say something like I help early stage companies grow ? What kind of companies ? Plumbers , saas companies , right , communications companies ? Who ? Who do you help ? I like to help everyone Me too , right , but it becomes really challenging to help everyone . So it usually starts off with something I call a value statement .

Then the thing I might do is flip it around and turn value into pain , problems , objections , challenges , worries and generally those are things that people say , yes , like I want your help , but these are the things I worry about , these are the objections .

I have to working with you , these are the things that are the concerns that I have , and you have to understand those things because you want to talk about those . The language that you use in your USP or your UVP have to be objection overcoming right . You have to be able to speak to the things that they worry about most .

Then we move from objections and we turn it into what I call like future value or a preferred future state . So when you think about a preferred future state , what you're thinking about is after somebody works with you or as they're going through the process of working with you .

If they were to describe it a 10 out of 10 , how might they describe it right ? So some words might be like easy , fast , simple , better than expected , step by step , right , like there's a lot of words your customers might use to describe a really thrilling experience and it's gonna be super dependent on what kind of sort of industry you work in .

But after a while you start to collect your specifics , you start to collect your customer pain and objections , your customer future state , and then I like to bring in like a movement statement . So a movement statement is really okay , great , we know who we're helping , we know what their worries are , we know how to talk about their future state .

But like , how do we really separate ourselves , almost like politicians do ? So if you think about politics , democrats here in the United States and Republicans generally don't go out and say look at us , we're great . They look at the other people and say they're terrible right .

So , we have to position ourselves against something an ethos , a thought process , a best practice that gets weaved into the UVP too . So that's four steps right , and we kind of go down this really long path where , at the end , what you have is almost like an extended elevator pitch .

So you're able to say very succinctly , very crisply , who are you for , why shouldn't they worry about their objectives ? Tell me exactly what it's gonna feel like when they're done . What's the movement we're all going on together . When you do that , someone should be able to come to you and say I've interviewed 10 people who do X just like you .

Man , you really spoke to me . You nailed everything you said . It really resonated with me . That's how you get chosen . That's at least part of how you get chosen , and so I weave a lot of that into the course because I think it's critical .

It's not like you're stepping and shitting on people , and that positioning is a delicate balance , and the way you describe us versus them is actually like in the 48 Laws of Power . It's how to build a cult . So one of the core components is having that enemy . It's how religion is constructed . It's how a lot of debates and politics are constructed .

But what's really again made me admire your work for so many years is the fact that you don't push too far , right , so you mentioned that getting to the top is one of two ways . You step on people's head or you get lifted under shoulders . How come you've never had to ? How have you sustained your kind of integrity which you're writing over years ?

Right , because internet's getting more divisive .

That comes from just the values from my parents and it felt uncomfortable for me . That's interesting . So to like put people in two camps and have them duke it out , like that just doesn't feel comfortable for me . There's a lot of people who do that on the internet right .

But how many things have you seen online where people are like this thing is dead or these people are terrible ? It's like short-term , you'll get some followers . But anyone who reacts to like , very like , definitive statements 100% Are the most immature people 100% . I don't want a following of immature folks who think definitively .

I want a following of people who think okay , I have this sort of strong opinion , loosely held . That , to me , is a following worth building . That , to me , is a network worth being in the middle of . And so I try and use padded words when I talk . So I use words or when I write . More likely to right Instead of like .

It's always going to be this way More likely to , less likely to . I found that often this helps right . Perhaps you will enjoy this too , or maybe there'll be some good nuggets in here for you . It's always maybe , perhaps likely . I try not to speak in absolutes .

And by being very careful about not speaking in absolutes , I feel like I've been able to build a movement where I don't have to shit on a bunch of other things in order to build it , and I think that's a lack of a more classy way to say it .

Whatever you want to do , your reputation carries you and your brand is your reputation , and a lot of these kids some 27 , right , a lot of people that are my age or even a little bit younger they're very quick to make those absolute terms or to pretty much banish themselves by saying something particular that it's just so divisive .

And this is kind of why I'd never really resonated that much with Twitter , because I guess I love LinkedIn , because the fact that you get people on the platform , people are behind the mission , they're more professional and they kind of , even if they don't agree with you , they kind of understand that you're kind of on a quest to build something , whereas Twitter ,

to me , seems much more divisive . There's people doing great things , of course , but just at a general level , which is kind of at odds with who I am as well , my kind of value system , and I don't want to be at the top of the mountain and everyone else kicked off the side , right .

Like you say one thing to someone's face and then when you have some time with the CEO or whomever your boss is and it's private , you use that time to kind of like push the other person down and jockey ahead . Happens all the time , right ?

And , by the way , to say that I've never done it would be a lie , right , I'm guilty of doing bad things in my life and it's been a learning experience for me as I've grown .

What I found , the more that I grew inside of startups especially from going from my first one to my second one , where I went from sort of like individual contributor and middle manager and director to eventually being an executive and a C-level .

Like I found that and that you saw less of sort of the former , where people were kind of jockeying for positions , still happened , but the people who were really getting to the top were the folks who were doing it . What I felt the right way .

They were being lifted on shoulders and so I built an organization at my last business , 150 employees that reported to . You know people who reported to me . So I had 150 folks on my team and , like , we NPS internally that team and that team always had the highest NPS is because we built a culture where , like , you felt like part of something bigger .

You felt like people weren't jockeying to be politically ahead of you . You felt like if you performed really well , you got promoted and it was deserved , it went to the right person and of course , we made mistakes .

But , like I saw that happening and I watched the culture that it built internally and I thought , you know , when I go and do my own business , like I don't wanna add to this chamber of anger and fear and divisiveness , I wanna like , I want people to like my content and I wanna grow because people are putting me on their shoulders and cheering me on versus

they hate me and that's what drives my growth . You know that just felt more natural to me after having gone through that for 10 years .

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I had this very similar experience . It was one of the largest startups in the UK , as fast as growing , like Unicorn Company , like ever in the UK , and one of the reasons why they grew so quickly was because it was so cultural .

It was like the Goldman Sachs of FinTech , basically how it was described , and I've had another experience with someone recently I actually was talking about it earlier . This individual got to head of private banking , one of the biggest investment banks in the world . So think of how far up the chain .

And this individual mentioned to me that to get to that point after 30 years , you have to literally kill people in the process . So you have to push them off the mountain , stab them in the back . This is what they told me directly at a dinner and I just taught myself . In terms of your values and your systems , who are you at the end of that right ?

Does that make sense ? What ? type of individual have you become to just get this financial reward ? Because you've definitely lost a lot of the life experiences right , so it's quite interesting . Now I wanna transition into some of the different aspects of why creators fail . So you alluded to seven fantastic points , media around , course building and failure

, so not having an intended outcome , not teaching a framework and inability to transfer complex ideas to students . Focusing too much on looking professional , the content just being anecdotal . Unrealistic expectations and not focusing on actions within the course . What brought you to that realization of why creators are failing ?

But mostly it's because when I see people especially getting started as creators number one , they're impatient , so they see maybe the last year of my journey or the last two years . They don't see the previous eight , previous seven , whatever it might be .

They think everything's overnight and I'm generalizing , by the way , there are plenty of people who don't think that way . But that's a tough mindset to get started with .

And then , once they collect a little bit of experience whether it's in marketing or in customer success or sales or coaching or whatever it is that they're doing they tend to want to take all that stuff right , everything they know , and put it together inside something massive and monstrous and package it in charge . $1,000 for 1,500 .

I don't think people recognize the amount of trust that you have to build in order to sell something really expensive . People aren't just stumbling upon your website . You've been creating content for two months or even six months , and they're like oh , 1,500 bucks For most people that is a massive purchase .

That's their mortgage , that's their five times , six times their car payment . That is a huge purchase . So I see that happening so often . So what I try and tell creators to do and there's a great guy , irwin Lear , who's doing this he's got 5,000 , 6,000 followers . He grew his following and then he's like hey , I figured out how to do this .

One really specific thing when I was growing Want to figure it out it's $25 . And people have been following his journey for the last 12 months . He's been trying to build it and , of course , he's got probably 500 people who want to spend $25 , right , like $12,500 . That's awesome .

That's like a great way to get started , because then you learn from selling that and then all the lessons that you learn from selling that can be applied as you grow and you grow and people will ask me great , 12,500 . How do I make 125,000 ? How do I 10x that ? You do it 10 times longer . That's the answer .

It's not like there's two levers and you pull one and you press a button and then you 10x your revenue . You just do it longer . You build your following longer If you have 5,000 followers , imagine what you'll make when you have 50,000 or 500,000 . But on that journey you have to understand the fundamentals of business .

Creating content and getting attention is a lot different than monetizing the attention that you actually get .

So that's why I think , growing really slowly on social media , learning business as you grow , making mistakes , having this long game mindset , or where people win , the guys who are hacking and tricking and potting their way to 500,000 followers in six months really struggle to monetize , because I know a lot of them who can't make more than four grand a month even

though they have 300 , 400,000 followers , because they use hacks and tricks and they're not known for anything in particular , like saying cash .

So it's that , that cumulative trust and authority that you build up , which , I think , is why getting yourself in a space of a service business initially was what I did , right , because I had the info product , but I didn't have the audience in the scale .

So it was like , yes , this was helpful on the side of my nine to five , but I wasn't gonna replace my income , whereas a service business for me , yeah , there's a bit of elbow grease , a lot of work involved with it , but it's a good way to build your authority and build your influence and your scale .

So then , over time , then you can move between the two and this was something you did quite familiar in the beginning too , right , you did a lot of coaching .

And so if you just I know everyone wants to build a course or an info product If you can't talk to people , if you don't have thousands of data points or even hundreds of data points for something smaller , it becomes very difficult . A service business is essentially you're getting paid to talk to people , 100% right , and that is like an easy way .

It's not easy , it's a simpler way to get started right . So when I came out , my first service business was I was doing advising and consulting for SaaS companies , because that's what I had done . As I was creating content , I kept checking my DMs , because a lot of times when people wanted to hire me , they DM me .

Hey man , I wanna jump on a call with you . I'd love to learn more about your consulting business . And these data points started coming in where they were like scrolling through LinkedIn . It was like not a lot about . There's some sales and marketing , right .

It's like oh , how do you build an outbound marketing team or outbound sales team or how do you get in more inbound leads , right , Like normal questions . But there was like in between that , there was like 100 questions about LinkedIn content and I was like , oh , this is really interesting . This isn't what I do for a living . I do .

Early stage healthcare SaaS right Like this is so unrelated , but I thought of those as data points , and so I used that to build my first little Piddly Wink $50 course , and that became something that people bought , and when they bought it , I offered them an opportunity to talk to me about it , and when I started having conversations I realized it could be bigger

. So I slowly , over time , pivoted towards something I had no intention of getting into , based on everything that I heard from my audience . But it wouldn't have happened unless I was talking to them , unless I was getting on a Zoom call and saying tell me more about what you said .

So you have to find a way to talk to , eventually , who your end user is going to be . Service business is the easiest way to do that . That's why I recommend it .

I always look at them , I read through them and I'm like , oh , and then my mind will do this thing where it kind of goes down the path of what that might look like in the perfect future . So it's like , oh man , if I just did this thing and it worked really well , like wow , life would be so different .

You have to kind of come back to reality , reground yourself and say what's all the work that I have to do to get there ? Number one but are there any other data points , like in my universe right now , that would suggest that that thing is going to work really really well ?

And oftentimes the answer is either no or there's like one , like someone told me one time I should do this one thing , and that's it's not a good enough indicator that you should do something .

What I wanna see is the same question 25 , 50 , 75 , 100 times coming from the same sort of prospect , and if I can see that happening over and over and over and over again , it becomes at least too loud to ignore . That doesn't mean you have to pivot immediately . You can do what I did .

I released a $50 course while I kept consulting and advising for early stage healthcare companies . I put that out there and like , watched it grow . 1,500 people bought it over the course of 18 months . As I was doing my work over here in a completely unrelated industry , I leaned into this again . I emailed all 1,500 people and said , like did you like it ?

What else would you like to know ? And I got all this feedback . I'd like to know this . I'd like to go deeper on this and I thought , well , if I just redo this , put more stuff into it , charge a little bit more , that 75 grand that I made could turn into 300 grand . So that's what I did . And that turned into 300 , then 500 , then 600 .

That signal compared to what I was doing over here , consulting and advising . I was like , great , this thing is selling on autopilot .

The more I talk about , it started to go down with this one Less clients , less time , fewer meetings , put more effort into the product , put more effort into the content that sells the product and pretty soon , over the course of maybe 18 to 24 months . I made a pivot sounds like it happens like on a dime made it over the course of probably two years .

I said it was really confusing , so I just built a website , right , it was just like thelinkedinplaybookcom or something , or theoperatingsystemco .

I put this course on there and I decided LinkedIn was such a powerful platform that I thought by talking more about that course , more about the things that went into it , more about LinkedIn in general , I could probably sell more . So I did . And then I thought , well , I gotta support this business , this advising and consulting business .

That's really paying my bills . So what are some other ways I could find customers , like VCs , networking , Slack groups , like . I started going in depth into other channels to try and find customers . I started working with Dan Martell .

I was able to find customers in a different way and I just slightly , over time , moved all my content over to talking about social media and once I did that , my course revenue grew , and then that all came down to me being on a podcast with Dickey Bush and Nicholas Cole going into something different . I was talking about a different topic .

Everyone's eyes lit up and I was like there's a second course there , build that . And like suddenly I had two courses and I was like , forget advising and consulting . I don't wanna do that anymore and I went all in .

And I was like because I used this template that I created on and like I was walked them through like line by line , how I wrote it and how I wrote something else exactly the same , like line by line , and a third one , and they all like popped off and everyone was like whoa , that's so cool .

I never thought about it and I was like , oh shit , there's like an idea here . There's like if I could show people that framework , how to do that , I think I can go out . So I built it like the next week and that became my second sort of flagship .

Which is really interesting it's the fact that you're not picking up on random cues where I asked you with the shiny of any syndrome , when you do decide something , it's like you are razor focused in on that .

True , you're an artist , you get lucky because you happen to notice like people's eyes light up . But I'm sure I miss things all the time that are right under my nose . I remember a couple of guys asked me to partner with them to market their software and I said no and then it went on and sold for seven million bucks and I was like , damn , so I miss .

You know I miss opportunities like that all the time . But every time you miss an opportunity you also recognize that by opening your ears and paying attention you're less likely to miss them in the future . So I try my hardest to do that .

So how do you think about like focus , even in your way , because you're not trying to , you know , conquer the world , or you're not focused right .

Amazon seems like a focused company , but it has Amazon , amazon Web Services , amazon Prime . There's a bunch of different business units underneath it . He diversified because it's a smart thing to do , right . It's like if one thing goes poorly , something else can go well .

It's the VC model , right , you invest in a hundred companies and if five give you outsized returns and you're in really good shape . So the way that I think of focus is a lot like a venture

capitalist . I wanna have a thesis , I wanna have like a focal point , which is , for me , solar partnership . So everything has to fall under that umbrella . It's not like courses for solar partnership community , for you know something different , and then like a coaching program for something wildly different .

Everything falls under the umbrella of solar partnership , whether it's courses , whether it's the newsletter which gets sponsors , whether it's one-on-one coaching , whether it's a subscription email that I send out that I charge for every revenue unit that I diversify into falls underneath the umbrella , and part of how I diversify is not just like oh , that could be a good

idea . It's listening to the customers , recognizing a gap in what they wanna know and then figuring out a new way to solve that gap . So , for example , a lot of people bought my courses and they were like these are great . I really like the templatization that you talked about with Dickie and Nicholas .

I just wish like , instead of having to go out and make them on my own , like you could just send me a hundred of them . So I was like cool , I've already got those right , like they're already made . So what if I just dropped them into an email that went out on the 15th of every month and charged you $9 for it ?

So suddenly I added a month recurring revenue email subscription to my products , not because I thought it would be interesting or cool or a way to make more money , because it solved a problem for my audience and in turn , of course , I make more money , but it's related to the thing they wanna figure out how to do .

So I think about it all under the umbrella of solopreneurship , that's awesome .

It's about not building a team , it's about not having full-time employees , but it's not about doing everything yourself . I have a coach , so it's not just , it's not me on an island . I have a wife at home who's extremely supportive , who helps me with things , with the business . I belong to communities .

So it's not as though solopreneurship is about cutting ties with the world and saying I'm in a vacuum and doing everything on my own . It's about how you wanna build your life and your business . That is what , to me , solopreneurship is . Even if you hire an employee , I still don't care , like it's not , like what we call people matters , it doesn't matter .

So doing it together to me is something that I heard from my audience . I originally just planned on going with a course , but when people came to me and said I wanna have a place to ask questions , I wanna have a place to meet other students who are going down the same journey , who are ahead of me behind me at the same level that I'm at .

I wanna chance to ask you questions at a live event , or at least a couple times a month , or once a month , whatever it might be . I couldn't ignore how many emails I got that said that it's number one piece of requested feedback .

And so I was like I have to have a community Doing something because I think I should do it , because I think it's gonna be good for my business , because I think it's what everyone else is doing is how you get yourself in trouble . And I built something . I didn't know how to build it . I had no experience .

We studied our butts off to try and get it right and the people loved it . I just didn't love it . It didn't fit in with my lifestyle . It was a synchronous community . So it was like Slack , bing , bing , bing , bing , bing all day long , which is what I wanted to get out of when I was in corporate America in the startup world .

So I just like I swung and missed . People loved it , but I did not like it . So I shut it down after about 15 months . When I took the feedback from my audience , this time I didn't hear I want a synchronous community , I want to be on Slack , I want to have constant conversation .

What I heard was I want a place to ask questions , I want a place to meet other people . So I thought this is what my students are asking for , not what I think I should do . And when you do it with that with student first , like customer in mind first , student in mind first , buyer in mind first you generally make a better decision .

Then it became okay , how do I do what the student wants , what the buyer or customer wants , and make it so that it fits into my lifestyle .

So I've been studying like crazy how to use Circle , how to , like , create a really great peer to peer community where people help each other out , where I'm not the center of attention , where it's not ask Justin Welsh every single question , it's ask your students , it's ask your friends , it's ask your peers , and so we're working really hard to build the thing

that people ask us for Circle is great for that as well . Yeah , yeah , my buddy , Jay Klaus runs one and Brennan Dunn runs one , and they've been really instrumental in helping me learn how to use it .

pricing so definitely something that we struggled with . People kind of say sometimes about like raise your prices , like get better clients , stuff like this .

We do a multi-subscription well , kind of subscription product service and we moved from like a 3K a month to even like a 5K a month because we're what companies are doing like five to nine million a year , so it's kind of like within their range .

But we got faced with a lot of resistance and then we had to come back down and then we had to kind of regroup . So pricing is a soul finicky . And looking at your courses , the beginning , do it yourself as 497 , do it together 897 and do it a one to one , 6997 .

I honestly , my feedback to you is that I think you could probably do like 15K for do it your one to one . I would actually probably pay for that yeah .

Having come from the startup world , there are companies , specific companies of hundreds of people that literally just do that thing . Like they come in , they evaluate your SaaS pricing and they go through a huge consulting fee and very expensive and at the end you get pricing . So for me to sit here and act like I have the pricing formula would be disingenuous .

But the way that I think about it is this very long gameplay where in 2018 , when I released my first course , it was 50 bucks . My goal was for you to get $5,000 to $50,000 worth of value out of it and to be wildly shocked .

Like I spent 50 bucks , it looked really cheap and looked really stupid , but like I turned it on or I pressed play and I was blown away . That's what I did . So when it came time for the next course , a year and a half later , I made it $150 . Again , I wanted you to get 15 grand 150 grand out of it .

I wanted you to be blown away by the price Got 4.98 stars out of five stars , 23,000 reviews , 23,000 students excuse me , about 2,000 reviews . So people love the value they get versus the price . So I'm just sort of stepping up , right , and I'm not stepping up because I can make more money .

I'm stepping up because the courses that I released before were 90 minutes , two hours . They helped you achieve one outcome on like one platform where this is five years of aggregate experience building online businesses . It's gonna be eight to 10 hours . It's 2,000 slides . It is like deep , detailed , almost everything that I know .

I say almost because I'm sure I'm missing something that the audience is gonna point out and then I'll build that . And so I thought I can't charge $150 for that . There has to be a better price . I could have done 1,000 , I think I could have done 1,500 or 2,000 , considering some of the price points I've seen out there . I wanted to blend two things .

I wanted to blend expensive enough , where I thought , if you're gonna build your own business and I'm speaking for folks in the United States , I don't know how different currencies work , but $500 you can probably spend if you're serious about building your own business and you wanna do it yourself .

If you wanna be in a cohort with other people or , excuse me , in a community with other people . You want peer to peer action . You wanna talk to me on an AMA once a month , like if you're serious about it . You probably have $900 .

I realized I could have charged more for the one to one , but I wanted to make it accessible and affordable so that people in other countries could buy it , so that people at different stages of their journey could buy it . So it was a blend of accessibility , affordability and really not trying to rob my audience .

I had one guy write me and say there's other guys who seem like they're trying to retire based on the course they're releasing and I didn't wanna give off that vibe . That's the takeaway . That's like the best probably takeaway of everything . I just said , yeah , yeah

.

And then , a little bit closer , maybe like six weeks out , you say hey , we're taking it , put it together like a course , we're researching a course . And then , about four weeks out , you say , hey , there's a course coming out in a month . And you don't over burden your timeline . You just say we're working on this . Two weeks out , you build up more demand .

So you imagine like whisper , whisper , whisper , and you're basically selling the benefits , the outcomes , all the lessons . And then , when you get into the three day window beforehand , that's when you're shouting and that's effectively what he did and he used his marketing strategy to push 100 million dollar leads . So it sounds quite similar to that .

And then , when you get into that moment , his server broke right , his Zoom server broke , so he had like a specific date and it's like hey , you got to be on 10 minutes beforehand , this is what's gonna happen .

And it was someone like me who was in Asia who stayed up until 12 o'clock at night , deliberately on a Saturday right , because he brings you true to that journey . It's great . You should definitely check it out . It's a great video . I think it's labeled something to do with like affiliate program , not so people don't watch it .

It's like how to build out like an affiliate program , cause he used other affiliates to promote the book . But yeah , that sounds quite similar in your regard .

Even with the behind the scenes email series that I'm doing , like in the back of my mind , am I hoping , as a human being , that it resonates and that because it resonates , it turns into more sales ? Of course , right , I'd be lying if I said I wasn't .

But my true intention with the behind the scenes email and I was actually I'm working with a friend of mine . I outsourced some of this work to him . His name is Brennan Dunn . As we were talking the other day , I said , like dude , the thing I'm most worried about is that someone buys this who shouldn't Like .

It's not about selling the most , it's about selling the right thing to the right person and making sure that if all the people it's not right for can very easily self-identify and be like , hey , I shouldn't buy this course , I don't want them to be disappointed . I don't want them to want to refund . I don't want any of those things .

I want like 100% satisfaction . It's impossible , but that's what I want . So , to kind of get back to the point , there was no whisper and yell strategy or whisper and shout strategy . There was no strategy other than I knew some people would want one-to-one guidance . I wanted for it to be relatively accessible . Right , 7,000 bucks isn't accessible to everyone .

I wanted it to be people who could spend that and people who I would enjoy working with . So we're thinking of some sort of application process and I wanted to make sure that it didn't take up a ton of my time . That was like the thought process that went behind it .

I wish I was like more cunning and more strategic to say that I had like a really cool marketing thought process behind it , but it was more . It was more just like that , was it ? What else worries you ? Wow , what else worries me ? I mean , everything worries me . I'm a very like anxiety driven , anxiety-driven person yeah so what worries me ?

I'm very fortunate to make a good living . I always wonder if that'll just go away one day , right ? I wake up every day thinking like I'm irrelevant , right .

So being completely irrelevant , I think , not for the attention's sake of it , but like for the business's sake , the more people know who I am or pay attention to my business , the more my business grows and the more people get value out of it , right , the more happy customers . That 23,000 customers goes to 53,000 .

So I worry about that all the time , right , waking up and being obsolete , right , you see it in any sport or entertainment business , right , singers are hot for a while and then , you know , no one cares anymore . Sports guys get old , they retire , right . So I think about that a lot , especially because the career that I do is not a traditional career .

So , like God forbid , two years from now it doesn't exist . Like I haven't been in the workforce for six years , right . Like I think about that all the time . I am very I try and de-risk a lot of things .

When I get away from that brain fog , like I recognize that I have , I like to think that I have some talent and that I'm driven and that I don't really think there would be a problem . That doesn't mean I don't worry about it , so I worry about that .

I worry about not to get off on a tangent , but like I worry about just the negativity I see on social media .

Like I can't go on Twitter without like just seeing some of the most terrible shit in the world and like I worry that so many people get sucked into that because I think there's a whole other side of the coin that people should be paying attention to . So I worry just in general where the world's going .

I think sometimes that can be a good thing to not be over your head , right , cause a lot of guys are getting a 10K a month and they're oh , I'm sorted . I'm the man . I'm the man . Yeah , totally , I'm the opposite and I'm quite similar to you in that regard .

But when you're , you've learned the skills right and the skills are more fundamental and like often here , like which I agree with , like when you learn how to sell , it's kind of beginning at the end right Because you can reinvent yourself . You could do something else you might do like a faceless brand in the future .

And you have a lot of those skills right , but I think a lot of people are getting caught online . The issue is the fact that it's in the wrong shit . They think about the wrong stuff . So you've had that core , solid foundation , which a lot of people don't have as the issue , and that's insecurity , right , dikemi .

It's not in arguing , it's in just like improving yourself I know that sounds super cliche , by the way like invest yourself . It's like if you just took 12 months and decided you wanted to learn one thing as deeply as possible and you ignored all the noise and bullshit around you .

You can do it and unfortunately , the world as it's going is being built in a way where we're being distracted intentionally all the time , and I feel bad for people who don't know how to push away those distractions , because there's a lot of people with a lot of talent and a lot of skills who can't seem to figure out how to stop being distracted by things

that are not important to them . How do you do that ? I don't always effectively , in fact , I was just talking with my wife about it . Today I got up and looked at trending Twitter for the first time in a while and I was like wow , this world is a terrible place sometimes . So that like really got me down this morning .

For the most part , I usually use a trend blocker on Twitter , so it takes away all Twitter trends , so I just don't see that . I got rid of the news , so I don't see the news on a regular basis . I muted all words politically and things that upset me .

It's good to be upset sometimes , so I still see those things every once in a while they make their way through , but for the most part my phone's on do not disturb . Seven days a week , 24 hours a day , 365 days a year . I don't have social media on my phone , so I try to curate a distraction-free environment .

I recently started meditating , which is like I'm not very good at it , but it's grounding and it's useful . And it's again , it's super cliche but like I found that it's helpful for me . In the morning I'm trying all those things , but some days , like today , it doesn't work and I wake up I see something .

I get really frustrated and usually my wife's pretty good at talking me down from the ledge .

I just got rid of it all and I actually had a friend said to me before that he thought I was ignorant because I didn't keep up the date of what was happening in the news and I was like to your point , you don't need no opinion on everything the world is always happening , the world's always happening .

It's just there are so many things I could care about that if I chose to care about everything worth caring about , I would do nothing but think about those things every single moment of every single day , and that is detrimental to both my business , my family and my mental health . So I don't do it .

how to sell to you . So if I was to sell to you because you've so much , you've a lot of experience , you've great network and everything , if I was to sell to you , like what's the best way to sell ?

Here's something that I did using that takeaway that bettered my life , right ? So not just like , hey , love your newsletter . Anyways , here's the thing I wanna pitch you right .

So it's like really making a connection , saying that I have an ego just like everybody else , I'm human , right , and so like when someone writes and says I read something of yours and it changed my life yeah get pumped . You know like that makes me excited . It's a great way to open an email or a call or a DM or whatever .

The next thing is that they truly understand a challenge that I have in my business . So , for example , like if someone sees me tweet something about I'm worried about a particular part of my landing page because of conversion rates down , and they reach out and they're like yo dude , read this thing , loved it , changed my life , blah , blah , blah .

It was like hey , saw this thing that you wrote and I think that can be helpful . And before , like , we jump on a call , I recognize you're busy recorded you a short loom , right , it's five minutes . It's not generic , it's not like hey , bud , it's like hey , justin saw the thing that you wrote . Here are like three thoughts that I have .

Here's why I think those things right and here's what I would do if I were you , and I'll show you a little bit behind the scenes . A , b , c , right , don't know if that's interesting , but if that's interesting to you and it's useful and you wanna go deeper into that , let's jump on a call . That simple , right .

I wanna know that someone genuinely understands a problem that I have . Personalizes their outreach , so they don't sound like everyone else and seems like they wanna help me do something . In particular , when we get on the call , what I expect is really like really genuine deep discovery . So like , what's the challenge ? What's the real challenge ?

What have you tried ? How did it work ? How much is it costing you ? What does it mean to you personally ? How big of a priority is it to you when you wanna fix it by right ? What else could get in the way ? All these different things ? I want them to very clearly understand the problem that I have and very clearly articulate a solution .

And I can say this because when I was trying to figure out where I should host my courses originally , I got on this one call and I told the girl I don't need help marketing , I need help with X . And she was like great , our marketing suite , x , y , z . And I was just like not listening and it was very frustrating experience for me .

So if you take me through good discovery and you show me that you can solve the specific challenge that I'm talking about at a price that's fair , in a time period that's expedient , and the value that I get will be five , eight or 10X the price you charge . I'll listen to that almost every time .

production , design , growth , like different aspects , and it's been like oh , cause , you can see it , it's all public , you know . I'm like , oh , here's what I did and here's what we do . And then people are like , oh , that's not . You know , completely ridiculous , seems sense , let's have a conversation and it's not scalable .

But you don't need to be scalable , you need to be effective .

Like you can do things that aren't scalable for a long time , I do things today that aren't scalable , and my business has been around for five years , so I yeah , when I'm sort of Dakota Robertson .

You don't even have a job and you're giving out about what you'll be like at 50K a month . It's problems that you're not even anticipating , right , and it's the problem solution continuum . When you do solve a problem , you get a new one , fair enough in your business , but it's not what my problem is at 50K a month .

They're different problems , but they're not problems you have right now . That's right .

Maybe , if you're lucky , maybe one out of a thousand people do , but most people will get slightly better over time . And by getting slightly better over time , every problem that you tackle you can figure out a solution . Move on to a bigger problem , bigger solution . And it's so much easier to build a business slowly over time than it is to be a rocket ship .

I've been a part of two rocket ship unicorn businesses On the inside , messy , shit , show Shit show right . So like I would much rather build a slow growth business that eventually got to the point where I wanted to be .

So we do a lot of stuff like that in our company and it runs really nicely and it's really helpful and it saved us from hiring people , so it helps in that aspect . How do you think about , like , integrating AI into your own like workflow ?

I use it ad hoc right now and I'll give you the best example that I can think of recently of how I used it , which is the creator MBA agenda . So I put together this agenda based on what I thought and what I heard from my customers , pushed it through AI and was like is this good , is this a good agenda ? And it was like yeah it's good .

But here are a few aspects you missed . Legal formation I'm like I don't care about that . I don't care about that . People can Google how to form an LLC . They don't need me to talk about it . But I spit back a couple of really good things and I was like oh , interesting , like I'll move those into the agenda .

And I would ask again like , okay , here's the new agenda . Like any holes in this ? No , it looks good . What about the chapters themselves ? Any missing lessons ? Yeah , anything overkill . I love asking for it to like eventually we whittled down to this great agenda . That I think is not overkill , has the things people need , doesn't have a hole .

It might , you know , customers might say , hey , you're missing one thing , great , I'll deal with it then . But like I feel confident about it . That's how I use AI . Every time I write my newsletter , I feed it into AI and like chat , gpt and say what's the alternative argument to what I'm saying here ?

Like if someone were to say this is bullshit , what would they say about it ? And that gives me a way to like use good language to handle those objections inside of the article . So most of the feedback I get is like cool , that was relatively well written because I try and think through the points and when I can't think of them .

You know I use chat GPT , but struggling to integrate it into my workflows .

So when we put in different variations that we've built over the years , yeah , they could make an evaluation , but you could have made the evaluation you know , Like Elise makes the evaluation A lot of the times I'm like which do you like ?

And I look at her eyes and I see her reaction and that's actually more helpful than just throwing a true some like generic information coming back .

So it's like I can look through the agenda and make , or I can look through content or I can read in my newsletter and I can form hypotheses around what people will say , what some objections will be . I love it as like a sounding board , because every once in a while I'll put it through and it'll say something like gosh , that was a really good idea .

I didn't actually didn't think of that . So that's why I struggle to put it into workflow is because I don't think of it as an employee . I don't think of it as an intelligent person that can be super useful in my marketing strategy , or it's just not there yet for me .

Someone's gonna be listening to this and be an AI pro and tell me why I'm wrong , and that's awesome . I'd love to be wrong about it and integrate it more into my workflow in 2024 . But today I just use it at Hawke .

But then for us , we do a lot of customization and changes and it's difficult to make those adjustments and be very specific . So , as a result of what was less applicable , but he's like I don't care , he's gonna just put up my clips and I'm happy out .

the kind of generic and inauthentic side of like AI . So if you're gonna be writing and if you're gonna be trying to like implement this and add this into your even like even your content , are you using any of it to train yourself on previous content that you've written , cause you've written so much content that you've stored ? I ?

I mean , at least to me , by the way , like to say that I haven't experimented with just seeing how it would be as a writer . I would be telling you a lie . So .

I have found times where I was like super uncreative and in a rut and like really want chat GPT to write me something good Because I just want to hit a button and just like have something in a rush at state night with my wife and like I don't have time .

If you continue to do that like every single time , like your friend who fired 16 employees , if you continue to let good enough be good for my business , I just don't think I'm gonna thrive that way 100% . I think I have to be excellent , especially with which I fail all the time to be .

But , like I think , with people coming into this game and like more attention online and more people becoming solar printers and more options out there for customers , like I don't know , you just got to be really good , you got to be at the top of your game and you can't rely on sort of lazy machine writing to do that .

, after four years as a solarpreneur , number one lesson is nobody's coming to save you .

So if all the shit hit the fan for a bunch of people , including myself , I've got maybe one or two people in my life who I think would like haul me out of a ditch right , so you better be able to save yourself .

The way that I think about that is , if you go through times in life where you fail really miserably and you hit bottom and you figure out how to get out of that bottom , that is like the most , that's the top skill you can learn . I think about myself . I was fired for my first three jobs coming out of school .

I was a huge loser coming out of school . I was immature . I didn't know anything about work . All I wanted to do was party . All I wanted to do was hang out with girls and meet , hang with my friends and that's all I wanted to do . So I had a nothing career until 28 . I was like 30 or 40 grand in debt .

I was fired for the third time like rock bottom , worked my way out of that , had a panic attack in 2019 , thought I was gonna die . Had 911 come like it was 250 pounds , like I was super out of shape and I was drinking like a lot and like there was just a lot going on in my life and that was a rock bottom for me .

I pulled myself out of that and like , the more I go through that and this isn't like yay me , it's certainly not a hero story it's just the more you go through that , the more you're like , oh man , if that happens again , I can get out of that . That's a pretty confident way to be .

So I think if you can go through that and you can feel like no one's coming to save me but I can save myself , I think you're set , not set . You're better off . You're 100s .

But I was a good sprinter as a kid and I decided to stop sprinting to become a rugby player because there's a higher chance of becoming a rugby player . Ireland's a big sport . And a week later I dislocated my knee , tore my cruise sheet and I was all over 17 , 18 years old .

It was a really good school , like on-pad all over , and then had to figure out the school thing . And I was good at school .

I wasn't good at school , I was good at working at a school , got into a career that I really didn't want to and then had to take a handbrake , turn out of that and again it was like rock bottom feeling and because I had those two instances coming from , like a tech company which all like fell apart and I had to go figure things out .

That's given me the confidence now to say that if anything was happening in the future . I will have those similar motor skills of back against the wall , so they're a blessing right . How do you think about learning from like failure ? I mean ?

Right , like I just popped into my mind as the first thing that I felt was like a real failure of mine . Everything that I failed about it , everything that failed in that community , is being used to influence the next iteration . Like it's not , like I can't do this or I'm not good enough or that's not the right thing for me .

It's just like , okay , we know it failed . What's gonna succeed ? It's probably gonna be the opposite or some version of the opposite . I think you can't be afraid of it . I think every time you put yourself out there , there's something to be learned . I'm trying a bunch of new stuff with this course . Right , I put sevens on the end of my pricing .

People got furious . I got like 10 emails about it , like how dare is this so against what you've preached ? And so whatever , right , what's the story of the sevens Cause I see it every time . I wrote a tweet once and I was like , if you're gonna charge $147 for something , you can make it $150 , not fooling anyone .

And like I wrote it two years ago Like could my mind change about something like that ? I don't know . So as I was thinking about the pricing , I was like , let's test it out . What if it's the greatest thing in the world ? What if it 10X is conversion rate ? What's the psychology behind this ? Just a test , just an experiment , right .

But people got so mad about it and I was like I know I'm gonna get shit about this . I did , but like I just wrote back to those people and was like why don't you let me just experimenting with it ? Let's see how it goes ? If it's the worst thing in the world , then I'll flip back .

I knew every time you slog through some shit and no matter what decision you make , 10% of people are gonna hate it . You learn something about what people want , what they don't want . You also learn something about yourself . Like if I could go back in time a little bit , I probably would have just made it 500 , 900 .

Like I probably would have stuck with my guns . I didn't . Oh well , I'll know that next time I launch something , to stay true to myself , which I wish I would have right . That's all lessons , all failures , it's all learnings . Every time that you go through like that , you can't let it be , you can't take it personally .

You have to just figure out okay , cool , we messed something up . What does that mean for the future ? Cool , it means I won't do it , or I'll do something differently . Or man , I shouldn't have said that thing to that one person , because life went really badly after that thing . Great , that's a great lesson to learn earlier on in your life .

So I just think failure and lessons are what you make of them , versus letting them kind of crumble you or knock you down . So I don't know . Expect to make them , use them , cliché , but how I think about it .

And I was like , oh , here's an idea . I remember me and Elise sitting in our apartment in Singapore and I remember I was like fuck this dude Totally . And then Elise was like but what if you just grew the podcast ? And I was like yeah , I was like what if we just grow the podcast ? And then we just swapped and it went boom , straight away .

Alternatively , I get mad when people are mean to her . But every time I get mad about something that someone writes , I recognize it's because there's probably a kernel of truth inside of it .

And if you can learn to separate yourself from the anger and be like oh , that guy makes a good point and it makes me feel foolish , so therefore I'm angry , so therefore I should probably do it . What are you saying ? Just like you just told me about with Elise , like there's good stuff when you're feeling upset .

I try and come across online as like mature and thoughtful , and I generally think that I am , but behind the scenes , like I mean again , I'm human . I have oftentimes have thin skin . I , you know , I get my feelings hurt . Like you know , with 500,000 followers on two different platforms .

Like 10% of people say mean things , like it's a lot of mean stuff and so it tends to beat you down after a while . But , like , if you cut out the meanness and look at the actual substance inside of it , it can be very helpful .