Modern Wisdom - #279 - How Not To Start An Online Business

Episode Date: February 6, 2021

Jonny joins me (without Yusef) to discuss the wild west of creating money on the internet. Given the living hell that real businesses have been through with Covid, many budding entrepreneurs are trying to get some of that sweet, sweet internet money. Expect to learn, the biggest tips Jonny has learned over 10 years of working on the internet, the fundamentals of creating an online business, why traffic & conversions are life, the most common problems everyone makes and much more... Sponsors: Get 50% discount on your FitBook Membership at https://fitbook.co.uk/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Get Propane's Free Online Business Training - https://propanefitness.com/mwbusiness Get Propane's Free Online Fitness Business Tips - https://propanefitness.com/modernwisdom Get free diet advice from PropaneFitness - https://propanefitness.com  Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom Kw6gTyhZ9YOL0WOUnBR7 - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello beautiful people, welcome back. My guest today is Johnny. Without you, Seth, we're talking about the Wild West of creating money on the internet. Given the living hell that real businesses have been through with COVID, many bud of creating an online business by trafficking conversions are life, the most common problems everyone makes, and much more. It's just nice, even if you're not planning and starting an online business, it's really good to understand the dynamics of how it works. And if you are thinking of doing it, you need to know the fundamentals,

you need to understand why you should build alongside your audience, how organic and paid strategies go together, and there is no one better on the planet to talk about this. And Mr Jonathan Watson from Propane Fitness. Also, if you like this and you want to find out more, you can head to propanefitness.com slash MW Business, and that is a free online business training that is not just for fitness professionals, but for absolutely everyone, propanefitness.com slash MWBusiness. I hope that it helps.

This seems like a sort of episode that really could help to broaden your horizons about how you can make money. But for now, it's time to learn how not to start an online business with Jonathan Watson, look at the show. Make Chris, thanks for having me on. Feels like we're missing something today. I know, I know. The third square. Missing a... The scone-shaped, like the...

Like, the... Like, raisin, an almond-scone-shaped hole. Yusuf is saving lives, whereas me and you just spend all that time on the internet. So I thought, get a hold of you today and just record a Rogue podcast. What are we going to be talking about? Well the internet basically or how how people make money using the internet? So I guess the the broad

Subject would be online business building an online business starting online business and It's pretty common at the moment, isn't it? Very much so. I mean, a lot of people are either thinking about it. You can't make money anywhere else. There is no money to be made in real person at the moment. Yeah, yeah. Well, I suppose like even people who go to offices or have worked in an officer entire life and are basically living the same life as someone who's been a digital entrepreneur in

their entire life, so everyone's working from home. There's a lot of remote working. But yeah, so I suppose this is something that I've been doing with you, Seth, for quite a while, since 2010 ish officially. I think we actually incorporated the business. I don't know whether you know this, Chris,. I think we actually incorporated the business. I don't know whether you know this, Chris, but I think we actually incorporated

propane in your flat in Jesmond. Yeah, I seem to remember that. So you've been running an online business for over a decade, and now the main source of your business is teaching other people to run an online business. So if there is anybody on the internet that can tell us how to start an online business, how not to, it's

you. Well, I mean, that's very kind of you. I can certainly talk about the pros and cons and the kind of the common mistakes. So we do fitness coaching. And then the other side of what we do is, I guess, teaching people who do fitness coaching to use the other side of what we do is I guess teaching people who do fitness coaching to use the internet to teach fitness coaching. And that's kind of the so you know helping, helping PT's a lot of personal trainers at the moment are obviously they can't train clients so a lot of them are using the internet, using an online-based service to coach clients and that. I think a lot of them have run into this problem of like,

I'll just do a zoom thing, I'll just get people in there and then you're like, actually, there's quite a lot to this, it's quite complicated. And then we step into help. So that's kind of a, what gives me any, get a right to talk about this, I guess? You've got, you've got license to talk about in man. So where do we, where do we begin? Like, what are the, why would someone even want to start a business on the internet? It's a good question. I think why did I want to start a business on the internet? That's probably the best place to explain that from. So I started out of university. I went into a typical 9 to 5, it's not 9 to 5, supposed to be nine to five. You have to sign that bit of paper that means that you're all that they can basically make you work as many

hours as you want. And I was driving to work listening to, I think, the book that every anyone with a hint of entrepreneurial desire is read, which is the four hour work week. And in that book, if you've not read it by Gagelton Ferris, he talks about basically starting a business as this kind of a way to live the life on your terms. So you have more command over your when you work, where you work, how much money you make, etc. and the multiple currencies. And he refers that to that as a muse. So you build a business that's kind of small. You're not trying to build the next Facebook. You're not trying to conquer the world. You're trying to inner living, selling something typically through like maybe through like a drop shipping process, which I guess we'll talk about shortly, or selling information, getting it to the point where you can actually

leave the constraints of the typical employed life and work for yourself. And I guess a lot of people, even as they progress through a career, realize that they're basically in this cycle of, I am working for a salary, I have to go to a certain place and I get paid a certain amount and I have to work for this amount of time otherwise that I don't get the paycheck at the end of the month. And I think you only need to know one person who doesn't fit that mold. And to be honest, I think it was you for me, Chris. It was like the one friend who's like, yeah, but he he earns more than my friends and he doesn't have to go. He doesn't have to put a tie on, he doesn't have to wear a shirt and he doesn't have to travel to stock to an every morning to go and

audit a manufacturing plant. So like, you know, you just have to know one person, you start to question these things and you read these books and I think now a lot of people are having similar questions when you know they're being forced to work from home or perhaps even lost their job for various reasons. It's like, well, what else could I do that's maybe less reliant on somebody else or another company? Why do online business rather than just progressing what you're currently doing in the real world? In terms of...

What's the reasons for it? What are the benefits? Why not just be... start your own accountancy firm? I see. Leave the accountancy firm you're at and start your own as opposed to becoming an online accountant somehow or selling online accountancy how to be an accountant courses. How to be a coach to coach accountant? A coach accountant to move online. Yeah, well to be honest, I think one of the easiest ways to do something like this is actually to take a skill you already have and just do it for yourself online. A lot of service-based businesses can be done

like that. So, suppose what I immediately think of when I think of online business and why someone would want to start it is it's usually some kind of informational, information transaction, right? So, it's a service or it's selling advice or it's selling information. There are others, but that's a very common type and the reason for that is it doesn't really involve the traditional structure that you think a normal business would require. So you don't need an office. You don't need a 25-ground start of loan. You don't need loads of stock. You don't need a factory or production line or any of that stuff. It can literally be you and a laptop and the information that you have or some kind of service you're looking to provide. And then missing piece of that puzzle is client, so guess, and a way to help them. But if you get yourself into the position where you have clients in a

business like that, it can be extremely profitable because the costs are not basically all the costs of your time and the software and the technology that you need. So the low barriers to entry in terms of not needing massive amounts of investment financially and the low skill barrier to entry I suppose as well that you are for a lot of people with their online business, repurposing existing, that you are, for a lot of people with their online business, repurposing existing knowledge that you already have, and then just putting it out into the universe to see,

I think it's, was it you that told me everyone is an expert in something? Yeah, so that, there's a few people online that really promote that message, that like, if you, the more you think about it, if you had to, so I think we spoke about this on maybe a life hacks episode where one of the bits of advice I gave was try in some way

to think like, how would I monetize myself? And I don't mean like set up an only fans account. I mean, I'll get all of it, you know, arguably that's very important. They're making one one even all of us. So yeah, you can plan. They're the ones winning. But yeah, I know some people personally who worked as an engineer

or something that you wouldn't necessarily think could be translated online. But they were receiving a salary and then they left that set up on their own and now they're kind of consulting in the same capacity, earning three, four times the amount. So I suppose it's going from taking something that you're maybe doing for somebody else in the confines of a business and they're paying you kind of what they think that's worth, but the market may think that's worth more, right? Someone else, or multiple five, six, ten customers may think, well, I'll pay a monthly fee for that advice, or I'll pay a fee for access to help and then consulting on that specific thing.

So, yeah, there is still a barrier to entry. I think that just to quickly cover the the misconception here, and I think the mic winner you've had on twice now? Yeah, once a toast. So his YouTube channel and the idea behind the Contrapreneur is there is a big movement in the online world that if you buy some course and set up a webinar or something like that, you can suddenly have an online business. And I get the idea of it and obviously the people selling the course, I'm sure make a lot of money out of it, but I think just because a business is online, it doesn't mean that demand and supply and shorten the gap from A to B. I'm trying to learn to slackline. How do I slackline? I've got no idea. Well, I could just work for someone who's an expert in slacklining and they'll

make me slackline in 12 weeks. For example, I mean, that's a service that you could be turned into a course or a service. And I don't think anybody could say that like, if that's your goal, you want to learn a slackline and you learn to slackline, that you've done anything wrong by selling somebody that information or that help. Right? You've delivered a valuable service. And you can use the internet to do that in a very highly like profitable way that doesn't, you don't have to sell to people on your street or in your town. You can sell the people anywhere in the world. So the scale and the ability to leverage your two of the main points, I think, people entering the online world won't necessarily be familiar with those words, but the Navalman Act has certainly helped and people like Jack Butcher talk about it and awful lot on the internet. You can only do one PT session at a time, but if you make a course that people can follow

passively, you can have a million people do it. It's not like you need to say that word a million times to every single person that's watching. You don't get a call in the middle of the night at 3am, like right, Johnny, such and such is doing some chest press over in Adelaide, you're going to have to get up and like, and Skype him so that he understands what he's doing. So that's certainly one of them. And you touched on kind of the dark secret of the classic nine to five world, which is that the amount of security that you get from your job is offset by you not capturing the upside of whatever the transaction is with the person that's

paying for you. And that really is like for so many businesses, especially looking at COVID this year, the people who should have been the most worried were the totally useless, fluff filler middle management, like the regional manager of HR. Like, why do you need, you've got a guy in each town and you've got a director of HR. The guy that's in between is basically there to make the guy at the top's life easier and the guy at the bottom's life harder.

But the person that actually delivers the value is the person who is cranking the widgets. And the person who coordinates everything is the guy that does strategy up at the director's office. So very often, there is within a business, the person at the bottom can't afford really to pay that person much more because they have all of these different layers of bureaucracy to make sure that that person at the bottom is actually doing their job.

So if you as the person at the bottom who can do the job and knows that you're reliable and maybe has the business acumen to think, right, I can go to the market, maybe I understand branding, maybe I'm quite good at copywriting, maybe I've got a bit of an eye or I've got some existing contacts within the industry, I can perhaps try and pivot this online. What are the common types of online business, what are the most common ones that people use? I think there's a lot because there's common types that a lot of people try that don't necessarily last very long. So I think there's a lot, there's common types that a lot of people try that don't necessarily

last very long. And that might be those. So I think like everyone's seen an ad for like far x trading, for example, or dropshipping is a very common one, you know, like making money through dropshipping stuff on Amazon and you hear that, you're like, I don't know what any of those words mean, this sounds great. So you know, the stuff that I suppose is easier to conceptualize, you think, okay, I'm gonna buy something from overseas and ship it and then sell it,

and I can run it all from my laptop. And obviously there are businesses that run like that and they're immensely successful. But I'd say most people who try that don't succeed because there's like operational risk with that. You've got to actually, you're moving physical things around and you can get that wrong. Forex markets, we've just released a podcast of use of having a bad experience of stuff like that. I think it was on life fails, life hack fails, you

spoke about that. So that has its downsides as well. So I think the most common type of online business that I see consistently succeed is basically exactly what we what we spoke about where copywriting or consulting larger businesses or obviously personal training right things that can can quite easily to be honest be taken from an offline here I am in the flesh speaking to, telling you what to do in a one-to-one, or maybe a one-to-three or four, if you didn't group based stuff, now I'm going to package the knowledge that I would typically deliver in that session.

I'm going to put it into videos, text, like stuff that appears on a screen that anyone can access whenever they want, or I'm going to do the same coaching, but virtually. That's a very, especially if you've already got the knowledge and expertise, it's a very low cost, very, like despite what a lot of people think there's a lot of technical know-how, at this point, they're really isn't. So that, I'd say that was the most common. So, and that, I would even argue

that people who, you don't have to have a course, or an ebook or something like that for it to be an online business, I think if you are using the internet to deliver the service and you are doing it remotely and you are working with a client on multiple clients, I'd say that's an online business. Right. You don't have to have a members area or an ebook to sell. So I know people who are accountants who do this or, as I say, engineers who do this, who do consulting-based work, but they work for themselves And their businesses are all remote or online Yeah, so I guess that kind of changes the dynamic of an online business a little bit

You're not necessarily delivering I mean my accountant delivers his product to me via email I wouldn't consider him to be an online businessman despite the fact that Chris probably hasn't been into his office For a year it doesn't need to. So yeah, that's an interesting way to look at it. What about principles? To say there's someone that's listening that thinks, I have some expertise, or maybe I'm a PT who's considered, I mean go to propanefitness.com slash mod and wisdom if you're a PT that wants to pivot online.

But if you're just someone who's thinking, right, I want to get started in the online world, what are the principles, what should they focus on getting right first? Yeah, so that's, I suppose, when people, this is the most common failure point, is the starting point, and it's the rabbit, the one of 10 rabbit holes that you can go down and spend months down without actually gaining any kind

of traction, and that's the common stuff stuff like online business needs, means I need an expensive website and a great logo and I'm worried about whether it should be purple or green or maybe even building out program or building materials, doing cash flow forecast and all this sort of stuff. And I think basically you can have all of that right, but ultimately not have a customer, not only revenue. You technically don't really still have a business to speak of. So the example I always give our students is, you stuff when I ran a propendence for quite a while

from Microsoft Word, like that was it. I'll do that. Well, Andy email obviously, we were just typing documents ourselves. So we were, yeah, I wrote this really long document and I just kept paying myself. It was great. Now, we would email clients from our personal email and it would all be done through Word.

There was not really a website in place. Paypal or something probably, one of the things I really submitted in voices. Nightmare. Nightmare. It's the sort of thing you said has recurrent nightmares about now. But the point is, is that like, the why did it work? Well, we were just, I have this thing that I'm trying to do, and I'm struggling, or I have this

thing in my life that I'm trying to get rid of or solve, and I don't really know how to do myself. So I'm looking for a solution. And that's everything down from a consumer, like a you and I looking to solve a problem or a business or an organization looking to solve a problem and want to get someone in remotely. If you're solving something like that, then someone somewhere will pay to have that problem

solve all that goal process accelerated for them. And that's basically where you step in as a business, as an offering. And if you get that bit right, you can make a lot of mistakes and still kind of succeed. You can get a lot of the technicals wrong and still have happy clients basically. What's the question that you're asking yourself to try and work out whether you've got that right? Is it, is there a market for the thing that I'm trying to give? got that right? Is it, is there a market for the thing that I'm trying to give? Yeah, so I think, so some of the things we do with our clients is you have this hypothesis, which is like, I think this kind of person wants this kind of thing, right? I want, I

think this sort of person wants this, once this problem solved, or once reached this goal. And oftentimes, and this is for our work, we could like scratching your own itch is a pretty easy way to start. Like I like, so you said when I started a propon fitness because we were really into fitness and we'd had a really elongated struggle figuring it all out and we could compress five years into five months for someone else.

So that's a quite an easy way to start. So we knew that was already a demand there because people were asking us for it. Or it's like how can I test that assumption? So asking friends and family, asking you on your social media, I'm thinking about doing this for this sort of person. Do you think anyone would be interested?

Do you know anyone who's in an expedited way of doing that, just posting online? I think going to your social circle, yeah. Like your personal Facebook, your personal social media and saying, yeah, I'm gonna start this new thing, this new venture, it's going to be doing this sort of service for this kind of person or this kind of business. Do you know anyone that might be interested? Just have a conversation with them and see if it's right. Because if one person's got the problem and they're like, you know what, I'm happy to just pay

you for that. That tells you something pretty important. So, you know, if there's one person, there's probably going to be more than one. Chris Barks has an interesting, curiously, for this where he says, what do people often ask you for advice on? So a lot of the time, you might be the techy guy, the guy that understands what the new gadgets are that are coming out, or how to set up your iPhone properly, or you might be the guy that's in good shape,

or the guy that can cook interesting meals, or the guy that can cook interesting meals, or the guy that raised his kids to not be complete brats. All of those things that people come to you and say, man, I love how Charlie and David are just so well-behaved, like what did you do with them? And then you look at someone like Savan Matosi and who I had on the show a couple of months ago, he was raising children, then decided,

I quite enjoy raising children and people like my methods, I'm going to document it on Patreon and now him and his wife have a business. Not a business. I know it's run through Patreon, which is, again, it's not the most flash of websites, you've involved a third party, they're taking a commission, they're doing all the right, there's no fancy landing page or retargeting, but it's making money on the internet selling expert knowledge. Exactly. We've been in programs where you'll kind of interact with other people who are also running a business online. I think a lot of people assume like, oh, everybody doing this is selling how to make money online, right? And that's the only business that can work. There was a guy on this on this call who was

had the biggest business by anybody by quite a margin and he was teaching guitar teaching. He was just teaching people how to play the guitar on the internet and doing like multiple hundreds of thousands per month doing that. And you're just like how, you know, but at the core of it it's like well why is successful? Well, a lot of people want to play the guitar probably in 2020, this kind of time, maybe more than never. It's like, yeah, I've got to do it home, I've got a guitar, I've never played it, I'm going to take it to guitar playing course and he's doing really well. So it doesn't even have to be the thing that you do professionally. It doesn't have to be well. If I'm in a accountant, I'm going to loads of the examples you mentioned there. It's often like the passion of the thing that you have that you're like obsessed

with, that a lot of friends would ask you for help about. And if you would turn that into a product or an offering, because you know so much about it, because it's the thing that you're always reading and learning more about, ends up being pretty good thing that you produce. So that's the first principle. Make sure that there's an actual market for what you're going to create. And don't obsess over fancy website, fancy branding, getting an office, getting a backdrop, getting a flower wall, none of that. What's next? I think the next thing would be, so ideally, you don't want to get into a one-to-one

based business if you can. Just, but it's a great way to start, but you are very constrained long-term. If you want to try and grow that you're limited by hours in the day. It's kind of the same problem. However, if you're going to produce something, you're going to make a call, or make anything that you're going to sell, I think the best way to do that is to do it with customers. So try to get into conversations with a few people through research, through figuring out, does this problem actually exist, even if it's for free and they're

not paying you initially, but build the thing that you're going to offer to the market with the help and input of people who are actually that market. Because I think if we assume it's a standard kind of information-based business, so the area we know the most is fitness, right? So if someone, if you, if you, self and I have just made a lot of our fitness programs from what we found interesting, it would have been way over the heads of a lot of our customers. And the example I use a lot is like, we do get people join the program and say, which foods have protein in? Like which food should I eat that protein?

I like it surely like surely no one's asking that question right but if we don't cover that in the program It's a bad experience for the customer. So I think making the service if you got the expertise the challenges What is it like to not have the expertise like what was that like again? How how does it feel to completely not understand all the stuff that I understand now and I help someone quite the same information well, I'm going to work with someone who doesn't have the information I'm going to try and figure out what the best way to do that is. What you end up with is a really good offering for the customer not just what you think is interesting or what you think is the right thing for you. That's something, that's a common error that people make right, making a product that they think that they want themselves that doesn't fit the market at all.

Exactly. And it's either too basic or too advanced, a lot of the time. Yeah, I guess another online business that we haven't touched on yet is becoming some sort of creator, whether that be Instagram influencer starting a podcast, starting a YouTube. And I can say from personal experience that if you're starting a podcast with the hopes that it's going to be the thing that you make money from, like just do something else, because it's such a slow, long burner to get yourself to the stage where you can even begin to monetize,

where you can even get advertisers to take one look at you. And then to move from that stage to the stage where the amount of money starts to remotely be worth your time on an hourly wage, again, that's not a thing. And if you're doing it for the money, you're going to run out of gas pretty quickly. Whereas if you're just doing a thing that you enjoy, it doesn't really matter. The money comes and money comes, it doesn't, it doesn't. And that's kind of what I found. But I think we made on YouTube in the first year, the ad revenue that we made in total was somewhere in the region of about 75 pounds. And we've done, we've done 50 episodes, maybe more than 50 episodes by then. And this

sort of rule, urban myth rule that's floating around on the internet that it takes 150 episodes of a podcast before you can monetize it. Now you can actually hasten that. Obviously you could do that in a year. If you're doing three a week, which is where I'm at now, then you could do that in a year. But most're doing three a week, which is where I'm at now, then you could do that in a year. But most people are doing one a week, which means you're going to be doing a podcast for three years before you can even start to sell ads. So again, Jorugan getting a many, many, million pound deal from Spotify's amazing and Logan Paul and Russell Brand getting taken off of normal podcasts and put behind a paywall and

Sam Harris monetizing in another way, all of that stuff's great, but the typical way that people make money from podcasts and from YouTube is with a combination of baked in, i.e. the, hey guys, this episode is brought to you by and the ad revenue adverts that you have to skip on YouTube on the way past, you need to be doing an awful lot of plays before you can get to that stage, which means you're going to be very, very disappointed and unfulfilled for a long time before you get there.

But again, as I said, the beauty is if what you're doing is something you enjoy, it kind of doesn't matter. You're just gonna be on the treadmill, taking over, taking over, and if and when the money comes, then fantastic. But yeah, it can be a miserable, miserable process if you want, if you're doing it for a cash return.

So that I think there's two, in like the online business world, there's two camps really. There's, there's like the direct response world, which is, have a product or an offering, get someone to click a link and, into the email address and then buy it. And that's the way that you build your business. And then the other side is more the branding side, which is pretty much what you've spoken about where you spend five years building this audience, this interested audience,

and then you sell something to that audience and it does incredibly well. And I think where we sit is somewhere between the two, I think there's value in both of those. And I think both of them done to their extreme have a lot of downsides. But is it, is it, YouTuber is still like the most desired career run? Number one, survey. Number one career that children between the age of five and eight want to be as YouTuber. It used to be like Dr. Policeman firefighter. That's true. Not asked. Yeah, you're liking on of that. It's like YouTube is number one.

And little do they know that what they're going to spend almost all of their time doing is looking at a camera and forgetting the line that they just wrote below it on a laptop and going, ah, fuck, Dean! And that's it. That's what you do. You spend your time thinking of ideas. I'm currently the big push for this year is to do what I can with the modern wisdom YouTube.

Started trickling some of those proper monologue videos out. And it's only when you get really, really deep into the weeds of the video creators Tim Schmeier, who's this YouTube affiliated coach Seth Stun his course. I'm going through it at the moment. Or that any one of a million Ali Abdad are leaving him in his course, when you get really deep into the way do you realize just how sophisticated YouTube is? Like Mr. Beast, if you've seen his video, it's very, very successful YouTuber.

I know it might appear like most of the videos, just like, hey guys, we're gonna see what happens if we put one million footballs in this park, but that has taken months of planning. Mr. Beast has two people that work for him and all that they do is give him 300 video titles every week and then he goes through and goes like, no, no, no, no, maybe no, no, no, maybe, maybe like that's it. 300 video titles every single week and then from there they just iterate down, iterate down, no, no, no, maybe, maybe like that's it. 300 video titles every single week. And then from there, they just iterate down, iterate down, iterate down.

That is, oh my God. I mean, so that I've seen those videos where it's like everything you can fit in this circle, I'll pay for. And my first question is like, how is he funding that? But I mean, I'd add the ad right, I'd be doing will be in a fairly insane. But yeah, it's not just the sort of thing that you tumble into, but that being said, if you have the passion to talk about politics

or football or philosophy or cooking or whatever, like happily start a YouTube channel or a podcast about it, personally, if it's a business, if that's the goal, I just think that you are starting off on such a back foot. Because the metric of success that you have chosen to judge your project by is the final thing which is going to arrive into your project. Way, way, way after late nights and awkward conversations and your partner saying what the fuck you're spending time on your laptop for again and all of those different things all of those are going to occur first and well I think that in four years time I might be able to start charging like 10 pounds CPM for adverts on my channel isn't going

to cut it and it's also not going to motivate you so yeah it's a fantastic thing to do as a hobby it's also a fantastic thing to do to further enhance an existing Platform. Here's an interesting thing. I can't remember the podcast, but George put it in a monomysium chat talking about the reverse Direction now of people who begin with Audiences and then create a product for the audience. Did you see that? Mm. Can you explain what it means and just give us your thoughts on it? So I can't explain. I haven't read the article, but I'm aware of the general

concept. So I think it's linked back to what I was saying before. So you either view it as, I'm going to, what I was talking about, like, build this product, to solve this problem. And the audience will kind of build around that. So as you get customers and you get leads and you get people becoming aware of what you've done, that creates the audience as a result of like the economic activity, the buying, the sales, the revenue. And the other way around is the opposite. So you make a channel or some kind of platform where people have this common interest

or this common problem, and then you solve that problem for them with a product. And I suppose the difficulty is, is that with just making and with trying to make content to build an audience, there's a lot of guessing involved. And there's also, you still have to live somehow in the in the interim, like you still got to pay yourself from something. A lot of people you see, so Ali Abduz a great example, right? He's recently, he's quite public about it. He released his YouTube, I can't remember the name of it, YouTube creator

something, there's this course. It seems sort of done extremely well from it, right? But when he started his channel, he wasn't doing it to try and live, and he was working as a doctor and was working as a doctor for most of the time that he was doing it, which has allowed him to put in two, three years of just regular high quality content, almost without even mentioning the financial side of it. So what he's really done there is he's built this audience of people who a lot of time probably look at him and think, I want to create YouTube channel, I want to create YouTube channel, I want to do this too. He's built this audience with a common problem and they swept in with the solution to the problem and being paid very well for it. So yeah, there are

pros and cons to both. I think the way we do it is we have podcasts to, as you mentioned, we have podcasts to support an existing business. And the podcasts aren't getting anywhere near modern wisdom number downloads, but they do very well in bringing customers into the business. And it's weird, like we make way more from the podcast directly attributed than we'd ever make through throughout revenue, just by chatting about the subject because people like to listen to it. So it does really, I think it really depends on what as well on top of like what are you going to do and who you're going to work with.

It's kind of like how do you want to spend your time? How do you want to spend a day? Because as you mentioned, the reality of being a YouTuber is a probably a little bit different. It's not just going around supermarkets with a trolley and giving it to someone and so out. By the end of the year, there's a lot of prep, there's a lot of monotony, there's a lot of saying the same sentence ten times and giving it wrong ten times and a lot of stuff. But that's the, I would kind of start with that. Like, how do you want to, if you've got an idea in mind,

how do you want to spend a day and average day, was that look like, and then which platforms or which business models, but most suit that? Yeah, so if you're the sort of person who likes to be wordy and likes to talk and has things to say and is kind of outgoing, then a platform where you end up talking face to camera might be a great idea.

But if you're someone who's more analytical and introverted and wants to tinker with figures, then perhaps creating a course or selling an ebook and then retargeting and using ads maybe a little bit more up your street. That's a starting with the end goal of what is the sort of life that you want to live in mind. Because very much the degrees of freedom you have when starting an online business are much greater than those when you go into a typical job. Like, what do you want to do today is not a question that your boss often asks you. Like, you don't get to that when you walk in. Right, mate. How are you feeling today? Do you want to do a bit analytical, a little bit more

sort of creative? Like, you don't get that. But when it's you at the beginning of whatever entrepreneurial side hustle, main hustle online business that you start, you are putting yourself onto a particular trajectory and presumably as well, the longer that you go down that road, the more difficult it's going to be. It's either wasted time or a direction that you're going to have to turn around and come back from. Yeah. Um, it's, it's interesting actually because I, hearing you say that like your, I remember when a big chunk of your week was spent driving from Manchester through in the morning to back to Newcastle and then getting three hours sleep and then waking up and having to go and take the

blow up to your ex down from the club and moving the flower wall down. And now your day is very, very different. Yeah, I suppose, and I realize obviously nightclubs, one of the businesses that can't really be done online, but you've very much, I guess the way that an average day looks like for you now, is certainly a lot more enjoyable. There's a lot fewer late nights. Sleeping patterns are hell of a drug man. It's wonderful the way he could put it in the same time. Yeah, honestly, crazy. All right, so what are the most common mistakes?

We've talked about someone not understanding that they have a product market. Well, there's a market for their product. Also, product market fit is the product that they're creating for the market, actually what it wants in terms of that delivery. Don't fuck about getting your next expensive website. Don't spend ages building yourself an office. What else? Where else do people, what do they think is going to make the difference,

which completely does not? I think there's definitely an assumption that I'm just going to post on Instagram. And it'll work. I've even heard that sentence or variations from that sentence from people who, it's pretty common if someone's like outside of the fitness industry so that maybe a personal trainer, they worked in a gym for a bit, I decided the five AM start wasn't for them. They now are working somewhere else into a different industry and they think, I want to make online a go, I'm gonna build an online business.

And we have a chat with them, they go, I'm just gonna post on my Instagram, and I'll get five or 10 clients, and then they'll work together. And you try and convey how it's really not that simple. But if you never tried that before, why would that not work? Because influencers do that.

You see people doing swipe ups and linking bios and all this, all this stuff, and it seems to work for them. Why would it not work for me? So I suppose thinking that it's, um, thinking that this, this, just because you start talking about it, the people are going to care, thinking that you have a link or you have something that you've made something that people are going to care, um, is probably the nextumbling block. And I think that this is the point where people start giving up when they've been posted on social media for 30 days, set themselves a 30 day challenge in January 2021. I'm going to post every day on my, my, my

business Instagram and they don't make a sale and they think that they're doing something wrong. So that sort of thing, lots of busy work, lots of copying someone who's famous, doing some of the things to them, thinking that that's all there is to it. What's the assumption there? Is it people being mistaken around how hard it is to get others to part with their cash on the internet? Yeah, I think so.

Or more that not maybe appreciating the gap between you know that what you've got is good. You know that your service is good and that you can really help someone, but no one else knows that. And actually, someone's less likely to trust you on the internet than really any other part of your life. So, you know, if you, the advice we give our clients is you don't need to, if you're solving a problem, you don't often need to convince the customer that they need the problem solving. They kind of know that. I kind of know that I want to lose weight or whatever it is. It's just that there's 10 reasons why I don't want it to be you.

Like there's 10 reasons. I don't trust you. Who the hell are you? What's this? Why should I, you know, this is a scam? So unless you're going to overcome those somehow, I'm just never going to pay any attention to what you're doing. So there has to be something online as part of your process. And this is what's often referred to as the sales funnel in a business or the, like, the sales sequence, the customer journey that starts to help somebody else see why you might be able to help them. Because the, like Because the build it and they will come strategy of, I've got a website with a product on it and a link to buy. So I'm going to post about that on Instagram and hope that people find their own way through.

It works for some people. If they, something they do goes viral for some reason, and some either got huge audiences and they get 1% of that audience to purchase. But most people don't achieve that and most people will always fall short. So I think just thinking basically what you're doing in online business if you're reaching someone who doesn't know who you are, you're walking up to someone in the street and saying, here's the link, can I give you a card? Yeah, it's not going to work. So you have to treat them like it. It's that the dating analogies used a lot, right? You don't ask for marriage on the dance floor.

So there's steps in between and you've got to create that experience online. And that's where it starts getting like, oh, there's quite a lot of work involved in this. And this is actually quite difficult, but that's the reality. There is quite a lot of work involved. It's a very nice way to live. It's a very rewarding outcome to have like a high profit margin business, but it isn't as easy as a lot of people imply it to be.

What about if it's a lower ticket product? I'm selling an ebook on Gumroad about how to save money or something like that. I know Yusuf has some very strong opinions around this. Do I need a big fancy sales funnel for that? Or can I just post on my Instagram? So, Gumroad's got a bit of a traction on Twitter. I don't think anyone really knows why there's like a trust issue, I think, on Twitter in some places. It's certainly easier. But the other side of that is just because it's a lower price, doesn't mean that it's a lower percentage of what someone's willing to spend, if that makes sense. I could buy, if I want to achieve, like, I'll back to the wait lost example.

If I want to lose weight, and I really want to lose weight, and I'm serious about it, and I've got some money to invest, I'm going to look at the £7.99 ebook as like, well, the answer's not going to be in there, right? Otherwise, I would have found it already. But the person who might be considering that might have £10 to spend. So you've still kind of got the same, at every price point, you've got someone who thinks it's too expensive, every price point you've got someone who'll complain. So there is a lot of research behind like lower price point sales tend to generate higher percentage of complaints and problems

and all that sort of stuff, which we've seen ourselves as well. Not to say that you can't have a £8.10-pound e-book, but I'd start at a higher price thing first, personally, and figure out the selling part, because if you can't sell something to your customer, there's probably something going on that's deeper level rather than it's more than £10. One of the things that's interesting there that most people don't realize is price isn't just the transaction of how much the customer pays. It's also a massive signaler to that customer of what they're paying for. That price is an indicator of quality.

That's why a pair of Nikes cost £100, but a pair of high-techs costs less. I don't know how much a pair of high-tech costs. Don A. I was truly going back to like, what are the shit shoes I remember from 20 years ago? Don A. Yeah, you get what you pay for. And that is another piece of information. You have to think that the way that customers look at your website, they're looking at everything.

They're looking at the sales copy, they're looking at the imagery. What does it look like? What are the colors like? Has someone put a ridiculous soundtrack over the top of this? Is the video well-short? And then the price is also another... Okay, so all of these different things tell me something about the business and person that is trying to take my money from me. The price is also another indicator of that. And I think that you're right. The presumption on the internet,

even if people like your mum and my mum aren't explicitly aware, I think everyone knows that the cost on the internet generally are lower, which means that if the amount of money that's being charged is still super, super low, you've just got this sort of Ick factor, this level of mistrust. And I get

it as well, even having seen, taken the red pill and sort of seen through the, the, the other side of the curtain about this stuff, I still see something I'm like, that's 15 pounds, that can't be worth any value. You go, I can have a second, like maybe, maybe it is, but that compulsion, that, that sort of sense that you get the response as a customer should tell you everything that you need to know. So yeah, I would agree on that. What are the markers of a good and a bad sales funnel? Let's say that someone has now been convinced they say, right, I understand the product.

I understand need to have product market fit. It's worked with a few people, started to build something up, and now I'm going to maybe start converting some slightly less hot leads, some warm leads that I've got that I know some friends, or maybe even starting to post out to the wider internet. I need to build a sales funnel. What are the principles around making it good and making it bad? It's a big question. So I suppose that the most important thing about anything like that, especially if you're thinking I'm going to try and live off this is just repeatability.

I give, if a sales process works because you're like a guy who you met once his mate went through it and bought from you and you're like, oh, my sales funnel work. It needs to be some aspect of, you know, once every month I get about this many customers or I make about this many sales, when I do these things. And then you get that's like a foundation to build on. So repeatability does it consistently work? It's quite hard to say, like, this is the best sales approach or this is the best way to do it because that's very different market to market.

Some things might just require a page that explains what it is, with a video that explains how it works. Other things that are a bit more of a commitment might require a bit more contact with the person. They might involve a phone call, they might involve a group call or something like that. So I think I would, to start of where should I begin, I would think about who's the person that I'm trying to sell to and how do they normally make decisions. So if it's a personal trainer in a gym, how does this person normally make a decision? Well, they might go to the gym for a trial session. So I can't do that in the internet. So how am I going to create this same feeling as like,

the more I'm getting a walkthrough of what it might be like or an experience of what it might be like. So you're mimicking a customer's decision, right? So that's probably the best way of giving a general answer is it should be, you should be able to rely on it really. And if you can't, it's not really doing the job that it needs to in running the business. And it should as closely as possible match what the customer needs to make a decision. If someone needs longer than a day to make a decision, but you try to make everyone a pick it, you try to make everyone make a decision in a day, it's not going to work. So that's how I would think of it. So in that situation where someone takes longer

than a day to make the decision, you could perhaps have an email sequence over seven days or over 14 days that would slowly explain to them the different benefits or perhaps even provide some free advice around whatever it is that you're talking about. Exactly. And that might convince someone, whereas creating a 14 day set of email sequences for a 10 pound e-book on something that's very transactional and someone can learn in half an hour kind of makes a lot less sense. Yeah, that's spot on. And I think like you and I have both bought courses, books, programs online before,

right? So we are probably both of us on the side of the spectrum, which is skeptical, need quite a lot of convincing, or like I need you to come up to me and say, you should buy this thing, right? I'm not the sort of person who's going to make a decision very quickly, but some people do. And I think generally the way that we operate is there's usually 3% 5% of any round of people who are just looking for someone to help them. They're not in the browsing phase, they're in there. I'm going to buy one of these. I'm just picking which one. I'm just actually showing online weight loss program. Exactly.

Best online PT course. Best. Whatever. Just literally looking to buy something. So those people probably don't need six months. Because actually if you wait six months, they'll abort from somebody else. If someone's looking for a consultant, a program, a product, anything, and you are there, and you speak to that person in a way that kind of makes them feel like you're a good choice, you can make some sales pretty quickly. But there are also people who just click on something, because it's the internet and people do it passively while Netflix is under the background, right? They'll click on something and opt in, but not really make a decision for a year.

So you need the shorter window, but also a way of kind of keeping in touch of people. So as you mentioned, email sequences, or that would be when a podcast or a YouTube channel or something like that comes in handy. So there's a lot to this, but basically it comes down to what does my customer need from me to make a decision about this, whether that's now or in six months time, and how do I create that experience in my business? So that if someone is just browsing, if you imagine a shop situation, if every person came in the shop, the shop assistant went up to them and pushed them against the wall and went,

you've got to buy this now, otherwise the time is going to run out. They'd probably go to jail, right? I. They'd probably go to jail. Right, I imagine eventually they'd go to jail. Whereas if it's like, hey, can I help you? Do you want a free sample? Have you seen this? Have this brochure? Can I get you remiled rest? Do you want to be on a remal list? What a nice experience. When I am reading it, but I'm going to go back to that shop. It's thinking about it like that. There's no magical three-step script that makes this all work. It's just people buying from people. So you've got to mimic that as closely as possible.

What we've talked about a lot so far has been, I would guess, mostly conversions, product market fit, making sure that people come in the right, they understand what you're trying to sell them, that they don't get to put off. What about traffic? Any people to actually see the thing that I'm trying to sell them? How can I drive traffic?

So this is something that Chris and I have like discussed on and off since I've known you. So I'm Mr. Ads and Chris is Mr. Organic basically. So if a people who don't know what those terms mean, like ads paying for, I pay Facebook, Instagram, Google, whatever, for something to appear. And everyone's seen the word sponsored underneath an Instagram post, right? Organic would just be using a following that you have.

And I guess they require different approaches and different strategies in fact, so you can basically do one of those two things. You can run ads to something, you can pay to target specific type of person who has a specific interest to come and visit your customer journey. Or you can take a less direct approach and try and build things organically

by getting traction. So you can have platforms and channels online, Instagram, I guess, maybe slightly on the downhill, I'd like to say. A lot of people are building platforms on Twitter these days, YouTube channels, podcasts, and you send that traffic, those people, those clicks, to where you know if I send 100 people here, one of them all by, generally speaking. Or you're so confident in the sales sequence that you've built that you know for sure from the last thousand people

that one in ten people buy, right? And if one in ten people buy and I know if I spend a hundred pounds and make 150, then there's a pretty strong argument to then use advertising to just get people to come in through the door. Because you know you can very closely control who comes and sees you, right? Who comes and finds the sales sequence. Because you can basically select interests and demographics and all that sort of stuff. So that's the traffic side of things. And all of these words, like conversions and traffic and the optimization of them are

worlds in and of themselves. There's lots to them. optimization of them are worlds and in and of themselves. There's lots to them. We opt more for paid because it's a bit easier to control and I guess use often I quite introverted don't necessarily want to post that post our tops off all the time. I'm like suited to being behind the a spreadsheet and a graph whereas I guess Chris is being very successful with the opposite. So those are kind of two examples of how you might go and get attention to your business once it's

built, once it's functioning. What's your current opinion on the online platforms for organic? In six years ago, everyone wanted a Facebook page and three years ago, everyone wanted an Instagram and now TikTok's taken off. So where are we at at the moment? What do you think is useful to use now and then what's your predictions for the next five to ten years in terms of whether the power for organics going to be? I think we probably agree on this. I think in that I think search-based content is gonna be the dominant thing. And by search-based, if you imagine Instagram, Twitter, Facebook,

their feed-based social media. So like, you don't necessarily search on Instagram for something or search on Facebook for something. A podcast, a YouTube video, an article, blog posts, that sort of stuff, is like someone type something in the YouTube because they follow someone on YouTube or they follow a podcast, or maybe they read a blog regularly, for example. You can make something once on those platforms, and I mean, I'm sure you've got some crazy stats over your, some of your videos, the

higher performing ones, where it's been made a year ago, and still every day, a thousand people are finding it, a thousand people are finding it and there's a new people every single day. I think there'll always be a feedback social media and there'll always be like something that's invoked. I know like Clubhouse is something that's gradually gaining traction, TikToks obviously replaced, always going head-to-head with Instagram, reels and stuff like that. That, I think it's a dangerous game to get involved with because those platforms can die overnight.

Like we saw Facebook business pages with their thing, like six, seven years ago, and now you can barely get anybody, see a post if you post it on Facebook. So I think it'll be a long time before people stop searching for things on Google before people stop searching for things on Google, people stop searching for things on YouTube, whereas I think people can leave social media platforms very, very quickly with that bit of press.

I've never thought about it like that, but that's a such a good way to put it. So do you see almost the search-based stuff, which would be articles, host-numblogs, going through Google, YouTube, which is also owned by Google, and also the second most popular search engine in the world, and also appears within Google results. So, YouTube's also kind of somehow a Google... Yeah, that's the same thing. Yeah, essentially. Podcasts aren't wonderful on SEO, but they're not bad, and they sometimes appear in there.

You would put that stuff into one particular side of the internet. And then that's moving at a slightly slower place. The turn over the attrition rate, the churn rate of that is moving slower than Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Clubhouse, Twitter, etc, etc. I'd say so, yeah. So like, it depends on sort of the age of people listening, but I can remember when all anybody spoke about was Facebook, and then I can remember when all anybody spoke about was Instagram, and then things gradually die. And now, actually, most of my friends have deleted their Facebook account because they saw some like woke Netflix documentary that makes something that being minute people in. Right? So, you know, but it's amazing, isn't it?

How that can happen? How there's just a little bit of bad press about something and people are like, right, I'm on my Facebook. Isn't it interesting? No one's deleted the YouTube account. Like no one has stopped watching YouTube. Precisely. Precisely.

Yeah, I just thought this the other day, it wouldn't surprise me if Elon Musk doesn't have Facebook account. And he deleted Tesla's Facebook page on a whim. And yet him and Jeff Bezos, when they're sat somewhere at three in the morning, because they've got jet lag because they've just traveled halfway across the world on the private jet, will 100% watch videos on YouTube. There isn't a chance in hell, but there is a pretty big chance in hell that they wouldn't watch TikTok. So yeah, it seems more ubiquitous. The search based platforms.

And you've got to consider like, you know, people are bad things to say about Google, but they also have Gmail and Chrome. So for like those behaviors to stop, it's going to take real shifts. Because what's interesting is when someone leads a Facebook account, they don't then spend no time on their phone. They just replace that habit with Instagram or TikTok or something else, whereas if you're searching for something,

or you follow a YouTuber, you just follow a content, because it's interesting. And you don't go on YouTube with this like, ah, this is, I mean, yeah, it's easy to spend five hours on YouTube, but it kind of feels better than spending five hours in Instagram. It's so hard to explain why isn't it? Like, it feels like time better spent. So here's my, here's one potential proposal for that.

The number of people who have accounts versus the number of people who create content for the platform on YouTube is more, there's more inequality in that than probably on anything else. Almost, almost no one that's listening has ever uploaded a video to YouTube. And yet, no one, no one that's listening hasn't ever watched something on YouTube.

The same can't be said for Facebook or Instagram, like, you know, sometimes you wish that your dad would stop posting on Facebook. Like, dad, not again. Like, but the, like, dad, stop uploading your channel and you know, you're like, you're like, dad, stop uploading your channel and you're like, you're like, you're like, dad, stop uploading your channel and you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're

like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're putting vlogs on YouTube. Like that doesn't happen. So I certainly think that basically what you have is a channel with more high barriers to entry to create the content for it, because anyone can take a photo and upload it to Instagram, but because this race to ever increasing quality, it saves the guy shooting this on a DSLR camera with a studio quality microphone, the race to ever higher quality, saves the guy shooting this on a DSLR camera with a studio quality microphone. The race to ever hire quality because there is so much money to be made on YouTube and other similar platforms if you get it right, has men that it's almost... If you're to say to someone,

hey man, I need you to film a vlog. Are you being serious? Like, film a vlog of myself? That's the Logan Paul territory, that's Mike Thurston territory. But if you to say, hey man, take, put that on your story. Take a selfie and put it on your story. But that probably highlights where the value is felt and also the evergreen nature of the platforms. So that thing from David Perrell, almost 90% of the content that you consumed today will have been created

within the last 24 hours. Like that statistic should terrify everybody because it just means if it's easy, come it's easy, go, it's probably pointless, you're not going to remember, you're not even going to remember that you consumed it. Whereas if you've got something which has been around for a little bit longer, it's most likely going to be of worthwhile content. If it's popped up on your radar after having been on the internet for three years, you're like, oh, right, well, you know, to accumulate half a million views over three years. Perhaps this is actually worth a ton, and it probably is because it's been selected for by other people, as opposed to another bootie selfie photo from like that girl that you follow on Instagram.

I think I never thought about the comparison of most people know someone who uploads Instagram regularly, whereas I literally can think of you in terms of my social circle, who posts on YouTube, it's you. So I think part of that is podcasting YouTube are like a step down from TV and radio in terms of how it's perceived. So for someone to think to be on YouTube, that's like, whoa, like I can't put myself on YouTube, that's like being on TV, same with the podcast. A lot of people have nerves about being on a podcast. So I mean, it's just one of those things where I would happily spend all day on YouTube

because of the amount of stuff I can learn. And I think because of that, and because you can find a video that's 10 years old, and it still be really valuable, the incentive is to pour your heart into this piece of art that might still be existent 10 years time. Whereas your Instagram story isn't going to last more than 24 hours. Imagine if you watched someone's Instagram poll, if you got delivered someone's Instagram polls from ten years ago, you go, what is this doing on my phone? Why is this here? I don't want to know. I don't want to know about that meal that they had a decade ago, like that's pointless. But the video that they made on YouTube might be different. Okay, so

all kind of campaign, we understand that, we understand that traffic is getting people to see the thing and conversions is getting people that see the thing to buy the thing. Is there anything else that we haven't spoken about? Are there any loose ends to tie up here? So I suppose the part that we've not covered is actually providing the product of the service,

which is harder to speak generally about because that it's going to depend. The traps that I would avoid are view it as, yes, this is great when I've got three customers. I'm going to put everything into these three customers. They're going to get the most bespoke experience. I'm going to call them every morning. I'm going to make sure that at 30 customers starts actually becoming a worse service, a worse way of living your life.

The 31st customer's got to wait for the 31st email reply, and if you're answering the same questions over and over again, delivering the same service that gets watered down all the time, you just start to resent it. And I think where we nearly got to with Propane was at the point where it was like we just don't enjoy doing this. Which circles back to my point was like, what do you want your data look like? If you build your business and how you work with your customers around that assumption and the platforms you pick and you end up enjoying it and you end up doing it for a long time. So I can't really say this is how you run an online business because the specifics of the delivery are very a lot,

but I would always consider what would happen if, for some reason this really starts succeeding and I had double my customers by this time next week, would I be able to actually fulfill that? Because if your systems aren't scalable, then it'll just break and you'll hate it basically. Is there an argument to be made at the beginning being a little bit closer to the customer

is a good idea to get more of that quick iterative feedback? So I know that you guys did this when you first started out. Although you look back on it now and cringe at the amount of time that you spent slash wasted, I also think there is value in that because it gives you such a close up, highly magnified look at the inner workings of a client customer, a client coach relationship.

Or this could be for anybody, this could be someone who is helping someone to start up their own small medium-sized business in the real world, like understanding the pains that that person goes through as they begin to do it helps you to see down the line. So perhaps, do you think that might be a way to not not necessarily look to future proof yourself to the ten-year goal, but to maybe just have a trajectory of how you could start dropping things away? Definitely, Yeah. So I think there's absolutely, there's nothing wrong with working closely with your customers to get feedback and ideas and all that sort of stuff.

Generally, what we advise now is if you're working with someone closely initially, and they say, I don't understand how this works. Or can you explain this a bit better? What do you think about this? See that as an opportunity to create a resource for that question or something that is a, I'm gonna answer this question once to the best of my ability

and then it's the best answer to that question ever or it's the best explanation walk through of this ever rather than, oh yeah, good question mate. Let me just write a long email for you and press send and then it's just gonna disappear forever. So yeah, absolutely, the more you can know your customers, the better your service is going to be, the happier everyone will be. Did you see Derek Sivers when he talks about what he did at CD Baby with customer inquiries?

No. So CD Baby was the one of the biggest online stores selling music CDs, Derek Sivers, who has been on the show, multi, multi, multi millionaire, also a friend of Tim Ferris and just generally interesting human. Every time that a customer rang, this is after he understood this particular problem, he was coming up against that he was constantly spinning his wheels, doing the same things over and over. He made a decision that he was going to create a operating procedure for the whole business, for everything that he did. Every single time that a customer rang, excuse me, my CDs are arriving, it's

cracked, excuse me, my CDs being delivered to my name, excuse me, whatever, whatever, whatever, whatever the issues are. I can't play it, I'm putting it upside down, I've done it, whatever. Every time that that happened, he stopped the whole office and said, right, everybody, this is how it's going to happen, this is what the answer is, these are the particular roots that you go down and he had someone write it as well. And over the course of some months, I can't remember how many months he'd created this how to be Derek Doc. Buckle it, which was all of the things that he ended up encountering, and then he left the business.

He left the business for six months, and nothing went wrong. And he was ringing them, and they were like, what are you ringing for? We're fine. Like, leave us alone. We've got work to do. That's very important for us. Yes. So, that's such an interesting insight, and it's one that me and Darren learned later

than we would have liked, but still earlier than we could have done, that most of the problems that you're going to come up against in any business actually forget just online, most of the problems you're going to come up against are consistent challenges that you're going to face not just once, but probably monthly or every couple of months for the rest of the time that you run this business. monthly or every couple of months for the rest of the time that you run this business and the person who will inevitably end up sitting below you or to the side of you, it is easier for you to write the perfect way in the in the fewest number of words and the most precise language possible how you deal with this thing and then you can just give it to a person and it's basically like

taking your knowledge out of your brain and giving it to a person and it's basically like taking your knowledge out of your brain and giving it to them. I can't remember who it was that was reading that said the job of a owner or managing director is basically to be a complex decision engine that can never be matched by anybody else. So if you actually think about what your role as business owner is, you're taking in a million different inputs, like the way that that customer looked when he walked into the nightclub and how the DJ played his last half hour and the amount of mess on the floor of plastic glass waste and whether

that this many people went home with the inflatables or without. And none of these things, using my industries as an example, I'm not noting any of those down. I don't have them quantified anywhere, but they do appear in consciousness and they will aggregate together to give me a sense of what is going on. And then when we sit down and we talk about the event the next day, I can say things that stayed in consciousness. I'm like, actually, did notice quite a big weight at the bar, sort of between 12 and 12.30. Oh yeah, actually, what happened? We ran out of ice. So it's, okay, can we fix the ice machine ready for next week?

Is there a way that we can get bags of ice in already? Utilizing all of those different things is your job. But what you find is that more and more, that is the only place that you add value, especially as you move up through the echelons of a business, that's the only place you can add value, because there will be someone half your age in a decade's time that can come and do the thing that you used to take pride

on to do with optimizing Facebook ads or writing copy or doing whatever, that thing you used to think that you were the best at, you're now going to be not even halfway up the company ad. The thing that you, the thing that you can't be competed out with is your experience and your ability to take those multiple things in. And by writing the document, it permits you to get other people to do what they can do and leaves you to do what only you can in the business. It's the thing that like every time you go through McDonald's, dry through, you get given a big Mac. It's largely the same as the last big Mac and the next big Mac. And that's the same in London, Manchester, New York and like, but it's not Ray Croc making

the big Mac. Right. And that's really like when you really think about that, that's incredible that like there is such a process like even the way McDonald's has laid out and the way the drive through works and the window that you pay out and lots of stuff. So that that's someone taking this is how to run a McDonald's out of their head and making a document that can literally be copied and pasted around the world. But it's certain that there's a book called the Emyth Revisited that goes into this. It's so hard to do. It's so hard to come to terms of the fact that what you think you're good at is actually just a recipe that you can write down, give to someone else and they might even be better than you.

All you have to do is actually, the challenge for me is just picking a better person and making the thing that I thought of and then I'm just going to slow the pace. That's a good point. If there's someone listening that thinks this sounds all right, I might give you online business stuff a crack, other than going to propanefitness.com slash mod and wisdom, what are the books that you think would have the best impact on someone's insight? So I think you've got to read the four hour work week,

to be honest, I think it's such a, the way of thinking about it. I think that's very important such a the way of it's a way of thinking about it I think that's very important and Tim talks about Exactly what we just spoke about this idea of working towards taking many retirements So he's as an example of when he think his business was called brainquicken. I think it was a supplement business He built it up and he gave Virtual assistance thresholds of like you can spend up to two hundred dollars to solve this problem Do not ring me unless it is absolutely less as above a $200 and then he went on,

just went away and left everything and proved that this could be done. So I think that's a very important way to think about it from day one and then the email through visited walks through this example of pretty much what we've spoken about, although not online, of a lady who has a passion about baking. So she sets up a bakery and then before she knows it she's spending more time filing attacks, doing the accounts, cleaning the services and actually doesn't do any baking at all and hate it. And part of that is realizing that in setting up a business there's not just the core thing that you like doing. It's not just training clients, it's like all of the other

sort of support stuff. So probably those two books, they're very, very commonly recommended, but they're very good at founding sets of principles. They're both quite accessible as well, right? Yeah. Yeah. There is a book that I've not read, which is on my list of things to read. I think it's called Made in America by Sam Walton, I believe who's the, I may have got those names wrong, but he's the guy who founded Walmart who talks about this idea that's then being popularized by Jeff Bezos, which is this idea of a flywheel or kind of Amazon. The bigger Amazon gets, the better Amazon gets, and it's on this, like, runaway snowball that, so, like, people buy from Amazon

because there's loads of trouble with Amazon. The more people buy from Amazon, the more people sell on Amazon, which means there's more choice in Amazon, which means more people buy from Amazon and the whole thing just gets away from itself. So, like, that sort of stuff as well, learning from big CEOs, like watching interviews with people who've done it,

is always really interesting. They always have recommendations as well. But I start with those two books, I would say. Cool, man. I like it, I wish that I'd had the insight that I do now, and hopefully it's cut through some of the bullshit for people today, all of the stuff that you spend time when you start a business, especially if you're young, especially if you're listening to this and you're

20 years old and you've never done a business before and you're thinking about, do I need to be a limited company? Do I need to register for tax and that and an account? It's like you have a PayPal. The internet doesn't need you to do anything more than that. Start iterating on what it is. And here's a quote, I got a couple of these from yesterday. I don't know whether you saw them on my Instagram. Tiago Forte, a paradoxical thing about people who consistently choose the most high leverage activity is their efforts have a rough-edged half-assed quality, because polishing things to perfection is a low leverage activity. And someone commented underneath saying, perfectionism is a nice way to hide from shipping at a pace necessary to find what works. I love that. I really, really agree with that.

This is something that, so the thing we spoke about right at the start of, like, just if you've got an idea, like, sell it and then build it with your customers, and you'll end up building a better product, that's something that I'm always pushing you so slow to the mids are. So like, he always wants to have something half perfect and then sell it. But I, you hear so many people talk about, like, just,

like, anybody can sit and procrastinate, anybody can sit and try and perfect something, anybody can sit and tweak the color scheme, but if you just launch it, if you just get it out there and you do it quicker than you compare it to, you'll probably be ahead in a year's time. Do you have that question? The other thing as well is you run out of motivation, usually at getting something from 90% perfect to 100% perfect. Far more than doing another 90% perfect thing of the same thing. So for instance, I'm eating some frogs at the moment with this YouTube stuff and still finding my workflow. And I sat myself down and had a bit of a word

with myself at the beginning of the year. I was like, look, you're going to encounter like so much discomfort. You're going to get frustrated at yourself. You're going to feel like you're incapable of doing what it is. Just keep getting yourself to good enough and ship it and get it to good enough and ship it. And over time, good enough will continue to increase. And I've found keeping that in mind, keeping that little mantra that it's like, look, yeah, maybe you don't like the way you said this or the edit could be a bit more that, but it's like, it's there and you've learned, you've gleaned most of the learning you had to from that particular iteration. I'm aware that this works more easily when it's a YouTube video that goes out three times a week or a podcast that goes out three times a week,

as opposed to a big product that's maybe taking you six months to do. But even with that, asking quickly for bits of feedback, doing a glass door policy, which has been championed by Jack Butcher at Jack Butcher on Twitter for the people who aren't initiated into his little cult, he has very much a glass door policy around his business. He happily tells people what his daily revenue is, how he's building things, where he's going next, what the next course is that he's going to release. And I think part of it is because his success is a humble brag, which makes him increase in status and people want to be attached to him. But the other side of it is that he gets constant feedback from market saying, actually, mate, why are you giving us a course about how to do design? Another course about design, I don't

want that. I want one about mindset, I want one about this thing. What is it that you said says, idea is the constant delivery as the multiplier? It may be, I've never heard them say that before, but I agree. It's not his quote, he's quoting someone else. But the point is everyone always considers that they've got this idea, this really unique way.

It's going to be like fitnesswear, but it's like vegan and it's in like sustainable packaging. And all of the clothes are going to be purple and like it's every pound of a sale goes to a dog and whatever. Like that's the thing. But what people, idea is the constant execution as the multiply. People don't realize that it is all about the execution. That for the most part, you can have the best idea for a YouTube video in the world, but if your execution of it is awful, then no one's going to listen. And the same thing goes for pretty much every other online product.

It's the person walking around the Tate Gallery in London going, I could have done that. So well, yes, but someone did. Well, they are. Like, I know you could have taken a photo of a cow in that way. And I'm sure it would have done very well, but ultimately you didn't. So it kind of removes the, it like removes the ability to criticize. It's that in the person who says they thought of Uber before Uber was made, all the sorts of things. So yeah, I fully agree. And the other thing about that as well is like, only you know what the 100% might have looked like. No one else knows that what that your 80% was actually the 100% and if we've got any criticisms, great. Like, it was only 80% perfect. So I got re-improved. Yeah. That's a really, really good point as

well. That was something I was thinking of the other day that it is only you that ever feels the lack of potential that you fulfilled within a project. Because to everyone else from the outside looking in, they just think, well, that's the that's the product service. Course sales funnel video podcast. That's the thing. And think, oh, well, that funnel, video, podcast, that's the thing. I don't think, oh well, that could have been the thing, but actually he's half-assed it and given it at this stage. So yeah, man, I love it.

A nice reminder of that, just a wrap up. Nice reminder of that principle that I'm faced with all the time is every time I launch an ad campaign, four images, I always guess, I'm like, that one's going to do best. And I'm every single time I'm wrong. Even after using that to getting it wrong, consistently and learning which one one and using that information going forward, I've still never been right. So like, your idea of what other people are going to think is good is very, very rarely the case. So 8% of it do it and people respond either positively or negatively. And that's the only really the only way to progress. So.

I love it. I love it. I love it. How not to start an online business. People want to check out stuff about propane and what you do. Where do they go? What do they get? So I've just been lovely again and done something special for you.

Which is nice, isn't it? So we did a training the other day, which is more general. It's still still for online fitness business mainly, but it's kind of more. If you're sat there thinking I'd like to give this a crack, but I'm not sure where to start. It's more from the ground up principles based covers everything that we're just spoken about in a bit more detail. So that is at propendifitness.com forward slash MW business. You can go and grab that, free training, yours forever, in terms of following us in general. Probably the best place is we have two podcasts, we have a fitness podcast and a business podcast. We talk about, as my guest fitness and business, or our YouTube channel, just search, prop in fitness on YouTube. And on the YouTube channel,

actually, you'll find links to both the podcasts as well. So as the best places, don't go to Instagram and stuff like that, because it'll be dead in a couple of years. I love that. And thank you. It's been a shame not to have Sefi, but I've thoroughly enjoyed this. If you've got any thoughts, comments or feedback, just throw them in the comments below on YouTube or message Johnny on a platform which is an Instagram. Thanks for having me, honour. you