the bossbabe podcast - 47. Turning your Side-Hustle into a Full-Time Business, Travelling the World, and Becoming a Digital Nomad with Tommy Griffith

Episode Date: October 21, 2019

In this episode, we interview Tommy Griffith who previously managed SEO at PayPal and AirBnb. Tommy then founded ClickMinded, a digital marketing training platform for marketers and entrepreneurs. Natalie and Tommy are diving into everything you need to know about turning your side hustle into a full-time business. Whether you’re looking to quit and travel the world as a digital nomad or just create more freedom for yourself, you will take away so many valuable insights from this conversation.  Check out Tommy’s blog post on his journey here: https://www.clickminded.com/burning-the-boats/ If you’d love to learn from the BossBabe team about how to grow your audience on Instagram by 10,000 ideal clients in 30 days, register for a free spot in the next training at: https://bossbabe.com/growthatinsta  This episode is sponsored by the Insta Growth Accelerator. A 12-week accelerator designed to show you how to grow and monetize your Instagram account. www.instagrowthaccelerator.com

Anything you can do to get that unfair advantage and stack it in your favor, it's something you should do. Because if you're not doing that, to be frank, you're not desperate enough. It takes about a thousand days to get your side project replacing your full-time salary. Welcome to the Boss Babe podcast, a place where we share with you the real behind the scenes of building successful businesses, achieving peak performance, and learning how to balance it all. I'm Natalie Ellis, co-founder and co-CEO of Boss Babe and your host for this week's podcast episode. So this week I'm interviewing

Tommy Griffith and we're diving into everything you need to know about turning your side hustle into a full-time business. Whether you're looking to quit and travel the world as a digital nomad or just create more freedom for yourself, I know you are going to love this episode. Tommy has been doing search engine optimization for more than 10 years. He previously managed SEO at PayPal and Airbnb and now runs ClickMinded, a digital marketing training platform for marketers and entrepreneurs. Tommy started ClickMinded as a side project while working full-time at Airbnb. He grew it until it started generating more revenue than his annual salary, which is absolutely

incredible. Two years ago, he quit Airbnb to go full-time on it and ran into a number of problems trying to grow the business from there. as always remember screenshot yourself listening to this podcast and share it on your stories along with your biggest takeaways and there are so so many in this episode so make sure you tag me at IamNatalie and at bossbabe.inc and I'll be sharing them on my Instagram and just I love seeing what resonates with you and so with that let's dive straight in and welcome an actual guy to the Boss Babe podcast. This episode is brought to you by the Boss Babe Insta Growth Accelerator, a 12-week program designed to help you grow and monetize your Instagram account. If you're ready to grow your audience with your absolute ideal clients who are

throwing their credit cards at you, then listen up. I've created a completely free 90-minute training to show you how to do exactly that. I'm taking you through the step-by-step strategy to attracting 10,000 ideal clients as followers over the next 30 days. If you know that growing your audience with ideal clients who can't wait to buy from you would completely change the game, then this training is for you. As I said, it's totally free. I just recommend turning up with a journal and getting rid of all distractions as we waste no time getting into the nitty gritty specifics.

You know that I love specifics. To get started with the training, just head to bossbabe.com forward slash IG dash growth or hit the link in the show notes below. A boss babe is unapologetically ambitious and paves the way for herself and other women to rise, keep going and fighting on. She is on a mission to be her best self in all areas. It's just believing in yourself.

Confidently stepping outside her comfort zone to create her own vision of success. Welcome, Tommy. Natalie, thanks so much for having me on the show as an honorary boss babe. I really, really appreciate it. Yeah, we love having guys on. It really shakes things up a little bit. So thanks for coming on. So for everyone listening, the way this came about is you actually sent me your story and I started reading it. You have an amazing blog article, which we will link in the show notes. And I started reading it and I was so in awe of how transparent you were

about everything from the struggle of actually going from a full-time job to a full-time business the exact revenues you were making like all of those details that I wish I had seen someone sharing when I had the idea of starting a business because I think a lot of us think it's this really easy process of like oh there, there's so much money. It's so easy to make money and actually getting started and even making your first sale. It can be really, really overwhelming. So how were you even able to start exploring an idea when you had a full-time job? Yeah, that's a really good question. It's really overwhelming if you're sitting there listening and you have a side project or you're working full time somewhere else and you're thinking about doing your own thing. There's so much disheartening information out there. And by that, I mean, you know, you're on Instagram and you're seeing the most attractive people you've ever seen in your life in Lamborghinis that are like, I started my business last week and you can too, right? And it's like, there's a lot

of fake stuff out there. And the post I wrote that you're mentioning, thanks for taking a look at it, by the way, it was kind of more a therapy session more than anything. And I'd sort of wish someone had done that as well, which was, I left Airbnb two years ago to go full-time on my business. And I just wrote about everything that happened. And it turns out a lot of bad stuff happens. There's a lot of failure and a lot of messing up and stuff like that. It was just sort of a therapy session to document it. And people seem to resonate with it. The story with me, it kind of started way back in 2008. I read this book called The 4-Hour Workweek. Are you familiar with this book? Oh, yeah. I remember reading it in Australia whilst laying in a park and being like, this is going to be my life from now on.

Really? So I was the exact same. I thought the exact same thing. I read it in a hammock at my family home in New Hampshire and thought, this is going to be my life now. But yeah, so for anyone who hasn't read it, The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss, it's probably a little out of date now, but the general premise behind it was that you can build a business and travel and have a remote team and you don't need to be tied to an

office kind of thing. And I think it's probably a little out of date, but the book was the catalyst for a lot of people to kind of start internet businesses. It sounds like maybe it inspired you. It definitely inspired me. I studied finance in college and graduated when the recession started, didn't know what to do, decided to travel and teach English abroad and read this book while I was doing it and got really interested in online marketing. I made my first product, a really dorky ebook that I wrote a long time ago and sort of tried to figure out how to get it to the top of Google. I ended up trying to start a business really early when I was 22 or 23 years old with a friend of mine and I failed miserably. I was one of these guys. I was

very blessed. My parents paid for university. I graduated school with no debt, and I ended up putting myself into debt trying this business. I worked on it for a year. My friend and I started a medical tourism company. The basic idea was we were trying to offer Americans that didn't have insurance for these really high-cost procedures in the US, kind of trying to get them lower cost medical care overseas. It was exactly as bad of an idea as it sounds. I was 22. I was a complete idiot. I had no experience in the field. I didn't know what I was doing. I wasn't interested in it. But it was an internet marketing play. The idea was, okay, people are going to be Googling this stuff. Can we rank on Google and run ad campaigns on this? It didn't work. I worked on it for about a year, borrowed a bunch of money,

burned it all up, came home miserable, like with my tail between my legs, like, hey, mom, hey, dad, is there room on the couch? And this is one of the hidden upsides of trying to start something and ended up kind of failing up or failing forward or whatever they call it. It was just the right place, right time. PayPal was hiring a search engine optimization manager. And I went from running my own business that failed miserably to being on mom and dad's couch to running SEO at one of these big companies a month later. So that was the next phase of my life was I managed search engine optimization at PayPal and then at Airbnb. And because I had put myself in all this debt, I was relentlessly trying to start side projects while I was working. So I tried a bunch of different ideas and ClickMinded ended up being the one that started working. It started as an offline SEO training course. So my boss had asked me to kind of do a training session for my coworkers at PayPal. And I ended up turning that into a small like weekend business. I rent a co-working space in San Francisco around 2012. And it would be kind of like an all-day Saturday, all-you-can SEO, nine to five

marketers and entrepreneurs. And anyone would come in with their website and we would sort of nerd out on their site and figure out how to generate more traffic for them. That was sort of the first version of it. It was an offline course and it ended up just being the right place, right time with this online course kind of revolution or renaissance that we're in now. So I ended up putting that course online around 2012 and it sort of took off. After three years, it eclipsed more than my salary. And then two years ago, I went full time on it. And now we've expanded to seven new courses.

I have a small team. And for the last two years, I've been kind of traveling and building the business and working on it. So it's been quite a ride. I love that and I love that you're saying it took three years because often it can look like launching online courses is a bit of an overnight success like you talked about and it's just not the case you know you've got to understand all elements of getting the course getting great content but then actually having knowing how to market yourself and all of these different things which just don't happen overnight, especially if you don't have

an audience straight out of the gate. When did you decide it was time to go full-time? Was it when you started making the same amount back from your salary or was it even before that? Yeah, that's a really great question. And there's this sort of meme going around in entrepreneurial circles now that I really like, and it's called the thousand day principle. And the idea is, and this is the exact opposite of all the gurus on Instagram that tell you you're going to have a Lamborghini by tomorrow. The thousand day principle is, it takes about a thousand days to get your side project replacing your full-time salary. And the back of the napkin math, that's about three years. But that's not very sexy to say, right? It's a lot of hard work. And of course, it can be faster,

it can be a little slower. But I'd actually be curious with you and your business, what your timeline was. But I was astounded at how many entrepreneurs I talked to about this. And it's always about a thousand days. And so, yeah, for me, it was interesting because I was in this weird situation where I really liked my job. The typical case is like, you know, you're in a cubicle, you hate your job and you're trying to get out. But I was in this situation where, you know, I joined Airbnb at a pretty wild time. It was pretty early. There was only a hundred something employees when I joined and there was 2000 something employees when I left. Like none of my friends had heardsomething employees when I joined, and there was 2,000-something employees when I left. None of my friends had heard of it when I joined, and everyone had heard of it when I left. The first week I joined, the state of New York subpoenaed the company for their data.

And then the last week I was there, I worked on a Super Bowl ad, and Beyonce was staying in an Airbnb, right? So it was just this kind of wild time to be there. So I was working on the side projects, but I liked my job. I felt unaccomplished at my job, and I still time to be there. So I was working on the side projects, but I liked my job. I felt unaccomplished at my job and I still wanted to do stuff. I had friends in San Francisco I was still hanging out with. I was dating someone at the time. So it was just like a lot of personal reasons that I just was staying. I ended up, I was in this weird situation where the side project had eclipsed my salary for two or three years before I ultimately left. And the other thing too, I think the wounds were fresh for me. Like I knew how to fail. I'm really good at failing. And so I had just gone through an

experience where I borrowed a bunch of money and burned it all up. And so I was overly cautious the second time around when I went to leave, but I ended up sort of taking longer than I needed to before bailing. Let's take a quick pause to talk about my new favorite all-in-one platform, Kajabi. You know, I've been singing their praises lately because they have helped our business run so much smoother and with way less complexity, which I love. Not to mention our team couldn't be happier because now everything is in one place, so it makes collecting data, creating pages, collecting payment, all the things so much simpler. One of our mottos at Boss Babe is simplify to amplify and Kajabi has really helped

us do that this year. So of course I needed to share it here with you. It's the perfect time of year to do a bit of spring cleaning in your business, you know, get rid of the complexity and instead really focus on getting organized and making things as smooth as possible. I definitely recommend Kajabi to all of my clients and students so if you're listening and haven't checked out Kajabi yet now is the perfect time to do so because they are offering Boss Babe listeners a 30-day free trial go to kajabi.com slash boss babe to claim your 30-day free trial that's kajabi.com slash boss babe I love that, for me, it was less than a thousand days, but I've never really had a real job. So it was straight out of university. I was like, I want to just try and launch something, but I had no money coming in. I was in student debt. And so I would freelance on

the side and it took me, I would say probably 18 months from then to get up to something I was really happy with, like a great salary that I could travel. And then it was slower growth and then picked up. And I think there's a tipping point. Have you noticed this where you hit some kind of growth and then all of a sudden it just like goes so much faster? For sure. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of compounding where you don't see it at all at the beginning and then you just don't even know where it came from towards the end. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's what people see as the overnight success is I've been working so hard. All of a sudden, I get this break and then everything comes at once. And people are like, whoa, she just started and all of this stuff is happening.

And I think that's what the overnight success looks like. But I mean, I've seen different. I mean, my husband quit his corporate job last October. I mean, he was kind of exploring ideas for businesses. He launched in March and with a monthly recurring revenue business and already got the exact same salary he was on at a tech company. And it's been very different, but I think it really depends on the industry you're going into, whether you already have an audience who you're partnering with. So I think

there's lots of hacks, but I actually think if you're coming into it from, I'm just going to explore, I've never done this before, then I think it if you're coming into it from, I'm just going to explore, I've never done this before, then I think it's totally reasonable to assume it would take you a thousand days because it's not just the money, like there's the salary you get, there's so many other things, there's the benefits. So how scary was that? I know you were saying you had definitely had wounds around having failing businesses before, but how scary was it for you to leave? What did that decision look like? Yeah. So when I made the actual jump, it was pretty funny. I think one of the biggest disservices I did to myself was I gave myself way too much time to plan, right? So I lived in San Francisco for about six years. And towards the end, I was really not hate on the city too much

or anyone listening from San Francisco, but I was really over the city. I love to travel. I've been traveling a lot. I've lived in a lot of different countries and I was so ready to go. But, you know, I still try and accomplish things at work. And so, I spent a really long time on the Saturday and Sunday mornings kind of planning out the next phase of my life. And when I ultimately left, you know, I had this moment like I packed up my apartment and gave my stuff away and sold it all and whatever, and packed everything into a backpack. And my dream was like, go to Bali, right? Like, you know, everyone on Instagram is drinking coconuts and on the beach on their laptops in Bali, like I gotta get over there. And I really drank this Kool-Aid hard. I mean, I bought the dream pretty intensely, right? And so I was sitting planning and just like,

I really set the expectations for myself so high for what kind of life would be. And if you do this, you really set yourself up to fail because no matter how awesome it is, if your expectations are crazy high, you'll almost never meet them. And so what ended up happening with me was, I was working on the business. I got it higher than my salary. I was ready to go, put in my notice, said bye to family and friends. And I left. I went with my video guy. We filmed all this new content and I put it all on a hard drive and it showed up in Bali. And from the minute I got there, the basic plan was like expand the business, expand to new courses, film a bunch of new stuff, go full time on this, hire staff and try and massively grow it. And from the minute I got to Bali, it was a disaster. I was robbed by the police my first day. I started throwing up from food poisoning. I had food poisoning the minute I got there.

The audio, I spent $15,000 filming the new versions of the course and it was raining really hard on this warehouse we'd rented. And so, all the audio was messed up on this course. So, I'm sitting in Bali a couple days in, it started pouring raining. I had just been robbed by the police. I was throwing up from food poisoning. I'm holding this external hard drive with $15,000 worth of garbage footage from the course. And I'm sitting up looking at the sky, like thinking about unlimited breakfast, lunch, and dinner at Airbnb and like the beanbags and the MacBooks and all my friends back in San Francisco. I'm just like, why am I here? Like, why didn't anyone post about this on Instagram? Right? Like, I was never told about this. And so yeah, like it just, it went really bad at first. And I'd

really set my expectations crazy high and everything went wrong. Ultimately, I'm being a little bit of a drama queen. I turned it around and ended up solving a lot of these problems. But I think the big disservice I did in making the leap was I gave myself way too much of this, like painting this vivid image in my head of how it was going to go. And the reality was life is a little more average than you ever want it to be, right? And like, how did we end up turning the business around? Okay, well, I did a lot of really boring work in Excel docs for like four months. Like that's not that sexy, right? But that's the kind of stuff that ended up turning it around. So yeah, I think

one big caveat to kind of watch out for is like, if you are getting ready to make the leap, you do have traction, you do have users, and you're starting to get revenue growth. My recommendation would be to pull the trigger a little faster than you think. And that's coming from someone who has messed it up and failed miserably. I still recommend kind of pulling the trigger faster. Because if you set your expectations too high for how it's going to go, you're only setting yourself up to be miserable about it. You know what I mean? Yeah, I love that. And I always think with everything, you should always act just before you're completely ready because you're never going to feel completely ready. And like you say, you can get there and everything can fall apart. So how's your experience traveling while building

a business been since then? Yeah, so it's been interesting. I was really gung-ho on traveling and building the business and moving all around. Did a bunch of different cities and countries. It wore off though for me. Maybe I'm just turning in an old grandpa now, but the allure of it wore off a little bit. I've actually had a lot more fun. I guess you could call it slow traveling or, you know, I used to kind of change cities every two weeks and I'm like just getting nauseous now

even thinking about that just a couple of years ago. But the business really started to accelerate when I stopped moving. When you do things like, you know, where your gym and your grocery store is and you have a core group of friends and wherever you want to work and that kind of stuff. I just found that I was kind of using too much mental energy to sort of travel to the next place and the next place and the next place. If you're having a ton of fun traveling, usually your business is suffering. And if you're working on your business, you're not having as much fun traveling. So I just wasn't as good at juggling it. So now I found kind of six months is sort of the absolute minimum that I'll stay in one place now, you know? Yeah, I feel you on that.

I did the exact same thing. I used to travel a ton and it really wore for me between not being able to get great Wi-Fi and then always changing time zones and then finding that balance between actually having time to explore the place and then work. And I used to do, I went up to six months and now I'm fully in LA all the time, which I really love. But maybe I'm just getting old too. I don't know. Yeah, I get it. Yeah. So one thing that I'm definitely curious about, because I know you do travel still,

do you have a fully remote team? Yeah. So we have a team of five. Everyone's fully remote. I'm actually in Honolulu, Hawaii right now. But most of the team is in Europe. So Spain, Portugal, Serbia, and Romania. So how do you manage your team on different time zones? Are they full-time or part-time?

It's a mix, full-time and part-time. So how do you manage that? That must be quite difficult at times. Yeah. I mean, the nature of our business is, and this was kind of, we made a bunch of decisions around this a couple of years ago, but the nature of the business is it makes it really easy to do, right? So we're just a, ClickMinded is an online course. It's an online training platform for marketers and entrepreneurs, seven different courses on digital marketing, but it's not kind of a service-based business. We're not doing any consulting or agency work or anything like that. So when you have a product, particularly a digital product that scales really

nicely, whether it's media, YouTube videos or podcasting or an online course or something like that. It's very easy to sort of like compartmentalize time zones. You don't necessarily have to have meetings. We've gotten to the point now where sometimes we're only having like one meeting every two weeks, right? And it's just sort of Slack messages and things like that. So time zones aren't as much of a problem. If you need meetings and you need to check in and that's the nature of your business, of course, you know, being in a closer time zone is much better. For us, it's not. It's like we're sort of working on long term work. Everyone work a little bit and then you stop and people write messages in Slack and all that. And yeah, the two big tools we use are Slack and Help Scout for our customer service stuff. And we use time scheduling app for where staff logs their hours and it's super easy to use. I love that. Yeah, it's a great idea, I think, to have them map their time. Not only is it good for their productivity, but when they're working remotely, it's a good way for you to keep tabs on people as well, which is

important. Yep. So how is ClickMind doing now? So how long have you been doing it full time now? It's kind of crazy. So ClickMind has been two years full time. We're on the eighth year of the business, which is nuts. And're on the eighth year of the business, which is nuts. And this is sort of one of the things, the overnight success stuff that is just, I just 100% don't believe in at all. And yeah, like you mentioned, I sort of posted all the revenue numbers of the business. And I've had friends and people reach out and say, oh my God, the business is looking great. And it is, but it's been eight years. And so I wrote this post and i posted all of our revenue numbers and if you look at it right now at this one snapshot sure it looks like it's doing

well but then i went back in time and i listed out all these companies that were started after clickmited i'm just pulling up the blog post now so here's a list of companies created after clickmited lyft 24 billion dollars snap $15 billion. Instacart, $7 billion. SoFi, $4 billion. Like, okay, you could argue, okay, these are like venture capital funded tech companies. That's not a fair comparison. And that's true. That's not a fair comparison. But then like while I was writing this blog post, I went for a walk and was sort of clearing my head and I walked past a Panda Express. I don't know how long you've been living in LA. I don't know how familiar you are with gross fast food, Chinese food in America. But Panda Express is like this Chinese fast food

restaurant. And they had a sign in the window that said, now hiring regional managers, $65,000 a year. And I was thinking like, what? And so I went back and I went back to my revenue numbers. And I looked at my first three years revenue. And even though I thought I had made it, even though I thought I was in that elite percentage of people that actually gets their business off the ground, and even though I thought I was killing it, I went back and realized that if I had worked at a Panda Express as a manager for three years, I would have earned more money than my business. And I graphed out all the numbers. And so I think people very reasonably wonder, should I start this business. And I graphed out all the numbers. And so I think people very reasonably wonder, should I start this business? And I think it's a really reasonable thing to ask. It's scary.

Good paying jobs that you love working on every day where you don't have to take a lot of risk, they can be a good trade depending on what you're looking for. So these overnight success stories you hear, they're just so ridiculous and they can be really disheartening. At least for me, they were. It was really depressing to see all these other people like that seem to be doing so well with so little work. And I was there like working my ass off and I would have made more money at a Panda Express. And so I do think that is one kind of thing to think about is like, not only is it, can it be a risky proposition, but the trade-off is really reasonable. And sometimes you are insane to want to try and do that. So if you do make the

jump and you do ultimately commit to it, I think you have to relentlessly push a lot of the entrepreneurial stories out of your feed and out of your inbox because they'll just make you a little bit more miserable. You know what I mean? Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. And I think it really all comes down to what you want and what you value. Because for me, the first couple of years starting my business, even when I was making money, I was reinvesting so much of it in the business and I was taking home so little,

but it felt so great that I was building something that I had freedom of location, schedule. I didn't have to clock in and out of anywhere that felt really good. But I know if I didn't understand they were my core values and I understood how important those things were to me, it would have been really easy to throw in the towel and go and work for someone else because it isn't the easiness you see. And even with companies, you know, that are like, I have a multi seven figure company, but it's not like I have a multi seven figure company,

but it's not like I'm taking home millions of dollars every year. I take home a really good salary, but I also pay other people's salaries. And just when you see someone on Instagram saying, like I have this kind of company, doesn't mean that's what they take home. And so it is always worth exploring and seeing, maybe I could go and get the same salary somewhere else,

but am I gonna be happier doing this? And sometimes the answer is yes. And sometimes it's no, and that's okay. Right. Yeah. And Natalie, I'm curious with you and your business, like, okay, money is obviously a factor for everyone to some degree. For some people, it's more important for somebody who was less important. But what I realized going into this, that like a lot more of what I was prioritizing was like kind of time and freedom sort of stuff. And I'm curious with you how you balance that when you get to your level. Do you have tradeoffs where you're like, okay, this is worth the revenue. Okay, that isn't like I want more time to myself.

Are you balancing that all the time? Or do you know like exactly what you want and everything falls into place? Because I'm still kind of struggling with that. You know what I mean? Yeah, that's a really good question. I mean, I feel like at every corner, I'm being told I'm going to leave money on the table because there's so many opportunities that come in. There's so many chances to do lots of different things.

But at some point, money isn't everything. And you'll be like, you know what? I'm going to leave money on the table here because I'm going to go all in here instead. And for me, and it is an absolute luxury I will say that and put it out there but I now make decisions based on whether things are energy lean or not like if something's going to really drain my energy and make me stressed then generally I'm going to turn it down they say you can only earn over a certain amount a year

before nothing much changes in your happiness after that and I do really believe it and so there's definitely things that I'm not willing to do that are going to stress me out and I will say no to them and then it's also the balance of okay I might do this thing which actually isn't going to bring in any revenue it's going to cost me money but it's going to add on to the company valuation and if I want to exit eventually then that will be a good trade so we make a lot of those decisions based on okay what do we need in the short term to really be growing in revenue? And then also what do we do in the long term that's going to raise our valuation and what feels good. And so my business partner and I like constantly are looking at ways that

we can cut the fat from the business and make things more energy lean and get rid of things that might be taking like 80% of our time and only bringing 20% of our revenue. I think it's always something you need to look at. Do you find the same thing in yours? Right. That's really interesting. I wish you could go back in time and tell me this in 2011. That would have been awesome. I think it's such a good point. I think for anyone listening that hasn't getting into the phase of starting something new. I think that's such a good point. I think for anyone listening that hasn't getting into the phase of starting something new, I think adopting this mentality earlier is even better. As one example, like I said before, I was trying to pay off debt for my first business and

ClickMinded was like idea number 15, right? I tried a lot of different ideas and I was one of these people who had entrepreneurial ADD. I tried a lot of different things. I always had a new idea. And the way to test this for a lot of internet nerdy folks, however many unused domain names you have in your web hosting account is like... I've been buying domains since I was 13. I own so many domains. It's ridiculous. Really?

Okay. So you have the entrepreneurial internet nerd ADD. But yeah, so I was this way as well. And some of the ideas would last a couple months. Some of them would last a week. So ClickMind, it ended up being a lot of fun because I really loved it. And I don't want to be like too dorky Hallmark moment kind of here. I loved computer games as a kid.

And search engine optimization to me felt like a computer game. You watch traffic go up, right? You watch like sales go up on a dashboard. It felt like an online game to me. And I also loved teaching. I taught at a university. I used to teach with other like kind of college groups I was in. So when I was teaching search engine optimization, it just felt very natural, like as dorky and specific as that sounds. I really enjoyed it. But there were other examples where I was working on stuff and I really didn't. There was this one side project I was trying to pay off this debt. I started an iPhone app development lead generation site. So the idea was like, it was 2011 and iOS development was getting

really popular. Everyone wanted to learn how to make iOS apps for the iPhone. Or if you were a company that didn't have an iPhone app yet, you were kind of lame and you wanted one. And the idea was like, okay, I'll get this site up and running and ranking in Google for terms like iPhone app development costs, iPhone app development companies, people kind of looking for iOS developers. And then I would grab all the leads, ask them for an email address, and then maybe sell the lead, connect those to agencies and stuff.

And I got the site up and live and working and ranking and generating traffic and generating leads and everything was going well. And I just hated it. Like I would wake up on Saturday morning and I just couldn't get out of bed. Like I wasn't interested in it. I wasn't passionate about it.

It was just boring to me. And I ultimately ended up dropping it, even though it was kind of working. And so I think one thing to think about, like for any listeners who are at that stage of like they're trying a bunch of different things that they're trying to figure out what to do, your own personal interest in the idea and the way you explained it earlier, Natalie, is it energy draining or not? There's a huge value on that. Whatever your first goal is, whether it's like your first $1,000 or first $10,000 or

first $100,000 or first 1,000 users, whatever it is, you are the engine that has to drag this thing across the first finish line, right? And so your own personal interest in it, in my opinion, is first, second, and third place, right? And people are going to tell you like, oh, that's a bad market. That's a bad idea. There's no money in it, right? And they're going to say all these things. But if you're working at something that's a really great market, but you hate it, and you don't want to wake up on Saturday morning to do it, you're screwed long term. It's never going to work, right? I mean, that's what happened with me. I ended up teaching search engine optimization physically in person on Saturday mornings. I love doing it. It was

actually a really bad business, right? It was a ton of work. It didn't scale at all. I wasn't charging enough. It costs a bunch of money to rent out all the materials in the space. The business was really bad, but I loved it. And I kept working on it, working on it. And it ended up being right place, right time. It turned into an online course. And then the minute it became an online course, it exploded. Going back to what you were saying around, you focus more on things that don't drain your energy, but like kind of get you more excited. If I could go back in time and figure this out way earlier, I think I would have been way better off. And I think it's worth thinking about for anyone that's listening now is like one of my favorite tech people that I follow on Twitter, he said this, like I retweeted a billion times, it was what feels like work for your competitors should feel

like play to you. And if that's the case, I mean, you think about it over the long term, right? If you're working 8, 12, 16 hours a day, and it's play for you, and it's work for everyone you're competing with, you're not going to lose. You can't really lose, right? And so that's sort of where my mentality shifted is like, if everyone starts to focus on what they really want to do, you'll eventually find it. So I'd highly recommend anyone listening

that's thinking about that is to kind of find your unfair advantages. Where does it just feel like play for you and work for everyone else? I love that so much. That's so, so true. And actually, it's something I've never thought about. But when I think about what's play for me is actually really hard for my competitor. That's so much. That's so, so true. And actually, it's something I've never thought about. But

when I think about what's play for me is actually really hard for my competitor. So yeah, that's golden. I love it. Curious, what is play for you? Is it this media stuff? Is it like working with your users and some of your like mastermind groups? Like what's the play stuff? Or is it a little bit of everything? Monetizing a community, for sure. Interesting. A lot of people know how to like grow communities and grow audiences,

but not everyone knows how to really monetize that and create and cultivate an audience with buying power. And I think that's what feels like play to me. Interesting. That sounds like the most profitable play skill I've ever heard of in my life. Yeah, but it's something I really, really love. So I like that.

And of course there's other things like around the content creation I really like, but when I think really about it, it's sharing things that I love and building trust with my audience that I think converts into buying power because they know I'm never going to recommend anything that I don't believe in. And I think that comes from the way that I curate my community and the content that I put out there is like fully authentic. So that's what I hope does it. That makes a lot of sense. So I'm really interested in your business. I think the way that you do it is so incredibly smart in a sense of you have lots of different courses that you've mentioned, but you sell them all in one as one package. There's options for people to buy individual and you sell them all as one. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. So the latest phase of ClickBiner, which we're really excited about, yeah, we expanded from just SEO to seven different courses, SEO, paid ads,

content marketing, email marketing, social media, sales funnels, and Google Analytics. And our model is we try and find world-class instructors that do this stuff every day, right? So our social media course is taught by the former head of social media at Airbnb. The content marketing course is taught by the former content strategist from Lyft. And we try and find these people that kind of are doing this stuff every day at awesome companies. And we played around with pricing a lot. And I also talked about how we kind of think about pricing in that post as well. But yeah, we messed this up a lot. Pricing is fascinating.

Buying psychology is absolutely fascinating. I still don't understand it. But yeah, we price all these courses individually. Or we also say, also, here's everything. One click for everything at a super discount. And users seem to love that one. And most people take it. And so do you find doing that and having that core focus

along with that price has been powerful for you? Yeah, for sure. We're really dialed in now. And it took us a long time to get there. We find a lot of users, the way our model works is like all of our courses are lifetime access and free updates for life. So whenever you enroll, anytime we do future updates, there's no like upselling or cross selling on those. It's just you kind of get those updates all the time. And so when you do an online course, you're often competing with people all across the scale. We compete with tons of free YouTube videos and free blog posts all the way up to $100,000 master's degrees for our competitors. So one of our value propositions is lifetime access and free updates for life. People want

a single source to learn digital marketing from. The onus is on us to keep it up to date, to keep all of the checklists and templates and the latest strategies and stuff up to date. And you don't have to kind of scour the internet for what's working, what's not. We just sort of push in your account and update you. And so when people think about it in that way, they like it and they end up getting everything. Maybe they were just interested in social media or just interested in SEO, but a lot of them say, you know what, I probably need all of this for my business eventually. I'll take it all. And it's been working for us. Yeah. I really love that. And so you said it took you a while to get there. Did you have like a real core focus with your

business from the beginning? Was it SEO just as a main core focus? Yeah. And so this is a really good question, Natalie. And you're right. A lot of people don't talk about the early days and how they get started. They only talk about when they're in seven and eight and nine figures. So one of the ways I got started was being extremely specific with a topic that I loved. And it's actually kind of counterintuitive, but I think the single most underrated way to get started is with offline events. So like, as I mentioned, I started with an offline course. I think that meetup.com is the most underrated way to start a business. I started ClickMinded with meetup.com. And so the way I did it was, even now today, you can go to meetup.com and it's $15 to be

a meetup organizer. Meetup is the fastest way, in my opinion, to bootstrap an email list if you don't have any internet presence at all. And so the way I went about doing this was, you can go to meetup.com, you create a meetup group, it's 15 bucks, you create the topic, and then the categories you select during the account creation process, meetup will email everyone in your city once your group goes live, right? So I created the San Francisco SEO meetup in 2011 for $15. Meetup immediately emailed everyone in the San Francisco Bay Area that was interested in online marketing and SEO. All those people joined. And within three days, I had an email list of 100 people

for $15. I held one happy hour. I picked a bar in the middle of San Francisco on a Thursday night and didn't even pay. Just called the bar and said, hey, can I bring 30 people by or 40 people by? And they said, yeah. And just told everyone, come here at this time. And then maybe I held one more happy hour after that. I'm not even sure. And the meetup group was suddenly like 150 people. And that was the first version of my product. So I emailed them and I said, Hey, I'm going to be doing this SEO training course, you know, feel free to come by. Now one key for anyone that's thinking about doing this that I highly recommend is I put a price tag on the first event. I wanted it to be free. I wanted to get feedback. But the flake rate on Meetup is really high.

People will really ghost you on Meetup because it's free, right? And so what I ended up doing was I say, hey, I'm teaching this SEO course. It's on Saturday. It's normally $500 per user. It's free for the first 20 people to email me back. And that will increase your attendance rate from about 30% to 70%. So they'll actually show up. It's still free, but I actually created an event that had a $500 price tag on it and then just gave out free promo codes. So people kind of value it a little bit more. They were the guinea pigs of the first course. I got a ton of feedback from them. And then when I first launched the online course, they were the first users as well. Gave a bunch of feedback, gave a bunch of

five-star reviews, and that sort of helped bootstrapped. One thing that I think a lot of people don't think about, and I accidentally did this correctly. I had no idea I was doing it right at the time, but what I realized I did correctly was by being offline and being in person, you get so much feedback on your product so fast. You're actually sitting there drinking vodka sodas with your users and figuring out what their problems are. And you're actually sitting there seeing their reaction to this stuff, right? Some of my competitors at the time, they were in their basement, like making this SEO course, talking into their laptop, talking like using Excel and doing all this stuff. And when I was teaching this course in person, you see right on your student's face when you suck or when you're funny or when something

connects or when it doesn't, right? And so, the feedback loop is literally 100 times faster. When you create an online course and you push it out, you don't get feedback until you get those one-star reviews. So, I found that by going offline, which is very counterintuitive, by going out into the real world, I moved the product forward way, way faster. So, by the time I created my online course, I had already taught it like 10 or 15 times in real life, but it was really honed in. It was really dialed in. I got a lot of really good feedback.

And the last reason why I really liked the strategy is nobody wants to do it. Like it's hard. Internet marketers are much happier to post on Instagram or send 10,000 emails than they are to go out into the real world or to go out and do a cold call or something like that, right? And to go out into the real world or to go out and do a cold call or something like that. And so going out into the real world, I kind of interacted with

my customers. I got way more feedback on it. And then after putting it online, after all that sort of offline experience, it ended up being way better than anything else. So it doesn't scale at all. It's really slow. It's time consuming. It's annoying. But if you go offline first, you'll find that the V1 of your product ends up being a lot better. There's so much gold in there. I completely agree. I love what you said at the beginning about when you start, just get so specific in your area of genius. Because I think a lot of people in the beginning have all of these different ideas, and they go and try and do something with multiple things underneath it. And actually, really really hard like maybe it's 10 products as opposed to one and it's really hard

to do one thing really well never mind 10 things really well so I love that and I really love the idea of meetup.com I think that's so powerful and I also I'm a big advocate for offline events especially when you're trying to scale and convert because it's so much easier to convert face-to-face than it is online. So big, big fan of that. And you also use lots of other digital marketing methods, SEO, of course. You don't lean too much into social, is that right?

Like organic social? Yeah, just the nature of our business is slightly less social. We're kind of very specific digital marketing problems for businesses that are usually searching for them on Google or YouTube. So we have a social media course, right? Jasmine, the former head of social Airbnb teaches it. But in terms of user acquisition for us, it's just not a channel that performs as well. And we actually teach this too. It's really healthy

to look at every digital marketing channel and actively say, this one is good, this one is not. Like it's totally fine if one is not a good candidate for you. Not everyone needs to be on Snapchat or not everyone needs to be using Pinterest or App Store optimization. It's really going to depend on your business. Yeah, I agree with that. And it's better to really select which ones work for you as opposed to go and try and do everything just because you think you shouldn't. Other people are on there. I think that also catches a lot of people out like, I need to be doing this because everyone else is. And actually, are your clients even hanging out there? You just don't know that to be true. Right. Yeah, that's a really good point. And to think about in the context of how

you said you love to do offline events, I think especially when you're getting started and a lot of people with entrepreneurial ADD do this, they have an entrepreneurial seizure or a shower thought where they're like, oh, I have this great product idea. This is going to be what I do. And yeah, they have 10 products. And instead of working on one really good one, they have kind of 10 mediocre ones like you were just alluding to. One other thing to do when you go offline, and this is really controversial, but ask people to pay you. I think a mistake a lot of people make is they create a product and then they think other people will want it, but they're not actually solving anyone's problems or they're not actually creating something that's valuable. And one thing

you can do when you go offline is actually offer the product and try and get people to pay you. And this is controversial, but I've seen it done before. Get people to pay you on the spot. If you create something and someone says, oh, I really like that. Figure out if they're just doing the American politeness thing. Like, oh, that's a great idea, but now I'm going to go walk away and never talk to you again. Or are you really solving their problem? And can you actually sling your wares at your meetup group or whatever it is, whatever you're trying to do? So when you get offline and in person, you're really dialed into one thing, you're much better off finding out if your product sucks or not, or if you're

actually solving someone's problems, you're actually creating value for someone because if you're not, that's fine. But you need to find that out really, really fast and then move to something that is solving their problems. You know what I mean? I love that so much. And I so agree with that philosophy. Funny story. When I was at university, my lecturer was, I think you're really good at business. I really want you to help me with my company. And so I was consulting with her while I was at uni and we created a product that we ended up pitching in person to Richard Branson and we showed him the product and he was like, yeah, I love it. And we were like, okay, well, do you love it enough to actually pay us for it?

Because there's only one way to tell if someone really, really means it. And we were like, okay, well, do you love it enough to actually pay us for it? Because there's only one way to tell if someone really, really means it. And that's if they'll give you cold, hard cash. And he was like, yeah, I do. And so he handed over money and he was like, that's really smart. And I really recommend you keep doing that. And so- Wait, I was suggesting you do this with like randos at your meetup. You did this with Richard Branson? Are you serious? Yeah, I was a crazy 19 year old. I was like, let's just see if he is going to put his money where his mouth is. And you were 19? Jesus, that's incredible. Oh, I have so many stories. I once pretended to be a Bloomberg

reporter to sneak in to ask Richard Branson for an internship. I was very much the person that would spot any opportunity and go for it. Yeah. Well done. Whenever your book comes out, let me know. Guys, DM me. Should I be writing a book? Let me know. I really do believe that. And also, I think it's great training for entrepreneurs. My husband is not a typical entrepreneur at all. And he is not super into sales. He's like, I don't know how to do it. It makes me super uncomfortable. I'm like, well, you should literally put yourself out there

and ask people to pay you. Just say, do you like this product? Okay, pay me for it. Or like when you're getting coffee, say, hey, can you give me a discount on this? Put yourself in those uncomfortable financial conversations. Because as an entrepreneur, your job is to sell. No matter what you like doing or whatever, if you can't sell, you're going to really struggle. 100%. So let's just bring this full circle. And so for someone listening who is getting really hyped up,

they have a job right now, but they have an idea for a side hustle or they already have one. What would be the first things you recommend they do in order to start getting them on a path where they could swap their job for their business? Yeah. So the big one we just talked about, which is, you know, having a passion, having an interest in the thing, being your own customer is kind of wrapped up in that, like solving your own problem and enjoying it. I've seen so many examples of someone like, you know, they're a lawyer for 20 years and then they go to sell CrossFit jump ropes. And they're

like, it's just like a, it made sense in their Google sheet or their Excel doc, but they're not actually invested in the idea. So I think the kind of first, second, and third place thing is you get fired up for it. And you get more power and energy working on it than less. It isn't draining. Because if your batteries aren't fully charged on this thing, it's just eventually going to die.

The other thing too, I think worth keeping in mind is this other term that's kind of been coined in entrepreneurial circles called exit velocity. A friend of mine, Dan Andrews, he runs this podcast called Tropical MBA. He coined this term called exit velocity. And I'm fully convinced that this is the best way to go from side project to full time. So exit velocity is this idea, I'm just pulling it up now in this blog post. Okay, here's the definition. Exit velocity, the amount of professional and entrepreneurial momentum you have when quitting your job and starting a new venture. Momentum can come from a variety of sources, investment, capital, experience, anchor clients, industry knowledge, and connections,

aka unfair advantage. So the idea here is like, you're working for someone right now, you're being paid right now, you're probably smart, you're probably have special skills that most people don't have. And you're like learning stuff every day, right? You can use this for your next thing is kind of the point. When I started my first business that failed miserably, I was 22 and I started a medical tourism company. I had no connections, no money, no interest in the topic. I had no experience. I had no unfair advantage at all. And surprise, surprise, it failed miserably, right? But with my second attempt, I was managing search engine optimization at two of the biggest websites in the world, like every single day. And then on the side, I went to go teach search engine optimization. And then I was using my product at work, right? So all the

designers and engineers and data scientists that joined my team, that joined the growth team at Airbnb, they were using ClickMind. I was using ClickMind to train them up. I was getting, making the product better and better and better. And then I continued to work on it on the side until it started generating more than my salary. I also used the branding, right? So ClickMinded was quote unquote, the SEO course from the SEO manager at PayPal and Airbnb. So I was like leveraging the brands as well. So by the time I left, I had stacked the deck so much in my own favor with all these other

things. I had so much unfair advantage that even though I stumbled out of the gates and I messed up a lot the first six months, it was kind of inevitable that I had to succeed because I had kind of cheated so much, right? And so, I highly recommend thinking about your unfair advantages and your exit velocities. Like, if you hate your job right now, don't like keep working at it, working at it, working at it, and then suddenly quit one day and start from scratch. Like, the way I view it is like you're kind of shooting out of a cannon. And if you have no exit velocity, that cannon is pointed completely straight, completely horizontal. But your exit velocity is how much you can point that cannon up before you

quit. And so what are you doing now that your current company is paying you for that you could pivot into your business that you can work on? Can you create something and have the company be the first customer? Can you use the company's brand in some way? And so I think startups are hard and most startups fail. Most small businesses fail. And so anything you can do to get that unfair advantage and stack it in your favor, it's something you should do. Because if you're not doing that, to be frank, you're not desperate enough. And if you're not desperate enough, it's not going to work. I think a lot of this is rooted in being desperate enough to do it. At least that's how it was for me. You know what I mean? So much gold in there. I absolutely love it. Thank you so much for just being so open. I'm going to put the link to the

blog post that we are referencing below because I think it's such a good read for all entrepreneurs. I generally don't read a ton of blog posts and I was hooked. I was like, this is so refreshing to really, really see everything put out and laid out. I think I want to do something for myself as well for my own journey. So thank you for that. Where can everyone find you and find out more about what ClickMinded does? Yeah, Natalie, thanks a lot for that. Yeah, so we're at clickminded.com. We just launched two free digital marketing and SEO strategy guides. They're like these retro 8-bit design strategy guides that if

you ever played Super Nintendo or Nintendo in the 90s, that's kind of how they're designed. On Twitter, I'm at Tommy Griffith. And on Instagram, I'm at HeyTommyG, although I don't post on there all that much. I love it. Thank you so much for your time. Yeah, Natalie, thanks a lot. I really appreciate it. If you loved this episode, please subscribe and be sure to leave us a review i want to hear what you enjoyed what your main takeaways were and also i really want to know who you want to see appear on the show we'll be reading all of the reviews so we will be implementing your feedback and speaking of reviews we've got a little something up our sleeves

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