Welcome back, everybody, to the Panel Podcast. It is just Brian and I today. Justin is out. Sounds like a very cool trip to conferences, and now he's in Canada. Well, guess back in Canada, but in Toronto.
Jordan:Yeah, he's doing a of
Brian Casel:a whirlwind tour over there.
Jordan:That's right. I'm looking forward to hearing about it. We hear about it, you and I in, you know, in DMs, but we'll hear about it on the show next week. But for now, it's Brian and I. I am Jordan Gal.
Jordan:I am the co founder at heyrosie.com.
Brian Casel:And I'm Brian Casel, founder at Builder Methods. So so just like the old times, we're, you know, getting the the Bootstrap Web crew back together here. Of course, we we've been doing weekly episodes, you know, throughout this throughout this year. You you've joined us on the panel. And, for those listening, I think I'm gonna be cross posting this episode over to the Bootstrapped Web podcast feed, which I haven't done in a in a in minute.
Brian Casel:So if you're if you just happen to catch us over there, by the way, we've been back on the mics like most of this year. So
Jordan:You gotta move. You gotta move over with Yeah. That's right.
Brian Casel:Get get subscribed over on The Panel Podcast. That's where Justin Jackson and Jordan and me have have been talking.
Jordan:And and a quick apology and explanation for me. Some people on Twitter letting us know about microphone issues. It's not a microphone issue. I am just restless and I can't stop moving. And so you hear, like, my desk and my chair and my pen.
Jordan:You can't
Brian Casel:contain this guy.
Jordan:Sorry. You know? Sometimes I get on a call with someone, I'm like, my energy level is a couple standard deviations above what this person is right now. And either
Brian Casel:I need to calm down or whatever it takes to get the to get to get the the good content on on the airwaves. You know what I mean?
Jordan:I feel like, you know, that's that's when it's good when it gets passionate and
Brian Casel:That's right.
Jordan:Interesting. So speaking of business, we're going to put that aside for a sec. We're going to talk about workout routines.
Brian Casel:Yeah,
Jordan:dude. Let's do it. Just a couple of dudes in their forties trying to keep themselves in good shape.
Brian Casel:How are we keeping these bodies functional? That's the question.
Jordan:Artificially, in my case. Yes. I have been really interested in medicine, I guess, for lack of a better term, but like men's health medicine and where that's going. Right. There's a lot of talk about peptides.
Brian Casel:There's
Jordan:all these things. I am hesitant to go too far. I think I'm waiting for the FDA and I'm waiting for more clarity, maybe a couple more studies just to feel generally safer on Yes. The Around peptides and around these, like, I don't know, prescription strength, like serious things.
Brian Casel:Okay. So let's about the stack. But actually on the peptides question, what would you actually be interested in? Like, I'm not interested in like Ozempic or like Like weight what are the other peptides that people are talking about that are like interesting? Know there's stuff for like sleep, right?
Jordan:Yeah. There's it seems like they're like, I don't even know, metabolism boosting, fat burning. But I am with you. I'm really worried about the anything that impacts my appetite too much. My appetite's chilled out.
Jordan:I don't eat like a lunatic. It feels healthier in that way, but it freaks me out, the idea of just not really being hungry and people say it impacts your ambition. I kind of want to go the other way.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Like, you know, I hear a lot of like interesting science on it, it's like, I don't know. I still just, I'd rather just make sure that I dial in calories in and calories out and burn and, and extra exercise and eat well, you know? I'm, I'm not great on both. Like I'm, I'm trying to optimize both.
Brian Casel:We can talk about that. But what is your stack right now? Let's talk about like the, before the workout. So what are you taking? Like what?
Jordan:I'm still, I'm still taking creatine.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And Yeah. I'm on that too.
Jordan:Yes. And and that I think is great. The feel I don't know. My energy level just feels great on that front.
Brian Casel:Do you do it every like, I do it I'm not daily. I'm like I'm like every other day. I usually just do it on the days that I'm planning on strength training workouts.
Jordan:Okay. I really do it five days a week because where I work out of on the 3rd Floor, there's a bathroom here. So it's kind of like my office bathroom, and that's where I keep some of the stuff to like, you know, like the creatine and the shaker bottle and whatever else. So it's part of my workday routine, but not part of my weekend routine. So I often forget Saturdays and Sundays.
Jordan:But when I'm up here, I'm like, I come up, I, you know, drink some creatine. I come here, do this vitamin thing.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Amy does it too. So we we we like share the same thing every morning. Like, I'm I'm really just doing that and vitamin like a multivitamin.
Jordan:That's it. You know? Okay. So here's what I've been experimenting with. One of the online services, the what's it called again?
Jordan:Telehealth, right? With doctors. They have a testosterone. It's like a combination of a few things. So I don't want to take like growth hormone or straight testosterone because that has other issues and it also forces you to basically stay on that forever.
Jordan:That is unappealing at our age. So I tried this like in between step that's like a combination of like in clomiphene and tadalafil. And that shit works. Yep. So I am.
Jordan:And here's the interesting part, the energy level is good and I have been working out more. I joined a gym. Let's talk about that in a sec. But the unexpected side effect, it's not just the energy and like vitality, but it has a psychological impact.
Brian Casel:Like not just focus, but like ambition, bro. Ambition. Yeah.
Jordan:Yes. I feel like I did ten years ago where I was like, what wall is next that I need to run through to get to where I want to get to? Now, that's positive in the motivation, but there's a negative aspect, which is the impatience, the dissatisfaction. They seem to really go hand in hand for me. That's just how it is for me.
Brian Casel:I don't really know what I what I because I I feel like I'm pretty ambitious, but also at the same time, a little little chill. And I sort of like like it. Like, I am I would be very hesitant for for me personally about things that mess with that sort of balance, but at the same time, the the creatine is noticeable. Like, on the days that I'm on it, I feel much more hyper focused, like, throughout the day, you know? Yeah.
Brian Casel:And and the energy level seems more, just more consistent. Like, I guess on the days that I don't, I'm I've got much more ups and downs on on energy level, you know?
Jordan:Yeah. I the creatine's amazing because it's both physical and psychological energy level. Yeah. You just I feel more up, awake, aware, interested, excited, focused, all that. But I hear you.
Jordan:I got into a I get into a place where I was motivated and ambitious, but kind of chill. And this has changed that a little bit. And it's, it's not all good. It's not all bad.
Brian Casel:Well, I'll save this for like the business update side, but there there's like a mental aspect of it where it's like, what I always sort of battle with on a mental level and ambitious level, ambition level is like sense of urgency. What is my level of urgency? And is, is that level healthy and helpful urgency? Or is it do I, do I really need it? Can I, can I calm the fuck down a
Jordan:little bit? Right. Stress without the benefit is Yeah. It's just kind of torturing yourself.
Brian Casel:Yep. Alright. So on the physical side, what are what are we doing in in in the gym or at the home gym or what's what's that looking like?
Jordan:So here's what happened. I was all about group fitness classes. You pay and then it's scheduled and then you already paid, so you may as well go. I use that as my key motivation. Then I didn't love the gym that I was going to for the group workout classes wasn't quite right and the timing was just okay and whatever combination of things.
Jordan:So then I joined Lifetime Fitness. I don't know if you have one by you. It's it's it's almost like a I don't even know what to call it. It's like a country club gym thing. It's a little more expensive.
Jordan:It's got a bunch of nice stuff, so. I wanted to give that a try. So I joined and the reason I joined is because it has both. You pay one membership fee and it has classes And also, could just go to the gym. My one of my issues with just the group classes is you go to the group class, but you don't have just a gym to just go to and work out for half an hour if you feel like it.
Brian Casel:Oh, okay. Yeah. And what what kind of classes? Is it like strength training? Is it like HIIT?
Brian Casel:Is it like what what are you doing?
Jordan:I was all about strength training of some type or another. Right? I'm not into the flexibility stuff or pilates or yoga or anything like that. I had a fun experience going to the gym that my wife goes to, which is an amazing gym. I don't know what the owner is doing, but that it's called the vibe and the vibe in that place was incredible.
Jordan:However, it's not for me. It's for women.
Brian Casel:Remember you talking about that.
Jordan:Yes. It was I, like, walked in. I was like, there are 50 women here, and they're so happy, so excited to see each other. The energy was amazing. And I was like, amazing.
Jordan:But I don't belong here.
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Jordan:Yeah. So I backed away from that. So the funny thing that's happened to me is that I joined Lifetime Fitness, and I have not gone to a single group class. I now just go to the gym.
Brian Casel:And do you ever do like a personal trainer session? No. I thought
Jordan:I've done in the past. And that was the best shape I've ever been in was with a personal trainer. But I haven't done it in in a long time. But what it did is it now motivated me to work out at home. So now I think I'm going to quit the gym and just keep up the motivation home.
Jordan:For me, I have an addiction to my body feeling sore.
Brian Casel:I don't know
Jordan:what that is. It makes you feel strong or and sore and like you're doing what you're
Brian Casel:supposed to be doing.
Jordan:You don't feel soft. Whatever that is, that's like a And
Brian Casel:I think that there's like an age thing, at least for me, where I noticed that like, if I'm, if I slack off on the gym days, on the strength days, on day three or four, my body starts to hurt more. Like I'm, I'm much more sore from sleeping or from sitting on the couch or on the chair, like my, I'll get back pains, but actually lifting and having the good soreness from lifting also makes, it just definitely makes the body more resilient. Okay. Right? So like the normal wear and tear and the aches and pains don't really happen when I'm on a on a steady gym regimen.
Jordan:So you say more like well oiled, things are functioning properly.
Brian Casel:It feels good. Like, like, no, it's a, it's a physical reminder that I've been slacking off if if I'm just getting random back pains for no reason. Yeah. You know? Fair.
Jordan:I I do get a little pain in my knees from workouts. So, I'll I'll just notice that going up and down.
Brian Casel:I've had that too with with knees. Yeah. And I've been playing a lot of basketball with my kids, and that just slams my knees when I'm when I'm like Yes. Teaching them how to do a layup and stuff.
Jordan:But When you do a workout, first, you you do it at home or you go out? And then All about
Brian Casel:the home. Yeah. Both both Amy and I have been home workout people for the last couple of years. I used to do I used to have a gym membership for the same reason, like if I pay for it, I wanna go to it. And that never really stuck.
Brian Casel:But like but you know, with the house, like maybe three or four years ago, I I really set up the garage. Like half of our garage is my gym. I've got the what do you call it? Like, I've got like the bar, like lifting Yeah. Set Bench.
Brian Casel:So my so my routine is like, I basically rotate between lifting sessions and a, like a, like a circuit training thing. So my, my lifting, it started out, on, on a program called five by five. It's a pretty popular like system for, you know, five reps of five exercises, sort of rotating through. There's like an A workout, like an A day and a B day that you can rotate, you know, like bench squats, deadlift, rows, overhead lift, things like that. I've, I've modified it over the years and I've simplified it down to like, instead of like five exercises going down to three, for me, especially during the weekdays, like I need to get this thing done within thirty minutes.
Brian Casel:I can't spend an hour or more, you know?
Jordan:All of my workouts, home or not, are thirty minutes.
Brian Casel:Thirty minutes, you know? The other thing that I do is walk every day. Like every day I, in addition to either strength or the the circ and by the way, the circuit is like another like twenty minute of like, I'll rotate between like push ups and jumping jacks and ab stuff and planks and stuff like that. Which is, you know, like, like thirty second rest in between, sort of get the heart rate up. And then I do go out and walk and that to me, like the walking is like the most, like I cannot miss a day.
Brian Casel:I do seven days a week, always go out there and walk in the morning. And that is more mental than physical for me. I do try to get the speed up and I go up hills and stuff, it helps with the heart a little bit, but it's more about like, first of all, get me out of the house, get me in into some sun, 07:38 in the morning. Because I'm going be sitting here in the house the rest of the day. So I need to get out there.
Jordan:Yeah. Don't like when you get to the end of the day and starting to get dark out. I have not left the house.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Like that's
Jordan:Yep.
Brian Casel:Knock out. That's no good. But yeah, that's, that's like podcast time that I listen to. Sometimes I, I speak, I do voice, voice noting while I walk out there. And that's a way to either process my thoughts or I'm brain dumping for a new piece of content that I'm gonna do or Okay.
Brian Casel:Or whatever it might be. But, yeah. And so, and on the weekends, I do an extended thing. So like on the weekends, instead of going, you know, a minute away to, to the local like town center track, I'll, I'll drive fifteen minutes to the beach. Not the beach, it's like a water area and I'll walk like four miles along the water.
Brian Casel:It's amazing. But, and I'll spend about an hour, more than an hour on a Saturday or Sunday doing that. But I'm not going to take that kind of time during the week, you know?
Jordan:Yeah. Oh, that's good. I almost completely unplug on the weekends. I'm focused on the five days a week, Monday, Friday, the walks, the workouts, that sort of thing. On the weekends, I'm generally just unplugged.
Jordan:Don't care.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yeah. Cool.
Jordan:But I have a habit of I do push ups right before getting the shower. That's like, oh, you know, put the water on, let it heat up. And I'm like, well, you know, I'm already here. I got sixty seconds. May as well just do 25 push ups.
Jordan:So at least that that keeps me going on the weekends.
Brian Casel:The the thing, I mean, what I just described though, I'm not like a 100%. Like the walking always happens like, non negotiable, but the the the workouts, the the strength training in the circuit, like my problem with it is I get bored. If I if I'm just doing the same thing every single morning, I'm just like, this again, you know? And that's a bad, like, mental blocker. Like, I I I need to be doing it every day.
Jordan:Yeah. You know? What what what works for you on a reason that you're doing it? Is it like, this is maintenance. I need to stay healthy.
Jordan:Therefore, I should work out today?
Brian Casel:Yeah. How do I convince? I just I do want to feel like I'm in shape, you know? I like to like, I hate feeling like I like I look like shit, like like I've gained weight and stuff.
Jordan:Right. So it's it's psychological and like level but in a good way.
Brian Casel:Upcoming trips tend to motivate me too.
Jordan:Okay. Yes.
Brian Casel:So, like, I'm I'm speaking at a conference in June.
Jordan:Great excuse.
Brian Casel:I wanna be in pretty good
Jordan:shape for that, know. Perfect.
Brian Casel:We've got a bunch of summer trips, you know, we're gonna be hanging out at the beach a lot. Not that I care so much about, like, you know, with my shirt off or whatever, but like but, you know, just especially in the summer when when we are more active. Everybody cares.
Jordan:Yeah.
Brian Casel:I mean, the like, the other thing is, like, my family's really into hiking. Like, we most Saturdays or Sundays, we we drive around and do and the girls are old enough now that we do, like, longer hikes with them. So that's another another thing we like to do.
Jordan:That's great. All right. Well, want to keep it up, but I'm I'm with you. I need some near term motivation then. I need to stay healthy.
Jordan:So I'm around for fifty years is is not enough of a connection on why I should do this workout. Yeah.
Brian Casel:I guess the like one more thing on this, eating for me is like, I don't eat like total shit anymore, but I do sometimes I my my habits get like, I just like overeat. Like I I I eat beyond the point when I'm actually full. So like portion control and and so I I've been using an app off and on and I just turned it back on like a week ago. What's it called? Lose It is the app.
Brian Casel:You log your log all your meals, you log your, your weight every morning. Okay. And it's like a calorie tracker and it's a really, really nice app because you could just scan like any, any barcode of any food or you could just type in what you ate and it just instantly like tracks it, grabs all the nutrition information, puts you on like a butt, like a calorie budget and you can track against that. Interesting. And it's like, does it, I'm not like drastically changing my, my, my habits.
Brian Casel:And I'm super like routine eater. I eat like the same thing for lunch every day and stuff. Okay. You know, protein shake and every morning and all this stuff, but like just logging it, just the act of even if I'm logging the same things every day, it makes me like second second guess. Like, do I need that snack?
Brian Casel:Just more aware. Just more aware because I know I'm gonna have to log it and Right.
Jordan:A database somewhere is gonna
Brian Casel:It works.
Jordan:Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
Jordan:I may need to try that. Something like that. I've been eating really well. I just have a problem at night. Just the sugar.
Jordan:Yep. Yep. Whole Foods here has these chocolate chip muffins. They're so good. They're so good.
Jordan:And it is it is tough for me. The kids are in bed. It's 10:00 at night. I'm like, man, do I just want a little bit of sugar? Maybe a little something in that that I could not stop
Brian Casel:My killer is restaurants and we eat out a lot on the weekends. And everything at home is pretty routine, so I can keep it under, under control. But like I have such a hard time going to a restaurant and just ordering a salad, you know? Like if the burger's on the menu, it's hard to grab that salad. You know what I mean?
Jordan:Yeah. Well, gotta live a little. Yeah. Alright. Well, look.
Jordan:Look at the two of us in our four. We we look good. We're doing we're doing alright. We're just gonna stay healthy. Keep it going.
Jordan:I saw some Eli Lilly thing got published about LDL cholesterol, like all these advancements. I think that the general advice is good to just stay healthy another few years as this stuff improves. It'll really help avoid whatever is avoidable.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yeah, for sure. And I mean, I got a friend just, you know, turned like like 41 yesterday and I was like, man, I really like my forties. I'm I'm having fun in this decade. I feel like this is a good, just overall, like health wise, business wise, career, life, the family, like it's all like I don't know.
Brian Casel:If I if I'm looking back on the last couple of decades, I'm I'm I'm really enjoying the forties so far.
Jordan:I I agree. Thirties, I I was pretty stressed, man. I was Yeah.
Brian Casel:Same. Whatever that was, it was a bit
Jordan:of self torture. I'm a little more chill now, but I do feel pressure around the kids getting older, moving toward college. No, no joke. You know, the the financial pressure around that is significant. It is not a small thing.
Jordan:It's like, oh, you got to buy a house three times, you know, over the span of six years. Like, Okay, Okay.
Brian Casel:Noted. It's crazy. I guess it'll it'll sneak up on you. My my oldest going to jump into middle school next next year. So here we go.
Jordan:I'll just go in high school, my
Brian Casel:friend. Crazy. Alright. Let's talk Yeah. About
Jordan:That's a good transition. There we go.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Alright. So should we start with some updates?
Jordan:I have been focused on optimization. What I mean by that is I I I sometimes kick myself. I'll go through these periods where I'm worried about everything.
Brian Casel:As I as I, like, stretch these, like, back pains that I'm having right now. Anyway, go on.
Jordan:I I worry about everything in the business. Not worry. Just I'm just focused on it. Whatever that word is. Like, how are we doing on our ad spend?
Jordan:How are we doing on churn? What's going on with monetization? Where's average revenue per user? I feel like I have it all in my mind. I'm really on top of things.
Jordan:And then every once in a while, I'll have this revelation that of something so obvious that I'll feel stupid about it and I'll kick myself. For me this week, it was, hey, buddy, you forgot about optimizing what happens after the ad click. Look at your homepage. Look at the hero section. You haven't changed it in, I don't know, four months?
Jordan:Make a tweak.
Brian Casel:I so Just You know, it's a trip. On the thing about, like, forgetting to optimize that, I I feel like that's a really common thing, definitely for me too, because it's it usually, like, setting up your website is like one of the first things that you do. And once you once you have it set, then you then you'll go for months working on everything else. And it's so easy to to forget about like circling back to what are we saying on the homepage again? I still have parts.
Brian Casel:I just redesigned my thing last month and I'm I'm still like, wait, I'm still saying that on
Jordan:the H one? Like Yeah. It's funny. And and and you can often convince yourself that you're doing the right thing. Like we when we launched native app, Very exciting for us.
Jordan:Of course, it's on our mind. And of course, we're like, we'll get it into the get it onto the home page. Let's go. It'll increase conversions. And then you look at the hero section, you're like, well, we don't really need to announce it at the very top.
Jordan:I mean, this is paid traffic that just saw an ad clicked on it. And then like, you're going to be like, new, we now have a native iPhone app. Like, give that a minute. Let the more important things breathe for a sec. If you don't change things for a few months, you know what?
Jordan:What what did it for me? What triggered a focus on it was I'm looking at our average. What I look at is the average number of cards on file per day. So the the number of people who sign up and put their credit card on file. That's what determines our growth, and it's 90% of it happens within the first twenty four hours.
Jordan:So I'm basically looking at a bar chart of, let's call it, 30 sign ups for today, and 12 of those have cards on file. And I look at that and I'm like, that's a twelve or that day, seven days from now, most of those 12 are going to convert. And let's say that's a good day, and then the next day will be six and the day after will be eighteen. So that's what I'm focused on. And I'm looking at it like, do I get that number to go up?
Jordan:And I focus so much on the ads. We've talked about this, the the the organic and then the partnership ads and then the straight ads and the retargeting and static. And then I look at the onboarding, the conversion rate, and it's almost like I just went blind to the fact that I am empowered. To increase it myself while keeping everything else the same. Like, I have an ad agency and the creative, all that stuff.
Jordan:And then I have the product team and the dev team, and I'm like, hey, buddy, you're in control of the actual conversion rate once they land on the page.
Brian Casel:What it's I guess it's set up differently in different businesses. But like, wouldn't the person who's in charge of the ad funnels need to be aware of where what what the landing pages that they're landing on and optimize They
Jordan:are, but it's not their responsibility. So they're asking questions and and I guess that handoff, that's where we take responsibility. It's our website. It's our Look, we have not been able to be at our home page. We launched landing pages.
Jordan:We do a whole bunch of stuff. Our homepage just converts best. So it turns into, well, that's where the traffic goes. And so it's it is understandable that the ad agency doesn't look to us and says, hey, guys, I I need you to change your homepage. That, like, doesn't really fall under their responsibility.
Jordan:They can give feedback, but it's on us. They're they're looking at the campaigns. They're looking at the budgets. ABO moving over to scaling. How much budget to give retargeting?
Jordan:Should we experiment with Bing? How much are we doing in branded searching? You know, like, they have a whole universe of things to worry about. And I
Brian Casel:almost like, imagine if, like, if if you have the the messaging really dialed in and targeted, how much better your existing ads would start performing, you know?
Jordan:Well, we we have a weird curse that happens all the time when you run paid ads in that it gets to a point where it's good. And then you take your eye off the ball and you go look to optimize the other things. And you forget that, well, it can be better. Yeah. Don't stop experimenting on getting it better.
Brian Casel:And I don't know about you, but I've always been afraid to change things. Like, when things are working, I'm afraid to touch it. You know?
Jordan:Same. Same. Yeah. But you can't you can't let that stop all experimentation. Yeah.
Jordan:So, yes, what I end up doing is I look to the engineering team and basically saying, want to make some changes. Some of them are more extreme. Can you help me feel comfortable that you can have everything saved exactly the way it is today, the way things are performing right now? And if I make this big switch and we don't like it, you can just click a button and go back
Brian Casel:with the switch.
Jordan:Yeah, right. And that at least gives me this calm of like, well, I might screw up three or four days, but I'm not going to totally derail the company. So that's where I've been looking at. I'm looking at the pricing page. And Claude was ridiculously helpful.
Jordan:I put a pricing page in. I I put in a bunch of other pricing pages that I like. I said use best practices and the recommendations were very good. And I was like, be harsh. It made fun of me.
Jordan:You know, this makes no sense. Nobody thinks of it that way. People think of this plan name as bigger than the other one. Switch those right away. But it's really good.
Jordan:So now I do feel the need to synthesize it into something more digestible to hand over to the designer. And then the home page, we have a bigger issue where we're moving toward never miss another customer as opposed to never miss another call, and that creates more to think about. It's a bigger change. And then I realized, well, that's cool, but I can just change the hero right now. That's that's easy to experiment with.
Jordan:So we have hero changes, pricing page changes, and the set of experiments that I pretty sure we I talked about in the last episode. The first experiment will be adding the credit card form after the account creation instead of after the test call much deeper into the onboarding.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I like that. I like getting the like I I on Clarity Flow, I experiment with the credit card in multiple places and I end up pushing it all the way to the front. And and then even eliminating the trial. Like now they pay on day one.
Brian Casel:Okay.
Jordan:I think that makes sense for for your funnel because when they're in your funnel,
Brian Casel:you build a lot
Jordan:of trust.
Brian Casel:This works for everyone. It's That's right. Business. Yeah.
Jordan:Right. I have to acknowledge most of the people going through our funnel found out about us five minutes ago on an ad. Exactly. Yeah. And so their willingness to put a card on file might be different.
Jordan:I still want to run the experiment because if it's true that they are willing to put their cards on file, it makes onboarding a lot easier, better, they're more engaged, they're more committed.
Brian Casel:On on that idea of letting things drift, this is this is something that I've been it it, you know, I start to I I know myself. I I know the things that I tend to let drift over time. Okay. Right? And I guess sort of little too, like tactical things that I've started to put in place with using agents.
Brian Casel:Right? Sort of similar to what you're talking about, but a little bit little bit elsewhere. So one is SEO meta titles and descriptions, like title tags and descriptions. Right? So over time, I'm slapping up new pages on the builder message site all the time, whether I'm launching new course pages, new releasing new tools, you know, new articles, new new videos, all these pages start to add to the sitemap.
Brian Casel:And and I have like an SEO sitemap system in place and everything, but occasionally, I either forget to, you know, put in like an optimal title and meta tag on these, or I don't know, Cloud Code makes a change that, that wipes out a title or something. So a few weeks ago, I built a backend CMS feature for me to, to manage the titles and metas myself without like, like an interface for me to do it. Right? But then I also added an API for that so that I can have an agent. So now I have an agent process every, I think it's like every week, every two weeks maybe.
Brian Casel:It just goes and it scans my sitemap and it identifies like, oh, you've got like two pages over here that just have a generic duplicate title that should really be tightened up and it reads the page and it rewrites the title. Meta pushes it to the site. I don't even think about it. It's just like, oh, like plugging the holes And and like that's what for SEO, that's like the low hanging fruit. Just make sure your site has titles and metas and and the site map is is is like in order, And that's, that's basically good to go.
Brian Casel:And then the other one, and this is the thing that I let drift like for months is my email marketing sequences with Kit. Okay.
Jordan:When someone signs up.
Brian Casel:Yeah. So I've got a couple of sequences. Like one is for non buyers yet, it just nurtures them with a sequence of emails that talks about builder methods pro. It talks about some free tools I offer and sort of, you know, tries to like they've joined my list. They haven't, haven't bought yet.
Brian Casel:Let's bring them back. And then there's another sequence that goes out to existing new members to sort of nurture them, get them engaged in the membership. Those are the kinds of things that I also let drift because like over a course of months, I might start to release like new courses or new tools that really should be featured in these, or maybe like a tool is less important in my funnel than it used to be, but but it's like the second email that they receive from me. Like every every single person is receiving a a big, you know, banner email about this thing that that's not important anymore, you know?
Jordan:Yeah.
Brian Casel:Yeah. So so this agent, again, think it goes through every, like, two months and it just does an audit of my sequences and it gives me a report and says like, these things might be out of date and you launched this thing, but that's not mentioned anywhere. And, know, just like this is something that like a junior level marketing person on the team would be doing, but now I've got an agent that just
Jordan:doesn't Right. Like, this is how I've worked with when I work with someone and I acknowledge my weaknesses. Like, I'm not good at this. Please put it on your, you know, calendar once a week to cover this. That's a great use for it.
Jordan:And a lot of those things are you set them up, you check the box, you move on. And then because you don't interact with your welcome sequence regularly, you it's becomes invisible. And you and you forget that, oh, something very, very important has become invisible, and then it falls behind. Yeah. I I think that's great to just kind of force a little review on a regular basis.
Jordan:Yep. Yeah, for sure.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Let's see. On my end, I'm at the end of a two week, I'll
Jordan:call
Brian Casel:it like a pause and a regroup in my, my business. And I've, and I've just finished a bunch of work on, on this. That's going to start to get, get back up and running on, on Monday next week. All right. So I've been talking about this for the last several months, I would say.
Brian Casel:And that's this like bottleneck that I have in my business with, you know, around the YouTube channel and producing videos. And okay. So like the business is about ten months in ten, eleven months in, in terms of like, yeah, like time since I launched builder methods and started bringing in revenue and everything. And in that ten months, it's done really well as a business, like out of the gate, right? Like overall, a bunch of, a bunch of repeated spikes in traffic and sales, and that has sustained.
Brian Casel:And then even in the periods when like sales have declined, like it's it, they, they have dropped to a comfortable, state. There's a, there's a floor, which is still actually still a pretty good business. And, and I've learned a ton, like I've learned so much over the last ten months about everything about like what, what's the product, what's the, what's the fit, who's the ICP. And then so much about YouTube. Like it took me and I'm still learning so much about the mechanics and the levers that I can pull on YouTube and how to make that work and building the business around it.
Brian Casel:Right. But I came to a similar point that I came to back in audience ops in like the early, in the earliest days of audience ops. Like it was early in audience ops, it was more like month five when I when I did this sort of pause. Where back then too, I had a a whole influx of new clients from the very beginning, and it was like, oh, wow. I've struck gold.
Brian Casel:I've got a really great, great business on my hands here, but it's total chaos. And there are bottlenecks everywhere, mostly me being the bottleneck. And so back then I had to pause that business too and regroup. And I took over a month to like write processes and hire some managers and put a team together and then reopen the doors to say like, okay, now we've got a new operating system in place. Now let's keep growing to get into the next phase, the next level.
Brian Casel:And that's what this pause for the last two weeks has been for me. Basically, you know, I haven't published a new YouTube video in about two weeks. And I didn't know it was going to take this long. I thought it was more like a two day break, which turned into a two week break. But I took this time to really refactor and redesign, rebuild, re architect everything that in my operation in terms of how I create, how I run this business and how I optimize.
Brian Casel:I ended up building like a basically like four custom apps that sort of talk to each other, a whole bunch of agent systems, agent skills. I'm using Hermes as an agent platform behind the scenes now. You know, spun up these these four kind of companion apps, custom custom built like pipeline apps. And the the main goal is there's like three goals that all converge together in this, like, why am I taking this this break? Right?
Brian Casel:One is obviously the bottleneck thing that I like, how do I leverage my time so that if I think about YouTube channels that are much larger than mine, hundreds of thousands of subscribers, million plus subscribers, they have the YouTube YouTuber, and then they have a team around that person. Writers, content strategists, artists, video editors. Editing. Yep. Editing.
Brian Casel:You know, like all There's a whole production team around like Marcus Brownlee and and all these people. Right? How do I create the same thing with a team of AI agents? And that is essentially what I've been building here. I am a solo creator and the the before state up up until now, a single video, and I've talked about this.
Brian Casel:Let's say there's one single video, one long form video that I'm publishing on YouTube. I might record that on a Wednesday, but I spent all of Monday and all of Tuesday in ideation and scripting and and crafting it. And then on on Wednesday, I'm actually able to record it and then and then choose b roll myself and assign it. And then Thursday, I I hand it to my video editor and then he's not gonna finish it till Friday. And then I still do the thumbnail and then that thing is not publishing until Monday or Tuesday.
Jordan:So it's it's a week of work per
Brian Casel:It's a whole week of work per video. But that's those are days when I could not go build other tools, learn, explore other marketing channels, work on the course that people keep asking for, you know, do, do all this other stuff because I'm a solo creator. Right? So how do I get it to a point where I could eliminate those first two days and the backend two days so that I could just show up on the Wednesday or the Tuesday and, and I'm handed a 95% finished and tightened up script that is, that is like, I have an ideation pipeline, a script writing pipeline, a script tightening pipeline. It comes to me.
Brian Casel:I record it. I hand it off to, to the editor or or I'm starting to use Cloud Code actually in the the video editing process now. If I could solve that problem, that would be massive.
Jordan:Just time. What does it do? Is it does it allow you to do two or three videos per week? And and so it's just a quantity of top of funnel content becomes much
Brian Casel:That's the number one big big thing here is is like, yes, it's the quantity, but I'm also freeing up three or four new days of work that I could go do other things that grow the business. You know, I need to be spending most of my time building and researching and learning and teaching and having a day where I'll where I'll record videos, but I can't spend four days on one video, you know? And then yes, if if if instead of doing one video, if I could do two or three in a week, that just doubles or triples my highest traffic source of in the business. But then, of course, I I I I want to expand out. I I I want to be doing Shorts.
Brian Casel:I want to be getting on Instagram and LinkedIn and and X and and paid funnels. I need to be executing on all that. I I think that I'm leaving so much on the table, having this funnel that I know converts, and I'm and I'm only relying on YouTube traffic, you know? So, there's that whole thing. And, but then, like another aspect of this is like quality too.
Brian Casel:So, I've also started to realize that when I'm so bottlenecked and, and I have that sense of urgency every single week, this is where the urgency level actually is more harmful than, than good for me. I started to learn in the last couple of months where it's like every single week I'm on this treadmill. I'm like, I got to get that next video out. I can't let a week go by and not have another video out. It might, my funnel depends on it.
Brian Casel:Know, when I'm, when I'm under, when I put myself under that pressure and I have no extra time in the week to like really take the time and explore and learn and, and watch the right topics, that means I'm going to land on suboptimal topics for videos. I don't have enough time to develop high quality content. I'm sort of just slapping it together and rushing through it. And yeah, I can get a decent video out, but I'm not satisfied with when I say quality, I don't mean like the video editing or the, or the, or the shiny splashy stuff you see on the screen. It's, to me, it's more about the ideation.
Brian Casel:Okay.
Jordan:Just the amount of time you can spend on an individual piece of content to develop it. It's like writing, you know, any you write a two page paper. If you just spend an hour on it, it's good. You spend four hours on it. It's a lot better.
Brian Casel:Yeah. But it's and it's also like the idea matters more than anything else, I think. Like choosing the right idea for at the right time, you know? Like the videos that I've, that have done the best for me have been like, nailed an idea. I, I was able to boil it down to a, to a hook that really resonates.
Brian Casel:And I happened to release it during the right week and the right month when it just hit. Okay.
Jordan:So a lot of benefits to speed along with just being able to do more.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And so like, so I'm and so the nice and, you know, I have this skill now and and this experience of of being able to leverage agents. And and I I think at a at a much higher level than most people are able to, including like other YouTubers and creators. So I I actually can, like, I have a whole system for like storing training on ICP and voice and pillar topics and hook formulas and title formulas and story arc formulas that can train the agents to write in a way that I write, to speak like I speak, and you know, same thing with like editing techniques and stuff like, all this can be codified into systems and processes and and I can put them into agents and you know, I'm still working out the kinks on this, but it's like, that's that's the vision. It's like, how can I make this like a one person shop that like actually is able to scale content?
Brian Casel:Because that's that's the business that I'm in now.
Jordan:It is a good analogy with audience ops, but audience ops required optimizing a human workflow.
Brian Casel:It is so similar. And
Jordan:coordination between those roles.
Brian Casel:Literally
Jordan:It's the same thing, but it's not people.
Brian Casel:It's uncanny how similar it is. I wrote hundreds of Google docs, like processes for audience ops. You know, like there, it was like a 100 plus SOPs in Google docs. And then I would just hire managers and writers and editors and they would follow them. It was a system and a and now I am writing those things and they are skills that agents follow, you know?
Jordan:Yeah. What what a it's super interesting. And and the question it brings up for me is, you know, can that succeed? Like, can it can it do what you need it to do? How far along do you need it?
Jordan:It doesn't need to be a 100%. It doesn't need to be absolutely amazing and perfect, and you do nothing and you do no work. But like, what is that place where the system of agents can get to that it makes the impact that you'd be looking for?
Brian Casel:I think what is interesting about that question is that, like, look, I'm not I'm not gonna sit here and say like, AI can be a magic pill that you plug it in. You just grab this random skill off the internet and plug it in and you and you have a you have a high functioning creative creative business.
Jordan:Maybe one thing.
Brian Casel:But, but what, what it does allow now is, especially for someone like me, I have builder skills. So I can build systems that I can tinker with. Right? So like I was talking about, like I just built four apps. Right?
Brian Casel:But each of these four apps are the big leverage points that I have when it comes to creating effective YouTube content. Right? Or any content. And like one is just dedicated to, audience research, like my ICP pillars, arcs, hooks, formulas. Like another is dedicated to finding trending topics and ret and researching.
Brian Casel:And, and like now I have a custom app and custom agent skills that are built around those things. So every week I'm getting a new batch of research and a new batch of drafts and ideas pitched to me. And if I'm unhappy with those things, I just go back in and I, and I make tweaks. Can tune them. I can adjust them.
Brian Casel:I can put better training in them. I can swap in different models. So this is literally working on the business. This is working on the systems that drive this business. Right?
Brian Casel:Just because that stuff is creative, it doesn't mean humans have to do it, you know? And my input into the process as the creator is on the systems, on the training, and then, and then I get pitched ideas, I approve them, or I give feedback and I say like, improve this or change the focus on this. And then, and then I actually have systems in place for it to learn. Like, oh, Brian gave feedback on this draft, maybe we should fold that feedback into our core training. And like, that's what these applications are designed to do, you know?
Brian Casel:So, it's yet to be proven, you know? And it's gonna take many months of tuning this stuff, but now I've spent the two weeks of like, I have the system stood up and it's ready to go. And it it completely eliminated the need for for me to, spend every Monday and every Tuesday, like scrambling and writing the next script. Even even like, I was using Claude for every script, but it's still me having to sit at the desk with Claude all day long and go back and forth on it. And that's and that's preventing me from doing other things in the business, you know Yeah.
Brian Casel:On that Monday or Tuesday. So
Jordan:Yeah. It's it's, I mean, it it it's very interesting because it is it is like the pure version of it with with one human in in the middle of it, but it extends to other organizations with more people. Yeah. What a what a cool kind of like new discipline that this is. It really requires like a It's really cool.
Jordan:Yeah.
Brian Casel:I mean, you know, I'm I'm such a systems guy anyway, but like it's it's just real I've always been interested in like, how do I how can I craft a business that runs like a machine even, and now it's like the question is like, do I do that even when it's a creative business, a content driven business? And that's really interesting to me, you know? And it's like along, like while I'm building this stuff, that's material that now I'm able to actually learn and teach stuff and, know, like the the number one request that I'm that I'm getting from my audience and and my members is like, I wanna learn how to use her Hermes and these agents and Open Claw and how do I build, you know, run these processes in my business and things like that.
Jordan:So it's it's very meta that you are learning what you need to do for your business, and it is is very closely related to what your audience wants also. It sounds to me like it's not that far off from what I think of very often as, like, the perfect synchronicity in a creator business where the people buying really what they want is they want to be like the creator.
Brian Casel:There's some of that.
Jordan:You know, that's what they want. They want your not your job. Maybe they don't want to be a creator, but they want they want they want their business more like yours. They want their skills more like yours. They want their whatever's around it.
Jordan:The freedom, the income, the all these things. I think that's a very, very powerful I mean, I I I actually think that's what drives a lot of purchases in the creative creator world. I think you're right.
Brian Casel:People don't necessarily want to see like, how do I create a how do I have systems for a YouTube channel? Because most people aren't YouTubers, but they do vibe with how I teach it. And and there there's there's 50 other teachers who who who are teaching the same thing that I teach, and they're on YouTube and stuff. You can find any of them. But there's a certain sub segment that's just like, I don't know.
Brian Casel:This guy's in his forties. I'm in my forties. I kind of vibe with what he's got to say.
Jordan:I like how he teaches. You don't need everybody. You just want you just need some people to love you. Yeah. Yep.
Jordan:Yep. Very cool. It does make me think, you know, what does it look like in six months? What does it look like in twelve months? How much leverage can you really create?
Jordan:I I I think it's a lot more than people expect.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And like, look back to that ambition thing. Like, I really do want to grow this thing. And it's, it's, it's, it's really solid business now, but it's, but I've been thinking a lot about like, what will it take to, to, to make, to really, to really change the trajectory in a, in a big way? And, you know, the first thought has always been like, okay, well, what if I just drastically increase prices?
Brian Casel:I am gonna be ratcheting up the price pretty soon, but the, but like the thought was like, okay, how do I do a super high ticket offering? And I have some like back of house stuff for teams that I do, but the, what, where I landed was actually doing like a high price, like cohort program or mastermind program or high, or like coaching. Like, yeah, I could, I could charge more like higher, like 4 figures for that per seat. But now I'm adding all the, all this stuff on my calendar and all this extra work and, and I'm changing up the whole product and what the value proposition in the lower versus the higher. When, what if I just took all that time and energy and just dumped it into like, how do I quadruple the top of the funnel into the, into what I already have, you know?
Brian Casel:And that's sort of where I'm landing because I'm, I love the freedom. Like when I'm not on this treadmill with, I'll always be on the treadmill to some extent, but like if I could really optimize it, I love my weeks right now. I have so few calls. I'm building most of the time. I'm learning and I get to teach.
Brian Casel:Like teaching is what I'm doing and I don't need to be doing coaching all the time. I don't need to be doing like a live thing all the time, you know?
Jordan:Yeah. Just because one business model looks right now like it'll it's the most effective in terms of revenue. Doesn't necessarily mean that's the direction you should go, especially if it's not appealing as like a what you do day to day.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And I see a lot of untapped opportunity like there's YouTube, but like, I feel like there is a ocean of, of perfect fit customers out there who are probably on LinkedIn, maybe Instagram. Yeah. They haven't seen yet. And they just haven't stumbled into YouTube, you know?
Jordan:So Yeah. I love how big the market is. Same thing with Rosie. It just feels like, okay, this is we're not even on the radar. It's we haven't even started.
Jordan:And that that part's exciting because you can I don't know? It's it's a bit depressing. I I remember not feeling great about the e commerce world, especially when we were outside of Shopify. It didn't feel very big. You know, the dollar amounts and revenue and all these direct to consumer and Yeah.
Brian Casel:But you think about how many businesses have a phone.
Jordan:It really where I think about it now is how many small businesses communicate with their customers.
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Jordan:That's that's actually that's actually the market. And how many businesses are small enough or have a specific mindset that they don't want to build AI tools themselves, that they do want to buy?
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Jordan:That's that's, you know, a maybe a better definition of the market than just everybody. But it's still it's just so many. It's millions and millions and millions. Yep. Yep.
Jordan:I've been trying to challenge my, like, frame, You know, what
Brian Casel:do you mean?
Jordan:Well, I look at my projections a lot, and that puts me in that frame. Right. How do I get to 5,000,000 ARR? Right. So that if that's my frame, then that's what I'm thinking about and the math of how many sign ups, what the conversion rate after every user, how much we spend in ads, who should partner with?
Jordan:But I try to challenge that and I say, well, what if I was trying to get to 20,000,000 ARR in the same time frame? Would I be doing the same things? And if not, what should I be doing instead?
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan:You know, I I have some trouble with that because I I like to think ambitiously, but then I I almost act in a more conservative way than I think because I'm like, cool story, but don't run out of money. You know, the the stay alive long enough to get rich is is real in in startup software world, but it's not always the right way to look at it.
Brian Casel:I I've been looking at the the this last two weeks and feeling this tension in the mindset. And it comes back to that urgency thing where earlier last week, I was just like, shit, it's been it's been like almost two weeks and I haven't done a YouTube video. And when am I gonna do the next one? And I'm I'm really in the weeds on these on these tools and and re refactoring my business here. I'm spending way too much time on that shit.
Brian Casel:I need to get back to what's driving the funnel. And there's always that voice that's just like, you're not pushing. Like, you have a good thing. Like, you're taking your foot off the gas. Right?
Brian Casel:Yeah. But then I was like, near the end of this week, I was just like, wait a minute, dude. Like, first
Jordan:of all,
Brian Casel:first of all, I'm, I'm exactly where I want to be now. Yeah. Like what I mean by that is like, I'm actually having like a, well, it's ending up not being a down month, but it's not a breakout record breaking month like it, like it was a couple months ago in terms of revenue. But revenue is totally fine right now. Even for the month of May.
Brian Casel:Right? So like, so, and the bank account is padded from the past year of this business. So I've got plenty of runway ahead of me. Have to
Jordan:hold both.
Brian Casel:Have to hold both of operating like, plenty of operating space. And and I was saying to to Amy the other day, I was like, a year ago, a year and a half ago, I was freaking the fuck out. Like, I was like, where is my income gonna come from next month? You know?
Jordan:Yeah. The the combination of both perspectives at the same time on let's not be hyperbolic or let's not let's not incorrectly judge the situation just to create more urgency. Like, that's wrong. But then also find a way to be more ambitious and and want more in a healthy way. It's it's really a challenge.
Jordan:Yeah. Figured it out.
Brian Casel:A lot of it was just like, look, I I kind of needed this past two weeks not to take a break, but to but to retrick rejigger the the operation, the, the machine that I'm building here, so that I can step on the gas into the next phase. Because what I was doing to get here is not just going to keep scaling. It's, it's not sustainable, you know? So like I had to take a break to take a, to, to, to figure out the system. And, and it's just like admitting that like, Hey, you could afford that and actually your business needs it.
Brian Casel:And I don't know, but that's kind of where I landed on that.
Jordan:Yeah. What's helped me over the last few weeks is to connect the ground level day to day with like the larger corporate and personal goals. Right. I've been kind of living up there in the corporate level, talking to investors, talking to lenders about debt financing. What that does is it forces you to button up your projections.
Jordan:So I've been living up there a lot. And that has really motivated me because it feels like the the the big opportunity is like it's closer than I think it is. Like where we are right now, this next phase to get to, like, 4,000,000 ARR, everything just gets a lot more interesting. Mhmm. The ability to raise money, the ability to sell, the ability to spend more, to expand.
Jordan:And that really, really motivated me. It's like it's like I was looking at the projections like twelve months into the future. And I was like, If if the optimistic scenario comes true, I'm going to be so happy that it's worth the work now to make it as likely as possible that we hit those projections. And that part of that's part of what motivated me so much to look at the funnel and look at the pages and do the work on the pricing page and the hero page and get to the partnership ads and, you know, because it's like, oh, if you're averaging, you know, this number of cards on file per day, if you just increase that by 20%, then look at what happens in the projections off into the future. And that is what motivated me like, hold on a second.
Jordan:I can make it go by 20%. I don't need anyone else. I can just
Brian Casel:do that
Jordan:myself. Can I do today to I know how to do that?
Brian Casel:Do you so when you when you look at those projections and and you think about like what what can really change the trajectory, do you look at it like, okay, there's a lot of little optimizations that we can make or we need to fundamentally change the game plan in the next couple of months to set us up?
Jordan:No. I don't think it's anything like huge and fundamental.
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan:I do think there's a difference. If you talked to me a year ago, I would have said, I think we can just put our heads down and try to get to 10,000 customers with this voice receptionist that answers the phone. Now that we have like 2,000 customers and they're telling us what they want and what they're willing to pay for, the vision on where the product should go is much clearer. And I no longer think we should just stick with the voice thing that answers the phone. So on that side, it's almost like the roadmap has kind of unfolded in front of us.
Jordan:It's relatively obvious. Right? So we're doing website chat next. And then we're doing right. We just released a more sophisticated version of message taking so you could have scenarios.
Jordan:And we we are releasing actually released this week our first purely growth. That's our highest tier. So a feature only for the highest tier, which we haven't done in a while. So it does feel like these incremental improvements in the product that move it away from just a voice agent to a more customer communications tool. Right?
Jordan:We're about to launch our Shopify integration. Then we're going to launch CRM integrations beyond Shopify. So that part almost it's not like it's not going to think about that, but because Rock and Jess are in place to lead those efforts, I feel confident that that's going to happen. Because I have two great people who are that's their job, they're going to focus on that, they're going to make that happen. So what that allows me to do is focus on, well, how do we market it?
Jordan:How do we price it? How do we sell it? And that does not feel like this huge, like, well, we have to change everything.
Brian Casel:Seems like it feels like hearing you talk about hearing this and earlier in the episode and throughout, it seems like you basically have taken on, obviously like CEO, but you've taken on the role of the marketer. You're running all of the funnel marketing stuff. Like, you're hiring these these specialists, you know, the ad managers and and and stuff like that. But, you know, but like, you're you're putting those chess pieces in place. Right?
Brian Casel:Like, would you say that's
Jordan:like Because like you, the funnel works. Yeah. People see it and then they go through it and then they buy. Like, oh, okay. That's like the that's like the foundational thing.
Jordan:If that's true, then there's so much motivation to do everything. Then, okay, make the product better, get churn to go down, improve all the things that reveal the features and the onboarding. And then on the other side of that is, woah, get more people in the door. Make sure people know about it.
Brian Casel:You know, that that this question has has also been on my mind about like, is what is your North Star? You can you can interpret that a bunch of different ways. Right? But like the way that I think about that, what is my job? What is your job in the, what can you be doing every day?
Brian Casel:What should you be doing every day? What you, what should you not be doing every day? You know? And also like, how do I even simplify that job description down to just a few words, you know, or maybe one word, you know?
Jordan:I think this is That's really hard.
Brian Casel:Think it's Yeah. Really of course, not only am I somebody who does all the things, but I also tend to overthink all the things, you know, and over engineer all the things. And I sort of got to a place after a long period of time, like, you know, trying to strategize around this. At the end of the day, I'm a teacher. I gotta be teaching, you know, because that's the thing.
Brian Casel:Like it, it starts that wasn't totally clear. Like if I think about like, what is the actual value that my business is offering? And then the value that I offer to the business. Like, yeah, end of the day, like there's like pricing strategy and there's positioning and there's ICP and there's creative, but people are coming in because I'm teaching them something or a video is performing because viewers learned something from me and they like the way that I teach it. People are buying because they're, they're going to learn something.
Jordan:So everything else you see as like productizing and monetizing what people want, want to learn?
Brian Casel:Yeah. What I mean is like, I've been getting so hung up on like, how do I make a YouTube video go viral? How do I optimize all these different levers in the business? Like, those things are going to get optimized over time. Incremental improvements on every video we do.
Brian Casel:Right. But if I stopped stressing out so much about like, is this video going to be a banger or is it going to be a dud? And just focus only on the question of like, what can I teach? And is this worth teaching and am I actually helping the person? And yeah, like not every video has to perform, but if I'm just always doing that and especially if I'm increasing the volume, like the quantity of videos that I'm putting out there that are, that are teachable, then that's just, that's just more good things are going to happen in the business overall.
Brian Casel:More customers, more people resonating, more people learning. I'm teaching, I'm, I'm getting better, you know? So like, so at the end of the day, I was just like, yeah, I'm going to optimize all the things, but like, my time needs to be spent teaching. And in order to be a good teacher, I need to learn, I need to build and things like that. Yeah.
Jordan:That feels like a pretty healthy
Brian Casel:For like, for you and It it sounds like like you're sort of like, I don't know, like like the marketing, like, chess master
Jordan:or something. Like like Yeah. Capital allocator
Brian Casel:Well, yeah.
Jordan:There's the resource.
Brian Casel:There's like the resource like the company stuff, but I also think like you're more tactical than that. Like, you're talking about like conversion rate optimization and Yeah. Headlines. Deciding on channels and stuff like that, you know?
Jordan:Yeah. I I I think I think part of my week to week struggle is I I have too many north stars. And I think about all of those levels at the same time. And that that is that's challenging because it doesn't give you this clear place to focus. Yeah.
Jordan:Because I I feel I don't know. It depends on the day. It depends on the hour.
Brian Casel:I mean, that's that's been me forever too.
Jordan:Yes. It's tricky.
Brian Casel:I still struggle with it.
Jordan:Yeah. Like, if if I distilled it all the way down, I don't know, man. Sometimes I sometimes I look at it. I'm like, you know what my problem is? My problem is I'm not spending $250 a month on ads.
Jordan:That's actually my problem. That's that's it. You know, if if I distilled it all the way down, just not spending enough money to get people to to see the product. And because because it works. When I spend money, people see the product, they buy and we grow.
Jordan:And our payback period is healthy enough that I should be spending a lot more money. And so part of the North Star is like, hey, you're the person responsible for resources. Go find more resources because that is holding back everything else so much more than the tactical level and the headlines and the next feature release and the emails attached to it and the video. So that messes with me.
Brian Casel:I'm actually curious how you think about this. Cause I, I know you've had that sort of mindset for a long time, but when you think about like, okay, I know I'm going to allocate another 50 ks, another a 100 K in marketing in general, or maybe spread across a couple of new channels. Every time you bite off one of those things, are you thinking about like, that's creating a new job either for me or for somebody that I have to hire, like to manage that? Or like, like sometimes that's, that's a limiting factor for me is like, even if I'm willing to spend, am I willing to manage it? You know?
Jordan:I don't worry about that too much because it feels like there's a lot of work upfront. Like, this week was the first time we have organic creators posting completely organic content about Rosie. So we got we got 10,000 views in week one. Okay. It's a start.
Jordan:We have five creators. They're posting every single day on multiple platforms. I can now track it. I don't worry too much about the job of dealing with that into the future because I'll just kill it if it doesn't work. So I just look at it as inexpensive as an experiment because I'm not stuck with it forever.
Jordan:I can just decide. One of the things about paid anything, whether it's traffic or hiring creators, you just stop if you want.
Brian Casel:Turn off.
Jordan:Yep. Yep. If I if I look around, I'm like, I don't like where this is going. I just hit pause.
Brian Casel:You never think that it's but even that though, it's like, okay, well, this could work, but it might take a few weeks or months of iterating until you until you get it to to what it could to to get it to reach its potential.
Jordan:Yes. But I that feels very much like a financial decision. Let's Okay. How much are we spending these creators? We need at least two months to understand if this thing is gonna work.
Jordan:Therefore, I just assume this experiment is going to cost X. So it's tricky when I take a walk like you. I've what I find is listening to podcasts is entertaining. But when I put music on and my mind wanders is actually when I'm happier and I get more ideas. So when I take that walk, my North Star is personal.
Jordan:How do I make, like, $30,000,000 personally? Like, that's what I'm trying to do. But then I walk back into the office and that rightfully, I think, moves off to the side because that's not what I should be thinking about while looking at the computer screen on what I should be doing today. That kind of doesn't help. It's too disconnected.
Jordan:But I need that there as the key motivating force. And then I pull that down into, well, given that. What should my North Star be this quarter, this week, this day, this year on this business and what it needs? And and a lot of times for me, I think it comes down to challenging myself to think about it with the right frame from the right perspective. And that is really hard because I have so many jobs.
Jordan:Because I do. You know, I'm I'm rightfully or five people, six people, including including support. So I think it's too far away. I still I got to respond on Slack and that people need feedback. And Jess is like, cool story.
Jordan:But these are the two options. Which one do you like better? Changing levels so many times during the day is fun and very challenging.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I've always struggled with that. And, like, again, like, getting, like, for a second, like, getting back to, like, the systems, I need to be pushing out content, but I can't be stopping what I'm doing four times a day to go log on to LinkedIn or Twitter and think of something, you know, snarky to say and push it out. Like, don't operate that way. So I need to have systems that just push stuff out for me while I can be in my cave building and teaching, you know?
Jordan:Yeah. There's some in between there. Yeah. Yeah. Cool.
Brian Casel:Yeah, dude. Yeah. Alright. Well
Jordan:We're rolling. It's Friday.
Brian Casel:That's right. The New York Knicks are in the NBA finals for the first
Jordan:time in twenty seven years. That's very exciting to you. I'm basically gonna
Brian Casel:watch So psyched.
Jordan:On your behalf. Oh. Where where I'm at on sports is that somehow my horrendous Tottenham Hotspur's barely barely managed to avoid relegation into the lower league. So this is like one of the Who are we even talking about? This is messed up, bro.
Jordan:No. I'm a Spurs fan. They're in the Premier League. They're one of like the richest, beautiful stadium, everything. And they had such a bad year, and the the bottom three teams in the Premier League get relegated to the lower league.
Jordan:And Tottenham was gonna be the laughing stock of England going from, like, so much money spent to relegation into the lower leagues, and we barely avoided that.
Brian Casel:Soccer, dude. Sorry. I mean, one nothing? Is that a game? I don't know.
Jordan:Look. I would have more easily agreed with you before when I was very critical of, like, how do you watch f one racing? For God's sake. Yeah. Who cares?
Jordan:And then I watched a Netflix document. Okay. Anything can be interesting once you get into it.
Brian Casel:Right.
Jordan:So same kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah. With that said, I am rooting for the Knicks. Hell, yeah.
Brian Casel:Hell, yeah, dude.
Jordan:It's good to see you. Thanks, everyone, for listening.
Brian Casel:See you next week. Have a good weekend. Later.