Part 1- Becoming the Expert, Education Entrepreneur Mentor Series

In this LMScast episode, Chris Badgett and Jason Coleman explore the importance of developing subject matter expertise as an education entrepreneur, highlighting important tactics and procedures.

Chris Badgett has spent more than 15 years working in the online education and course development sector, constantly changing jobs as a software entrepreneur, agency owner, and course producer. A key component of developing competence is creating a deliberate “media diet.” This is consciously consuming materials that are in line with particular objectives, whether they are books, blogs, YouTube channels, podcasts, or newsletters.

Jason Coleman emphasizes how crucial it is to modify this diet in accordance with present goals, such as emphasizing business-related items when an entrepreneur is starting out. In order to establish a learning and collaboration ecosystem, tools such as YouTube’s “Watch Later” feature, carefully chosen subreddits, and resource sharing via Slack are essential.

Writing becomes a fundamental component of the professional journey, acting as a means of elucidating and expanding comprehension. Drawing from the Feynman Technique, Chris and Jason stress that true comprehension comes from the ability to explain complex concepts simply.

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Episode Transcript

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co founder of Lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello and welcome to the education entrepreneur mentor series where we unpack the five critical hats that you as an education entrepreneur yourself or with a team need to wear to be successful teaching online, potentially building a business around your knowledge, skills, and experience. Those five hats are being an expert, being an entrepreneur, being a teacher, being a technologist, and being a community builder.

Today, Jason and I are going to be talking about becoming the expert. So we’re going to be talking about the expert hat. Enjoy this session.

All right, today we’re talking about becoming the expert, and the first idea we want to dig into is developing subject matter expertise. And I have this idea around craftsmanship and what does it mean to be a craftsperson or a craftsman. And really I think the main strategy here is it’s all about lifelong learning.

It’s a huge commitment. And once you commit, you really have to commit. ’cause you can do a project in school and learn in shop class, how to build a wooden toolbox. But if you really wanna become like a finished carpenter, you’re gonna need to spend years in that industry. And so there’s a big commitment, but it takes continuous improvement and lifelong learning.

And some of the ways I do that is once you commit, like I committed to online courses as an example. First it was just a fascination, but I really committed about 15 years ago. I just fell in love with the industry. And once I decided to do business in this area, both as a course creator and later with an agency and later with software.

It’s just a commitment that I’ve kept up with and once you commit as a crafts person It’s really important to keep up with your industry and not rest on your laurels And one of the ways I keep up with the industry of online education, influencer marketing, online coaching industry, course creator into industry is through YouTube podcasts, newsletters, books, and blogs.

Like it’s almost like entertainment for me to spend a big chunk of time on that. And the other part of lifelong learning is just not stopping and asking for help. Whether that’s coaches, mentors, community, peer masterminds, that’s part of being a craftsperson is that continuous learning.

So for example, a couple of years ago, I joined Dan Martell’s SAS Academy, which is designed for software founders. I spent two years in the program. It was a coaching program community that are like 300 training courses in there. I looked at that like my nontraditional master’s degree. When I signed up, I committed for two years and the other piece, which is really fun is making time for experimentation.

We’ve been doing that lately in our businesses with AI tools. I was recently trying to create a course with all AI and I’m making a course about that from our community, but it’s not just about studying. It’s also about experimentation and. For me, I’m just constantly experimenting, constantly studying my industry and my fascination, looking at competitors.

Seeing what influencers are coming up in the space, what’s new with the tech. And I’ve just, I feel like I have my pulse on it, like an obsession.

Jason Coleman: Something that stands out to me is that I think we both do is curate this media diet consciously. And I go through phases in my life where something is different, isn’t focused.

Am I like being a developer? Or like a father or like working on the business and when I’m working on the business, I’ll update my YouTube subscriptions and put different things on my watch later, like on Reddit. If you’re on Reddit as a site and you just look at what they show you, it’s all like dogs doing backflips and people breaking their legs and like whatever hilarious things.

But if you actually subscribe to the subreddits that are related to business and your topic, you start getting that as like a newsfeed. So like I hide all the like poker. Parenting, politics, unsubscribe from all that stuff, subscribe to all the business stuff and immerse myself. I’m reading books.

So it’s Oh, like the book I’m reading, fiction start, I have these business books I want to read. I’m in a business mindset. I’ll start reading the business books while I’m, so I changed my media diet. across all the different forms. And that helps me like stay in the zone.

So even when I’m relaxing and going for a walk and listen to a podcast, it could be, if I’m working on the business, it’s like a business podcast instead of a comedy podcast or whatever might, also be in there.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And I just to piggyback on that, I like to, when I am walking, it’s learning time for me or when I’m exercising.

If I hear something like I need to implement that, I like literally email myself on out just like a note to jog my memory. And also I appreciate, like I, you mentioned watch later on YouTube. I also like Slack myself all the time using our instant messenger and also have trusted.

People like if Jason sends me a slack message with Hey, check out this video. Like I, I highly value it. It’s like the human feed of like curators that, that have similar interests.

Jason Coleman: Some, I want to talk about like, how do you develop subject matter expertise and really dive in and learn something like one of the big ideas I have is around writing to learn.

And it’s not my idea. I think there’s a name like called the Feynman technique Richard Feynman, the physicist. So the basic idea is you don’t really understand something until you can explain it well in the simplest terms and forcing yourself to write about it forces you to do that. And so more recently, like folks like David Perel, James Clear and Anne Lamott, like all talk about this, like power of writing to help you organize your thoughts.

I think writing is unique. Some folks aren’t good writers. So maybe it’s, making videos forces you, or like doing audio if there’s some other medium that kind of works for you, drawing diagrams, but I think writing in particular is special about organizing your thoughts. And tactically, I would, recommend blogging like you’re trying to learn about something you feel like you have what I don’t know anything yet.

What do I have to write about it? It’s write about your experience learning about this thing. A tactic for that, if you feel like. Jason says, write something, but I don’t know what to write about is this concept called an e bomb, which I take from the 30 by 500 course by Alex Hillman and Amy Hoy.

And that’s basically like when someone asks you a question or sends the E stands for email, when someone sends you an email and you answer it, that’s content. It’s oh, other people have that same question. Put it on your blog. And answer it, maybe a little bit better, a little bit longer, long form, go into it more deeply.

And so that’s that’s where you can find these content. Or if you have a question and you answer it, and then the other one is publishing it so don’t just write it down and put it away in your journal. There’s something about putting it online and other people can read it that like forces you to really nail it.

So often I have an idea and it’s in my notes. Then when I’m like, I’m going to write this and publish it, I’m like, I don’t actually understand that as well as. Or I thought I knew the history, but I don’t, let me read and get it more clear. I always thought like in, in college, like everyone struggles to write and you’re like, I’m trying to get like a hundred percent.

That means I like followed, like the best practices of writing. It’s so artificial. I didn’t really learn to write well until I started publishing for other people to read. And it’s there’s an audience and you have to explain something to them and transfer knowledge.

It forces you to really do that well. And so like in our, my career, like where this came up was the investor geeks blog, which was like my first kind of WordPress project online. Me and two other friends had just come out of college and we had decent jobs and we had four or one case for the first time.

And that literally was probably like one of the first blog posts is like, What is a 401k? And as we learned about it, we wrote about it like, Oh, this is what it is. There’s different kinds and here’s how you should think about it. So every time we learn something about investing, we would blog about it there.

And it really forced us to understand what we were talking about. And we had an audience and, we built an audience from that, but also probably the biggest value we got from that was just learning all those things and how to manage money. So now later in life. Yeah. When business is going well I know all these things.

Chris Badgett: I think writing is critical and it’s almost like it’s going out of fashion. Like what a kids want to be when they grow up, they want to be a YouTuber. It’s about video, visual, the rise of Instagram and everything. But writing it literally, it’s not just blogging, like social media is writing a script for a video is writing emails, writing, writing a business plan is writing, communicating to your team or your friends is writing text messaging.

It’s all writing. So it’s like the super skill. And you mentioned blogging. I think. There’s a misconception that like, Oh, is blogging dead? Everything’s on social media. Now that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t blog. And, really owning your library of content, especially while building in public and what you’re learning, it just sharpens you so much.

And it’s all about putting in the reps. Yeah, nobody’s a great writer at the beginning or, graphic designer or teacher, but just putting in the reps as a subject matter expert, all of a sudden it’s that whole thing about you overestimate what you can do in a day, but underestimate what you can do in a year.

Jason Coleman: Yeah. And I think on that point of, Is blogging out of fashion. There probably was a moment where on the internet content wise, you could learn something, become an expert, write a blog and kind of become famous as a blogger. And now it feels like you said, YouTube, social media, it’s different. It’s all, it’s like in the moment it’s shorter attention.

It’s, it has to be outraged, not just look how smart I am. And that’s like chat GPT knows everything anyway. Like I don’t have to like search for a blog on what a 401k is. Like Google just tells me when I. Search it. It’s still a good method to organize your thoughts. And then once you have that content, you can repurpose it and you like, okay, I wrote the blog post now, you want to, record yourself talking about it and share that on social media 10 times.

So if as part of a bigger marketing strategy, like you said, it’s you still write a script often before you video record, you write a draft before you talk to your team, sending emails and stuff. So it’s still a good skill as a baseline for, even if the As a marketing engine, it’s not as strong as it used to be.

Chris Badgett: I think just one more point on that, that I call it a news item. So if you’re going to do a marketing campaign about a new product launch or a sale or something important, the first thing I do is write a blog post about it or a page of content on the site. And that becomes the hub of all that other stuff, like social media, building a course about it, sending emails, all this other types of writing, but that blog.

Post the news item is the core of everything. We’re talking about

Jason Coleman: educational content. If you have ideas for courses and lessons and things like writing a blog post about one core aspect of it and sharing it around and trying to see how it sticks, see what’s interesting to people, that’s really useful for helping you in the early stages of, figuring out the content.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Let’s talk about inner game. As a subject matter expert looking to teach online or just being an entrepreneur, there’s a lot of inner work that has to happen. The biggest thing I see is imposter syndrome, like who am I to do X or I’m not ready, perfectionism creeps in. And what I’ve learned over probably 15 plus years being an entrepreneur is that Entrepreneurship is personal development.

It’s like the, in my opinion, one of the highest and most useful ways to improve yourself. And, but these things creep up like imposter syndrome and self belief issues. We hear about things like fear of failure, but actually fear of success is a bigger problem. Like not what if I fail, but what if it works?

And now my high school friends are going to see me and I have this like new identity and Oh, I remember when that guy was doing XYZ and now he’s like teaching business or doing whatever. Like it, you get all this, get in your head and creates this imposter syndrome thing.

Everybody deals with this. Yeah. I would say even like presidential candidates as an example, like deal with that. Like in the highest job positions. If you don’t have imposter syndrome. You might be a psychopath, but one of the ways that I work on that, that I’ve learned over the years is shifting the focus.

Don’t make it about you and the perception of you just focus on helping people. Cause as soon as you transition the focus from I need to be perfect to how can I best help these people? Some of the weight of imposter syndrome just melts away. And the other thing is, I’ve noticed this at Lifter LMS as an example.

It’s been going for over 10 years, and I’ve, pattern recognition is something that entrepreneurs do, which we’ll talk about later. But one of the things I’ve noticed with the projects that are successful, the people that, make the million dollars, or get 300 enrollments on their first sale or the first time they offer their course or their membership or whatever, Is that people have, these people all have this mode of consistent, imperfect action.

So they’re okay with like little micro failures along the way, or, I’m like 80 percent happy with this course. Let’s just ship it. Like they, they overcome. Is that the

Jason Coleman: same as I’ve heard of like a bias towards action as like a skill? Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And it’s, and I add the word imperfect, a bias towards imperfect action, but it’s forward.

Yeah. Yeah. And the other thing that really helps, and I think this is like writing you have to put in the reps, is just developing a thick skin because when you go on the internet as a public expert or entrepreneur, there are quote haters or you get judged. You’re on stage. And the reality is there’s a lot of mental illness in society, a lot of negative energy you get.

Online is really more of a reflection of the person who’s given that out. And of course, nobody’s perfect. If you can admit mistakes, if you do make a mistake and you get some negative blowback, but just having a thick skin, it just comes with time. I think we’ve both seen that in our companies at lifter LMS and paid memberships pro that like when you’re doing customer support and working with people.

Sometimes people are like frustrated, they’re angry, maybe the tone’s not great. But after you do it for a decade, you’re just trying to help these people. You understand their project’s really important to them, understand there’s all these cultural differences and people are in different emotional states.

It’s not that you get immune, but your skin thickens. Yeah, you take

Jason Coleman: it a little less personally. It’s like you said, it’s not about you. It’s about them. Exactly. It’s like the mental switch.

Chris Badgett: Exactly. And if we’re all coming from a frame of we’re just trying to help. Yeah. Yeah. The whole business is just a business of helping.

And if you’re coming to us for support or coaching or content, it’s just a frame of helping. One of the things I wanted to talk about in terms of a story related to this an imposter syndrome. One of my first course projects I did with my wife, and we did it in the organic gardening and permaculture niche.

And I wanted to get other course creators, like more famous people. So like here’s imposter syndrome, like who are the best organic gardening and permaculture experts in the world? And there’s a guy who had the bestselling book on Amazon and the topic of permaculture named Toby Hemingway. He was, I was living in Montana at the time he was doing a talk over in Idaho or Washington state.

And I was just dreaming a little bit with my wife. We could just go over to that talk, film it, talk to him about it, get him to become an expert on our platform. All he has to do is say, yes we’ll just make the pitch. I was like, to my wife, Sam, that’s her name. And I said, just send him an email, tell him all that stuff I just said, and just ask him. I was joking when I said this, but she didn’t really see it as a joke. She emailed him. I just said, finish the email with just saying, where do you want us to send the check?

Jason Coleman: And

Chris Badgett: she literally wrote him that. And he said, yes. And a week later we filmed it and then he put it on his website and then we got a bunch of traffic.

We did more stuff with him. But that’s, sometimes you just got to be a little bold to get past the imposter syndrome. And there’s just P people are just people. Yeah. And yeah, we made a good offer. He said yes. And we did a partnership.

Jason Coleman: And imposter syndrome is everywhere. And like you said, if you don’t have it, that’s almost something that’s wrong.

And the people who don’t have it to me, anyway, they’re annoying. The opposite is what, a know it all. Yeah. And those folks, I guess have a different path where they can fake it to you and make it. But I think. I start to see in others if you dive deep and build relationships with folks, you see how other people are imperfect and you’re like, Oh I’m as smart as them.

I should be able to do this too. And I guess it’s just something you build up over time. The other thing you talked about was like dealing with the haters, the hate you get. That’s the negativity from stuff. If you’re putting content out online, building courses and putting it, making yourself a public figure, exposing yourself to that.

You just open up to it on a scale and we know as humans I forget what it is like I think it’s humans process negative things like four times as much as positive. So that it’s like a, an investing, there’s I forget what they call it, like negativity bias. So if someone says something bad about you, like that hits you like four times as hard as if someone says, Hey, your hair looks nice.

You’re gonna be like, sure, that’s good. And I have a post about this, tons of things to deal with that. But I think, One thing that’s important early on that helps is to seek out that positive and ask for it and be open about it. So sometimes like example that we got negative reviews that were hitting us on like the paid memberships pro product.

And we had an emailing list and it was like, let’s just email them and say Hey, could you say something nice about us and give us a review? We really appreciate it. Boom. And then a bunch of customers came back and gave us some reviews and then we could dive into that. And yeah, it’s good to process that stuff too.

Cause there is. underlying the whatever the negativity that’s in there. It’s there’s a point. So you’re like, Hey, is there a point to this? Is there a way that I can learn from this? Cool. Take that out and then, try to deal with it. So another thing about intergame related to that maybe is I see a lot of folks who who give up too early sometimes and they have big dreams They want to make a million dollars and then they only make a little bit of money and it feels like insurmountable and so a concept that helps there is to think about getting just one percent better every day And this is a concept that’s james out to share talks about in his book choose yourself And there’s other flavors of this but it’s like a focus on incremental growth.

And so it’s You know, when you’re shooting for some big goal, this many members, this many subscribers, this much money. You could get upset on the, on that path when you handle setbacks and you talked about having thick skin helps with that. Another thing that helps with that is starting small.

So there’s this tactic. So it’s Hey, I want to make a million dollars a year. I wish I could credit this. We’ll find it. Who talks about this, but it’s a, okay, you want to make a million dollars a year and that seems hard. What would make that easy? And you’re like, if I had this, it’d be real easy to make a million dollars.

So oh, if I had a million email subscribers, I just need a dollar for my rhythm and I could do that. Oh, cool. Okay. How do you make a million email subscribers? Okay. I don’t know. What would make it easy to have a million email subscribers? It’s I don’t know if some other guy with a mailing list with 10 million promoted my email list.

And I’m making something up, but it’s, that’s that kind of thing. You can scale back from your big goal. And come up with the small goal. That’s this is the next step. What’s the next good step for this. So I think thinking about that and focusing on those small steps and also like always be learning.

So this is like a trick is like of handling setbacks. If you set out to make a course and sell it, it’s the first time you’ve ever done it and you like to be successful. I want people to learn from this and make money off it. That could happen, but it might not. But one thing you can control is you can learn from the process.

At the end of it, you’ll know how to create a course and promote it and sell it and put it out there. And so some, I always try to have that with every new project. It feels like a little risky or brand new is like, how can I always be learning? How can I like, even if I fail, still pull something from this, like a version of all these things I’m thinking about.

That come, this comes up often in like the, maybe like the indie hacker space or people who are trying to build a business on the side. They set a goal I need $10,000 a month, and that will replace my like, nice cushy job, and then I can do this full time. And they build up a system, they get attention, they start selling stuff.

They create a way to sell money or sell money, had to get to sell things to make money. And like after six months or a year of work, they’re making like a thousand dollars a month. And they’re like, I failed. I’m only making a thousand dollars a month. I need 10, 000 a month. And they feel like they’re 10 percent of the way there.

But in reality, like an experience of watching people do this and our own experience going through it is they’re really halfway to 10, 000. Like that first step is so hard. Just getting any money is like a big deal. And of course there could be like problems with the market or the product that you’re building that kind of limit its potential.

To that it might not grow to 10,000, but the effort part of it is you’ve done half the effort to get, if you’re at a thousand dollars a month, you’ve done half the effort to get to $10,000 a month. And I think people don’t think of things that way. So it’s that message sometimes helps people like keep pushing when they’re ready to give up.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Failure is feedback. That’s how I think about it. And that’s, it’s like a reframe. Like I heard a really cool reframe that stuck with me as soon as I heard it. This is like inner game stuff. You know how a lot of people say, man, I’m crazy busy. I heard this guy on a podcast being interviewed and he never said that.

He said, I’m active. It’s I’m not busy. I’m active. Like he would reframe what the interviewer was saying to put a positive spin on it or a productive spin on it. Yeah. And in terms of 1 percent better every day. I don’t know the math behind that you, you might know, but if you do get 1 percent better every day, you’re like a thousand percent better at the end of a year or something like that.

It compounds. It’s crazy. Yeah. And then one way I noticed that which kind of ties into the imposter syndrome thing is I went. The first time I started getting out from behind my computer and going to industry events and things, nobody knew who I was or is not very well known. And only a couple of years later, I’d show up at similar events and like a lot of people knew who I was, but I was writing, I was publishing and put myself out there as being authentic.

And then, but it didn’t feel like it at the time, but every day I was just shipping a little bit, shipping a little bit, trying to help people, making imperfect content, and that just compound to becoming a micro celebrity in a niche.

Jason Coleman: Yeah. It’s nice to have a buddy in that process that can help. For me, I need a buddy to do this.

I don’t know. Maybe some people just on their own to like really when those moments come up. Celebrate them as wins. I’m always like moving on to the next thing, but it’s nice when someone’s Oh my God, that’s crazy. Everyone knows you here. That’s a big deal. You’re like, Oh, okay. Felt normal or like a thousand dollars a month on the side.

That’s crazy. That’s awesome.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And getting off zero, like you were saying Oh, you’ve made a thousand dollars. It’s a failure. Like I see it all the time. I’ll talk to a course creator who is man, I only got three sales. I’m like, yeah, but that’s not zero sales. Yeah. It’s like a big deal.

And I can. Be very different in a couple of years. Let’s talk about creating influence. Yeah. And I’ve actually never been comfortable or a fan of the phrase like influencer is probably my own limiting beliefs or imposter syndrome or whatever. What came before influencer? Was it guru or. They all have their challenges, right?

Even what we’re talking about today, being an expert. Okay, subject matter expert. And it’s a little counterintuitive, is sometimes I’m a really strong introvert, so it was hard for me to take the stage and just put myself out there on the internet, but eventually I just said, okay, I guess I’m doing this, and over time I got comfortable with it.

The other thing I found with that when you do take the stage, that’s the big idea is like at some point you got to get out of your head and onto the web and, be public. And I think it’s a lot of work to try to manufacture a persona or a brand. So just being yourself authentically and you can be like the professional version of yourself.

So for example, if you have a bad day or something bad’s going on in your life, it’s going to the doctor. The doctor still shows up for work, puts on the white coat and gets the job done, but they might be having a bad day. There’s some little bit of professionalism that you just show up, but you got to take the stage.

And I see a lot of, I’ve heard this in another community. They have a name for this person. They call it good idea, Glenn, like a person with a lot of ideas that like nothing ever happens or there’s never visible work. And if you don’t do it, you’re never going to create. influence. And one of the things, if you are going to create influence, I’m a big fan of this idea that your vibe attracts your tribe.

So the more you act like yourself when you take the stage and the vibe you put out there, you’re going to attract people like that. I noticed that for example, in Dan Martell’s SAS Academy that I joined, like Dan’s like a smart entrepreneur dude. And he had a bunch of software companies, but he’s also like into fitness and like lifestyle and make sure relationships are good and stuff.

So I think of him as like full stack. So when I get in there, I’m like, Oh, there’s other people in there that, yes, they care about business and growing software companies. But they’re also like, care about lifestyle and a lot of bootstrappers in there and stuff. And I was like, cool. Yeah.

Like the vibe he was putting out there attracted a great community and a couple of tactical things about creating influence. The first one is if you haven’t done it yet, you need to read Robert Cialdini’s book called influence. And he even has a second book called. Pre fluence, I believe that’s what it is about what to do before you try to influence.

But Cialdini goes over the seven things, which are reciprocity, social proof, authority, liking, and I think there’s one more I’m missing. And once you really get all that stuff, It helps give you a roadmap of what to do. I think reciprocity is one of the easiest ones to understand, which is if you want to create influence, give something away for free.

So tying into what we were talking about earlier, like when you write a useful, valuable blog posts that somebody finds value in, that’s like a form of influence. You’re giving away something for free. If you like stay committed as a craftsperson to a subject matter. Like I’m a total online course nerd.

That’s like consistency. That’s another part of influences is that and then just being authentic as you do that, it’s, it works. And the crazy thing about Cialdini is. A lot of his research was around cults, like how to cults create influence like cult leaders. So when you’re reading the book, you’re like, man, this is a little gross.

Like I’m not trying to become a guru or manipulate people. I think the difference between positive influence and manipulation is intent. Are you just trying to help these people and influence them in a positive way? Or are you trying to take their money, get them in a cold and pull them away from their family or whatever your, that is.

And then I think it’s really important. I think a lot of people miss this step. If you are going to create influence is to choose your audience wisely. So sometimes when you create a business, you think that, Oh, it’s for everybody. Is it really though? Does it, do you want to work with every type of person out there?

And so make a choice about a lot of, it’s just, and we’ll talk about this more later about. Your customer avatar and niching and things like that. But I had an aha moment, of course, as a human and a idealist, I do want to help everybody. I want to save the world. But I think you do your best job as a expert really picking a tribe or community to help.

And that whole community thing, the tribal thing is real. From my story, I’ve moved through several tribes. Like I was anthropology guy in college. I was after that climber Mountaineer guy, then I was a dog musher guy in Alaska. Now I’m a software guy, a tech entrepreneur guy.

And I move in these tribes and I think there’s a lot of loneliness out there. And if you’ve, if you’re vibe attracts your tribe and you want to help these people, you like these people, that creates a lot of sustainability in your project.

Jason Coleman: Chad Dini’s book is awesome. It feels influence, feels like this magical thing that just happens.

And then he just lays it out and very clear left brain. This is the reality of it. And you’re like, oh, it’s the playbook. And there is that risk, like when there’s other things like this. When you know the playbook, it feels like manipulation, and you’re like, it might be inauthentic.

It’s really hard to find that line. But I think like in marketing in particular, it can feel like sleazy at times you’re using these tactics and you remind yourself we actually make this thing that they want we’re actually helping them if they actually complete my course, it’s good for them.

And so if you believe that in the core, then it can help you use some of these tactics and under understanding that you pick up from like a book like that. You were talking about choosing your audience wisely. And I, yeah, I guess like the customer avatars about that. I’m reminded of the who’s the guy with the pumping patch video.

Chris Badgett: Oh, I know what you’re talking about. It’s a personal finance thing

Jason Coleman: or

Chris Badgett: it’s about finance.

Jason Coleman: I think it’s on business, but that he’s every so often you take a list of all your customers and you think of which customers do I hate and they cause the most stress, and it’s okay, how can I, and which customers do I like and they’re the most awesome and I love working with them.

And it’s of course, after that, then you should like, okay how can I rearrange my business? So then I’m serving these people I like and not serving these people I don’t like, and it could be as simple as like on your copy, be like, this isn’t the product for these whiny assholes that end up in my

Chris Badgett: customer chain.

I recommend that by the way, for when you’re writing a sales page and having a section who it’s for three bullet points who it’s not for three bullet points. Yeah. Yeah. It’s like good exercise. Yeah.

Jason Coleman: Every bad customer to bounces off your sales page is a good outcome as well, including this is really for you.

Come on in. But if you’re the kinds of folks who get into this business, like we solve pro we’re good at solving problems. We like helping people and you just do it reflexively when you’re in the weeds. And then you find out you’re like, it’s, you got to take a step back and be like, what are we doing?

Am I doing, am I actually doing the thing I really want to do and helping the people I really want to help? Am I in, in the tribe I want to be in. I think you touched on this too, of, building influence through trust. You said about like giving stuff away for free. And that’s almost like a core value that we have.

We build this free software, just solving problems for people, delivering value that You’ll naturally build up a reputation for being someone who gets something done and delivers And I think a lot of folks maybe if you in the content space you’re building like a course or education I think very rarely do you have that top secret?

These are the five ingredients that make the thing and I have to hold, you know Don’t share that unless people give me the money a lot of people feel that way but more often You probably should switch your mindset and it’s give away your best stuff for free And it’s like just put it out there for free on your blog send it to them If all you want to do is hook them to sell a thing like what’s gonna do it best But the big idea the nugget the most useful tactic the you know The clearest description of like how you go from you know Where you are, to where you want to be and get your outcome.

So like the clearest way you can do that, the best content you have is always good to put out for free. And then people will pay for access to you for having it in a clear, organized way. A tactic like that, that I often recommend for people want to build courses is like, so I talked about blogging as a way to learn.

You blog, just blog, keep blogging, write the thing, give it away for free. And when you’re done, like if you did that once a week for a year and I have 52 decent articles and you’re like, all right, cool. Take that content and now build it into a different format that you can sell. And you’d be surprised, you feel like, Oh, they can just get my stuff for free. So why would they pay for it? But the real interaction, typical interaction on this website is someone searches for something. They see your one good article and then your post like promotes, here’s the book that explains everything. And you’re like, Oh, I, you got me.

Let me get the book that explains everything. There’s also a speak with your actions instead of your words. And so it’s like actually do it, talk about yourself. And your journey, instead of theorizing I felt that way when I was like writing notes for this, sometimes it’s I so that pumpkin patch, I wish I could remember that guy’s name.

That’s a story I heard that’s useful and I could share useful stories. Like we’re in the space, we have lots of useful stories, but that’s actually when I did and worked. So I actually went through that process a couple of times and I try to go back to it every time. So I’m, I can give, I’m really talking about something that is authentic to like.

I operate. And maybe it’s just another rephrasing of this. Gary Vaynerchuk has a book called jab, right hook. And he’s thinking about if you have emails, if you have a four email series, don’t always be selling. I think that’s like always be selling is probably something someone says, but actually.

I think you might have a better outcome if you’re like give, and then you deliver value and now they’re on your side. And then you’re like, Hey, by the way, I sell this thing and it could help you too. And that’s like a mode that I use both. So it’s it’s funny, I’m talking about like selling, but it’s like this, these concepts build influence towards the sale.

So it’s these If you think about it in that way, a story also related to Gary Vaynerchuk. That’s like the antithesis of this. I have a lot of, some of the stories I have in here are like you said, like learning from your failures early on. I had this website, wine log. net. It was like a social site for wine and you could keep track of the wine you’re drinking.

And there was a couple of other websites in the space. Cellar tracker is the one that was like the old school one. That’s still around. So they, they won. So shout out to sell a tracker. I keep track of your wine with cell tracker. It’s a really good app. But at the time they were like this old windows 95 slow, not really web to a website.

We built like the modern version of it. There’s another site called court. And there’s all these wine websites were coming up and Gary had a wine podcast and he was advertising on all our websites. I remember he, Hbought an ad on our site and I had twelve hundred dollars for an ad placement for a month or something and he’s like you should give it to me for I forget how you tried to talk me down to 600 bucks or something like that and I stuck to 1200 and he was like, alright Jason He’s like I’m gonna give you 1200 bucks, but like you should know like you Probably should have took the 600 deal and just had me had the goodwill towards you.

It was great. He gave me like this little business nugget. And at the time I was like I was like, I don’t know. I didn’t want to give up the money, I was like, that’s what I think it’s worth. It should be worth it. I don’t care who you are. It was my attitude at the time. And fast forward for a bunch of other reasons, like Gary Vaynerchuk bought that website corked and built it into his brand.

And it became part like, and we were friends, but you’re like we interacted before, but yeah, Our wine website didn’t tie onto Gary Vaynerchuk and made some of the biggest wine websites in the world. So it’s like I, for 600 bucks, I lost a little bit of influence with Gary Vaynerchuk, which would have been useful.

And I wasn’t thinking at the time. And I do feel it’s funny. It’s like when you put a price tag on something, that’s your price and you should stick to it. And I’m not like a big biz dev guy. But I think in that moment, if I really was thinking about what was best for that website, if I was like, how do I build influence so that I can turn this into a bigger thing?

It was like, Oh, cool. You got the attention of The biggest, like social, early social media guys talking about wine right now, like building influence with him and his connections was way more important than money at the time. And it’s instead that conversation of cool, I’ll do an ad for your paying.

And what more can I do for you to help you? That would have paid back in spades. If I had been helping Gary and said the other way around what would have, how would that relationship developed?

Chris Badgett: Giving away your best stuff for free. Like in that case maybe not give Gary the free ad, but reduce the price, give him the hookup.

And one way I think about that is this concept from I think I first heard it from Eben Pagan is moving the free line, like not necessarily all the way to free. But information wants to be free. So like you should be giving away uncomfortably free amounts of stuff or valuable stuff. And like you said but if it’s also like available on the internet and other places, what you’re actually selling is your way of supporting it, your unique style that just resonates with people or whatever.

But, and we, but like with Lifter LMS and paper shows pro we give away so much for free with our core softwares that are in many ways more powerful than really expensive paid solutions and it works. So moving the free line and then show, don’t tell. I like that a lot. It’s easy to like, talk about things theoretically.

And some of the way I built influence in WordPress is I didn’t just say you should use WordPress, build a blog, sign up for a hosting account here and install the software. One of the first courses I made was how to build a WordPress website in a weekend. I showed people how to do it.

I just sat down and turned on ScreenFlow and recorded it. Turned it into a six module course. Put it on Udemy, put it on YouTube as a video playlist. And then what happened is, so what I’m, my idea here of creating influence is give away your secret sauce, tell people your process, particularly if you have an agency or whatever.

Because at that time people were watching my videos on Udemy or on YouTube and they’re like, you know what? This stuff is actually complicated. Can I just hire you?

Jason Coleman: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: So by moving the free line, then the clients came in. Not just from my local community, but from all over the world. And that was uncomfortable to be like shouldn’t I just build websites for people?

I’m just going to teach everybody how to do it themselves and show them, not just tell them about it. Let’s look at the difference between being a guide versus a guru. I really love this framing. And a guru, like it’s like a religious figure who. Preaches and speaks truth. And this is the way but a guide, and I actually come from a background of guiding wilderness guiding.

So I understand guiding at a deep level. It’s a guru would just be like climb this mountain and a guide is going to be up there adapting working with people, dealing with setbacks, dealing with weather changes, and I think also being a guide. Takes a lot of pressure off like you don’t need to be the guru Giving a sermon.

You just need to help people get results. And the big idea here is Instead of just having quote the best information as a subject matter expert Be like a results getter for people like the guy doesn’t climb the mountain for you like they help you get that outcome of Climbing the mountain successfully you Or whatever your niche is, starting a business, getting in shape, finding the love of your life.

People want results. They don’t necessarily want you to be, give them like the golden book. They really, there’s a underlying motivation and result or transformation that people want. And I think it’s really important when you do become a guide to marry a problem. So don’t necessarily think about who’s my target market.

You should think about that, but what problem do you want to solve in the world? What what wrong do you want to write in the world and just obsess about it? And I can’t really explain how I got obsessed about it, but I love this idea of people being able to post, basically create information products and create this digital content.

Anybody, anywhere in the world could pull it up on a web browser, put their credit card or their PayPal account in and build this online business around. I just fell in love with this problem and tying it to the problem of education because education has a lot of potential to make societies better, improve people’s lives.

And all and help people economically and so on. I just fell in love with the problem. And one of the ways to, get good at this and being a results getter, a helper, a guide is to build the name for it as a customer advisory board. So like regularly I meet with some of our users, our customers, I’m hearing what their challenges are, what their wins are.

It totally informs how I think about. What product do we make? Or you hear about how are we different from the competition? What’s our positioning? And then when I think about problems and marrying a problem I heard this from a guy named Dev Basu, I believe that people only buy three things, which is speed, certainty, or insight.

And there’s a fourth one, which is to stay out of jail, but that one’s more this is why we hire accountants at tax time and so on to stay out of jail. But, and usually the speed, certainty, and insight, sometimes it’s a combination of those, but there’s usually one primary. If I’m, if I was going to do like a health course it, you could take different approaches, like speed, you’re going to get this health outcome really fast, or if I’m going to do certainty, it’s going to be like, okay, this is actually going to work this time.

If it’s going to be insight, it’s going to be. Yeah, the industry is completely wrong and I’m going to give you like new ways to think about health and whatever the specific result I’m trying to get is. So I often think about speed, certainty and insight, not just in marketing and selling, but also our approach to this problem and how we solve it because the speed, certainty and insight people don’t, aren’t necessarily buying you as an influencer.

They’re buying the result. But even under the result is that quality of speed, certainty or insight.

Jason Coleman: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Badgett: And then the last thing is, this is a classic mistake that experts make. I call it like the library of Alexandria problem where people don’t necessarily want, especially these days with information overload and internet everywhere, infinite scrolling.

It’s not about giving people like so much stuff and like a hundred hours of training and 50 bonuses and all these modules and stuff. What’s the minimum effect? A guide, once you get, wants to get you to the top of the mountain as efficiently as possible while staying safe. And that is They’re not trying to teach you everything they know about mountaineering or climbing or whatever.

It’s just we’re going to help you get this result as efficiently as possible. I think it came from Tim Ferriss, the minimum effective dose, like productivity folks are all about this idea of what’s the minimum I can do to get the maximum output? What’s the 80, 20. So instead of giving your customer as an expert Hey, here, check out my awesome library of knowledge.

It’s I can get you this result quickly. So in terms of guiding, I feel like we’ve been guiding people at Lifter LMS for over a decade now. And we’re not just selling them a product. We’re not just giving them software. We’re not just providing technical documentation. I talked to users, customers, people who are just in the industry, people using competitor products.

We get on live calls and we do all this like personalized guiding. And one of the, one of the last kind of ideas around that is when you’re helping your market they really want you to still be able to help them even in challenging circumstances. And this is why how guiding is different from being a guru.

A guru would say this is the way a guide will be like, Oh, I see you’re having this challenge adapt this way. And you’ll still get the outcome person be different challenge. Okay. Let me help you adapt. And over time you can bake that wisdom into your. actual process. So maybe it’s more automated or whatever, but humans are not robots.

So eventually you do end up with some personalization there and that’s why they like you.

Jason Coleman: I’m hearing there in this guide, the difference between a guide and a guru is instead of here’s my knowledge, take it or leave it. You’re taking responsibility for the outcome. I think that’s a challenge in that you’re trying to teach someone something and you feel like I’m giving them all the information. But they’re not getting it, is that their problem, but really you could be a better teacher by meeting them where they’re at. Maybe you said how to get from a to C, but they’re actually at B, they need a different path guide, guide to get there.

So I like that it’s, and yeah, taking responsibility for the outcomes that you’re given instead of just like being an info dump on people. I hope it’s useful. I think it’d be more effective.

Chris Badgett: And on that note, just like a pro tip, I think the sh it is shared. Like some people would just be like, Oh, I have churned.

My people didn’t renew their monthly membership or the annual thing because they just didn’t do the work. So I, but there is a piece that is shared. Like the people do have to do the work. Oh yeah. There is some failure that’s outside of your control, but there’s a lot we can do as. As the expert to help when there are setbacks.

Jason Coleman: Yeah. Yeah. We all know those folks who, it goes both ways. Like we know those folks who are like the idea people. Who’d never actually get over the hump of shipping and getting something done. And if they’re also selling to an audience of people who sometimes like, I would like to lose weight, but I’m not actually going to do anything to, to make a difference, the folks who are super successful, they find like a different way to talk to a different subset of that group, and maybe some of these folks aren’t hopeless, trying to get results and dealing with it on that level at the same time, I think.

You don’t have to know everything. So you don’t, maybe that’s related. We talked about a few different ways of focusing on helping people and being resourceful instead of omniscient. Like you said, like the library of Alexandria, right? So it’s Oh, it’s not just dumping everything there is to know about this.

If one tactic of how to get the A to B, that will help people. Congrats, something that you can turn into content that you can, give away and sell to, to help people. It’s like a mindset shift of being the kind of person who can find the answers instead of having them.

Like we said, don’t be the no at all. You’ll figure it out. And when you figure it out, then you can share that experience with folks. I’m building a network of experts to consult with. You don’t have to be the only one who knows there’s other folks. Don’t be scared that like they’re your competitors.

They’re also like potential partners that, you know, Oh, this, software’s better for this use case. You should use that software. It’s good for that. Or my content focuses on helping this target audience, but you’re, you fall outside of it. It’s good to know. It’s important to like.

Communicate confidently that you’ll be able to find the answer to them. You want to be known as someone who’s able to find the answers and follow up and come back. It’s it’s crazy. I think it’s crazy impressive sometimes. Through customer support channels or interactions with folks online and checking, they throw a zinger and you’re like, I have no idea.

I never heard of that one. And then if you come back the next day and you’re like, I couldn’t sleep. I was thinking about this and here’s everything I learned about it and how it fits into the stuff I do know. They’re like, wow, that feels like a guide, not a guru. And they’re like, Oh, this is someone who’s really helping me with my specific issues.

Get to where I need to go. This kind of mindset is something I had when out of college, I worked for two years as a consultant at Accenture. It’s like one of the, what do they call it? The big five consulting companies. And that experience is crazy. Cause as a really young person who didn’t know much, I’m thrown like into these businesses.

And people are paying a lot of money for this guy who’s supposed to have the answers. And I don’t know anything yet. This is my first job out of college and I’ve only been here a couple of months. So they really bill you and charge for you as if you have the answers. And I think it’s clear.

to most of the, the people on the the business side that are working with you, they’re like, this guy, kid doesn’t know it, but super quickly and they train you on this at Accenture. They do a good job of like, when they ask you a question, you don’t know the answer. You tell them like, don’t worry, you hired Accenture at a whole team.

There’s a team of experts and I’m going to talk to them and they’re going to give me an answer and I’m going to tell you, and I’ll facilitate this. And You do that a couple of times and they don’t sweat the fact that you’re like, you’re this fresh young kid who doesn’t know anything cause you’ve proven that you’re helping them anyway.

There’s this other aspect of that, that you’re still useful to them at finding the answers, even if you don’t have them. And over time, that’s how you become the kind of person after, you do that for 10 years and a lot of the questions are, I’ve seen this a bunch of times before. Here’s like the three things that help people, you become the person who knows it all.

Chris Badgett: Being the person that can find the answers is, can also help you actually just launch. So I see it all the time where let’s say you’re doing a membership site and you have like individual trainings or mini courses and maybe you think you have to build like a hundred of those before it’s ready to launch.

But if you just have a few ready, And you offer actual one on one or group support, the customers, your early customers will literally pull the product out of you and be like, Oh, okay. They need help with this now. So now you don’t have to just assume, exactly what this person who has come to you made a purchase, ask for your help needs, there’s like a real feedback loop and you can just create in front of them.

I don’t have that for you yet. And then by the time we meet next week or next month. We’ll have a new training on exactly that problem. So I think that’s really cool. It allows you to just launch and pre sell and just help people more in real time, giving them exactly what they need. Once you, your community gets bigger, you’ll start seeing patterns of that.

And you’ll intuitively know Oh, this other thing, they really, I’ve had seven people who really need help with this thing, but that’s where. So your like quarterly plan or your annual plan just gets mapped out in front of you and you’re not guessing because there you have paying customers asking for your help with X.

Yeah. And that’s the benefit of lifelong learning when you make the commitment to that is. You’re also learning how to learn. It makes you more resourceful because you’re kind of Matt, you’re focusing on craftsmanship and mastery. So you’re getting better at metal learning or the act of actually learning, which is part of being resourceful.

Let’s talk about the customer avatar.

Jason Coleman: All right.

Chris Badgett: So this goes by a lot of different names. Some people call it your audience, your niche. Your ICP, which stands for your ideal customer profile. And these things all are like a little different, but I think the customer avatar is really the main, the avatars, the way to think about it.

So who is the ideal person? That’s a perfect fit for your course or your coaching program or your online community your reader, your audience, and. How do you figure that out? And the key to that, in my opinion, is to actually obsess about it forever. It’s a forever commitment. One of the easiest ways to do it is to actually, if you’re like not sure what to choose, and you’re like one of these people who’s like interested in a lot of different things, I don’t know what to make my course about or my coaching program or my online business, just do a previous version of yourself.

Cause you, you remember yourself. So like when Chris or Jason was just starting an agency. And what did they need help with? It’s easy cause you know who it is. If you’re already moving and let’s say you have a services business and you’re trying to productize, you already have these people that are paying you money. You can think about productizing what you know, and you’re learning about their challenges and you’ve already got the this kind of avatar forming like who’s my favorite customer.

Like we were talking about earlier Who do I not want to work with that develops like your anti customer avatar. But once you have this person nailed down, it could be an it could be a previous version of yourself It could be like your favorite client.

That also happens to pay you the most money and be the easiest to work with or whatever So Some people also invent like a fictional version, which is fine too, where you just Oh, it’s a woman who’s just had a baby.

She’s in this income range. She’s just left corporate, whatever. And you’re like figuring out this avatar based on Demographic stuff like we’re talking about there, but also psychographic stuff like, Oh, but they’re depressed because of this. Or, they’re really emotional about this topic and so on.

So you just map out this avatar of like you’re the FBI or whatever, and you’re profiling like some suspect you’re looking for is one way to think about it. And one of the things I like to do when I get into the customer avatar, is do a pain and opportunity map. So what is the, what are the most painful things in this person’s life?

What are their, when on the opposite side of pain. What are their goals? And what opportunity are they seeking. Would they pay money to get closer to? Cause it’s either away from pain or towards pleasure. And if you can find the top six pain points in the top six what do they want to move towards?

And then which one of those is like primary or which, what’s another theme that like governs all of that? Is there an identity transformation? There’s this idea that you can have your avatar, you give them incremental improvements, but if you can actually like change their identity, That’s the most powerful product you can sell.

You can charge the most for it. So an example of that would be like in the business niche if my program is going to help you quit your day job and become an online entrepreneur, six figure entrepreneur, this is like the classic example. That’s like an identity transformation. Somebody who’s stuck in corporate hates their job to entrepreneur with a working business.

He’s happy and has. impact and lifestyle freedom. So that’s like a transformation. So think about that. It is okay to help people with incremental improvements, but those big flips of identity transformation, like I’ve seen one that’s a little more counterintuitive is I’ve seen a user help people move to Australia and become doctors in Australia.

So it’s it’s that’s like a major change. And that’s what his program was. all about. And the other thing that happens, this is just more of a nuance with the avatar. I’ve often, when I started with Lifter LMS, I had the subject matter expert person that we’ve been talking about here is the avatar, the aspiring course creator, the monetized knowledge person, somebody who has a lot of passion.

They want to create impact income and freedom by helping others through teaching and charging for that with the information product. That there’s a lot more that goes to that avatar. I won’t go into the two pages of it, like who they are, but what ended up happening is I was moving forward with this.

I started noticing all these agencies. And, WordPress professionals and stuff showing up like, Oh, the people that build sites for clients in this niche for courses or membership sites, Or e commerce stores and they want to diversify into digital products, but they have this like agency person that’s helping them.

And I started looking at who’s following me on social media. It’s Oh, the people that actually interact with my tweets and stuff is like these agency and WordPress and technology people. So I ended up like having to split there’s two avatars and no matter what I do okay, we’re just going to focus on this one.

This other one’s always here. And so that sometimes happens. But I think it’s a really valuable exercise to figure out the avatar, obsess about it. And just be open to, it’s not something you set in like year one and you’re good, like it evolves and it changes and you end up in weird situations like I’m talking about where I have two.

Jason Coleman: A common template for that shows up in like business to business space is there’s the person who uses your training and then the person who pays for it.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Jason Coleman: And they have different needs and avatars. And if you want to reach that audience and sell to them, you have to map both people, the person who’s paying for it and the person who’s that you’re actually, delivering the content for man, a couple mistakes.

I see folks run into. When they’re working on their customer avatars. And I say that because I’ve run into these mistakes several times over and over, like I’m actually talking about myself, my friend who’s had these issues. But I do see it a lot. Cause we help a lot of, similar businesses and people too is one is like resisting, like not going niche enough, not making it specific enough and resisting that.

Under the pretense of I’m trying to make a big thing that helps everybody. And I’ve done that. Like it’s a membership platform for all kinds of things. The problem with that is that that I, this customer avatar is very useful tool when you’re writing sales copy. When you’re figuring out how to build the product and when you’re figuring out. The content or the, learning, if you, it’s almost like you want to go through the exercise of really having a very specific customer avatar.

And feel what it feels like to write like you write sales copying it so hard and you’re like you’re not talking to me You’re talking to chris badgett He’s this old, he’s right in front of you. He looks like this is what he loves. This was, and you’re like, Oh, you’re just talking to Chris Badgett. It flows.

You’re just like, this is what he needs to know. And what I would tell him, some people resist that they want to niche down. And I think also if you do, it doesn’t mean you can’t help everybody. It’s just a bullseye. It’s just the center of the target. And you’ll still help a bunch of people that, you know, but there’s someone in the middle that you’re writing towards.

Chris Badgett: It’s just a quick example of that, like Apple computer. Like when they did the whole, the crazy ones, the artists, the misfits, all this, a lot of other people still have Apple products besides the, the artistic, innovators type people. Yeah, but the avatar and maybe it still is like that.

Yeah, it’s but it doesn’t mean you can’t sell to and help other people

Jason Coleman: Related to that when you’re building your customer avatar. I think a mistake I made early on was thinking about like demographic Information like man or woman or they like, You know, expensive things are cheap things or how they dress or you almost think of building a Facebook ad and you can choose to demographic traits.

And I find that stuff is not as important when you’re building your customer avatar as the things you talked about, which were like, what are their pain points? What are their common challenges? And in like we were figuring out use cases for paid memberships pro. And if there, or there’s a bunch of people who build courses and the thing that’s common among them is not if you think of a yoga course and like a, health food course and a get fit course, the thing that’s not common is that like they’re women and they, I don’t know, demographic information about those folks.

It’s was not as useful as they wanted to build a website. To sell their course. That’s what’s common among them. The, and specific chat. So that’s the top. And then specifically, like what was challenging about it? Was it that they, had struggled to make the content. It was that they struggled with the tooling?nd then you’re like helping them with their specific problems and challenges instead of, I think sometimes people get caught up in the fluff of I’m trying to speak to women, so it needs to look and smell this way, right? And you’re like no focus on the challenges. Another thing to focus on is, the people who want to pay you, it’s assuming you’re doing this, you don’t have some outside funding source and you’re just spreading the word.

You’re trying to turn this into a business. I find like a very specific version of this. And when it comes up is you’re you’re selling something and there’s a cancel, people can cancel and they churn. And I think early on, there’s almost a lot of. recommendations to, hold on to those people.

So you only have three customers and one of them left. And you’re like, I guess like a third get them back. I need that a hundred dollars a month or whatever they’re charging. And you struggle and. I don’t think you should totally ignore that person. You should get the feedback, but very specifically, like they came into your orbit and they left, like that’s a very clear signal that they don’t want to pay you for the thing you have currently.

So maybe take some feedback and you can use that to figure out like, am I creating the right thing? But that customer that left is like not your customer avatar. are, is that the person you’re serving or not? If they are and they left, that’s like a different story now. Okay. I, Don’t want that person to go.

So then think about how you could keep them. But a lot of the people who will bounce out and cancel out and churn. are like, that’s a good turn. They actually don’t need the thing. And you don’t want to strive too hard to focus on those folks. And I think we also talked about like various forms of consulting and customer interaction as a way to get this feedback.

So I guess I’m thinking, how do you find out? It, I’m assuming the situation where you have a little bit of traction, you’re selling something and you want to g. So you want to find out more about your current customers so you can figure out how to find them and make more of them. It’s like focusing on the ones who pay you.

And I think you can have these like consultation calls with them. Sometimes if you’re selling like an info product, it’s Hey, for an hourly rate. You can still talk to me or I mean in the early days, like put an hour, actually probably put an hourly rate and then say, but actually it’s free for the first whatever, or I’m giving, everyone who signs up gets, instead of 300 an hour, they got to talk to me for an hour for free.

But talk to your customers and do like you said that there’s so many reasons why Products of all kinds folks who build them start out as consultants because they were very close with a customer and trying to solve specific Problems and then they realize other people have this problem So if you skipped over that part and you have a little bit of success people are buying your stuff It’s like maybe back take a step back and consult some of them and work really closely with them to figure out who they are and what problems they have.

And so some tools you could do. So like that consultation calls put an hourly rate for people to just talk to you if your time is busy. And then we did a paid memberships pro, and I’ve seen other folks do this, like what we call do it for me setups. So it’s and then like the educational space, I think it’s pretty common of I have a course, but if you want mentorship and like a more, high touch help through this.

You can pay me more and then I’ll do that. And you can price those lower. It’s a, they make, it’s a way to make money. So it’s like another way to make money off your audience and stuff. But I think always think about it as Oh, this is me like learning about a very, not just a customer, but a customer is willing to pay more than what the average customer pays me.

Like it’s a super valuable customer to dig into and try to figure out. And I guess quickly, like when paid nurses pro did the, to do it for me, like how it worked, we were selling for at that time. I think I don’t know, various times, like 100 a year, you gain access to the software and support, but for 500, we’ll spend five hours, like helping you to set it up.

And it was a way to talk to a lot of customers. And again, that thing of figuring out who you like to work with and who you don’t. I remember the stats when we did the, do it for me Like 50 percent of them were perfect. It was like, this is our ideal customer and they just need a little bit of help.

And we help them exactly how we can. We get a little bit like, Oh, we build a tool that we can give to other people where we fixed a bug or we learned something was like perfect. And then after. The five hours was up, like they went on their way and they didn’t need us anymore. Another 25 percent in that cohort were, they needed more.

So it went really well. And then they’re like, you’re the smartest WordPress person I know. Can you do all this other stuff for me? And we’re like, we’re not consultants. We don’t do online. We’re building a product. So it didn’t they like, which is, it’s a good problem to have. And you got to build partners of people that you can push that work off to, but it’s I, you helped me with this.

Can you help me with my whole life? And you’re like, we don’t actually do that. But then 25% We’re just crazy bad failures because we were taking the money up front and then saying, Hey, we’ll solve your problem in five hours. And just the expectations were off. And they were quote unquote bad customers, but that experience of digging it wait, why was it bad?

Why did they think they would get this when they were only going to get this and using that information of how to change the copy and the documentation and the product itself. So that when those people come, they deflect before they pay you.

Chris Badgett: One more pro tip with the figuring out your avatar and who’s going to pay you is to just pre sell them.

Don’t even create anything yet except for the sales page. So I want, I think I want to sell to this person. This is the problem I want to solve. This is my mechanism of how I’m going to solve it. And you can set it up. You can use our softwares to take the money. You can be totally transparent and give them like, Hey, it starts like a month from now and even say if I don’t get this many orders, I’m going to refund your money and so on.

Pre selling helps. I love the idea of if you’re not already a consultant and like really understand the avatar and the The solution in the problem space do coaching first before you try to do a course and do private coaching work with them one on one, even if you’re losing some money, based on your hourly rate or whatever, it’s very validating to make sure like this avatar is right.

I can help them. I’ll over deliver through private coaching or even done for you services. And there is a framework I learned, which is really simple. They can help with this, like structuring these things, which is DIY, do it yourself, DWI, which is done with you. And then DFY, which is done for you.

and the passive online course with no support is do it yourself, good luck. The done with you is like we’ve got courses, we also have like weekly office hours and so on. And then done for you is more like a agency, like you’re hiring us and we’re going to get you the result. We’ll get it done for you.

So using that, those frameworks help and yeah, it takes time to adjust and get that avatar offer clarity. So you got to experiment. It’s part of the learning process. Let’s talk about practicing with intention. I’m pretty convinced you, the reason why a lot of folks fail or lose momentum is that they, not only did they not commit to a problem for an extended period of time, but they didn’t It wasn’t the right problem for them and they didn’t really go all in on a single problem.

They got shiny object syndrome. For me, if you’re going to spend all this time creating courses, coaching community, maybe writing a book, maybe doing public speaking, Becoming the person for this, category of problem. It’s a huge commitment. So in my view, if you’re not willing to focus on this avatar and this problem or problem set for more than a decade or at least a decade, it’s probably not worth doing.

Maybe you don’t love the space enough or. You’re not just, you just don’t have the passion to keep going. So it’s just to make a decade commitment when you choose your problem, particularly if you’re one of those people that has multiple interests, maybe like fitness, maybe like investing. Maybe you like cooking and you’re like, I want to get into this space.

I’m not sure which one to focus on. There’s this test you can do called the onstage test, which is like if five years from now, if you’re on a stage giving a talk about this topic. and your mother or your family or whoever is in the audience watching you like, are we good here? Are you still doing this in five years?

It’s called the stage test and really putting in those 10, 000 hours. So your products and programs will get better with 10, 000 hours. And if you’ve already spent 10, 000 hours in this space and that decade commitment it’s going to work, but it’s a huge commitment. So don’t take it lightly. I think this idea of get rich quick overnight success, it’s just not helpful because it’s not the way it works.

And when you do marry these problems and stuff, you can revise as you learn. There’s sort of two ways I think about it is, or patterns I’ve seen in the space when you become a subject matter expert. There’s whatever your niche is, you can either be like, I’m the person for X and I have this signature program that delivers this result for this person.

It’s called this name. And then every year you rebuild it, you deliver it. Again and again through cohorts Maybe you just redo all the content every now and again and you have a signature program Then there’s more of like the serial entrepreneur who’s okay. I’m really committed to this avatar And i’m just gonna I am going to build the library But it’s I’m taking micro problems and I’m like building a thing here.

And I just keep going until I’ve essentially surrounded this person with help. And it’s not really a signature program. It’s more of a doctor patient thing, like where the coach is like prescribing Oh, you need help with this problem. Take this training in my program, come to office hours on the weekend.

It’s more. It’s less of this signature structure thing and more of a prescriptive. Hey, you’re in the club and then I’m here to help you and prescribe training and content as needed. And the other thing that’s okay to do is to admit mistakes. If you, maybe your signature program has a major problem in it and Hey, I think I need to take this part out.

It’s not helpful. Or maybe I structured my offer so that it’s actually not starting early enough in their journey. Or maybe I’m not staying with them after they get to this point and they really need me for another part or this middle part is not working. If I’m helping people build an agency and I show them how to do that, but they’re ha my clients are having trouble getting clients.

Like I think what I’m teaching, maybe it’s not working. I got to readjust. And I got to learn. I got to be resourceful. And then in terms of practicing with intention, I take this seriously. So like when I make a commitment, like when I got into sled dogs or I got into the LMS space or I became a podcaster or started a YouTube channel I knew I would be doing it 10 years later.

And that decade commitment is just it’s both sounds like a lot of work, but it’s also freeing you know what, I could see myself in 10 years. And it helps rule out things that maybe you shouldn’t focus on. Whatever’s hot of the day, you might see an opportunity, but do you see yourself doing that in 10 years?

Jason Coleman: That’s great stuff. I it’s funny, it’s like you brought up 10, 000 hours and I know what it means and you know what it means. There’s like a famous essay about 10, 000 hours and that’s like the average time it takes for someone to be labeled as an expert for something or mastery. Yeah. They love all mastery.

And yeah. That’s the thing is we’re talking about becoming an expert at something. And one way definitely is to do it over and over again, like 10, 000 hours. And you like through osmosis, you’ll accidentally become good at it. Like almost anything, if you just do it that often. But I think when practicing with intention will get you there faster and better.

I think like anything that any skill I’ve tried to learn if you trying to get better at guitar. Just learning songs and playing is pretty good. But if there’s a reason, like there’s coaches. There’s a reason that like coaches who aren’t the best can still help people. Who are the best is they’re walking them through exercises that, you know, for guitar, stretch your fingers.

Learn to memorize, these chords and changes and notes and, keys and things. So setting goals for each practice session, like one small concrete thing to improve over time. And so recognizing every time you do, every time you write a blog post, I did it for this podcast, every time I’m recording something I wrote.

So for this, it was, don’t cough. And I wrote the. the overarching topic of this discussion is becoming an expert. So it was like, Oh, remember to like, keep tagging that. So I put that on like on the top of my notes and over time the. These things will become more natural.

And that’s really how you become better at a skill. And I think it’s also how you can learn with intention as well. So yeah, you do the same thing over and over, but better each time. And then I think another version of that is not to be scared to copy from the best.

And so you might feel that you have to do it your own way or pay your dues. Which is, it’s true, but don’t, it’s, it is good to just copy. And there’s an ethical way to do it. Like whether it’s copy as practice. And even I brought up the guitar. It’s you watch like a really good guitarist and you’re like, and let me try to learn that someone else’s song, and there’s like a good course, I think it’s called copy that is like a sales copywriting course. And there’s 10 different examples of really good sales pages. It’s like literally put this on your screen and then type it up and feel what it’s like to write those words as if you wrote them.

And yeah. Building websites or like building courses, like a good, if you there’s a course that you really like, it’s like just steal some aspect of it. You’re not going to copy the whole course, but it’s like copy the structure of the course, but it’s your content. It’s about a totally different subject matter, but you just steal the structure of it.

And if you steal it, be like, Hey, give props to it if it makes sense. Or there’s other ways you can do that. You can take your favorite parts of some of the. other material and and apply it to your own work. And don’t be worried about doing that again. Like you don’t have to be the guru, the person who knows it all.

This just comes out of, your glorious, magical brain is. Being transparent about how you figured it out and working towards this helps.

Chris Badgett: I think copying, that’s in humans there’s mirror neurons in our brain. It’s how we learn language and kids copy their parents and their siblings and stuff like that.

That’s just what makes us human. I’ve heard it called R and D, which stands for rob and duplicate. That’s a funny way to say it. So you want to R and D, but you want to actually give credit. Like you’ve heard us cite, like earlier, I said, moving the free line, that’s Ed and Pagan. You found the 10, 000 hours from Malcolm Gladwell and so on.

So good site credit. And the other thing is to just think about remixing because a great book, like a nonfiction book, came from research where there’s a lot of different ideas. So what plagiarism is like not giving credit, copying exactly, not mixing and matching with other things. And so that’s, I think that’s an important thing for an expert, especially a lifelong learner.

Just because you heard something really good from somebody else in your industry, you can use it. Just give them credit, mix it into your style and your framework and everything. And you’re good. That’s how like great books are written.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.