# How to get your first customers (even with ZERO audience)

Channel: Greg Isenberg
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzUMAl9PgBk
Duration: 50 min
Language: English
Words: 8774
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/HzUMAl9PgBk

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[0:00] today's episode of the startup ideas podcast is well needed it's about how do you get customers for your startup without a social following without spending tons of money on ads uh and just some really really simple tips on how to do it and we go through three ways on on how to do it in this episode and this this is a tutorial so by the end of it you'll really understand how to do this we talk about a concept called The Dream 100 and we give you a spreadsheet for it it's about how do reach out to potential Partners or people and leverage their audiences to

[0:35] to be wellknown the second is you know how do you utilize groups and communities to get customers and leads and the last is thinking about how do you make highquality videos and coming up with ideas for Content that uh that's going to spread within the audiences you care about this episode's with Jonathan Courtney one of my favorite uh people to come on the startup ideas podcast show you're going to love it see you in [Music] there what are we talking about today today we're going to talk about how you get clients or how you get leads without needing to be a social media influencer without needing to even use social media

[1:22] necessarily and also without needing to create content thought that might be interesting for people like this kind of cold start problem of finding an audience finding leads finding like building a list but like out of nothing that could be interesting to your audience okay don't hit don't hit the desk because it picks it picks it up oh yeah yeah I saw one of the recent episodes and it just sounds like I'm drumming the whole [Laughter] time don't do that but this whole like getting leads and customers like probably one of the biggest questions I get asked they listen to the startup ideas podcast and they're like great

[2:04] good for you Greg with your 500,000 followers or whatever easy for you to say yes you're gonna go and create this startup and then people are going to go and use it but we're keeping it real here we're keeping it real we're keeping it real yeah like I work with a lot of people or I chat with a lot of entrepreneurs who you know never use social media they've never run ads before uh there's no chance of them going on X and posting regularly or even making YouTube videos um and then they're like how do I get leads you know how do I do this um and so I talk about

[2:42] this a lot but I I don't think I've ever made content specifically about how to do it um and I just thought that maybe I'll just jump straight into some strategies they're not already connected they just kind of all can work and I don't even know how many there are it's it's not something I've ever written down it's just something I do um have you heard of the dream 100 method I haven't that's good then it would suck if you're like yes I have and I already talked about it on this pod by the way before you talk about the dream 100 method I literally need to

[3:15] take off my sweat sweatshirt because that's how hot I'm getting yes talking to you before I talk about the dream 100 method we need to talk about the dream 200 method you've already upgraded so dream 100 step the idea here is that you try to find other people who have access to the audience that you're looking for so for example you wna I don't know start a web design agency or just give me a random give me a random business and I'll give it I'll use it as an example sure you want to start a I mean web design agency is a great one fine so you want to start a web design

[3:54] agency and so you and you also think I should I probably would like to work with like Founders and not you know massive corporates so I want to work with like small businesses or startups and I want to web design agency okay I'm starting it tomorrow and I have no social media presence and I don't know what an ad is and I'm one of those people who thinks that ads don't work even though that's not true um but anyway it would take me too long to figure that out anyway so what's the first thing you do well one of the first things you can do is a strategy called

[4:25] dream 100 the idea behind it is you literally make a list you make like an Excel sheet or a Google sheet and on the left you make a list of all of the people who you think would be already talking to your audience or would have access to your audience it can be people or it can be organizations so off the top of your head Greg can you think of anyone who has an audience of people that speaks to Founders and startup owners who might at some point want to have a website can you think of anyone wait can we do this live can I just open

[4:59] up a Google doc and we can write write this out okay yeah let's make it live this top left we have the you know partner name or company name or person name so back to the question I want to start a web design agency okay I want to somehow think about not not thinking about how to contact them but who are the people that I who are talking to the audience that I want to have so question one can you think of anyone off the top of your head who's speaking with audience of startups uh startup owners or Founders who you think might at some point want a website designed for them

[5:38] um maybe like when I think okay so prod me yeah since you are an example of someone's dream 100 so you would be at the very top for a listener of this podcast true so your and then you just fill this out so your main website you just fill in their main website you link to all their social media stuff you probably want to blur that out yeah I let blur that out um you try to fill this whole thing out and get a feeling for that person and like who how big is Their audience all of that so this is like a research project basically and if you honestly

[6:20] spend one day just filling this out let's like jump to the second one already who would be another person who speaks with uh Founders and people who might want want their website designed I was thinking of product hunt just product Hunt is a website which you could do a partnership with so yes product hunt so it could be people or um oops it could be people or uh comp companies right theoretically it can be people or companies it's only worth putting a company there if you think that there's something you could potentially do with that company for example if that company has a podcast which also have that audience so I would say

[7:02] it's worth it at least for this first pass to put product hunt on there I would also put like okay um thinking about my city looking at different meetups finding oh there's an entrepreneurs organization Meetup happening every Thursday in the city and so I'm going to figure out who runs that and I would put them in the list as well how can they put me in front of those people that would be something I'm thinking about so step one is just making a list of people or organizations or meetups or like containers where the people you want to work with are already being talked to are already being

[7:48] interacted with and are already Gathering essentially quick breaking the Pod to tell you a little bit about startup Empire so startup Empire is my PR private membership where it's a bunch of people like me like you who want to build out their startup ideas now they're looking for content to help accelerate that they're looking for potential co-founders they're looking for uh tutorials from people like me to come in and tell them how do you do email marketing how do you build an audience how do you go viral on Twitter all these different things that's exactly what startup Empire is and it's for people who want want to start a

[8:30] startup but are looking for ideas or it's for people who have a startup but just they're not seeing the traction uh that they need so you can check out the link to Startup empire.co in the description so this is like step one now you have a list of people that might be able to like massively they it might be that contacting one of these people gets you more leads or gets you more traffic than doing all of the other stuff like doing all the Social Media stuff and doing all the other things you could be doing so for example let's say someone is thinking okay out of this list I've made

[9:09] a list of 100 by the way a lot of people just do 10 a lot of people just do 20 now your next step is figuring out what could I do or what could I offer this person or organization that would put me in front of their audience or that would somehow expose me to Their audience but would also give them a lot of value like very you know simple question in your mind like what can I do to either have a partnership with them or give them value so they put me in front of the audience one option is paying them so I'll give you an example early on in the comp in

[9:45] my company's history I realized a lot of our audience is reading daring Fireball John gruber's website and so I just straight up paid for an ad on his blog and it got us a crap ton of traffic so that was just like a paid way of doing it a second example is about 6 months ago I reached out to a guy called Greg Eisenberg and I pitched him on an idea of me being an occasional host of of this podcast and that also generated a ton of leads for me I don't post on any social media you see I'm a disaster at social media but I'm able to generate

[10:23] leads using a system like dream 100 a system where I just look for who are essentially the people who are just already great at talking to the audience people already like them they're already like a face and a trusted person in those people's lives and can I just be a slug hanging on to the back of them and just somehow be exposed to Their audience so that's one really simple first step that you can do to start getting traffic to whatever it is you're doing there's loads of steps and loads of ways you can do this wrong but there's a strategy for reaching out to people so that you don't it up and

[11:06] it's called a canvas strategy so once you have your list of people and you're like okay how do I actually reach out to people who are super busy already and already like don't need anything from a nobody like me you're usually that's what stops people because they're like there's no point in me reaching out to Greg like he's already got a huge audience there's really nothing I can do for him that's because you haven't really learned any strategies for reaching out to people and my favorite one is called the canvas strategy Google it it's a thing that Ryan holiday wrote and the idea here is that you're it's a it's a system that

[11:43] helps you figure out how to be helpful for people who are you know Gatekeepers or above you in the sort of business hierarchy we did an entire episode on the canvas strategy uh Greg at one point so maybe it's worth just like linking to that we actually did a full episode on it uh you and I um sometime in the summer but the idea here is don't just reach out to Greg and be like hey can I come on your podcast because Greg's GNA be like it's almost insulting to do that because he knows you just want to have access to his audience but for example

[12:17] what I did uh when I reached out to you Greg even though we already knew each other I still took it seriously I made like a pitch for why it would be worth your while having me on your podcast and I put effort into it even though I could have been lazy and just said how can I come on your podcast it's like it's almost insulting so reaching out to people is an art and we did an episode called canvas strategy and I think you should just link to that that that is the art of reaching out to people in my opinion how many millions of dollars

[12:50] have you made in your career from the the hustle 100 slash canvas strategy way more so probably that's actually a great question let me think so we've been around for 14 years 14 let me do a little bit of math this is actually a great question I've never thought about this so that's like F I didn't know you could do math honestly I'm quite bad at math for being a CEO of a company I'd say not me personally but my business has made 50 to 60 million euro just from that you couldn't have said dollars you had to say oh sorry dollars yeah well then it's a little bit more um

[13:31] I'm trying to I'm trying to be accurate about it no one's ever asked me that question we've been around for 14 years and then the last eight years you're wearing a Yankees hat trying to be all American but then you're saying Euros Euros yeah I'd say like conservatively being really conservative I'd say 40 40 to 50 million because we also use ads and I can't 100% that out but I'll give you one very clean and clear example um Jake Napp the guy who wrote the book Sprint I reached out to him a couple years ago I talked about it in canvas strategy this connect this one single

[14:13] connection instead of me like going on loads of podcasts and doing loads of things I zeroed in on one person I was like Jake is talking to our audience our audience buys his book that's one specific person who really is the perfect like partner for AJ and smart and and like nobody else I put all of my effort into that one person into really trying to figure out how we could have a really good partnership for him as well that created our entire training business which now we're working with corporates all over the world for the last since that book came out basically and just us training people on the

[14:53] design Sprint has been responsible for tens of millions of dollars uh but that would never have happened if we had not met Jake um even just being on this podcast like just spending time uh thinking about how I can be valuable to you probably within 12 months will have been worth three or four million so that's pretty amazing like thank you no worries so yeah crazy I remember the first time I met you and first time I met you yeah cute one yeah yeah the first time I met you you looked at me like I was a crazy person because I started talking about what I do and creating

[15:46] content tracting audiences that sort of thing and you were like what are you doing that is so much work to do that so you look like I was taking crazy pills you were doing a you do a lot as well you're you're a busy man yeah I mean the truth that I love doing I love the creation of content I also think it gives you a certain amount of clarity to the community and audience that you don't get if you're just renting yes yes um but I think that for a lot of people doing what you you say just like get in the door get some customers get some

[16:30] feedback and then you can always create content afterwards right like then no one's stopping you yeah and I think like it is one of the strategies I use it's not the only strategy but I think it's one it's it's one of these strategies by the way I didn't come up with it I just learned it somewhere I don't even remember where um but I was like ah this seems too easy you just write the names of the people who are talking to your audience and you reach out to them and that like gets you clients um the the only catch is you have to be good at

[17:03] what you do like as in you have to be able to talk about the thing so if you're a web designer and you absolutely suck at web web design it won't work at all uh so it's only going to work if you are like the real deal as in if you can do the thing but then it really works who's trying to oh sorry never mind someone's trying to call me I was telling you before we started this call I'm having a really annoying day it is the most annoying day at AJ and smart of the year don't don't bring that on air don't bring that Vibe on air I'm

[17:36] I'm gonna bring all the rage onto this you didn't say that in the original text message to me when you wanted to be an occasional co-host hey I'm gonna come on air just I'm gonna like rant you know people in your audience maybe need to know that we also well especially me are also sometimes just having an annoying bad day running a business because I think they probably think we're just like every day is easy it's all super simple anyway let's get to the next strategy let's do it what's number two so dream 100 is number one you don't have to do 100 but just even the

[18:09] research even just researching the people researching the potential Partners is going to give you a ton of ideas on you know the different potential ways that you could reach out to different people and all the you you'll also be shocked oh there's people like I never heard of in a super Niche part of the market that are talking to like 20 people who could completely change my life so that's another thing okay the next thing it doesn't really have a name it's just figure out where your audience is congregating and spending their time and start spending your time there too and start delivering extreme levels of value

[18:49] to the places where those people are spending time let me give you an example there are a lot of groups for entrepreneurs like for example are you still running a school group I am um so you have a school group uh Community what is it called actually I think it's called the community startup empire.co so startup empire.co it's probably like in this is not an ad for startup empire.co I'm just giving an example I do not get anything if someone joins startup empire.co so how does it does it cost something or is it free it cost something like what if you wouldn't mind uh uh it's $149 a

[19:30] month okay $149 you pay and I guess you can cancel anytime so let's say you're thinking about this strategically and you're thinking okay where can I find people who are hanging out who could potentially be my clients I'm not going to recommend people go in and spam your group don't worry um so if I was looking at this what I'm looking for is okay that's potentially a high quality place where people are hanging out which maybe I might want to do work with so I'm going to join that group I'm going to spend the entire first month just being the most valuable person in that group

[20:05] zero spamming zero telling people to reach out to me and DM me and trying to get work out of it just being the most valuable person in the group when people are asking questions about web design here you go here's a question don't even follow up with me you know also that people struggle with this so you just post like free templates whatever it is whatever you can do to make yourself an extremely valuable person in that group while also observing the challenges people have in that group that's an amazing way to start lightly generating leads for yourself there's a ton of free groups on platforms like Discord School

[20:45] Facebook whatever it is and you're look and even the comments of like YouTube channels that are dedicated to specific topics and in these groups you can just go in there and deliver as much value as per as as possible and doing that alone will generate leads for you for free or for a very low price per month like the price of one day of failed experiments on Facebook uh running ads and so for me if I'm starting a company tomorrow day one I'm writing out my dream 100 list day two I'm joining as many godamn communities as possible I'm lurking in reddit reddit groups as well

[21:28] I'm looking at different type of entrepreneurial Reddit groups I'm looking into the places where these people are congregating and I am just being the most valuable person another thing that I used to do is when I started to try to become like a well-known facilitator I'm on Kora I've got like the paid cor account or whatever it is and I'm giving people the most detailed answers no chat GPT just clean detailed extremely like overthe top better than everyone else's answers and I'm just trying to be valuable if you're thinking about how do I generate leads as fast as possible it still take some time but if

[22:08] you just do dream 100 and just go to where people are congregating and deliver value within one month you're going to start getting that momentum it's like absolutely ridiculously easy and that's still without you having to be an influencer without you having to create content you're just reacting to other people's stuff and without you having to run ads or speak at conferences or release a book it's just the basics of getting people interested in what you're doing and seeing the quality of what you can do those two things will get you like 80% of your clients in the first few months if you just do it like that quick ad break let

[22:47] me tell you about a business I invested in it's called boring marketing.com so a few years ago I met this group of people that were some of the best SEO experts in the world they were behind getting some of the biggest companies found on Google and the secret sauce is they've got a set of technology and AI that could help you outrank your competition so for my own businesses I wanted that I didn't want to have to rely on Mark Zuckerberg I didn't want to depend on ads to drive customers to my businesses I wanted to rank high in Google that's why I like SEO and that's why I use

[23:24] boring marketing.com and that's why I invested in it there so confident in their approach that they offer a 30-day Sprint with 100% money back guarantee who does that nowadays so check it out highly recommend boring marketing.com I want to add one quick thing to that whole strategy which I I do I do that strategy today like you know honestly um so I think it not only does it work for like Facebook groups and school groups and and discords it also works on uh just replying and commenting to to creators that that you know are in your Niche so for example on YouTube like on this podcast

[24:10] startup ideas podcast on YouTube I recognize this the same people who comment every single time like for example there's this guy named Ryan Aldridge no idea who he is but I know he comments yeah hi Ryan and I know that he comments on every single video and he says something like pretty thoughtful and if Ryan hit me up and he was like you know on Twitter let's say and he was like hey I'd love to do something I don't know if I'd say yes but I'm 10 times 50 times a 100 times more likely to to do something with Ryan because I've seen his name so many goddamn times

[24:50] and the same is true with uh Omar who was recently on the Pod who taught a 90minut you know session around using a to to build directories he was like a listener of the Pod he was like commenting on stuff he you know he he was messaging me you know from that you know he ended up getting access to the pod which um you know that episode might get 100 plus thousand views and listens which is worth a lot of you know worth a lot so what I suggest people do is turn on notification bells for or a list of creators that you care about and just be

[25:32] the first first person to write something thoughtful don't write like cool video or or great thread on Twitter right like are you kidding me don't do that um but add value through comments and you'll also attract other commenters you'll you'll you'll also attract trust with the Creator thoughts that's an amazing idea and I also think turning on all notifications for your dream 100 as well just there any of the people who are in that list of people who are talking to your audience they're probably the same people you're talking about I actually somehow never thought about the fact that it makes sense to turn on notifications so you can jump in

[26:16] there and reply to them but yeah any any time you can deliver value also to the Creator by being a helpful person in the comments also by sharing the Creator stuff so that they have the feeling that you actually care about what they do and that you like what they do and that you're spreading it um I think that's a fantastic idea and you can see all of these are like layers that you put on top of each other for the machine to start working I love that one I remember you told me a story you told it on the podcast of like you reaching out to the

[26:49] like singer of Weezer was it and then getting to go to one of the gigs dude not not even just going to the gigs like I I was like hanging hanging out with him backstage you know you're the master at this you're the absolute Master at it like you're yeah you're just killer with that sort of stuff um if you also have some money one thing that people also don't realize and I don't mean a crap ton of money but if you're like a if you're listening to this if you're listening to this and I know you are because I've spoken to some of you and

[27:21] you're running an agency that's making like uh 500k and you want to grow and you're like you know spending loads of money on branding agencies all of this other stuff take like 10k of that money or or 15K reach out to the top person on your list and ask them to ask them to do a collab of some sort or ask them what could we do together that would expose me to your audience we did a and I'm not going to talk about the number but we did a collaboration with Chris doe the uh he's like got a huge huge Design Channel and I just went on Instagram

[28:01] reached out to him and I was like I'd love to do some sort of collab with you guys you know we had zero followers back then and I just straight up said right from the beginning because I had nothing to offer I had no I I I thought of the whole canvas strategy thing and I was like I have nothing to offer this guy he's just too he's too far ahead of me in this game that we're playing and so the only thing I can say is we have a pretty good budget and we'd love to do a collab with you done we did a collab

[28:32] within the next like three weeks or something so I think just being clever with your marketing spend and thinking about over leverage things versus we're going to do a Rebrand versus we're going to throw this into something we don't understand or versus sometimes like hiring a marketing agency I hear this a lot people hire a marketing agency to like run their ads these people don't care they don't care about your company necessarily so sometimes it would be better to take that 50k or 10K and just use it on your dream 100 and I heard a really killer one recently my mentor bought his number one dream 100 person a

[29:14] $50,000 guitar signed by like a super famous person um and brought it person obviously with permission brought it personally to the guy's office and now they're like doing crazy collabs together it's so cool and that's the kind of thing people don't think about he could have spent that on some sort of marketing thing he could have spent that on like rebranding or making tons of YouTube videos or whatever it is but he spent it on buying a guitar for this guy and I just think that's such a like these are the types of things you need to be thinking about if you're looking for a lever and by the way that

[29:52] guy also has no social media he's nowhere he's nowhere to be found this is an invisible person um I just love that kind of crap guys I'm not asking you to buy me a 50k guitar I I don't want you turning up to my office with a guitar but he's he had an angle he had a whole thing it was really just super cool what do you think about those types of things like these like you know lasering in on one person you think you could have a killer collab with maybe just offering to pay for it or maybe just uh you know bringing something interesting to their

[30:24] life like for example a crazy guitar I think uh a lot of people hit me up and they're like I you know I do cold email or I reach out to people and no one like I don't hear back and they get like super they feel bad and and I don't blame blame them for feeling bad um but it's just that the reach out isn't targeted it's not personalized it's not it's about it's not about the person you're reaching out to and I think like gifting is such an underrated tool to get someone to be on your side it just Stacks the cards in your favor so I love

[31:02] hearing stories about like a you know 50k guitar that's like meaningful you know like um I think uh I also heard a story I don't know if he he wants me to share it but someone who you all know uh who buys you know companies you know offer he wanted to you know in his dream 100 I guess he had a compan you know this founder and he wanted to buy this founder he you know I think like a Ferrari he said like hey like I got a Ferrari waiting for you in Hawaii you know in Hawaii and you paint this like picture you know if if you

[31:39] come and uh you know close this deal like I can't wait to meet you in Maui and and and we're going to like sail into the sunset um things like that um and now I know the comment section is going to be like but I don't have enough money for a Ferrari and you know and it's like it doesn't need to be that right it could be something small yeah yeah someone recently brought me this like a business partner we started a deal together and they brought this little teenage engineering thing thank you Alan by the way um and it's just such a meem I I think it's like $80 or

[32:15] something and it's such a memorable thing because he knows I love teenage engineering he know he knows I like to make music doesn't need to be something crazy and you said what was the thing you said you always gift people was it a little Buddha or something yeah yeah I did a year of Buddha which is hilarious because I'm just a Jewish guy with a bunch of Buddhas um so uh one year I I bought like I don't know 500 budas or something hundreds of Buddhas um these small little things that were about like $5 maybe $7 each it was it was a really good deal I will say like it was a high

[32:55] quality mini Buddha and to the and I would you know meet all you know this is like I'm in my early 20s I'm in San Francisco I'm trying to meet as many people as possible uh I've got my dream 100 list even though I didn't know that that's what it was and every meeting I would basically just be like hey like thanks for your time you know I wish you good luck and I would just hand them a mini Buddha and to this day some of those people ended up you know they were also in their early mid-20s some of them are like billionaires now or or run

[33:28] hundred million Venture funds or you know sold companies to stripe and things like that Executives at meta and they still to this day 10 years later more than 10 years later they have that Buddha and they send me photos they send me photos and they're like hey hope all is well and it's like dude you're like the SBP product of a trillion dollar company and I'm on your mind for this $5 Buddha from this Jewish guy how does this make this make sense that's so cool you are very very good at this game I have to say like you are one of the rare people like you do have a

[34:09] superpower of like keeping in touch with people and keeping like making people feel and I think it's real like making people feel thought thought of like I am I for your audience just in case you think you need to have superpowers like Greg I'm the opposite I'm like a disaster with keeping up with people people as Greg knows like Greg you are you have like the absolute Mastery of just I'm going to send a quick message to Jonathan I'm going to reach out to this person you know everyone on the planet and I think you have like almost like a natural inbuilt dream 100 machine inside

[34:45] you and I'm lazy as so what I do is I like have my dream 100 and I like focus on one person per year or one thing every two years or one thing every three years and even that you know if you're not trying to build a hundred million company if you're just trying to do what I'm doing which is bootstrapped under 10 million that you can do this and be lazy and still it's like not true you can't be lazy you can do this be good at what you do keep it consistent and still be pretty successful with it without even what do you think about the

[35:20] angle actually Greg I'm saying here without building any sort of content without doing any sort of you know being an influencer but obviously I think it goes without saying having content out there so my our YouTube channel for AJ and smart having content out there being like somewhat visible that makes everything 10 times easier then that's almost like a you know moving it from hard mode to easy mode right yeah I mean I mean that's the whole game of of business and life in general is you want you want to make you want to make your life easy right and you're you're trying to stack the deck in your

[36:01] favor content audience building The Leverage that you get from that is so big um so I think it's and then once you're doing multiple things right you're doing dream 100 plus you're doing content for example like you've just multiplied it you're just it just starts to multiply so that's why I look at some someone like you and I'm like I don't know why you don't do content I'm lazy and I'm not trying to build a that makes I mean look I am I think that a big part of it is that I don't really like to be a public figure yeah and I um I kind of like you

[36:41] know okay if I do a tweet right no one is no one is following me on Twitter or X right if I po do a post on X I'm worried the whole day that I've said something bad that I'll and and I'll like have to go back and re-explain myself or something I'm just like a I'm not really good with this sort of putting opinions out there and all of that kind of stuff I used to do it when in my early 20s and I used to like almost thrive on a bit of the controversy of the things I would post uh and now I'm like I want to

[37:16] be not checking stuff on which is why I actually like YouTube I want to actually that that would be one of my other examples if you don't want to build like a personal brand if you don't want to get out there and be like I'm also not naturally good at it the way you are I think you have a really you're you've kind of almost got this brain that's optimized to the max for being really good at uh regular content I look at your X account and it's just like you're nonstop and I think you'll always beat someone like me if we were competing in that sort of game and I think that's

[37:54] also why people who make a lot of content are actually usually the most successful people like it's just it's impossible to compete with if it was like a video game or a board game it's like the overpowered skill is the ability to keep producing content even when there's lots of like annoying little comments that you're like you know I'll get one comment negative comment on a YouTube video and it will ruin my day you can get like probably 10 and you you're like whatever I'll just make the next video um I just have thin skin for that sort of thing and so that's why I naturally

[38:33] lean towards methods which are less about me creating content I guess I'm a baby you have you have the thinnest skin in the game dude I literally see your bones I do need to put on some way to be fair I want to talk about YouTube for a second there's a channel I want to give a shout out to uh one of my mentors is the founder that's actually the best way to say it without giving away too much information one of the founders of this company uh is a mentor to uh to me it's mastering doom and I think they've really in my opinion mastered the art of

[39:10] creating content in a way for for YouTube in a way that's ludicrously overthe toop valuable and number two isn't focused on the individuals and the individual characters who are posting the content I've been trying to do this at AJ and smart for years I've not succeeded with it but they've completely nailed it if you check like their recent videos sometimes their videos are 11 hours long 12 hours long 15 hours long and they put this insanely valuable these insanely valuable tutorials out there and then the people who find those tutorials valuable are obviously going to check out who's this company who's giving away all of this

[39:50] insane value so if I were a web designer today trying to start a company and I want to to and I wanted to like have people reach out to me on this next level like the next level is content creation but I wasn't super comfortable being like right up front as the face and I like giving my opinions then I would probably copy what mastering docomo affiliation with mastering

[40:27] I don't care if they succeed or not I just think it's a really cool YouTube channel so is what you're saying is what you're saying basically go and what is what is the most amount of value you can give basically you know instead of for example creating a course and selling a course maybe it's just you create the course but you just give it away for free right and you just create as much freaking value highly produced as possible that people feel almost guilty for consuming it here's what I would absolutely yes and here's specifically what I would do I would be on Reddit I would be on cute Kora and I

[41:02] would be in 20 different groups on school and all these different platforms and I see a question coming up it's like how do I like what's the quickest way to make a landing page in framer uh that's completely responsive and blah blah blah has a checkout what I would do is I would sit at my computer turn on loom and make a goddamn five hour from zero to the pages made video with no Cuts like maybe going to the bathroom or something and then cutting those bits out or bringing the camera with you and that would be one of my YouTube videos and I would then send it to the person

[41:39] who asked the question and they're going to be like what the actual hell this this person's like way too much like that's way too much value so that's what I would be doing so but yes it's like making courses but without the baggage of making courses because making courses is like a looming stressful thing this is just I'm making a video to show you how to do the thing in my lowf way but I'm good at what I do and here's how I do it here's how I would do it using framer or whatever it is I buy it I also think that it's a really good way to sell

[42:15] software like start by um like the margins and software are so great especially like SAS 70 80 90% go and create a bunch of uh videos don't worry that it doesn't it doesn't even need to look good even and it's funny like people ask me all the time like this show looks like crap and and Raa my producers gonna hate hate me for saying this it looks like crap in the sense that when you compare this to like Diary of a CEO we're just sitting at our laptops yeah we're just sitting on our laptops I this people hate me that this is in 720p and you're yet you're ating

[42:58] you know by the way I will do some 4K videos for for for the people in the comment section I see you the new nude videos will be in 4k yeah it's true it's true so um yeah that's kind of where I'm at wait what you were just about to say something really like profound and I was I think we got distracted by the 720p thing I think you were just about to say something big yeah me too but I haven't I haven't had enough coffee this is the what was it what was I even talking about yeah I also don't know I got so distracted by the 4K thing

[43:41] um oh yeah yeah yeah yeah sorry we were talking about making these long form YouTube videos and the fact that it doesn't have to be high quality totally yeah exactly low quality is the new high quality look at the mastering decom videos also did you hear what I just said low quality is a new high quality yeah do you agree with that 100% 100 lowest quality is the new 4k yeah exactly and by the way low quality doesn't mean low effort like we put a lot of effort into the well this episode we didn't put that much effort into prep but like this show this show I do put a

[44:18] lot of effort into it yeah you do for sure and it it's it's it's also like don't don't think that just low effort means sorry don't think that low quality means low effort what you want to do is low quality High effort yes that's where you want to be yeah um also just don't forget on YouTube a lot of people just want to have something on in the background and learn through osmosis so if you look at the mastering decom videos or i' I've been recently looking at um my favorite YouTube video this week was a two and a half hour like review of the new OP XY from teenage

[44:59] engineering and it's just two guys literally it's just like a video a camera pointed down at the device and the person pressing buttons on it um that's something I'll passively watch but get a lot of value from so it doesn't it doesn't need to be obsessively high quality with slides with whatever just showing the people how to do the thing and doing it like showing how good you are at the thing as well in the end you know when these people are watching it they're going to be like can I just get Jonathan to do it actually I don't want to watch a video well I also think you're you're dropping

[45:33] a Jem here which is Kora is there's so much Val there's so much good stuff on Kora because you can understand what people are asking for and and just go and make like going to make videos based on top Kora questions yes and answers in in itself is such a huge Insight so thank you for sharing that oh you're welcome man I'm trying to think is there anything else so dream 100 going to where people are just you know getting together and talking about the topic just going to where your audience already is um thinking about things like lower you know High effort low quality content options is there

[46:14] anything else like it's if it's about how are we spending this first month generating a couple of new clients without building a big personal brand and you don't have a list those work really well those for me are the things that I recommend or the things that I do with people yeah don't over honestly don't overthink it like that's that's what I would do and in fact I feel like I want to create I want to put this in into like the process of whatever new company we launch I think the dream 100 thing you know what I'm annoyed about at AJ and smart I we talk

[46:50] about this dream 100 thing all the time but it only comes back to me once every two years when somehow we've stagnated like our our Revenue has stagnated our profits are going down and I'm like yeah but we're doing this and we're doing that and I'm tweaking all these little things and it's I you've probably heard this uh quote where it's like you know don't be the lion that chases the rabbits or there something about lions and rabbits and get the antelope instead of the rabbits great quote right but I end up looking at all the small things and trying to optimize the crap out of them

[47:25] and it brings up our like Vue by 1% or 2% and then it just clicks with me and I'm like wait a minute what if I just reached out to this person and we did something together and usually that's the step function explosive growth thing that happens when I go back to the godam dream 100 list and just look at it again and remind myself oh yeah like for example I I give you a clear example of this we were thinking about okay we're doing our Facebook ads we're doing all this other stuff where you know we're tweaking the funnel in all these little ways and

[48:00] we're like but but how where did looking at the looking at the email list where did this huge bump come from like that's basically 80% of the whole year and then we were like oh we did a webinar with this partner like we did a webinar for this person's list why the am I not doing a webinar with this person again then it's because we forget how it's just the high the hardest thing about running a business is trying to discern what's high leverage and what's just like menial tasks that feel good but do nothing and honestly just starting a business and focusing on something like

[48:38] dream 100 focusing on something like being in the place where your customers are these are like hyper High leverage things to do and to be good at couldn't agree more dude couldn't agree more all right well you're firing me up you're firing me up I know what I'm doing today ah we'll include the dream 100 Google doc in the description for people to download and do it themselves highly encourage it you know what else I highly encourage liking this video commenting yes stuff like just say something to us and probably subscribing because that's that lets us know that we should continue creating videos and podcasts for free um so please do that

[49:23] and I want to know who the top five people on your dream 100 let me know in the comments now all right I'll catch you later dude thanks so much Craig see you thank you [Music]

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