I am in the process of building the online course that I threatened to build a few months ago. I intend to post progress updates here in this thread; and if I fail to post timely updates with tangible and concrete progress forward towards the goal, I am open to mockery and flaming. REAL progress, NOT action faking! Printing business cards doesn't count! As member of Gen X, I respond well to that scathing indictments if I disappoint my peers... I find it motivating
So, back in December I posted in a previous thread about the decimation of my affiliate marketing side hustle because it violated the Commandment of Control. Without warning, literally my entire side income was wiped out with a single email from the company for whom I was marketing. (That thread is here, if you wanted to read that tragedy in detail LOL : SIDE HUSTLE - MJ Warned Me (or, I had to learn the hard way) )
They still continue to get the benefit of thousands of posts of content that drive traffic to their business, they just don't plan to pay ME for it ♂️♂️♂️
HOWEVER, the silver lining was that it was the FTE that I needed to truly escape the lure of "easy" and build a business that has a more bulletproof adherence to the Commandment of Control.
At the time of this affiliate marketing crash-and-burn, I had already been building an online course in my area of expertise; BUT, I had been building it on a turnkey platform (e.g. Podia, Xperiencify, Udemy, Kajabi, etc). In that way, I was giving up the control, AND succumbing to the lure of easy all at once! Sure, it's easier and faster to just import your course content into someone else's turnkey platform; but what if a year down the road they change their compensation arrangement? What if they decide to start charging 10 times as much for the platform? What if they decide that they are going to keep 90% revenue from courses on their platform? Or what if there's a tiny fine print line in their TOS that I miss and it is legalese that gives them ownership of all of my intellectual property? All risks that I was ignorantly going to take until after I got bit by the Commandment of Control by the affiliate marketing company.
So, it was an absolute blessing that I was granted this kick in the teeth with the affiliate marketing fiasco at the time that it happened. That way, I was not TOO far down the wrong path with my online course!
I even asked MJ in that previous thread for his input on whether or not I should continue to use a turnkey third-party platform for my online course, but he didn't answer... HE DIDN'T NEED TO. And I think that he knew that he didn't need to. If I was too unaware to figure that one out immediately after feeling the burn of a Control Violation, then I was probably hopeless. If I WAS self-aware enough to reach the correct conclusion on my own, then MJ didn't need to chime in to reinforce the obvious for me.
So, I (of course) decided to start building my OWN course platform from scratch. One that I would have end to end control of. I absolutely have had to learn a LOT of new skills in order to do it. I am eternally thankful that I am learning how to do this NOW, with the litany of drag and drop tools available today, as opposed to 20 years ago (when I'd have to learn to code from wholecloth or something), but I have zero web design experience, and so this has been a learning curve for me.
I have tested the market by teaching my material in person, and I have been able to sell my instruction to satisfied business clients in differing industries. Sales teams and businesses with public facing employees have been the bread-and-butter client so far; but what I consider to be the best indicator of the need for what I teach is the fact that 100% of my clients have returned and hired me a second (or more) times to return to train additional groups of employees. Getting asked back to teach another team at the same business is an incredibly satisfying feeling that I didn't realize would be so meaningful to me until it happened. So, my confidence in the potential of my business is significantly bolstered by the fact that literally EVERY client has been a repeat customer.
I erred on the side of caution with pricing, to start with, charging only $100 total for the first client that hired me to teach a block of instruction. I taught for about 90 minutes, not counting my travel time. That client returned and we agreed upon $150/hr for future training. Throughout the “test” phase, I have become comfortable with charging $400/hr for what most of the elements of what I teach, and as I said before, repeat business from the clients continues to be the norm. In fact, an insurance company that has had me come back 12 times to train THREE separate sales teams nearly all of the courses that I have; and they have specifically ASKED if I will be providing an online learning option so that they can have their entire workforce have access to my material on demand!
As a side income, it has been incredible; however, I am extremely limited because I do have a full-time day job (technically 9-5; but we all know that as a salaried upper-management employee, that “9-5” looks suspiciously like 7a-7p each day LOL).
My day job is fine, and by any objective SlowLane measurements I would be considered reasonably successful. My title has the word “Director” in it, and I answer only to members of the C-Suite.
Honestly at my job all is well and I am grateful for it. I truly have no right to complain about it, and I won’t.
But it’s not the best move for my family’s future. I don’t want to settle for a job that’s "fine," successful in the SlowLane, contributing to a 401k and hoping for the best.
Plus, one of the most important metrics evaluated for advancement there is “how many hours does he put in each week? Does he regularly work weekends?”
I won’t rely on temporal prostitution forever. It isn’t sustainable.
So that led me directly into evaluating the productocracy commandments to make sure I am on the right side of all of them as I launch my business:
Commandment of Need: I tested the market as I documented above, and there is a clear need for what I am teaching, AND my deliverable has brought in repeat customers. Even customers have asked for a digital on-demand version of what I teach.
Commandment of Time: Continuing to teach in person would violate this commandment, as I can only be in one place teaching one group for one fee at a time. That’s just another version of temporal prostitution. Hence the reason that I am turning it all into an online course. This course will be available to everyone in the English-speaking world at the same time, all the time. That will allow me to use in-person teaching as a marketing strategy, and not as a cornerstone of income.
Commandment of Scale: As stated above, this course will be available to everyone in the English-speaking world at the same time, all the time. It will be MY mission to garner the attention on my material sufficient that whenever someone in the English-speaking world thinks about the topic, they think of me first. But the scale is essentially unlimited, based on my success in getting the world to know about my service.
Commandment of Control: I sincerely believe that I am adhering to this one. Unless we consider the use of WordPress as being something that is out of my control (I am sincerely not certain if that qualifies or not ). Using WordPress and plugins, I am building the entire course delivery platform myself, under my own control. I am even hosting all of the video content myself, instead of using YouTube or Vimeo or some other third party platform. I intend to have complete control of the ENTIRE service to the extent reasonable. Getting burned by this commandment HURTS.
Commandment of Entry: My online course centers around my area of expertise. It is a milieu in which I have worked and studied for 22 years. The fact that business owners are routinely requesting me to come back and teach more to their employees lets me know that the knowledge I have cultivated has value for them and dependably merits the exchange of value vouchers. It would be truly difficult for someone without a similar background of education and experience to be able to emulate what I do or to be able to articulate the science behind it in a way from which others can learn.
So, I sincerely believe that I am adhering to all of the Commandments of a productocracy to the very best of my ability.
One negative byproduct of my focus on me testing my product and building the service over the course of the past 5 months comes in the form of yet another reminder about the Commandment of Control:
I have been running a small YouTube channel for about 6 years. It is a project I do for fun, and it is completely unrelated to my business. I am not shaking the Earth with my videos, but I have about 10,000 subscribers, and another 1,500 on X where I also post my videos. Again, I am not making any big waves on YouTube, but some of my videos get over 250,000 views, and each month I earn between $100 - $300; with some months as high as $2,500. It isn’t an income on which I depend, but it’s nice to be in the “monetized” club on YouTube.
However, since I have been laser focused on building my business for the last 5 months, I have done very little on the YouTube channel, and have posted no new videos. The current videos continue to get views and earn money… BUT… I am not in control of the platform, and so this is an excerpt from an email they sent me yesterday. This is the first paragraph of the email:
“We noticed you haven’t posted any content to your YouTube channel, <channel name redacted>, for several months, and have fallen below the eligibility criteria for YouTube Partner Program (YPP). We know monetization is important to you as a creator, so we want to let you know that unless you meet the YPP eligibility threshold in the next 30 days, we will disable monetization on <channel name redacted>. After that, we will cancel your contract and you will need to reapply for YPP.”
That's the FIRST paragraph. That's how YouTube says "Salutations!"
I don’t know what others have experienced when trying to get into the YouTube monetized Partner Program, but for me it was a two-year slog, posting regularly, and jumping through hoops to appease the YouTube guideline gods on their ever-changing and vaguely explained requirements. Fun fact: I checked my analytics, and on my end it absolutely appears that I have met every single requirement to stay active in the program; and I have not received any further guidance or clarification on where I might be deficient… so I don’t even know WHAT problem to fix!
The idea of getting booted out of the program and having to get BACK in is incredibly frustrating, and further illustrates the need to be IN CONTROL of your own sources of income.
I will continue to post updates as I take steps to build my business, so in a way I am “building in public,” as a means of ensuring that I continue to be accountable to myself (and to you champions of industry ) for continued REAL progress on the business.
I am intentionally being pointedly vague about specifics concerning my online course/service offering, because I do not want to give any impression that I am trying to inappropriately leverage the attention of MJ’s audience that he has spent decades building.
I only want to discuss my experience of building the business on which I am working; and to hopefully garner some feedback or advice from anyone who has been down these roads before. As we all know, “A smart man learns from his mistakes. A wise man learns from the mistakes of others.”
I am being open about every time I step in a turd sandwich in hopes that others will be able to avoid the pitfalls by learning from my mistakes. If anyone knows of the bear traps I should be watching out for, I am ready and willing to learn!
I’ll keep working, and will see you heroes tomorrow!
So, back in December I posted in a previous thread about the decimation of my affiliate marketing side hustle because it violated the Commandment of Control. Without warning, literally my entire side income was wiped out with a single email from the company for whom I was marketing. (That thread is here, if you wanted to read that tragedy in detail LOL : SIDE HUSTLE - MJ Warned Me (or, I had to learn the hard way) )
They still continue to get the benefit of thousands of posts of content that drive traffic to their business, they just don't plan to pay ME for it ♂️♂️♂️
HOWEVER, the silver lining was that it was the FTE that I needed to truly escape the lure of "easy" and build a business that has a more bulletproof adherence to the Commandment of Control.
At the time of this affiliate marketing crash-and-burn, I had already been building an online course in my area of expertise; BUT, I had been building it on a turnkey platform (e.g. Podia, Xperiencify, Udemy, Kajabi, etc). In that way, I was giving up the control, AND succumbing to the lure of easy all at once! Sure, it's easier and faster to just import your course content into someone else's turnkey platform; but what if a year down the road they change their compensation arrangement? What if they decide to start charging 10 times as much for the platform? What if they decide that they are going to keep 90% revenue from courses on their platform? Or what if there's a tiny fine print line in their TOS that I miss and it is legalese that gives them ownership of all of my intellectual property? All risks that I was ignorantly going to take until after I got bit by the Commandment of Control by the affiliate marketing company.
So, it was an absolute blessing that I was granted this kick in the teeth with the affiliate marketing fiasco at the time that it happened. That way, I was not TOO far down the wrong path with my online course!
I even asked MJ in that previous thread for his input on whether or not I should continue to use a turnkey third-party platform for my online course, but he didn't answer... HE DIDN'T NEED TO. And I think that he knew that he didn't need to. If I was too unaware to figure that one out immediately after feeling the burn of a Control Violation, then I was probably hopeless. If I WAS self-aware enough to reach the correct conclusion on my own, then MJ didn't need to chime in to reinforce the obvious for me.
So, I (of course) decided to start building my OWN course platform from scratch. One that I would have end to end control of. I absolutely have had to learn a LOT of new skills in order to do it. I am eternally thankful that I am learning how to do this NOW, with the litany of drag and drop tools available today, as opposed to 20 years ago (when I'd have to learn to code from wholecloth or something), but I have zero web design experience, and so this has been a learning curve for me.
I have tested the market by teaching my material in person, and I have been able to sell my instruction to satisfied business clients in differing industries. Sales teams and businesses with public facing employees have been the bread-and-butter client so far; but what I consider to be the best indicator of the need for what I teach is the fact that 100% of my clients have returned and hired me a second (or more) times to return to train additional groups of employees. Getting asked back to teach another team at the same business is an incredibly satisfying feeling that I didn't realize would be so meaningful to me until it happened. So, my confidence in the potential of my business is significantly bolstered by the fact that literally EVERY client has been a repeat customer.
I erred on the side of caution with pricing, to start with, charging only $100 total for the first client that hired me to teach a block of instruction. I taught for about 90 minutes, not counting my travel time. That client returned and we agreed upon $150/hr for future training. Throughout the “test” phase, I have become comfortable with charging $400/hr for what most of the elements of what I teach, and as I said before, repeat business from the clients continues to be the norm. In fact, an insurance company that has had me come back 12 times to train THREE separate sales teams nearly all of the courses that I have; and they have specifically ASKED if I will be providing an online learning option so that they can have their entire workforce have access to my material on demand!
As a side income, it has been incredible; however, I am extremely limited because I do have a full-time day job (technically 9-5; but we all know that as a salaried upper-management employee, that “9-5” looks suspiciously like 7a-7p each day LOL).
My day job is fine, and by any objective SlowLane measurements I would be considered reasonably successful. My title has the word “Director” in it, and I answer only to members of the C-Suite.
Honestly at my job all is well and I am grateful for it. I truly have no right to complain about it, and I won’t.
But it’s not the best move for my family’s future. I don’t want to settle for a job that’s "fine," successful in the SlowLane, contributing to a 401k and hoping for the best.
Plus, one of the most important metrics evaluated for advancement there is “how many hours does he put in each week? Does he regularly work weekends?”
I won’t rely on temporal prostitution forever. It isn’t sustainable.
So that led me directly into evaluating the productocracy commandments to make sure I am on the right side of all of them as I launch my business:
Commandment of Need: I tested the market as I documented above, and there is a clear need for what I am teaching, AND my deliverable has brought in repeat customers. Even customers have asked for a digital on-demand version of what I teach.
Commandment of Time: Continuing to teach in person would violate this commandment, as I can only be in one place teaching one group for one fee at a time. That’s just another version of temporal prostitution. Hence the reason that I am turning it all into an online course. This course will be available to everyone in the English-speaking world at the same time, all the time. That will allow me to use in-person teaching as a marketing strategy, and not as a cornerstone of income.
Commandment of Scale: As stated above, this course will be available to everyone in the English-speaking world at the same time, all the time. It will be MY mission to garner the attention on my material sufficient that whenever someone in the English-speaking world thinks about the topic, they think of me first. But the scale is essentially unlimited, based on my success in getting the world to know about my service.
Commandment of Control: I sincerely believe that I am adhering to this one. Unless we consider the use of WordPress as being something that is out of my control (I am sincerely not certain if that qualifies or not ). Using WordPress and plugins, I am building the entire course delivery platform myself, under my own control. I am even hosting all of the video content myself, instead of using YouTube or Vimeo or some other third party platform. I intend to have complete control of the ENTIRE service to the extent reasonable. Getting burned by this commandment HURTS.
Commandment of Entry: My online course centers around my area of expertise. It is a milieu in which I have worked and studied for 22 years. The fact that business owners are routinely requesting me to come back and teach more to their employees lets me know that the knowledge I have cultivated has value for them and dependably merits the exchange of value vouchers. It would be truly difficult for someone without a similar background of education and experience to be able to emulate what I do or to be able to articulate the science behind it in a way from which others can learn.
So, I sincerely believe that I am adhering to all of the Commandments of a productocracy to the very best of my ability.
One negative byproduct of my focus on me testing my product and building the service over the course of the past 5 months comes in the form of yet another reminder about the Commandment of Control:
I have been running a small YouTube channel for about 6 years. It is a project I do for fun, and it is completely unrelated to my business. I am not shaking the Earth with my videos, but I have about 10,000 subscribers, and another 1,500 on X where I also post my videos. Again, I am not making any big waves on YouTube, but some of my videos get over 250,000 views, and each month I earn between $100 - $300; with some months as high as $2,500. It isn’t an income on which I depend, but it’s nice to be in the “monetized” club on YouTube.
However, since I have been laser focused on building my business for the last 5 months, I have done very little on the YouTube channel, and have posted no new videos. The current videos continue to get views and earn money… BUT… I am not in control of the platform, and so this is an excerpt from an email they sent me yesterday. This is the first paragraph of the email:
“We noticed you haven’t posted any content to your YouTube channel, <channel name redacted>, for several months, and have fallen below the eligibility criteria for YouTube Partner Program (YPP). We know monetization is important to you as a creator, so we want to let you know that unless you meet the YPP eligibility threshold in the next 30 days, we will disable monetization on <channel name redacted>. After that, we will cancel your contract and you will need to reapply for YPP.”
That's the FIRST paragraph. That's how YouTube says "Salutations!"
I don’t know what others have experienced when trying to get into the YouTube monetized Partner Program, but for me it was a two-year slog, posting regularly, and jumping through hoops to appease the YouTube guideline gods on their ever-changing and vaguely explained requirements. Fun fact: I checked my analytics, and on my end it absolutely appears that I have met every single requirement to stay active in the program; and I have not received any further guidance or clarification on where I might be deficient… so I don’t even know WHAT problem to fix!
The idea of getting booted out of the program and having to get BACK in is incredibly frustrating, and further illustrates the need to be IN CONTROL of your own sources of income.
I will continue to post updates as I take steps to build my business, so in a way I am “building in public,” as a means of ensuring that I continue to be accountable to myself (and to you champions of industry ) for continued REAL progress on the business.
I am intentionally being pointedly vague about specifics concerning my online course/service offering, because I do not want to give any impression that I am trying to inappropriately leverage the attention of MJ’s audience that he has spent decades building.
I only want to discuss my experience of building the business on which I am working; and to hopefully garner some feedback or advice from anyone who has been down these roads before. As we all know, “A smart man learns from his mistakes. A wise man learns from the mistakes of others.”
I am being open about every time I step in a turd sandwich in hopes that others will be able to avoid the pitfalls by learning from my mistakes. If anyone knows of the bear traps I should be watching out for, I am ready and willing to learn!
I’ll keep working, and will see you heroes tomorrow!
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