Joe: 00:00:03 Hey guys, it's Joe Troyer and welcome back to another show here at, show me the nuggets and I'm super excited today to be spending this interview with Tommy Griffith. For those of you guys that don't know Tommy he's the founder of click minded and and guys, my team did some digging and found that he previously worked with and did SEO with some crazy players like airbnb and paypal and he grew click minded from just kind of a, a little side project in business to earning over six figures. And I'm excited to have him on today and just kind of pick his brain. So what's up Tommy?
Tommy: 00:00:39 Joe, what's going on man? Thanks for having me on the show.
Joe: 00:00:42 Yeah, 100%. So before we dive deep into today's topic can you give us a little bit of background on how you got started with click minded?
Tommy: 00:00:52 Yeah, sure. So my story started like, like a lot of internet marketers by reading a four hour work week. And did you, are you familiar with four hour work week? And Tim Ferris, right. So, yeah, so most of your audience, probably most people listening probably know, but for the uninitiated, the four hour work week was a book written in what, 2007, maybe 2008 written by Tim Ferriss. And it was kind of the, some of the principles are probably a little out of date now, but the general theory behind is still pretty strong, which is like he kind of wrote this book that was the catalyst for a lot of people to build remote businesses and build Internet businesses and have remote teams and things like that. And I got really excited about this and I created my first info product. After reading his books I created a very dorky ebook and I wrote this ebook and tried to figure out how do I get this to the top of Google.
Tommy: 00:01:46 This was, this was before the exact match domain update. And
so I did the keyword research. You know, found my primary keyword, the really obnoxious story. I started a a fraternity in university with I know, I know I started a fraternity with a bunch of my friends in, in university. It started as like a joke and then by the time I left there was like a hundred guys in it. And so after I read four hour work week, opened up the keyword tool and there's like 1500 people a month searching for how to start a fraternity, right? So I bought how to start a fraternity.com wrote a dorky 60 page ebook on how to start a fraternity and you know, had the keyword in my domain and it got like one backlink and was ranking number two in like a week.
Tommy: 00:02:37 And I'm like, I'm a genius, right? Having not known, you know, later on the exact match, domain update, et cetera. I basically
got lucky got really excited about SEO, started a business with a friend of mine shortly after that failed miserably. I was one of these guys. I was very blessed and my parents paid for college and I graduated with no debt. And then I ended up putting myself into debt after college, borrowing money from family and friends. So I got interested in SEO and trying to work on this business, but it didn't work. It went really bad, really miserable. Came home like tail between my legs, knocking on the door like, hey mom, hey dad, can I have a spot on the couch again kind of thing. But it was just kind of right place, right time. And and paypal was hiring an SEO manager and I had been working on it for two years even though I'd failed miserably and ended up, I was 24 years old and ended up managing search engine optimization at, at, at paypal, which is kind of crazy.
Joe: 00:03:32 Yeah, that's crazy.
Tommy: 00:03:34 Yeah. And so a while I was at paypal, like I had incurred all this
debt from this side project. I've heard this business I was telling you about and that's, that was the genesis of, of click mind was I was like, okay, I have a job, I'm back, I'm back. I'm working at it, but how do I, how do I go after this debt that I put myself into? Right. And Click minded. It was probably like idea number 15. I tried a lot of different things, but it just ended up being the thing that worked. My boss had asked me to to teach an SEO course to my colleagues in marketing at paypal. It went pretty well and I ended up turning that into a physical in person teaching business. So like Saturday mornings would rent a coworking space in San Francisco, kind of nine to five, like all you can SEO, right?
Tommy: 00:04:21 So just like nerd out on search engines. Yeah. Entrepreneurs and marketers would come in and I would like sort of, we'd nerd out on title tags all day, right on a, on a Saturday. That particular business was actually a terrible business. It was just like, was not generating any revenue. It doesn't scale. It's like very, very manual. But that ended up being the right place right time with this online course kind of renaissance we're in now. So it was 2012 I was like this teaching offline, and then Udemy was suddenly had suddenly taken off. Are you familiar with, udemy online course marketplace?
New Speaker: 00:04:57 Yep. 100%.
Tommy: 00:04:58 Yeah. And so that was sort of the first phase. It's like turn this
offline course I had into an online course. And from there it grew. I kept working on it while managing SEO at paypal and Airbnb. And then two years ago I went full time on it.
Joe: 00:05:12 Okay, great. So these dropped a little nugget in there. You're
working at airbnb doing SEO as well, right?
Tommy: 00:05:19 Yeah, I agree that that's right. Yeah. So two years managing SEO
at paypal and then for years managing SEO at Airbnb.
Joe: 00:05:25 Okay, great. So were you around when Airbnb was like
implementing all their growth hack strategies? I mean, they were crazy, like the stuff that they were doing and coming up with you read the stories like man.
Tommy: 00:05:35 Yeah. So, so yeah, the, the growth team was the official growth
team was, was founded a few months before I got there. And was, was only one guy for awhile. Gustaf uh but, but the stories, the stories you're probably talking about are with Nate, the Co- Founder, I don't know what the, what the, what the official position from the company is on some of those things have people can go look, look for themselves. I can't speak to, to, to, to all those. But yeah, it was part of that or the early members of the growth team working specifically on, on SEO.
Joe: 00:06:14 Yeah. I mean, at that stage in a company, you can obviously be a
little more risk averse and you know, really go for it. You know, being the stage that they're at now probably shouldn't be making decisions like that, but crazy, crazy stories. So I've thought it was cool just sitting around and watching those moves happen. Yeah. And unfold.
Tommy: 00:06:32 So, yeah, I mean, it was, it was wild man. Like the first, I've told
a couple of people this, but like the first week I joined the company was subpoenaed for their data by the state of New York. And the last week I joined, I worked on a Superbowl ad and Beyonce was staying in an airbnb like it was, it was, it was wild. I mean, my friends didn't know what it was when I joined and everyone knew what it was after. There was probably a hundred something people when I joined and it was like 2,500 people when I, when I left. It was, it was pretty nuts.
New Speaker: 00:07:01 That's awesome. So [inaudible] so you stumbled into click
minded. It wasn't working, running workshops. So you took it to an online course. Did you end up using you to me or somebody like that? Or did you host it yourself from the beginning or tell us about that transition. What happened next?
Tommy: 00:07:18 Yeah, yeah, that's a really good question. And so I'm a huge online course nerd. I'm a massive fan of, of online courses. I think they're gonna, they can solve a lot of problems. I think
there's so much room in this for anyone that's interested in, in online learning. I think the graduate, to go on a little bit of a tangent, I think the graduate school system in this country is the most fraudulent fake bs thing that needs to be destroyed and it represents billions of dollars for entrepreneurs to take. All of it can be killed with online courses. The vast majority of it, maybe not the rocket scientists and the pediatricians, but, but the vast majority of it. But yeah. So yeah, started with udemy and then sort of transitioned to my own platforms. I've tried so many different learning management systems and the course has evolved a ton since we started. I started as a physical, in-person, offline SEO course and then online course just on SEO and now we teach we have seven different courses with a number of different instructors and we're kind of expanding from there. But the, yeah, but the online course sort of like the transition has been crazy because in 2012, it was not that easy to, to launch an online course. I don't know how familiar you are with the, with the space, right.
Joe: 00:08:41 But 100% very familiar. Yeah. It's not easy.
Tommy: 00:08:45 Yeah. Yeah, for sure. And it's become, it was certainly not easy
in 2012. It's become a little bit easier as time has gone on. But there was a, there was a lot a lot of pitfalls I had in getting that. I mean, every single wordpress learning management system, user credentials, you know, like uploading Wistia video and like encoding this stuff myself and you know, one wordpress developer changes, one plugin, it, everything breaks, shhh and i'ts just so bad. Yeah. So it was, it was very tough at the beginning.
Joe: 00:09:18 Yeah. 100%. Yeah. There, there's definitely a learning curve. But I think you're right that I think learning online learning can solve a lot of traditional education problems these days. And I keep pushing on my students who are, are a lot of agencies, right. And a lot of them were on very niche focused agency, so they're going after, you know, one vertical dentists, right. They're going after optometrists. And that's the way that they've been able to scale is by staying in one vertical and building the systems and processes and then just staying in their lane. Right. and, and not veering out of it, but I've been talking to a lot of them now with and pushing on them to really understand that they have a big opportunity, I think when it comes to online learning and why isn't their front end offering a course, right? Why isn't it a major ticket or a higher ticket course showing people the systems and processes that they've spent years building out and perfecting and tweaking. Why doesn't that become the front end? And
then the done for you is like an ultra premium.. You can double that business overnight
Tommy: 00:10:20 For sure. Absolutely. That's really interesting that you brought
that up. We actually just created a course for our users. It's free, but it is exactly that. We just expose our back end and just show like, Hey, we've been working on this for, for eight years now. Here's exactly how we do it. And we're getting feedback on it now. And people love it. People love it. So it's a really good point. That's awesome.
Joe: 00:10:41 So my team when doing research was, was, were looking
through your guys' stories and it said that you and your partner invested in some business automation and some systems and processes when the business was actually losing money. So what made you kind of make that decision? Where were you at mindset wise and tell us what was happening?
Tommy: 00:11:00 Yeah, so so the whole story was kind of wild. I was you know, I
was very hesitant, click minded ended up generating more revenue than my salary in the third year I was working on it, but I didn't end up leaving until like until like the fifth or sixth year. For a lot of people that sounds a little crazy, but I just kind of, I was in a situation where I really liked my job and I actually felt like fairly unaccomplished at that point, at the job. I want it to stay right. And so I ended up really growing it a lot. And I was one of these guys where this whole story of like you know, the digital nomad scene and all that, like I really took the bait on this one man. Like I, you know, I was, I was on Instagram way too much.
Tommy: 00:11:50 Like, you know, looking at the most beautiful people ever seen in my life in Bali or, you know, drinking coconuts, the laptop on the beach. And I, I tripped for this hard and one massive mistake I made, you know, I was, I still love my job and I was, I, you know, I have friends in San Francisco and I was, I was dating someone and all that, so I really didn't want to leave. But I was kinda over the city. I got really over the city of San Francisco. I really wanted to leave and leave the city. And so I was preparing my escape to like go abroad. And I did myself a huge disservice by taking too long to make the jump. Right. And I like, I was planning way too hard and my expectations for myself were bananas. Right.
Tommy: 00:12:37 I was looking at these, you know, these Instagram clowns with
the, with their filters on and like, like it just set my expectations. So insane. So when I finally left Airbnb, did four years there, I finally left Airbnb and I decided to expand the product. So we
were going to go from an SEO course to seven different types of digital marketing content, right? I wanted to go head to head with universities that are offering this stuff as a master's degree, coding bootcamps, engineering bootcamps, and anyone kind of offering this as a digital marketing training as a service. And like when I, when I did that, you know we, I went in and developed this entire curriculum, spent about 15, I wrote a blog post, kind of documenting all this the last two years. But with all the revenue numbers and stuff spend about $15,000 upgrading the whole course and filming all this new content.
Tommy: 00:13:29 And I arrived in Bali and it was miserable. Like I got there, I was robbed by the police on my first day. I got food poisoning. The, the, the footage we just filmed for all these new courses, it was raining really hard on the warehouse we rented. And so all the audio was shot. And so I'm like, I'm in bali. I had just been robbed. I was throwing up from food poisoning. I'm holding this external hard drive with like messed up audio that I thought was completely shot. And I'm just looking up at the sky just like, what am I doing? Like why am I here? Right. And and eventually started to recover. My expectations were a little wild. But one of the ways I recovered was by bringing on a cofounder very late into the game which was like a little bit controversial to a lot of people.
Tommy: 00:14:19 I was like four or five years into a business, we had hit six
figures. I was working, brought on a cofounder, a guy I had worked with before and who's absolutely amazing. But one of the things, so this is a very long winded answer to your question. One of the things he, he kind of recommended was we did this, this big launch. It worked really well. And then everything started to, to fail afterwards, right? Like traffic started to drop. We got hit with a bunch of refunds cause the, the product was in like a v-one. Just sort of everything went wrong. And we were at this crossroads where I wanted to fix much more trivial stuff like you know, the very kind of kind of micro optimizations like let's let's you know, let's make the checkout button red instead of green or these kinds of like sort of things.
Tommy: 00:15:05 And Eduardo, my now co-founder was very big into automating
things. And the, in the, the posts where I, or I read about this, I called it, I think I called it taking your vitamins while you're bleeding. And the, and the, the basic idea here was he actually had a much stronger vision for how the future would go than I had. Right? He was sort of our customer Avatar. He was, the guy clicked my to now it's a digital marketing training course for marketers and entrepreneurs and we could focus on very
specific digital marketing tutorials. So like very specific over the shoulder walkthroughs on how to launch an email marketing campaign and reduce 99% of errors or how to add the Google tag manager to a wordpress site. Right. Something like that. And so we made these investments in a lot of the automation, right? We knew our customer avatars, we really like drew them out very specifically. And we created a bunch of these flows for users. So what are all the checklists and templates and cheat sheets we can give them, what are the mini courses we can give them? Like how do we add a ton of free value to all of these avatars all at once. And it wasn't like the most intuitive thing in the world. It was a little bit risky, but within four months, five months, it really started to, to pay off.
Joe: 00:16:23 Gotcha. Gotcha. So completely different mindsets there. And
that's interesting obviously when you have a co founder, right? Like you're not the one just running and gunning anymore. So at that point, how long, I'm curious, did you have your cofounder?
Tommy: 00:16:38 Yeah. So so at Eduardo and I, it was a little bit different because
a Eduardo was like an apprentice sort of at first. So he was sort of working with me just to, just to learn. And then after six months he went off to work for a different company and then I basically wrote him back in and that was the moment in Thailand when I was throwing up in Bali and like miserable and like, you know, on the ropes I emailed them like, hey man, what are you doing? Because I'm in a huge mess right here and how you feeling. Right. but we had basically the idea was I, I told him the situation he helped it started to work on a bunch of stuff. And then the first launch we did, I just sat down and said, how you feeling about your job? How are you feeling about this? How do you feel about everything? Do you want to be the cofounder on this thing? Because I, I, you know, I think one of the, one of the things that was good at was I was pretty good at the first round, getting the product to like zero to the first six figures. He's much better at the operations, the long term customer Avatar stuff. Like a lot of the growing something that had just been started, right. And, and ended up working way.
Joe: 00:17:50 So how did you find Eduardo?
Tommy: 00:17:54 Yeah, so this actually is you talking about nuggets. I can give you
a nugget here. I was, I taught at a and this is part of why I'm so grumpy about, about graduate school, but I taught at a university in San Francisco for four years. I taught a summer elective while I was working at at Airbnb and it was a it digital marketing elective for, for master's degree students. And at the end of every at the end of every elective, I would offer up an
apprenticeship to one, one student to one university student. I highly recommend finding a university. And specifically, I don't know why this is, this is going to sound a little bit strange, but I found that that like foreigners and immigrants and, and MBA and people have second generation families have this like work ethic that is, I say this is like a sixth generation American that's just way more nose to the grind than regular than Americans, right. Something happens. I say this as a, as a, as an American, something happens. It's that like immigrant hustle, right? And this, this was an international university. And yeah, I highly recommend finding your apprentice at a at a university that had a lot of international students because for whatever reason there's like a natural natural hunger there that really, really worked for me.
Joe: 00:19:26 Yeah. So there's a, there's a guy called Bedros Keuilian, Have
you heard that name.
Tommy: 00:19:31 No, I haven't.
Joe: 00:19:32 So he's a bestselling author. You just came out with a book. It's
called man up. Definitely a fantastic book, but he calls it the immigrant edge because he's an immigrant and a lot of people that he hired or that he interviews and that he has do trainings with him are, are immigrants and he's found the same kind of the same thing. So it's interesting that you [inaudible]
Tommy: 00:19:54 That's fascinating. It's someone else's started to figure this out too. Yes. It's a first and second generation something about it. It's like this, this hunger and a, and something, something happens after the, after the third generation were, you know, people were eating too much ice cream and watching too much Netflix or something like that. I don't know. I don't know what's going on, yeah, exactly. Exactly. Exactly.
Joe: 00:20:18 All right. So how, how would, how would you advise somebody
like me, right, that didn't have your background. Right. Find somebody then for example, right. Like I'm not teaching, right, so get them from an international school. I get that. But how would you approach that if you were in my shoes? I'm curious and you had to Redo that.
Tommy: 00:20:38 That's interesting. I mean one other way, cause I actually, I
actually did acquire some apprentices before I was teaching there was speaking at the universities, right. So finding different electives and courses where you have relevant overlap and being willing to, if you can go in and speak, that's, that's best. But another way to do it would be would be just emailing them
and letting the professor emailing the professor and letting them know, hey, we have this, this this opportunity. Another way, a kinda , interesting back doorway was, and this was this really, I bootstrapped my entire business off of this meetup.com .meetup.com I think is one of the most underrated ways to, to just start a side project for a number of reasons. And my first hundred users came from, from meetup.com. The biggest reason I think is that Internet marketers hate leaving their basement.
Tommy: 00:21:35 Like Internet marketers would much rather send 10,000 emails
than pick up the phone once. Right. And I ended up starting this, the San Francisco SEO meetup in 2011. Umeetup.com does, and this is still the case today. They still, they do all the work for you. So you create the topic, they email everyone in the city that's interested in that topic. And then you can have, this is the single fastest way to bootstrap an email list. You can easily get your first hundred emails through through meetup. Ubut I also ended up hosting these meetups and found one. Uone student who was, he was started in internet marketing, like interest group at the university. I found him and every time I did a meetup, I would send it to him and he would blast that to his people and all the, all the college kids would would show up. So that's kind of another interesting way to do it is using meetup to get those university students into the door.
Joe: 00:22:32 Love it. Yeah, those are three, three great takeaways. Just to
recap for everybody. So finding an apprentice through speaking at universities, emailing the professor or running the meetups and then trying to get somebody from the university right. To, to help promote the meetup. Yeah, that's fantastic. That's exactly, that's, and again, right. Show me the nuggets man. That's it.
Tommy: 00:22:51 There the nuggets. There they are,.
Joe: 00:22:53 There are the nuggets. All right, good stuff. So let's let's get back
to automation. What, what were the first things that you and Edwardo really decided to kind of prioritize and think about in terms of automation?
Tommy: 00:23:09 Yeah, so the biggest help for us here was actually the the
transitioning everything over to drip and Brennan Dunn has a, not sure if you're familiar with him, but yeah, he's really got a he has this drip mastery course that really lays out how you can automate everything. What he, there's been actually, everyone's gotten to be frank, pretty grumpy with drip the last year. They've had some problems, they have some problems
with pricing and some outages and things like that. And it looks like there's other tools like convert kit that are starting to roll out a lot of these features. So whether or not drip is going to be the Goto source going forward, I'm not sure. But the basic concept is finding a sort of centralized CRM to to, to make sure all your workflows exist in one place and laying out first of all being really rock solid on your customer avatars and then laying out journeys for them.
Tommy: 00:24:07 So just to rattle off a bunch of tools, if you want to go into the
weeds on this. Yeah, drip has sort of where we centralize all of our, all of our a users, right? We have three customer avatars entrepreneurs in house marketers at, at larger companies and consultants or agencies that want to train up their teams. And we have seven different topics, right? SEO, paid ads, content marketing, social media, email marketing, Google analytics and sales funnels. And so you could be any one of these combinations. You can be right, a consultant or an agency interested in content marketing or an entrepreneur interested in SEO. And we sort of have journeys for all these, right? And so we're using yeah, are, we're using wordpress as our, as our core sites, teachable installed on a sub domain is our learning management system.
Tommy: 00:24:58 Drip is the back end that manages everything. Zapier is the duct
tape that duct taped everything together. Yeah. And we, we also got a lot of, a lot of mileage out of mini courses. So the basic idea is every course is like four to six hours long. We use world-class experts that do this stuff every day, right? So our social media course is taught by the former head of social media at Airbnb. The content marketing course is taught by the content strategist from Lyft, but we we we allow roughly 30 minutes to an hour of the course to be like viewed as a mini course. The way we do it is we, when you enroll, we say, okay, hey, you're enrolled in this mini chorus. You have seven days to complete it. If you were, if you and we update these mini courses in the future, they have templates and cheat sheets.
Tommy: 00:25:53 We keep them up to date. If you complete it in seven days, you
get lifetime access to it. You'll get all the updates as, as things go on, you'll have access to it forever. If you don't, we rescind your access and you'll never get it again. And this has been a very powerful carrot for us because people do it. They have seven days to complete a 30 minute course. It's fairly reasonable. But, but if they're not, and we're pretty strict about it. And so if they, if they're not in, that's fine, but they'll lose access. But if they actually want to commit and do it of course they complete it. They get about 30 minutes of the product and
then we give them an offer shortly after. And of course the conversion rate increases significantly. They've seen 30 minutes of the product, they've seen 30 minutes of the teacher. They're much more comfortable with it. And, and so we found that to be very powerful is not only do you give them a preview of the product, but also you force them to complete it by, by, by taking it away. If they don't write that, then that's worked for us.
Joe: 00:26:53 Yeah, that's, that's great. It's, it's forced consumption. Right. So people do that these days, but I don't think they do it quite like you. I see a lot of people doing like challenges, right. To force consumption, right? So they get somebody to pay seven bucks or something for a challenge so that they're committed. And then you look at the consumption and like the, the success rate of the people during that challenge. And it's really, really high because everybody's on board at one time to do one thing. So that's really interesting. I've never thought of doing that for a course.
Tommy: 00:27:25 Yeah. Yeah. And it's worked for us. The, the there's just too, it's
just too easy to, people are just want bombarded with free offers for everything. Right. And and we saw a lot of value. Like, Hey, if you're actually serious about this, that's fine. It's free, but you have to finish it in a week. And if anyone who's actually serious about it could finish it in a week. And if you're not, that's fine too. You can go, but just half an hour. Right? I mean, it's happened, it's a half an hour over seven days. Yeah. Okay. But it's just enough to get them to commit. Right? And so it's just a very clear like, do you want to do this or not? Yes or no. Like complete it in seven days.
Joe: 00:28:07 That's great. So I'm sure you find a lot more people consuming
your content and getting involved and then you're ultimately converting more cold traffic into customers at the end of the day.
Joe: 00:28:19 Yeah, exactly. So yeah, our, our model is pretty standard. I
mean, all of our blog posts and youtube videos and things like that are the top of funnel things. We have almost always have a custom content upgrade or lead magnet for each one of those pieces of content. We know that the topic type based on that, right? So we have a bunch of content about SEO, a bunch of content about email marketing, right? We, we have templates and cheat sheets and, and downloadables associated with those. And then,uonce you grab the email address there, we're pushing the user into the mini course so we know what they're topically interested in. And then whenever we get them to
commit to the mini course,uthey have seven days to complete it from there.
Joe: 00:28:58 If so, I'm curious in that funnel, I'm curious about funnel. It
makes a whole lot of sense. How do you tie in though the three different avatars? So you brought up the three avatars. Where are you tagging that or where are you, where, where are you getting them to self identify when they take the course or,
Tommy: 00:29:15 Yeah, this is a great question. So we're, we're using, it's also
Brendan Dunn's tool, right message. I Dunno if you're familiar with this. Yeah, it's very, very cool tool. The basic idea is you can give people a simple prompt either a little nag on the bottom right hand of the screen or, and the welcome email and you just get them to self identify. You just get them to say who are you, why are you here? One of one of these three options. And what's amazing about right message is it's basically, it's basically a container you can use on the site to change out copy based on the Avatar. Right? So you know, if the headline, the headline well we'll take a headline and it'll be massively grow your agency if they're an agency or consultants or I, it's you know train up your team if you're an in house marketer or, or, or, or something like that.
Tommy: 00:30:10 So that's really helpful. The other piece of it that's really helpful as well is once we know who you are in our CRM, which is drip, we don't show them the same CTA, which is really helpful. So for example, if they're on a top of funnel page and they're not a user, we give them a lead magnet, but if they're on a top of funnel page and we already have their email, will that, that CTA changes from the lead magnet to start the mini course, right? And so there's kind of no wasted space. It's like you, you, you cut up your site based on here are the calls to action, right? And kind of where are they, who are they and where are they in the funnel? And you can just sort of swap all of those out. So it's an incredibly efficient way to do it. You centralize all your copy and all your calls to action in one place and then you just rotate them out. And the conversion rates are just bananas on all of these because they're so targeted. You know what I mean?
Joe: 00:31:05 So the CTA is are targeted, but the sales pages, I'm guessing
probably aren't so much maybe, right. Or have you went through the kind of 10th degree and customized every sales page addressing, you know them as the three avatars and followup sequences for the three avatars or where have you kind of drawn the line because you could go down that path, right? Like
Tommy: 00:31:26 You, you are Joe, you're 10 steps ahead of me on this one, man. Yeah, you can you can. If you want it to go nuts with this. That's what's really cool about right messages. You could go nuts with it. We have a little bit too many, too many permutations to do that right now. So we just went for the big ones, which is like the big headline and the big call to action on each page and saw a massive lift from there. The next phase is probably, yeah, each individual bullet point, like based on each customer Avatar. But there's just other kinds of bigger, bigger things for us right now, but we're just going for the big ones to start.
Joe: 00:31:59 Okay. So the big thing, the big wins so far have been automation and the trial's kind of forcing consumption, getting people to, to go through it and get some value out of it and then hitting them with an offer or you doing like are you hitting them with like a kind of a three day sale and a discount on the course or something at that point to try to get everybody to take an action or how do you go from, you just went through the mini course to the full course? What's that look like?
Tommy: 00:32:26 Yeah, that, that, that's exactly it. And we're playing with a bunch
of stuff all the time. So if would, if you go to check out the site, you might get different things all the time. All the time. But yeah, the basic idea is preview the product. Then once you have, we'll give you some type of discount in order to enroll. Right. And then once you enroll in that individual product, we say, hey, did you like this? By the way, there's, there's six more other courses over here are these interesting too. Right. And just kind of continue to to, to push more, more content.
Joe: 00:32:55 Gotcha. Have you tried putting like a hard stop with that
urgency and scarcity so to speak? Like you're only give seven days, right? For the mini course? Do you do the same? Are you like release really harsh about the upgrade then too?
Tommy: 00:33:07 Yeah, exactly. Sorry, I forgot to mention that. Yes. Anytime we
offer a discount or a sale or you are 10 steps ahead of me, man, anytime we offer a discount or anything like that, that is the beauty of, of using drip. And we also use thrive ultimatum is, is we, yeah, every offer actually is a hard stop. So users are getting them at custom times but they really actually do get locked out. Right. So that's been the key is unfortunately you have to be a jerk to some people, but it doesn't work if everyone knows you're soft on it. Right. And so like, we really do have to lock people out when we do it. So yeah, they, they, they'll complete the mini course and then they'll have a 24 hour window to, to enroll at a at a discount.
Joe: 00:33:53 Awesome. Awesome man. Any other big things in terms of
automation and that's, that's great. Great takeaways. And those are some good nuggets, man.
Tommy: 00:34:01 Yeah, let me think. We have, I mean, just in general, like we're
obsessed with SOPs which stands for standard operating procedure. For the uninitiated, it's just a fancy way to say like a really comprehensive checklist. And we actually
Joe: 00:34:17 A really fancy way to say we don't reinvent the wheel every
single time.
Tommy: 00:34:22 Right? Exactly. Exactly. And this was all a Duarte. Eduardo is like
the process guy. And I'm like the idiot that gets on the microphone and just like sings in dance like, like a monkey. Right? You know what I mean? But, but we, we wanted a product for ourselves to do this. We started creating SOPs for ourselves and then we turned it into a product. So we have a product called the SOP library. It's just this archive of digital marketing, SOPs and it's a product for our users. They can brand them, use them for clients and things like that. But we we use these all the time in our business and we are just crazy about the two best books for this are I don't know if you're familiar with work, the system this is a book about SOP es and then the myth is kind of a similar one, but just for just adding a process around everything.
Tommy: 00:35:09 So we got a ton of mileage out of things like in helpscout when
we get tickets email templates, right? Like we almost never write a personal email unless it's absolutely required. It's like a user asking a specific question, but if we ever think we're going to get a question twice, it's a template. And so those are like quasi automations. The, the basic idea is like the, the whole company mindset is like, try and never do something twice ever. And it's brutal at the beginning. It's so annoying at the beginning. It's so painful at the beginning. And then like within six months, it's like the greatest possible thing you could ever do. It ends up being very valuable.
Joe: 00:35:49 Oh, 100%. 100%. Alright, cool. So any thoughts or pushback on
things maybe that you think shouldn't be automated? Right. Anything that maybe you've tried, failed or things you just like, yeah, we, we're gonna leave that as is
Tommy: 00:36:05 Interesting. What are we not automating here? Yeah. I mean, I
still do when people have personal questions, I answer and I usually answer within, within 30 minutes. And it's not because of a policy or anything like that, I'm just, I'm just a nerd that's
always on my, my phone or my laptop. And people do sit like, think like, oh my God, how did you reply so, so quickly. So that has been cool. There's kind of a personal touch too, whenever it's absolutely necessary.
Joe: 00:36:38 So if it doesn't, if one of the rules or triggers don't grab it or somebody else doesn't respond, comes to you and you just knock it out real quick.
Tommy: 00:36:45 Yeah. Knock it out. And and I just have fun with it too because
like r w you know, we like our users and like we understand a lot of their problems and sometimes it's fun to like poke fun of them and like just treat them like you're, you're their best friend and they like, they kinda can't believe in it. Right. But that you're getting that, that personal touch. So that was sort of cool. And yeah, I can't really think of too many when we try and automate as much as as we can.
Joe: 00:37:11 Okay. Yeah, no worries. Yeah. I mean tell us about your internal tool called the ring. Yeah. What them, what that, what the heck is the ring?
Tommy: 00:37:24 Yes. It's basically just what I was describing just now. The, yeah,
the ring. And yet I have a, a blog post. Maybe we can link up in the show notes that describes like the last two years, but it's just this automation flow around in drip, kind of inspired by Brennan Dunn's drip, drip mastery course. But yeah, the basic idea is we know what you're interested in and who you are when you opt in. And every the, the idea is the, the total possibility. Like the idea is we've created all these sort of flows for users, but it almost never runs out, right? So let's say you know, you're, you Google like you know, social media content calendar template and you come to our site, we're ranking in Google and you want the template from us. We know you're interested in social media and we'll hammer you with a ton of value over a few weeks and try and get you into the mini course.
Tommy: 00:38:21 And let's say you take the mini course and everything and you get the offer, but you don't enroll will actually drop you out of that flow. Yup. And take you back to the top. It's like a circle, right? That's why it's called the ring. We take you back to the top and then we'll test other types of content, whether or not you're interested in w a email marketing overview. All right. Google analytics overview, something like that. And when you take the bait, when you click one, that triggers off a whole automations, like you've shown interest in it and you'll go down the sequence again, value, value, value, value mini course offer.
And if you don't take it, you go back up and we start prodding again and kind of testing again. So we'll get your email address and you may be interested in one particular topic, but we'll keep testing different topics on you for, I think our maximum now is almost a year right with, with, with all the, all the flows we have. So, so we, we, we basically had to create like 50 or so , pieces of really great content, but they're all positioned in a way where they're part of, everything's part of a part of a flow.
Joe: 00:39:25 Okay. And so you said there's a bunch of this on the, on the blog
too. We'll link up to this in the, in the show notes for the ring, right?
Tommy: 00:39:32 Yep, Yep, sure. I can include a link to that. Yep.
Joe: 00:39:35 Okay, cool. And then is this something that you teach more in
depth with your SOPs and everything inside of one of your courses too?
Tommy: 00:39:43 Yup, Yup. We have all that in there as well. The other piece too that a lot of people are interested in is [inaudible] and a bunch of people do this now, but we got really good at being really efficient with content. We create. I know you had a guest, a guest on that, talked about this as well on your show. But yeah, so like we would create an Sop, right on a particular topic and either we wanted it or it had search volume or something like that. And then I would create a youtube video explaining that sop and I would go through step by step on how to do that, right? And then we would transcribe that youtube video with a service like rev.com, right? So transcribe everything and then we would take that transcription and turn it into a blog post, right? And so that would be a blog post with the youtube video embedded on the top.
Tommy: 00:40:28 Then we take that blog post and turn it into an email, right? And
so that becomes an an email, right? So we have one sop that gets so much mileage, it's part of our sop library, and then it's a youtube video that ranks, and then it's a blog post that ranks, and then it's an email that push us into the mini course. Right. And so a lot of people, like, they're just not as thoughtful about their content marketing plan. Right. And it's just like they, they get out of the shower and they're like, I'm going to write about, you know, Vegan donuts today or whatever, whatever it is. But if you're just a little bit more thoughtful up front you can get so much mileage out of one piece of content and it's ended up being really valuable for us.
Joe: 00:41:11 So how long does it take you to create an sop? Right. And then
do your video. So for me it takes me a long time to create a process. Right? So like the, I know for me that's been one of my bottlenecks is I throw out a lot of content, but most of my stuff is more off the cuff, kind of let me build something for you on the fly based upon user's request. So I'm getting things that they want and need, which end up having search volume. But I'm starting that way and just kind of on the spot. Like I'll get on an ama and I'll unmute the person and I'll work out a system on the fly just because it's easier for me. Then starting from scratch, I feel like with no deadline, like it would take me a month. Right? Like I would just wait time on it. Like lots on that I guess or how, how, how should my mindset change?
Tommy: 00:41:59 Yeah, you're 100% right. I am wired the exact same way as you
and I yeah. So like individual requests and exceptions and things like that. Yes. Like, like a user asked for it and then another user asks for it and then another user asks for, it's like, let's do it right now. Right. Like I get that urgency and things like that. But we had a ton of success around basically having like contents sprints, so yep. Not kind of always doing it, but setting aside time where like, okay, these two weeks everyone stopped doing everything and we're going to blast out 55 sops. And they do, they take a really, really, really long time. Our slps, the Sh, the smallest ones are probably five pages and the longest ones are probably 35 pages. I mean 30 like they're, they're very, very long. We keep screenshots updated and things like that, they take a long time to do well. But until you can't, yeah. If you just do them and you're constantly doing them and you don't have a deadline, I agree with you. It doesn't work. So we sat down, it's like two weeks. Who's doing the SOPs? Who's doing the filming? Who's doing the editing? Who's doing the, the, the rev.com stuff. Right. And it's like everyone has to do it. You sprint, you do it. It feels like you just gave birth to a child and then you move on. Right. That's kind of how we do it.
Joe: 00:43:16 Okay. Yeah, man, that's crazy. Two weeks, 55 SOPs man, that's,
that's nuts. Crazy. Yeah. But yeah, I mean if that's all that you think about, you block out all the noise, obviously one big sprint, like you said. That makes a whole lot of sense. And then you've got your content calendar and your email calendar filled for, you know, a good, a good amount of time, obviously.
Tommy: 00:43:38 Yeah. It depends on your business, but if you're really diligent
and put in the extra effort about keyword research up front, and then you have set, you, you allocate a time to be like a content sprint and you really have your, your plan down, even if you, you're going to fumble of course at the beginning, but you
really can like front load all the work and it just plays beautifully for, for, for a year or two, right? I mean it depends on your, your business, but it can really it'd be very helpful for future planning.
Joe: 00:44:06 100%. So where do you draw the line on free content and paid
content? I know as like a user, as a user, somebody watching this, if they could chat in right now, they'd be like, yeah, where is that line? It sounds like there isn't one, right? Like that's getting beat, but where do you draw that line?
Tommy: 00:44:23 Yeah, there's a really good question. I love, are you familiar with
Ramit Sethi I will teach you to be rich. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I love this guy. First of all, he's an amazing, like personal finance guy, but he's, I think he's sneaky, very sneakily or maybe not so sneakily now one of the best internet marketers in the world. I mean, he's incredible. Very, very good copywriting, psychology, all this kind of stuff. But we, we've, I love his model, which is, I don't know if he's still says this, but he said it a while ago, which is like 98% of everything I do is free. And then the 2% is for the paid products and like the people who want the results kind of faster, right? And that, that's the way we do it as well. Probably 90, 95% of everything we create as free content tutorials, walkthroughs, emails, templates, checklists, cheat sheets, and mini courses.
Tommy: 00:45:15 And our basic model is yet all this stuff is free. There's a lot of
tire kickers, a lot of people that don't enroll, of course. And and we say, but if you want the results faster, or if you're trying to train up a whole team go for the paid product. And we, and our model is unlimited lifetime access and free updates for life. So it's one time fee and then anytime we push updates to the course, you get those forever. So some people appreciate that they don't want to keep up to date on their own. They want us to keep their sops up to date. Right. And so what one time fee for one user. They love it. I, I've also found that to be frank it's usually the noobs that are really protective of their content. Like they think they have a secret and they think that they've got a monetize that secret. Right. And the reality is you're probably not the first person to think of whatever you're, you've, you've thought of and it's way more about building your audience and solving your customer's problems. Right? So we got a lot more mileage out of giving most of it away for free and saying, by the way, for those that are interested, the paid product, which you can get the results faster or, or train multiple people is over here and we just got a lot more mileage out of it that way.
Joe: 00:46:26 Yeah. That makes a whole lot of sense. For sure.
Tommy: 00:46:29 How do you deal with that? Like do you, do you have a line
between free and paid? Like,
Joe: 00:46:34 Yeah, so my line is between free and paid is I have daily content
at the moment, so we're doing a lot of content between podcasts and then I do a weekly Ama and then that content gets split up into multiple pieces right for the week then, and it gets scheduled ahead and kind of random. So right now, like we're probably, I don't know, 120, even 150 days out on content. And that's what daily content. So it's the, it's the same kind of process though, rev though, ultimately, and blog posts. And the difference is I'm not putting as much thought in so to speak beforehand. So I run a Webinar for an hour and that's my content and I get on an hour before and plan through what I'm going to talk about at least high level. I outline it out and it gives my brain enough time to kind of think through it.
Joe: 00:47:24 So then like I'm really good then on the fly, like building it out.
And I know that it's just two hours a week for me and I've automated my content. But to be honest, it's not, your content is at a completely different level because it's sop, doubt, you know what I mean? It's, it's processes and systems instead of here's how I would handle this unique situation I get, I get a lot more low hanging fruit traffic. Right. But I don't get the I don't get the big traffic so to speak. Uis the big gap that I see between mine and yours.
Tommy: 00:47:58 Got It. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. And it's not, it's not one
size fits all either. Right. I mean it sounds like it's, even though like there are differences in that, it sounds like it's still fairly low time investment on your side, which that seems like a great return on your time, right?
Joe: 00:48:14 Yeah, 100%. What, what do you think are like the, I'm curious
from your point of view, because you work with these different avatars, what do you think are like the core four, the core five, what are the main sops that it seems like everybody's after or potentially if you think it's wrong, should be after, right. That you guys have, like what are the, what are the big things? And I think that'll probably shock people.
Tommy: 00:48:39 Interesting. You mean like which sop, I'm just pulling up, pulling
it up now. Most of them.
Joe: 00:48:45 What gets the most views? What gets the most shares? Like and
then do you think that that is actually the most important or do you think that it's just like chocolate, vegetables? It's what
everybody's after, but it's not, it's not the, it's not the thing that they really need.
Tommy: 00:49:01 Interesting. Yeah. Well I'm just looking at, yeah, yeah. No, no,
no, not at all. I'm just, yeah, we're just refreshing cause we are, we're now up to, yeah, we have 75 sops and growing all the time. And we get requests for them as well. Yeah. I mean, yeah, you know what the, there, there are definitely sexy ones versus ones that are that are eating your vegetables. So sexy ones are always around social media and content. Yep. So should, we can get content calendar right? And content, content planning and a lot of stuff, which is important. But the, I guess the, the, the big dirty secret is that the sexiest ones are pretty simple. I mean, you could, like, you can use our sop I like, we're very happy with our templates and our checklist in our cheat sheets, but you could also just open up a Google sheet and like, say like, January, February, March, and that'd be the 80 20.
Tommy: 00:49:56 Right. You know what I mean? So those are the, those are the
very like the sexiest ones are usually the most simple. The, the, the, the, the boring ones are the ones that, that save your ass, right? So it's things like how to exclude certain types of traffic and Google analytics, right? Or like setting up conversion events in, in Google analytics, right. Verifying that you're tracking subdomains correctly in Google analytics like that, like, that's so boring. No one cares about that. But if you get that wrong and you have crossed out sub domain tracking, you're done, right. You're done. And so those are the ones that are like everyone just, it's Kinda like potholes on the highway. Like you're never, like, you're never, you're never grateful that there's no potholes, but you're always super pissed when there are. Right. It's just like they kinda infrastructure ones that no, everyone just expects it to work. But they don't, they don't have any plan in place to get it to work. We're the ones who give, who provide the infrastructure to our users to, to get it to work. And it's just, it's very kind of it's all the ungrateful work, but it's, it's super important. You know what I mean?
Joe: 00:51:07 Yeah, yeah. For sure. So I'm curious for you, as you do your
research, I'm sure you're looking at like, what's a good link worthy asset, right? That people would want to link to? What, what are some other criteria that help you identify what kind SOPs right would be worth building? Like what goes through your, you and your team's mindset?
Tommy: 00:51:28 Yeah. So are, are you talking in terms of talking of like for your audience that's listening, how they should create their sops or
in terms of just running a business and how you create link where the assets are or what do you mean?
Joe: 00:51:39 Yeah, I think the combination of both, right? If they want to take
kind of your model and apply it to their roofing marketing business and start creating some, some sops that they're going to give out and they're going to give away for free. Like how, how, what should their criteria be? Right? How should they go about deciding if it's a good sop or not. Right? And if it's a good potential linkable asset or not. Like, what are your thoughts? Obviously you guys have just done this to a level that I've never seen quite done before. Right? And just like, that's a lot of output. 75 sops you keep updated. Like that's a lot.
Tommy: 00:52:16 Yeah. Thanks. And we're super excited about it.
New Speaker: 00:52:18 I've probably given out a dozen and it's hard for us to keep them
updated. Right?
Tommy: 00:52:23 Yeah, yeah, yeah. And especially in, in internet marketing,
there's just so many platforms and systems that have to communicate to each other now and it continues to grow. So 10 used to be a problem. Right? my, yeah, my answer to this is, is very annoying and Meta, which is that that like, I think taking a step back and going back to the customer avatars solves so many of these problems, right? Like it's just such a trope now and when you're building a business and startups and everything around dogfooding and being your own customer and things like that, but it's so true. And the thing is, is like we, we were our own customer, right? Like I've been doing search engine optimization for 10 years. I haven't already clickminded on it for awhile. I'm obsessed with digital marketing and I love digital marketing.
Tommy: 00:53:09 And so when we went to go create our Sop library, it was
incredibly obvious, but the first 55 should have been, right. And so if users are sitting here listening, okay, like what are the assets I can give to my customer base? Being your own customer is incredibly important. If you're not your own customer, making sure someone arms length from you is a customer is also important. Whether that's a co founder, a spouse, a best friend, a roommate, but someone who who, who you are solving this problem for. This is such a huge problem I had with other businesses. I try and start. It was, I had no idea what the actual problems were of my customers. Like I was, I was more obsessed with the market size and the revenue and the money and that kind of stuff. And I didn't actually care about the user's problems. And that's a huge long term problem
because you miss things, you don't understand what actually are there. Are there problems? Right? And so if your users are listening and they're thinking about what are the assets I can give my users, hopefully you are the customer Avatar. If not, hopefully it's someone near you. And the first kind of 50 should be like very obvious, right?
Joe: 00:54:18 Yeah. So I think in my example, I guess to give a little
perspective, right? So if it's like an agency that's working with roofing companies, right? They have their sops that they've built out internally, now they're, they're [inaudible], they want to make an approach like you to give away the 98%. Right? So they know, they know what's important, but ultimately to your, to your point, they don't really understand their avatar. Right, exactly. They are, they aren't their avatar. They figured out the system and process. They've figured out how to make the market work from a marketing standpoint. Right. But what would be their next steps to make sure that they picked link or the asset, so to speak, or they pick good assets that make sense to their avatar? You maybe interview the Avatar or what was your thoughts?
Tommy: 00:55:07 Yeah, that's an interesting one. So speaking of interviews, and
this is again another area where Eduardo, my cofounder just blew me out of the water on this cause I, I hated this process. He was, he was formerly a content marketer at teachable, the learning management system. And they were apparently incredible at really dialing in their customer Avatar to the point where to the point of insanity, I mean like so and when we went through this process, we, we got on the phone with these brutal phone calls with our users, 45 minutes per user and like 20,30 40 users. Right? And you just painstaking details down first, the demographic data, like how old are you? How much do you make a year? How much college education do you have? Are you married? Do you have kids? Where do you live?
Tommy: 00:55:55 And then like really getting into their, their personal life. Like what do you do on weekends? Like what are you doing? Like why, why do you live where you live? What do you do with friends? What are you doing at work? What are your problems? You can, I mean you can, there's all kinds of things you can Google around for, for, for customer interviews. But yeah I think, I think really hammering your customer Avatar and getting on the phone with them can be really helpful. This is, this is like a Dorky cliche kind of moment I had, but I was on the phone with, with an agency, one of our avatars, our, our, our customer consultants and agencies and I thought that the vast
majority of what we were doing was help agencies grow revenue, right. And like help agencies get more clients.
Tommy: 00:56:37 And I got on the phone with one guy who was a user and they had enrolled in a bunch of different seats for his team and the basic conclusion of the call was I signed up so I don't have to train more of my entry level employees because I want to spend more time with my son. And it just like blew my mind. Right. It was like it sounds Dorky and cheesy and like hallmark moment. What is true. Like, I thought we were doing these like very quantitative, like excel doc, like total addressable markets and know our product was helping this guy spend more time with his son. And it's kind of kind of interesting when you think of it that way. Right? But I would have never happened if I didn't go deep into his problem. So really the more Meta takeaway on there is speed. We're selling speed to that guy right now. Not necessarily the hallmark son moment, but, but we're selling speed. And that was actually counter intuitive to what I thought. I thought we were selling the process. I thought we were selling all this other stuff. It turns out he could have done it, but he didn't want to and we were telling him speed. So yeah, long, long answer to that question. I think getting on the phone with really deep, comprehensive interviews can be, can be very helpful.
Joe: 00:57:41 All right. Awesome. Fantastic. Yeah, good stuff. All right. So
we've talked a lot about systems, we've talked a lot about processes, we've talked a lot about automation and we're just about to hit the top of the hour. So I want to be mindful and respectful of your time. This has been an awesome interview. Are there any other automation tools or processes or systems that you found helpful? Maybe, maybe even not related to business.
Tommy: 00:58:07 Automation tools or processes? Unot even related to business.
Let me think here. Uyeah, just, you mean like kind of kind of life ,.
Joe: 00:58:21 Big, high level stuff? Yeah, zoom out for a second.
Tommy: 00:58:28 Yeah. I mean I've Dorky like Dorky, fun ones. This one of the
single biggest ones was, was laughing last pass from me. Like.
Joe: 00:58:38 We, we love dorky fun ones.
Tommy: 00:58:40 Okay. Uyeah, I mean, just,us like last pass, centralizing logins for
me was, oh, I will not ever admit to you how much time I spent
like requesting for God passwords and things like that. Right. Uso that was a massive one for me. Uuwhat are some other ones I had? Oh, just,ugeneral stuff around,uboomerang for Gmail and calendar reminders. Like, I, I, I'm, I'm a big inbox zero guy, which is,uyeah.
Tommy: 00:59:15 Yeah. So a lot of your audience probably is as well. But the basic
idea is like, your inbox should be treated as a to do list and every single email you act on, you either do it right away, find a time to do it later, give someone else it to do or deleted immediately. Right. And I'll put, I also do this with free family and friend stuff too. So like reminders to call mom, right? Like reminders for friends, birthdays. I really liked this idea and this is actually, again, a remeet safety idea around people in general are so lazy. And you can, I really love this idea of like, and he, he, he does it. He does it when you're negotiating a raise at work, he does it when you're negotiating or applying for a new job, the idea is like, Yep.
Tommy: 01:00:02 Things you can do that require up front effort that pay in spades for years to come. Right? So it's like, like setting up automations for your, your girlfriend's birthday for 10 years. Or like you said, again, not automating the gift, automating the reminder. Right? Like something like that or or yeah, in his example he says over prepare for your interview. Like really kill it. [inaudible] Or the 99% of people because that's going to pay your salary for five years. Right. Those, those kinds of things. So I really loved those like fixed costs one time investments up front that just pay forever. So yeah, like automating reminders, automating finances, these kind of one time things that that continued to pay back.
Joe: 01:00:52 Awesome man. All right, and last question. What's the one book
that as you look at your business today at quick minded has made the biggest direct impact on the way that you do business?
Tommy: 01:01:05 Ooh, actual business book or like kind of life philosophy book
Joe: 01:01:11 Wherever you can see a direct correlation in your business.
Right. So not like that book was good, but I never got anything from it. Right. Like it makes me happy, but nothing changed in my business. Right. Like that I feel like on podcasts, like that's kind of the takeaway for most people is like feel good books, but not so much. Did we get anything that directly correlated out the other side as a winner?
Tommy: 01:01:35 I s)ee. So in that case it's a, it's technically pitched as a course,
but it's just a text course. So I've called that a book. It's just text. Yep. On Andre Chaperon, autoresponder madness. Yeah. Have you familiar with, with him? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So we are our copies very much inspired by him. The basic idea is storytelling in your email marketing and the way he does it is incredible. The basic format is tell stories that are interesting, that are human and keep users wanting more. Every single email. All of our, all of our email marketing is designed around this and it was incredibly helpful as a, I guess as a book.
Joe: 01:02:16 Yeah, it definitely can see that it's a book. I mean, it's all text.
You're right. And I'd definitely read it like a good book, you know, picked it up and didn't drop it until it was done. So definitely a great, a great book. Thanks Andre. Alright, man. Any last thoughts? Or, or places I guess that we could link up? In the show notes for you that we can send people.
Tommy: 01:02:39 Yeah. And we're at click minded.com. I'm on Twitter, I'm at
Tommy Griffith. We just launched these, these free, they might be more intermediate, beginner, intermediate level, but we just launched these free digital marketing and SEO Strategy guides. We designed them like a retro eight bit Nintendo powers and yeah. Did you ever play like Nintendo or Super Nintendo in the 90s? Of course. Yeah. Did you ever get those like Nintendo power magazines that had like the cheat codes that get to the last level of Mario or anything like that? Yup. I mean it looks just like it [inaudible] right. Yeah. We tried to go for those. I was obsessed with these things as a kid. I cannot believe I didn't have a girlfriend. Right. But, but we designed these, these things to be like eight bit strategy guys. So you can, you can take them out the fruit.
Joe: 01:03:29 Yeah, man, they're awesome. Okay, great. Yeah, we'll link up to
those in the show notes as well. It, man, I just want to say thank you for all the time. I'm sure everybody's gonna love this interview. And we'll let you know once it goes live. Man, thanks so much.
Joe: 01:03:40 Sweet, Joe. Thanks a lot. Really appreciate it. All right, man.
Thanks so much. Have a good one. See Atomic. I'll see it. Yeah, take it easy.
Joe: 00:00:03 Hey guys, it's Joe Troyer and welcome back to another show
here at, show me the nuggets and I'm super excited today to be spending this interview with Tommy Griffith. For those of you guys that don't know Tommy he's the founder of click minded and and guys, my team did some digging and found that he previously worked with and did SEO with some crazy players like airbnb and paypal and he grew click minded from just kind of a, a little side project in business to earning over six figures. And I'm excited to have him on today and just kind of pick his brain. So what's up Tommy?
Tommy: 00:00:39 Joe, what's going on man? Thanks for having me on the show.
Joe: 00:00:42 Yeah, 100%. So before we dive deep into today's topic can you
give us a little bit of background on how you got started with click minded?
Tommy: 00:00:52 Yeah, sure. So my story started like, like a lot of internet
marketers by reading a four hour work week. And did you, are you familiar with four hour work week? And Tim Ferris, right. So, yeah, so most of your audience, probably most people listening probably know, but for the uninitiated, the four hour work week was a book written in what, 2007, maybe 2008 written by Tim Ferriss. And it was kind of the, some of the principles are probably a little out of date now, but the general theory behind is still pretty strong, which is like he kind of wrote this book that was the catalyst for a lot of people to build remote businesses and build Internet businesses and have remote teams and things like that. And I got really excited about this and I created my first info product. After reading his books I created a very dorky ebook and I wrote this ebook and tried to figure out how do I get this to the top of Google.
Tommy: 00:01:46 This was, this was before the exact match domain update. And
so I did the keyword research. You know, found my primary keyword, the really obnoxious story. I started a a fraternity in university with I know, I know I started a fraternity with a bunch of my friends in, in university. It started as like a joke and then by the time I left there was like a hundred guys in it. And so after I read four hour work week, opened up the keyword tool and there's like 1500 people a month searching for how to start a fraternity, right? So I bought how to start a fraternity.com wrote a dorky 60 page ebook on how to start a fraternity and you know, had the keyword in my domain and it got like one backlink and was ranking number two in like a week.
Tommy: 00:02:37 And I'm like, I'm a genius, right? Having not known, you know, later on the exact match, domain update, et cetera. I basically
got lucky got really excited about SEO, started a business with a friend of mine shortly after that failed miserably. I was one of these guys. I was very blessed and my parents paid for college and I graduated with no debt. And then I ended up putting myself into debt after college, borrowing money from family and friends. So I got interested in SEO and trying to work on this business, but it didn't work. It went really bad, really miserable. Came home like tail between my legs, knocking on the door like, hey mom, hey dad, can I have a spot on the couch again kind of thing. But it was just kind of right place, right time. And and paypal was hiring an SEO manager and I had been working on it for two years even though I'd failed miserably and ended up, I was 24 years old and ended up managing search engine optimization at, at, at paypal, which is kind of crazy.
Joe: 00:03:32 Yeah, that's crazy.
Tommy: 00:03:34 Yeah. And so a while I was at paypal, like I had incurred all this
debt from this side project. I've heard this business I was telling you about and that's, that was the genesis of, of click mind was I was like, okay, I have a job, I'm back, I'm back. I'm working at it, but how do I, how do I go after this debt that I put myself into? Right. And Click minded. It was probably like idea number 15. I tried a lot of different things, but it just ended up being the thing that worked. My boss had asked me to to teach an SEO course to my colleagues in marketing at paypal. It went pretty well and I ended up turning that into a physical in person teaching business. So like Saturday mornings would rent a coworking space in San Francisco, kind of nine to five, like all you can SEO, right?
Tommy: 00:04:21 So just like nerd out on search engines. Yeah. Entrepreneurs and marketers would come in and I would like sort of, we'd nerd out on title tags all day, right on a, on a Saturday. That particular business was actually a terrible business. It was just like, was not generating any revenue. It doesn't scale. It's like very, very manual. But that ended up being the right place right time with this online course kind of renaissance we're in now. So it was 2012 I was like this teaching offline, and then Udemy was suddenly had suddenly taken off. Are you familiar with, udemy online course marketplace?
New Speaker: 00:04:57 Yep. 100%.
Tommy: 00:04:58 Yeah. And so that was sort of the first phase. It's like turn this
offline course I had into an online course. And from there it grew. I kept working on it while managing SEO at paypal and Airbnb. And then two years ago I went full time on it.
Joe: 00:05:12 Okay, great. So these dropped a little nugget in there. You're
working at airbnb doing SEO as well, right?
Tommy: 00:05:19 Yeah, I agree that that's right. Yeah. So two years managing SEO
at paypal and then for years managing SEO at Airbnb.
Joe: 00:05:25 Okay, great. So were you around when Airbnb was like
implementing all their growth hack strategies? I mean, they were crazy, like the stuff that they were doing and coming up with you read the stories like man.
Tommy: 00:05:35 Yeah. So, so yeah, the, the growth team was the official growth
team was, was founded a few months before I got there. And was, was only one guy for awhile. Gustaf uh but, but the stories, the stories you're probably talking about are with Nate, the Co- Founder, I don't know what the, what the, what the official position from the company is on some of those things have people can go look, look for themselves. I can't speak to, to, to, to all those. But yeah, it was part of that or the early members of the growth team working specifically on, on SEO.
Joe: 00:06:14 Yeah. I mean, at that stage in a company, you can obviously be a
little more risk averse and you know, really go for it. You know, being the stage that they're at now probably shouldn't be making decisions like that, but crazy, crazy stories. So I've thought it was cool just sitting around and watching those moves happen. Yeah. And unfold.
Tommy: 00:06:32 So, yeah, I mean, it was, it was wild man. Like the first, I've told
a couple of people this, but like the first week I joined the company was subpoenaed for their data by the state of New York. And the last week I joined, I worked on a Superbowl ad and Beyonce was staying in an airbnb like it was, it was, it was wild. I mean, my friends didn't know what it was when I joined and everyone knew what it was after. There was probably a hundred something people when I joined and it was like 2,500 people when I, when I left. It was, it was pretty nuts.
New Speaker: 00:07:01 That's awesome. So [inaudible] so you stumbled into click
minded. It wasn't working, running workshops. So you took it to an online course. Did you end up using you to me or somebody like that? Or did you host it yourself from the beginning or tell us about that transition. What happened next?
Tommy: 00:07:18 Yeah, yeah, that's a really good question. And so I'm a huge online course nerd. I'm a massive fan of, of online courses. I think they're gonna, they can solve a lot of problems. I think
there's so much room in this for anyone that's interested in, in online learning. I think the graduate, to go on a little bit of a tangent, I think the graduate school system in this country is the most fraudulent fake bs thing that needs to be destroyed and it represents billions of dollars for entrepreneurs to take. All of it can be killed with online courses. The vast majority of it, maybe not the rocket scientists and the pediatricians, but, but the vast majority of it. But yeah. So yeah, started with udemy and then sort of transitioned to my own platforms. I've tried so many different learning management systems and the course has evolved a ton since we started. I started as a physical, in-person, offline SEO course and then online course just on SEO and now we teach we have seven different courses with a number of different instructors and we're kind of expanding from there. But the, yeah, but the online course sort of like the transition has been crazy because in 2012, it was not that easy to, to launch an online course. I don't know how familiar you are with the, with the space, right.
Joe: 00:08:41 But 100% very familiar. Yeah. It's not easy.
Tommy: 00:08:45 Yeah. Yeah, for sure. And it's become, it was certainly not easy
in 2012. It's become a little bit easier as time has gone on. But there was a, there was a lot a lot of pitfalls I had in getting that. I mean, every single wordpress learning management system, user credentials, you know, like uploading Wistia video and like encoding this stuff myself and you know, one wordpress developer changes, one plugin, it, everything breaks, shhh and i'ts just so bad. Yeah. So it was, it was very tough at the beginning.
Joe: 00:09:18 Yeah. 100%. Yeah. There, there's definitely a learning curve. But I think you're right that I think learning online learning can solve a lot of traditional education problems these days. And I keep pushing on my students who are, are a lot of agencies, right. And a lot of them were on very niche focused agency, so they're going after, you know, one vertical dentists, right. They're going after optometrists. And that's the way that they've been able to scale is by staying in one vertical and building the systems and processes and then just staying in their lane. Right. and, and not veering out of it, but I've been talking to a lot of them now with and pushing on them to really understand that they have a big opportunity, I think when it comes to online learning and why isn't their front end offering a course, right? Why isn't it a major ticket or a higher ticket course showing people the systems and processes that they've spent years building out and perfecting and tweaking. Why doesn't that become the front end? And
then the done for you is like an ultra premium.. You can double that business overnight
Tommy: 00:10:20 For sure. Absolutely. That's really interesting that you brought
that up. We actually just created a course for our users. It's free, but it is exactly that. We just expose our back end and just show like, Hey, we've been working on this for, for eight years now. Here's exactly how we do it. And we're getting feedback on it now. And people love it. People love it. So it's a really good point. That's awesome.
Joe: 00:10:41 So my team when doing research was, was, were looking
through your guys' stories and it said that you and your partner invested in some business automation and some systems and processes when the business was actually losing money. So what made you kind of make that decision? Where were you at mindset wise and tell us what was happening?
Tommy: 00:11:00 Yeah, so so the whole story was kind of wild. I was you know, I
was very hesitant, click minded ended up generating more revenue than my salary in the third year I was working on it, but I didn't end up leaving until like until like the fifth or sixth year. For a lot of people that sounds a little crazy, but I just kind of, I was in a situation where I really liked my job and I actually felt like fairly unaccomplished at that point, at the job. I want it to stay right. And so I ended up really growing it a lot. And I was one of these guys where this whole story of like you know, the digital nomad scene and all that, like I really took the bait on this one man. Like I, you know, I was, I was on Instagram way too much.
Tommy: 00:11:50 Like, you know, looking at the most beautiful people ever seen in my life in Bali or, you know, drinking coconuts, the laptop on the beach. And I, I tripped for this hard and one massive mistake I made, you know, I was, I still love my job and I was, I, you know, I have friends in San Francisco and I was, I was dating someone and all that, so I really didn't want to leave. But I was kinda over the city. I got really over the city of San Francisco. I really wanted to leave and leave the city. And so I was preparing my escape to like go abroad. And I did myself a huge disservice by taking too long to make the jump. Right. And I like, I was planning way too hard and my expectations for myself were bananas. Right.
Tommy: 00:12:37 I was looking at these, you know, these Instagram clowns with
the, with their filters on and like, like it just set my expectations. So insane. So when I finally left Airbnb, did four years there, I finally left Airbnb and I decided to expand the product. So we
were going to go from an SEO course to seven different types of digital marketing content, right? I wanted to go head to head with universities that are offering this stuff as a master's degree, coding bootcamps, engineering bootcamps, and anyone kind of offering this as a digital marketing training as a service. And like when I, when I did that, you know we, I went in and developed this entire curriculum, spent about 15, I wrote a blog post, kind of documenting all this the last two years. But with all the revenue numbers and stuff spend about $15,000 upgrading the whole course and filming all this new content.
Tommy: 00:13:29 And I arrived in Bali and it was miserable. Like I got there, I was robbed by the police on my first day. I got food poisoning. The, the, the footage we just filmed for all these new courses, it was raining really hard on the warehouse we rented. And so all the audio was shot. And so I'm like, I'm in bali. I had just been robbed. I was throwing up from food poisoning. I'm holding this external hard drive with like messed up audio that I thought was completely shot. And I'm just looking up at the sky just like, what am I doing? Like why am I here? Right. And and eventually started to recover. My expectations were a little wild. But one of the ways I recovered was by bringing on a cofounder very late into the game which was like a little bit controversial to a lot of people.
Tommy: 00:14:19 I was like four or five years into a business, we had hit six
figures. I was working, brought on a cofounder, a guy I had worked with before and who's absolutely amazing. But one of the things, so this is a very long winded answer to your question. One of the things he, he kind of recommended was we did this, this big launch. It worked really well. And then everything started to, to fail afterwards, right? Like traffic started to drop. We got hit with a bunch of refunds cause the, the product was in like a v-one. Just sort of everything went wrong. And we were at this crossroads where I wanted to fix much more trivial stuff like you know, the very kind of kind of micro optimizations like let's let's you know, let's make the checkout button red instead of green or these kinds of like sort of things.
Tommy: 00:15:05 And Eduardo, my now co-founder was very big into automating
things. And the, in the, the posts where I, or I read about this, I called it, I think I called it taking your vitamins while you're bleeding. And the, and the, the basic idea here was he actually had a much stronger vision for how the future would go than I had. Right? He was sort of our customer Avatar. He was, the guy clicked my to now it's a digital marketing training course for marketers and entrepreneurs and we could focus on very
specific digital marketing tutorials. So like very specific over the shoulder walkthroughs on how to launch an email marketing campaign and reduce 99% of errors or how to add the Google tag manager to a wordpress site. Right. Something like that. And so we made these investments in a lot of the automation, right? We knew our customer avatars, we really like drew them out very specifically. And we created a bunch of these flows for users. So what are all the checklists and templates and cheat sheets we can give them, what are the mini courses we can give them? Like how do we add a ton of free value to all of these avatars all at once. And it wasn't like the most intuitive thing in the world. It was a little bit risky, but within four months, five months, it really started to, to pay off.
Joe: 00:16:23 Gotcha. Gotcha. So completely different mindsets there. And
that's interesting obviously when you have a co founder, right? Like you're not the one just running and gunning anymore. So at that point, how long, I'm curious, did you have your cofounder?
Tommy: 00:16:38 Yeah. So so at Eduardo and I, it was a little bit different because
a Eduardo was like an apprentice sort of at first. So he was sort of working with me just to, just to learn. And then after six months he went off to work for a different company and then I basically wrote him back in and that was the moment in Thailand when I was throwing up in Bali and like miserable and like, you know, on the ropes I emailed them like, hey man, what are you doing? Because I'm in a huge mess right here and how you feeling. Right. but we had basically the idea was I, I told him the situation he helped it started to work on a bunch of stuff. And then the first launch we did, I just sat down and said, how you feeling about your job? How are you feeling about this? How do you feel about everything? Do you want to be the cofounder on this thing? Because I, I, you know, I think one of the, one of the things that was good at was I was pretty good at the first round, getting the product to like zero to the first six figures. He's much better at the operations, the long term customer Avatar stuff. Like a lot of the growing something that had just been started, right. And, and ended up working way.
Joe: 00:17:50 So how did you find Eduardo?
Tommy: 00:17:54 Yeah, so this actually is you talking about nuggets. I can give you
a nugget here. I was, I taught at a and this is part of why I'm so grumpy about, about graduate school, but I taught at a university in San Francisco for four years. I taught a summer elective while I was working at at Airbnb and it was a it digital marketing elective for, for master's degree students. And at the end of every at the end of every elective, I would offer up an
apprenticeship to one, one student to one university student. I highly recommend finding a university. And specifically, I don't know why this is, this is going to sound a little bit strange, but I found that that like foreigners and immigrants and, and MBA and people have second generation families have this like work ethic that is, I say this is like a sixth generation American that's just way more nose to the grind than regular than Americans, right. Something happens. I say this as a, as a, as an American, something happens. It's that like immigrant hustle, right? And this, this was an international university. And yeah, I highly recommend finding your apprentice at a at a university that had a lot of international students because for whatever reason there's like a natural natural hunger there that really, really worked for me.
Joe: 00:19:26 Yeah. So there's a, there's a guy called Bedros Keuilian, Have
you heard that name.
Tommy: 00:19:31 No, I haven't.
Joe: 00:19:32 So he's a bestselling author. You just came out with a book. It's
called man up. Definitely a fantastic book, but he calls it the immigrant edge because he's an immigrant and a lot of people that he hired or that he interviews and that he has do trainings with him are, are immigrants and he's found the same kind of the same thing. So it's interesting that you [inaudible]
Tommy: 00:19:54 That's fascinating. It's someone else's started to figure this out too. Yes. It's a first and second generation something about it. It's like this, this hunger and a, and something, something happens after the, after the third generation were, you know, people were eating too much ice cream and watching too much Netflix or something like that. I don't know. I don't know what's going on, yeah, exactly. Exactly. Exactly.
Joe: 00:20:18 All right. So how, how would, how would you advise somebody
like me, right, that didn't have your background. Right. Find somebody then for example, right. Like I'm not teaching, right, so get them from an international school. I get that. But how would you approach that if you were in my shoes? I'm curious and you had to Redo that.
Tommy: 00:20:38 That's interesting. I mean one other way, cause I actually, I
actually did acquire some apprentices before I was teaching there was speaking at the universities, right. So finding different electives and courses where you have relevant overlap and being willing to, if you can go in and speak, that's, that's best. But another way to do it would be would be just emailing them
and letting the professor emailing the professor and letting them know, hey, we have this, this this opportunity. Another way, a kinda , interesting back doorway was, and this was this really, I bootstrapped my entire business off of this meetup.com .meetup.com I think is one of the most underrated ways to, to just start a side project for a number of reasons. And my first hundred users came from, from meetup.com. The biggest reason I think is that Internet marketers hate leaving their basement.
Tommy: 00:21:35 Like Internet marketers would much rather send 10,000 emails
than pick up the phone once. Right. And I ended up starting this, the San Francisco SEO meetup in 2011. Umeetup.com does, and this is still the case today. They still, they do all the work for you. So you create the topic, they email everyone in the city that's interested in that topic. And then you can have, this is the single fastest way to bootstrap an email list. You can easily get your first hundred emails through through meetup. Ubut I also ended up hosting these meetups and found one. Uone student who was, he was started in internet marketing, like interest group at the university. I found him and every time I did a meetup, I would send it to him and he would blast that to his people and all the, all the college kids would would show up. So that's kind of another interesting way to do it is using meetup to get those university students into the door.
Joe: 00:22:32 Love it. Yeah, those are three, three great takeaways. Just to
recap for everybody. So finding an apprentice through speaking at universities, emailing the professor or running the meetups and then trying to get somebody from the university right. To, to help promote the meetup. Yeah, that's fantastic. That's exactly, that's, and again, right. Show me the nuggets man. That's it.
Tommy: 00:22:51 There the nuggets. There they are,.
Joe: 00:22:53 There are the nuggets. All right, good stuff. So let's let's get back
to automation. What, what were the first things that you and Edwardo really decided to kind of prioritize and think about in terms of automation?
Tommy: 00:23:09 Yeah, so the biggest help for us here was actually the the
transitioning everything over to drip and Brennan Dunn has a, not sure if you're familiar with him, but yeah, he's really got a he has this drip mastery course that really lays out how you can automate everything. What he, there's been actually, everyone's gotten to be frank, pretty grumpy with drip the last year. They've had some problems, they have some problems
with pricing and some outages and things like that. And it looks like there's other tools like convert kit that are starting to roll out a lot of these features. So whether or not drip is going to be the Goto source going forward, I'm not sure. But the basic concept is finding a sort of centralized CRM to to, to make sure all your workflows exist in one place and laying out first of all being really rock solid on your customer avatars and then laying out journeys for them.
Tommy: 00:24:07 So just to rattle off a bunch of tools, if you want to go into the
weeds on this. Yeah, drip has sort of where we centralize all of our, all of our a users, right? We have three customer avatars entrepreneurs in house marketers at, at larger companies and consultants or agencies that want to train up their teams. And we have seven different topics, right? SEO, paid ads, content marketing, social media, email marketing, Google analytics and sales funnels. And so you could be any one of these combinations. You can be right, a consultant or an agency interested in content marketing or an entrepreneur interested in SEO. And we sort of have journeys for all these, right? And so we're using yeah, are, we're using wordpress as our, as our core sites, teachable installed on a sub domain is our learning management system.
Tommy: 00:24:58 Drip is the back end that manages everything. Zapier is the duct
tape that duct taped everything together. Yeah. And we, we also got a lot of, a lot of mileage out of mini courses. So the basic idea is every course is like four to six hours long. We use world-class experts that do this stuff every day, right? So our social media course is taught by the former head of social media at Airbnb. The content marketing course is taught by the content strategist from Lyft, but we we we allow roughly 30 minutes to an hour of the course to be like viewed as a mini course. The way we do it is we, when you enroll, we say, okay, hey, you're enrolled in this mini chorus. You have seven days to complete it. If you were, if you and we update these mini courses in the future, they have templates and cheat sheets.
Tommy: 00:25:53 We keep them up to date. If you complete it in seven days, you
get lifetime access to it. You'll get all the updates as, as things go on, you'll have access to it forever. If you don't, we rescind your access and you'll never get it again. And this has been a very powerful carrot for us because people do it. They have seven days to complete a 30 minute course. It's fairly reasonable. But, but if they're not, and we're pretty strict about it. And so if they, if they're not in, that's fine, but they'll lose access. But if they actually want to commit and do it of course they complete it. They get about 30 minutes of the product and
then we give them an offer shortly after. And of course the conversion rate increases significantly. They've seen 30 minutes of the product, they've seen 30 minutes of the teacher. They're much more comfortable with it. And, and so we found that to be very powerful is not only do you give them a preview of the product, but also you force them to complete it by, by, by taking it away. If they don't write that, then that's worked for us.
Joe: 00:26:53 Yeah, that's, that's great. It's, it's forced consumption. Right. So people do that these days, but I don't think they do it quite like you. I see a lot of people doing like challenges, right. To force consumption, right? So they get somebody to pay seven bucks or something for a challenge so that they're committed. And then you look at the consumption and like the, the success rate of the people during that challenge. And it's really, really high because everybody's on board at one time to do one thing. So that's really interesting. I've never thought of doing that for a course.
Tommy: 00:27:25 Yeah. Yeah. And it's worked for us. The, the there's just too, it's
just too easy to, people are just want bombarded with free offers for everything. Right. And and we saw a lot of value. Like, Hey, if you're actually serious about this, that's fine. It's free, but you have to finish it in a week. And if anyone who's actually serious about it could finish it in a week. And if you're not, that's fine too. You can go, but just half an hour. Right? I mean, it's happened, it's a half an hour over seven days. Yeah. Okay. But it's just enough to get them to commit. Right? And so it's just a very clear like, do you want to do this or not? Yes or no. Like complete it in seven days.
Joe: 00:28:07 That's great. So I'm sure you find a lot more people consuming
your content and getting involved and then you're ultimately converting more cold traffic into customers at the end of the day.
Joe: 00:28:19 Yeah, exactly. So yeah, our, our model is pretty standard. I
mean, all of our blog posts and youtube videos and things like that are the top of funnel things. We have almost always have a custom content upgrade or lead magnet for each one of those pieces of content. We know that the topic type based on that, right? So we have a bunch of content about SEO, a bunch of content about email marketing, right? We, we have templates and cheat sheets and, and downloadables associated with those. And then,uonce you grab the email address there, we're pushing the user into the mini course so we know what they're topically interested in. And then whenever we get them to
commit to the mini course,uthey have seven days to complete it from there.
Joe: 00:28:58 If so, I'm curious in that funnel, I'm curious about funnel. It
makes a whole lot of sense. How do you tie in though the three different avatars? So you brought up the three avatars. Where are you tagging that or where are you, where, where are you getting them to self identify when they take the course or,
Tommy: 00:29:15 Yeah, this is a great question. So we're, we're using, it's also
Brendan Dunn's tool, right message. I Dunno if you're familiar with this. Yeah, it's very, very cool tool. The basic idea is you can give people a simple prompt either a little nag on the bottom right hand of the screen or, and the welcome email and you just get them to self identify. You just get them to say who are you, why are you here? One of one of these three options. And what's amazing about right message is it's basically, it's basically a container you can use on the site to change out copy based on the Avatar. Right? So you know, if the headline, the headline well we'll take a headline and it'll be massively grow your agency if they're an agency or consultants or I, it's you know train up your team if you're an in house marketer or, or, or, or something like that.
Tommy: 00:30:10 So that's really helpful. The other piece of it that's really helpful as well is once we know who you are in our CRM, which is drip, we don't show them the same CTA, which is really helpful. So for example, if they're on a top of funnel page and they're not a user, we give them a lead magnet, but if they're on a top of funnel page and we already have their email, will that, that CTA changes from the lead magnet to start the mini course, right? And so there's kind of no wasted space. It's like you, you, you cut up your site based on here are the calls to action, right? And kind of where are they, who are they and where are they in the funnel? And you can just sort of swap all of those out. So it's an incredibly efficient way to do it. You centralize all your copy and all your calls to action in one place and then you just rotate them out. And the conversion rates are just bananas on all of these because they're so targeted. You know what I mean?
Joe: 00:31:05 So the CTA is are targeted, but the sales pages, I'm guessing
probably aren't so much maybe, right. Or have you went through the kind of 10th degree and customized every sales page addressing, you know them as the three avatars and followup sequences for the three avatars or where have you kind of drawn the line because you could go down that path, right? Like
Tommy: 00:31:26 You, you are Joe, you're 10 steps ahead of me on this one, man. Yeah, you can you can. If you want it to go nuts with this. That's what's really cool about right messages. You could go nuts with it. We have a little bit too many, too many permutations to do that right now. So we just went for the big ones, which is like the big headline and the big call to action on each page and saw a massive lift from there. The next phase is probably, yeah, each individual bullet point, like based on each customer Avatar. But there's just other kinds of bigger, bigger things for us right now, but we're just going for the big ones to start.
Joe: 00:31:59 Okay. So the big thing, the big wins so far have been automation and the trial's kind of forcing consumption, getting people to, to go through it and get some value out of it and then hitting them with an offer or you doing like are you hitting them with like a kind of a three day sale and a discount on the course or something at that point to try to get everybody to take an action or how do you go from, you just went through the mini course to the full course? What's that look like?
Tommy: 00:32:26 Yeah, that, that, that's exactly it. And we're playing with a bunch
of stuff all the time. So if would, if you go to check out the site, you might get different things all the time. All the time. But yeah, the basic idea is preview the product. Then once you have, we'll give you some type of discount in order to enroll. Right. And then once you enroll in that individual product, we say, hey, did you like this? By the way, there's, there's six more other courses over here are these interesting too. Right. And just kind of continue to to, to push more, more content.
Joe: 00:32:55 Gotcha. Have you tried putting like a hard stop with that
urgency and scarcity so to speak? Like you're only give seven days, right? For the mini course? Do you do the same? Are you like release really harsh about the upgrade then too?
Tommy: 00:33:07 Yeah, exactly. Sorry, I forgot to mention that. Yes. Anytime we
offer a discount or a sale or you are 10 steps ahead of me, man, anytime we offer a discount or anything like that, that is the beauty of, of using drip. And we also use thrive ultimatum is, is we, yeah, every offer actually is a hard stop. So users are getting them at custom times but they really actually do get locked out. Right. So that's been the key is unfortunately you have to be a jerk to some people, but it doesn't work if everyone knows you're soft on it. Right. And so like, we really do have to lock people out when we do it. So yeah, they, they, they'll complete the mini course and then they'll have a 24 hour window to, to enroll at a at a discount.
Joe: 00:33:53 Awesome. Awesome man. Any other big things in terms of
automation and that's, that's great. Great takeaways. And those are some good nuggets, man.
Tommy: 00:34:01 Yeah, let me think. We have, I mean, just in general, like we're
obsessed with SOPs which stands for standard operating procedure. For the uninitiated, it's just a fancy way to say like a really comprehensive checklist. And we actually
Joe: 00:34:17 A really fancy way to say we don't reinvent the wheel every
single time.
Tommy: 00:34:22 Right? Exactly. Exactly. And this was all a Duarte. Eduardo is like
the process guy. And I'm like the idiot that gets on the microphone and just like sings in dance like, like a monkey. Right? You know what I mean? But, but we, we wanted a product for ourselves to do this. We started creating SOPs for ourselves and then we turned it into a product. So we have a product called the SOP library. It's just this archive of digital marketing, SOPs and it's a product for our users. They can brand them, use them for clients and things like that. But we we use these all the time in our business and we are just crazy about the two best books for this are I don't know if you're familiar with work, the system this is a book about SOP es and then the myth is kind of a similar one, but just for just adding a process around everything.
Tommy: 00:35:09 So we got a ton of mileage out of things like in helpscout when
we get tickets email templates, right? Like we almost never write a personal email unless it's absolutely required. It's like a user asking a specific question, but if we ever think we're going to get a question twice, it's a template. And so those are like quasi automations. The, the basic idea is like the, the whole company mindset is like, try and never do something twice ever. And it's brutal at the beginning. It's so annoying at the beginning. It's so painful at the beginning. And then like within six months, it's like the greatest possible thing you could ever do. It ends up being very valuable.
Joe: 00:35:49 Oh, 100%. 100%. Alright, cool. So any thoughts or pushback on
things maybe that you think shouldn't be automated? Right. Anything that maybe you've tried, failed or things you just like, yeah, we, we're gonna leave that as is
Tommy: 00:36:05 Interesting. What are we not automating here? Yeah. I mean, I
still do when people have personal questions, I answer and I usually answer within, within 30 minutes. And it's not because of a policy or anything like that, I'm just, I'm just a nerd that's
always on my, my phone or my laptop. And people do sit like, think like, oh my God, how did you reply so, so quickly. So that has been cool. There's kind of a personal touch too, whenever it's absolutely necessary.
Joe: 00:36:38 So if it doesn't, if one of the rules or triggers don't grab it or somebody else doesn't respond, comes to you and you just knock it out real quick.
Tommy: 00:36:45 Yeah. Knock it out. And and I just have fun with it too because
like r w you know, we like our users and like we understand a lot of their problems and sometimes it's fun to like poke fun of them and like just treat them like you're, you're their best friend and they like, they kinda can't believe in it. Right. But that you're getting that, that personal touch. So that was sort of cool. And yeah, I can't really think of too many when we try and automate as much as as we can.
Joe: 00:37:11 Okay. Yeah, no worries. Yeah. I mean tell us about your internal tool called the ring. Yeah. What them, what that, what the heck is the ring?
Tommy: 00:37:24 Yes. It's basically just what I was describing just now. The, yeah,
the ring. And yet I have a, a blog post. Maybe we can link up in the show notes that describes like the last two years, but it's just this automation flow around in drip, kind of inspired by Brennan Dunn's drip, drip mastery course. But yeah, the basic idea is we know what you're interested in and who you are when you opt in. And every the, the idea is the, the total possibility. Like the idea is we've created all these sort of flows for users, but it almost never runs out, right? So let's say you know, you're, you Google like you know, social media content calendar template and you come to our site, we're ranking in Google and you want the template from us. We know you're interested in social media and we'll hammer you with a ton of value over a few weeks and try and get you into the mini course.
Tommy: 00:38:21 And let's say you take the mini course and everything and you get the offer, but you don't enroll will actually drop you out of that flow. Yup. And take you back to the top. It's like a circle, right? That's why it's called the ring. We take you back to the top and then we'll test other types of content, whether or not you're interested in w a email marketing overview. All right. Google analytics overview, something like that. And when you take the bait, when you click one, that triggers off a whole automations, like you've shown interest in it and you'll go down the sequence again, value, value, value, value mini course offer.
And if you don't take it, you go back up and we start prodding again and kind of testing again. So we'll get your email address and you may be interested in one particular topic, but we'll keep testing different topics on you for, I think our maximum now is almost a year right with, with, with all the, all the flows we have. So, so we, we, we basically had to create like 50 or so , pieces of really great content, but they're all positioned in a way where they're part of, everything's part of a part of a flow.
Joe: 00:39:25 Okay. And so you said there's a bunch of this on the, on the blog
too. We'll link up to this in the, in the show notes for the ring, right?
Tommy: 00:39:32 Yep, Yep, sure. I can include a link to that. Yep.
Joe: 00:39:35 Okay, cool. And then is this something that you teach more in
depth with your SOPs and everything inside of one of your courses too?
Tommy: 00:39:43 Yup, Yup. We have all that in there as well. The other piece too that a lot of people are interested in is [inaudible] and a bunch of people do this now, but we got really good at being really efficient with content. We create. I know you had a guest, a guest on that, talked about this as well on your show. But yeah, so like we would create an Sop, right on a particular topic and either we wanted it or it had search volume or something like that. And then I would create a youtube video explaining that sop and I would go through step by step on how to do that, right? And then we would transcribe that youtube video with a service like rev.com, right? So transcribe everything and then we would take that transcription and turn it into a blog post, right? And so that would be a blog post with the youtube video embedded on the top.
Tommy: 00:40:28 Then we take that blog post and turn it into an email, right? And
so that becomes an an email, right? So we have one sop that gets so much mileage, it's part of our sop library, and then it's a youtube video that ranks, and then it's a blog post that ranks, and then it's an email that push us into the mini course. Right. And so a lot of people, like, they're just not as thoughtful about their content marketing plan. Right. And it's just like they, they get out of the shower and they're like, I'm going to write about, you know, Vegan donuts today or whatever, whatever it is. But if you're just a little bit more thoughtful up front you can get so much mileage out of one piece of content and it's ended up being really valuable for us.
Joe: 00:41:11 So how long does it take you to create an sop? Right. And then
do your video. So for me it takes me a long time to create a process. Right? So like the, I know for me that's been one of my bottlenecks is I throw out a lot of content, but most of my stuff is more off the cuff, kind of let me build something for you on the fly based upon user's request. So I'm getting things that they want and need, which end up having search volume. But I'm starting that way and just kind of on the spot. Like I'll get on an ama and I'll unmute the person and I'll work out a system on the fly just because it's easier for me. Then starting from scratch, I feel like with no deadline, like it would take me a month. Right? Like I would just wait time on it. Like lots on that I guess or how, how, how should my mindset change?
Tommy: 00:41:59 Yeah, you're 100% right. I am wired the exact same way as you
and I yeah. So like individual requests and exceptions and things like that. Yes. Like, like a user asked for it and then another user asks for it and then another user asks for, it's like, let's do it right now. Right. Like I get that urgency and things like that. But we had a ton of success around basically having like contents sprints, so yep. Not kind of always doing it, but setting aside time where like, okay, these two weeks everyone stopped doing everything and we're going to blast out 55 sops. And they do, they take a really, really, really long time. Our slps, the Sh, the smallest ones are probably five pages and the longest ones are probably 35 pages. I mean 30 like they're, they're very, very long. We keep screenshots updated and things like that, they take a long time to do well. But until you can't, yeah. If you just do them and you're constantly doing them and you don't have a deadline, I agree with you. It doesn't work. So we sat down, it's like two weeks. Who's doing the SOPs? Who's doing the filming? Who's doing the editing? Who's doing the, the, the rev.com stuff. Right. And it's like everyone has to do it. You sprint, you do it. It feels like you just gave birth to a child and then you move on. Right. That's kind of how we do it.
Joe: 00:43:16 Okay. Yeah, man, that's crazy. Two weeks, 55 SOPs man, that's,
that's nuts. Crazy. Yeah. But yeah, I mean if that's all that you think about, you block out all the noise, obviously one big sprint, like you said. That makes a whole lot of sense. And then you've got your content calendar and your email calendar filled for, you know, a good, a good amount of time, obviously.
Tommy: 00:43:38 Yeah. It depends on your business, but if you're really diligent
and put in the extra effort about keyword research up front, and then you have set, you, you allocate a time to be like a content sprint and you really have your, your plan down, even if you, you're going to fumble of course at the beginning, but you
really can like front load all the work and it just plays beautifully for, for, for a year or two, right? I mean it depends on your, your business, but it can really it'd be very helpful for future planning.
Joe: 00:44:06 100%. So where do you draw the line on free content and paid
content? I know as like a user, as a user, somebody watching this, if they could chat in right now, they'd be like, yeah, where is that line? It sounds like there isn't one, right? Like that's getting beat, but where do you draw that line?
Tommy: 00:44:23 Yeah, there's a really good question. I love, are you familiar with
Ramit Sethi I will teach you to be rich. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I love this guy. First of all, he's an amazing, like personal finance guy, but he's, I think he's sneaky, very sneakily or maybe not so sneakily now one of the best internet marketers in the world. I mean, he's incredible. Very, very good copywriting, psychology, all this kind of stuff. But we, we've, I love his model, which is, I don't know if he's still says this, but he said it a while ago, which is like 98% of everything I do is free. And then the 2% is for the paid products and like the people who want the results kind of faster, right? And that, that's the way we do it as well. Probably 90, 95% of everything we create as free content tutorials, walkthroughs, emails, templates, checklists, cheat sheets, and mini courses.
Tommy: 00:45:15 And our basic model is yet all this stuff is free. There's a lot of
tire kickers, a lot of people that don't enroll, of course. And and we say, but if you want the results faster, or if you're trying to train up a whole team go for the paid product. And we, and our model is unlimited lifetime access and free updates for life. So it's one time fee and then anytime we push updates to the course, you get those forever. So some people appreciate that they don't want to keep up to date on their own. They want us to keep their sops up to date. Right. And so what one time fee for one user. They love it. I, I've also found that to be frank it's usually the noobs that are really protective of their content. Like they think they have a secret and they think that they've got a monetize that secret. Right. And the reality is you're probably not the first person to think of whatever you're, you've, you've thought of and it's way more about building your audience and solving your customer's problems. Right? So we got a lot more mileage out of giving most of it away for free and saying, by the way, for those that are interested, the paid product, which you can get the results faster or, or train multiple people is over here and we just got a lot more mileage out of it that way.
Joe: 00:46:26 Yeah. That makes a whole lot of sense. For sure.
Tommy: 00:46:29 How do you deal with that? Like do you, do you have a line
between free and paid? Like,
Joe: 00:46:34 Yeah, so my line is between free and paid is I have daily content
at the moment, so we're doing a lot of content between podcasts and then I do a weekly Ama and then that content gets split up into multiple pieces right for the week then, and it gets scheduled ahead and kind of random. So right now, like we're probably, I don't know, 120, even 150 days out on content. And that's what daily content. So it's the, it's the same kind of process though, rev though, ultimately, and blog posts. And the difference is I'm not putting as much thought in so to speak beforehand. So I run a Webinar for an hour and that's my content and I get on an hour before and plan through what I'm going to talk about at least high level. I outline it out and it gives my brain enough time to kind of think through it.
Joe: 00:47:24 So then like I'm really good then on the fly, like building it out.
And I know that it's just two hours a week for me and I've automated my content. But to be honest, it's not, your content is at a completely different level because it's sop, doubt, you know what I mean? It's, it's processes and systems instead of here's how I would handle this unique situation I get, I get a lot more low hanging fruit traffic. Right. But I don't get the I don't get the big traffic so to speak. Uis the big gap that I see between mine and yours.
Tommy: 00:47:58 Got It. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. And it's not, it's not one
size fits all either. Right. I mean it sounds like it's, even though like there are differences in that, it sounds like it's still fairly low time investment on your side, which that seems like a great return on your time, right?
Joe: 00:48:14 Yeah, 100%. What, what do you think are like the, I'm curious
from your point of view, because you work with these different avatars, what do you think are like the core four, the core five, what are the main sops that it seems like everybody's after or potentially if you think it's wrong, should be after, right. That you guys have, like what are the, what are the big things? And I think that'll probably shock people.
Tommy: 00:48:39 Interesting. You mean like which sop, I'm just pulling up, pulling
it up now. Most of them.
Joe: 00:48:45 What gets the most views? What gets the most shares? Like and
then do you think that that is actually the most important or do you think that it's just like chocolate, vegetables? It's what
everybody's after, but it's not, it's not the, it's not the thing that they really need.
Tommy: 00:49:01 Interesting. Yeah. Well I'm just looking at, yeah, yeah. No, no,
no, not at all. I'm just, yeah, we're just refreshing cause we are, we're now up to, yeah, we have 75 sops and growing all the time. And we get requests for them as well. Yeah. I mean, yeah, you know what the, there, there are definitely sexy ones versus ones that are that are eating your vegetables. So sexy ones are always around social media and content. Yep. So should, we can get content calendar right? And content, content planning and a lot of stuff, which is important. But the, I guess the, the, the big dirty secret is that the sexiest ones are pretty simple. I mean, you could, like, you can use our sop I like, we're very happy with our templates and our checklist in our cheat sheets, but you could also just open up a Google sheet and like, say like, January, February, March, and that'd be the 80 20.
Tommy: 00:49:56 Right. You know what I mean? So those are the, those are the
very like the sexiest ones are usually the most simple. The, the, the, the, the boring ones are the ones that, that save your ass, right? So it's things like how to exclude certain types of traffic and Google analytics, right? Or like setting up conversion events in, in Google analytics, right. Verifying that you're tracking subdomains correctly in Google analytics like that, like, that's so boring. No one cares about that. But if you get that wrong and you have crossed out sub domain tracking, you're done, right. You're done. And so those are the ones that are like everyone just, it's Kinda like potholes on the highway. Like you're never, like, you're never, you're never grateful that there's no potholes, but you're always super pissed when there are. Right. It's just like they kinda infrastructure ones that no, everyone just expects it to work. But they don't, they don't have any plan in place to get it to work. We're the ones who give, who provide the infrastructure to our users to, to get it to work. And it's just, it's very kind of it's all the ungrateful work, but it's, it's super important. You know what I mean?
Joe: 00:51:07 Yeah, yeah. For sure. So I'm curious for you, as you do your
research, I'm sure you're looking at like, what's a good link worthy asset, right? That people would want to link to? What, what are some other criteria that help you identify what kind SOPs right would be worth building? Like what goes through your, you and your team's mindset?
Tommy: 00:51:28 Yeah. So are, are you talking in terms of talking of like for your audience that's listening, how they should create their sops or
in terms of just running a business and how you create link where the assets are or what do you mean?
Joe: 00:51:39 Yeah, I think the combination of both, right? If they want to take
kind of your model and apply it to their roofing marketing business and start creating some, some sops that they're going to give out and they're going to give away for free. Like how, how, what should their criteria be? Right? How should they go about deciding if it's a good sop or not. Right? And if it's a good potential linkable asset or not. Like, what are your thoughts? Obviously you guys have just done this to a level that I've never seen quite done before. Right? And just like, that's a lot of output. 75 sops you keep updated. Like that's a lot.
Tommy: 00:52:16 Yeah. Thanks. And we're super excited about it.
New Speaker: 00:52:18 I've probably given out a dozen and it's hard for us to keep them
updated. Right?
Tommy: 00:52:23 Yeah, yeah, yeah. And especially in, in internet marketing,
there's just so many platforms and systems that have to communicate to each other now and it continues to grow. So 10 used to be a problem. Right? my, yeah, my answer to this is, is very annoying and Meta, which is that that like, I think taking a step back and going back to the customer avatars solves so many of these problems, right? Like it's just such a trope now and when you're building a business and startups and everything around dogfooding and being your own customer and things like that, but it's so true. And the thing is, is like we, we were our own customer, right? Like I've been doing search engine optimization for 10 years. I haven't already clickminded on it for awhile. I'm obsessed with digital marketing and I love digital marketing.
Tommy: 00:53:09 And so when we went to go create our Sop library, it was
incredibly obvious, but the first 55 should have been, right. And so if users are sitting here listening, okay, like what are the assets I can give to my customer base? Being your own customer is incredibly important. If you're not your own customer, making sure someone arms length from you is a customer is also important. Whether that's a co founder, a spouse, a best friend, a roommate, but someone who who, who you are solving this problem for. This is such a huge problem I had with other businesses. I try and start. It was, I had no idea what the actual problems were of my customers. Like I was, I was more obsessed with the market size and the revenue and the money and that kind of stuff. And I didn't actually care about the user's problems. And that's a huge long term problem
because you miss things, you don't understand what actually are there. Are there problems? Right? And so if your users are listening and they're thinking about what are the assets I can give my users, hopefully you are the customer Avatar. If not, hopefully it's someone near you. And the first kind of 50 should be like very obvious, right?
Joe: 00:54:18 Yeah. So I think in my example, I guess to give a little
perspective, right? So if it's like an agency that's working with roofing companies, right? They have their sops that they've built out internally, now they're, they're [inaudible], they want to make an approach like you to give away the 98%. Right? So they know, they know what's important, but ultimately to your, to your point, they don't really understand their avatar. Right, exactly. They are, they aren't their avatar. They figured out the system and process. They've figured out how to make the market work from a marketing standpoint. Right. But what would be their next steps to make sure that they picked link or the asset, so to speak, or they pick good assets that make sense to their avatar? You maybe interview the Avatar or what was your thoughts?
Tommy: 00:55:07 Yeah, that's an interesting one. So speaking of interviews, and
this is again another area where Eduardo, my cofounder just blew me out of the water on this cause I, I hated this process. He was, he was formerly a content marketer at teachable, the learning management system. And they were apparently incredible at really dialing in their customer Avatar to the point where to the point of insanity, I mean like so and when we went through this process, we, we got on the phone with these brutal phone calls with our users, 45 minutes per user and like 20,30 40 users. Right? And you just painstaking details down first, the demographic data, like how old are you? How much do you make a year? How much college education do you have? Are you married? Do you have kids? Where do you live?
Tommy: 00:55:55 And then like really getting into their, their personal life. Like what do you do on weekends? Like what are you doing? Like why, why do you live where you live? What do you do with friends? What are you doing at work? What are your problems? You can, I mean you can, there's all kinds of things you can Google around for, for, for customer interviews. But yeah I think, I think really hammering your customer Avatar and getting on the phone with them can be really helpful. This is, this is like a Dorky cliche kind of moment I had, but I was on the phone with, with an agency, one of our avatars, our, our, our customer consultants and agencies and I thought that the vast
majority of what we were doing was help agencies grow revenue, right. And like help agencies get more clients.
Tommy: 00:56:37 And I got on the phone with one guy who was a user and they had enrolled in a bunch of different seats for his team and the basic conclusion of the call was I signed up so I don't have to train more of my entry level employees because I want to spend more time with my son. And it just like blew my mind. Right. It was like it sounds Dorky and cheesy and like hallmark moment. What is true. Like, I thought we were doing these like very quantitative, like excel doc, like total addressable markets and know our product was helping this guy spend more time with his son. And it's kind of kind of interesting when you think of it that way. Right? But I would have never happened if I didn't go deep into his problem. So really the more Meta takeaway on there is speed. We're selling speed to that guy right now. Not necessarily the hallmark son moment, but, but we're selling speed. And that was actually counter intuitive to what I thought. I thought we were selling the process. I thought we were selling all this other stuff. It turns out he could have done it, but he didn't want to and we were telling him speed. So yeah, long, long answer to that question. I think getting on the phone with really deep, comprehensive interviews can be, can be very helpful.
Joe: 00:57:41 All right. Awesome. Fantastic. Yeah, good stuff. All right. So
we've talked a lot about systems, we've talked a lot about processes, we've talked a lot about automation and we're just about to hit the top of the hour. So I want to be mindful and respectful of your time. This has been an awesome interview. Are there any other automation tools or processes or systems that you found helpful? Maybe, maybe even not related to business.
Tommy: 00:58:07 Automation tools or processes? Unot even related to business.
Let me think here. Uyeah, just, you mean like kind of kind of life ,.
Joe: 00:58:21 Big, high level stuff? Yeah, zoom out for a second.
Tommy: 00:58:28 Yeah. I mean I've Dorky like Dorky, fun ones. This one of the
single biggest ones was, was laughing last pass from me. Like.
Joe: 00:58:38 We, we love dorky fun ones.
Tommy: 00:58:40 Okay. Uyeah, I mean, just,us like last pass, centralizing logins for
me was, oh, I will not ever admit to you how much time I spent
like requesting for God passwords and things like that. Right. Uso that was a massive one for me. Uuwhat are some other ones I had? Oh, just,ugeneral stuff around,uboomerang for Gmail and calendar reminders. Like, I, I, I'm, I'm a big inbox zero guy, which is,uyeah.
Tommy: 00:59:15 Yeah. So a lot of your audience probably is as well. But the basic
idea is like, your inbox should be treated as a to do list and every single email you act on, you either do it right away, find a time to do it later, give someone else it to do or deleted immediately. Right. And I'll put, I also do this with free family and friend stuff too. So like reminders to call mom, right? Like reminders for friends, birthdays. I really liked this idea and this is actually, again, a remeet safety idea around people in general are so lazy. And you can, I really love this idea of like, and he, he, he does it. He does it when you're negotiating a raise at work, he does it when you're negotiating or applying for a new job, the idea is like, Yep.
Tommy: 01:00:02 Things you can do that require up front effort that pay in spades for years to come. Right? So it's like, like setting up automations for your, your girlfriend's birthday for 10 years. Or like you said, again, not automating the gift, automating the reminder. Right? Like something like that or or yeah, in his example he says over prepare for your interview. Like really kill it. [inaudible] Or the 99% of people because that's going to pay your salary for five years. Right. Those, those kinds of things. So I really loved those like fixed costs one time investments up front that just pay forever. So yeah, like automating reminders, automating finances, these kind of one time things that that continued to pay back.
Joe: 01:00:52 Awesome man. All right, and last question. What's the one book
that as you look at your business today at quick minded has made the biggest direct impact on the way that you do business?
Tommy: 01:01:05 Ooh, actual business book or like kind of life philosophy book
Joe: 01:01:11 Wherever you can see a direct correlation in your business.
Right. So not like that book was good, but I never got anything from it. Right. Like it makes me happy, but nothing changed in my business. Right. Like that I feel like on podcasts, like that's kind of the takeaway for most people is like feel good books, but not so much. Did we get anything that directly correlated out the other side as a winner?
Tommy: 01:01:35 I s)ee. So in that case it's a, it's technically pitched as a course,
but it's just a text course. So I've called that a book. It's just text. Yep. On Andre Chaperon, autoresponder madness. Yeah. Have you familiar with, with him? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So we are our copies very much inspired by him. The basic idea is storytelling in your email marketing and the way he does it is incredible. The basic format is tell stories that are interesting, that are human and keep users wanting more. Every single email. All of our, all of our email marketing is designed around this and it was incredibly helpful as a, I guess as a book.
Joe: 01:02:16 Yeah, it definitely can see that it's a book. I mean, it's all text.
You're right. And I'd definitely read it like a good book, you know, picked it up and didn't drop it until it was done. So definitely a great, a great book. Thanks Andre. Alright, man. Any last thoughts? Or, or places I guess that we could link up? In the show notes for you that we can send people.
Tommy: 01:02:39 Yeah. And we're at click minded.com. I'm on Twitter, I'm at
Tommy Griffith. We just launched these, these free, they might be more intermediate, beginner, intermediate level, but we just launched these free digital marketing and SEO Strategy guides. We designed them like a retro eight bit Nintendo powers and yeah. Did you ever play like Nintendo or Super Nintendo in the 90s? Of course. Yeah. Did you ever get those like Nintendo power magazines that had like the cheat codes that get to the last level of Mario or anything like that? Yup. I mean it looks just like it [inaudible] right. Yeah. We tried to go for those. I was obsessed with these things as a kid. I cannot believe I didn't have a girlfriend. Right. But, but we designed these, these things to be like eight bit strategy guys. So you can, you can take them out the fruit.
Joe: 01:03:29 Yeah, man, they're awesome. Okay, great. Yeah, we'll link up to
those in the show notes as well. It, man, I just want to say thank you for all the time. I'm sure everybody's gonna love this interview. And we'll let you know once it goes live. Man, thanks so much.
Joe: 01:03:40 Sweet, Joe. Thanks a lot. Really appreciate it. All right, man.
Thanks so much. Have a good one. See Atomic. I'll see it. Yeah, take it easy.
ke it easy.
Joe: 00:00:03 Hey guys, it's Joe Troyer and welcome back to another show
here at, show me the nuggets and I'm super excited today to be spending this interview with Tommy Griffith. For those of you guys that don't know Tommy he's the founder of click minded and and guys, my team did some digging and found that he previously worked with and did SEO with some crazy players like airbnb and paypal and he grew click minded from just kind of a, a little side project in business to earning over six figures. And I'm excited to have him on today and just kind of pick his brain. So what's up Tommy?
Tommy: 00:00:39 Joe, what's going on man? Thanks for having me on the show.
Joe: 00:00:42 Yeah, 100%. So before we dive deep into today's topic can you
give us a little bit of background on how you got started with click minded?
Tommy: 00:00:52 Yeah, sure. So my story started like, like a lot of internet
marketers by reading a four hour work week. And did you, are you familiar with four hour work week? And Tim Ferris, right. So, yeah, so most of your audience, probably most people listening probably know, but for the uninitiated, the four hour work week was a book written in what, 2007, maybe 2008 written by Tim Ferriss. And it was kind of the, some of the principles are probably a little out of date now, but the general theory behind is still pretty strong, which is like he kind of wrote this book that was the catalyst for a lot of people to build remote businesses and build Internet businesses and have remote teams and things like that. And I got really excited about this and I created my first info product. After reading his books I created a very dorky ebook and I wrote this ebook and tried to figure out how do I get this to the top of Google.
Tommy: 00:01:46 This was, this was before the exact match domain update. And
so I did the keyword research. You know, found my primary keyword, the really obnoxious story. I started a a fraternity in university with I know, I know I started a fraternity with a bunch of my friends in, in university. It started as like a joke and then by the time I left there was like a hundred guys in it. And so after I read four hour work week, opened up the keyword tool and there's like 1500 people a month searching for how to start a fraternity, right? So I bought how to start a fraternity.com wrote a dorky 60 page ebook on how to start a fraternity and you know, had the keyword in my domain and it got like one backlink and was ranking number two in like a week.
Tommy: 00:02:37 And I'm like, I'm a genius, right? Having not known, you know, later on the exact match, domain update, et cetera. I basically
got lucky got really excited about SEO, started a business with a friend of mine shortly after that failed miserably. I was one of these guys. I was very blessed and my parents paid for college and I graduated with no debt. And then I ended up putting myself into debt after college, borrowing money from family and friends. So I got interested in SEO and trying to work on this business, but it didn't work. It went really bad, really miserable. Came home like tail between my legs, knocking on the door like, hey mom, hey dad, can I have a spot on the couch again kind of thing. But it was just kind of right place, right time. And and paypal was hiring an SEO manager and I had been working on it for two years even though I'd failed miserably and ended up, I was 24 years old and ended up managing search engine optimization at, at, at paypal, which is kind of crazy.
Joe: 00:03:32 Yeah, that's crazy.
Tommy: 00:03:34 Yeah. And so a while I was at paypal, like I had incurred all this
debt from this side project. I've heard this business I was telling you about and that's, that was the genesis of, of click mind was I was like, okay, I have a job, I'm back, I'm back. I'm working at it, but how do I, how do I go after this debt that I put myself into? Right. And Click minded. It was probably like idea number 15. I tried a lot of different things, but it just ended up being the thing that worked. My boss had asked me to to teach an SEO course to my colleagues in marketing at paypal. It went pretty well and I ended up turning that into a physical in person teaching business. So like Saturday mornings would rent a coworking space in San Francisco, kind of nine to five, like all you can SEO, right?
Tommy: 00:04:21 So just like nerd out on search engines. Yeah. Entrepreneurs and marketers would come in and I would like sort of, we'd nerd out on title tags all day, right on a, on a Saturday. That particular business was actually a terrible business. It was just like, was not generating any revenue. It doesn't scale. It's like very, very manual. But that ended up being the right place right time with this online course kind of renaissance we're in now. So it was 2012 I was like this teaching offline, and then Udemy was suddenly had suddenly taken off. Are you familiar with, udemy online course marketplace?
New Speaker: 00:04:57 Yep. 100%.
Tommy: 00:04:58 Yeah. And so that was sort of the first phase. It's like turn this
offline course I had into an online course. And from there it grew. I kept working on it while managing SEO at paypal and Airbnb. And then two years ago I went full time on it.
Joe: 00:05:12 Okay, great. So these dropped a little nugget in there. You're
working at airbnb doing SEO as well, right?
Tommy: 00:05:19 Yeah, I agree that that's right. Yeah. So two years managing SEO
at paypal and then for years managing SEO at Airbnb.
Joe: 00:05:25 Okay, great. So were you around when Airbnb was like
implementing all their growth hack strategies? I mean, they were crazy, like the stuff that they were doing and coming up with you read the stories like man.
Tommy: 00:05:35 Yeah. So, so yeah, the, the growth team was the official growth
team was, was founded a few months before I got there. And was, was only one guy for awhile. Gustaf uh but, but the stories, the stories you're probably talking about are with Nate, the Co- Founder, I don't know what the, what the, what the official position from the company is on some of those things have people can go look, look for themselves. I can't speak to, to, to, to all those. But yeah, it was part of that or the early members of the growth team working specifically on, on SEO.
Joe: 00:06:14 Yeah. I mean, at that stage in a company, you can obviously be a
little more risk averse and you know, really go for it. You know, being the stage that they're at now probably shouldn't be making decisions like that, but crazy, crazy stories. So I've thought it was cool just sitting around and watching those moves happen. Yeah. And unfold.
Tommy: 00:06:32 So, yeah, I mean, it was, it was wild man. Like the first, I've told
a couple of people this, but like the first week I joined the company was subpoenaed for their data by the state of New York. And the last week I joined, I worked on a Superbowl ad and Beyonce was staying in an airbnb like it was, it was, it was wild. I mean, my friends didn't know what it was when I joined and everyone knew what it was after. There was probably a hundred something people when I joined and it was like 2,500 people when I, when I left. It was, it was pretty nuts.
New Speaker: 00:07:01 That's awesome. So [inaudible] so you stumbled into click
minded. It wasn't working, running workshops. So you took it to an online course. Did you end up using you to me or somebody like that? Or did you host it yourself from the beginning or tell us about that transition. What happened next?
Tommy: 00:07:18 Yeah, yeah, that's a really good question. And so I'm a huge online course nerd. I'm a massive fan of, of online courses. I think they're gonna, they can solve a lot of problems. I think
there's so much room in this for anyone that's interested in, in online learning. I think the graduate, to go on a little bit of a tangent, I think the graduate school system in this country is the most fraudulent fake bs thing that needs to be destroyed and it represents billions of dollars for entrepreneurs to take. All of it can be killed with online courses. The vast majority of it, maybe not the rocket scientists and the pediatricians, but, but the vast majority of it. But yeah. So yeah, started with udemy and then sort of transitioned to my own platforms. I've tried so many different learning management systems and the course has evolved a ton since we started. I started as a physical, in-person, offline SEO course and then online course just on SEO and now we teach we have seven different courses with a number of different instructors and we're kind of expanding from there. But the, yeah, but the online course sort of like the transition has been crazy because in 2012, it was not that easy to, to launch an online course. I don't know how familiar you are with the, with the space, right.
Joe: 00:08:41 But 100% very familiar. Yeah. It's not easy.
Tommy: 00:08:45 Yeah. Yeah, for sure. And it's become, it was certainly not easy
in 2012. It's become a little bit easier as time has gone on. But there was a, there was a lot a lot of pitfalls I had in getting that. I mean, every single wordpress learning management system, user credentials, you know, like uploading Wistia video and like encoding this stuff myself and you know, one wordpress developer changes, one plugin, it, everything breaks, shhh and i'ts just so bad. Yeah. So it was, it was very tough at the beginning.
Joe: 00:09:18 Yeah. 100%. Yeah. There, there's definitely a learning curve. But I think you're right that I think learning online learning can solve a lot of traditional education problems these days. And I keep pushing on my students who are, are a lot of agencies, right. And a lot of them were on very niche focused agency, so they're going after, you know, one vertical dentists, right. They're going after optometrists. And that's the way that they've been able to scale is by staying in one vertical and building the systems and processes and then just staying in their lane. Right. and, and not veering out of it, but I've been talking to a lot of them now with and pushing on them to really understand that they have a big opportunity, I think when it comes to online learning and why isn't their front end offering a course, right? Why isn't it a major ticket or a higher ticket course showing people the systems and processes that they've spent years building out and perfecting and tweaking. Why doesn't that become the front end? And
then the done for you is like an ultra premium.. You can double that business overnight
Tommy: 00:10:20 For sure. Absolutely. That's really interesting that you brought
that up. We actually just created a course for our users. It's free, but it is exactly that. We just expose our back end and just show like, Hey, we've been working on this for, for eight years now. Here's exactly how we do it. And we're getting feedback on it now. And people love it. People love it. So it's a really good point. That's awesome.
Joe: 00:10:41 So my team when doing research was, was, were looking
through your guys' stories and it said that you and your partner invested in some business automation and some systems and processes when the business was actually losing money. So what made you kind of make that decision? Where were you at mindset wise and tell us what was happening?
Tommy: 00:11:00 Yeah, so so the whole story was kind of wild. I was you know, I
was very hesitant, click minded ended up generating more revenue than my salary in the third year I was working on it, but I didn't end up leaving until like until like the fifth or sixth year. For a lot of people that sounds a little crazy, but I just kind of, I was in a situation where I really liked my job and I actually felt like fairly unaccomplished at that point, at the job. I want it to stay right. And so I ended up really growing it a lot. And I was one of these guys where this whole story of like you know, the digital nomad scene and all that, like I really took the bait on this one man. Like I, you know, I was, I was on Instagram way too much.
Tommy: 00:11:50 Like, you know, looking at the most beautiful people ever seen in my life in Bali or, you know, drinking coconuts, the laptop on the beach. And I, I tripped for this hard and one massive mistake I made, you know, I was, I still love my job and I was, I, you know, I have friends in San Francisco and I was, I was dating someone and all that, so I really didn't want to leave. But I was kinda over the city. I got really over the city of San Francisco. I really wanted to leave and leave the city. And so I was preparing my escape to like go abroad. And I did myself a huge disservice by taking too long to make the jump. Right. And I like, I was planning way too hard and my expectations for myself were bananas. Right.
Tommy: 00:12:37 I was looking at these, you know, these Instagram clowns with
the, with their filters on and like, like it just set my expectations. So insane. So when I finally left Airbnb, did four years there, I finally left Airbnb and I decided to expand the product. So we
were going to go from an SEO course to seven different types of digital marketing content, right? I wanted to go head to head with universities that are offering this stuff as a master's degree, coding bootcamps, engineering bootcamps, and anyone kind of offering this as a digital marketing training as a service. And like when I, when I did that, you know we, I went in and developed this entire curriculum, spent about 15, I wrote a blog post, kind of documenting all this the last two years. But with all the revenue numbers and stuff spend about $15,000 upgrading the whole course and filming all this new content.
Tommy: 00:13:29 And I arrived in Bali and it was miserable. Like I got there, I was robbed by the police on my first day. I got food poisoning. The, the, the footage we just filmed for all these new courses, it was raining really hard on the warehouse we rented. And so all the audio was shot. And so I'm like, I'm in bali. I had just been robbed. I was throwing up from food poisoning. I'm holding this external hard drive with like messed up audio that I thought was completely shot. And I'm just looking up at the sky just like, what am I doing? Like why am I here? Right. And and eventually started to recover. My expectations were a little wild. But one of the ways I recovered was by bringing on a cofounder very late into the game which was like a little bit controversial to a lot of people.
Tommy: 00:14:19 I was like four or five years into a business, we had hit six
figures. I was working, brought on a cofounder, a guy I had worked with before and who's absolutely amazing. But one of the things, so this is a very long winded answer to your question. One of the things he, he kind of recommended was we did this, this big launch. It worked really well. And then everything started to, to fail afterwards, right? Like traffic started to drop. We got hit with a bunch of refunds cause the, the product was in like a v-one. Just sort of everything went wrong. And we were at this crossroads where I wanted to fix much more trivial stuff like you know, the very kind of kind of micro optimizations like let's let's you know, let's make the checkout button red instead of green or these kinds of like sort of things.
Tommy: 00:15:05 And Eduardo, my now co-founder was very big into automating
things. And the, in the, the posts where I, or I read about this, I called it, I think I called it taking your vitamins while you're bleeding. And the, and the, the basic idea here was he actually had a much stronger vision for how the future would go than I had. Right? He was sort of our customer Avatar. He was, the guy clicked my to now it's a digital marketing training course for marketers and entrepreneurs and we could focus on very
specific digital marketing tutorials. So like very specific over the shoulder walkthroughs on how to launch an email marketing campaign and reduce 99% of errors or how to add the Google tag manager to a wordpress site. Right. Something like that. And so we made these investments in a lot of the automation, right? We knew our customer avatars, we really like drew them out very specifically. And we created a bunch of these flows for users. So what are all the checklists and templates and cheat sheets we can give them, what are the mini courses we can give them? Like how do we add a ton of free value to all of these avatars all at once. And it wasn't like the most intuitive thing in the world. It was a little bit risky, but within four months, five months, it really started to, to pay off.
Joe: 00:16:23 Gotcha. Gotcha. So completely different mindsets there. And
that's interesting obviously when you have a co founder, right? Like you're not the one just running and gunning anymore. So at that point, how long, I'm curious, did you have your cofounder?
Tommy: 00:16:38 Yeah. So so at Eduardo and I, it was a little bit different because
a Eduardo was like an apprentice sort of at first. So he was sort of working with me just to, just to learn. And then after six months he went off to work for a different company and then I basically wrote him back in and that was the moment in Thailand when I was throwing up in Bali and like miserable and like, you know, on the ropes I emailed them like, hey man, what are you doing? Because I'm in a huge mess right here and how you feeling. Right. but we had basically the idea was I, I told him the situation he helped it started to work on a bunch of stuff. And then the first launch we did, I just sat down and said, how you feeling about your job? How are you feeling about this? How do you feel about everything? Do you want to be the cofounder on this thing? Because I, I, you know, I think one of the, one of the things that was good at was I was pretty good at the first round, getting the product to like zero to the first six figures. He's much better at the operations, the long term customer Avatar stuff. Like a lot of the growing something that had just been started, right. And, and ended up working way.
Joe: 00:17:50 So how did you find Eduardo?
Tommy: 00:17:54 Yeah, so this actually is you talking about nuggets. I can give you
a nugget here. I was, I taught at a and this is part of why I'm so grumpy about, about graduate school, but I taught at a university in San Francisco for four years. I taught a summer elective while I was working at at Airbnb and it was a it digital marketing elective for, for master's degree students. And at the end of every at the end of every elective, I would offer up an
apprenticeship to one, one student to one university student. I highly recommend finding a university. And specifically, I don't know why this is, this is going to sound a little bit strange, but I found that that like foreigners and immigrants and, and MBA and people have second generation families have this like work ethic that is, I say this is like a sixth generation American that's just way more nose to the grind than regular than Americans, right. Something happens. I say this as a, as a, as an American, something happens. It's that like immigrant hustle, right? And this, this was an international university. And yeah, I highly recommend finding your apprentice at a at a university that had a lot of international students because for whatever reason there's like a natural natural hunger there that really, really worked for me.
Joe: 00:19:26 Yeah. So there's a, there's a guy called Bedros Keuilian, Have
you heard that name.
Tommy: 00:19:31 No, I haven't.
Joe: 00:19:32 So he's a bestselling author. You just came out with a book. It's
called man up. Definitely a fantastic book, but he calls it the immigrant edge because he's an immigrant and a lot of people that he hired or that he interviews and that he has do trainings with him are, are immigrants and he's found the same kind of the same thing. So it's interesting that you [inaudible]
Tommy: 00:19:54 That's fascinating. It's someone else's started to figure this out too. Yes. It's a first and second generation something about it. It's like this, this hunger and a, and something, something happens after the, after the third generation were, you know, people were eating too much ice cream and watching too much Netflix or something like that. I don't know. I don't know what's going on, yeah, exactly. Exactly. Exactly.
Joe: 00:20:18 All right. So how, how would, how would you advise somebody
like me, right, that didn't have your background. Right. Find somebody then for example, right. Like I'm not teaching, right, so get them from an international school. I get that. But how would you approach that if you were in my shoes? I'm curious and you had to Redo that.
Tommy: 00:20:38 That's interesting. I mean one other way, cause I actually, I
actually did acquire some apprentices before I was teaching there was speaking at the universities, right. So finding different electives and courses where you have relevant overlap and being willing to, if you can go in and speak, that's, that's best. But another way to do it would be would be just emailing them
and letting the professor emailing the professor and letting them know, hey, we have this, this this opportunity. Another way, a kinda , interesting back doorway was, and this was this really, I bootstrapped my entire business off of this meetup.com .meetup.com I think is one of the most underrated ways to, to just start a side project for a number of reasons. And my first hundred users came from, from meetup.com. The biggest reason I think is that Internet marketers hate leaving their basement.
Tommy: 00:21:35 Like Internet marketers would much rather send 10,000 emails
than pick up the phone once. Right. And I ended up starting this, the San Francisco SEO meetup in 2011. Umeetup.com does, and this is still the case today. They still, they do all the work for you. So you create the topic, they email everyone in the city that's interested in that topic. And then you can have, this is the single fastest way to bootstrap an email list. You can easily get your first hundred emails through through meetup. Ubut I also ended up hosting these meetups and found one. Uone student who was, he was started in internet marketing, like interest group at the university. I found him and every time I did a meetup, I would send it to him and he would blast that to his people and all the, all the college kids would would show up. So that's kind of another interesting way to do it is using meetup to get those university students into the door.
Joe: 00:22:32 Love it. Yeah, those are three, three great takeaways. Just to
recap for everybody. So finding an apprentice through speaking at universities, emailing the professor or running the meetups and then trying to get somebody from the university right. To, to help promote the meetup. Yeah, that's fantastic. That's exactly, that's, and again, right. Show me the nuggets man. That's it.
Tommy: 00:22:51 There the nuggets. There they are,.
Joe: 00:22:53 There are the nuggets. All right, good stuff. So let's let's get back
to automation. What, what were the first things that you and Edwardo really decided to kind of prioritize and think about in terms of automation?
Tommy: 00:23:09 Yeah, so the biggest help for us here was actually the the
transitioning everything over to drip and Brennan Dunn has a, not sure if you're familiar with him, but yeah, he's really got a he has this drip mastery course that really lays out how you can automate everything. What he, there's been actually, everyone's gotten to be frank, pretty grumpy with drip the last year. They've had some problems, they have some problems
with pricing and some outages and things like that. And it looks like there's other tools like convert kit that are starting to roll out a lot of these features. So whether or not drip is going to be the Goto source going forward, I'm not sure. But the basic concept is finding a sort of centralized CRM to to, to make sure all your workflows exist in one place and laying out first of all being really rock solid on your customer avatars and then laying out journeys for them.
Tommy: 00:24:07 So just to rattle off a bunch of tools, if you want to go into the
weeds on this. Yeah, drip has sort of where we centralize all of our, all of our a users, right? We have three customer avatars entrepreneurs in house marketers at, at larger companies and consultants or agencies that want to train up their teams. And we have seven different topics, right? SEO, paid ads, content marketing, social media, email marketing, Google analytics and sales funnels. And so you could be any one of these combinations. You can be right, a consultant or an agency interested in content marketing or an entrepreneur interested in SEO. And we sort of have journeys for all these, right? And so we're using yeah, are, we're using wordpress as our, as our core sites, teachable installed on a sub domain is our learning management system.
Tommy: 00:24:58 Drip is the back end that manages everything. Zapier is the duct
tape that duct taped everything together. Yeah. And we, we also got a lot of, a lot of mileage out of mini courses. So the basic idea is every course is like four to six hours long. We use world-class experts that do this stuff every day, right? So our social media course is taught by the former head of social media at Airbnb. The content marketing course is taught by the content strategist from Lyft, but we we we allow roughly 30 minutes to an hour of the course to be like viewed as a mini course. The way we do it is we, when you enroll, we say, okay, hey, you're enrolled in this mini chorus. You have seven days to complete it. If you were, if you and we update these mini courses in the future, they have templates and cheat sheets.
Tommy: 00:25:53 We keep them up to date. If you complete it in seven days, you
get lifetime access to it. You'll get all the updates as, as things go on, you'll have access to it forever. If you don't, we rescind your access and you'll never get it again. And this has been a very powerful carrot for us because people do it. They have seven days to complete a 30 minute course. It's fairly reasonable. But, but if they're not, and we're pretty strict about it. And so if they, if they're not in, that's fine, but they'll lose access. But if they actually want to commit and do it of course they complete it. They get about 30 minutes of the product and
then we give them an offer shortly after. And of course the conversion rate increases significantly. They've seen 30 minutes of the product, they've seen 30 minutes of the teacher. They're much more comfortable with it. And, and so we found that to be very powerful is not only do you give them a preview of the product, but also you force them to complete it by, by, by taking it away. If they don't write that, then that's worked for us.
Joe: 00:26:53 Yeah, that's, that's great. It's, it's forced consumption. Right. So people do that these days, but I don't think they do it quite like you. I see a lot of people doing like challenges, right. To force consumption, right? So they get somebody to pay seven bucks or something for a challenge so that they're committed. And then you look at the consumption and like the, the success rate of the people during that challenge. And it's really, really high because everybody's on board at one time to do one thing. So that's really interesting. I've never thought of doing that for a course.
Tommy: 00:27:25 Yeah. Yeah. And it's worked for us. The, the there's just too, it's
just too easy to, people are just want bombarded with free offers for everything. Right. And and we saw a lot of value. Like, Hey, if you're actually serious about this, that's fine. It's free, but you have to finish it in a week. And if anyone who's actually serious about it could finish it in a week. And if you're not, that's fine too. You can go, but just half an hour. Right? I mean, it's happened, it's a half an hour over seven days. Yeah. Okay. But it's just enough to get them to commit. Right? And so it's just a very clear like, do you want to do this or not? Yes or no. Like complete it in seven days.
Joe: 00:28:07 That's great. So I'm sure you find a lot more people consuming
your content and getting involved and then you're ultimately converting more cold traffic into customers at the end of the day.
Joe: 00:28:19 Yeah, exactly. So yeah, our, our model is pretty standard. I
mean, all of our blog posts and youtube videos and things like that are the top of funnel things. We have almost always have a custom content upgrade or lead magnet for each one of those pieces of content. We know that the topic type based on that, right? So we have a bunch of content about SEO, a bunch of content about email marketing, right? We, we have templates and cheat sheets and, and downloadables associated with those. And then,uonce you grab the email address there, we're pushing the user into the mini course so we know what they're topically interested in. And then whenever we get them to
commit to the mini course,uthey have seven days to complete it from there.
Joe: 00:28:58 If so, I'm curious in that funnel, I'm curious about funnel. It
makes a whole lot of sense. How do you tie in though the three different avatars? So you brought up the three avatars. Where are you tagging that or where are you, where, where are you getting them to self identify when they take the course or,
Tommy: 00:29:15 Yeah, this is a great question. So we're, we're using, it's also
Brendan Dunn's tool, right message. I Dunno if you're familiar with this. Yeah, it's very, very cool tool. The basic idea is you can give people a simple prompt either a little nag on the bottom right hand of the screen or, and the welcome email and you just get them to self identify. You just get them to say who are you, why are you here? One of one of these three options. And what's amazing about right message is it's basically, it's basically a container you can use on the site to change out copy based on the Avatar. Right? So you know, if the headline, the headline well we'll take a headline and it'll be massively grow your agency if they're an agency or consultants or I, it's you know train up your team if you're an in house marketer or, or, or, or something like that.
Tommy: 00:30:10 So that's really helpful. The other piece of it that's really helpful as well is once we know who you are in our CRM, which is drip, we don't show them the same CTA, which is really helpful. So for example, if they're on a top of funnel page and they're not a user, we give them a lead magnet, but if they're on a top of funnel page and we already have their email, will that, that CTA changes from the lead magnet to start the mini course, right? And so there's kind of no wasted space. It's like you, you, you cut up your site based on here are the calls to action, right? And kind of where are they, who are they and where are they in the funnel? And you can just sort of swap all of those out. So it's an incredibly efficient way to do it. You centralize all your copy and all your calls to action in one place and then you just rotate them out. And the conversion rates are just bananas on all of these because they're so targeted. You know what I mean?
Joe: 00:31:05 So the CTA is are targeted, but the sales pages, I'm guessing
probably aren't so much maybe, right. Or have you went through the kind of 10th degree and customized every sales page addressing, you know them as the three avatars and followup sequences for the three avatars or where have you kind of drawn the line because you could go down that path, right? Like
Tommy: 00:31:26 You, you are Joe, you're 10 steps ahead of me on this one, man. Yeah, you can you can. If you want it to go nuts with this. That's what's really cool about right messages. You could go nuts with it. We have a little bit too many, too many permutations to do that right now. So we just went for the big ones, which is like the big headline and the big call to action on each page and saw a massive lift from there. The next phase is probably, yeah, each individual bullet point, like based on each customer Avatar. But there's just other kinds of bigger, bigger things for us right now, but we're just going for the big ones to start.
Joe: 00:31:59 Okay. So the big thing, the big wins so far have been automation and the trial's kind of forcing consumption, getting people to, to go through it and get some value out of it and then hitting them with an offer or you doing like are you hitting them with like a kind of a three day sale and a discount on the course or something at that point to try to get everybody to take an action or how do you go from, you just went through the mini course to the full course? What's that look like?
Tommy: 00:32:26 Yeah, that, that, that's exactly it. And we're playing with a bunch
of stuff all the time. So if would, if you go to check out the site, you might get different things all the time. All the time. But yeah, the basic idea is preview the product. Then once you have, we'll give you some type of discount in order to enroll. Right. And then once you enroll in that individual product, we say, hey, did you like this? By the way, there's, there's six more other courses over here are these interesting too. Right. And just kind of continue to to, to push more, more content.
Joe: 00:32:55 Gotcha. Have you tried putting like a hard stop with that
urgency and scarcity so to speak? Like you're only give seven days, right? For the mini course? Do you do the same? Are you like release really harsh about the upgrade then too?
Tommy: 00:33:07 Yeah, exactly. Sorry, I forgot to mention that. Yes. Anytime we
offer a discount or a sale or you are 10 steps ahead of me, man, anytime we offer a discount or anything like that, that is the beauty of, of using drip. And we also use thrive ultimatum is, is we, yeah, every offer actually is a hard stop. So users are getting them at custom times but they really actually do get locked out. Right. So that's been the key is unfortunately you have to be a jerk to some people, but it doesn't work if everyone knows you're soft on it. Right. And so like, we really do have to lock people out when we do it. So yeah, they, they, they'll complete the mini course and then they'll have a 24 hour window to, to enroll at a at a discount.
Joe: 00:33:53 Awesome. Awesome man. Any other big things in terms of
automation and that's, that's great. Great takeaways. And those are some good nuggets, man.
Tommy: 00:34:01 Yeah, let me think. We have, I mean, just in general, like we're
obsessed with SOPs which stands for standard operating procedure. For the uninitiated, it's just a fancy way to say like a really comprehensive checklist. And we actually
Joe: 00:34:17 A really fancy way to say we don't reinvent the wheel every
single time.
Tommy: 00:34:22 Right? Exactly. Exactly. And this was all a Duarte. Eduardo is like
the process guy. And I'm like the idiot that gets on the microphone and just like sings in dance like, like a monkey. Right? You know what I mean? But, but we, we wanted a product for ourselves to do this. We started creating SOPs for ourselves and then we turned it into a product. So we have a product called the SOP library. It's just this archive of digital marketing, SOPs and it's a product for our users. They can brand them, use them for clients and things like that. But we we use these all the time in our business and we are just crazy about the two best books for this are I don't know if you're familiar with work, the system this is a book about SOP es and then the myth is kind of a similar one, but just for just adding a process around everything.
Tommy: 00:35:09 So we got a ton of mileage out of things like in helpscout when
we get tickets email templates, right? Like we almost never write a personal email unless it's absolutely required. It's like a user asking a specific question, but if we ever think we're going to get a question twice, it's a template. And so those are like quasi automations. The, the basic idea is like the, the whole company mindset is like, try and never do something twice ever. And it's brutal at the beginning. It's so annoying at the beginning. It's so painful at the beginning. And then like within six months, it's like the greatest possible thing you could ever do. It ends up being very valuable.
Joe: 00:35:49 Oh, 100%. 100%. Alright, cool. So any thoughts or pushback on
things maybe that you think shouldn't be automated? Right. Anything that maybe you've tried, failed or things you just like, yeah, we, we're gonna leave that as is
Tommy: 00:36:05 Interesting. What are we not automating here? Yeah. I mean, I
still do when people have personal questions, I answer and I usually answer within, within 30 minutes. And it's not because of a policy or anything like that, I'm just, I'm just a nerd that's
always on my, my phone or my laptop. And people do sit like, think like, oh my God, how did you reply so, so quickly. So that has been cool. There's kind of a personal touch too, whenever it's absolutely necessary.
Joe: 00:36:38 So if it doesn't, if one of the rules or triggers don't grab it or somebody else doesn't respond, comes to you and you just knock it out real quick.
Tommy: 00:36:45 Yeah. Knock it out. And and I just have fun with it too because
like r w you know, we like our users and like we understand a lot of their problems and sometimes it's fun to like poke fun of them and like just treat them like you're, you're their best friend and they like, they kinda can't believe in it. Right. But that you're getting that, that personal touch. So that was sort of cool. And yeah, I can't really think of too many when we try and automate as much as as we can.
Joe: 00:37:11 Okay. Yeah, no worries. Yeah. I mean tell us about your internal tool called the ring. Yeah. What them, what that, what the heck is the ring?
Tommy: 00:37:24 Yes. It's basically just what I was describing just now. The, yeah,
the ring. And yet I have a, a blog post. Maybe we can link up in the show notes that describes like the last two years, but it's just this automation flow around in drip, kind of inspired by Brennan Dunn's drip, drip mastery course. But yeah, the basic idea is we know what you're interested in and who you are when you opt in. And every the, the idea is the, the total possibility. Like the idea is we've created all these sort of flows for users, but it almost never runs out, right? So let's say you know, you're, you Google like you know, social media content calendar template and you come to our site, we're ranking in Google and you want the template from us. We know you're interested in social media and we'll hammer you with a ton of value over a few weeks and try and get you into the mini course.
Tommy: 00:38:21 And let's say you take the mini course and everything and you get the offer, but you don't enroll will actually drop you out of that flow. Yup. And take you back to the top. It's like a circle, right? That's why it's called the ring. We take you back to the top and then we'll test other types of content, whether or not you're interested in w a email marketing overview. All right. Google analytics overview, something like that. And when you take the bait, when you click one, that triggers off a whole automations, like you've shown interest in it and you'll go down the sequence again, value, value, value, value mini course offer.
And if you don't take it, you go back up and we start prodding again and kind of testing again. So we'll get your email address and you may be interested in one particular topic, but we'll keep testing different topics on you for, I think our maximum now is almost a year right with, with, with all the, all the flows we have. So, so we, we, we basically had to create like 50 or so , pieces of really great content, but they're all positioned in a way where they're part of, everything's part of a part of a flow.
Joe: 00:39:25 Okay. And so you said there's a bunch of this on the, on the blog
too. We'll link up to this in the, in the show notes for the ring, right?
Tommy: 00:39:32 Yep, Yep, sure. I can include a link to that. Yep.
Joe: 00:39:35 Okay, cool. And then is this something that you teach more in
depth with your SOPs and everything inside of one of your courses too?
Tommy: 00:39:43 Yup, Yup. We have all that in there as well. The other piece too that a lot of people are interested in is [inaudible] and a bunch of people do this now, but we got really good at being really efficient with content. We create. I know you had a guest, a guest on that, talked about this as well on your show. But yeah, so like we would create an Sop, right on a particular topic and either we wanted it or it had search volume or something like that. And then I would create a youtube video explaining that sop and I would go through step by step on how to do that, right? And then we would transcribe that youtube video with a service like rev.com, right? So transcribe everything and then we would take that transcription and turn it into a blog post, right? And so that would be a blog post with the youtube video embedded on the top.
Tommy: 00:40:28 Then we take that blog post and turn it into an email, right? And
so that becomes an an email, right? So we have one sop that gets so much mileage, it's part of our sop library, and then it's a youtube video that ranks, and then it's a blog post that ranks, and then it's an email that push us into the mini course. Right. And so a lot of people, like, they're just not as thoughtful about their content marketing plan. Right. And it's just like they, they get out of the shower and they're like, I'm going to write about, you know, Vegan donuts today or whatever, whatever it is. But if you're just a little bit more thoughtful up front you can get so much mileage out of one piece of content and it's ended up being really valuable for us.
Joe: 00:41:11 So how long does it take you to create an sop? Right. And then
do your video. So for me it takes me a long time to create a process. Right? So like the, I know for me that's been one of my bottlenecks is I throw out a lot of content, but most of my stuff is more off the cuff, kind of let me build something for you on the fly based upon user's request. So I'm getting things that they want and need, which end up having search volume. But I'm starting that way and just kind of on the spot. Like I'll get on an ama and I'll unmute the person and I'll work out a system on the fly just because it's easier for me. Then starting from scratch, I feel like with no deadline, like it would take me a month. Right? Like I would just wait time on it. Like lots on that I guess or how, how, how should my mindset change?
Tommy: 00:41:59 Yeah, you're 100% right. I am wired the exact same way as you
and I yeah. So like individual requests and exceptions and things like that. Yes. Like, like a user asked for it and then another user asks for it and then another user asks for, it's like, let's do it right now. Right. Like I get that urgency and things like that. But we had a ton of success around basically having like contents sprints, so yep. Not kind of always doing it, but setting aside time where like, okay, these two weeks everyone stopped doing everything and we're going to blast out 55 sops. And they do, they take a really, really, really long time. Our slps, the Sh, the smallest ones are probably five pages and the longest ones are probably 35 pages. I mean 30 like they're, they're very, very long. We keep screenshots updated and things like that, they take a long time to do well. But until you can't, yeah. If you just do them and you're constantly doing them and you don't have a deadline, I agree with you. It doesn't work. So we sat down, it's like two weeks. Who's doing the SOPs? Who's doing the filming? Who's doing the editing? Who's doing the, the, the rev.com stuff. Right. And it's like everyone has to do it. You sprint, you do it. It feels like you just gave birth to a child and then you move on. Right. That's kind of how we do it.
Joe: 00:43:16 Okay. Yeah, man, that's crazy. Two weeks, 55 SOPs man, that's,
that's nuts. Crazy. Yeah. But yeah, I mean if that's all that you think about, you block out all the noise, obviously one big sprint, like you said. That makes a whole lot of sense. And then you've got your content calendar and your email calendar filled for, you know, a good, a good amount of time, obviously.
Tommy: 00:43:38 Yeah. It depends on your business, but if you're really diligent
and put in the extra effort about keyword research up front, and then you have set, you, you allocate a time to be like a content sprint and you really have your, your plan down, even if you, you're going to fumble of course at the beginning, but you
really can like front load all the work and it just plays beautifully for, for, for a year or two, right? I mean it depends on your, your business, but it can really it'd be very helpful for future planning.
Joe: 00:44:06 100%. So where do you draw the line on free content and paid
content? I know as like a user, as a user, somebody watching this, if they could chat in right now, they'd be like, yeah, where is that line? It sounds like there isn't one, right? Like that's getting beat, but where do you draw that line?
Tommy: 00:44:23 Yeah, there's a really good question. I love, are you familiar with
Ramit Sethi I will teach you to be rich. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I love this guy. First of all, he's an amazing, like personal finance guy, but he's, I think he's sneaky, very sneakily or maybe not so sneakily now one of the best internet marketers in the world. I mean, he's incredible. Very, very good copywriting, psychology, all this kind of stuff. But we, we've, I love his model, which is, I don't know if he's still says this, but he said it a while ago, which is like 98% of everything I do is free. And then the 2% is for the paid products and like the people who want the results kind of faster, right? And that, that's the way we do it as well. Probably 90, 95% of everything we create as free content tutorials, walkthroughs, emails, templates, checklists, cheat sheets, and mini courses.
Tommy: 00:45:15 And our basic model is yet all this stuff is free. There's a lot of
tire kickers, a lot of people that don't enroll, of course. And and we say, but if you want the results faster, or if you're trying to train up a whole team go for the paid product. And we, and our model is unlimited lifetime access and free updates for life. So it's one time fee and then anytime we push updates to the course, you get those forever. So some people appreciate that they don't want to keep up to date on their own. They want us to keep their sops up to date. Right. And so what one time fee for one user. They love it. I, I've also found that to be frank it's usually the noobs that are really protective of their content. Like they think they have a secret and they think that they've got a monetize that secret. Right. And the reality is you're probably not the first person to think of whatever you're, you've, you've thought of and it's way more about building your audience and solving your customer's problems. Right? So we got a lot more mileage out of giving most of it away for free and saying, by the way, for those that are interested, the paid product, which you can get the results faster or, or train multiple people is over here and we just got a lot more mileage out of it that way.
Joe: 00:46:26 Yeah. That makes a whole lot of sense. For sure.
Tommy: 00:46:29 How do you deal with that? Like do you, do you have a line
between free and paid? Like,
Joe: 00:46:34 Yeah, so my line is between free and paid is I have daily content
at the moment, so we're doing a lot of content between podcasts and then I do a weekly Ama and then that content gets split up into multiple pieces right for the week then, and it gets scheduled ahead and kind of random. So right now, like we're probably, I don't know, 120, even 150 days out on content. And that's what daily content. So it's the, it's the same kind of process though, rev though, ultimately, and blog posts. And the difference is I'm not putting as much thought in so to speak beforehand. So I run a Webinar for an hour and that's my content and I get on an hour before and plan through what I'm going to talk about at least high level. I outline it out and it gives my brain enough time to kind of think through it.
Joe: 00:47:24 So then like I'm really good then on the fly, like building it out.
And I know that it's just two hours a week for me and I've automated my content. But to be honest, it's not, your content is at a completely different level because it's sop, doubt, you know what I mean? It's, it's processes and systems instead of here's how I would handle this unique situation I get, I get a lot more low hanging fruit traffic. Right. But I don't get the I don't get the big traffic so to speak. Uis the big gap that I see between mine and yours.
Tommy: 00:47:58 Got It. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. And it's not, it's not one
size fits all either. Right. I mean it sounds like it's, even though like there are differences in that, it sounds like it's still fairly low time investment on your side, which that seems like a great return on your time, right?
Joe: 00:48:14 Yeah, 100%. What, what do you think are like the, I'm curious
from your point of view, because you work with these different avatars, what do you think are like the core four, the core five, what are the main sops that it seems like everybody's after or potentially if you think it's wrong, should be after, right. That you guys have, like what are the, what are the big things? And I think that'll probably shock people.
Tommy: 00:48:39 Interesting. You mean like which sop, I'm just pulling up, pulling
it up now. Most of them.
Joe: 00:48:45 What gets the most views? What gets the most shares? Like and
then do you think that that is actually the most important or do you think that it's just like chocolate, vegetables? It's what
everybody's after, but it's not, it's not the, it's not the thing that they really need.
Tommy: 00:49:01 Interesting. Yeah. Well I'm just looking at, yeah, yeah. No, no,
no, not at all. I'm just, yeah, we're just refreshing cause we are, we're now up to, yeah, we have 75 sops and growing all the time. And we get requests for them as well. Yeah. I mean, yeah, you know what the, there, there are definitely sexy ones versus ones that are that are eating your vegetables. So sexy ones are always around social media and content. Yep. So should, we can get content calendar right? And content, content planning and a lot of stuff, which is important. But the, I guess the, the, the big dirty secret is that the sexiest ones are pretty simple. I mean, you could, like, you can use our sop I like, we're very happy with our templates and our checklist in our cheat sheets, but you could also just open up a Google sheet and like, say like, January, February, March, and that'd be the 80 20.
Tommy: 00:49:56 Right. You know what I mean? So those are the, those are the
very like the sexiest ones are usually the most simple. The, the, the, the, the boring ones are the ones that, that save your ass, right? So it's things like how to exclude certain types of traffic and Google analytics, right? Or like setting up conversion events in, in Google analytics, right. Verifying that you're tracking subdomains correctly in Google analytics like that, like, that's so boring. No one cares about that. But if you get that wrong and you have crossed out sub domain tracking, you're done, right. You're done. And so those are the ones that are like everyone just, it's Kinda like potholes on the highway. Like you're never, like, you're never, you're never grateful that there's no potholes, but you're always super pissed when there are. Right. It's just like they kinda infrastructure ones that no, everyone just expects it to work. But they don't, they don't have any plan in place to get it to work. We're the ones who give, who provide the infrastructure to our users to, to get it to work. And it's just, it's very kind of it's all the ungrateful work, but it's, it's super important. You know what I mean?
Joe: 00:51:07 Yeah, yeah. For sure. So I'm curious for you, as you do your
research, I'm sure you're looking at like, what's a good link worthy asset, right? That people would want to link to? What, what are some other criteria that help you identify what kind SOPs right would be worth building? Like what goes through your, you and your team's mindset?
Tommy: 00:51:28 Yeah. So are, are you talking in terms of talking of like for your audience that's listening, how they should create their sops or
in terms of just running a business and how you create link where the assets are or what do you mean?
Joe: 00:51:39 Yeah, I think the combination of both, right? If they want to take
kind of your model and apply it to their roofing marketing business and start creating some, some sops that they're going to give out and they're going to give away for free. Like how, how, what should their criteria be? Right? How should they go about deciding if it's a good sop or not. Right? And if it's a good potential linkable asset or not. Like, what are your thoughts? Obviously you guys have just done this to a level that I've never seen quite done before. Right? And just like, that's a lot of output. 75 sops you keep updated. Like that's a lot.
Tommy: 00:52:16 Yeah. Thanks. And we're super excited about it.
New Speaker: 00:52:18 I've probably given out a dozen and it's hard for us to keep them
updated. Right?
Tommy: 00:52:23 Yeah, yeah, yeah. And especially in, in internet marketing,
there's just so many platforms and systems that have to communicate to each other now and it continues to grow. So 10 used to be a problem. Right? my, yeah, my answer to this is, is very annoying and Meta, which is that that like, I think taking a step back and going back to the customer avatars solves so many of these problems, right? Like it's just such a trope now and when you're building a business and startups and everything around dogfooding and being your own customer and things like that, but it's so true. And the thing is, is like we, we were our own customer, right? Like I've been doing search engine optimization for 10 years. I haven't already clickminded on it for awhile. I'm obsessed with digital marketing and I love digital marketing.
Tommy: 00:53:09 And so when we went to go create our Sop library, it was
incredibly obvious, but the first 55 should have been, right. And so if users are sitting here listening, okay, like what are the assets I can give to my customer base? Being your own customer is incredibly important. If you're not your own customer, making sure someone arms length from you is a customer is also important. Whether that's a co founder, a spouse, a best friend, a roommate, but someone who who, who you are solving this problem for. This is such a huge problem I had with other businesses. I try and start. It was, I had no idea what the actual problems were of my customers. Like I was, I was more obsessed with the market size and the revenue and the money and that kind of stuff. And I didn't actually care about the user's problems. And that's a huge long term problem
because you miss things, you don't understand what actually are there. Are there problems? Right? And so if your users are listening and they're thinking about what are the assets I can give my users, hopefully you are the customer Avatar. If not, hopefully it's someone near you. And the first kind of 50 should be like very obvious, right?
Joe: 00:54:18 Yeah. So I think in my example, I guess to give a little
perspective, right? So if it's like an agency that's working with roofing companies, right? They have their sops that they've built out internally, now they're, they're [inaudible], they want to make an approach like you to give away the 98%. Right? So they know, they know what's important, but ultimately to your, to your point, they don't really understand their avatar. Right, exactly. They are, they aren't their avatar. They figured out the system and process. They've figured out how to make the market work from a marketing standpoint. Right. But what would be their next steps to make sure that they picked link or the asset, so to speak, or they pick good assets that make sense to their avatar? You maybe interview the Avatar or what was your thoughts?
Tommy: 00:55:07 Yeah, that's an interesting one. So speaking of interviews, and
this is again another area where Eduardo, my cofounder just blew me out of the water on this cause I, I hated this process. He was, he was formerly a content marketer at teachable, the learning management system. And they were apparently incredible at really dialing in their customer Avatar to the point where to the point of insanity, I mean like so and when we went through this process, we, we got on the phone with these brutal phone calls with our users, 45 minutes per user and like 20,30 40 users. Right? And you just painstaking details down first, the demographic data, like how old are you? How much do you make a year? How much college education do you have? Are you married? Do you have kids? Where do you live?
Tommy: 00:55:55 And then like really getting into their, their personal life. Like what do you do on weekends? Like what are you doing? Like why, why do you live where you live? What do you do with friends? What are you doing at work? What are your problems? You can, I mean you can, there's all kinds of things you can Google around for, for, for customer interviews. But yeah I think, I think really hammering your customer Avatar and getting on the phone with them can be really helpful. This is, this is like a Dorky cliche kind of moment I had, but I was on the phone with, with an agency, one of our avatars, our, our, our customer consultants and agencies and I thought that the vast
majority of what we were doing was help agencies grow revenue, right. And like help agencies get more clients.
Tommy: 00:56:37 And I got on the phone with one guy who was a user and they had enrolled in a bunch of different seats for his team and the basic conclusion of the call was I signed up so I don't have to train more of my entry level employees because I want to spend more time with my son. And it just like blew my mind. Right. It was like it sounds Dorky and cheesy and like hallmark moment. What is true. Like, I thought we were doing these like very quantitative, like excel doc, like total addressable markets and know our product was helping this guy spend more time with his son. And it's kind of kind of interesting when you think of it that way. Right? But I would have never happened if I didn't go deep into his problem. So really the more Meta takeaway on there is speed. We're selling speed to that guy right now. Not necessarily the hallmark son moment, but, but we're selling speed. And that was actually counter intuitive to what I thought. I thought we were selling the process. I thought we were selling all this other stuff. It turns out he could have done it, but he didn't want to and we were telling him speed. So yeah, long, long answer to that question. I think getting on the phone with really deep, comprehensive interviews can be, can be very helpful.
Joe: 00:57:41 All right. Awesome. Fantastic. Yeah, good stuff. All right. So
we've talked a lot about systems, we've talked a lot about processes, we've talked a lot about automation and we're just about to hit the top of the hour. So I want to be mindful and respectful of your time. This has been an awesome interview. Are there any other automation tools or processes or systems that you found helpful? Maybe, maybe even not related to business.
Tommy: 00:58:07 Automation tools or processes? Unot even related to business.
Let me think here. Uyeah, just, you mean like kind of kind of life ,.
Joe: 00:58:21 Big, high level stuff? Yeah, zoom out for a second.
Tommy: 00:58:28 Yeah. I mean I've Dorky like Dorky, fun ones. This one of the
single biggest ones was, was laughing last pass from me. Like.
Joe: 00:58:38 We, we love dorky fun ones.
Tommy: 00:58:40 Okay. Uyeah, I mean, just,us like last pass, centralizing logins for
me was, oh, I will not ever admit to you how much time I spent
like requesting for God passwords and things like that. Right. Uso that was a massive one for me. Uuwhat are some other ones I had? Oh, just,ugeneral stuff around,uboomerang for Gmail and calendar reminders. Like, I, I, I'm, I'm a big inbox zero guy, which is,uyeah.
Tommy: 00:59:15 Yeah. So a lot of your audience probably is as well. But the basic
idea is like, your inbox should be treated as a to do list and every single email you act on, you either do it right away, find a time to do it later, give someone else it to do or deleted immediately. Right. And I'll put, I also do this with free family and friend stuff too. So like reminders to call mom, right? Like reminders for friends, birthdays. I really liked this idea and this is actually, again, a remeet safety idea around people in general are so lazy. And you can, I really love this idea of like, and he, he, he does it. He does it when you're negotiating a raise at work, he does it when you're negotiating or applying for a new job, the idea is like, Yep.
Tommy: 01:00:02 Things you can do that require up front effort that pay in spades for years to come. Right? So it's like, like setting up automations for your, your girlfriend's birthday for 10 years. Or like you said, again, not automating the gift, automating the reminder. Right? Like something like that or or yeah, in his example he says over prepare for your interview. Like really kill it. [inaudible] Or the 99% of people because that's going to pay your salary for five years. Right. Those, those kinds of things. So I really loved those like fixed costs one time investments up front that just pay forever. So yeah, like automating reminders, automating finances, these kind of one time things that that continued to pay back.
Joe: 01:00:52 Awesome man. All right, and last question. What's the one book
that as you look at your business today at quick minded has made the biggest direct impact on the way that you do business?
Tommy: 01:01:05 Ooh, actual business book or like kind of life philosophy book
Joe: 01:01:11 Wherever you can see a direct correlation in your business.
Right. So not like that book was good, but I never got anything from it. Right. Like it makes me happy, but nothing changed in my business. Right. Like that I feel like on podcasts, like that's kind of the takeaway for most people is like feel good books, but not so much. Did we get anything that directly correlated out the other side as a winner?
Tommy: 01:01:35 I s)ee. So in that case it's a, it's technically pitched as a course,
but it's just a text course. So I've called that a book. It's just text. Yep. On Andre Chaperon, autoresponder madness. Yeah. Have you familiar with, with him? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So we are our copies very much inspired by him. The basic idea is storytelling in your email marketing and the way he does it is incredible. The basic format is tell stories that are interesting, that are human and keep users wanting more. Every single email. All of our, all of our email marketing is designed around this and it was incredibly helpful as a, I guess as a book.
Joe: 01:02:16 Yeah, it definitely can see that it's a book. I mean, it's all text.
You're right. And I'd definitely read it like a good book, you know, picked it up and didn't drop it until it was done. So definitely a great, a great book. Thanks Andre. Alright, man. Any last thoughts? Or, or places I guess that we could link up? In the show notes for you that we can send people.
Tommy: 01:02:39 Yeah. And we're at click minded.com. I'm on Twitter, I'm at
Tommy Griffith. We just launched these, these free, they might be more intermediate, beginner, intermediate level, but we just launched these free digital marketing and SEO Strategy guides. We designed them like a retro eight bit Nintendo powers and yeah. Did you ever play like Nintendo or Super Nintendo in the 90s? Of course. Yeah. Did you ever get those like Nintendo power magazines that had like the cheat codes that get to the last level of Mario or anything like that? Yup. I mean it looks just like it [inaudible] right. Yeah. We tried to go for those. I was obsessed with these things as a kid. I cannot believe I didn't have a girlfriend. Right. But, but we designed these, these things to be like eight bit strategy guys. So you can, you can take them out the fruit.
Joe: 01:03:29 Yeah, man, they're awesome. Okay, great. Yeah, we'll link up to
those in the show notes as well. It, man, I just want to say thank you for all the time. I'm sure everybody's gonna love this interview. And we'll let you know once it goes live. Man, thanks so much.
Joe: 01:03:40 Sweet, Joe. Thanks a lot. Really appreciate it. All right, man.
Thanks so much. Have a good one. See Atomic. I'll see it. Yeah, take it easy.
Joe: 00:00:03 Hey guys, it's Joe Troyer and welcome back to another show
here at, show me the nuggets and I'm super excited today to be spending this interview with Tommy Griffith. For those of you guys that don't know Tommy he's the founder of click minded and and guys, my team did some digging and found that he previously worked with and did SEO with some crazy players like airbnb and paypal and he grew click minded from just kind of a, a little side project in business to earning over six figures. And I'm excited to have him on today and just kind of pick his brain. So what's up Tommy?
Tommy: 00:00:39 Joe, what's going on man? Thanks for having me on the show.
Joe: 00:00:42 Yeah, 100%. So before we dive deep into today's topic can you
give us a little bit of background on how you got started with click minded?
Tommy: 00:00:52 Yeah, sure. So my story started like, like a lot of internet
marketers by reading a four hour work week. And did you, are you familiar with four hour work week? And Tim Ferris, right. So, yeah, so most of your audience, probably most people listening probably know, but for the uninitiated, the four hour work week was a book written in what, 2007, maybe 2008 written by Tim Ferriss. And it was kind of the, some of the principles are probably a little out of date now, but the general theory behind is still pretty strong, which is like he kind of wrote this book that was the catalyst for a lot of people to build remote businesses and build Internet businesses and have remote teams and things like that. And I got really excited about this and I created my first info product. After reading his books I created a very dorky ebook and I wrote this ebook and tried to figure out how do I get this to the top of Google.
Tommy: 00:01:46 This was, this was before the exact match domain update. And
so I did the keyword research. You know, found my primary keyword, the really obnoxious story. I started a a fraternity in university with I know, I know I started a fraternity with a bunch of my friends in, in university. It started as like a joke and then by the time I left there was like a hundred guys in it. And so after I read four hour work week, opened up the keyword tool and there's like 1500 people a month searching for how to start a fraternity, right? So I bought how to start a fraternity.com wrote a dorky 60 page ebook on how to start a fraternity and you know, had the keyword in my domain and it got like one backlink and was ranking number two in like a week.
Tommy: 00:02:37 And I'm like, I'm a genius, right? Having not known, you know, later on the exact match, domain update, et cetera. I basically
got lucky got really excited about SEO, started a business with a friend of mine shortly after that failed miserably. I was one of these guys. I was very blessed and my parents paid for college and I graduated with no debt. And then I ended up putting myself into debt after college, borrowing money from family and friends. So I got interested in SEO and trying to work on this business, but it didn't work. It went really bad, really miserable. Came home like tail between my legs, knocking on the door like, hey mom, hey dad, can I have a spot on the couch again kind of thing. But it was just kind of right place, right time. And and paypal was hiring an SEO manager and I had been working on it for two years even though I'd failed miserably and ended up, I was 24 years old and ended up managing search engine optimization at, at, at paypal, which is kind of crazy.
Joe: 00:03:32 Yeah, that's crazy.
Tommy: 00:03:34 Yeah. And so a while I was at paypal, like I had incurred all this
debt from this side project. I've heard this business I was telling you about and that's, that was the genesis of, of click mind was I was like, okay, I have a job, I'm back, I'm back. I'm working at it, but how do I, how do I go after this debt that I put myself into? Right. And Click minded. It was probably like idea number 15. I tried a lot of different things, but it just ended up being the thing that worked. My boss had asked me to to teach an SEO course to my colleagues in marketing at paypal. It went pretty well and I ended up turning that into a physical in person teaching business. So like Saturday mornings would rent a coworking space in San Francisco, kind of nine to five, like all you can SEO, right?
Tommy: 00:04:21 So just like nerd out on search engines. Yeah. Entrepreneurs and marketers would come in and I would like sort of, we'd nerd out on title tags all day, right on a, on a Saturday. That particular business was actually a terrible business. It was just like, was not generating any revenue. It doesn't scale. It's like very, very manual. But that ended up being the right place right time with this online course kind of renaissance we're in now. So it was 2012 I was like this teaching offline, and then Udemy was suddenly had suddenly taken off. Are you familiar with, udemy online course marketplace?
New Speaker: 00:04:57 Yep. 100%.
Tommy: 00:04:58 Yeah. And so that was sort of the first phase. It's like turn this
offline course I had into an online course. And from there it grew. I kept working on it while managing SEO at paypal and Airbnb. And then two years ago I went full time on it.
Joe: 00:05:12 Okay, great. So these dropped a little nugget in there. You're
working at airbnb doing SEO as well, right?
Tommy: 00:05:19 Yeah, I agree that that's right. Yeah. So two years managing SEO
at paypal and then for years managing SEO at Airbnb.
Joe: 00:05:25 Okay, great. So were you around when Airbnb was like
implementing all their growth hack strategies? I mean, they were crazy, like the stuff that they were doing and coming up with you read the stories like man.
Tommy: 00:05:35 Yeah. So, so yeah, the, the growth team was the official growth
team was, was founded a few months before I got there. And was, was only one guy for awhile. Gustaf uh but, but the stories, the stories you're probably talking about are with Nate, the Co- Founder, I don't know what the, what the, what the official position from the company is on some of those things have people can go look, look for themselves. I can't speak to, to, to, to all those. But yeah, it was part of that or the early members of the growth team working specifically on, on SEO.
Joe: 00:06:14 Yeah. I mean, at that stage in a company, you can obviously be a
little more risk averse and you know, really go for it. You know, being the stage that they're at now probably shouldn't be making decisions like that, but crazy, crazy stories. So I've thought it was cool just sitting around and watching those moves happen. Yeah. And unfold.
Tommy: 00:06:32 So, yeah, I mean, it was, it was wild man. Like the first, I've told
a couple of people this, but like the first week I joined the company was subpoenaed for their data by the state of New York. And the last week I joined, I worked on a Superbowl ad and Beyonce was staying in an airbnb like it was, it was, it was wild. I mean, my friends didn't know what it was when I joined and everyone knew what it was after. There was probably a hundred something people when I joined and it was like 2,500 people when I, when I left. It was, it was pretty nuts.
New Speaker: 00:07:01 That's awesome. So [inaudible] so you stumbled into click
minded. It wasn't working, running workshops. So you took it to an online course. Did you end up using you to me or somebody like that? Or did you host it yourself from the beginning or tell us about that transition. What happened next?
Tommy: 00:07:18 Yeah, yeah, that's a really good question. And so I'm a huge online course nerd. I'm a massive fan of, of online courses. I think they're gonna, they can solve a lot of problems. I think
there's so much room in this for anyone that's interested in, in online learning. I think the graduate, to go on a little bit of a tangent, I think the graduate school system in this country is the most fraudulent fake bs thing that needs to be destroyed and it represents billions of dollars for entrepreneurs to take. All of it can be killed with online courses. The vast majority of it, maybe not the rocket scientists and the pediatricians, but, but the vast majority of it. But yeah. So yeah, started with udemy and then sort of transitioned to my own platforms. I've tried so many different learning management systems and the course has evolved a ton since we started. I started as a physical, in-person, offline SEO course and then online course just on SEO and now we teach we have seven different courses with a number of different instructors and we're kind of expanding from there. But the, yeah, but the online course sort of like the transition has been crazy because in 2012, it was not that easy to, to launch an online course. I don't know how familiar you are with the, with the space, right.
Joe: 00:08:41 But 100% very familiar. Yeah. It's not easy.
Tommy: 00:08:45 Yeah. Yeah, for sure. And it's become, it was certainly not easy
in 2012. It's become a little bit easier as time has gone on. But there was a, there was a lot a lot of pitfalls I had in getting that. I mean, every single wordpress learning management system, user credentials, you know, like uploading Wistia video and like encoding this stuff myself and you know, one wordpress developer changes, one plugin, it, everything breaks, shhh and i'ts just so bad. Yeah. So it was, it was very tough at the beginning.
Joe: 00:09:18 Yeah. 100%. Yeah. There, there's definitely a learning curve. But I think you're right that I think learning online learning can solve a lot of traditional education problems these days. And I keep pushing on my students who are, are a lot of agencies, right. And a lot of them were on very niche focused agency, so they're going after, you know, one vertical dentists, right. They're going after optometrists. And that's the way that they've been able to scale is by staying in one vertical and building the systems and processes and then just staying in their lane. Right. and, and not veering out of it, but I've been talking to a lot of them now with and pushing on them to really understand that they have a big opportunity, I think when it comes to online learning and why isn't their front end offering a course, right? Why isn't it a major ticket or a higher ticket course showing people the systems and processes that they've spent years building out and perfecting and tweaking. Why doesn't that become the front end? And
then the done for you is like an ultra premium.. You can double that business overnight
Tommy: 00:10:20 For sure. Absolutely. That's really interesting that you brought
that up. We actually just created a course for our users. It's free, but it is exactly that. We just expose our back end and just show like, Hey, we've been working on this for, for eight years now. Here's exactly how we do it. And we're getting feedback on it now. And people love it. People love it. So it's a really good point. That's awesome.
Joe: 00:10:41 So my team when doing research was, was, were looking
through your guys' stories and it said that you and your partner invested in some business automation and some systems and processes when the business was actually losing money. So what made you kind of make that decision? Where were you at mindset wise and tell us what was happening?
Tommy: 00:11:00 Yeah, so so the whole story was kind of wild. I was you know, I
was very hesitant, click minded ended up generating more revenue than my salary in the third year I was working on it, but I didn't end up leaving until like until like the fifth or sixth year. For a lot of people that sounds a little crazy, but I just kind of, I was in a situation where I really liked my job and I actually felt like fairly unaccomplished at that point, at the job. I want it to stay right. And so I ended up really growing it a lot. And I was one of these guys where this whole story of like you know, the digital nomad scene and all that, like I really took the bait on this one man. Like I, you know, I was, I was on Instagram way too much.
Tommy: 00:11:50 Like, you know, looking at the most beautiful people ever seen in my life in Bali or, you know, drinking coconuts, the laptop on the beach. And I, I tripped for this hard and one massive mistake I made, you know, I was, I still love my job and I was, I, you know, I have friends in San Francisco and I was, I was dating someone and all that, so I really didn't want to leave. But I was kinda over the city. I got really over the city of San Francisco. I really wanted to leave and leave the city. And so I was preparing my escape to like go abroad. And I did myself a huge disservice by taking too long to make the jump. Right. And I like, I was planning way too hard and my expectations for myself were bananas. Right.
Tommy: 00:12:37 I was looking at these, you know, these Instagram clowns with
the, with their filters on and like, like it just set my expectations. So insane. So when I finally left Airbnb, did four years there, I finally left Airbnb and I decided to expand the product. So we
were going to go from an SEO course to seven different types of digital marketing content, right? I wanted to go head to head with universities that are offering this stuff as a master's degree, coding bootcamps, engineering bootcamps, and anyone kind of offering this as a digital marketing training as a service. And like when I, when I did that, you know we, I went in and developed this entire curriculum, spent about 15, I wrote a blog post, kind of documenting all this the last two years. But with all the revenue numbers and stuff spend about $15,000 upgrading the whole course and filming all this new content.
Tommy: 00:13:29 And I arrived in Bali and it was miserable. Like I got there, I was robbed by the police on my first day. I got food poisoning. The, the, the footage we just filmed for all these new courses, it was raining really hard on the warehouse we rented. And so all the audio was shot. And so I'm like, I'm in bali. I had just been robbed. I was throwing up from food poisoning. I'm holding this external hard drive with like messed up audio that I thought was completely shot. And I'm just looking up at the sky just like, what am I doing? Like why am I here? Right. And and eventually started to recover. My expectations were a little wild. But one of the ways I recovered was by bringing on a cofounder very late into the game which was like a little bit controversial to a lot of people.
Tommy: 00:14:19 I was like four or five years into a business, we had hit six
figures. I was working, brought on a cofounder, a guy I had worked with before and who's absolutely amazing. But one of the things, so this is a very long winded answer to your question. One of the things he, he kind of recommended was we did this, this big launch. It worked really well. And then everything started to, to fail afterwards, right? Like traffic started to drop. We got hit with a bunch of refunds cause the, the product was in like a v-one. Just sort of everything went wrong. And we were at this crossroads where I wanted to fix much more trivial stuff like you know, the very kind of kind of micro optimizations like let's let's you know, let's make the checkout button red instead of green or these kinds of like sort of things.
Tommy: 00:15:05 And Eduardo, my now co-founder was very big into automating
things. And the, in the, the posts where I, or I read about this, I called it, I think I called it taking your vitamins while you're bleeding. And the, and the, the basic idea here was he actually had a much stronger vision for how the future would go than I had. Right? He was sort of our customer Avatar. He was, the guy clicked my to now it's a digital marketing training course for marketers and entrepreneurs and we could focus on very
specific digital marketing tutorials. So like very specific over the shoulder walkthroughs on how to launch an email marketing campaign and reduce 99% of errors or how to add the Google tag manager to a wordpress site. Right. Something like that. And so we made these investments in a lot of the automation, right? We knew our customer avatars, we really like drew them out very specifically. And we created a bunch of these flows for users. So what are all the checklists and templates and cheat sheets we can give them, what are the mini courses we can give them? Like how do we add a ton of free value to all of these avatars all at once. And it wasn't like the most intuitive thing in the world. It was a little bit risky, but within four months, five months, it really started to, to pay off.
Joe: 00:16:23 Gotcha. Gotcha. So completely different mindsets there. And
that's interesting obviously when you have a co founder, right? Like you're not the one just running and gunning anymore. So at that point, how long, I'm curious, did you have your cofounder?
Tommy: 00:16:38 Yeah. So so at Eduardo and I, it was a little bit different because
a Eduardo was like an apprentice sort of at first. So he was sort of working with me just to, just to learn. And then after six months he went off to work for a different company and then I basically wrote him back in and that was the moment in Thailand when I was throwing up in Bali and like miserable and like, you know, on the ropes I emailed them like, hey man, what are you doing? Because I'm in a huge mess right here and how you feeling. Right. but we had basically the idea was I, I told him the situation he helped it started to work on a bunch of stuff. And then the first launch we did, I just sat down and said, how you feeling about your job? How are you feeling about this? How do you feel about everything? Do you want to be the cofounder on this thing? Because I, I, you know, I think one of the, one of the things that was good at was I was pretty good at the first round, getting the product to like zero to the first six figures. He's much better at the operations, the long term customer Avatar stuff. Like a lot of the growing something that had just been started, right. And, and ended up working way.
Joe: 00:17:50 So how did you find Eduardo?
Tommy: 00:17:54 Yeah, so this actually is you talking about nuggets. I can give you
a nugget here. I was, I taught at a and this is part of why I'm so grumpy about, about graduate school, but I taught at a university in San Francisco for four years. I taught a summer elective while I was working at at Airbnb and it was a it digital marketing elective for, for master's degree students. And at the end of every at the end of every elective, I would offer up an
apprenticeship to one, one student to one university student. I highly recommend finding a university. And specifically, I don't know why this is, this is going to sound a little bit strange, but I found that that like foreigners and immigrants and, and MBA and people have second generation families have this like work ethic that is, I say this is like a sixth generation American that's just way more nose to the grind than regular than Americans, right. Something happens. I say this as a, as a, as an American, something happens. It's that like immigrant hustle, right? And this, this was an international university. And yeah, I highly recommend finding your apprentice at a at a university that had a lot of international students because for whatever reason there's like a natural natural hunger there that really, really worked for me.
Joe: 00:19:26 Yeah. So there's a, there's a guy called Bedros Keuilian, Have
you heard that name.
Tommy: 00:19:31 No, I haven't.
Joe: 00:19:32 So he's a bestselling author. You just came out with a book. It's
called man up. Definitely a fantastic book, but he calls it the immigrant edge because he's an immigrant and a lot of people that he hired or that he interviews and that he has do trainings with him are, are immigrants and he's found the same kind of the same thing. So it's interesting that you [inaudible]
Tommy: 00:19:54 That's fascinating. It's someone else's started to figure this out too. Yes. It's a first and second generation something about it. It's like this, this hunger and a, and something, something happens after the, after the third generation were, you know, people were eating too much ice cream and watching too much Netflix or something like that. I don't know. I don't know what's going on, yeah, exactly. Exactly. Exactly.
Joe: 00:20:18 All right. So how, how would, how would you advise somebody
like me, right, that didn't have your background. Right. Find somebody then for example, right. Like I'm not teaching, right, so get them from an international school. I get that. But how would you approach that if you were in my shoes? I'm curious and you had to Redo that.
Tommy: 00:20:38 That's interesting. I mean one other way, cause I actually, I
actually did acquire some apprentices before I was teaching there was speaking at the universities, right. So finding different electives and courses where you have relevant overlap and being willing to, if you can go in and speak, that's, that's best. But another way to do it would be would be just emailing them
and letting the professor emailing the professor and letting them know, hey, we have this, this this opportunity. Another way, a kinda , interesting back doorway was, and this was this really, I bootstrapped my entire business off of this meetup.com .meetup.com I think is one of the most underrated ways to, to just start a side project for a number of reasons. And my first hundred users came from, from meetup.com. The biggest reason I think is that Internet marketers hate leaving their basement.
Tommy: 00:21:35 Like Internet marketers would much rather send 10,000 emails
than pick up the phone once. Right. And I ended up starting this, the San Francisco SEO meetup in 2011. Umeetup.com does, and this is still the case today. They still, they do all the work for you. So you create the topic, they email everyone in the city that's interested in that topic. And then you can have, this is the single fastest way to bootstrap an email list. You can easily get your first hundred emails through through meetup. Ubut I also ended up hosting these meetups and found one. Uone student who was, he was started in internet marketing, like interest group at the university. I found him and every time I did a meetup, I would send it to him and he would blast that to his people and all the, all the college kids would would show up. So that's kind of another interesting way to do it is using meetup to get those university students into the door.
Joe: 00:22:32 Love it. Yeah, those are three, three great takeaways. Just to
recap for everybody. So finding an apprentice through speaking at universities, emailing the professor or running the meetups and then trying to get somebody from the university right. To, to help promote the meetup. Yeah, that's fantastic. That's exactly, that's, and again, right. Show me the nuggets man. That's it.
Tommy: 00:22:51 There the nuggets. There they are,.
Joe: 00:22:53 There are the nuggets. All right, good stuff. So let's let's get back
to automation. What, what were the first things that you and Edwardo really decided to kind of prioritize and think about in terms of automation?
Tommy: 00:23:09 Yeah, so the biggest help for us here was actually the the
transitioning everything over to drip and Brennan Dunn has a, not sure if you're familiar with him, but yeah, he's really got a he has this drip mastery course that really lays out how you can automate everything. What he, there's been actually, everyone's gotten to be frank, pretty grumpy with drip the last year. They've had some problems, they have some problems
with pricing and some outages and things like that. And it looks like there's other tools like convert kit that are starting to roll out a lot of these features. So whether or not drip is going to be the Goto source going forward, I'm not sure. But the basic concept is finding a sort of centralized CRM to to, to make sure all your workflows exist in one place and laying out first of all being really rock solid on your customer avatars and then laying out journeys for them.
Tommy: 00:24:07 So just to rattle off a bunch of tools, if you want to go into the
weeds on this. Yeah, drip has sort of where we centralize all of our, all of our a users, right? We have three customer avatars entrepreneurs in house marketers at, at larger companies and consultants or agencies that want to train up their teams. And we have seven different topics, right? SEO, paid ads, content marketing, social media, email marketing, Google analytics and sales funnels. And so you could be any one of these combinations. You can be right, a consultant or an agency interested in content marketing or an entrepreneur interested in SEO. And we sort of have journeys for all these, right? And so we're using yeah, are, we're using wordpress as our, as our core sites, teachable installed on a sub domain is our learning management system.
Tommy: 00:24:58 Drip is the back end that manages everything. Zapier is the duct
tape that duct taped everything together. Yeah. And we, we also got a lot of, a lot of mileage out of mini courses. So the basic idea is every course is like four to six hours long. We use world-class experts that do this stuff every day, right? So our social media course is taught by the former head of social media at Airbnb. The content marketing course is taught by the content strategist from Lyft, but we we we allow roughly 30 minutes to an hour of the course to be like viewed as a mini course. The way we do it is we, when you enroll, we say, okay, hey, you're enrolled in this mini chorus. You have seven days to complete it. If you were, if you and we update these mini courses in the future, they have templates and cheat sheets.
Tommy: 00:25:53 We keep them up to date. If you complete it in seven days, you
get lifetime access to it. You'll get all the updates as, as things go on, you'll have access to it forever. If you don't, we rescind your access and you'll never get it again. And this has been a very powerful carrot for us because people do it. They have seven days to complete a 30 minute course. It's fairly reasonable. But, but if they're not, and we're pretty strict about it. And so if they, if they're not in, that's fine, but they'll lose access. But if they actually want to commit and do it of course they complete it. They get about 30 minutes of the product and
then we give them an offer shortly after. And of course the conversion rate increases significantly. They've seen 30 minutes of the product, they've seen 30 minutes of the teacher. They're much more comfortable with it. And, and so we found that to be very powerful is not only do you give them a preview of the product, but also you force them to complete it by, by, by taking it away. If they don't write that, then that's worked for us.
Joe: 00:26:53 Yeah, that's, that's great. It's, it's forced consumption. Right. So people do that these days, but I don't think they do it quite like you. I see a lot of people doing like challenges, right. To force consumption, right? So they get somebody to pay seven bucks or something for a challenge so that they're committed. And then you look at the consumption and like the, the success rate of the people during that challenge. And it's really, really high because everybody's on board at one time to do one thing. So that's really interesting. I've never thought of doing that for a course.
Tommy: 00:27:25 Yeah. Yeah. And it's worked for us. The, the there's just too, it's
just too easy to, people are just want bombarded with free offers for everything. Right. And and we saw a lot of value. Like, Hey, if you're actually serious about this, that's fine. It's free, but you have to finish it in a week. And if anyone who's actually serious about it could finish it in a week. And if you're not, that's fine too. You can go, but just half an hour. Right? I mean, it's happened, it's a half an hour over seven days. Yeah. Okay. But it's just enough to get them to commit. Right? And so it's just a very clear like, do you want to do this or not? Yes or no. Like complete it in seven days.
Joe: 00:28:07 That's great. So I'm sure you find a lot more people consuming
your content and getting involved and then you're ultimately converting more cold traffic into customers at the end of the day.
Joe: 00:28:19 Yeah, exactly. So yeah, our, our model is pretty standard. I
mean, all of our blog posts and youtube videos and things like that are the top of funnel things. We have almost always have a custom content upgrade or lead magnet for each one of those pieces of content. We know that the topic type based on that, right? So we have a bunch of content about SEO, a bunch of content about email marketing, right? We, we have templates and cheat sheets and, and downloadables associated with those. And then,uonce you grab the email address there, we're pushing the user into the mini course so we know what they're topically interested in. And then whenever we get them to
commit to the mini course,uthey have seven days to complete it from there.
Joe: 00:28:58 If so, I'm curious in that funnel, I'm curious about funnel. It
makes a whole lot of sense. How do you tie in though the three different avatars? So you brought up the three avatars. Where are you tagging that or where are you, where, where are you getting them to self identify when they take the course or,
Tommy: 00:29:15 Yeah, this is a great question. So we're, we're using, it's also
Brendan Dunn's tool, right message. I Dunno if you're familiar with this. Yeah, it's very, very cool tool. The basic idea is you can give people a simple prompt either a little nag on the bottom right hand of the screen or, and the welcome email and you just get them to self identify. You just get them to say who are you, why are you here? One of one of these three options. And what's amazing about right message is it's basically, it's basically a container you can use on the site to change out copy based on the Avatar. Right? So you know, if the headline, the headline well we'll take a headline and it'll be massively grow your agency if they're an agency or consultants or I, it's you know train up your team if you're an in house marketer or, or, or, or something like that.
Tommy: 00:30:10 So that's really helpful. The other piece of it that's really helpful as well is once we know who you are in our CRM, which is drip, we don't show them the same CTA, which is really helpful. So for example, if they're on a top of funnel page and they're not a user, we give them a lead magnet, but if they're on a top of funnel page and we already have their email, will that, that CTA changes from the lead magnet to start the mini course, right? And so there's kind of no wasted space. It's like you, you, you cut up your site based on here are the calls to action, right? And kind of where are they, who are they and where are they in the funnel? And you can just sort of swap all of those out. So it's an incredibly efficient way to do it. You centralize all your copy and all your calls to action in one place and then you just rotate them out. And the conversion rates are just bananas on all of these because they're so targeted. You know what I mean?
Joe: 00:31:05 So the CTA is are targeted, but the sales pages, I'm guessing
probably aren't so much maybe, right. Or have you went through the kind of 10th degree and customized every sales page addressing, you know them as the three avatars and followup sequences for the three avatars or where have you kind of drawn the line because you could go down that path, right? Like
Tommy: 00:31:26 You, you are Joe, you're 10 steps ahead of me on this one, man. Yeah, you can you can. If you want it to go nuts with this. That's what's really cool about right messages. You could go nuts with it. We have a little bit too many, too many permutations to do that right now. So we just went for the big ones, which is like the big headline and the big call to action on each page and saw a massive lift from there. The next phase is probably, yeah, each individual bullet point, like based on each customer Avatar. But there's just other kinds of bigger, bigger things for us right now, but we're just going for the big ones to start.
Joe: 00:31:59 Okay. So the big thing, the big wins so far have been automation and the trial's kind of forcing consumption, getting people to, to go through it and get some value out of it and then hitting them with an offer or you doing like are you hitting them with like a kind of a three day sale and a discount on the course or something at that point to try to get everybody to take an action or how do you go from, you just went through the mini course to the full course? What's that look like?
Tommy: 00:32:26 Yeah, that, that, that's exactly it. And we're playing with a bunch
of stuff all the time. So if would, if you go to check out the site, you might get different things all the time. All the time. But yeah, the basic idea is preview the product. Then once you have, we'll give you some type of discount in order to enroll. Right. And then once you enroll in that individual product, we say, hey, did you like this? By the way, there's, there's six more other courses over here are these interesting too. Right. And just kind of continue to to, to push more, more content.
Joe: 00:32:55 Gotcha. Have you tried putting like a hard stop with that
urgency and scarcity so to speak? Like you're only give seven days, right? For the mini course? Do you do the same? Are you like release really harsh about the upgrade then too?
Tommy: 00:33:07 Yeah, exactly. Sorry, I forgot to mention that. Yes. Anytime we
offer a discount or a sale or you are 10 steps ahead of me, man, anytime we offer a discount or anything like that, that is the beauty of, of using drip. And we also use thrive ultimatum is, is we, yeah, every offer actually is a hard stop. So users are getting them at custom times but they really actually do get locked out. Right. So that's been the key is unfortunately you have to be a jerk to some people, but it doesn't work if everyone knows you're soft on it. Right. And so like, we really do have to lock people out when we do it. So yeah, they, they, they'll complete the mini course and then they'll have a 24 hour window to, to enroll at a at a discount.
Joe: 00:33:53 Awesome. Awesome man. Any other big things in terms of
automation and that's, that's great. Great takeaways. And those are some good nuggets, man.
Tommy: 00:34:01 Yeah, let me think. We have, I mean, just in general, like we're
obsessed with SOPs which stands for standard operating procedure. For the uninitiated, it's just a fancy way to say like a really comprehensive checklist. And we actually
Joe: 00:34:17 A really fancy way to say we don't reinvent the wheel every
single time.
Tommy: 00:34:22 Right? Exactly. Exactly. And this was all a Duarte. Eduardo is like
the process guy. And I'm like the idiot that gets on the microphone and just like sings in dance like, like a monkey. Right? You know what I mean? But, but we, we wanted a product for ourselves to do this. We started creating SOPs for ourselves and then we turned it into a product. So we have a product called the SOP library. It's just this archive of digital marketing, SOPs and it's a product for our users. They can brand them, use them for clients and things like that. But we we use these all the time in our business and we are just crazy about the two best books for this are I don't know if you're familiar with work, the system this is a book about SOP es and then the myth is kind of a similar one, but just for just adding a process around everything.
Tommy: 00:35:09 So we got a ton of mileage out of things like in helpscout when
we get tickets email templates, right? Like we almost never write a personal email unless it's absolutely required. It's like a user asking a specific question, but if we ever think we're going to get a question twice, it's a template. And so those are like quasi automations. The, the basic idea is like the, the whole company mindset is like, try and never do something twice ever. And it's brutal at the beginning. It's so annoying at the beginning. It's so painful at the beginning. And then like within six months, it's like the greatest possible thing you could ever do. It ends up being very valuable.
Joe: 00:35:49 Oh, 100%. 100%. Alright, cool. So any thoughts or pushback on
things maybe that you think shouldn't be automated? Right. Anything that maybe you've tried, failed or things you just like, yeah, we, we're gonna leave that as is
Tommy: 00:36:05 Interesting. What are we not automating here? Yeah. I mean, I
still do when people have personal questions, I answer and I usually answer within, within 30 minutes. And it's not because of a policy or anything like that, I'm just, I'm just a nerd that's
always on my, my phone or my laptop. And people do sit like, think like, oh my God, how did you reply so, so quickly. So that has been cool. There's kind of a personal touch too, whenever it's absolutely necessary.
Joe: 00:36:38 So if it doesn't, if one of the rules or triggers don't grab it or somebody else doesn't respond, comes to you and you just knock it out real quick.
Tommy: 00:36:45 Yeah. Knock it out. And and I just have fun with it too because
like r w you know, we like our users and like we understand a lot of their problems and sometimes it's fun to like poke fun of them and like just treat them like you're, you're their best friend and they like, they kinda can't believe in it. Right. But that you're getting that, that personal touch. So that was sort of cool. And yeah, I can't really think of too many when we try and automate as much as as we can.
Joe: 00:37:11 Okay. Yeah, no worries. Yeah. I mean tell us about your internal tool called the ring. Yeah. What them, what that, what the heck is the ring?
Tommy: 00:37:24 Yes. It's basically just what I was describing just now. The, yeah,
the ring. And yet I have a, a blog post. Maybe we can link up in the show notes that describes like the last two years, but it's just this automation flow around in drip, kind of inspired by Brennan Dunn's drip, drip mastery course. But yeah, the basic idea is we know what you're interested in and who you are when you opt in. And every the, the idea is the, the total possibility. Like the idea is we've created all these sort of flows for users, but it almost never runs out, right? So let's say you know, you're, you Google like you know, social media content calendar template and you come to our site, we're ranking in Google and you want the template from us. We know you're interested in social media and we'll hammer you with a ton of value over a few weeks and try and get you into the mini course.
Tommy: 00:38:21 And let's say you take the mini course and everything and you get the offer, but you don't enroll will actually drop you out of that flow. Yup. And take you back to the top. It's like a circle, right? That's why it's called the ring. We take you back to the top and then we'll test other types of content, whether or not you're interested in w a email marketing overview. All right. Google analytics overview, something like that. And when you take the bait, when you click one, that triggers off a whole automations, like you've shown interest in it and you'll go down the sequence again, value, value, value, value mini course offer.
And if you don't take it, you go back up and we start prodding again and kind of testing again. So we'll get your email address and you may be interested in one particular topic, but we'll keep testing different topics on you for, I think our maximum now is almost a year right with, with, with all the, all the flows we have. So, so we, we, we basically had to create like 50 or so , pieces of really great content, but they're all positioned in a way where they're part of, everything's part of a part of a flow.
Joe: 00:39:25 Okay. And so you said there's a bunch of this on the, on the blog
too. We'll link up to this in the, in the show notes for the ring, right?
Tommy: 00:39:32 Yep, Yep, sure. I can include a link to that. Yep.
Joe: 00:39:35 Okay, cool. And then is this something that you teach more in
depth with your SOPs and everything inside of one of your courses too?
Tommy: 00:39:43 Yup, Yup. We have all that in there as well. The other piece too that a lot of people are interested in is [inaudible] and a bunch of people do this now, but we got really good at being really efficient with content. We create. I know you had a guest, a guest on that, talked about this as well on your show. But yeah, so like we would create an Sop, right on a particular topic and either we wanted it or it had search volume or something like that. And then I would create a youtube video explaining that sop and I would go through step by step on how to do that, right? And then we would transcribe that youtube video with a service like rev.com, right? So transcribe everything and then we would take that transcription and turn it into a blog post, right? And so that would be a blog post with the youtube video embedded on the top.
Tommy: 00:40:28 Then we take that blog post and turn it into an email, right? And
so that becomes an an email, right? So we have one sop that gets so much mileage, it's part of our sop library, and then it's a youtube video that ranks, and then it's a blog post that ranks, and then it's an email that push us into the mini course. Right. And so a lot of people, like, they're just not as thoughtful about their content marketing plan. Right. And it's just like they, they get out of the shower and they're like, I'm going to write about, you know, Vegan donuts today or whatever, whatever it is. But if you're just a little bit more thoughtful up front you can get so much mileage out of one piece of content and it's ended up being really valuable for us.
Joe: 00:41:11 So how long does it take you to create an sop? Right. And then
do your video. So for me it takes me a long time to create a process. Right? So like the, I know for me that's been one of my bottlenecks is I throw out a lot of content, but most of my stuff is more off the cuff, kind of let me build something for you on the fly based upon user's request. So I'm getting things that they want and need, which end up having search volume. But I'm starting that way and just kind of on the spot. Like I'll get on an ama and I'll unmute the person and I'll work out a system on the fly just because it's easier for me. Then starting from scratch, I feel like with no deadline, like it would take me a month. Right? Like I would just wait time on it. Like lots on that I guess or how, how, how should my mindset change?
Tommy: 00:41:59 Yeah, you're 100% right. I am wired the exact same way as you
and I yeah. So like individual requests and exceptions and things like that. Yes. Like, like a user asked for it and then another user asks for it and then another user asks for, it's like, let's do it right now. Right. Like I get that urgency and things like that. But we had a ton of success around basically having like contents sprints, so yep. Not kind of always doing it, but setting aside time where like, okay, these two weeks everyone stopped doing everything and we're going to blast out 55 sops. And they do, they take a really, really, really long time. Our slps, the Sh, the smallest ones are probably five pages and the longest ones are probably 35 pages. I mean 30 like they're, they're very, very long. We keep screenshots updated and things like that, they take a long time to do well. But until you can't, yeah. If you just do them and you're constantly doing them and you don't have a deadline, I agree with you. It doesn't work. So we sat down, it's like two weeks. Who's doing the SOPs? Who's doing the filming? Who's doing the editing? Who's doing the, the, the rev.com stuff. Right. And it's like everyone has to do it. You sprint, you do it. It feels like you just gave birth to a child and then you move on. Right. That's kind of how we do it.
Joe: 00:43:16 Okay. Yeah, man, that's crazy. Two weeks, 55 SOPs man, that's,
that's nuts. Crazy. Yeah. But yeah, I mean if that's all that you think about, you block out all the noise, obviously one big sprint, like you said. That makes a whole lot of sense. And then you've got your content calendar and your email calendar filled for, you know, a good, a good amount of time, obviously.
Tommy: 00:43:38 Yeah. It depends on your business, but if you're really diligent
and put in the extra effort about keyword research up front, and then you have set, you, you allocate a time to be like a content sprint and you really have your, your plan down, even if you, you're going to fumble of course at the beginning, but you
really can like front load all the work and it just plays beautifully for, for, for a year or two, right? I mean it depends on your, your business, but it can really it'd be very helpful for future planning.
Joe: 00:44:06 100%. So where do you draw the line on free content and paid
content? I know as like a user, as a user, somebody watching this, if they could chat in right now, they'd be like, yeah, where is that line? It sounds like there isn't one, right? Like that's getting beat, but where do you draw that line?
Tommy: 00:44:23 Yeah, there's a really good question. I love, are you familiar with
Ramit Sethi I will teach you to be rich. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I love this guy. First of all, he's an amazing, like personal finance guy, but he's, I think he's sneaky, very sneakily or maybe not so sneakily now one of the best internet marketers in the world. I mean, he's incredible. Very, very good copywriting, psychology, all this kind of stuff. But we, we've, I love his model, which is, I don't know if he's still says this, but he said it a while ago, which is like 98% of everything I do is free. And then the 2% is for the paid products and like the people who want the results kind of faster, right? And that, that's the way we do it as well. Probably 90, 95% of everything we create as free content tutorials, walkthroughs, emails, templates, checklists, cheat sheets, and mini courses.
Tommy: 00:45:15 And our basic model is yet all this stuff is free. There's a lot of
tire kickers, a lot of people that don't enroll, of course. And and we say, but if you want the results faster, or if you're trying to train up a whole team go for the paid product. And we, and our model is unlimited lifetime access and free updates for life. So it's one time fee and then anytime we push updates to the course, you get those forever. So some people appreciate that they don't want to keep up to date on their own. They want us to keep their sops up to date. Right. And so what one time fee for one user. They love it. I, I've also found that to be frank it's usually the noobs that are really protective of their content. Like they think they have a secret and they think that they've got a monetize that secret. Right. And the reality is you're probably not the first person to think of whatever you're, you've, you've thought of and it's way more about building your audience and solving your customer's problems. Right? So we got a lot more mileage out of giving most of it away for free and saying, by the way, for those that are interested, the paid product, which you can get the results faster or, or train multiple people is over here and we just got a lot more mileage out of it that way.
Joe: 00:46:26 Yeah. That makes a whole lot of sense. For sure.
Tommy: 00:46:29 How do you deal with that? Like do you, do you have a line
between free and paid? Like,
Joe: 00:46:34 Yeah, so my line is between free and paid is I have daily content
at the moment, so we're doing a lot of content between podcasts and then I do a weekly Ama and then that content gets split up into multiple pieces right for the week then, and it gets scheduled ahead and kind of random. So right now, like we're probably, I don't know, 120, even 150 days out on content. And that's what daily content. So it's the, it's the same kind of process though, rev though, ultimately, and blog posts. And the difference is I'm not putting as much thought in so to speak beforehand. So I run a Webinar for an hour and that's my content and I get on an hour before and plan through what I'm going to talk about at least high level. I outline it out and it gives my brain enough time to kind of think through it.
Joe: 00:47:24 So then like I'm really good then on the fly, like building it out.
And I know that it's just two hours a week for me and I've automated my content. But to be honest, it's not, your content is at a completely different level because it's sop, doubt, you know what I mean? It's, it's processes and systems instead of here's how I would handle this unique situation I get, I get a lot more low hanging fruit traffic. Right. But I don't get the I don't get the big traffic so to speak. Uis the big gap that I see between mine and yours.
Tommy: 00:47:58 Got It. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. And it's not, it's not one
size fits all either. Right. I mean it sounds like it's, even though like there are differences in that, it sounds like it's still fairly low time investment on your side, which that seems like a great return on your time, right?
Joe: 00:48:14 Yeah, 100%. What, what do you think are like the, I'm curious
from your point of view, because you work with these different avatars, what do you think are like the core four, the core five, what are the main sops that it seems like everybody's after or potentially if you think it's wrong, should be after, right. That you guys have, like what are the, what are the big things? And I think that'll probably shock people.
Tommy: 00:48:39 Interesting. You mean like which sop, I'm just pulling up, pulling
it up now. Most of them.
Joe: 00:48:45 What gets the most views? What gets the most shares? Like and
then do you think that that is actually the most important or do you think that it's just like chocolate, vegetables? It's what
everybody's after, but it's not, it's not the, it's not the thing that they really need.
Tommy: 00:49:01 Interesting. Yeah. Well I'm just looking at, yeah, yeah. No, no,
no, not at all. I'm just, yeah, we're just refreshing cause we are, we're now up to, yeah, we have 75 sops and growing all the time. And we get requests for them as well. Yeah. I mean, yeah, you know what the, there, there are definitely sexy ones versus ones that are that are eating your vegetables. So sexy ones are always around social media and content. Yep. So should, we can get content calendar right? And content, content planning and a lot of stuff, which is important. But the, I guess the, the, the big dirty secret is that the sexiest ones are pretty simple. I mean, you could, like, you can use our sop I like, we're very happy with our templates and our checklist in our cheat sheets, but you could also just open up a Google sheet and like, say like, January, February, March, and that'd be the 80 20.
Tommy: 00:49:56 Right. You know what I mean? So those are the, those are the
very like the sexiest ones are usually the most simple. The, the, the, the, the boring ones are the ones that, that save your ass, right? So it's things like how to exclude certain types of traffic and Google analytics, right? Or like setting up conversion events in, in Google analytics, right. Verifying that you're tracking subdomains correctly in Google analytics like that, like, that's so boring. No one cares about that. But if you get that wrong and you have crossed out sub domain tracking, you're done, right. You're done. And so those are the ones that are like everyone just, it's Kinda like potholes on the highway. Like you're never, like, you're never, you're never grateful that there's no potholes, but you're always super pissed when there are. Right. It's just like they kinda infrastructure ones that no, everyone just expects it to work. But they don't, they don't have any plan in place to get it to work. We're the ones who give, who provide the infrastructure to our users to, to get it to work. And it's just, it's very kind of it's all the ungrateful work, but it's, it's super important. You know what I mean?
Joe: 00:51:07 Yeah, yeah. For sure. So I'm curious for you, as you do your
research, I'm sure you're looking at like, what's a good link worthy asset, right? That people would want to link to? What, what are some other criteria that help you identify what kind SOPs right would be worth building? Like what goes through your, you and your team's mindset?
Tommy: 00:51:28 Yeah. So are, are you talking in terms of talking of like for your audience that's listening, how they should create their sops or
in terms of just running a business and how you create link where the assets are or what do you mean?
Joe: 00:51:39 Yeah, I think the combination of both, right? If they want to take
kind of your model and apply it to their roofing marketing business and start creating some, some sops that they're going to give out and they're going to give away for free. Like how, how, what should their criteria be? Right? How should they go about deciding if it's a good sop or not. Right? And if it's a good potential linkable asset or not. Like, what are your thoughts? Obviously you guys have just done this to a level that I've never seen quite done before. Right? And just like, that's a lot of output. 75 sops you keep updated. Like that's a lot.
Tommy: 00:52:16 Yeah. Thanks. And we're super excited about it.
New Speaker: 00:52:18 I've probably given out a dozen and it's hard for us to keep them
updated. Right?
Tommy: 00:52:23 Yeah, yeah, yeah. And especially in, in internet marketing,
there's just so many platforms and systems that have to communicate to each other now and it continues to grow. So 10 used to be a problem. Right? my, yeah, my answer to this is, is very annoying and Meta, which is that that like, I think taking a step back and going back to the customer avatars solves so many of these problems, right? Like it's just such a trope now and when you're building a business and startups and everything around dogfooding and being your own customer and things like that, but it's so true. And the thing is, is like we, we were our own customer, right? Like I've been doing search engine optimization for 10 years. I haven't already clickminded on it for awhile. I'm obsessed with digital marketing and I love digital marketing.
Tommy: 00:53:09 And so when we went to go create our Sop library, it was
incredibly obvious, but the first 55 should have been, right. And so if users are sitting here listening, okay, like what are the assets I can give to my customer base? Being your own customer is incredibly important. If you're not your own customer, making sure someone arms length from you is a customer is also important. Whether that's a co founder, a spouse, a best friend, a roommate, but someone who who, who you are solving this problem for. This is such a huge problem I had with other businesses. I try and start. It was, I had no idea what the actual problems were of my customers. Like I was, I was more obsessed with the market size and the revenue and the money and that kind of stuff. And I didn't actually care about the user's problems. And that's a huge long term problem
because you miss things, you don't understand what actually are there. Are there problems? Right? And so if your users are listening and they're thinking about what are the assets I can give my users, hopefully you are the customer Avatar. If not, hopefully it's someone near you. And the first kind of 50 should be like very obvious, right?
Joe: 00:54:18 Yeah. So I think in my example, I guess to give a little
perspective, right? So if it's like an agency that's working with roofing companies, right? They have their sops that they've built out internally, now they're, they're [inaudible], they want to make an approach like you to give away the 98%. Right? So they know, they know what's important, but ultimately to your, to your point, they don't really understand their avatar. Right, exactly. They are, they aren't their avatar. They figured out the system and process. They've figured out how to make the market work from a marketing standpoint. Right. But what would be their next steps to make sure that they picked link or the asset, so to speak, or they pick good assets that make sense to their avatar? You maybe interview the Avatar or what was your thoughts?
Tommy: 00:55:07 Yeah, that's an interesting one. So speaking of interviews, and
this is again another area where Eduardo, my cofounder just blew me out of the water on this cause I, I hated this process. He was, he was formerly a content marketer at teachable, the learning management system. And they were apparently incredible at really dialing in their customer Avatar to the point where to the point of insanity, I mean like so and when we went through this process, we, we got on the phone with these brutal phone calls with our users, 45 minutes per user and like 20,30 40 users. Right? And you just painstaking details down first, the demographic data, like how old are you? How much do you make a year? How much college education do you have? Are you married? Do you have kids? Where do you live?
Tommy: 00:55:55 And then like really getting into their, their personal life. Like what do you do on weekends? Like what are you doing? Like why, why do you live where you live? What do you do with friends? What are you doing at work? What are your problems? You can, I mean you can, there's all kinds of things you can Google around for, for, for customer interviews. But yeah I think, I think really hammering your customer Avatar and getting on the phone with them can be really helpful. This is, this is like a Dorky cliche kind of moment I had, but I was on the phone with, with an agency, one of our avatars, our, our, our customer consultants and agencies and I thought that the vast
majority of what we were doing was help agencies grow revenue, right. And like help agencies get more clients.
Tommy: 00:56:37 And I got on the phone with one guy who was a user and they had enrolled in a bunch of different seats for his team and the basic conclusion of the call was I signed up so I don't have to train more of my entry level employees because I want to spend more time with my son. And it just like blew my mind. Right. It was like it sounds Dorky and cheesy and like hallmark moment. What is true. Like, I thought we were doing these like very quantitative, like excel doc, like total addressable markets and know our product was helping this guy spend more time with his son. And it's kind of kind of interesting when you think of it that way. Right? But I would have never happened if I didn't go deep into his problem. So really the more Meta takeaway on there is speed. We're selling speed to that guy right now. Not necessarily the hallmark son moment, but, but we're selling speed. And that was actually counter intuitive to what I thought. I thought we were selling the process. I thought we were selling all this other stuff. It turns out he could have done it, but he didn't want to and we were telling him speed. So yeah, long, long answer to that question. I think getting on the phone with really deep, comprehensive interviews can be, can be very helpful.
Joe: 00:57:41 All right. Awesome. Fantastic. Yeah, good stuff. All right. So
we've talked a lot about systems, we've talked a lot about processes, we've talked a lot about automation and we're just about to hit the top of the hour. So I want to be mindful and respectful of your time. This has been an awesome interview. Are there any other automation tools or processes or systems that you found helpful? Maybe, maybe even not related to business.
Tommy: 00:58:07 Automation tools or processes? Unot even related to business.
Let me think here. Uyeah, just, you mean like kind of kind of life ,.
Joe: 00:58:21 Big, high level stuff? Yeah, zoom out for a second.
Tommy: 00:58:28 Yeah. I mean I've Dorky like Dorky, fun ones. This one of the
single biggest ones was, was laughing last pass from me. Like.
Joe: 00:58:38 We, we love dorky fun ones.
Tommy: 00:58:40 Okay. Uyeah, I mean, just,us like last pass, centralizing logins for
me was, oh, I will not ever admit to you how much time I spent
like requesting for God passwords and things like that. Right. Uso that was a massive one for me. Uuwhat are some other ones I had? Oh, just,ugeneral stuff around,uboomerang for Gmail and calendar reminders. Like, I, I, I'm, I'm a big inbox zero guy, which is,uyeah.
Tommy: 00:59:15 Yeah. So a lot of your audience probably is as well. But the basic
idea is like, your inbox should be treated as a to do list and every single email you act on, you either do it right away, find a time to do it later, give someone else it to do or deleted immediately. Right. And I'll put, I also do this with free family and friend stuff too. So like reminders to call mom, right? Like reminders for friends, birthdays. I really liked this idea and this is actually, again, a remeet safety idea around people in general are so lazy. And you can, I really love this idea of like, and he, he, he does it. He does it when you're negotiating a raise at work, he does it when you're negotiating or applying for a new job, the idea is like, Yep.
Tommy: 01:00:02 Things you can do that require up front effort that pay in spades for years to come. Right? So it's like, like setting up automations for your, your girlfriend's birthday for 10 years. Or like you said, again, not automating the gift, automating the reminder. Right? Like something like that or or yeah, in his example he says over prepare for your interview. Like really kill it. [inaudible] Or the 99% of people because that's going to pay your salary for five years. Right. Those, those kinds of things. So I really loved those like fixed costs one time investments up front that just pay forever. So yeah, like automating reminders, automating finances, these kind of one time things that that continued to pay back.
Joe: 01:00:52 Awesome man. All right, and last question. What's the one book
that as you look at your business today at quick minded has made the biggest direct impact on the way that you do business?
Tommy: 01:01:05 Ooh, actual business book or like kind of life philosophy book
Joe: 01:01:11 Wherever you can see a direct correlation in your business.
Right. So not like that book was good, but I never got anything from it. Right. Like it makes me happy, but nothing changed in my business. Right. Like that I feel like on podcasts, like that's kind of the takeaway for most people is like feel good books, but not so much. Did we get anything that directly correlated out the other side as a winner?
Tommy: 01:01:35 I s)ee. So in that case it's a, it's technically pitched as a course,
but it's just a text course. So I've called that a book. It's just text. Yep. On Andre Chaperon, autoresponder madness. Yeah. Have you familiar with, with him? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So we are our copies very much inspired by him. The basic idea is storytelling in your email marketing and the way he does it is incredible. The basic format is tell stories that are interesting, that are human and keep users wanting more. Every single email. All of our, all of our email marketing is designed around this and it was incredibly helpful as a, I guess as a book.
Joe: 01:02:16 Yeah, it definitely can see that it's a book. I mean, it's all text.
You're right. And I'd definitely read it like a good book, you know, picked it up and didn't drop it until it was done. So definitely a great, a great book. Thanks Andre. Alright, man. Any last thoughts? Or, or places I guess that we could link up? In the show notes for you that we can send people.
Tommy: 01:02:39 Yeah. And we're at click minded.com. I'm on Twitter, I'm at
Tommy Griffith. We just launched these, these free, they might be more intermediate, beginner, intermediate level, but we just launched these free digital marketing and SEO Strategy guides. We designed them like a retro eight bit Nintendo powers and yeah. Did you ever play like Nintendo or Super Nintendo in the 90s? Of course. Yeah. Did you ever get those like Nintendo power magazines that had like the cheat codes that get to the last level of Mario or anything like that? Yup. I mean it looks just like it [inaudible] right. Yeah. We tried to go for those. I was obsessed with these things as a kid. I cannot believe I didn't have a girlfriend. Right. But, but we designed these, these things to be like eight bit strategy guys. So you can, you can take them out the fruit.
Joe: 01:03:29 Yeah, man, they're awesome. Okay, great. Yeah, we'll link up to
those in the show notes as well. It, man, I just want to say thank you for all the time. I'm sure everybody's gonna love this interview. And we'll let you know once it goes live. Man, thanks so much.
Joe: 01:03:40 Sweet, Joe. Thanks a lot. Really appreciate it. All right, man.
Thanks so much. Have a good one. See Atomic. I'll see it. Yeah, take it easy.
