The Nathan Barry Show

[00:00:00] Nathan: Do you want to add passive income to your business? My guest today is Allie Schwanke, a HubSpot and inbound marketing expert with over 15 years of B2B marketing experience.

[00:00:09] Ali: We need to retrain how we think about marketing. Marketing is simply communicating the value to your customer, the right customer, so that they take action.

[00:00:17] Most people are missing a lot of that strategy piece. The way that people are searching now is like. That's my bread and butter when it comes to a content strategy for how to do things.

[00:00:27] Nathan: Let's jump up on the board and map out how to add 100, 000 in passive income. If we go 10 years out, what's the goal for you and your brand?

[00:00:36] Ali: I am that central hub in all of these, and there's teams of people that are all solving similar problems.

[00:00:41] Nathan: When we know what we're optimizing for long term, then these other decisions become so much more clear. I want to play with decoy pricing. I don't want someone deciding, should I buy this or not? That is a terrible decision.

[00:00:53] Just which one should I buy? Which one should I buy? I would keep the price point the same and the offer the same, and I would just

[00:01:01] Ali: Oh, that's a great idea.

[00:01:02] Nathan: There's a pretty clear path to getting to 100K in revenue there.

[00:01:05] Ali: The clarity now that I, that I have, this will move it forward.

[00:01:13] Nathan: Allie, you have this line that I hear you say fairly often, and that's that marketing is simple when your strategy is sound. What does that mean to you?

[00:01:21] Ali: Well, as a lifelong marketer, one of the things that I see people struggle with is that they just want to do all the things or they get stuck and it's this analysis paralysis and what you should do is really driven by where your business is going and what you want to achieve and setting goals and putting those in, let's say like 90 day timeframes.

[00:01:38] When I do that for clients, they end up just like their mind is blown because it's just less noise and more focus.

[00:01:44] Nathan: Okay. So. I think I see a lot of people dive in and they are like, okay, I need a marketing plan and they start to immediately go to tasks, right? So I'm going to write these blog posts. I'm going to produce these YouTube videos or here, you know, I'm going to level up from here.

[00:01:59] It sort of makes this like marketing chaos and mayhem where this is entirely activity driven. And it's not strategy driven in any way. Is that something that you see where you're trying to say like, okay, let's take a step back and focus on the strategy.

[00:02:12] Ali: Yeah. And we're trying so hard to define what we think marketing is.

[00:02:15] So marketing now is like, you have to do YouTube videos and you have to do this and whatever, but it's all driven by what your audience, where they are. Who they get information from, who they trust, and then what action they need to take to solve their problems. And so even when I say it in that way, they go, Oh, okay.

[00:02:28] So, you know, do you think blogging is effective? And I said, the answer is not, is it effective? Is it, is it the right thing for your business to drive the results that you need? So it becomes less about like making really cool, creative things and more about like a business kind of step by step approach.

[00:02:44] And I think that's where like, it becomes clear because you can just say in this 90 day timeframe, this is important or this is not. 12 month timeframe. This is important. And maybe down the road, we need to start a YouTube channel that can't be today. And that's, that's how you tend to think about it.

[00:02:58] Nathan: So how would you take someone who is in that chaotic marketing tasks focus and then bring them back and start to create a strategy?

[00:03:07] Ali: Yeah, it's one of the first things that so I'll give you an example of a call that I had this morning. And so this particular business owner was looking to get more people in her, her sales funnel.

[00:03:16] Okay. So the first question I asked is, where did you get your current clients? And that question usually tells me a lot that tells me that they either found them by referral or somebody else had trusted them and that, you know, stumbled upon them. So in that case, my question to her is, if I could just find more clients like that for you, would that be?

[00:03:35] Right. Would that work? And she says, yeah. How would you do that? And so again, that question then like opens up, well, have you gone out to your current you know, base and actively ask them for referrals? No. So it's that simple, simple question is, well, in the next two weeks, here's what I want you to do.

[00:03:51] I want you to get everybody that you've talked to and I want you to send them these three emails and then we're going to check back in two weeks. And it just goes. That's clear. I would be shocked if she doesn't get one meeting from that. But that then is like, not don't do LinkedIn outreach. Don't do all this other stuff and focus on the things that, you know, have already worked and then kind of work your way back from that.

[00:04:10] Nathan: And it's working backwards from what's already working. Whereas so many people set marketing and business strategy based on not to dig on podcasts since we're recording one right now, but they listen to a podcast and go. Oh, LinkedIn is in it. Okay. Or YouTube. Oh, okay. I'm going to, you know, I'm going to copy and paste this thing that I heard into my business with no context or understanding about it.

[00:04:35] And I'm going to run that for three weeks. And then I'm going to discourage when it doesn't work and then I'm going to jump on and copy and paste the next thing in. And so I love your approach because you're just saying, no, no, no. Like what is already working and what can we learn from that?

[00:04:48] Ali: Well, and how many times do you, I don't know if you've been in your career like this where someone will say, I want to do, let's say, cold outreach, and that tends to be the hot thing, or like, cold outreach is dead, or this is dead, or whatever, but

[00:04:58] Nathan: fill in the blank is dead, like just these generic statements that people make based on such a limited amount of life experience in worldview.

[00:05:07] Ali: Well, and if that's the case, I mean, one of your first, we were looking at the yearbooks sort of things that you guys create, and one of them says, you know, blogging, people would say blogging is dead. I would say it's not, I would say terrible blogs are dead that don't have any unique point of view. So.

[00:05:20] That's what's dead. But in the same respect, I think what we, what we find when people go to LinkedIn, for example, when's the last time you got a LinkedIn message that was not personalized, that had some sort of, you know, call to action that you were like, wow, I'm really glad I got this.

[00:05:34] Nathan: I think never, never.

[00:05:36] Ali: And yet we, the very things that we despise and do not work on us for some reason, when we get in this like marketing mindset, all of a sudden we forget that we hated that. And so we go try to hire someone to do it and then get surprised when it doesn't work. So my job and on all the content that I produce is like breaking down the reality of those myths and beliefs that people have.

[00:05:56] If you're going to use, let's say LinkedIn and your CRM together to drive leads. For the love, please figure out who your target customer is, what motivates them, and then what messages you can start with and make it personal quality over quantity. Do not measure how many outreaches you're doing a week.

[00:06:14] That's not going to gear. That's not going to, that's not a bar that's worth tracking.

[00:06:18] Nathan: How would you go about finding? Those common threads that you want to say, okay, I need to target more people like this and I need to, I need to use messaging like that.

[00:06:29] Ali: Yeah. Well, I'm going to take it back one step and people always think that they need more, I need more clients.

[00:06:35] I need more leads. I need whatever. And the first thing I would have you do is look at your customer journey from start to finish, even if you don't have a CRM or something to track all of this. How many people are in that right now? So if they became a customer, when's the last time you talked to them after their last sale?

[00:06:50] Okay. Your current customers, best opportunity to get new sales. Cause they, the cost of acquisitions lower. If you need more leads, what is your current conversion rate? If you get a hundred leads a month and you convert one, I would argue that you're probably either getting the wrong people or you're a pretty terrible salesperson, you know?

[00:07:05] So I think really when you're looking at making your strategy sound and you're looking at simplifying that, it's where in my overall funnel do I need to focus right now? What are the two places? And then you laser focus those and you kind of, I create what's called the on fire pile. The stuff that's on fire and you can kind of let it burn, but it's not going to burn your business down right now.

[00:07:27] If you do not address this in the future, it needs to be here. But so the two places, and if you want to get more than I would say, tell me what business goal this ties to. So in order for us to get different results, we need to change our behaviors, but we need to retrain how we think about marketing.

[00:07:42] Marketing is simply communicating the value to your customer, the right customer, so that they take action. And the action could be newsletter, it could be webinar, it could be purchase, it could be referral. You got to know what you're asking those people to do and what motivates them to act. And most people are missing a lot of that strategy piece because then the execution becomes, you know, simple.

[00:08:02] Nathan: I love it. Okay. So you obviously have thought about this topic for thousands of hours. Give listeners a sense of your business today. Like, what is it that. I mean, you've built up an amazing business, both from the content side and then the services side and the way it ties together, but yeah, give the summary of it.

[00:08:20] Ali: Yeah. So we, a little bit of background to me. I've been a marketer my whole career, as I mentioned, but in about 2016, 2017, started a business called simple strap. So that's a services business right now with some residual. We'll get into that here in a second, but we help folks get more out of their HubSpot CRM.

[00:08:34] So if you happen to use HubSpot automate things, CRM training, I mean. Go to our website, all the things, but we actually launched that as a by product of what the market told us. So in 2019, we launched a YouTube channel. We were based locally in the Midwest and I'm in from Lincoln, Nebraska, and the ability to find really great sales and marketing talent that knew HubSpot knew the sophisticated digital marketing realm was, was.

[00:09:01] So when we went remote, we launched this YouTube channel and actually all of a sudden maybe it wasn't all of a sudden we can go into that, but a year later we were getting people that were converting and asking us for services and they would say, do you offer HubSpot consulting? And at the time we were just offering marketing and we're like, no, no.

[00:09:16] But what about this marketing thing? And I started saying, yeah, we do. And with that iteration then came, you know, the, the fits and starts, but now we've grown that into a full line of HubSpot services. We have six full time consultants hiring too, just in case you know, exactly. And so, so we've got folks that are coming in with these very specific business problems.

[00:09:36] But on the backside of that, we also have a new podcast called Marketing Deconstructed designed to help address some of these channels or, or problems that are higher in the funnel. Then just moving into your, your CRM. So that's where we're

[00:09:48] Nathan: at. What's the revenue map for your services business?

[00:09:51] Ali: Yeah. So we're about one and a half to 2 million right now. Yep.

[00:09:53] Nathan: That's fantastic.

[00:09:54] Ali: Yeah.

[00:09:55] Nathan: And now one thing I know that you want to learn and like talk through how to add a hundred thousand dollars in passive income, and we're going to get into that in a few minutes and we'll jump up on the board and diagram a bunch of ways that we could do that.

[00:10:08] But before we go there, I want to ask about. Starting the YouTube channel because you had both some really great timing of getting it established before the pandemic and you know, you were there ready. You know, you're the surfer in the water in the right position, ready to catch the wave. But it also didn't, you know, it didn't take off like crazy immediately.

[00:10:33] Right. You didn't, you know, put out your first tutorials and have something go viral and have instant success. So talk about the strategy there of, you know, why launch the channel and then what it took to get that additional momentum.

[00:10:46] Ali: Yeah, I love those instances where you kind of luck out with the things at the time.

[00:10:49] I mean, a lot of it was really strategic, but a lot of it was timing. So, when we first started, it's called HubSpot Hacks. If you search for HubSpot on YouTube, there's a good chance you'll find us or HubSpot. And at the time, HubSpot didn't have a channel that was, They had a channel, but they weren't really doing like teaching type of content.

[00:11:05] So we were just getting frustrated at like, we would tell clients how to do something. And then we'd record a loom loom was very new at the time. And I was convinced that when you show somebody a video, they get it instantly. And so I thought there was one other channel at the time on YouTube teaching people how to use.

[00:11:20] And they were very verbose. It was like life story, intro. I went on a walk this week, whatever. And

[00:11:27] Nathan: I'm really like, how do I automate this thing with this lead? And I came with a purpose. Yeah.

[00:11:32] Ali: Yeah. So I just, I had someone up on to buddy. It's our, it's still our preferred optimization tool, but I had inserted that channel on a bunch of other channels and just like studied what they were talking about and said, okay, what if we shoot some initial videos we did.

[00:11:46] And they were just with loom and they got several thousand views on the first day on just a random channel. We're like, we're going to start this HubSpot hacks channel. So built a strategy, also developed a whole brand. We just were convinced at the time that this is the future of how people are going to learn software and buy software too, and get help.

[00:12:02] And Quick and to the point. Do not tell me a life story. I'm a very like, quick and to the point person. It's like this fit my personality, my business partners. So we launched it. And our goal, we had an email, campaign, social, all the things. Our goal was a hundred subscribers. On the first day.

[00:12:17] Nathan: First day?

[00:12:18] Ali: Well, first month. First month. First month. Okay. First month. And we got 72.

[00:12:21] I mean, I know, I know, but even like now when people talks about getting millions of people following them on YouTube, it's like, guys, we started with 72

[00:12:33] Nathan: And setting a goal of a hundred in a month. And you have to build that momentum in, you know, we published weekly, right.

[00:12:41] Ali: And we had to map out what the content strategy was. And so we did, but I was telling you before we started recording that six months in, I stepped in and looked at our strategy. Cause I was kind of creating the videos and then handing them off. And I stepped in and I was mortified at the strategy behind the scenes for anybody who does YouTube, our tags were like Midwest and Adobe and our description had like the, you know, license of the software, the, the Adobe, and then like the music.

[00:13:06] And so we just didn't have the right content people on that backside. So I went through, did a big analysis and revamped all of that. We found some gaps. And then about that same time, we started to see the hockey stick take off. We had one video, a beginner tutorial to HubSpot that just started, like the number started taking in and that started to be served.

[00:13:24] We started getting the top 10 spots in YouTube. HubSpot was not on our, on our case at that point. And then the pandemic happened and half the marketing teams got let go. And the rest that were left behind were like, what is HubSpot and how do I use it? And we had a video called. What is HubSpot and how do I use it?

[00:13:39] So it was just an

[00:13:40] Nathan: actual search term that people put.

[00:13:42] Ali: It is. We have a blog about that too. And even now with AI, like the way that people are searching now is like dumb human questions. Dumb human questions are my bread and butter when it comes to a content strategy for how to do things.

[00:13:56] Nathan: So, well, I think it's people, you know, you're trying to be clever and you're like, what's the perfect headline and all of that.

[00:14:01] And. It's just like, how do I do this? I was teaching I was teaching my 13 year old how to code using cursor. Okay. So he's making a video game in a AI and it's really interesting showing it to him because he had no inhibitions about asking dumb questions to cursor. Cause he's just like, like he got stuck on something.

[00:14:22] And I knew the answer, but I wanted to, that won't help him

[00:14:25] Ali: if you tell him, right. And so

[00:14:27] Nathan: I was like, Oh, that's a good question. Why don't you, why don't you ask it? And he was like, how do I, you know, like, as I move my character, it's stuck here. What do I do about it? And it

[00:14:33] was like,

[00:14:34] Nathan: there you go. And so it's interesting watching him just turn on question after question.

[00:14:39] And like the speed of iteration was really, really impressive. And. I think that we like forget that that's human behavior and we, we try so hard to be clever.

[00:14:49] Ali: Yeah. And that's, so the essence even behind some of the new content that we're creating under marketing constructed, it's a new channel, it's a new podcast is when you're in a boardroom or if you're in a meeting and someone says we should do LinkedIn outreach, everyone's like, it's not a long, do you guys even know what you're talking about?

[00:15:06] Do you even know what you're agreeing on? And nobody wants to raise their hand and be like I don't,

[00:15:09] Nathan: I don't actually look like, I know. Yeah.

[00:15:11] Ali: Or like they're sitting in the background going, Is LinkedIn even worth investing in? And so the, the, the title then of that podcast episode becomes, is LinkedIn worth it, or is it a giant fat lie?

[00:15:23] That's the content piece. Right. So I think we've figured that out, like in the HubSpot lands. And so now my next goal in this like creator spaces, let's apply that same methodology to marketing and in a broader sense. We'll still continue to really build those services in our HubSpot area, but I think there's so much more value that we can extract from the market and serve them by helping address these, these paths that people go down.

[00:15:45] Nathan: The simplicity of all of that is, is so, so good. Well, let's jump up on the board and map out your business as it is today, where you want it to go, and then find where we can build in like the best path for your longterm goals to build in that a hundred thousand dollars of passive income.

[00:15:59] Ali: Yeah, sounds good.

[00:16:00] Nathan: All right. All right. So the goal is to add a hundred thousand dollars in passive income. Okay. I want to break down your business of what the assets that you have, where revenue is coming from, all of that. But then we've written out the short, medium and long term because it's really important to keep those in mind as you know, we go forward, who will be choosing between different options that you have to consider because that's the amazing thing of where you're at in your business is you have so many great opportunities.

[00:16:27] And so we need something that we're going to rank those against. All right. So. Let's look at where you're at now. I'm going to want to think about two different sets of assets. I want to know where revenue is coming from and I want to know about the audience. Okay. So the business right now is Simple Strat and revenue is 1.

[00:16:50] 5.

[00:16:50] Ali: Yeah, our target this year is two. So let's go with,

[00:16:53] Nathan: let's go with that. All right. So revenue target is 2 million. All right. Thank you. And then what audience do you have primarily? What's the, the YouTube channel at for subscribers?

[00:17:02] Ali: Yeah. So YouTube is at, I think 25, 700.

[00:17:07] Nathan: Okay. And then what's the newsletter at?

[00:17:09] Ali: So the newsletter is about 5, 000, but I would say we have probably half of that that are not super engaged. So

[00:17:17] Nathan: there's some work to do there. Yeah. Okay. That sounds good. Okay. And then are there any other platforms that are places you have an audience that would be relevant to hitting this 2 million goal or the hundred K and passive income?

[00:17:29] Ali: Yeah. I mean, I have the start of a YouTube channel for marketing deconstructed, currently 108 subscribers there, so nothing huge, but more than the goal that I talked about with our initial HubSpot launch. And then I've got a newsletter list of 1900 there that need reactivated.

[00:17:46] Nathan: Okay. All right. So you've got marketing deconstructed, which has how many subscribers on it?

[00:17:50] Ali: 108 was the last I checked

[00:17:52] Nathan: For YouTube and then the newsletter?

[00:17:55] Ali: There's a LinkedIn newsletter that has about 3000 and then an email newsletter that has about 1900.

[00:18:00] Nathan: One thing that I want to talk about briefly is what's the reason that you have the, that you created marketing deconstructed as a new brand separate from SimpleStrat?

[00:18:08] Ali: Yeah. Our, I mean the bread and butter of what we do all day every day and like what's been actually helpful for us and our focus is like we only serve people that are using HubSpot. And so there's a lot of things that if you think about the customer journey, when someone goes to understand how to use a CRM, a lot of that is like understanding marketing.

[00:18:25] Right. And sales. So I started this as a way to extract more value out of those conversations, but also educate this audience so we can drive more leads for the business overall. So as we're looking at passive income, I know that there's things I could like pull out of this already today. If I had some focus on what I could sell here.

[00:18:44] Nathan: Right. I like that. Okay. Why don't you write HubSpot focused here. Okay. And then that will help us map that out. Okay. And so as we're looking at 2 million is the target for, for this year. Why does a hundred K and passive income matter to you?

[00:18:58] Ali: So right now, one of the things that like, One of my biggest strengths is the ability to identify new opportunities and create revenue.

[00:19:05] And some of the things were like in our business right now, the while we can do this, a lot of it is actually execution focus. So it's finding new team members, scaling that up. So the ability to generate new passive income creates not only more leads for that business, But for me, long term down the road, should I decide to sell the agency or something along those lines, I'm now setting myself up to have additional portfolio opportunities that are not going to go away if in fact anything changes or, you know, we decided to shift the business and I, I become a silent owner.

[00:19:38] Nathan: That's an important point. And I'm just going to map this out with kind of a dashed line here. You've deliberately set these up as distinct from each other, which gives you the ability To sell this off and not to say that you have to, or that's the ultimate goal,

[00:19:54] but I think it's the book built to sell.

[00:19:57] Ali: I've read that front to back numerous times

[00:19:59] Nathan: because what happens is you end up just, if you follow that mindset, I've, I'm building this business to sell. Then you build so much of a better business and it comes down to little decisions. Like you don't combine the Google analytics accounts for these two businesses.

[00:20:12] You do it separately, right? There's all of these little things you know, these businesses invoice each other for. Yeah. And it just requires like crisp operations which will serve you even if you decide, I want to keep running this business for the next decade.

[00:20:27] Ali: Yeah. I mean, from a perspective of audiences to these folks are, I mean, zero to 500 employees typically they're going to be.

[00:20:36] Business owners are going to be sales ops, fred ops marketing. But here we've got a lot of people that I believe are more solopreneurs are kind of their starting stages. And like we discussed when we first started, they're just, they're honestly trying to figure out the muck of what to do. And so we can't serve them here if they don't really know where they're going.

[00:20:56] And here this is designed to kind of help them in their earlier journey. Whereas down here you have to have a much more of an operational mindset because you can't take advantage of technology if you don't really know where you're going.

[00:21:05] Nathan: Right. That makes sense. Okay. So when you're considering that a hundred K in passive income.

[00:21:11] What are the things, what are the options that you're choosing between?

[00:21:14] Ali: Yeah, right now, I mean, a couple of things that have you know, taken off so far have been, we've, we've offered a couple of podcast sponsorships and haven't pressed that hard, but I've gotten a couple of. Sponsors over the last six months we've got things that exist like ancillary to our hub spot, which we don't want to execute on in our, in our primary business, which might be how to, you know, do X, Y, Z outside of the platform.

[00:21:39] So LinkedIn, for example, LinkedIn lead gen have no desire to be a company that you hire and run your LinkedIn. stuff.

[00:21:45] Nathan: Okay. But I don't want to do services around that, but

[00:21:49] Ali: like I've done webinars and every time we do a webinar, the, the attendance rate is huge. So I mean, Nathan, I did a webinar for 300 people about how to use LinkedIn and HubSpot together and only if they buy our services, do we profit from that?

[00:22:02] So if there's a way, cause if, if they're like, that's cool, but I don't really want to use you for HubSpot. I'm not extracting that value. So can there be a course or some training opportunities around that that create once and kind of then refer them over, you know, so on and so forth. And we would pay a referral fee from one business to the other.

[00:22:20] If in fact that does happen, because we're using these resources to host the webinar.

[00:22:25] Nathan: Right. That makes sense. Okay. So sponsors courses, what other things would you like, what are the other buckets?

[00:22:31] Ali: Yeah. Another bucket is live training. So hosting people in a location and charging, you know, let's say 500 a seat and it's a day long training and taking that on the road.

[00:22:42] I think one, the opportunity right now to do that and then set yourself up on the backside to have. We'll call them subscription products so that they can get more value out of that. And then we've talked about coaching and memberships. So like one thing we tossed around early in the days of our YouTube channel is creating a HubSpot Hacks membership.

[00:22:59] But again, based on what people are looking for for value, the return wasn't there, but I think that would apply here because the expectations are much different and the companies are different.

[00:23:11] Nathan: That makes sense to me. All right. So. Got four different options. There's sponsors, courses, live training, coaching, maybe we'll

[00:23:21] Ali: we're coaching,

[00:23:22] Nathan: coaching, we're coaching.

[00:23:23] We'll put a little apostrophe there. Yeah, there you go. Coaching and membership. And then I think the last thing. Like how would you describe it, resources or are there things in your business it could be anything from SOPs that you use to like actual apps that you've made for the HubSpot ecosystem or cheat sheets, guides.

[00:23:42] Yeah. I mean,

[00:23:43] Ali: one of my most popular things that I give away for free right now, which is how that newsletter list got built initially, kind of on accident, the content went viral and all of a sudden I had like a signup sheet on my homepage. People are signing up, but I'm like, I don't have anything else to give you here, people.

[00:23:56] But I have a LinkedIn posting calendar. That's a 30 day quick start. And again, that resources, I've got automation playbooks. I've got email templates, like the things I just told you I would do. And those three steps of referrals. So resource and sort of playbooks would be another one of those options.

[00:24:14] Nathan: Nice. Okay. So out of these, if you had to pick one, which one has in your gut feeling, which one has the best. shot at getting you to 100k in passive income.

[00:24:24] Ali: I mean, when I look at ideas and opportunities, I, I tend to think about return and effort. So if I was ranking these, like the one that probably has the least amount of effort for quick return, I'm not sure, like I have to figure out the pricing structure is probably this last one is, I mean, I've got a whole library full of resources now already.

[00:24:43] They would just need to be leaning page, you know, gumroad kit, whatever. purchase. And since we've got the newsletter, it's a relaunch, and it could be a quick test of what's, you know, what people want to buy. The next one that I think has you know, since we've already got content going, if we can add 25, 000 this year in sponsor revenue, just by simply continuing to create the content we're already creating, that seems like an easy lift.

[00:25:07] But this one. It might just be, I, I'm thinking too small on how much you could get from that.

[00:25:14] Right.

[00:25:14] Ali: I think long term live training has a lot of opportunity but it's a big lift. That's a lot of,

[00:25:19] Nathan: yeah. I'm not sure that live training fits our passive income. Oh,

[00:25:24] Ali: you know what? Yep. All right. Well, let's cross that one off training that we recorded and offered online, I guess.

[00:25:29] Yeah. That

[00:25:30] Nathan: could work. I mean, there's ways that you could teach that workshop and then create videos in it and go from there. Yeah.

[00:25:37] Ali: Yeah. I mean, of all the ones we have up here is sponsors and resources and playbooks are the two that come to the top as we can realistically look at a hundred K in revenue from those two.

[00:25:48] Nathan: So I like those two examples, resources and playbooks stood out to me as well. Sponsors. What I want to know is, do you have existing deal flow from sponsors that feels like there's a lot more momentum and energy there?

[00:26:02] Ali: We do, so we do get sponsors on our HubSpotHacks YouTube channel now, and we only take on a short, a small amount of those, so we have sponsored videos there.

[00:26:09] What we haven't done is really gone out to go find more, and we know in the B2B ecosystem, this is a huge thing right now, like, it is. So I don't want that to be off the radar, but to your point, like, since we don't have a deal flow already of that, it may be harder to get that going to get to that a hundred thousand.

[00:26:31] Nathan: Yeah. Well, let's dive in on resources and playbooks because again, as you talked about from, you know, effort and impact ease and impact, however you, you know, you want to frame it, then that's the. You've got so much there already. So what would go into like, if we, maybe we mapped this out here on the resources and playbooks, if we were to sell a single thing that might feel a lot closer to like what you're giving away for free.

[00:26:59] But if you put together a bundle, That might be something where people feel like, Oh, I'm getting all of these things. Sure.

[00:27:05] Okay.

[00:27:06] Nathan: Are there, is there something that stands out of like an angle or a job to be done, a pain point for this bundle in particular, if you were to. Yeah,

[00:27:19] Ali: the first one that comes to mind is back to that, like using LinkedIn and HubSpot together, and if it happens to be a, these are, it's the ultimate lead gen bundle for using HubSpot and LinkedIn, that title probably needs a little work, but in there, we'd have things like Training on how to set up your LinkedIn profile, how to do sales navigator research, how to, again, record this in HubSpot, but then like what email templates do you, or what message templates do you use?

[00:27:46] What tools do you use? Because there's a couple of tools that they have to have outside of those, just the two there that, that they're going to have to purchase or use. And so we could also maybe get affiliate revenue from recommending those tools inside of that package.

[00:28:00] Nathan: Yep, I like that. Alright, so that was message templates.

[00:28:04] You had the scheduling.

[00:28:06] Ali: Yeah, posting calendars. Probably things like the reports you'd need to set up within your system, so the pre built reports. There's

[00:28:15] Nathan: a lot of things that you could do here. And what I like about this is while it's a bunch of things that you've already made, it doesn't feel like a hodgepodge.

[00:28:22] It has a clear purpose. And then, I think it's interesting to talk about the course's angle. With this, because you could. Package that in really well, right? There's a very specific course that walks you through how to do all of this.

[00:28:38] Ali: Yeah, because left to your own devices, you may find out that like, great, I got, I got access to the library, but I need to know how to like, navigate this library now and actually put the execution plan in place and maybe accountability.

[00:28:50] Maybe that's where the course comes with like one free coaching or something of that nature where the, because sometimes you just don't know what you don't know.

[00:28:57] Nathan: Is there a price point that you think of? For this, or maybe separately, is there a price point that you want to hit? For this offer.

[00:29:04] Ali: I mean, I think so.

[00:29:05] I've looked at the market as far as there's people that are doing linkedin sales nav training like they're doing it in that way. The benefit about this particular products opportunity is when you look at budgets, people typically have budgets to increase sales, right? They might not have budgets to increase marketing.

[00:29:21] But I think the ability for us just to have a quick calculator of if you could land one client from linkedin this. this would pay off tenfold or something. So my initial thoughts are positioning this at, you can get the template of resource, all the resources for 4. 99, but if you want all of this, it's like 2, 500.

[00:29:39] Nathan: What goes into each one?

[00:29:41] Ali: So the templates would, I mean, they're all going to be like, here's what to use when you reach out to people, here's all the things. Right. When you get the full bundle, it's the schedule, it's the way in which you're supposed to execute them, it's more the methodology. And then the course would be the videos and all that stuff walking through.

[00:29:57] Nathan: Right. Okay. So the two options are 2, 500. Okay. Now, if we take a break from this for a second, The main revenue is coming from the. the agency. And tell me, talk to me about the price points and offerings that the agency has.

[00:30:15] Ali: Yeah. So our minimum investment here to help somebody is going to be about 2, 500, well, 2000, I guess is where we're kind of at now.

[00:30:23] All of our goals as far as where someone comes in the business, one of the. Biggest pieces that we usually have to quote unquote fix is their HubSpot set up. And again, these are usually organizations that have a lot of hands on the cookie jar. So because they have a lot of hands on the cookie jar, they've kind of made a hot mess of themselves.

[00:30:39] And so our fix my HubSpot program is usually where they start. And that's about 3500. And so if they want to buy ours, it's 2000 is ours. But if you're wanting to like dip your toe and even like Get approval for someone to do something. This, a salesperson would shell out. So this meaning 499 is a something that a salesperson would shell out because they know they need to get more revenue going.

[00:31:02] And so the way that people buy is going to be different. I think this appeals more to the individual contributor price point. This you're going to have to hire an agency, which doesn't.

[00:31:12] Nathan: Yeah, that makes sense because it falls into a different budget, right? The 499 can go on a credit card or it's in your learning development budget or something like that, whereas the 2, 000 a month one time or recurring is, is a different thing.

[00:31:28] My gut reaction, the reason I was asking about the agency side of it is my gut reaction is That you want to pray a lower price point. Mm

[00:31:36] Ali: hmm.

[00:31:36] Nathan: So we're staying within the impulse buy Oh sure category and

[00:31:40] Ali: there isn't confusion between agency services in here. Okay, that makes a lot of sense,

[00:31:43] Nathan: right? Cuz one thing you were saying Separately before we were recording is that we don't one of our rules for the passive income efforts is it can't cannibalize rights the the core Offer.

[00:31:54] Ali: Hmm. Yeah,

[00:31:55] Nathan: and so like what I would hate to have happen. Is someone to buy a 2, 500

[00:32:00] collection of digital products, not achieve their outcome and then assume. That, that's what they would have gotten if they had paid for the patient. Ah, that's actually a really good point,

[00:32:10] yep. And

[00:32:10] so I want to stay in these like, probably under 1, 000.

[00:32:15] Ali: Yeah, I mean, now that you say that, I mean, the value you could extract from this, it may look more 299, 999. Yeah. Because under 1, 000 is 100%, I know a lot of professional sales folks that have purchased things like that because that fits in their budget and they know they can recoup 1, 000.

[00:32:33] Right.

[00:32:34] Ali: And then if it, then the idea there being, if they are a target client for a simple strap, for example, then they bring their whole team in and then they hire all of us to do that.

[00:32:44] But here we're assuming like, this is the goal is we have a lot of people who they believe in what they can do here, their organization does not. And so because we don't offer these right now, we're not going to be able to get that value. But this is relying on my knowledge and my personal brand here, because I'm the only one on our team that like, goes, like, I live this and breathe this myself.

[00:33:03] Nathan: If you figure out your urgency that you're using, you can say, Hey, if you do this, if you commit to a year of our agency services, I'll give you this for free.

[00:33:10] Ali: Oh, that's a great idea.

[00:33:11] Nathan: Or there's some other things that you can offer.

[00:33:13] Ali: Yeah, actually, that's a really good idea, because right now we're moving toward a rate increase.

[00:33:16] And one of the things is how do we continue to get people to like, if you have a month where you don't use us a whole lot, and then you have the next month, right now, if you Stop and come back. You're gonna come to the new rates. But I don't, it's sort of a negative message. Yeah. I like the message of, as long as you stay contained or retained with us, you get access to all the marketing deconstructed resources for free.

[00:33:36] Nathan: Yeah, I like that. Okay, so I like this 2, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9 price point a lot better. But I wanna play with the pricing a little bit. Okay. Because I think that pricing really, really matters. Oh, yeah. And there's, I, I wanna play with decoy pricing. Okay. And so that's the idea that you're not trying to get someone to, you're trying to make one offer seem so, so valuable.

[00:33:57] In this case, if I'm 299 for the resources and 999 for the entire thing, is there a really obvious value? And there might not be. So what I'm wondering is if we could split these in half, split the offering in half. And so it's like, do you want to buy A or B and they're entirely separate? There's no overlap between what's offered.

[00:34:17] Or do you want to buy C that is both of those things? So let's say made up example, but let's say that I have all the resources in the bundles and these are so valuable and they're going to save you so much time and that's 500. And then I have all of the courses, and this is so detailed and so good and all of that.

[00:34:35] And that's 500. And so when you add them together, those should be 1, 000? Mm

[00:34:39] Ali: hmm.

[00:34:40] Nathan: Nope, it's gonna be Or something. Or 600.

[00:34:43] Ali: Okay. Okay, so it's just so stupid. Like, if you buy one of those separate, it's like buying something at Kohl's without using a coupon.

[00:34:50] Nathan: Yes, exactly. Where you're like, what are you doing? No.

[00:34:54] Get that Kohl's cash in here. Come on. Yes, exactly. And so there's a guy named Dan Ariely, who's written a lot about pricing strategy.

[00:35:01] Ali: Oh, yes. He has a very famous TED talk. Yes, he does. The Wall Street Journal Electronic Plus Print Edition. Yes. I'm familiar with this. That example. Okay.

[00:35:08] Nathan: Right? And so, I don't remember the exact numbers, but it's one of those things in the, the Wall Street Journal, right?

[00:35:14] There, do you want, do you want to buy the print version or the digital version? And they're like very, very close to, you know, two or two totally separate prices. Or do you want to buy both for 10? I think it was just slightly more. Huh.

[00:35:26] Yeah.

[00:35:27] Nathan: Yeah. And like, as they played with the different versions, you know, they got it to where 90 percent of people, I think, selected the third one.

[00:35:34] And so they're paying for more. There's a risk that can happen where people say like, Oh, I want a C and D in your bundle, but I don't want, and they, they start to assign like, Oh, if you have six resources at. 600 and each resource is worth 100. They're trying

[00:35:52] Ali: to justify it too much at that point. You just think easy math.

[00:35:55] Nathan: And so I would really try to I want that bundle to be the obvious decision. Cause the other thing, the reason that I love cured pricing and like pricing packages is that I don't want someone deciding. Should I buy this or not? Gotcha. That is a terrible decision. Just which one should I buy?

[00:36:14] Which one should I buy? Sure. Right? Because then you're like, from your cases, it's like, do I win or do I win slightly more? You know?

[00:36:22] Okay.

[00:36:22] Nathan: And so in that case, I would love that pricing that is, let's say, I think it's 4. 99. And then the other one is 4. 99. And then both. I think it's 5. 99 and you should play with it with the actual bundles.

[00:36:47] Ali: Yeah. Cause at this point we're not, it's not about them getting more for their value. I mean, it is, but this then says I have to buy something as opposed to, I'm just not going to neither, none of these work for me.

[00:37:01] Nathan: And then the perceived value on your course is very, very high. right? Because it's like, Hey, this is a 500 course.

[00:37:07] We're going to teach you all of these things. We're going to anchor it against skills, skills that make money, right?

[00:37:13] Because the other thing that's important to call out the the price points that we're talking here are based around resources and skills that make money, taught and provided to people who have money, right?

[00:37:26] And so that's why we're not in the 20, 200 price point, right? Someone who's spending the company credit card right now. And the other thing this lets you do is it writes, lets you write out 1, 000 and cross it

[00:37:39] out. And it's not even like a made up thing. Normally this is 10, 000, but I'll offer it to you for 400.

[00:37:46] It's like, dude, it's an ebook. Like, you know,

[00:37:48] but in this case you're like, well, obviously it's a thousand dollars of value because it's 500 and 500.

[00:37:53] Ali: Huh. Right. They did the math. You don't even have to tell them that. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I like that. And I think that to your point, the making sure that it's positioned as like, maybe I'm a backside when we're proving value of someone who's gone through it, like having a touch point at the end of like, show me how much revenue or tell success stories.

[00:38:12] Cause I know that would be important to getting people bought in on the front side if they're like, okay, I took this course and I immediately like landed a new client that got me blah, blah, blah.

[00:38:22] Nathan: I think that's huge. The other thing that it lets you do is it lets you have testimonials for individual parts of it.

[00:38:27] Ali: Oh, sure. Okay. Yeah. I love the calendar. That

[00:38:30] Nathan: alone was worth the full amount that I paid. And then I went and implemented. something else. And like,

[00:38:38] Ali: yeah, the

[00:38:39] Nathan: business results were incredible from there.

[00:38:40] Ali: Absolutely. Okay. Yeah. That's good. Because I already, like, I already know I've gotten like DMS about the calendar and it can be so much better, but it's already like the best thing that they've found.

[00:38:50] So, okay.

[00:38:52] Nathan: The other thing that I like about this angle, right. If we go back to the LinkedIn plus HubSpot, right. How to use them together is that you have already proven that 300 people will sign up for a webinar about that.

[00:39:02] We're not speculating. Hey, is this a package or a combination? That resonates with the audience.

[00:39:07] I don't know. Maybe let's test it. You've already tested that the demand is there. Certainly.

[00:39:11] Ali: Yeah. Right now. I think I'm in this middle ground where I'm trying to figure out, I've got alley schwanky. com and I've got marketing deconstructed. com and D where do you host this sort of information? Cause right now marketing deconstructed is just the podcast website.

[00:39:26] Right. So do we, is this something launched there? Does it live on alley schwanky. com? I mean, I don't know an answer to say, but I think that's a question I have to. Think through.

[00:39:36] Nathan: Well, that gets into where are we going long term.

[00:39:38] Ali: Okay.

[00:39:39] Nathan: So let's move over to our other piece of paper and say, what is the short term goal that we're trying to figure out?

[00:39:44] Why don't you write in a hundred K in passive income? All right. So the short term goal is a hundred K in passive income. Let's talk about the medium term goal. So if we say three years from now, what does all of this look like? You can wave your magic wand. What?

[00:39:58] Ali: Mm hmm.

[00:39:59] Nathan: What are we doing in agency revenue and what are we doing in passive income?

[00:40:02] Ali: Yeah, agency revenue in the next three years is five million and for me personally I have a target of a million in we'll call it passive or creator. And what I think this looks like for me is It's right now, the little building blocks itself are a little cloudy, but at the, at the end, it's, if I could put the headlines on a wall street journal article, it would be, you know, LA schwanke headlines, XYZ conference, and you know, thousands of people are benefiting from this course.

[00:40:38] And, you know, like we're, I'm asked more and more to come in and help and create things. So I'm seeing marketing deconstructed as one vein. There's a whole sales specific you know, brand over here. And so I'm seeing it kind of like a portfolio of offerings. Right. And so that's where right now I'm inclined to say.

[00:41:00] Back to my like original way we started the podcast when it's when it the strategy is clear the execution becomes simple So if you go to marketing deconstructed, you don't have to figure out what it's about We're helping you market and drive sales and marketing results

[00:41:14] Nathan: Yeah, so that already starts to answer some questions for me right because I'm gonna use the orange marker What that does is I'm imagining this business diagram where you've got, you know, you and your brand and Then underneath it I'm just going to say Strat for the agency, right, of these, you know, simple, simple Strat marketing deconstructed, whatever the sales thing, whatever comes next, these all live underneath what you're doing.

[00:41:46] And so now we're starting to figure out how we could anchor different things here. Now let's go to, let's think about the longterm. If we go 10 years out, 10, 15 years out. What are we looking at? What's the goal for you and your brand?

[00:42:03] Ali: Yeah, the types of, the way I like to think about this is, so some of the women that I follow that I really emulate Oprah Winfrey and Martha Stewart are two that come to mind.

[00:42:12] Jillian Michaels is another where they have a really strong presence about what they do, but they have several different ways that that's applied across their portfolio, but their name resonates with one thing and one thing only. So with Oprah Winfrey, it's telling stories and making, you know, driving change with Marcus Stewart.

[00:42:29] It's, you know, beautiful and, and simplistic home decor, whatever Jillian Michaels, it's, it's health and wellness. So I, I envisioned that for myself. The revenue there, I think is far beyond, I think a 10 years, it could be 25 million and not just. This like, Oh, we're just going to double this. But to me, the vision is there's, I am that central hub in all of these.

[00:42:51] And there's, there's teams of people carrying out different brands in the space that are all solving similar problems.

[00:42:58] Nathan: Right. Okay. That makes sense. So is the longterm vision to be the Oprah Winfrey of marketing?

[00:43:05] Ali: If that was, if I could Google that and say that was a thing yes, I think so.

[00:43:09] Nathan: Okay. Why don't you write that down?

[00:43:10] Ali: Okay.

[00:43:11] Nathan: Oprah. Oprah of marketing. If you're watching. So I love what you have mapped out here because it's clear, right? This could look so many different ways, right? You could say, Hey, short term, I want to grow a hundred K and passive income. And actually. You said creator income at one point, we've, we've used those interchangeably.

[00:43:31] I actually like creator income much better because we all know none of this is passive, right? Like it's going to be a huge amount of work to to build out the template library to sell it, the automations for this and all of that. But that, that bucket of creator income, you know, really speaks to the types of things you're doing with your personal brand and all of that.

[00:43:53] But it'd be very easy to say, Hey, we want to go from a hundred K and creator income to five hundred K and creator income, and then actually maybe long term

[00:44:02] Ali: I want

[00:44:02] Nathan: to hold it at five hundred K because, and then I want to decrease. Now, like long term, maybe it's 500k of creator income in 10 hours a week.

[00:44:10] Mm hmm. Right?

[00:44:11] Sure. Gotcha.

[00:44:12] Nathan: But here, like, it is very clear. If someone was like, Hmm, does Allie have big ambitions? I, you know, like, I'm not sure. We can see it very, very clearly here. Yeah. Where you're saying, look, I want to scale revenue in two different buckets. I want to scale reach and the business, you know, and so level up and leadership and all these things that are going to be necessary.

[00:44:33] And then, you know, I, I want to scale impact, right. To me, the Oprah of marketing says, Impact.

[00:44:40] Ali: Yeah. I mean, the, I was sharing that my sister has a business and one of the biggest obstacles for her is the, like, she wants, she's just trying to do all the things. And it's that very same value proposition we started talking about at the start of the show where she's going to try and find someone to tell her what to do next.

[00:44:58] And I believe that the types of things that I offer give people clarity. And they don't spin their wheels. And imagine her, she could double or triple her business by simply putting a better marketing strategy and plan in place.

[00:45:11] Nathan: Yeah. I love that. Okay. So you had asked a question around, you know, as we're going back to the short term, how do we structure the site?

[00:45:20] How do we make it clear, you know, so what site does, what domain does this new offering live on? If you were to answer that question yourself, understanding your short, medium and long term view, what would you say?

[00:45:32] Ali: I mean, right now, my gut tells me that this still is the podcast, and this right here is building into the alicewonky.

[00:45:38] com with multiple offerings, because then I mean, what I've noticed about the types of I'm looking at the analytics of people that are coming is when someone does get something like we've got a couple resources there, they instantly go. What's next? What else does she have? What else can she offer? And so if that was the case, I could also be putting some of our resources from SimpleStrat on there and tracking and getting commissions from the agency.

[00:46:01] If in fact that wasn't an option, but right now it's, it is Ali Schwanke's brain. It is. Yeah. So that, I mean, just talking through that, that's, that's how it comes out to me.

[00:46:10] Nathan: Yeah. That sounds good. I think that's, that's the right path because it's really clear someone's coming. They're starting to follow you for more things, and then you have these offerings,

[00:46:20] which is a different structure than, oh, here's this site, this agency, oh, let me peel back a layer and see who's behind it.

[00:46:28] Right. Right. And so it's flipped. And because again, when we know what we're optimizing for long term, then these other decisions become so much more clear. Sure. Because so many other people, right, would say, hey, long term, I want to optimize for The business brand growth, and I want to be a behind the scenes operator.

[00:46:45] Nothing about the Oprah of marketing says you want to be a behind the scenes operator. I mean, the

[00:46:49] Ali: number, the number of times right now, just like anecdotal evidence of doing a podcast interview and getting the feedback of like, this is one of the best interviews I've ever had when they're on my podcast.

[00:46:59] Okay. That that's actually, because I put in a lot of work to customize the conversation and ask questions they don't get. If they download my template, it's because they follow me on LinkedIn and love my content. Not because they love SimpleStrat. We have good content, but they're like, I bought into her.

[00:47:13] So if I release a book, I'm very big fans of like Rand Fishkin and, you know, people that have built businesses off of their brand. But so much of their following is due to them.

[00:47:24] Nathan: I think that makes so much sense. And it lets you transcend a particular platform that you're focused on, or even a particular category.

[00:47:31] Right. Cause you go, you know, Ali Schwanke talking about sales, talking about all these other things.

[00:47:37] Ali: Yeah. I mean, a couple of things in here from a strategy perspective, like I am working on a couple of vanity URLs that like, When I'm on a podcast, I can say them so that my, cause my name isn't easy to spell or remember.

[00:47:48] But if you do go with me, I'm the only Ali Schwanke, at least right now, before the bots take me over. But if you do, if on a podcast, like right now we're using a URL for simple strikes, that's hard to fix my CRM. com. So I think we could probably do like URLs. That would be like the LinkedIn maximization program.

[00:48:04] com that's too long, but something of that nature.

[00:48:07] Nathan: Yeah. That makes sense. Okay. So it sounds like we've got a, a package and an offering that can drive a significant amount of revenue. We actually haven't gotten into numbers yet. So, but I know, you know this five 99 price point we're not going to do the live math, but you know, there's a pretty clear path to getting to a hundred K in, in revenue there.

[00:48:28] But let's, let's actually break it down. Let's make it super actionable. What are the next steps? And maybe we can use even this part of the board and just make the to do list. So why don't you write out to do there and we'll start to break down like what should you do next to bring this to life?

[00:48:45] Ali: So one of the questions I have is this idea of launching before creating.

[00:48:50] So that's been in the market. So if, cause I think that's where I get stuck is I'm going to go and I'm going to make all the things, but then you get bogged down and then you miss the opportunity. And so might there be a way for, for me to say this is coming and making the landing page and being one of the first to get it.

[00:49:09] Nathan: Yeah. I think that makes sense. So you're going to need. Yeah, the landing page. The thing that I want to test is the positioning and packaging around the whole thing.

[00:49:19] Ali: Okay.

[00:49:20] Nathan: So, brainstorming a few ideas of how we could do that, right? You could run If there's a niche to run ads to we're, cause we're just looking for titles and, and subtitles.

[00:49:31] Right. Cause we're trying to we're trying to get that, that right.

[00:49:36] Ali: Okay.

[00:49:37] Nathan: What, so we can run ads with split test to your existing audience, right? You've got 5, 000, you know, if you combine newsletters maybe you've got 8, 000 total people. Right. So we're going to split test that. What else? How, how could we refine down to the perfect packaging and positioning for this before we put a big focus behind it.

[00:50:00] I

[00:50:00] Ali: mean, I think this split test of the people on the newsletter list is important, but I think even more important is reaching out and it's, it would have to be a one to one email, not like a mass email, but a one to one of, Hey, you've come to two webinars that we've done on LinkedIn and actually like, I'm handpicking you as being one of the first people.

[00:50:19] I'd love to get your feedback on this, or maybe just like, I don't even know if I don't want feedback because I don't want unsolicited ideas. I don't really want any of that stuff. But if you're interested, like sign up here.

[00:50:31] Nathan: Yeah. And so you could take 20 of your best leads, 20 engaged people and send them the offer with the buy link, but split, you know, go 10 and 10.

[00:50:43] We don't have statistical significance,

[00:50:45] right?

[00:50:45] Nathan: But. That's okay. You do need to actually if we think about the amount of work, so I think this is great for testing Yeah, we've got that covered. Well So now we have to actually create this package in bundle

[00:50:59] And so the biggest thing that's missing in this is I understand it right now is the course.

[00:51:02] Huh. Sure So with the course do we want to? create it? Like, is, are you confident enough in this offering that you want to spend the dedicated week or multiple weeks to create the course and then sell it? Or should we pre sell all of this and then launch the course? What do you think?

[00:51:22] Ali: My gut tells me right now that the course, I can record that now.

[00:51:26] I, what I, so one thing that we usually ask on any webinar registrants or registrations is we have open field that says, what do you want to learn? And everybody that registered for that, I've got like hundreds of what they want to learn.

[00:51:38] Nathan: I love that question.

[00:51:40] Ali: Yeah.

[00:51:40] Nathan: You're just constantly learning.

[00:51:41] It's so telling.

[00:51:42] Ali: And it's not a drop down. It's like, put your stuff in there. Right. And help people to say. I want to learn literally what the objective said. So again, I think like I've got a really strong understanding that maybe a lot of creators don't have because they haven't done the sort of pre work up front of doing these these webinars.

[00:51:57] But I think the course is it's three parts. It's why and what do you want to get out of this and setting in the level setting expectations. It's going through all the details of what's here and then it's the it's like a video a day for our video a week for like eight weeks that you watch and implement.

[00:52:14] So. I think, like, for me, the biggest unknown is, is this a course where they, like, if they, if they buy it on its own, will they get value out of it now the way I have it mapped out? And I think that probably is where I need some work.

[00:52:30] Nathan: So what would give you confidence in? One direction or another

[00:52:34] Ali: maybe so in software, we call these like design partners.

[00:52:37] So if I found a couple of early adopters and mentality is that they were piloting the course with me, and that was actually the reason like they actually can get this for, let's say, 100 as opposed to 500. They still have some skin in the game and that release that first to them and then also use that as testimonial

[00:52:56] Nathan: evidence are good because you go to the landing page.

[00:52:58] That's really gonna matter. I'm gonna push back on the 100 price point. Okay. Because I think we need to find a way to position it so that this, this pilot program is more valuable than the initial one. Cause also, if we run the pilot program to a small group of 10 people at a hundred dollar price point, we didn't validate, we actually learned nothing about it.

[00:53:20] Maybe we invalidated our price point.

[00:53:22] And so I would say, try to have the exact same price point that you'll have, especially because we're talking a difference of a hundred bucks, 500 bucks, something like that. And also five or 10, say we had 10 people at a hundred bucks, has us 1 percent of the way towards our goal for the whole year, right?

[00:53:39] Or a thousand dollars, that doesn't do anything, but 600, we're now 6 percent of the way there, right? We've made meaningful meaningful progress. And so what I would do is I would keep the price point the same and the offer the same. And I would just find a way to say, Hey, this includes more of my time.

[00:53:57] Right? Or something else. Because it's going to, right? You're hands on learning and you're studying that. And so then increase the value with the amount of your time rather than decreasing the price. Sure.

[00:54:09] Ali: Okay. That makes sense. Because I'll also get more feedback by doing that.

[00:54:12] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:54:13] Ali: Without saying, give me feedback.

[00:54:14] Nathan: And I think the pilot program works really well because then you can release the videos as you go.

[00:54:19] And so

[00:54:19] Nathan: you're saying, Hey, I'm selling this. You immediately get all these resources. And then every week I'm releasing a module. And you have that accountability. You're getting feedback on it.

[00:54:30] Ali: I'm just going to write my note here.

[00:54:32] Nathan: Perfect.

[00:54:32] Ali: Yeah. The ongoing value beyond this. So something we haven't touched on is, as, as you and I are both active on LinkedIn, no, like this platform every day is like, this is new and here's changing. And so to stay in and get like training on the latest updates and how to take advantage of them, I think on the backside can be a subscription fee that they can have, but.

[00:54:52] You know, they're not going to have that. So we prove our value here first.

[00:54:55] Nathan: Yeah. And so you could say like, this comes with a year of updates on what's changing in the platform and the algorithm. Yeah. Right.

[00:55:01] Ali: Okay.

[00:55:01] Nathan: And then that lead tease it up for ongoing value. And the later you're, you're like, Hey, I'm watching the a hundred dollar a month community of, you know, for sales leaders or marketing leaders, as we stay up in touch of what's working and, and all of that, but it positions as well.

[00:55:17] Ali: Yeah. Fantastic.

[00:55:18] Nathan: Okay. That sounds good. Well, let's sit down and kind of recap what we went over. We've got some great action steps. I'd love to hear just a little recap from you of what you're thinking, like what the offer is going to be and then what is next on your to do list.

[00:55:31] Ali: Yeah. So this clarity is really helpful because I think I've mulled around a lot of these in my mind.

[00:55:36] And even when we talked about the ideas, just talking about the idea of what is passive income. Right. And I mean, even just saying live training isn't really passive. So it just helps qualify some of that. When it comes to the course or the bundling itself I would have never thought about actually taking, I was thinking more of the one on like, here's my calendar and here's this, but I love how we've taken that and said, here's all the things together.

[00:55:57] Nathan: And one thing on that is I noticed a lot of creators saying, I'm going to sell this and that and this other thing. And then they're asking this. Their audience to try to decide, should I buy any, like, I don't even know what to buy.

[00:56:11] Ali: Yes. An

[00:56:12] Nathan: example is I'm really into woodworking and so I bought a laser engraver from a company called X tool and it was the hardest decision because I couldn't figure it.

[00:56:23] They had like six different module or like models. And then within that they had all these variations of like, do I need this ad on or that ad on? And I was like, Yeah. Just make it simple. Like I almost didn't buy because I couldn't figure out how to make an informed decision. And I'm like searching YouTube for like, someone just explained to me, like buy this.

[00:56:43] And so when you're separately selling this for 50 and that for a hundred and all of that, someone's like, I don't know what all to buy.

[00:56:50] Ali: Yeah.

[00:56:50] Nathan: So here you're clearly saying you have a problem. By this to solve the problem.

[00:56:56] Ali: Mm hmm. Yeah.

[00:56:56] Nathan: And, and so it's just a lot of clarity.

[00:56:59] Ali: Mm hmm. Yeah. Also, as you say it that way, I can now picture if that, if I would have done that, I would have had the posting calendar, the messaging schedule, and all of that.

[00:57:08] And they would have, they really didn't know what they're supposed to start with.

[00:57:11] Right.

[00:57:12] Ali: So I love that from a action set perspective. I love the idea of the module release because now I can get in my brain. I can put together a production schedule or a to do list that involves dates. And it doesn't seem like this overwhelming.

[00:57:25] I have to have all the videos done by this time. And I've got a lot of those templates already. I think the piece that I'm taking as the most strategic part that I didn't like, I know it's important, but now it's just slapping me in the face is the name and the sub and the, and the description of it, you know, and, and naming that and testing that, and we get that from our YouTube stuff.

[00:57:45] And so that's like part of what I do all the time, but it hadn't really struck me as. That usually solves itself once you nail that down.

[00:57:52] Nathan: Yes. A big learning for me in 2024 was around packaging and positioning of books.

[00:57:57] I spent a

[00:57:58] Nathan: lot of time, you know, working on my next book and I'm, I'm very confident in the idea and what I'm teaching and the principles and all that.

[00:58:06] And I can't, I know that the, it has to be perfect in the packaging and positioning. And so spending time with authors like James Clear or like Dan Martell with his book, Buy Back Your Time, it has such a clear value proposition right there in the title. And I just saw that book came out two years ago and I just saw on Amazon today that it's the number one gifted book in that category.

[00:58:30] Right. And you're like, Oh, because it has, it's a very clear value proposition. And so I think it's completely worth. Spending a huge amount of time on the exact title and subtitle. And that the value proposition for what you're offering, you know, I would, if you came back later and said, Hey, I spent 25 hours just on that.

[00:58:51] I'd be like, perfect. Whereas I think most people would say I spent 25 minutes on it and that was good.

[00:58:57] Ali: Yeah. Cause it's that adage that if you don't get past the title, you don't get to the content itself. So how, how good the content is doesn't matter. It's if they don't get to it.

[00:59:06] Nathan: Exactly. Well, there's a lot of great things in there.

[00:59:09] I think for everyone watching, it's something where so many people have a services business where they're saying, Hey, I want to get to 100, 000 in creative income or, you know, digital products sold or something like that. So I think we've provided a clear roadmap. And as you execute on this, and as you, you know, realize this long term dream of becoming the Oprah of marketing, where should people go to follow you?

[00:59:33] Ali: Well, I'm going to say go to alishwonky. com. You know, that's what we decided, but I'm very, very active on LinkedIn. And then I would say the marketing deconstructed podcast would encourage you to go listen to that.

[00:59:43] Nathan: Sounds good. Thanks for coming on. Thank you. If you enjoyed this episode, go to YouTube and search The Nathan Berry Show.

[00:59:50] Then hit subscribe, and make sure to like the video and drop a comment. I'd love to hear what some of your favorite parts of the video were, and also just who else you think we should have on the show. Thank you so much for listening.