Making Better Leaders with Chris Lema

Sponsored by:

Chris and I talk about all sorts of stuff in this episode, all surrounding his site Beyond Good. We talk about tools, automation, and being a one-man show doing the work of a small company. Chris also shares some exclusive advice on creating content. Make sure to listen until the end!

Show Notes

Joe Casabona: Hey everybody. We have two great sponsors for you today. The first is hover.com. with hundreds of domain extensions, No heavy-handed upselling, and best in class support, Hover makes it easy to spend less time on your domains and more time on your big idea. I’ve been a customer of hover.com for years, and I couldn’t be happier. Their service is top-notch and the extra value they bring is unmatched. And now, you can use the offer code, ‘buildsomething’ for 10% off your first purchase. 

Our other sponsor is WP Stagecoach. WP Stagecoach provides easy WordPress staging sites. Create your staging site with one click and import your changes back to your live site with one click. If you need to make changes to your WordPress site, it could not be easier to test them with WP Stagecoach. Head on over to howibuilt.show/stagecoach for more information.

And now, on with the show.

Hey everybody. Welcome to another episode of How I Built It, the podcast that asks, “How did you build that?” Today, I’m here with my good friend, WordPress person, cigar aficionado, Chris Lema. Chris, how are you doing?

Chris Lema: I’m great. How are you doing?

Joe Casabona: Good. Very good. Thanks so much for joining me today. So today, we are going to talk about your website, beyondgood.com. Is that correct?

Chris Lema: That’s right.

Joe Casabona: All right. Cool. So, let’s just jump right into it. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about you, the product, and how you came up with this idea?

Chris Lema: Sure. So, I am a guy who’s been blogging for five and a half years, almost predominantly around WordPress. And yet a lot of what I do in my day job is leading people and managing people. And I’ve been doing that for about 20 years. And, I decided I wanted to spin up a new site where I could focus on the leadership side of things. And so I bought the domain name, Beyond Good, and spun up the website. And now I’m ruling out all of the features. It’s been several months in progress just to get some core content in place. And now start building out all the rest of the membership site and the store and all the things that go with a website when you put it all together. Of course, it’s sitting on top of WordPress, so it leverages all the things that I normally write about on chrislema.com. But I wanted a dedicated place where people could go if they just were looking at leadership stuff.

Joe Casabona: Nice. Yeah. And so, yeah, you’ve been, man, I mean,, you were, you know, my boss had a crowd favorite a little bit for a while with my direct boss. So, you manage primarily software people. Is that correct?

Chris Lema: Yeah. For the most part, I’ve done some work in a nonprofit. But, the 21 years of hardcore leadership management have all been leading people smarter than me.

Joe Casabona: Nice. I’m sure most programmers because of the way most of us think would agree with that. I necessarily would not. But, so, and I mean, like, you know, programmers can be, I can say this cause I’m one of them. We can kind of be a pain in the neck to manage. So this seems like a really great, great blog that’s probably helpful to a lot of people. You’ve been doing this for a long time. So did you do any specific research for this product? Or is this like mostly a brain dump or some combination?

Chris Lema: Well, the content itself comes from not only two decades of leading folks, but I actually have an, we were chatting with a friend at the conferences last week where I said, I actually have a master’s degree in leadership. And they were like, “Are you kidding me? I’m like, “No, no.” I didn’t want an MBA but I wanted to do more reading, research, and writing in this space. And so I went and got one.

And so in some ways, you could say there’s a lot of research behind this. On the flip side, the reality is,  when you’re talking about building out a new product, whether you’re talking about a website or a website with a store and selling books and all that kind of stuff, part of what you have to do is figure out, is there an audience for this, right? And so that’s where most people rush in, right? Buy a domain, get a website, roll it out, get it going. And then they’re like “Ha! nothing’s happening.” And so I move a lot slower,  building not only the content but starting to build and do the research to figure out what’s the network of people. What are the relationships and dynamics I have to have to make this, when in fact, for this website before the first post went online, I have a spreadsheet of the top 300 folks that blog about leadership. I have them ranked in terms of the number of posts they output in terms of the number of comments they get on average per post. I have a list of the top hundred people that have written books on Amazon about leadership. I have an average setting of the N the stars that they’ve gotten on reviews of the sum total of their books. Plus, the total number of their books. We don’t, again, normally we don’t talk about all this, right? But when I go to research into a space, I make sure that I know who the players are, right. What’s the content? And I’m not going to try and jump into the top Leisha blogger and say, “Hey, can you post back or link back to me?” Cause that’s ridiculous, right? They get those requests every day. Right.  

But the flip side, if you can create your own algorithm for ranking all this data into how you would score these people about this topic or about any topic if you can rank, create your own algorithm and then rank it and you start at the bottom. And you start back-linking, and creating links, and relationships, and comments at the bottom. And then they start giving you reciprocal love, and then you start moving up your chain. Eventually, you get to the top folks. And this is essentially what I did five years ago in the WordPress space, right? 

Today I have a lot of connections to a lot of people that are very important in the WordPress ecosystem. But it didn’t start there, right? You start at the bottom and you build your way up. But when I bring particularly a content-oriented product to market, part of what I’m saying in that space is I’ve done the homework to figure out who are the players, what the lay of the land looks like, so that I’m not just stepping into it and I might step on a landmine, right?

Joe Casabona: Yeah. I mean, that makes perfect sense. You wouldn’t, you know, if you were a baseball player or a football player, you wouldn’t go into a game not knowing anything about the team that you’re about to play against, right?

Chris Lema: Right. Exactly right.

Joe Casabona:  So, and I mean that forming relationships is one of the most important things. I did the same thing with WP in one month. You know, I could do the beginner WordPress stuff, but I’m not going to, Sean has catheters in that space and is doing it much better than I would do it. So I talked to him, I talked to Corey Miller and a few other people about, “Hey, you guys are doing this. Where can I fit in without stepping on your toes?” So that’s just great advice and kind of transitioning into that, you give tons of advice on clarity. Actually, you’re the one who got me onto clarity. So I know that a lot of people seek out your advice. Do you talk to people about, you know, ideas that you have floating around? Advice on how to make things work and things like that?

Chris Lema: I do. So, I’m a huge believer in collecting opinions whether or not I agree with them, and whether or not I obey them, right? That’s my prerogative. At the end of the day, I have to make the call, but the old paradigm of “I’m going to do all this in silence and never talk to anyone so that it can be a secret because someone might steal my idea” really is kind of dead. And so,  I mean, obviously, I’m not running a hedge fund. But, if in this space, right, I talked to a lot of folks and I walked through a lot of stuff, and really good friends with several leadership bloggers that are, you know, far further ahead than me. And I’m like, that’s fine. I want to take up a little particular space, right? And one of these little corners I want to focus on is particularly the angle of storytelling and leadership, and team management and leadership. There’s a couple of angles and I go “Those are the only angles I want to take.”

And so then you start having these conversations with people, right? And you start going, what do you think about this? Would you buy a book this way? What’s the angle here? Obviously, I speak at a lot of conferences. And so over the last several months, most of my topics have been storytelling in leadership as a way to constantly evaluate the content and evaluate, “Okay, what sticks, what doesn’t?” It’s amazing you give a talk and you think that didn’t go as well as I thought it might and its own feedback, right? So whether I’m doing it one-on-one collecting advice or whether I’m doing that in a group, in an audience sending back and forth, you’re always trying to collect feedback to help you then say, “Okay. Now that I have data, which of these data strikes me as really true or helpful?” And then you start course-correcting.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. And, like speaking at conferences, like doing things in like real-life spaces is great feedback. I can, like I’ve taught classes and my students, I’d give a bad lecture and my students wouldn’t have to say anything. It would be written all over their faces. Just like, what did you just say?  So, yeah. I mean, I know a lot of people have a phobia about speaking. But if you can just like go to WordPress meetups or whatever meeting, you know, it doesn’t have to be a WordPress meetup..

Chris Lema: Just, a meetup. A meetup, it’s so great cause you, if you don’t like it, or if you bomb, you don’t even have to go to that meet-up again.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. That’s exactly right. And it’s like super low pressure. Like even speaking at a WordCamp, it’s pretty low pressure. The community is very accepting. So find small places locally and just talk to people and get your ideas out there and get real-world feedback. So this site is on top of WordPress, but what else can you tell us about it? How did you build it? 

Chris Lema: So, it is sitting on a WP engine as a host, and on top of that, it runs WordPress layered on top of WordPress, obviously you need a theme. And so this particular theme framework is the Genesis framework from StudioPress. And they have a boiler plate free, child theme that I’m using because a lot of the custom page design work will be done with another plugin called Beaver Builder.

So Genesis is the base. And so for all the stuff that you see or just the display of the article, that is just the baseline. Genesis and the free child theme. But When you go to landing pages, obviously, you know, any of the landing pages and some of the WooCommerce pages are customized by a plugin called Beaver Builder, which lets you do a bunch of different layouts work for WordPress.

And then, of course, the moment you get into buying something, whether you’re talking about buying a t-shirt, buying a book, buying membership that is all sitting on top of woo-commerce. And I tell people if you’re going to build a membership site, and there’s no commerce related, I mean, the transaction is a membership piece, but you’re not going to sell anything else, especially not any physical goods, then I typically go with MemberPress. But in this particular case where I would be selling physical goods, I decided to go with WooCommerce. And if you’re going to go with WooCommerce,  then the membership and subscriptions extensions subscriptions is SkyVerge. I’m sorry. Subscription is ProsPress and membership is SkyVerge.

And both of those are maybe my two favorite extensions of the entire WooCommerce line obviously we’re commerce is free. But, subscriptions I think are $199 for a site. Membership is $149 for a single site. And you go, “Okay. Wow! That’s a little bit of money” and it is worth every single penny. I’ve said this before, nobody has done the level of work and detail and understanding of subscriptions as the folks at ProsPress.

I remember two, three years ago, I wrote a ridiculously long blog post about the fact that most of the subscription code in WordPress sucks. And it was a polite conversation, but it was still a, you guys don’t understand what it means to pause and restart a subscription. You don’t know what it’s like to upgrade a subscription, midstream, and prorate, and recalculate, and assign previous existing spend against new spend a new requirement of whatever the new plan that you did. The upgrade, there is no way to downgrade and prorate. And the guys at ProsPress, basically Brent, and everyone there just went, “Okay.” First, everyone said like, “No, we’re not gonna do it.” And most people didn’t do it. And then Brent said, “Okay. We’re going to do it.” And they have killed it. They have done remarkable work. And again, on the MemberPress side, Blair has done a lot to add that too. But the subscription code base is incredible. 

And then recently I met with the folks at SkyVerge to say what I really would like is for you to detach membership and subscription even though they work together so that I could say, I want something to be paid for in three payments. But I want the membership to last a year, right? So I want three monthly payments because you’re accruing all that value upfront. Like someone signs into Beyond Good as a member and they’re like, “Oh my gosh! they’re going to go and get all the value out of reading all those different posts on the stuff early.” So I want to be able to monetize that within the first two months or three months. I don’t want them to be paying in months 6, 7, 8, you know. But I want them to have access for say 12 months, right. And so the new memberships extension, just roll that new feature out that I can separate the two.

So I’m doing all that. But then it gets more fun because of my good friends over at Zapier, which some people say, Zapier, I think that’s how you actually say it because it makes you happier. But I heard that’s how I remember it now. But I’ve heard Sapir and Zapier and lots of different ways to say it. But they are a platform for connecting dots, right. And what’s really cool about the dot-connecting, they do is they open the world up to a lot of other possibilities. So if you become a member of Beyond Good, right, if you sign up and become a member, you pay something. And the moment you pay that goes through Stripe, right? So that’s the integration I’m using for payment. And the moment you hit Stripe, Stripe now has a record of the fact that you did a transaction, a certain volume of money, a certain descriptor in the tag. And I parsed that with Zapier so that I can see, “Okay. You actually paid me through Stripe, but I have 16 different sites that are coming in through Stripe and paying money.” So I look at not only the amount but also look at the descriptor. And when I have the right descriptor, “Oh! This is the Beyond Good membership” whatever. I can then use Zapier to say, “Okay, pull that one out. Listen to that one and connect the dots to other places.” So you can, like in this case, right, I can send you a custom postcard, right? A postcard that says, “Hey, thanks for joining up.” Because Zapier has a postcard partner, right. And so you go, “This is perfect. This is, you know, this is what I like. I can send you that. I can also send you a t-shirt, right?” And so you look at Spreadshirt, I think, which also has, you know, has a connection. And so I can send you, like, again, in this case, it’s free. A free t-shirt that basically is a thank you for joining, right? Thank you for being a member. And so you can walk around wearing whatever, right? So I’d have to look up specifically, which I think I was using Lob. Yeah. Lob is the folks that do the custom postcards. They also can do posters and other things like that, right? So it’s not just postcards, but that’s very cool. 

And then, on the t-shirt side, I’m trying to remember which one I was using. I will have to log in and actually see which player. But the benefit of using Zapier is that you can do more than the code that you have. You know, specifically in WooCommerce or specifically in WordPress, right?

And that’s where it gets really powerful. The last bit of it is I can also use all the same stuff that we’re talking about with Zapier connected to agile CRM. An agile CRM is my CRM program and I use Zapier to take every time you purchase anything, and I move you into my CRM. And I add tags, right? So like, “Hey, you bought the Beyond Good membership, but you also commented at chrislema.com, and you also went and bought membership huddle, which is another membership website that I run.” Right. And, we see that you took the storytellers cafe class at chrislema.com.” I’m going to come, right? So I can start tagging these people, give them more points or more scoring or whatever to say these are important people which allows me than to send them custom invitations and or discounts for something else, right? 

So, the benefit of WooCommerce, the benefit obviously of WordPress and then Woocommerce and then, using memberships and subscriptions to create more than just a regular store and then using Zapier to connect to other resources that lets you look like and feel like a bigger company, right? Custom postcards, custom t-shirts, and then getting all that data back into my CRM is what makes this whole thing a lot of fun without writing tremendous amounts of code, right?

Joe Casabona:  Yeah. Or doing it yourself, right? Like, you know, if you didn’t have Zapier, you’d have to print off your own postcards. And then when an order comes in, send it out yourself which is really time-consuming, more time consuming than the monthly subscription you pay for Zapier. So, using the…

Chris Lema: Yeah. And the t-shirt, the t-shirt player is called startup threads,

Joe Casabona: Startup threads. All right. Everything that Chris just mentioned, I have in the show notes, so you don’t have to like to take notes furiously or anything like that. It’ll all be there for you. So that is a lot of great tools. And you didn’t touch any code for that, right?

Chris Lema: No, Joe. I am glad to say that I could build like, you can if you’re like speed timing this thing. And you know, what you’re doing and you have it in your head, you can build everything I described in half a day on a Saturday. Because it’s literally just layering in the different components and then connecting some dots and then making sure that you, it’s not code. But you have to make sure.

Okay. So a mistake I made the first time I was doing something with Zapier and Stripe was, I just said, listen to this. And if the price is this, or whatever, do whatever. And I forgot that I had other things going through Stripe. And so all of a sudden, these people are getting tagged incorrectly in my CRM. And I’m like, what’s going on? And you go, “Oh, I need to parse the descriptor because the amount I was charging in two different sites, I was charging nine, $99.  And then if someone sends me money in a different way, but it all comes in through Stripe and hits $99, that’s just not a good way to do it. So you learn some little lessons. But fundamentally once you start parsing the descriptor and then you start building out from there, and Zapier has not only matches but they have definitely not. So you can also say It matches this string, but it is not this string. You can put some logic into that engine so that you’re protected. And then the trick is finding players like Lob and like Startup Threads, cause you’re like, someone must be doing this. And it turns out making t-shirts, everybody makes t-shirts, right. I’ve created a video on making t-shirts. 

In fact, I have a different store that is a t-shirt site with WooCommerce that is using Printful, I think. And so it’s great. It’s a video. It shows you how to do it, whatever. But, I can’t do anything in an automated way where I say, if you sign up for a membership, you get automatically sent this one t-shirt for free. I can’t do that with Zapier because it doesn’t print phones up if you don’t talk to each other. But starting threads and Zapier do. And so part of the work is researching which of the tools that connect, which of the tools that are available to me and how can I leverage them the most? And most people, once they get their mindset on I’m going to do X or I’m going to do Y, that’s where they stopped looking.

And so part of the job is to keep looking at what are all the things that are available to me? How can I sweeten this up and make this easier? How can I make my life easier? How can I automate more so that I have less to do? And the thing is running as a smooth engine.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. And like, that’s right. So there was no dev time, but there’s still a ton of testing time, right? And, that’s getting stuck or set on something is definitely something you need to be mindful of, right. Cause I was working on a project where I was certain I would use PMPro. Jason Coleman is a good friend of mine. He was the first guest on the show and for the minimum viable product, I decided on Nix memberships cause they didn’t make a whole lot of sense at the first launch.

And now I’m reconsidering using PMPro because there is something that integrates with WooCommerce a little better, a little easier without me having to write code. That’s not to say that PMPro is not a great product because I think it is. I’m talking to like a membership expert here. So, but, it’s not necessarily the right tool for the job.

Chris Lema: Right. And so the trick always is who’s the person, who’s using it, right? So if we’re talking to an audience that are all developers, PMPro and Restrict Content Pro are fantastic products. They have a bunch of hooks and you can do a lot, right? But if you’re talking to an audience of people who are young programmers or not programmers at all, PMPro can get scary, right? Because what happens is it has all the infrastructure you need, but then you’re like, “Oh! I need this other add-on’. And then you’re like, “How do you do this?” And you send a note to Jason who’s a really awesome dude. And Jason sends you back a little bit of code, right? Like, oh, just drop this into whether it’s your functions file or some other place.

And I know people who literally stop right there and go. I can’t do anything because he sent me code and I don’t, like this code could break my whole side if I put it in the wrong place. And you’re like, “It really can’t.” But, I understand the fear, right? So different products are better for different kinds of audiences.

For me, you know, when I go and build all this stuff with membership and subscriptions and store, and everything else on top of WooCommerce, what I’m looking for is that connection between the people who are building an extension for WooCommerce and the people who are building WooCommerce, because I can’t afford for those things to get out of sync. And so if you’re a little further away if you’re Restrict Content Pro or PMPro or a bunch of the other players, they’re kind of watching maybe a little bit of what Woocommerce just rolled out, and figuring out if they have to do something. But SkyVerge and ProsPress are tight in and hooked in and constantly updating. So I want to make sure all of these pieces are working well together so that I don’t have to worry about it when there’s an update to one or an update to another. It’s not going to break the whole site. 

Joe Casabona: Yeah. And that makes perfect sense. So, that is, you put a whole lot of things together. So you’ve launched the site, right now articles are out there. But is the store live or the membership is live?

Chris Lema: It’s all live here in the next couple of weeks. By the time people hear this episode, it may all be live. Or if not, it’s a week or two away. But it’s all launching this year. And that was when I left ‘Crowd Favorite’ Part of what I said I’d do is, I’d take some time off before I joined whatever next company or do whatever next thing. And one of the things I wanted to do was launch Beyond Good and get it up and running so that I had not only chrislema.com as a place where I was blogging but another place where I could blog about things that weren’t WordPress.

Joe Casabona: Nice. Nice. And so this is a relatively new product. So, do you have a lot of plans for the future? Or, maybe what are your general plans for the future? You know, whatever you want to talk about here.

Chris Lema: Yeah. So for the site, I have a book, a couple of t-shirts for sale. It’s a fairly substantive ebook on storytelling and leadership that is, I think we’re now 12 chapters in. And so I’m still writing, it’s a couple of thousand words a day of punching out content, separate from the blog posts themselves. And so there’s a book, there’s some t-shirts, there’s a membership that will get you access to a little mastermind group, right? And so trying to connect the dots between not just me giving other people information, but how do we get little groups of people connecting and talking about leadership. And I hope to get all that in place, and then figure out for me personally, what are the next steps? Because obviously, one of the things that you don’t do when you’re working as a consultant, for the most part, you don’t lead people, right?

So I am doing a lot of consulting where I’m writing assessments and looking at evaluations, and I’m giving advice, and I’m creating models and spreadsheets of revenue generation, and all these things. But it’s all just me, right? And one of the things I love doing is leading people. So at some point, I may look at joining a larger company where I get to do that. 

So that’s some of what we’re evaluating now over the, we, my wife and I, as we talk through what are the different opportunities and what makes sense. And of course, you’ve been to my home. We’re not leaving San Diego. So everything gets filtered, filtered through the, but I still get to smoke cigars in my hot tub.

Joe Casabona: Yes, which is a very important thing to do. Like when I go out to California, I try to make it a point to go there. Because smoking cigars in the hot tub is a highlight of being in that state. So,

Chris Lema: That’s right.

Joe Casabona: So, that’s before we get to the final question, actually, you turn out tons of content, right? So maybe this was your trade secret. But in case you had a different trade secret, I would love to ask, how do you come up with good, like a lot of good content?

Chris Lema: So, I think there’s two tricks to it, right? And I think I’ve never, I don’t know if anyone’s ever asked the question cause people just kind of shy away from “Okay. What’s the, how do you pull off all this content?” So here they are, right? Just exclusively for your audience.

Number one, you have to spend time with people who you are trying to serve, right? You have to spend time with people you’re trying to serve. And a lot of us go, “Oh yeah. I do that. I do that” But it’s not true, Right? If you’re a developer, who’s writing articles for young people who are starting off, their development journey and all you do is spend time with all your developer friends who are all as mature as you and know all the things, you’re not spending time with the community you’re serving.  and you don’t, you don’t have a clue like Joe when you teach a class, you teach a class to young people. So you really are engaging with that newbie. And you know what it looks like when you say something that is maybe three steps ahead of where you need to be, and you look at their eyeballs and their eyeballs are like, “I don’t have a clue what you just said.” Right? So, you know, I’ve been in rooms where I’ve talked with people and said something responsive, like, “Do you want the site responsive?” And they go, “Of course. I want it to react to people.” And you go, “Right. Right, Right. Of course.” That’s what you meant by the word responsive. I was thinking of something else. But now that I think about it, I’m the moron, right? So, the reality is you have to connect with the people that you’re trying to serve and spend a lot of time there.

What that does is it gives you a million questions, a million stories, right? Because those people are constantly asking like, “So how, what if I want to do this?” In fact, my whole idea of the postcard piece came from a conversation I had with a realtor who said, “Well, if someone signs up to my real estate website and wants to see my MLS’s, I also want to send them a direct print piece. How do I do that?” And I went, “I don’t know. Like, don’t you have a virtual assistant in your, you know, in an office that will just make it up and ship it out?” And they go, “But what if I want to automate it?” I’m like, there must be automation for postcards. Let’s go look, there must be someone who is connected. And eventually, you figured it out. And then one day you use it, and then another day you go write about it, right? So the more you spend time, right? The more you spend time in, the more you get all the questions, and those questions drive great content. 

The second thing is, your goal when you write has to be, to help someone else. And, I can’t tell you the number of times people have said, “Oh Chris!” You know, when we’re, you know, when you’re face-to-face and you’re chatting with them and they’re like, “God, you’re really like, you’re much smarter than you come across on your blog”, which I think they mean as a compliment.  And they followed up with you, should just write some really long deep, like even technical articles, right. People who don’t know, I have any technical background, you should write something to you so that people know, you know, what you know. And I’m like, “Yeah.” That’s not the objective. The objective is not to write a blog. That’s called a diary, right? The objective is not to demonstrate all of my knowledge, skill, and prowess. The objective is to help someone else. And normally that means distilling it down. It means changing your language. It means shaping it to be helpful. And it means to focus on answering those questions that you heard in part one of the two parts secret here.

And what that does is it just gives you a sense with that audience who’s reading. A sense that you care about them, which is what you need to do to win. And as you care, they give you more content cause they send you more questions like, “How do I do this? How do I do this? How do I do this?” And some people get frustrated with that kind of stuff. Like, “Oh, I got 42 emails this morning when I woke up because there were all these different people writing questions about some article I wrote” or something that you know, or just randomly they’re like, “You look like a helpful guy. Why don’t I send all my free questions to you?” And people get upset and I go, “No. No. That’s just them giving me content, right. So I can turn around now and say, “Hey, let’s go write this answer. So that’s the secret.

Joe Casabona: Nice. That’s awesome. Well, do you have another trade secret for us? Cause that’s a really good one. We can totally end on that.

Chris Lema: My trade secret is, you don’t need one killer product. You don’t need one killer company. You don’t even need to sell your business for $3 million, $5 million, $10 million, a hundred million dollars. Probably the first hundred thousand or $200,000 is going to change your life. And if that’s the case, it turns out that a hundred or $200,000 is a lot easier to make from multiple revenue streams than from a single revenue stream.

So my key is, and my takeaway, my suggestion, my recommendation is don’t build one product and put all your eggs in that one basket. Slowly build several. I don’t know if Beyond Good is going to kill it. But frankly, I don’t need it to kill it. I just need it to produce a 2000, 5000, 10000 a month revenue stream. And when you add that to another revenue stream of chrislema.com, and another revenue stream from a membership huddle.com, and other members, another revenue stream from vimeo.com, and another revenue stream from, you know, and you just keep layering revenue streams. And eventually, you’re like, “You know, if I quit my job today, I could go several months without working because the revenue streams are bringing in enough that I could sit in the hot tub and smoke some cigars and make some choices about my future without having to rush into something.” I think most people think I got to have that home run hit. 

And my recommendation is just be consistent by hitting a lot of, you know, singles and doubles. But that means building out multiple properties.

And maybe the last takeaway is, don’t put your name on them, right? I put Chrislema on Chrislema. I can’t sell Chris, like, I can only to my friends say “Yeah” who would gladly buy it. But I can’t sell Chrislema.com cause it’s Chris, like, who’s going to write like Chris Lema? But all the others are not with my name on it so that you also have the opportunity to take a single property if it connects to the right niche. And you can just sell that and move on and let someone else pick it up.

Joe Casabona: Man, that is great, great advice. So, and I love the baseball analogy. You know, people have the home run hitter, but the guy who has the 400 average probably contributes to the team more. So, that’s fantastic.

Well, Chris, thank you so much for joining me today and talking about all of your stuff.

And thanks to our sponsors, Hover.com and WP Stagecoach. Definitely check them out. And if you enjoy the show, make sure to check us out and rate us on iTunes at How I Built It. Subscribe if you want.

And please check out the Patreon over at patreon.com/howibuiltit.

Until next time. Get out there and build something.

7 Comments

  1. Awesome episode! Thanks for the BB plug 🙂

    Loved the baseball analogy and advice on building out multiple revenue streams. Also the point about spending time with your audience. Had some “ah-ha” moments in this one for sure.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *