Selling a Niche Buisness with Sam Brodie

Intro: Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of How I Built It, the podcast that asks, “How did you build that?” Today, my guest is Sam Brodie of Offsprout. But we’re not going to be talking so much about offspring today, and we’re going to be talking about JurisPage, a web design and marketing company for law firms that Sam founded and successfully sold. We’re going to be talking about acquisitions today, and it’s super interesting. I’ve never had a guest on talking specifically about that. I’m excited to get Sam’s insight into the process. If you are interested in acquisitions, maybe you want to sell your company or build a company to be sold, Sam’s got a lot of great advice. I also hope that you stick around to the end of this episode because I’m going to be doing a little miniseries over the next few weeks about how I built my podcasting course. A lot of you are interested in podcasting and how things are built, so I wanted to combine those, and this will be the first two-minute segment at the end of this episode where I talk about that. But you came primarily to hear Sam’s story, and we will get to that in a minute. But first, a word from our sponsors.

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Joe Casabona: Today I’m interviewing the first of many people I met at CaboPress 2018, Sam Brodie. Sam, how are you today?

Sam Brodie: Great. Thanks for having me, Joe.

Joe: Thanks for coming on the show. Sam is the founder of Offsprout, and you and I spoke about a year ago for a project that you were doing, but we hadn’t met until CaboPress. Is that right?

Sam: Maybe we had seen each other for a brief second at WordCamp US after that interview last year, but hadn’t hung out until CaboPress.

Joe: Yes, that’s right. We– I was fooling with sound recording equipment as we spoke.

Sam: Yep.

Joe: Cool. Yes. But we actually hung out at CaboPress. That’s the WordPress influencer project if I’m not mistaken.

Sam: Yep. That’s on the Offsprout site. Interviewed so far nine people from the WordPress community that have an audience, and talk to them about how they built their audience, and how they use their influence to do good.

Joe: Excellent. Cool. I was honored to be a part of that project because I saw some of the other people you interviewed and I consider them really great people. I will link to that in the show notes.

Sam: Awesome.

Joe: But that’s not what we’re talking about today. We’re talking about a company, a web design company that you founded and then sold, called JurisPage.

Sam: Yep. Should I start telling the story?

Joe: Let’s rock and roll. Who are you, and what do you do, and what is JurisPage?

Sam: JurisPage was a– Or, it still is a web design agency focused on websites and marketing for attorneys. I co-founded that with my business partner back in 2013. I had done some freelancing for about three years prior to that as a generalist. I was on the revenue rollercoaster as a freelancer that I’m sure a lot of people listening to this can identify with, but once my co-founder and I decided to go into business together he had a law degree and it made sense to niche down into a specific vertical. Law firms was the obvious choice there.

Joe: Nice. I’m going to stop you right there because I am curious. Law firms seem like a good niche because generally law firms have the money that you would want to charge, but was there another reason that you decided to niche down there?

Sam: It was basically the two things. One that there was a good market for it. Law firms do have money to spend on marketing and websites, and a lot of law firms have really bad websites to this day.

Joe: Right.

Sam: To this day, they do. The other thing was that my co-founder had a law degree, so we already had some domain expertise, and since he was doing sales that helped in the sales cycle to build trust.

Joe: Cool. I wanted to highlight that second point as well, that you had domain knowledge which allowed you to understand your market and create–  because I mean, niching down. The first time I tried to niche down I was like, “Construction companies have money, probably.” They didn’t in 2008 when I tried. But I didn’t know anything about construction companies, so how could they possibly sell to them?

Sam: It is important to have some domain expertise. I have a course where I recommend niching down, but I don’t think you necessarily need to have as deep a connection as we did with someone who’s been in the field. Typically I recommend, if you don’t have that connection to any specific industry, that maybe you’re a generalist for a little while. Then you see what clients you like working with, what clients you are connecting with the most. Maybe you have two similar projects. Maybe you do two law firm websites, and you like those clients, or maybe you do two construction company websites, and you like those clients. You start building the domain expertise there, and then you can pull those two projects from your portfolio and start a new brand that’s niched down.

Joe: That is fantastic advice. I’m going to link this Sara Dunn episode of this podcast in the show notes, and she talks about her journey trying to niche down. I do want to parse out some of this stuff in the research section, but I interrupted your story of how you got started. So I’d love for you to finish that if it wasn’t– Yeah.

Sam: I founded JurisPage in 2013 I would say, and for the first year the thing is when you niche down, maybe you come from a generalist doing freelancing work. Then you niche down and slowly you’re phasing out that generalist work. It takes a long time to build a brand, especially in a niche, because at least the way we did it we built our brand through content marketing. That, as you know, this podcast you’ve been doing it for two years, and now it’s starting to roll. But it takes a long time for that stuff to hit. For the first year or so we weren’t making a living with JurisPage, but we were writing blog posts multiple times a week, reviewing different tools in the legal space, and that’s definitely something that I recommend doing. Especially if you’re in a lesser known niche, reviewing different tools that people use because sometimes, at least in our case, there weren’t any reviews for law firm software. Like practice management software, even some time management software that was catered more towards attorneys. We got a lot of traction with that content, but it takes a while to build up that brand. Then year two things started to roll, we made our first hire, and then year three we made a few more hires. I can leave the acquisition story for later if you want to take a break and dive into any of that in greater detail.

Joe: Absolutely. You are a pro. Because there is a lot of stuff here that we can talk about.

Sam: Sure.

Joe: Taking a long time to build a brand, content marketing. That’s something that I’m, as we record this, I’m struggling with. I might have shared with you in CaboPress that this is something I’m trying to do better. I built a great audience with the podcast, and I built a great audience as a developer, but now that I’m moving into different things from my courses to site builders and how to build online courses, I need to build that authority. Your tip on reviewing different tools, things that cater to that niche, and playing the long game is really great advice. Because someone who is thinking about starting a business or niching down can start today and work on some good content a good content plan. Then in six months or a year when it starts to get traction really go all in on it, once they build that authority. Is that right?

Sam: The main thing is go into it knowing that you’re going to be doing a lot of work for about a year, maybe even a little bit more, without seeing much return. You’re going to want to quit multiple times within that journey. But you have to keep grinding away and eventually that stuff, you build up enough of a content library that things start to hit, and you also figure out which content is hitting. Again for us, that was review content, and we doubled down on that. For you that might be listicles, that might be tutorials, it might be video content. Whatever people respond to. Different niches will have different content that’s successful, and it also depends on what you’re good at.

Joe: Nice. When we’re trying to figure out what content is hitting. Obviously, there’s Google Analytics. Is there another tool that you might recommend, or is Google Analytics the thing that– It’s free, it’s what most people use, and it gives you good insight?

Sam: For us, it was mostly Google Analytics, I might add to that. We do content upgrades, which it’s a newer term, but many people have heard of that. It’s essentially writing a piece of content and having a highly relevant add on piece of content that people can download in exchange for their email. For example, we had practice management reviews, and for each of those practice management reviews, we prompted people to download a comparison chart that compared all of the different practice management software out there. That single piece of content generated thousands of subscribers. That’s obviously content that’s working. It’s the Google Analytics, and then e-mail subscribers for us.

Joe: That’s great, great advice. So, you know that people are taking action on that content. Maybe a good example of content that was not converting for me, even though I thought it would be really good content, was I had a blog post that was nine ways to make your website HIPAA compliant. Because I felt a lot of web designers don’t even know what HIPAA is. The content upgrade was– Or, maybe just nine general ways to make your website HIPAA complaint. Then the content upgrade was technically specific actions that you could take. But most people are– I guess, most of my audience is not doing HIPAA work, HIPAA compliant work, so nobody cares about that. That’s something that I didn’t then double down on. I’m like, “I got to put out all this HIPAA content.”

Sam: It’s funny, a lot of times you’ll think “This stuff is important and I  really need to share it with my audience.” Then you write, you spend all this time creating great content that you know is important, but then it just doesn’t hit. And you got to say, “I gave it a try. But that’s not the type of content that we are going to double down on.” Then you try something else, and that’s fine.

Joe: Absolutely. As we’re moving into the research section, you mentioned a couple of things about– Your co-founder had a law degree, and you mentioned if you don’t have a direct connection like that for domain knowledge, there’s a couple of other things that you can do. What research, if you didn’t do, would you recommend for someone who’s getting into niching down and starting what you’ve described as a highly productized service?

Sam: There are a number of things that you have to consider. One is the size of the market. For law firms, I can’t remember the exact number, but  I think there are something like 75,000, maybe up to 100,000 law firms in the US. Obviously, there’s a pretty big market that we can target there. You also have to see who else is serving that market. This is particular to, my answer is going to be particular to web design agencies, but this applies everywhere. See if there’s a clear winner in the market. For web design businesses, almost invariably there are no clear winners. It’s not like the Facebook of web design agencies.

Joe: Right. There’s not one web design agency that every law firm is using.

Sam: Right. There are tens of national brands doing web design for law firms, and they all are, they all have highly successful businesses. There’s plenty of space. Market size, who your competitors are, who you enjoy talking to, who if you’re going to be niching down you’re going to be in this space for years and years. You have to enjoy the people that you’re talking to and have an interest in the work that they’re doing. If you don’t have any interest in law and how to practice law, then don’t niche down into law firms because it’s going to come through in your sales calls. People are going to realize that you’re disinterested and just in it to get their money.

Joe: Like you said, it’ll be a year or more before you even start generating sales. You’ve got to make sure you like it because you’re going to have about a year where you’re not– Like you said, generating a ton. You’re doing a lot of front-loaded work for stuff to come later.

Sam: Right. You have to get embedded in that market and learn what questions they have, and start writing answers to those questions. If you don’t want to learn about the people that you plan on serving, then that’s not a good idea to serve them.

Joe: Great. That’s fantastic. Getting back specifically to JurisPage now, it sounds like you did all of this, you did this research, and you built a company that you ended up selling. As we get to the title question, it’s going to be two-pronged. How did you build this service in such a way that it was able to be acquired, and what was the acquisition process like?

Sam: Two big things there. One is being in a niche helps build the business once you get rolling, and makes you a more attractive target acquisition. We were acquired by another company in the space. The second is charging recurring revenue for all clients that you take on. That’s something that web designers, web design agencies still to this day are overlooking at their peril. Our minimum monthly was $100 bucks a month, and it went up from there if you wanted marketing or SSO, whatever else you could upcharge for.

Joe: This is because during an acquisition specifically, they’re looking at how predictably profitable you are? Or is it something else?

Sam: Exactly. They want two things. They want to know, and they want to be able to project your revenue out a few years. They look at your consistent lead flow compared to what your current monthly revenue is, then they can project that out a few years. Especially if you pour more gas on the fire to increase leads. The second thing is– Remind me what the question was? Sorry, I lost my train of thought.

Joe: Why is it essential to do recurring revenue for customers, even in a web design business?

Sam: Yes. The book of business, if another company in the space is going to look at you as a potential acquisition, then they’re going to say “How many customers do they have that we could sell to? How many people on their list do we think we can sell our other services to? Having– Being niched down with a book of business makes you a more attractive acquisition, just because of the two plus two equals four mentality of combining forces within a vertical.

Joe: Gotcha. That’s interesting, because again it’s not just if I have 100 people who have purchased courses before, and in my example, that doesn’t mean that they’re going to buy more courses. They were maybe interested in that course. But if I have a hundred members that are paying me annually to get all of my content, that’s a lot more valuable to someone if I want to get acquired by LinkedIn learning or whatever.

Sam: Yes, because they’re going to be able to market to all of your existing customers. They’re going to be able to market all of their other services.

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Joe: There’s a lot of good information here that I want to– I hope that the people listening, that it really lands for them. Being in a niche helps be more attractive to acquisition, charging recurring revenue on all customers is the other major part of that. Maybe continue with the acquisition story, or how you got to a point where you were ready to be acquired.

Sam: We were not intending to be acquired, we weren’t searching for a potential acquirer, but we had this relationship with another company in the space, and we had exchanged leads back and forth for years. We approached them, this is 2016, about three years after we founded. We approached them and said “Why don’t we white label web design for you guys? You guys can sign new clients and pitch them web design, and we’ll be fulfilling that in the background. But you can white label it as your own web design service.” They countered by saying, “Why don’t we just buy you instead.” To be honest for a while I didn’t think that we would be able to settle on a price, agree on a price, but they were motivated to expand their business into this particular area, and we were able to work out a price that worked. But again, that could only happen because we were niched down. We had recurring revenue. We had a predictable lead stream. We had an existing relationship with this company. There were all sorts of things that needed to be in place for this to be an acquisition where we could get the multiple that we got.

Joe: Gotcha, are you still doing work for this company?

Sam: My co-founder is. I did for about a year after the acquisition, and now those were– That’s part of the acquisition terms.

Joe: Gotcha. This wasn’t necessarily a talent acquisition. You’ll hear that in Silicon Valley a lot, an acqua-hire where they buy your company and hire you as an employee.

Sam: This is more buying the brand and the book of business, because the brand we were generating a good amount of traffic to JurisPage.com, and we had brand recognition in the industry. They wanted that brand equity, and they wanted the processes that we put in place, all of our processes were documented so that it was easier to onboard new hires, and we had figured out a lot of stuff. Plus we had the book of business, the email list, all of that stuff.

Joe: Nice. So they’re buying your truck. Maybe a good example is Apple about ten years ago bought a company called LaLa. I don’t know if you remember this company.

Sam: No.

Joe: It was incredible. You would sign up, and then you could stream any song for free once, and then you could download it for a dollar or stream it as you want for some preposterously cheap amount of money. Like, pennies. I loved that service. When Apple bought them, I thought, “This will be great. They’re going to integrate this with their library or whatever, and  maybe you can do the same thing on iTunes.” They just shut it down. They shut down LaLa. They bought the employees to improve iTunes.

Sam: Gotcha.

Joe: Presumably, since iTunes hasn’t improved much since then. But conversely, Microsoft within the last year bought GitHub. And that’s more of a trust-building acquisition if they want to be more visible in the open source space and GitHub has a good reputation in the open source space.

Sam: Exactly. That’s a great analogy. It was the brand equity, and  GitHub has quite a user base, and so all of those users are going to be like “I’m using a Microsoft product now, so what else?” Microsoft is thinking, “What else can we push on these people?” And in gentle a way as possible, possible at least in the case of GitHub, because you don’t want to be too aggressive with that community.

Joe: That’s a good point. That’s fantastic. I don’t know– I’m keen to learn as much as you could talk about what the negotiation process was like, and naturally, you don’t have to talk numbers or specifics. But how do you approach those negotiations?

Sam: Yes. It lasted about two months. We went back and forth with, and I would say, five total offers and counteroffers total. You’d get on the phone, we had at least biweekly calls for those four months or two months, and we were talking through different things. They would ask questions about our processes and about our lead flow and where we thought the business could be improved, and where we thought it could go. We had– We turned over all of our financial records once we signed an NDA, so that they could see exactly what was going on in the business. Which also– That reminds me. If a lot of people in this space are running multiple different businesses, if you’re running two different businesses and you think that one might be acquired separately from the other, make sure to keep separate books. Because going in after the fact and taking and dissecting to see which expenses and which payments can be attributed to which business is not fun. Maintain separate books.

Joe: That’s good advice that I’m 100% not following at the time of this recording.

Sam: It’s not too late to start. You could maintain separate bank accounts, but at the very least you should have separate Stripe accounts and separate PayPal accounts, separate credit cards that you at least have some separation where people can look and see which is and what’s driving what revenue and what expenses.

Joe: That’s wild. It makes perfect sense if somebody wants to buy this podcast they don’t care about how many courses I’ve sold over the last month. They care about my monthly expenses and how much sponsor revenue I’m generating or whatever.

Sam: Right, yeah.

Joe: So, make sure to keep multiple books. Negotiations lasted two months. Was there–? Again, feel free to answer whatever you’re most comfortable with. Was there a point where you were like, “This is not going to happen?”

Sam: I pretty much thought that up until the last week or two, because again we weren’t really looking to sell and we were asking for a number that would make it worth it to us. But it would still be fair to the acquirer. We got the high end of an acceptable valuation range, and if we couldn’t hit that number, then we wouldn’t have sold. But eventually a month and a half in we got there, and at that point, I was like “This is– This  might happen.” But if you’re in the negotiation process don’t be afraid to ask for what you want, and also weigh that against what it would be like to keep the business but then try to transition yourself out of it so that it runs more passively. Like, make a hire who you’ll be able to trust eventually to manage it, and then transition yourself out. Because that’s when I look back at this acquisition after the fact, and I’m like, “What would have happened if we had kept it and just transitioned out?” Because you’re selling an asset that potentially could pay you dividends for years and years to come, but you’re also selling the risk. You’re cashing in to forego the risk and the management headache and all of that stuff. But if you want to take that on, you can build it so that you can transition yourself out of it. That’s an important thing to weigh an acquisition against.

Joe: It’s almost like a long term investment versus a short term payout.

Sam: Right.

Joe: Cool. That reminds me of a story, in 2013 my friend came to me and said  “Joe we should buy Bitcoin,” and I’m like, “No that’s crazy. I don’t think we should do that.” Last summer I was definitely like, “I should have done that.” But I’m confident that over the four years, or maybe it’s 2011, so four to six years of Bitcoin changing value over those years, I’m confident I would have been out well before it blew up. So I don’t view that as lost revenue. I think, “What if I had done it and stuck in the long run?”

Sam: I remember a conversation I had. It was in 2012 where a friend was like, “This new crypto currency and all you have to do is mine it.” I’m like, “What the heck is mining the cryptocurrency? I don’t have time for this. This is stupid.”

Joe: Right. Like, “Fine. I’ll invest in Disney bucks because they’re more real to me. Awesome. That’s an interesting story. Generally, I would ask at this point, “What are your plans for the future?” But you said that you left– That you left after about a year, which was the terms of the agreement. That you had to stick around, you can’t just take your money and run, and you had to help make sure this transition is as smooth as possible.

Sam: Right. One of the reasons that we eventually took the deal is that we wanted to work on a new business, and that’s our current business Offsprout, which is a website builder for WordPress and specifically for freelancers and design agencies that are looking to improve their processes. We are applying all of our lessons learned from JurisPage and also using– We built the first version of Offsprout for internal use for JurisPage, and then rebuilt it so that we could release it publicly. That’s how Offsprout came about.

Joe: That’s interesting. So, it’s a white label page builder. Would you say that it’s more akin– Is it similar to Beaver Builder Elementor? Or is there some other hook, maybe something that works better for freelancers?

Sam: Yes. It’s funny, at CaboPress I talked to Chris Lema, and he said “Don’t call it a page builder. Call it a website builder, because it’s different. Because you could build your entire website with it and there’s more of a focus on that.” I would say that’s one of the differentiators, is that we have a different way of looking at site-wide content and building your entire website rather than tacking that on as an afterthought. We also have more of a focus on centralizing your design  so that, let’s say you built this entire site and the client says “This this looks great, but I just want to change that blue color to a lighter shade of blue.” And you’ve gone in, and if you’re using a different page builder, you might have gone in and set that blue color on each module individually. Then you have to go back and change it individually. We centralized stuff so that you can respond to those requests with a single change.

Joe: Nice. That’s applying the software engineering mantra of DRY, Don’t Repeat Yourself. Making these reusable aspects, because I’ve totally been there. “I’ve got to change this color everywhere now.”

Sam: That’s fine if you’re building a site for yourself and you want to be able to mess around with it, but if you’re trying to have an efficient process for maintaining and building and maintaining client websites, then you need to be able to do stuff like that quickly. We also have, you can have your own personal template cloud, so we have a site grower that allows you to enter the client’s company information and choose some page templates and it’ll build the site for you with all the company information in the places with all the pages that you asked for and the templates that you chose for those pages. Workflow tools for freelancers and agencies.

Joe: That’s cool, I feel like we could have a whole other episode on that. Especially because what you said reminds me of a similar story here across many episodes, which is we built it for ourselves for this thing, then we decided to make a product out of it.

Sam: But the whole, the central idea behind it was the same as when we had it for ourselves, which is “How can we make our workflow as easy as possible so that we can productize our business, easily onboard new employees, and easily train them to use the platform and produce good work with minimal skill?” To be frank.

Joe: That makes perfect sense. Because then it allows you to focus on the important things that help you sell the business, like growing your client base and developing trust among those clients. “JurisPage knows what they’re doing. They helped me create a website that worked and is not just, “Call us now. Are you injured? Call us.”

Sam: Especially in the web design space, there are so many companies that can build you a good website. You shouldn’t think of yourself as a web design company. You should think of yourself as a marketing company, marketing yourself. You do website design to be able to keep marketing yourself.

Joe: That is great advice. I said something similar to my wife recently about how we are in the service, and we are in the general service business to help people grow their businesses. The website is just how we do it. Because  you hear a lot of freelancers, “My client is stupid, and they don’t know this.” Your client is not hiring you to build a website because they know everything about it, they would use Squarespace or do it themselves. They’re hiring you because they don’t know what to do, but they know they need to be online. I’ll let you take it from here. You’re the guest on the show.

Sam: Right. You want to be spending your time building that trust, focusing on your marketing, writing thought pieces that help your clients out. Then you also do the web design stuff, but again everyone– Not everyone, but there are so many other companies that can do the web design part, you have to find the ways that you can differentiate yourself. That’s the content and thought leadership and helping people in other ways. Your customer service, that stuff. Having your processes dialed in gives you more time to focus on that stuff.

Joe: Absolutely. I’ve gotten “Why should I pay you thousands of dollars when I can– Somebody, my nephew, could build me a website for a few hundred bucks?” I’m like, “You have your website built by your nephew for 200 bucks and then come see me when you’re ready.” When you’re ready, right? You’re not ready for what I can offer you yet.

Sam: Right, yeah.

Joe: Cool. You have, as we approach the end of this episode, you have provided us with a lot of great advice. But I still need to ask, do you have any trade secrets for us?

Sam: I don’t know if there’s anything that I haven’t shared yet.

Joe: I’m going to–  I’m going to prompt you here because you say that you also have the highest rated course on Udemy for the search web design business. How did you do that? Because when I was on your, when I was in your series, I had some strong opinions about Udemy. I’m going to ask you for a quote-unquote “Trade secret” very selfishly.

Sam: I mean, I just made the course. I’m already out of the web design agency game. I was intending to share everything that I knew without holding back. That’s part of it. The other thing is I really like actionable content. I have, in the course, there’s a 30-day action plan, every lesson has an action item. If you want your hand held, this course holds your hand and tells you what to do each day. I find that’s more effective content for me when I’m consuming content. I don’t want to have to think about how I’m supposed to apply the knowledge. I want to be able to apply it as soon as I learn it. So, it’s highly actionable.

Joe: More great advice. If you’re keeping score at home, we have learned about an acquisition process, we have learned about how to be effective web designers, and we’ve learned how to create. What we need to do to create popular online courses. Sam, I am certain that people are wondering, “This guy has a lot of good info, where can I find him?” So, where can people find you?

Sam: I encourage people to check out Offsprout. There’s a contact form there. This is the time when most people share their Twitter profile, but I am terrible at social media, so if you want to get in touch with me directly email is the best way. That’s Sam@Offsprout.com.

Joe: Sam@Offsprout.com, I will link that and a lot of what we talked about in the show notes today. I’m sure that Sam is still productive because he’s bad at social media. I am OK at Social media, and therefore I am very unproductive most days. Sam, thanks so much for joining me today. I appreciate it.

Sam: Thanks for having me, Joe. It’s been great.

Outro: Thanks so much to Sam for joining me today. I appreciate what he said about, first of all, niching down. Niching down is something important to any freelancer because you get to become an expert in a singular field. You could maybe parlay that into something like Sam did, and the thing that resonated with me the most was keeping your books separate. I’ve got several different businesses. While I don’t intend to sell any of them, they’re all funneling into the LLC that I created for myself. It’ll be a big pain in the neck if I ever do decide to sell one of my businesses. My question of the week for you is, “What are your thoughts on acquisitions? If somebody came to you with an offer to acquire your business, would you take it? Have you been on the other side of it where you went to acquire a business?” Let me know by emailing me, Joe@HowIBuilt.it or on Twitter, @jcasabona. Thanks so much to Plesk and Pantheon for sponsoring this episode. Their support allows me to do this fun show. For all of the show notes you can head over to HowIBuilt.it/117. If you liked this episode be sure to give it a rating and review on iTunes Apple podcasts. It helps people discover us.

Mini-Series: All right, I want to tell you a little story about how I’m building my course, which is called Launch Your Podcast in Three Days, and I’m going to of course start at the beginning. I’m going to structure this the same way that I structure the show. Over the last few years, I’ve focused on building educational content around podcasting. I’ve gotten a lot of questions, and as a natural teacher, I wanted to put something together for people who want to learn more. Over these next few episodes, I’m going to give you some insights into the course creation process from inception to the failures, to iteration and launch. Let’s start with what it is and go from there. As you might know, I create and sell courses over at CreatorCourses.com, and one of the courses that I have is called Launch Your Podcast in Three Days. The way I got this idea was in August of 2013 when I went to podcast movement. It’s a huge podcast convention, and I noticed that a lot of people– Most people were interested more in the fact that I was a web developer than the fact that I was a podcaster. It makes a lot of sense. Most people there were podcasters or thinking about starting a podcast, but very few people were web developers as well. I get a lot of questions around their websites and what they should do and how best to do it. This gave me the idea to start a course called Launch Your Podcast Website with WordPress. Notice that there are only two similar words in that title, versus the title I said earlier. “Launch” and “Podcast.” That’s because over time I realized a few things, people weren’t necessarily interested in the exact tool that was being used. They wanted a good website. And I learned the hard way, and I learned this after I launched the course, that people want the whole shebang. If they’re going to take a course on podcasting, they want everything from beginning to end not just the podcast part. That’s where we are as I start this journey. I had the idea after podcast movement, the first iteration of the course was about the website, and in the next episode, I will tell you all about that. But it evolved because of feedback that I got from most people. If you are interested in checking out the podcast course today, you can head over to HowIBuilt.it/podcast to learn more and get some resources. As a How I Built It, listener, you have access to an exclusive 50% off the course using the code BUILD. That’s BUILD for 50% off the Launch Your Podcast in Three Days course. I will tell you more after the next episode. Until next time, get out there and build something.