online courses

Behind the Scenes: Building Podcast Liftoff: Launch

June 2, 2020

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Recently, I launched my brand new course. Podcast Liftoff: Launch. A lot of work goes into creating an online course, and this episode peels back the curtain a little bit. You’ll learn about the journey and decision making that took place, the research and audience building, and of-course, the process and tools.

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Transcript

Hey everybody. And welcome to another episode of How I Built It. The podcast that asks, how did you build that. Today, I am doing a solo episode where I talk about a topic that has been pretty popular lately, and that is podcasting. And specifically, I want to tell you how I built my new Podcast Liftoff launch course. Now if you are super excited and you just want to go check out the course right now, as you’re listening, I’ve got great news for you. If you go to howibuilt.it/podcast, you will get an exclusive discount for listeners only. Again, that’s howibuilt.it/podcast. And that’s an exclusive discount for listeners only. That discount is going to extend past the launch period. Which as this episode comes out, there’s only one day left for that. So if you are listening on the Tuesday that it comes out, that would be Tuesday, June 2nd. You have until the end of the day on June 3rd to get the course for as cheap as you’re going to get it. But, today I want to talk to you about how I put together the course. A little behind the scenes action for you. So as you probably know, I have been making courses for a long time. I think we’re coming up on a decade now since I’ve developed my first course. A little more than a decade since I started teaching. And I’ve been developing and selling my own courses for about six years now. So how did I come to make a course about podcasting, when I’ve been mostly in the web development and the WordPress space? Well, I’m going to tell you how I got here, how I created the course, the tools I used and all that. But first, I want to tell you about our sponsors. Our sponsors for the day are Ahrefs, CircleCI, and TextExpander. And you’re going to hear from Ahrefs right now. Break: This episode is brought to you by Ahrefs. Ahrefs is an all in one SEO tool set that solves that problem. It gives you the tools you need to rank your website in Google and get tons of search traffic. As someone who struggles with what kind of content to create or what’s ranking best in Google, or really anything SEO related, Ahrefs has been instrumental in increasing traffic to my website. Over the holidays, I had my best quarter for affiliate income because Ahrefs showed me my most popular pages and topics. And I was able to optimize my content and my gift guides, and update them accordingly. I would have never updated one of my gift guides because I didn’t think it was that popular. Ahrefs actually showed me it is my most popular page. Ahrefs makes competitive analysis easy as well. Their tools show you how your competitors are getting traffic from Google and why. You can see the pages and content that send them the most search traffic. Find out exactly the keywords they’re ranking for, and which backlinks are helping them rank. From there, you can replicate or improve on their strategies. Now as I said, I don’t think I’m getting significant search traffic. So I use Ahrefs tools to help find topics worth creating pages or content for. I can easily see estimated search volumes and gauge traffic potential with their keyword explorer tool. It’s been a fantastic addition to my toolkit. Just this morning, I learned that my everyday carry post has been popular. Lots of people are coming. So I think it’s time to update that because it’s five years old. If you want to gain a following or just improve traffic to your website, Ahrefs is the tool for you. You can get a seven day trial for $7 over at ahrefs.com. That’s A-H-R-E-F-S.com for a seven day trial or $7. And if you’re anything like me, you’ll be hooked. Again that’s A-H-R-E-F-S.com for a seven day trial for $7. And now, back to the show, All right, so let’s get right into it. I started this podcast back in 2016, shortly after I got married. But I’ve been podcasting on and off since about 2012, 2013. I started a podcast with a few friends of mine. I tried to evolve that into something. And then I started How I Built It. And over the course of those years, I’ve had four. I have two that still live on today. And this being by far the most popular one and the one that does the best for me as far as listenership and income. So I’ve been getting a lot of questions over the years about how I was able to grow my listenership. “How do you start a podcast? What do I do?” There’s so many steps. And honestly, when I started podcasting, I did not know of a course, perhaps there was one. But by the time I started thinking about doing an online course, there were a few already out there. Most notably Pat Flynn’s Power-Up Podcasting and a couple of others. But the story of how I started to do a podcasting course and getting into this niche starts at Podcast Movement 2018, which in Philadelphia. I think if I’m remembering that correctly. It was in Philadelphia. I’m definitely remembering that correctly. The year I’m trying to remember, and it was 2018. It was my first Podcast Movement. It was in Philly. So I could take the train to it because I was living, I am still living pretty close to Philly. So I decided to give it a go, see what I could learn. And on the first day I met a few people there who were way, actually most people I should say were way more interested in the fact that I was a web developer and not just a podcaster. See it was a podcasting convention, so most people there were podcasters. There were decidedly fewer web developers. So as I talked to people, I actually landed a couple of consulting gigs. And I talked to people about the struggles of their podcast websites, because I noticed that some people didn’t really have one. They were just using what their host provided. They weren’t sure what to do. There was a Wix website out there that was just like a bunch of boxes that linked directly to Apple Podcasts. And I got an idea. I didn’t come to Podcast Movement with this idea. I actually just came to Podcast Movement to learn more about podcasting. But I left with this idea that perhaps there should be a course focused specifically on podcast websites and how to build your podcast website. So I outlined it. I got all excited. I was going to call it, Build Your Podcast Website With WordPress. I got some great advice from my friend Chris Lema, that With WordPress should not be in the title because most people don’t care about the tool they’re using necessarily, just how to do it. And I thought that was a good idea. So I changed it to Launch your Podcast in Three Days. I think your day one is planning. Day two is building the website. Day three is publishing the website. And I went full steam ahead creating this course. I didn’t do any research. I just figured why do I need to tell people how to create a podcast when there are courses that tell people how to create a podcast? I’m just going to pick up where those courses leave off and say, “Here’s how you build your own website.” And then I launched the course. A couple of people bought it, but the most amount of feedback I got was, “I don’t want to learn how to build a podcast website. I want to learn how to launch a podcast.” And I thought all right, well maybe my assumption was incorrect. Spoiler alert, it definitely was incorrect. And I realized also that I didn’t really do a good job of building an audience. I was still trying to tap into my current audience. And maybe if I positioned that course the right way, How to Build a Podcast Website for your Clients maybe would have been better because I would have been attracting that audience. But I didn’t do that. I actually didn’t think about doing that until today as I record this. So I got a lot of feedback. The course did not sell very well. And I decided to go back to the drawing board, and actually start building an audience. So I created this podcast workbook. That is a very popular option for me. In fact, about half of my mailing list is people who opted into that. And I went on a little bit of a PR tour. I went on other people’s podcasts. I started creating more content around podcasting. And over the course of two years, maybe a year and a half, I established myself as a podcasting expert in my space. To the point now where people actually refer to me as, “Joe’s the podcasting expert.” And full disclosure. I don’t really think I’m a podcasting expert. I think I know a lot about podcasting because I’ve been doing it and I’m sharing my experience. But I let other people use the word expert to describe me. I try not to do that. So in that time where I built my list, I created a funnel or a sequence or whatever in ConvertKit where I ask people straight off the bat, “What’s your number one question. What’s your number one issue with podcasting? What are you having the most trouble with?” And I came to learn that there were a few things. “What do I podcast about, how do I hit record? Where do I go? How do I do it?” A lot of questions that people had about starting a podcast. So I decided that I would take that feedback and I would take what I was learning from trying to sell my course. And I would just revamp the course. I would call it Podcast Liftoff, and it would be all inclusive. It would do launching a podcast, the website, the promoting, and the monetizing. It would be like a monolithic course that covered everything. So I did that. I created a mind map with MindNode, and I will share a screenshot of that in the show notes for this episode, over at howibuilt.it/171. But I have this mind map. I take it. And my general process for course creation is to take the mind map, organize it into a way that makes sense as far as process and pedagogy is the fancy word the educators use, go. And then I created an outline, and I had this spreadsheet that I use to create courses where I break each lesson down into sections. So there’s a section with a bunch of lessons in it, and each one has a title and a description. And I use it to keep track of what I have the scripture in for and what I have recorded. And what’s out for edit. So it’s kind of like a tracker for me. And it was big. And then I let it sit for a long time because it was like 70 or 80 modules, different videos. And I was overwhelmed by it and I wasn’t sure if it was worth pursuing. But I finally, during the great quarantine of 2020, I finally got the spirit and I made the time to start recording these videos. So let me kind of get into the process before I tell you the pivot I ultimately decided to make. So you’ve already learned about my mind map. I used MindNode for that. I take the minds map and I convert it into a spreadsheet. That spreadsheet, I use Google Sheets for that. It’s the tracker for me, for everything that I’m doing in the process. It has the video names, the lesson numbers, the description, any edit notes, and things like that. Then I script and I don’t generally script a lot of my stuff. This episode is not scripted. I don’t know if you could tell or not. But this episode is not scripted. And I just thought it was too important, this course was too important for me to not script because I wanted to make sure I was covering all the bases. So I scripted like half of the course. And there’s a good chunk of the course in there that was already recorded for the podcast website stuff. Remember, this is a monolithic course that was going to cover launching and publishing, making the website, promoting the course, and making money. Promoting the podcast and making money off of the podcast. So I scripted a whole bunch of it. And then I decided, “You know what? I haven’t scripted the whole thing, but I’ll get there. Let me just start recording. And it’ll help kind of motivate me to get to the end so that I can quickly release this,” at a time where I felt a lot of people were probably trying to figure out how to launch a podcast. It was pretty apparent in the first few weeks of this, that lots of people were deciding to launch a podcast. So with about half the scripts were in, I decided to record. But before we get to that, let me tell you about our next sponsor CircleCI. Break: This episode is sponsored by CircleCI. Whether you’re on a development team, manage a development team yourself, or you have a business that relies on working software. A good process is so important to making sure you’re creating high quality work. Continuous integration, or the ability to check and manage code automatically, can help you and your developers streamline the process in a big way. And CircleCI is here to help. Designed for modern software teams, CircleCI’s continuous integration and delivery platform helps developers push code with confidence. Trusted by thousands of companies from four person startups to fortune 500 businesses. CircleCI helps teams take their software from idea to delivery quickly, safely, and at scale. Visit howibuilt.it/circleci to learn why high performing dev ops teams use CircleCI to automate and accelerate their continuous integration and delivery pipelines. As someone who’s worked on big coding projects or big companies with distributed development teams, I can tell you that continuous integration tools have helped us make sure we deliver working code to our clients. It helps instill trust in our team, and it lets our team focus on solving new problems instead of dealing with the same ones over and over again. So once again, learn how CircleCI can help you end your business at howibuilt.it/circleci. As a special bonus for How I Built It listeners, CircleCI is having a virtual raffle where you can win a pair of the newest Sony noise canceling headphones. Improve your team’s processes and enter for a chance to win at howibuilt.it/circleci. That’s C-I-R-C-L-E-C-I. And now back to the show. Okay. So again, with the scripts are in, I decided to start recording. And I have a YouTube video of how I do this, that I’ll link to. But the tools I use are OBS, my Sony A6400. A big component of this course was it was going to be a lot more talking head than previous videos or previous courses I’ve made, which have been basically all screencast. So I got a fancy new camera. I will link to a video of how I set that up as well, where I’m getting fantastic looking 4K video. So I have OBS, my camera. I created slides that I switched to. And the way I’m easily switching to those slides is with my stream deck. And this was really important because there was another thing I knew I was going to do before I started recording. And that was sending my videos out for edit. So I was going to send them to another video editor. And this was the first time I’ve decided to do this because I can edit videos myself. As a matter of fact, people hire me to create videos for them. So this was kind of a big step for me, especially because it was talking head and I wanted to make sure that they were cut the right way. And I found a former Treehouse video editor. He is great, but I sent him all of the videos or most of the videos, and he edited them. And it saved me a ton of time that I knew would just extend the life of this project and make it even longer for me to launch. So anyway, that whole tangent was to tell you that I wanted to be able to easily switch between just the camera, my slides, and my slides and the camera. And the stream deck with OBS allowed me to do that so I wouldn’t have to make a bunch of edit notes like use this slide here, etc. There were a few videos I did edit. And those were mostly screencasts that I recorded ScreenFlow. And I just did that because there are a couple of things that I wanted to make sure I got that it would have been easier for me to do or faster for me to do than for me to communicate those things. Now with my next course, I’m going to communicate those things to the editor. And I’m probably going to record in ScreenFlow. And one of the things I like to do is boost the size of the cursor so that people can see it more easily, especially on mobile devices. Because I record on a 5K screen. And I want to make sure that they could see everything. So I do boost the size of the cursor. And if I record that in OBS, there’s not an easy way to do that. With ScreenFlow, they capture the cursor separately so that you can easily replace that. So, that was the recording process. I recorded a lot of videos, like around 30 videos over the course of a couple of weeks. Usually dedicating Saturdays to it because I’m working fewer days now. Long story short, my wife is a nurse and my daughter’s not in daycare. So on days where my wife is working, I watch my daughter. And there’s not a lot of time for me to get much done. So I’m working on Saturdays. And since Saturdays are generally pretty quiet days, I decide to record podcast Liftoff on those days. I recorded the videos. I sent them to my editor. And then fairly recently, within the last couple of weeks before launching the course, I was in the hot seat in my mastermind group. So my mastermind group is a great trends. And each week or every other week, we rotate who is in the hot seat. Which means we give quick updates ourselves. And then we focus in on one person for most of the hour. And I was talking through some of the issues I was having. And somebody in my mastermind, actually it was like a team effort. But somebody led the discussion and they were saying, “The thing that you should do is take your learners on a journey.” And I know this inherently, “But present them with a course that allows them to get up and running quickly. And then present new courses or new workshops to them when they are ready.” And it seemed so obvious to me when I heard this in the mastermind group. But if I have one single giant course that covers the gamut, people probably wouldn’t want to buy that either because they might think, “Well, I’m not ready to build a podcast website. I don’t want to pay for that part of it.” So I decided with their help to break the course up into four courses and make it the Podcast Liftoff curriculum. So just to bring it back to the beginning, the first podcasting course I put out was Launch Your Podcast Website In Three Days. The problem with that is that nobody wants a podcast website if they don’t have a podcast. I was sending Luke Skywalker to fight Darth Vader without a light saber, let alone knowledge of the force. So that was my first big mistake. My second big mistake was thinking people would pay a high dollar amount for a giant course. And maybe that is true, right? But I’m not Pat Flynn. I’m not Amy Porterfield. I’m not some of these other people who are selling thousand dollar programs. I am Joe Casabona, and I make small consumable courses that have clear action items for people to get through. So Podcast Liftoff is now the curriculum. And the four courses inside the curriculum are Podcast Liftoff Launch to show you how to launch your podcast. Podcast Liftoff Build, which will show you how to build your website. Or I’m calling it Podcast Liftoff Website too, but that’s not a verb. So I’m struggling a little bit with that name. Then Podcast Liftoff Promote, which will show you how to promote and grow your podcast. And finally, Podcast Liftoff Monetize, which will give you all of the ways that you can make money with your podcast. The first two are done, because the website course already existed. And Podcast Liftoff Launch was all the videos that I had scripted up until that point. So with that knowledge and the fact that my editor was getting most of those videos to me pretty quickly, made me ready to launch last week. So I was super excited. I restructured the website course a little bit. I moved some lessons around. I went to my spreadsheet, and I basically broke up all of the videos into four courses instead of one giant course. And I was ready to go. So launching the course, let’s talk about how I’m selling it, where I’m selling it, etc. I have a website, creatorcourses.com. That is where all of my courses and my memberships live. But I want Podcast Liftoff to be a signature course of mine. And so I want it to sit on its own domain. A lot of people I should say who have signature courses, will employ this strategy where they have a top level domain that’s pretty much a landing page for the course. And then they send people to enroll at wherever their courses are. Most people have their courses on Teachable. I have a WordPress install that is using WooCommerce with WooCommerce memberships, WooCommerce subscriptions, and LearnDash. So my LMS is LearnDash. I put the courses in there. I had some people who were preregistered for Podcast Liftoff or got the Podcast Liftoff website course that I wanted them to be automatically enrolled in Podcast Liftoff launch. I was able to do that pretty easily thanks to LearnDash. And then I created the course. I have the course materials. I made sure that the Facebook group was ready to go and included in the course materials, because that’s where I want my students to interact. And then I built out the lessons. I host my videos with Vimeo, Vimeo Pro specifically. And I uploaded all of my videos to that. One thing actually is because I wanted to launch as quickly as possible, I had about 30 gigabytes of videos. And your weekly limit on the Vimeo plan that I had, Vimeo Pro, was 20 gigabytes a week. So I actually ended up upgrading to Vimeo Pro unlimited, which with the coupon code I found ended up being an extra five bucks a month. But I wanted to upload all of those at the same time. And I knew that I would probably run into this issue again because I plan on updating a lot of my courses over the course of the year. The coming year. And I’m doing a lot more 4K video. And those are big. Those are big videos. So I have the course in LearnDash. I have the videos hosted at Vimeo. I have the course materials, which is the podcast workbook I’m giving away, but with a lot clearer prompts. Every lesson or just about every lesson ends with an action item for them to do based on something in the workbook mostly. And then I have the emails. There’s a great add-on for LearnDash called LD Notification. It’s free, where you can send emails based on when somebody enrolls in the course, when somebody completes the course, when they complete a lesson, etc. So I have a few emails set up throughout the course where students will get emails and check-ins, and things like that. So the next thing I want to talk about is interacting. And that’s a problem that I’ve had for a long time with my students. Just trying to get more interaction. But before we get to that, let’s hear from our third and final sponsor TextExpander. Break: Today’s episode is brought to you by Smile and their product TextExpander. Save time typing and boost your productivity with TextExpander. I’m all about automation, and TextExpander is a great way to get started with automation. It allows you to create your own snippets for repetitive texts you tend to use everywhere. Add the text, create a snippet, and boom. Save precious time and keystrokes. One of my favorite snippets is for my address. So instead of typing out my full address and risking typos, I simply type $addr, and text expander does the rest, filling in my full address for me. I also have snippets for my street, my city, and my zip code. But that’s not all text expander does. With its advanced snippets, you can create fill-ins, pop up fields, and more. You can even use JavaScript or AppleScript. Another one of my favorite and most used snippets is when I type PPT. That will take whatever text I have on my clipboard and convert it to plain text. So I’m no longer fighting formatting when I copy from a Word document, a Google Doc, or a plain HTML page, like a website. I also use it for common links, email messages, which I can completely customize with fill-ins and drop down menus. And even date calculations. I’m currently writing a book, and TextExpander has been instrumental with that. TextExpander is available on Mac OS, Windows, Chrome, iPhone, and iPad. So pretty much anywhere you do computer. If you’ve been curious about trying TextExpander or automation in general, now’s the time. As a listener, you can get 20% off your first year. Just visit textexpander.com/podcast and let them know How I Built It sent you. That’s textexpander.com/podcast for 20% off your first year. And now back to the show. All right, thanks so much to TextExpander once again. They were actually integral in me adding a bunch of stuff to my course, because I created a bunch of snippets for the repeatable stuff, like the course materials and things like that. Anyway. So interacting with my students. This was idea I saw from a few educators or educational places like masterclass, Pat Flynn’s class, things like that. Peter Hollins’ class, or courses. And there are a few things I’m doing here. So I turned comments on for every lesson and topic. This allows students, I should say, to comment directly on the video they just watched. Ask questions, let others answer, share what they’re working on, and things like that. This is an ecosystem that they are already in. They don’t have to go any place extra. And for people who don’t use Facebook, this is a good way for them to interact with other students. But I also did create a Facebook student center for my members and all students. So we’ll see there’s not enough activity across all of my courses yet for each course to get its own standalone Facebook group. And with the members side of things, members are taking a bunch of courses. And I don’t want members to have to join a bunch of Facebook groups for every individual course they take. So this makes the most sense to me. I might change my mind in the future. I’ve been hearing good things about Discord now. I see a bunch of people using that, and that seems like a great community. But when I asked my members and my students what was best for them, Facebook seemed to win out the most. I think people are getting Slack fatigue. But I wanted to give my students some options, and one was super easy turning on comments. They also have the ability to email me of course. They’re always invited to email me. And one of the things I’m still considering as I record this is actually adding a chat bot to my lessons. I was using one for a little while that served as both kind of pre-sale and inline interaction with the students as they were taking the lessons, if they had specific questions about the lessons. But I didn’t really configure it that well, I didn’t include the URL for example. Or the lesson name. Right? So I’m like, “What course are they talking about?” But I just had a conversation with my friend Brad Morrison, that episode is coming out next week. So that’s the episode that follows this, 172. Where he mentions chat bots at some point. So it’s got me thinking about it again. But that’s everything. That’s all the stuff I’m considering. I know I talked about a lot of stuff. Tools and processes, things like that. But I hope it’s helpful and I hope it makes a lot of sense. So just to quickly sum up, I got an idea. And that turned out to be a not great idea. So step one is research and actually talk to people. And don’t just say, “Is this a good idea?” Actually get feedback and ask them how much they would pay for such a thing. Set up a presale page and see if people would actually order that. Build your audience is number two. I have an actual audience to launch to now, and this launch is going better than the podcast website launch. I use my node to create a mind map of everything I might want to include in the course. And then I distill that into an outline, which I use Google Sheets for. When it comes to scripting, yes I scripted a bunch of these. And if you watch some of the videos, you can kind of tell. I don’t have a teleprompter, because I don’t work off scripts that often. But you can tell at some points I’m glancing at the screen a little bit too long, like my monitor. In later videos, I just create an outline of talking points, right? Because it is stuff that I know that well, and maybe I just need a couple of prompts. So scripting is totally up to you. I generally don’t script. I just have a list of talking points that I like to get to. and with screencasts, I don’t. With onscreen tutorials, unless somebody has hired me to make a video for them where the scripting process is super important. Then that’s when I do it, but I don’t do it for my own videos most of the time. So then I record it. I will link to my recording process and all of the gear. Again, the show notes are going to be at howibuilt.it/171. I used an editor for the first time. I use LearnDash for my LMS. And the interaction stuff I’m doing through built-in comments and Facebook. So my trade secret for you would be, I think that what I started off this whole wrap up with, which is research and talk to people and get some real feedback. So that’s it for this episode. If you enjoyed this process and you’re interested in the course, which will take you from everything from planning, picking a topic, staying consistent, to publishing, launching episode zero, and submitting it to Apple Podcasts and Spotify and the rest. You can head over to howibuilt.it/podcast, because that will redirect you to a wonderful page where a discount has already been applied for you dear listener. Thanks so much to this week’s sponsors Ahrefs, CircleCI, and TextExpander. Their support allows me to keep coming to you every week with interviews and content that I hope you find useful. For more information about them and all the show notes, everything that I talked about here, head over to howibuilt.it/171. If you liked this episode, give us a rating and reviews on Apple Podcasts. It helps people discover the show, and I’m having a really good month. So I’m excited. Thank you for everybody who has been going off and giving a rating or review. Or telling a friend about it, maybe there’s a particular episode. The COVID-19 episode was like gangbusters. So thank you for telling people about the show. And until next time, get out there and build something.

Laura Elizabeth and Design Academy

February 19, 2019

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Laura Elizabeth is a fantastic designer who wants to “teach design to developers.” Her story from consulting to products is fantastic, and her method for building buzz and tension around her course worked perfectly. This is a fantastic case study for people who consult, but want to move into selling online courses or selling products.

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Transcript

Intro: Hey, everybody. Welcome to Episode 111 of How I Built It. Today my guest is Laura Elizabeth of Design Academy. I love Laura’s story so much. I met her at CaboPress and her talk that she hosted was about improving design and UX and things like that, but not in the normal ways you would think like making things look pretty, or whatever. She talked about converting or answering real questions and converting in a real way that would aid UX and UI and make your brand and your designs stand out. Today we’re going to be talking about how she built her Design Academy, and how she wanted to teach design to developers. As a developer myself I know that is a daunting task, and she does it very well. From her journey of research to launching the course to a ready and raring to go audience, I think this is a fantastic episode for anybody who wants to build an online course. I certainly learned a lot, and I started to put some of this stuff into practice, and I hope you learn a lot too. We will get to all of that and more, but first a word from our sponsors.

Joe Casabona: Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of How I Built It. The podcast that asks, “How did you build that?” Today my guest is Laura Elizabeth, founder and things doer of Client Portal and Design Academy. Laura, how are you today?

Laura Elizabeth: I’m pretty well. How are you?

Joe: I am fantastic. I appreciate you coming on the show. Laura and I met at CaboPress, and this is one of the– I guess it’s going to be an interview series because I have four or five people from CaboPress that I’m interviewing. Laura talked about good design as part of– Maybe actually, instead of me trying to butcher what you talked about, why don’t you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do?

Laura: Yes. I have a couple of things. The first thing I do is I teach design to developers, and the second thing I do is I have a WordPress plugin called Client Portal, which is a place for freelancers and agencies to store their deliverables. But like you said, we met at CaboPress, and at CaboPress I was talking about design. I love talking about design, teaching design to people, whether it’s developers or founders. We were talking a lot about how design can help increase customer engagement and all that stuff. So, yeah. It was pretty fun, and it was an amazing event.

Joe: Yeah. It was great, and I enjoyed your talk, and I think there was a lot of good things to think about that you’ll probably touch on as we start talking about both Client Portal and Design Academy. I’d like to focus on the Design Academy a bit, because I love talking about online courses and design, and very selfishly I think I’ll be able to get a lot of good information from you. But I do want to start with your WordPress plugin called Client Portal, and I’m interested, from a design aspect is I am a developer, and I generally take a very function over form approach. But I know that there’s, as you talked about in Cabo, a lot of things that go into creating good design and guiding the user along the path. Is that?

Laura: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. With Client Portal, it’s a really simple tool, and it’s something that I made for myself to use with my clients. I used project management software before, and my problem with that was that it was all super complex and it had a huge learning curve, and frankly clients didn’t use it, and it was expensive. I realized that I just wanted something really simple, no frills, but nicely designed because design was important to me as a designer. I felt like everything I needed to give to my clients had to be nicely designed throughout the process, because I felt like they were expecting it. So I made Client Portal, just a very simple place to keep all your assets together, it’s branded to your website, and the design was really simple, so it fits in with pretty much any website, and it doesn’t look like you are using a third party tool. But you can keep all your third-party tools that you’re using and link out to it from this central place. The design was super important to me to use with my clients, and then when I ended up selling it to other freelancers and agencies that was actually one of the main things that people comment on and the reason that they buy Client Portal versus something more complex, because they say “Client Portal makes me look good, because Client Portal looks good.” When you’re working with a client and their first impression of you and your project, or maybe not quite your first impression but the first impression when the project is started and when you’ve sold them the product, is this you’re being presented with this custom unique dashboard where everything lives. It just gives them a really good feeling and that sets the tone for the entire project. That you’re a professional, that this is going to be great. It sounds a little bit trite in a way, but I think the people do care about design and they do like when something is nicely designed, and so it’s one of the interesting things being a designer turned product creator is that design is such a huge thing in everything I do. It’s partly because I feel the pressure as a designer to make everything look good, but there’s been a ton of benefits along the way for doing and for prioritizing that.

Joe: Absolutely. Talking about Client Portal specifically, getting stuff from your client can be a job unto itself, and if you use something complicated, they’re going to be less likely to want to use that tool. Simplicity in its design and making it very intuitive is incredibly important for the entire process.

Laura: Yeah, exactly. So when you’re using something more complex, especially with a client, clients turn over relatively quickly a lot of times and they don’t want to learn a new tool every time they work with someone. Because maybe they’re working with a designer, maybe then they’re working with someone else like a business consultant, and if they all have these separate tools that’s a lot to learn. They don’t want to do it and they, for me, I found they just resorted to email, and then I’d have to take their e-mail and put it into a project management tool. Whereas with Client Portal the client is not expected to do anything, the client does not have to do anything at all with it apart from save the link. They log into it, and they can find all their files, everything they need there. Even after the project is completed, I always had this issue where clients would email me like six months after a project would finish being like, “I lost that logo that you did for me. Can you send it again?” And it was super frustrating because maybe I’d store them on external hard drives and I wouldn’t have it on my computer, and I’d have to dig it out, and it was just annoying that I felt like clients couldn’t keep hold of the stuff that I sent them. It was just taking up a bunch of time. So, Client Portal also helps with that, and it’s another reason that I made it.

Joe: Great. Just this morning I had that very issue finding client-related information, and I had to dig through email, and that ate up a bunch of my time.

Laura: Yeah, it sucks.

Joe: It’s awful. And the converse is you say, “What project management tool do you like to use?” And if they like use one, then you have to learn that one, so this is a nice middle ground. It’s easy to use for everybody. I like that. Part of the reason I wanted to talk a little bit about this is because it gives us some groundwork to Design Academy, where you mentioned that you teach design to developers. As a developer myself, I already know the answer to this, but why is it important for developers to know design?

Laura: The reason I teach developers specifically is because during my freelancing work my favorite clients were always developers. If I could work me as a designer and with a developer, the project was amazing. Because they got what I was doing, I got what they were doing, we both had mutual appreciation of each other’s craft. We didn’t have the client in the middle screwing things up. So, I loved working with developers. But one of the problems that they had when I would speak to them is they had all these amazing ideas for different products and tools that they wanted to build. Because, you might be able to relate to this, but it seems like developers just always like making things. That’s just what they love to do. But the problem that they had was they wanted to make something, they wanted it to look decent because everyone else is making things that looked good and they wanted to be able to do the same thing, but they couldn’t necessarily hire a designer to work on it with them because maybe it was going to be something that was open source. Or maybe it was something that they didn’t know whether people would pay money for it yet and they just they just wanted to validate it a little bit. The reason I teach developers is because I want to give them those tools, to be able to make something look decent without needing to hire a designer. That said, I don’t think developers have to learn design. I think there’s a lot of pressure on developers to be good at everything. All these new frameworks and everything that come out, it’s overwhelming, and I know that sometimes it can feel like it’s just too much. I don’t think they have to, but I think it’s a really good idea if they can learn just a few principles to make something look decent. Not anything award winning, but make something look decent. Because the thing about design is that those skills that you have once you’ve learned those principles, you keep them forever. It’s not like a framework or a new tool where there’s something else out in a month, and you have to relearn it. It’s just something that they can learn now that’s going to give them lasting benefit. I would say that it’s beneficial for developers to learn design, but I wouldn’t say that they absolutely have to learn.

Joe: That makes a lot of sense. I feel the same way. Moving from developer to designer, there’s the question of “Do designers need to know HTML and CSS?” And, no, I don’t think so. In some ways, I think maybe that could inhibit what the designer is thinking. If they know the limitations of HTML and CSS, maybe their designs will maybe show those limitations. But I do like this thought, “I want them to make something look decent,” and it’s hard to hire a designer. Then on the other side, when they get to a point where they are ready to hire a designer, maybe they hire you, and now you’re both speaking the same language. I’m not just saying, “Make it pop,” or whatever designers hate to hear. I would hate to hear that one, though.

Laura: It does make it a lot easier when you come to hire a designer. Also, it has that– I think most developers that I speak to they want to get into products in some way, so they want to be able to design to make something look decent. Then when they get enough revenue behind them, they want to be able to hire a designer to maybe do some branding and figure out how this is all going to fit together. But then on top of that, the knowledge that they’ve learned back in their early days on design, when they need to add a new feature or when they need to tweak something. Which is going to happen all the time, and unless you’ve got a full-time designer working for you or a team, you’re going to need to know how to do that. So, it’s really good. The skills are really good when you’re working with a designer, because you have a bit more of an appreciation for what they’re doing, but they’re also going to help you after when you need to change things, and you don’t want to completely wreck the design. I find that you were talking about how designers need to learn– Or designers don’t necessarily need to learn HTML and CSS, it’s completely true. But if they know a little bit, it’s definitely going to help them, but they don’t need to. It’s one of those, and it’s a really difficult balance. It’s useful in pretty much all aspects.

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. One more point on this before we get into the research of Design Academy and how you built the platform and how you marketed it. When I was doing full-time web design development, one of the things that I would do is convert PSDs to working websites. I know that there were a few very design oriented web developers I worked with who would notice if font typography was off just by a little bit. I absolutely did not notice that until I got more mature in the design side of things, They’re like “This is off,” and I’m like “How do you–? No one notices that.” But they spent a lot of time on that design to make sure it looked good.

Laura: That is so true. Yeah. The more you learn about design, and I find it especially with things like typography. The more you know about it, the more you notice when things that you never noticed before, and it’s one of those things that you could argue that “Unless it’s gonna be just designers looking at my product, who cares?” But even though a non-designer might not be able to notice specifically what’s wrong with the design, they will know that something’s off. That you get this– You’re going to have this feeling, like when you look at a website, and they’re similar in structure, but one looks designed, and one doesn’t, and you don’t know why, but that’s just how it is. When you learn design, you learn how to notice what the problem is, and you say “Nine times out of ten it’s probably something like spacing,” things are too squished together or alignment. Really simple things that you wouldn’t think would make a difference, but it’s all these tiny things that build up. But that’s such a good point, and I think it’s completely true that you don’t notice until you start learning.

Joe: Absolutely. I’m very reluctant to point things like that out to my wife who wouldn’t generally notice that, and I’m like “I don’t want to ruin this for you, but here you go.”

Laura: I know the feeling.

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Joe: I like this. Talking about Design Academy, it’s an online course, and you’re specifically targeting developers. We talked about the inception for the course, but what research did you do if any to make sure your messaging is right to target developers?

Laura: My research phase for this was two years or more.

Joe: Wow.

Laura: Not on purpose, I was freelancing at the time, and I had very limited time to dedicate to this. I knew I wanted to make a course, but I didn’t, as much as people told me, I didn’t realize how much work it would be. Even when I came to do it, it was about triple what I thought, and I thought I was being pretty realistic with it. I’ve lost my train of thought.

Joe: No problem. When you just said it was triple, it made me think about, and somebody was like “It should only take you like an hour to create this course.” And I’m like, “No it will not. It will not take me an hour to create this course, though.” That resonated perfectly with me.

Laura: Exactly. It took us so much longer than I thought. Back to– I was thinking, “What was the question again?” It was about research. So when I started researching it what I did, the first thing I did was I knew I wanted to create a course. I didn’t have the time right now, but I thought “I’m going to do it evenings and weekends.” That didn’t happen. What I did was I put up a landing page, which just had an email opt-in. The landing page was really bad, I can’t remember what it said, but it was basically saying “Put in your email address, and you’ll hear about when I’m going to create this course on design for developers.” It was really simple. So, I did that, and people were putting in their email address. I was doing things at the time like I was speaking at conferences, I was going on a few podcasts, I was doing a lot of guest posting because I wanted to get into writing. I knew that building my audience, I knew I wanted to get from freelancing to product and I knew that to get there I needed an audience. At this point, my focus was building that audience, so what I did was I had the landing page, and anytime I did a guest post or something I’d put a link to it. People would slowly sign up, and I very slowly built a list of people, and what I do was I would– When they signed up I just emailed them saying, “What led you to sign up today? What are you struggling with? Why do you want to learn design?” And they’d reply back to me, and I would collate every single answer that they gave me, and I’d put it into a spreadsheet which I’m still keeping up to date today. It’s absolutely humongous. I have headings with their different struggles at the top, and then I’d paste in exactly what they were telling me underneath. Over time I would reply to them, my list was small, so I could have conversations with them to find out what they needed, find out what they wanted it to be. It just give me a really good idea of what Design Academy was going to be. So, like I said, my research phase was like two years, but it wasn’t intentional. I finally got to the stage where I had someone email in being like, “I appreciate all the valuable content you’re sending out, but can you release something, some paid course? Please?” They sounded a little bit annoyed because they were like, “I’ve been waiting for so long and every email you send I’m hoping it’s gonna be something that I can buy, and it’s not.” I was like, “Wow I need to do something now.” So that gave me the push to be like, “OK. I’m going to open up preorders because I can’t freelance while I’m building a course. I just can’t. I opened up preorders that did well, and it allowed me to take off about three months. Which I needed full time, I was doing about seven days a week building this course, but the preorders helped me do that. So that’s that’s pretty much how I went from research phase to doing it, but I definitely needed that kick, and I needed to not be freelancing at the same time.

Joe: Wow. There’s a bunch of really good things to touch on here. First is, you knew you needed to build an audience. I think that’s something that I’ve maybe learned the hard way over the last year, because I’m very Field of Dreams when I’m like, “I’ll just build this and people will buy it.”

Laura: [You’re Rome.]

Joe: Yeah, exactly. That’s not necessarily, that’s not usually the case at least. I like that you set up a pretty simple landing page, you told people what they were getting, and then you’ve built a rapport with them enough that one person was comfortable enough to be like, “I want to give you money. Can you please let me do that?” Then the other thing you did was opened up preorders. This is advice that I hear a lot, and you open up preorders to– Maybe you didn’t necessarily do this, but the advice that I got is “Open up preorders to prove that people are definitely willing to pay for it.” Because if you open up your preorders and nobody buys it, then you don’t have to spend seven days a week for over three months building a thing nobody’s going to want.

Laura: Yeah, exactly. I do agree with that. I think it’s difficult though, because the problem is what happens if it’s probably not going to be zero people buy it, or a ton of people buy it. What if ten people buy it and that ten is just not worth it? You then have to refund them, which is awkward and probably looks bad on you. Which I wouldn’t want to do. I think it is really good advice, the difference that I had though is that I was pretty sure that people would buy because I’d been so engaged in talking to my list. People were super passionate about it and I could– I don’t know how, but I could tell that it was going to go well. I think that’s key, because I’ve done things in the past where I’ve tried to productize different things and the response has been a bit weak, and I could tell that it wasn’t going to go well. Then when I did launch something, it didn’t go well. With Design Academy I didn’t have that, and I knew it was going to do well. I don’t know if I would have launched preorders for something unless I was pretty certain that I was going to do it, but it’s still a risk. Because you either have to refund everyone, or you have to build it, and maybe you haven’t made enough money from it. There’s nothing that takes the risk away, and I don’t think.

Joe: You’re absolutely right. I’ve been in both of those situations, and I’m currently in one where I have preorders, and I’m certain and very sure the course will do well, I just haven’t reached the right audience. I’m accepting the risk of putting time into the course and then working with people to build up the right audience, which is again, backward from what you’ve done. But I want to get this course out. I’m very excited about it.

Laura: I don’t think there’s– I don’t think either of them are wrong ways to do it. There’s stuff that I’m planning now like I’m planning a different course that I’m not going to do preorders for. I’m just going to build it and then work on and selling it later. So, it just depends so much on an individual situation. You’re pretty sure, and you’ve got the experience to know that when you build the course, you’re going to be able to find the right audience. It’s just right now, having something to sell is going to be better than trying to build that audience first. It just depends completely.

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Joe: One thing I love talking about because I’m an educator, is how you built the course. I’m looking at the page right now, which I will link in the show notes. It’s DesignAcademy.io. You’ve got six modules, and you mentioned this, that you have a big spreadsheet where you ask your subscribers, “What is the biggest problem you have?” Did that serve as a boilerplate for how this course was created?

Laura: It did, but I struggled with figuring out how I was going to teach this. The mistake that I made was I made the course– I figured the course was going to be too broad. I’m going to teach developers how to design? That’s super broad. There are so many different types of design that a developer is going to want to do. Some of them– I found in my responses from the spreadsheet that some of them were working in-house at a company, and they wanted to know how to build features that were on brand and looked good. Other people were in e-commerce, and they wanted to know how to make their e-commerce websites look better and convert better. Some people were doing a SaaS, some people were doing their own products, and they wanted to know how to design and build a web app. There was just so many different avenues, and it took me so long to figure out how I’m going to teach this. I realized that it’s impossible to do all of that in one course, so what I did was I completely stripped all that out, and I thought “OK. What does every one of these different people need to know to give them the basics to be able to take what they’re doing and take it further?” The initial course outline was just based on the feedback, but it was based on these different personas. I was trying not to go too far in one direction, but just to give everyone the principles, and what I’m actually doing with Design Academy now is I have that baseline course where you learn about how to choose and pair colors, and you learn how to look at a design and see what’s wrong with it like we were talking about earlier. You learn about typography, all that stuff that everyone needs to know, but what’s going to happen now is that I’m currently building a bunch of different tracks for it. We’ve got the web app track, then we’ll have the e-commerce track, and the SaaS app track, the training website track, and all these different add ons that you can then– It’s kind of like a build your own design course based on what you learn. That helped, and once I realized that “I don’t need to teach everyone everything in this course.” It became a lot easier for me to put together a syllabus because I was treading water trying to figure out what to do for such a long time. I guess what I’m trying to say is, for me, niche-ing the cause I suppose– I don’t know if that’s the right word, but refocusing the course helped me build it.

Joe: That’s fantastic. Because I’ve taught at the college level for ten years, but students are put in a box. They have a major, and they have a minor, they have prerequisite for certain courses. Coming up with the curriculum you basically know the students who are gonna be in the course, when you release an online course it’s– Anybody can register for it. It’s up to you to make sure you’re communicating the things you’re going to learn. “Here’s what you know, or here’s what I believe you already know.” But the way you just described it sounds like you have the fundamentals course, and then people can choose their own adventure. Like those books from the 90s. I love that. I think that’s cool, and I think that’s probably a good takeaway, something for at least me to think about as I move forward with my courses. I also noticed– Actually, let’s get to the text stack a little bit. You had DesignAcademy.io, and I noticed that it is a closed enrollment. So it’s–?

Laura: Yep. Yeah.

Joe: OK, cool. How did you build this site? What are you using for the LMS and things like that?

Laura: The site is built on WordPress, and I use Sensei, which is the LMS. Then I actually custom designed the courseware and used a developer to help put that on top of Sensei, again because of that whole pressure “Because I’m a designer teaching a design course I felt like it all had to look good.” So I custom designed all of the courseware, and people like that, which is great. Totally unnecessary for the vast majority of people. If I didn’t do that, I’d probably, I was looking into Teachable or Podio or something, which is such a faster, easier way to get something up. But I knew I wanted something custom because whenever I use services, I always regret it in the long term, because I want to own things, and I want to be able to customize them. So, I built that myself. Sensei has been great. I haven’t used anything other than that, so I can’t tell you whether it’s good or bad. It works.

Joe: If it works for you, it’s good, right? That’s generally what I tell people.

Laura: Yeah, it’s good.

Joe: Cool, very cool. I love that you designed it and you went the custom route. I feel the same way, and when I launched my online courses site, I was like “I’m going to spend no time doing development. I want to focus on content.” And then I was like, “But I want this thing. I want the video to be big at the top with the information below,” and I just knew how I liked to take online courses and I knew what worked for my students, and I have the ability to do that. So again, you’re speaking my language here, designing the whole experience.

Laura: It’s definitely advice, if you’ve got that skill set, it is worth it. It has been for me, anyway. I take a lot of pride in everything in the course, and it’s basically based on me. I’m the one behind it, I’m the one teaching it, so I wanted it to look good. People would possibly argue that there were better things I could have been doing with my time, but I don’t regret it, because I love it when people email me saying “This courseware is amazing. Where can I buy it?” And I’m like, “Maybe I should sell the courseware. Or the theme.”.

Joe: That’s awesome. That’s cool. So it’s a video course, are you using something custom for the videos as well? Or are you using some solution for that?

Laura: I use Vimeo, and then I embed them into the courseware. It was between Vimeo and, what’s the other one, Wistia.

Joe: Wistia.

Laura: I loved Wistia because I love everything they do as a company, it’s just so cool. But it just came down to price in the end.

Joe: I’ve looked into Wistia as well, they do some cool things, but it’s prohibitively expensive.

Laura: Yeah. Vimeo ended up being pretty expensive for me in the end. It’s not too bad, and I can’t remember what I pay now. But I thought I could get away with one of the cheaper plans, and then I realized that there were some features on the higher plans that customers wanted and I was like “OK, fine.”

Joe: Gotcha. Very cool. I’ll definitely link to both of those in the show notes as well. I’m just going to do– We’ve had a good conversation. We’re coming up on time here. The last thing I want to ask you, and maybe we can roll this into plans for the future which we already touched on, was you did a closed enrollment. What was the reasoning behind that?

Laura: At the minute I’m just testing things, so I don’t know if I’m going to keep the closed enrollment. What I didn’t want to do is, previously I just did sales and discounts. I don’t want to do that with this, because it wasn’t working very well I don’t think, aside from after the preorders, doing a discount didn’t seem to be working well enough. I wanted to close enrollment, and the reason the preorders went so well is because I was saying “This is going to be open for three days and then it’s gone for a couple of months.” I think that’s what made it do well. So I’m testing closed enrollment now to see if that has the same effect, I don’t have the answer just yet, but I think I will keep it. The way it’s looking now I think I am going to keep it as closed enrollment. One thing I’ve been toying with is I’ve been toying with an evergreen closed enrollment, which is where people sign up and do the free course, and then they get pitched. They have a very brief open enrollment period for a few days, and I’ve been doing that for a while, but now I’m actually going to try closing enrollment for everyone and just doing the whole quarterly launch thing. I’m just in the testing stage at the minute.

Joe: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. I’ve heard this from a lot of people who are doing online courses, is you can’t create scarcity with a digital product. Scarcity is one of a big motivator at least for people to want to buy. You’re right, discounts– I’m offering a 33% discount on all of my courses right now because it’s my birth month as we record this and that’s how old I turned.

Laura: Yay, congrats.

Joe: Thank you very much. I made it 33 years. But people aren’t necessarily moved by the discount rate.

Laura: Yeah.

Joe: So, there’s something else you have to do, and I’ve heard a lot of great success with the closed enrollment.

Laura: I think I’m going to keep it up. The downside to what I’ve been doing like I said I’ve been doing the evergreen one, which I don’t know if I like. It’s very easy for me. But I think I want to switch to the quarterly launches thing because I like the idea of being able to do things like web life webinars and stuff like that and have a large group of people. What was cool about my preorders is I had a large group of people all join straight away, and they joined this Facebook group, and they all came in at the same time and said “Hey.” They were working through the stuff at the same time. And I don’t know if you saw Jennifer’s talk at CaboPress about online courses. She was saying that she does the hole everyone goes through at the same time, and I’m thinking of moving to that because it’s got the scarcity, but it doesn’t feel as sleazy. Because there is a really good reason as to why enrollment is closed, it’s not just because you’re trying to make more sales, and it’s going to benefit the students too.

Joe: It’s almost like a college semester, where a class enrolls at the same time, and then they have your undivided attention almost.

Laura: Yeah, exactly. You can answer questions, and everyone is going and can help each other. It’s a lot–

Joe: Right, instead of just focusing on constantly selling. These are words that you didn’t say explicitly, but I like that you’re selling me on this model right now as we talk.

Laura: Cool. I will let you know how it goes.

Joe: Absolutely. For those interested, I did interview Jennifer Bourne on the show, so I will link her episode in the show note, and you can get the full effect of what you talked about. So, this episode has been great. Laura, I do want to ask you my favorite question, which is, do you have any trade secrets for us?

Laura: See, I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, and I don’t know. I don’t know if I do. The only thing I could think of is, one thing that’s helped me is I try to build in the open a lot by– It’s really hard to do if you don’t like self-promoting, but post everything that you’re doing. If you’re trying to sell an online course, I definitely don’t do this enough but post everything you do. If I’m designing something, even if it’s not to do with my design course. Post it on Twitter or Facebook, because I’ve had some fantastic partnerships come from something I posted on Twitter that I thought nobody would see. It’s been one of those things where you say a lot of things is based on luck, but then you can increase your luck surface area. I’m not sure who said that by doing stuff like this it feels pointless, but it works sometimes. I don’t know if that’s a secret though, to be honest.

Joe: I like that a lot, though. I mean that’s part of the reason this podcast exists because I was asking people these questions and I was like “Maybe other people will benefit.” And so, now we’re having this conversation in the open. I think that’s a really good trade secret, and social media has enabled us to do this. Maybe the next time you’re editing or something, you can have your Instagram story going, and talk about what you’re doing. I think that would be cool. Awesome. Laura, thanks so much for joining me today. I appreciate it. Where can people find you?

Laura: You can– If you want to find out more about Design Academy you can go to DesignAcademy.io if you want to find out about Client Portal you can go to Client-Portal.io. Don’t put hyphens in domain names, by the way. I regret that so much. And then if you want to if you want to say hi you can– The best place to get me is Twitter, it’s @laurium. Or you can email me, my email addresses on those two websites they just showed you.

Joe: Perfect. I will link all of that and everything that we’ve talked about in the show notes. Laura, thanks so much for joining me. I appreciate it.

Laura: Thank you.

Outro: Thanks again so much to Laura for joining me today. Again, I learned so much from this interview. I loved everything she said about doing things like designing in the open, and the need to build an audience if you want to go from freelancing to products. That’s a lesson that I learned the hard way. I wish I had that advice two years ago. I hope that as you think about building a course, you take her advice to heart. My question of the week for you is, “Do you plan on building an online course? If so, what’s it about?” Let me know via email, Joe@HowIBuilt.it or on Twitter @jcasabona. For all of the show notes you can head over to HowIBuilt.it/111. If you liked this episode feel free to give it a rating and review on Apple podcasts, it helps people discover the show. Until next time, get out there and build something.

Anton Kraly and a Drop Ship Business

January 22, 2019

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Anton Kraly is the founder of Drop Ship Lifestyle and has an incredibly story of how he got to where he is today. I’m grateful for Anton’s time and for sharing both his story, and his tips on how we can get into drop shipping.

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Transcript

Intro: Hey, everybody. Welcome to Episode 107 of How I Built It. Today my guest is Anton Kraly of Drop Ship Lifestyle. I’m excited to talk to Anton today because way back in episode 101 Chris Lema talked about how an important thing to think about in 2019 is going to be drop-shipping, and in my opinion, there’s nobody better to talk to than Anton Kraly. He gives us lots of good advice on exactly what drop shipping is, and if you want to get into drop shipping, how to do that. In other words, how to build a dropship business. If this is something you’re especially interested in then this is a great episode, otherwise, there’s a lot of food for thought in this episode. Sit back, relax, and enjoy this interview with Anton. Of course first, I need to bring you a word from our sponsors.

Break: This season is brought to you by Plesk. Do you spend too much time doing server admin work, and not enough time building websites? Plesk helps you manage servers, websites, and customers in one dashboard. Helping you do those tasks up to 10 times faster than manually coding everything. As someone who just spent a bunch of time finding the right tools and automations to save myself time, I can tell you that Plesk is invaluable. You can try Plesk for free today at Plesk.com/build. This episode is brought to you by MailPoet. If you build WordPress websites, you’d probably recommend a newsletter solution to your customers. Why not offer them a solution that is built into the WordPress admin? The MailPoet plugin offers just that. On top of that, they have a new newsletter designer that’s easier to use than MailChimp’s, and it takes only a few minutes to configure. Your customers will love it. MailPoet offers a free sending plan to ensure top-notch deliverability, and if your customers run into issues, the MailPoet support team offers free email and chat support. Classy. Save yourself time and make your customers happy. Try the new MailPoet today. You can download the plugin over at the WordPress plugin repository, WordPress.org/plugins/MailPoet. Again, that’s WordPress.org/plugins/MailPoet.

Joe Casabona: Anton Kraly of Drop Ship Lifestyle.com. How are you today?

Anton Kraly: Doing well. How are you?

Joe: I am doing great. Thanks for joining me today. It is a little warmer for the fall here in the northeast of the United States, but that’s OK. I’m cool with it. I want to thank you for joining me today. I’m excited to talk about drop shipping and this general topic. Why don’t we start off with who you are and what you do?

Anton: Sure. My name is Anton Kraly. I see you have a New York Yankees shirt on there. I’m from New York, grew up there, went to school up in Albany. Started business there when I was 21, right out of school, selling cookies. That was my first business. I bought a delivery route for a bakery in Brooklyn, did that for a few weeks, thought “I don’t want to do this.” I learned about e-commerce in early 2007, and from then on there I’ve been building stores on different platforms, getting better hopefully, that’s always the goal with Google ads, and growing over the past ten or eleven years or so.

Joe: That’s fantastic. Did you go to SUNY Albany?

Anton: I did, yes.

Joe: Nice. That’s awesome. As we record this, it is the beginning of the baseball post-season, so hopefully, by the time this comes out, I’ll have a nice little pre-show intro talking about how the Yankees won the World Series. We’ll see. That’s cool. Why don’t we talk a little bit about that? How did you get into selling cookies for your first business? Was it– Were you really into cookies or did you see that as a good market to get into?

Anton: One of my friends’ dads, one of my friends– I realized they had a nice house and it seemed like they were doing well. It was funny because every time we would go to his house, they lived on a dead end street, and there were like five or six massive trucks out there. I asked him, “What is this?” And he said “My dad owns a delivery route business for a bread company. Like sliced bread, they had the rights to pick it up from wherever it’s made and then sell it to the grocery stores all around Nassau County on Long Island where I’m from. That was just one thing that popped into my head. I wasn’t like, “I need to be in this business,” but when I got out of school, and I knew I wanted to get into business, I was looking for opportunities that didn’t cost a million dollars because I was a kid. So I saw online that there were different businesses for sale, one of them caught my eye. It was a delivery route business for that bakery in Brooklyn, and it was about $25 grand. That was an opportunity I could get into. I saw someone and my friend’s dad that had bought something that was small, built it into something big, and I thought “OK this is an opportunity to, not do with the rest of my life at all, but to build this up maybe double the size, flip it and get into the next business.”

Joe: That’s fantastic. In college, you were ready to make a $25 thousand investment, which as somebody– We’re both around the same age. I basically worked online my entire life, and the startup costs for that are dramatically lower, like virtually zero, but that’s tainted me a little bit to wanting to make the initial investment. “You got to spend money to make money,” is the old adage. That’s cool that you were willing at that point to be willing to make that investment.

Anton: I didn’t know anything else. Back then when I bought that business, I did not know that I could build the website myself. I didn’t know there were tools out there. In fact, one of the things I was thinking of doing back then, again this is 2006. I was like, “I see an opportunity to have a for sale by owner home website. Have Nassau County, Suffolk County, all of Long Island.” And I was like, “I want to have that website built. Then we’ll find the people to list their homes.” And I went online, looked for Long Island web developers or something, and I was going to their offices and having meetings and getting quoted $100k, $200k. And I thought, “That’s any online business. That’s what you would need to spend to build it.” I had no idea that you can start something for $50 bucks. It wasn’t even an option to me.

Joe: $100k. I know a lot of the web developers listening to this cringed. Or, they’re like “I could charge that much.”

Anton: Yeah.

Joe: That’s interesting. I want to touch on two things, being a New Yorker myself. You’re from Nassau County. Does that make you a Mets fan? I don’t want to belabor the point of–

Anton: Unfortunately, yes. It makes me not like baseball.

Joe: I understand. Though the David Wright sendoff was a very nice one. A bakery in Brooklyn, for those of you outside of New York or maybe New York City, Brooklyn bakeries are the best bakeries. They make– I’m starting to sound a little bit like our president here, but there’s no better bakeries in the world, in my opinion. So that’s cool. From there I want to make sure that we have a good timeline for you talking about drop shipping. You started to do more research on e-commerce stuff, what was the leap you made from having this delivery business to getting into e-commerce?

Anton: Yeah, sure. I had the delivery business and a book, The Four Hour Workweek, that book came out in 2007. I read it, and there’s a chapter in it about building a Yahoo store on that platform. It said it was $29 for a month to get started, and then there was a chapter on Google AdWords. My thought process was like, “What products do I have access to?” And it was cookies. I built a website called NewYorkCookieShop.com, listed all those cookies, and set up Google AdWords. Figured it out pretty simply, targeting people outside of New York that searched for cookies or anything, saying “Do you miss New York bakeries? Order authentic cookies shipped to your home in three days,” something like that. That was a weekend experiment, and within a week or so, that was making more money than that business that I spent $25k for. So I was like, “OK. E-commerce. That’s what I’m doing.” Since then I started to get into more and more expensive products and whatnot because I realized I didn’t want to sell $20 items, but that was the start.

Joe: That’s incredible. You took a weekend. I will say, I rag on the Four Hour Work Week a lot, but there is a lot of good stuff in that book. I read it probably around the same time. So you set up a website in a weekend, you did Google AdWords which is a topic we could have a whole show on. And it started making a ton of money. You said you started to get into more expensive products? I imagine that this is the part where we start to talk about drop shipping because first of all just like shipping cookies you need to think of a couple of things to make sure they’re fresh when they’re delivered, and stuff like that. Maybe we can get into the research at this point. What research did you do getting into shipping these various types of products?

Anton: The transition there was, again, same thought process. “If I’m selling $20 items why can’t I sell $1,000 items?” Back then– It’s not the same now, so I don’t recommend anybody do this, but my research process was to go on eBay and go through all of the categories, search for products with the filters that were above $500 and then sort by completed listings. Then I was looking in all the categories for completed listings that sold at Buy It Now prices over $500 that looked to be consistent. Lots of green. When I saw that I was like, “OK. People are buying these things.” Once I figured that out I picked a subset of products I wanted to start with, still didn’t know what drop shipping was, so I went on Google and figured out everything comes from China. Then I found Alibaba and back then I was importing, we don’t have to talk about it, but for three years I was importing products from China. Bringing the containers to a fulfillment center in Long Beach, California and then I was selling them online. The fulfillment center was shipping them all out all over the country, and then from there once I had all those websites up, a few years into the process I started to get phone calls at my e-commerce businesses. I’ll give you an example. One of them was selling bed frames, so I had a bed frame company call me, and they were like, “We see you sell these products. We have our brands,” whatever bed frames ABC, and “Do you want to sell our stuff?” And at first, I said “No,” because I thought they wanted me to buy them and put them in the fulfillment center and I thought, “I don’t want to do that for the margins,” but then they explained to me “Listen. You put them on your website. We have them in our warehouses. When you get a sale, you let us know, we ship it direct to your customers. For me, that meant no overhead, no extra overhead, and the ability to increase the amount of products that I offered. Once I found out about that I started working with as many different brands as I could, that would work on that model.

Joe: That’s incredible. And that’s sort of like Amazon-ish like you’re the conduit for people being able to buy these products without having to yourself buy these products at wholesale.

Anton: Exactly.

Joe: That’s fantastic. You mentioned that your research process of 10 or so years ago is not the best research process today. What would you recommend for somebody today if they want to get into selling physical products, or their own products, online?

Anton: Some things that I look for, and again I want to see that somebody else, meaning another business, is making money doing it. Some things that I look for are– I use Google, so I go on Google, and I’ll type in different industry names. “Modern leather Italian sofa,” “Mahogany wood dining table,” things like that. Then I’ll pull up the first three pages of websites that have those products for sale, and from there specifically what I’m looking for are websites that don’t have retail locations and that don’t have warehouses. I want to find other internet retailers. The way that I check that, once I have a million tabs open on my computer, is I go through all those websites, and I check their contact page, and I check their about us page. I see if it says “Stores” or “Store locator,” and when they have that I’m just closing those out. Because I’m not going to be competing with them. What I end up with is a handful of sites that sell the stuff that I want to sell that don’t have that physical presence, and from there I take those domains. I usually check on Alexa to see how much traffic they’re getting. Obviously, it’s an estimate, but I’m looking for stores that are in the top hundred thousand or higher in the United States. Once I have those two things confirmed I take it to the next step, which is how many different brands are these websites selling for? Is it a modern Italian leather sofa website that’s custom making them in their garage in New York? Or is it a company that has 30 different types you could buy? And if I could find that, a website without the address, with that traffic, with multiple brands, then I’m like “OK this is an opportunity.” That’s the starting point.

Joe: Gotcha. That makes sense. You want to make sure that these are people who aren’t necessarily catering to a local crowd, they want to cater to everybody. Then you said that you want to make sure they don’t have a warehouse either, and that’s because a warehouse implies that they are stocking their own stuff. Right?

Anton: Right, and when that happens, the way that we get– Just so everybody, if anyone is thinking “I should try drop shipping,” never go online and Google drop ship suppliers or anything like that because you’re going to find these middlemen that will say “Pay us X amount of dollars per month, and you get access to a million products,” and you’re never going to make money with companies like that in the long run. The companies that we sell for, we sell for directly. We have direct relationships with every single brand and the way that we find our brands is by finding companies that we’re going to be competing with. We find them from those websites. If my research was just anybody, even that has a retail store, and I’m going to try to sell the stuff that they’re selling. A lot of those brands will say “We don’t work with online retailers.” It’s a waste. We want to segment down further before we start extracting suppliers.

Joe: Gotcha. That makes a ton of sense. We haven’t defined drop shipping, I made the assumption that people know what it is, but maybe– Can you define it for us–?

Anton: Sure.

Joe: Before we move forward?

Anton: Yes. It’s a very vague term, and there’s a lot of different things that would fall under drop shipping, but all it means is you’re selling something, and you’re not fulfilling the orders directly. Even if at your house you were making wooden tables, and I put one on Craigslist, and I’m in Austin, Texas now. I put one on Craigslist, and I sold it. Then I was like, “I got the sale. Can you ship it to my customer?” And you did that, that would be drop shipped. That’s one way to do it. With the cookie business, I don’t even realize back then, but as that website grew I was selling them on my website, and then I was having the bakery in Brooklyn ship them directly to my customers. That technically was drop shipping. If you go online and Google it now, you’re probably going to think it means using a website like Ali Express and selling stuff from China through Facebook ads. And technically that is drop shipping, but again it’s a generic term. It’s a method of order fulfillment.

Joe: Gotcha. As you said if I want to get into selling Star Wars prints, like Star Wars digital prints. Or not digital prints, the canvas type prints.

Anton: Yes.

Joe: And I’m not making them, and I’m not shipping them to the person. I contract with a few people, artists sell them through my website, and then they ship them out. Another good real example is my website for selling T-shirts. That’s all through Printful.com. I uploaded the artwork, somebody orders a T-shirt, Printful prints the T-shirt and then sends it. I don’t touch that process at all.

Anton: Right. That’s drop shipping. We use them too. Good company.

Joe: I’m testing out a few more different products right now. So, cool. I like the advice that you gave about never Googling dropshipping suppliers. Much like what you said, selling from Ali express or whatever, through Facebook ads, it’s a little bit disingenuous. Because you’re taking advantage of the fact that people aren’t sure what to look for.

Anton: Speaking on that too. Never Google drop ship suppliers, and never, when you’re talking to the real brands that you want to sell for, you also shouldn’t use the term drop shipping. My website is called DropShipLifestyle.com so people can find us. But when I’m talking to suppliers, I don’t call them and say, “Do you drop ship?” That’s not– It has a negative connotation associated with it because a lot of beginners think it means something that it’s not, and they think they’re going to make all this money by selling some big company’s stuff. The truth is the companies that you want to sell for, and they are only going to let you sell their stuff if they trust you and if they think you’re building a real business or already have a real business. That’s not a term you want to throw around besides discussions with other people that are in the business.

Joe: Gotcha. That makes sense. Because they’re putting their products on the line.

Anton: Exactly.

Joe: And if you’re disingenuous, to use the term I used before, then you’re diminishing their brand as well.

Anton: Exactly.

Joe: That’s cool. That’s almost like SEO ten years ago. If somebody said I’m a Search Engine Optimization expert, you’d almost look at them side-eyed. Like, “What are you trying to tell me?” Cool. So to talk about DropShipLifestyle.com, this is the thing that will be the title question. How did you build it? Can you tell us a little bit about that website specifically?

Anton: Sure. It’s a WordPress site, and it has so many, probably way too many plugins and themes. We’ve been through having everything done custom, and the problem with that for me is I’m not that technical, so when it came to making quick edits for changing out promotions or new content, it broke too much. Right now the front end of it, the main content site is running on WordPress using [thrive themes with thrive, architect]. That’s our builder. I love it, and it’s easy enough for me but still seems to load fast enough for Google to show, and we use that. Then for our community– A lot of what we do is teaching based. Our members area is also built on WordPress, that’s using a whole combination of tools, but using a tool called [Memberium], and that does content mocking and [Memberium] is a plugin that works with Infusionsoft. Infusionsoft is our CRM, so whether someone is getting emails from us or whether they buy from us and then get access tags, that’s all handled there. Then Infusionsoft works with [Memberium] to say, “OK give this person access to this thing.” That’s our main content for this company.

Joe: DropShipLifestyle.com is an area where people can come to learn about drop shipping, and there’s the community aspect where people can talk to each other. It looks like you have a couple of courses on here too, what are you– Are you using WordPress for the courses as well?

Anton: Exactly. WordPress. They’re on a subdomain, so it’s Courses.DropShipLifestyle, but that’s on WordPress as well with– It’s using [divvy] as the theme on there, but we use a plugin called Sensei, and Sensei is a good course plugin. It’s pretty basic but more than enough, and it tracks people’s progress throughout so they can click, they completed a lesson. It allows us to attach different downloads to different modules, like worksheets and whatnot. Easy to embed videos, we use Vimeo pro for all of our video hosting there. For our community side of it, that’s where the content lives for the education of it. But then we wanted to have a forum also, so people can interact with each other. We do have a Facebook group, but I started Drop Ship Lifestyle back in 2013 when Facebook groups weren’t even a thing yet, so we needed a forum integration. For the forum we found the best solution to be through Invision Power Board. It’s InvisionPowerBoard.com, and we use their software to run our forum.

Joe: That’s cool. I haven’t heard of Invision Power Board, and I’m definitely going to check that out. I use bbPress for my community, and it integrates well with my LMS LearnDash. But Sensei is the one that integrates with WooCommerce, right? That’s the WooCommerce LMS?

Anton: They do have a plugin, yeah.

Joe: Cool.

Anton: An extension.

Joe: Nice. It sounds like you have a lot going on, but it sounds like the perfect site builder map. If I wanted to go off and build a website that is a course and community, or an online courses and community, you’ve given us a good blueprint for what we should be using. Which is always insanely valuable.

Anton: Especially since there’s so much out there. We’ve been through so many different tools, and nothing’s going to be perfect, but if you do want to create something like an online course, pick something. This works for us, it does work, so if you want to use it then use it, but don’t get caught up. That’d be my advice for anybody, don’t get caught up in “Which one out of these thousand things should I use?” Because they all do the same thing.

Joe: That’s great advice, and it’s something that– I started a second podcast called Creator Toolkit where I go through things exactly like this. “What do I need to do to set up an online course?” I talk about the themes and different plugins that you could use and stuff like that, but you’re absolutely right, the tools are one thing, and the content is a whole other thing. So even if you want to use Vimeo pro to make the videos and sell the videos, you can do that on Vimeo pro now too. But this is fantastic, and I’ll be sure to link all of that in the show notes. It looks like– As we come up on, we’re coming up on time already I can’t believe it. You have three different courses. I don’t want to make this sound like an advertisement, but this is. There’s so much to know about drop shipping, and you’ve given us, again, like I said a really good blueprint. But what’s the difference between these three courses? I’m looking at the pricing table, but if I wanted to get started with drop shipping today, which course would you recommend for me?

Anton: Either what we call our premium course, which is all our training videos. That’s every training video we have plus our– We do have an app for Shopify that’s not in the Shopify app store, and it’s something that’s on our website. It lives on our website, but we allow our students to use it. That’s included with that. Then also we have– We call it the Drop Ship Lifestyle Shopify theme, really original name, but you get that too. So I’d recommend either that or for the people that want just us to build the website for you, we don’t go as far obviously as getting traffic and sales and supplier approvals because then we would sell the website ourselves for a lot more money. But that’s the top tier package where we will set up your Shopify store, and we’ll upload your products for you, do all your content pages and your logo. We will set up your social media pages. We will set up your first Google ads on Google Shopping campaign, but that’s for the people that are like, “Let me just hand that off,” and “I’d rather just pay to outsource it.” Depends how hands on you want to be in the beginning, I would say.

Joe: That’s great. This is the reason I ask this question because this is for anybody who wants to sell online courses. This is a great model.

Anton: Definitely.

Joe: You’ve got basic, which is some educational information. You’ve got premium, which is basic– This is the middle tier. This is what probably you’re–

Anton: That’s all the content. So if you want to learn again, boom here you go. You got it.

Joe: Then there’s the ultimate package, which like you said, will do everything for you. You get to learn, but then you understand what’s happening and the setup is being done for you. So you can understand, but you don’t have to sink a bunch of hours into the nitty-gritty of setting the site up and making sure, “Is this right? I think I understood this correctly, but I’m not sure.”.

Anton: Exactly.

Joe: And again, to hearken back to what we talked about earlier, this ultimate package is $4,997, one-fifth of what you paid to start your first business.

Anton: I know. It’s funny. People think about it different like you said too, and I get it. Even when I’m building a new website I’m like, “Can I start this thing for $200 bucks?” And it’s funny. I bought– The truck that I got with that delivery route was like a 1985 dodge something piece of crap that I paid to sit in traffic for two hours on the BQE every day, like that was my investment. And now people are like, “It’s going to cost me $29 a month for Shopify? That’s a ripoff.” Like, it’s powering your entire business. Relax.

Joe: Exactly. That’s something that I try to talk about a lot on this show because I was guilty of it starting out. I’m getting better about it now if I can pay $300 hundred bucks for something that’s going to save me even ten hours that is totally worth it for me. But you’re absolutely right, and it’s so funny. I quoted out a project for somebody, and they wanted an e-commerce site that would have 2,500 or 25,000– Some preposterous amount of products on it. But for simplicity’s sake, let’s say 40,000 products. And I quoted them at $20 thousand because it would just be WooCommerce where we’re sourcing the product somewhere else, and he’s like, “That’s expensive.” And I was like, “That is 50 cents a product.” It’s interesting because people understand how expensive it is to build a building because they can see it get built. But with a website it’s like, this guy goes into his magic box and sets up a website, and it’s done. That’s cool. We’re coming up on time, and I’m enjoying this conversation. What are your plans for the future of DropShipLifestyle.com? Or maybe if you want to wax poetic a little bit, what do you think the future of drop shipping is?

Anton: That’s one thing– The future for Drop Ship Lifestyle, what’s cool about it is, again, it’s been around for five years. The reason it’s still around and the reason I still do so much for it, like I’m doing a coaching call today for it at 2:00 PM, but it’s because things always do change. It’s enjoyable for me because I do love the business side of it, both on the info business which would be Drop Ship Lifestyle, and on the physical product business. It’s fun for me. So the future is seeing where things go, seeing what works for us and then sharing it once I can confirm some data with our other businesses. It’ll keep evolving as the e-commerce site evolves, and the future of drop shipping is more about the future of e-commerce than drop shipping. Because again, drop shipping is one method of order fulfillment. I don’t think that even if– I don’t see any big difference there between e-commerce as a whole, but what I hope doesn’t happen, because we’ll see what the government does. If they have to break up Amazon or not. Because right now the type of stuff we sell, knock on wood, it hasn’t been an issue with Amazon with prime because we don’t sell prime products. If you want to sell inexpensive stuff and have your own brand, that’s a great place to have your stuff too. With our stuff, it would never happen. In the future though, if it does, and there becomes a day that you’re moving into a new office, and everything’s going to be furnished from Amazon, and you’re going to place a $20k order on there and so is everybody else and they eat up the entire market, we’ll see if they get broken up or not. That might be five years from now, that might be ten years from now. It might never happen. But that’s the type of thing that would cause a big impact on sales. Same reason when Home Depot went everywhere, smaller retailers went out of business. Not happening yet, but again it could be a negative future for it.

Joe: That’s a really interesting take. Because we do see Amazon getting into– There’s the Amazon grocery service, Pantry I think it’s called, where you can get groceries on Amazon and if you live in the right place, you can get it in the same day. I live near Philadelphia now, and I’m indignant when something takes more than two days to get to me because I have same day shipping now. But that’s a good point. And they have prime wardrobe now which is the same sort of thing as Stitch Fix. They could conceivably monopolize the e-commerce market.

Anton: They’re trying to. That’s their goal.

Joe: Right. That’s so interesting. You’ve given us a ton of great advice, but I do want to ask my favorite question though. Which is, do you have any trade secrets for us?

Anton: Maybe. It might not be a secret based on the kinds of things we’ve been talking about, but one thing that made all the difference for me with growing our businesses was focusing on expensive products. It’s one reason also, even with Drop Ship Lifestyle, it’s why the course doesn’t cost $7. It’s why we make premium products there. The stuff we sell online also, the products we drop ship and the brands we sell for, it’s more of a premium price point. It’s more of something that honestly is going to give our customer a better experience, but it’s also going to allow us enough profit per sale to be able to pay for ads and to be able to have support people, to be able to invest time into growing these things. So, maybe it’s a secret maybe it’s not. But I would say for anybody, whatever you’re selling online, try to sell something– For us, our minimum is $200 hundred bucks that we look for. Ideally closer to $1,000 or more, and since we made that shift, it’s made a massive difference in how we can spend and how we can grow.

Joe: That’s great advice. Because like you said, if you’re going to be selling smaller stuff then maybe sell it through Amazon. Or people will likely buy it from Amazon anyway because their shipping overhead is a lot lower than what your shipping overhead would be. That is great advice, and that’s not just great advice for people who drop ship either. If you’re selling digital products, I for a long time underpriced my courses. I had to grind out each sale, and it wasn’t worth it for me. I’m raising the price of my courses, which allows me to spend more time creating good content, and it also communicates the value of those courses to the buyer. That’s another really important thing. If you’re selling a chair for $20 bucks or something like that, that’s probably a cheaply made chair. But if you’re selling it for a $1,000 bucks, people know I’m getting a good quality chair.

Anton: And it brings in the legitimate buyers. For Drop Ship Lifestyle, if I said “I’m going to teach you how I’ve been doing this stuff for the past decade and how I’ve built multiple eight-figure stores, and how I spend a million dollars on ads a year,” and it’s $599. People are going to be like, “OK this is a scam.” Right? Or instead, people are going to buy it thinking they’re going to get rich overnight. Instead, the people that invest in our program, at least 99% of them, they’re serious, and they’re trying to build something. That allows me to put like you said, more time into the content. It allows me to do things like– I do a monthly call with everybody, but a monthly webinar Q&A type thing. And if I sold something that was cheap you wouldn’t be able to do that. So everybody, go premium and give people what they want which is results, and more. They want more from you, so give it to them.

Joe: That’s great. And I will– Before I ask you where people can find you, there is one more anecdote I want to share with somebody who’s in my mastermind group. She was selling a very cheap or free membership, and they expected this from her because of where they were in their career. They weren’t ready to spend $2 thousand or $5 thousand on the proper learning material, but they still spent money and viewed it as “I need to get everything I can out of this.” And it wasn’t viable for her. That’s a good point about bringing in the legitimate buyers. Cool. Anton, thanks so much for your time. Where can people find you?

Anton: The best spot would be DropShipLifestyle.com. Everything is linked up off there. All the social pages, you want to contact me, we have the contact on there. But that’s where we’ve got all our links.

Joe: Awesome. I will include that and everything we talked about in today’s episode, which is a lot. It’s going to be lengthy show notes. Be sure to head over to HowIBuilt.it for those. Anton, thanks so much again for your time. I appreciate it.

Anton: Awesome, thank you.

Outro: Thanks so much to Anton for joining us today. I liked his thoughts about expanding his ability to sell, and how he built his website which is WordPress and a lot of stuff I use, which is cool. Then his future predictions for drop shipping, especially that of Amazon and how that’s the elephant in the room, and how that’s going to affect the future of drop shipping. He offers a lot of great advice, and I’m appreciative for that. I’m also appreciative of our sponsors, Plesk, Pantheon, and MailPoet. Be sure to check them out. For all the show notes you can head over to HowIBuilt.it/107. My question of the week for you is, have you been thinking about drop shipping or is this the first time you’ve ever heard of it? Let me know your thoughts at Joe@HowIBuilt.it, or on Twitter @jcasabona. If you liked this episode be sure to give us a rating and a review over an Apple podcasts. It helps people discover the show. Until next time, get out there and build something.

Episode 42: Chris Badgett & LifterLMS

July 18, 2017

Sponsored by:

WP Site Care
Liquid Web: Fast, Managed WordPress hosting whether your users are logged in or logged out. Get 50% off the first 2 months.

This is the first of a 2-part series called Educational WordPress!

Over the next 2 episodes, I talk to two of of the biggest names in a WordPress LMSs and WordPress in the educational space. Today, it’s Chris Badgett.

Chris Badgett is a software company owner, a world traveller, and first and foremost, an educator. In this episode, we get to talk all about empathy, teaching, and scratching your own itch. He offers some great insight on running a company, connecting with customers, and how there are some things you can’t outsource.

Show Notes

Want to get early access to ad-free episodes, extended interviews, video tutorials and more? Check out our Patreon.

Episode 34: Shawn Hesketh & WP101

May 2, 2017

Sponsored by:

Shawn Hesketh is a good friend of the show and an excellent educator and mentor. His widely popular site, WP101, teached thousands of folks how to use WordPress. In this episode, we get pretty deep into the woods on how he built WP101, and in typical Shawn fashion, he imparts some great advice all along the way. This one is a little longer that usual, but it’s packed full of fantastic content, including his recording setup.

Show Notes

Episode 9: Zac Gordon & Javascript for WordPress

October 18, 2016

Sponsored by:

In this episode, Zac and I get deep about how he built his online learning course, Javascript for WordPress! We discuss the tools he used, coming up with content, and how often the best course of action is to pay the pros to get the high quality work. It’s a great episode, with lots of show notes.

Show Notes

Episode 2: Rebecca Gill and DIY SEO Courses

August 30, 2016

Sponsored by:

LearnDash
WP in One Month: Used code BUILD for 10% off entire cart!

Rebecca and I talk about building an online course, the necessary dedication you need to be able to teach, and some great tools for setting up your own online course!

Links from the show: