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Evan Calkins and Hoban Cards

May 8, 2018

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Transcript

Hey everybody! And welcome to aniother episode of How I Built It, the podcast that asks, “How did you build that?” Today, my guest is Evan Calkins from HobanPress. I was really excited to talk to Evan because he does something I’m very interested in: letterpress. He creates fantastic looking business cards and sationary, and even did my cards! We’ll talk about what it’s like doing a highly specialized thing in the real world – a physical product! – but first, a word from our sponsors.

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And now, on with the show.

Joe: Hey, everybody, welcome to another episode of How I Built It, the podcast that asks, “How did you build that?” Today, my guest is Evan Calkins of Hoban Press.

Evan, thanks for joining me today. How are you?

Evan: I’m doing well. It’s amazing. Great to be here.

Joe: Yeah. Thanks so much for being on the show. I am a big fan of your work. I’m about to get my second round of business cards from you guys.

Evan: Appreciate it.

Joe: Before I guess I weigh too deeply into that, why don’t you tell everybody who you are and what you do?

Evan: Yeah. Like you said, I’m Evan Calkins. I now run a very, very tiny letterpress printing shop out of Chehalis, Washington. And yeah, I got into that a few years ba- … actually, I’ve been doing letterpress printing for six or seven years. It started as a hobby and then it kind of shifted into a business, which I think happens a lot of times for folks. They start out with a hobby and then it kind of works its way into a business. So yeah, and I have a website. We pretty sell all of our orders through our websites. And yeah, so that’s what I do.

Joe: Cool, very cool. And one more fun fact about you as we record this, is you’re working your way driving across the country, like a road trip, right?

Evan: Yeah, yeah, that’s right. My family and I, my wife, my 11-year-old daughter, we’re driving across the US. We’ve taken a year. And we have a Volkswagen Vanagon.

Joe: Nice.

Evan: Yeah. We’re just driving across the US trying to go to pretty much all the major cities, see all the states. And I’ve kind of set my business up to where I can be traveling and I can be working from the road, which doesn’t really sound possible with letterpress printing, because it’s such a hands-on thing, but I have a couple amazing employees that help me out, so it’s been great.

Joe: Awesome. Yeah, I was going to ask about that. We talk about digital nomads, and obviously I can do basically everything I need to do from my laptop, but you work in a more physical product space. What’s a challenge of being out of the office for that long?

Evan: Yeah. The challenge was initially I taught myself how to letterpress print, so I got a big cast iron letterpress, which is kind of a story in and of itself, but then I had to sort of pass on these things that I learned to an employee of mine, which was one of my good friends, and then I hired another employee. So over the course of the last six months before we left on this trip, I had to set up the business to where they could do everything in the shop. And so there’s a lot of training, a lot of teaching. And then right now, I’m just on the road doing emails, doing sales, growing the business, doing marketing. I do a lot of design work that’s surrounding the business, so people will have me design business cards and logos and things like that. I do a little web development and stuff, software development on the side, as well.

So yeah, it’s been a really cool project, sort of experience to work on the road. Trying to find Starbucks and reliable WiFi to work out of has been interesting. It’s been a lot of fun, though.

Joe: Awesome. Yeah, so for any of you completely web-based people who say you can’t take a week off because you think your business will crash and burn, Evan is out of his office for a year in a place where he actually does physical things. So if you stop listening at this point, that is the takeaway.

Evan: Exactly.

Joe: But you should not stop listening, because there are a bunch of questions I’d like to ask you. And so the first question I have for you is, so you do business cards and you do letterpress. You said you’re self-taught. I guess how did you come up with the idea or more since I don’t think you invented letterpress, what made you realize that this is a good business to get into or a business you wanted to get into?

Evan: Yeah. So I think the best way to talk about this is maybe to tell the story from the beginning and how I acquired my first letterpress. So I’ve been involved in design, in web design, for a long time. I’m kind of self-taught, like a lot of us are. From my teens, I was working in Photoshop, and I’ve always had a passion for sort of typography, minimalism. I’ve always appreciated those type of things. I’ve always appreciated really good print work and I’ve loved to flip through magazines and admired the typography and things like that, so that’s kind of where it started.

And a long time ago, I really wanted my own letterpress-printed business cards, because at that time always viewed letterpress printing as sort of the pinnacle of printing. If I could get ahold of some letterpress cards, I feel like my business would just skyrocket, because everybody would appreciate them. So I searched for a print shop around my local area. Nobody, of course, did letterpress printing, because it’s a very old art that was taken over by offset printing. And I had a really hard time, even in bigger cities around me, finding somebody who could do this locally.

So I thought, “Why not I research it and figure out how these things are made, because I know they’re being made.” So I did a lot of research. I went on a lot of forums online. There’s a forum called Briar Press that’s an amazing forum for letterpress printing that’s been around for many years. There’s a lot of older letterpress printers on there sharing their knowledge and freely giving tips to continue the craft. So I started there, started doing research, and I figured, “Man, I need to get ahold of one of these old letterpresses. You can’t just go down to the store, go down to the local Staples and buy a letterpress. So you have to do some research.

So what I did is I sent out an email. I live in Western Washington. I sent out an email, pretty much all the print shops I could find on Google from Portland to Seattle. That was kind of the corridor that I live on. And the only email I got back was from a little print shop in my actual hometown, which is a very small town, on Interstate 5 there. In basically an email I asked folks, “Hey, do you have any old printing equipment laying around that I could either buy or have or come by and look at?” So this print shop emailed me and the woman said, “Yeah, I think I have something like that. Come take a look.”

So I went down there to a little basement of theirs, and sure enough, there’s this amazing letterpress. It was a 1902 Chandler & Price letterpress that weighs about 1,500 pounds.

Joe: Wow.

Evan: It’s made of cast iron. So I was able to acquire that from her. I disassembled it, cleaned it up, and that’s how I started with letterpress printing. And I took it to my garage and I just basically taught myself how to print. And yeah, that’s how I started. At least that’s how I started onto the hobby of letterpress printing. It turned into a business I think because I started printing cards for friends and families, and people were like, “Well, let me pay you for these.” And so I just continued to do that. And yeah, that’s kind of how it turned into a business.

Joe: Awesome. So I mean, it sounds like there was a lot of research involved just all around, like finding the machine. Lucky that it was in your hometown, right? I imagine it probably wouldn’t be very cheap to pick up or ship this machine to you, right? Can you give me an idea of how big it is?

Evan: Yeah. It’s pretty big. They are very difficult to ship, and this being in a basement, we had to actually disassemble it in the basement, sort of haul it out piece by piece with a … I don’t know if you’ve ever seen an engine hoist that grabs hold of engines that you work on. So we used one of those, because nobody could … I can’t just get like five or six guys to pick up the pieces. They’re fragile, they’re cast iron, so if they fall, they break easily. So yeah, it is hard to acquire these things. You can find them on Craigslist and things like that, but it takes a lot of skill to get them out of wherever they are. So yeah, that was sort of an adventure in itself, just getting the letterpress into my garage, yeah.

Joe: Man, that’s wild. And so now you have this machine. You started doing letterpress business card and things like that for your friends, and they wanted to pay you. At what point did you decide, “All right, this is a viable business for me. I think enough people are willing to pay me to do this”?

Evan: Yeah. So at the time I was working for my local county, actually, as a software developer in their IT department, and so I was sort of moonlighting on the side, sort of half moonlighting, half doing this as a hobby. And since I was a web developer, I figured, “Well, why don’t I just make myself a very simple site, throw it up.” And that’s when I got the idea to make these very simple what I call calling cards. They’re sort of distinguished themselves from business cards in that they’re very simple, very typographic, and they’re mainly meant to have your name on them rather than a business name. And you know what I’m talking about.

So what I did is I worked up six templates. There were just six options that you could have. It was a one-page website. There wasn’t even an about page, a contact page, just one page with these six templates and a PayPal button, basically, to check out with.

And so I threw this up, and I had a little bit of success with it. I was surprised that I got some organic Google traffic from just having this simple one-page layout. But really what kicked off the business is that … I don’t know if you know who Kevin Rose is. He’s an investor, Silicon Valley investor, and he started Digg.

Joe: Digg? Yeah, yeah.

Evan: Yeah, the original digg.com. I was listening to a podcast he was doing at the time, and he mentioned somewhere in the podcast wanting cool business cards. In I was like, “You know? Why don’t I guess what email address his is, and just send him and email and tell him I’ll make him a free batch.” So I guessed his email address and sent him this email, and like within five minutes he emailed me back and was like, “Dude, I would love for you to make me cards, and I’ll pay you for them.” And so I made him these cards, I shipped them to him, and he actually Tweeted out my web page, and that’s kind of what kicked off my business is reaching out to this influencer and then them making a Tweet, and that’s kind of how I started.

Joe: Man, I had no idea about that. I’m so glad that you told this story, because that’s awesome. I tell a lot of people, “How do you get sponsors and how do you do this?” And I’m just like, “I just ask. I just ask.”

Evan: Exactly.

Joe: And the fact that you just acted on that and were like, “This guy is an influencer, he wants cool business cards, I can do that,” that’s amazing, which is really cool. And as far as your templates go, I’m looking at them right now. I’ll link them in the show notes. I think the trade card … I don’t think. I’m looking at my business card. It looks exactly like the trade card. So that was the one I went with.

So why don’t you tell us maybe a little bit about your process, right? ‘Cause again, we talk to, or I talk to a lot of developers and people in the software space. I’m venturing more into the physical realm of things. I talk to Brad Dowdy, The Pen Addict from Nock Co., and things like that. And so what’s the process for creating a business card, or maybe just the general letterpress process? How does that work?

Evan: Yeah. So back in the old days, they used what was called movable type. It was a set of … basically a font, right? It was lead, and you were only able to print with the lead type that you owned, right? So maybe you’d owned five or six different fonts in different variations. Maybe you had some italics and different sizes, point sizes of that font.

The way we print, we don’t set type like that anymore. We make a plate. So what we do is we start with a design first, so depending on if I have a custom card that somebody submits to me or one that I’m designing, I usually lay it out in Illustrator, Adobe Illustrator. And then once the design is finalized, we create a actual physical letterpress plate from that file, which is sort of a raised … all the surfaces that get printed are raised up out of the plate, and then we adhere that plate to our press with a special aluminum base that we use on our press.

In the industry, there’s something called type high. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard that term before, but it’s an old term meaning the height that lead type were from the base of the press. And so what happens is we use this aluminum base. We stick the plate on, and that makes a perfect type high base for us to print the cards on. So once we have that, we make a plate for every color that’s used on a card. So like your cards that you got are just one color, so we just have one plate, but if they had two or three colors, we’d have to make a separate plate for every one of those colors. So if anybody’s ever done screen-printing, they know of kind of that process. You have to make a separate screen for each one of the colors that you’re doing.

And then we used really nice 100% cotton, really toothy, textured cotton paper. And so we cut the paper to size and then we hand-feed those through the press. So if somebody orders 500 cards, we’re physically hand-feeding those 500 times through the press. If they have three colors, we’re physically touching those cards 1,500 times. So it’s a very time-consuming process, which is one of the reasons why it’s expensive compared to conventional printing methods.

So yeah, that’s the basic process that a card goes through.

Joe: Wow. That’s wild. And I’ve got to say, yes, it is time-consuming and it is a little bit more expensive, but in my opinion it is totally worth it. I’ve gotten so many compliments on my cards that I got from you guys, ’cause I had a double, I had it pressed on the front and the back the first batch through. So I got comments on the thickness and how nice it looked. In the meantime, between the time I placed my second order and the time I should receive them, which will be in probably a couple of weeks, I got cards from moo.com that I designed, so I controlled the font and everything like that, and they just, they look like what I paid for. And that’s not a knock against MOO or anybody who gets their cards from MOO, but after having these beautifully letter-pressed cards, it’s kind of hard to go back to more conventional kind of looking cards.

Evan: Yeah. It’s funny, because I end up … when I talk to folks about what I do, you come across people, “What do you do for a profession?” And then I start telling them about letterpress printing and the cards I make, and maybe I’ll give them one of my cards, and then they make a comment, something like, “Oh, I need to get cards from you.” And I ask them what they do, and they say, “I’m a real estate agent.” And I ask them how many cards they give out, and they’re like, “Oh, I set a batch of 500 on my desk and I give out 50 of them a day.” I usually end up talking that person out of ordering cards from me, mainly because that’s sort of not the use case. It can be, I guess, but that’s not really … it’s not cost-effective. It would get pretty expensive if you’re giving out 50 cards a day.

So I usually end up talking them out of it, or I talk them into ordering a very small amount of cards from me, maybe 100 cards, and then supplementing their existing maybe MOO cards, like you were saying, and you feel more free to give out those MOO cards. You feel more free to maybe waste some, put them on a desk.

Joe: Totally.

Evan: And then you can save a really nice batch of your 100 letterpress cards for maybe some special interactions that you’re having, maybe a special meeting. I think that’s a really good use case. Even Vistaprint, sometimes I encourage people, “Why don’t you go but 5,000 cards on Vistaprint. It’s not a big deal. It’s a tool, a business card is a tool, and I try not to get too sort of uppity on letterpress printing, but I think it serves a specific use case, if that makes sense.

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Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, to equate that to if somebody comes to me and they say they need a website and it’s just a standard kind of brochure site and they don’t have a huge budget, I’m like, yeah, go to Squarespace or Wix or whatever.

Evan: Exactly, exactly.

Joe: I’m primarily a WordPress developer. I’m not going to tell you that you need a $5,000 WordPress custom website if you don’t. So it makes perfect sense. There’s kind of a place for each type of these things, but man, it’s … I’ve got to say, I guess I can’t say everybody, but most people who have gotten my card has commented on it in some way. I think it does create a memorable experience. So I’ll give one out at conferences where people are meeting a million people, but mine will be the card that stands out.

Evan: Exactly. Yeah, they’re kind of like little pieces of art, which I like to describe them as. And people feel bad almost if they … I don’t know if you’ve ever had this happen, but I hear from customers a lot where you’ll give a card out and the person will actually want to give it back, because they, like, “Don’t waste this on me.” But it’s just a funny thing that happens. But yeah, when people receive them, they seem to want to kind of treasure them or keep them, which is really cool to hear. And I totally get it.

Joe: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, so actually, on your site you do have a reference to the movie I’m about to reference. Everybody’s like, “Oh, man, this is like an American Psycho card,” right?

Evan: Exactly. Oh, man, that’s funny, because the longest time I held off making an American Psycho Paul Allen card. If you’re in the letterpress printing, it’s so worn out. You hear it so much. To somebody who’s not, it’s like, “I’m going to make this comment under your Instagram photo about the American Psycho card.” It’s just funny, because if you’re in my shoes, you’ve heard it a million times. And so I’ve held off making one of those cards, but I finally did, and it’s been one of the biggest hits on Hoban Cards is that Paul Allen card, which actually I redesigned because I didn’t like the original card. So I took the same format of it and used a different font and kind of did my own spin on it.

Joe: Man, that’s awesome. 40% of the people I give the cards to are like, “Man, this is like …” I’m like, “Yes.” Cool, very cool.

So it looks like kind of looking at the cards that you have on your site, you have all different types of layouts, fonts. You have a really thin font, I see?

Evan: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Joe: And you mentioned that you do kind of custom stuff, too?

Evan: Sure.

Joe: Are there limitations to letterpress or are there things that are maybe extremely hard to do? If somebody wanted to get a letterpress business card, what would you recommend?

Evan: Yeah, there definitely are limitations, more than any other type of printing, actually, especially modern printing. One of the limitations is that letterpress printing, unless you really have some different type of equipment and techniques, it’s hard to spread a lot of ink over a large amount of surface. So a lot of people come to me and say, “Hey, can I have one entire side of my card black and then the other side white?” And that can be done with certain letterpresses, but letterpress printing was originally meant to print type. It wasn’t meant to print graphics, necessarily. It can print little wing bats and things like that in the early days, but it was mainly meant to print type. And so that’s kind of what I’ve chosen to do.

There’s a lot of letterpress printers out there that you can find, you can go to their websites and they just have amazingly intricate work. And it’s amazing and I love it, but that’s kind of not what I’ve chosen to do. I’ve kind of chosen to keep to the typographic nature of letterpress printing.

So yeah, spreading ink over a large surface is a limitation. Obviously you can’t reprint solid colors one at a time, so you can’t do a lot of gradients, and so you obviously can’t do photos. So it lends itself just intrinsically to minimalism, I think. And so I want to really take hold of that.

And something designer that I’ve always loved to do, and especially as a web designer, is designing within your limitations, right?

Joe: Yeah.

Evan: When you’re a web designer, you have … more so in the old days when you had very specific browser widths and heights, you had a very specific thing you had to design within. And so I’ve embraced that with what I do with making these calling cards. You have a very limited canvass you’re working on, but I love it. I love the challenge of trying to make it as clean and minimal as I can, but not boring. Does that make sense?

Joe: Yeah, definitely.

Evan: So yeah, I think I’ve kind of answered your question. I kind of like the limitations and I kind of embrace them.

Joe: Yeah, that’s fantastic. And the thing that made me think of that was my good friend, Brian Richards, from WPSessions, also cards made up by you guys. And it’s funny that you mentioned specifically the solid color, because I think, if I recall correctly, he wanted that done, so he had I guess it was maybe a teal, closer to green, with his logo on there. But I definitely bounced ideas off of him for the second round, because my logo has two colors in it, and then if I did black, that would be a third color, and so you’re able to simplify. Again, I’m very excited to see my cards.

Evan: Cool. Right on.

Joe: That’s fantastic. So we’re coming up on time somehow. But there are a couple of more questions I did want to ask. Maybe these can be more rapid-fire questions. And the first is, how did you come up with pricing for this sort of stuff? Is it based on design, complexity, demand? It’s kind of easy to slap any old price on software as long as people are willing to pay that, because you don’t have the … You have to factor in support and things like that, but you don’t necessarily have to factor in materials, for example.

Evan: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, there’s a lot more overhead and things to consider than when you’re just making software for people, for sure. So you have the type of paper you’re using, the thickness of the paper. I’ve mentioned the number of colors. Obviously the quantity of cards. The number of colors dictates how long they’re going to take to print, and obviously a quantity will increase the length. And so over time, what I’ve done is I’ve created a big spreadsheet that me and my employees can refer to, to price cards. Yeah, and so it all comes in, and it’s just something we’ve worked out over time. I think that initial website I was talking to you, when I had six templates, I just kind of guessed at it, and then we’ve kind of tweaked the prices from there. So yeah, that’s kind of how we’ve done it.

Joe: Cool, very cool. As a quick aside, since you keep mentioning the website, and this is mostly a WordPress audience I think I know the answer to this, but what are you using to power your website?

Evan: I’m so glad you asked. I’ve listened to several of your podcast and I know you’re pretty WordPress centric, and I wanted to hear what your reaction was when I tell you my site is Drupal.

Joe: Wow, awes- Well, so I was investigating before, and that’s what I thought. I mean, it’s a beautiful website.

Evan: Thank you.

Joe: And Drupal is maybe the second largest competitor to WordPress. Was there a reason that you decided to go with Drupal over anything else? I won’t specifically say WordPress, but you have an online shop, so maybe Shopify or something like that?

Evan: Yeah. Actually, I tried out a bunch, and before I had a CMS to manage my store, it was actually just a very static website that I built, like I said, with sort of PayPal buttons and stuff like that. That worked out. It just didn’t scale to the demand, obviously, and I wanted something a little bit more complex. And so I did a bunch of … I tried WordPress. The reason why I went with Drupal … I think WordPress aesthetically as far as the code goes was a little bit more down my alley, how they managed themes. I’m a designer. I like to get into theme code and make my own themes and something like that. WordPress was a little more clean to me, but the reason why I chose Drupal was because of a feature called views. I don’t know if you’ve ever used Drupal, but there’s a module, a very popular Drupal module called views that lets you basically build your own pages out of any data that’s in the shipbuilder. So you can easily just grab anything you want and create these very complex views.

Because I wasn’t too keen on actually getting in and building my own modules for Drupal and doing that stuff but I still wanted to create, have my hands completely on not only the layout but the data, I ended up choosing Drupal. And I had to do a lot of … not a lot, but a couple months of YouTube videos training myself to use Drupal and things like that. And right now I’m super stoked on Drupal. There’s a lot of things that’s terrible about it, but I actually love the fact that I can spin up a new page and work with the data how I want. It’s just how my mind works, you know?

Joe: Yeah, absolutely.

Evan: And of course, there’s just endless amount of modules, and the community’s huge. And there’s help and Drupal developers, if you need to hire them, all over the place.

Joe: Nice, very nice. And what you say makes perfect sense. I think maybe the biggest pitfall of WordPress for me is how they handle data. Everything is just a post and it goes into the post table. That could be handled a lot better, I think. But there’s a lot of technical debt now associated with that particular database architecture. I mean, I haven’t really touched Drupal, but what you said there just kind of makes me want to open it up and see what’s going on there.

Evan: Yeah. I think if you’re a designer and you’ve done a lot of front-end design but you also understand how a database works, Drupal’s an amazing tool for you to get in and to be your own developer. What I call Drupal is you have to be a configuration developer. I mean, there’s some configuration of WordPress, but it’s just like everything you’re doing is on user interface configuring things, which feels kind of messy and dirty, but it works out in the end.

Joe: Nice. That’s fantastic. Cool. So we talked about creating letterpress stuff and how that worked. We talked about how you acquired your letterpress machine and pricing and your website now. So I guess I’ll end on the two questions I always end with, which one, do you have any plans for the future, and two, do you have any trade secrets for us?

Evan: Yeah. Plans for the future, I am trying to understand marketing a little bit better with my business. I’m really trying to figure out clever ways to market Hoban Cards, because I think a lot of people like the product and I’m kind of adverse to using slimy marketing techniques and stuff like that, and so yeah, plans for the future is just growing it. And as much as I love actually doing the letterpress printing, I love kind of taking this tiny little business and seeing what I can do with it.

So just expanding the site, making more designs available. I think I’m going to expand my stationery offerings, ’cause right now I have calling cards. We also do sort of stationery and stationery sets, where you have a matching calling card. And I might try to expand, too, writing stationery. Maybe get ahold of some of The Pen Addict guys and figure out what papers are good to use of that.

Joe: Oh, man.

Evan: Yeah. So that’d be a lot of fun.

Joe: Awesome. Well, if you need somebody to test anything that you’re making, you let me know, ’cause I am … I don’t know if a lot of people know this about me ’cause I’m so embedded in the tech world, but I’m a huge stationery nerd.

Evan: Awesome.

Joe: I have tons of fountain pens and things like that. I very much love the analog world as much as the tech world. But sorry to-

Evan: Yeah. We should team up and do a little testing. I’d love to create some cool, not so much notebooks, but little personalized pieces of writing stationery, just like old-school writing stationery. So that’d be a lot of fun.

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. Cool, very cool.

Evan: Yeah. So as far as a trade secret, there’s many technical trade secrets I could share as far as letterpress printing goes, but I don’t think I could explain them well, and they probably wouldn’t be applicable to your audience.

But I think more generally a trade secret would be to I think try to be clever with … like I was talking about how I originally sent that email to Kevin Rose. And when I emailed out all the print shops in my area asking for … just try to be clever with how you’re getting into your business and what your passion is. Try to do things a little bit differently than everybody else around you is doing them. And I think just to be honest. Don’t try to make any shortcuts. Be honest with your marketing and how you present yourself.

As far as marketing goes, I’m just kind of getting into the looking more into marketing, and there’s this temptation I think to subscribe to all the SEO Newsletters you can and sort of try to hack the system as much as you can. And I think the more that you’re just doing what you love, that you’re honest, you’re putting out good content, you’re just going to rise to the top organically. And then just, yeah, find a niche you love, and do it.

Joe: Awesome. I love that. That sounds great. I try to do the same thing. I don’t really like the … you know there’s like the expiring sale and stuff like that that you see on … like the perpetual sale on websites all the time and other kind of not lying, but kind of disingenuous. And so I like the be honest, be clever sort of takeaway.

Evan: Yeah, cool.

Joe: Yeah. So thanks so much for joining me today, Evan. Where can people find you?

Evan: Yeah. People can follow me personally on Twitter, if you want, at Evan Calkins. And then you can check out my … My calling card website is hobancards.com, so it’s H-O-B-A-N, card.com. I’m sure you’ll link it up. And then my custom stuff is hobanpress.com. So I kind of have two areas of the business where I’m doing custom stuff, so if you want your logo and maybe you have your own design that you want printed, you can hit me up there.

Joe: Awesome. Yes, and I will definitely link all of those in the show notes.

And dear listeners, I’m giving you a call to action. I mentioned one pop culture reference on the calling cards page. I just noticed at least another one, so you should head over there and see how many pop culture references you can find.

Evan: Pretty much all the cards have a pop culture reference. So if you’re into TV shows, then go check it out.

Joe: Thanks again to Evan for joining me today! It was incredibly interesting to hear about how he got his equipment and his start. Letterpress is a tricky business and he does it really well! Be sure to check out his work at hobancards.com.

And Thanks again to our sponsors – make sure to check out Liquid Web for managed WordPress hosting. I use them on all of my important sites – they are that good! They are at buildpodcast.net/liquid. They’ll give you 50% off your first 2 months just for being a listener! If you want to save your clients (or yourself) money through recovering abandoned carts, check out jilt. They are over at buildpodcast.net/jilt. Finally, be sure to check out WordSesh. An incredibly affordable, 12 hour online conference with some of the biggest thought leaders in WordPress. get your tickets at buildpodcast.net/wordsesh.

For all of the show notes, head over to howibuilt.it/78/. If you like the show, head over to Apple Podcasts and leaving us a rating and review. It helps people discover us! Finally, if you like the show and what to support it directly, head over to patreon.com/howibuiltit/. We have lots of great perks for backers, and right now, you vote on the official t-shirt. You can support the show for as little as $1/month. If you pledge at $10/mo, you’ll get that shirt for free.

And until next week, get out there and build something.

Peter Hollens and Creating Online

February 6, 2018

Show Notes

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Transcript

Intro: Hey everybody and welcome to another episode of How I Buit It! In today’s episode, I’m so excited because I get to talk to Peter Hollens, who’s an incredible artist and creator. You may have seen some of his videos on YouTube (link in the show notes). Today we’re going to talk about what goes into making them, as well as his online courses at Hollens Creator Academy. Peter’s incredibly passionate about this project and it shows. I feel like we’re both cut from the same cloth (minus the singing – I wish!) so this is a great (albeit it slightly longer) episode. We’ll get into it next, but first, a word from our sponsors.

Sponsors: This season of How I Built It is brought to you by two fantastic sponsors. The first is Liquid Web. If you’re running a membership site, an online course, or even a real estate site on word press, you’ve likely already discovered many hosts that have optimized their platforms for a logged out experience, where they cash everything. Sites on their hardware are great for your sales and landing pages, but struggle when your users start logging in. At that point, your site is as slow as if you were on three dollar hosting. Liquid Web built their managed word press platform optimized for sites that want speed and performance, regardless of whether a customer is logged in or logged out. Trust me on this, I’ve tried it out and it’s fast, seriously fast. Now, with their single site plan, Liquid Web is a no-brainer for anyone whose site is actually part of their business, and not just a site promoting their business. Check out the rest of the features on their platform by visiting them at buildpodcast.net/liquid web. That’s buildpodcast.net/liquid web.

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And now…on with the show!

Joe: Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of How I Built It, the podcast that asks, “How did you build that?” Today, I am honored to have Peter Hollens as my guest today. Peter, how are you?

Peter: I’m doing great, Joe. Glad to be on here.

Joe: I am stoked to have you on the show. You are the first guest with my brand new audio setup, so this episode should sound more buttery than any previously released episode, which is nice. I’ll let you introduce yourself, but I have been subscribed to your YouTube channel for some time now, and I really enjoy listening to your music. You obviously released a new product that we’re going to talk about as well. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do?

Peter: Sure. First and foremost, I am a husband and a father. Got a beautiful baby boy. I get to make a living singing on the Internet. I consult a couple companies that I really care about a lot like Patreon and Loudr, and a bunch of companies that are really helping to create a revolution. I recently finally released the beginning of my Creator Academy to be able to help teach other people who have passion to create for a living how to actually do that. A little bit of everything. Most people know me for the dorky guy that makes a cappella videos on the Internets.

Joe: That is certainly how I found you. It’s really cool to hear that you’re doing all sorts of other stuff. A lot of people take a lot of things at face value. You mentioned you do some consulting, you do the online courses, which we’re going to talk about. I think a big lesson of this show has always been diversify your income streams. It sounds like you’re really doing that.

Peter: Oh, gosh. I think it’s so important for anyone who really does want to make a living as a musician to have their hand in every cookie jar imaginable, whether that’s ad revenue, digital sales, physical sales, consulting other musicians, helping song write. Whatever your skills are, you need to be part of it, because things change so quickly and you never know where it’s going to head. You always need to be diversifying. I think that’s the role of creators moving forward, is that we need to be entrepreneurs and you need to think about it in the aspect of building your business in that way.

Joe: Absolutely. That’s great advice. Have your hand in all of the cookie jars, something I’ve been learning over the last couple of years. I’m recently self-employed full-time and I’m definitely learning that’s super duper important. Thank you very much. It’s awesome. I picked a really good time to do it. It was about three months after my daughter was born, so I figure, let’s introduce more instability to my life.

Peter: Right? Congrats on the daughter. That’s amazing.

Joe: Thank you. It’s been a lot of fun. We have a lot of fun stuff to talk about. We do a lot of similar things. We make stuff online, we teach people online, we’re both family men, so I don’t get sued. You mentioned that the thing that most people know you best for is your a cappella videos. Why don’t we talk a little bit about that, and then we can segue into your online courses? When did you start doing that? I could look back on the YouTube channel to see when your first video was published, but when did you really start doing the a cappella videos?

Peter: I started playing with it the beginning of 2011. I went full-time about May 2012. Ever since then, I’ve been picking up on it and trying to expedite my workflow, and make sure that I have more and more content going all at once. Before I left for Broadway in November, I had 28 simultaneous productions being created or finished at that time. Now I think I’m more at 19 or 18, because I’ve released so many without being able to work on it when I was stuck in Midtown. I was on Broadway. I got to do 63 shows on Broadway. That’s kind of cool, right? Having the ability to sing on the Broadway stage and sing one of your own creations. Even being a really songwriter, being a Broadway writer now, which is the stupidest thing ever, but whatever.

Joe: That’s awesome too. You’re doing it all as far as producing and putting music out there and stuff like that. 28 simultaneous videos. I mentioned before we started the show, one of my recent favorites is your Disney villains melody. That’s the one that really pushed me to reach out to have you on the show. What was it like putting that together? What’s the process like? That is a high quality video.

Peter: Thanks. Initially, honestly, it was very conceptual. That’s obviously one of the videos where I’m like, “This is going to be made as, first of all, a labor of love because I’m a Disney freak. Secondly, from a business standpoint, as a fan acquisition model. I’m making this because I want it to be found and I want new people to find me and find my face and be like, ‘This guy is dorky. What else has he made?'” Then hopefully fall down the rabbit hole of all the other stuff.

I had really dabbled in a lot of Disney stuff, and then I had seen online that there wasn’t a lot of homage to the villains. I was like, “What are the best villain songs? I’m going to write them all out.” Then I said, “I really need to have one heck of a powerhouse female to do it.” I asked my wife if it was okay if it wasn’t her. I always have to ask permission, because she can sing darn good and she likes doing all that stuff. I reached out to Whitney, who I think has a tremendous following and is incredibly talented. Then we started talking and brainstorming. She is just as crazy as I am. Between the two of us, we finalized the concept. My production team then went to work on finishing the arrangement.

Basically, I get the arrangements. If we’re going to break this down all the way, I’ll go for it. I get the arrangements, it’s sent to me. Right over here I start sight reading everything in the studio off my iPad. I start from the lowest voices up. I’ll start bass in the morning. I won’t even speak. I’ll go into the studio, because I am a tenor, but I do have some nice low notes in the morning when I don’t speak. Sing all the lower parts, and then baritone, and then tenor five and tenor four and tenor three and tenor two and tenor one. I finish the entire song, the background stuff, and then I did a bunch of rough vocals. I sent it over to Whitney and I’d be like, “Does this work for you key-wise and blah, blah, blah.” Then I got a couple notes from her, sang all my parts, paid for her to go to the studio, get all her stuff recorded, and then edited all that stuff. From that perspective it’s tightening the rhythm and getting the intonation better. Once you add 110, 115 tracks of vocals, if they’re not pretty pristine in tune, it is a cacophony of madness and doesn’t sound good.

Then, mix it, master it, and then really conceptualize the video from that point on. In my videos, the videos that do the best are the ones that showcase how my music is being made, because the majority of people that run into me still don’t believe that what they’re hearing is really all a cappella. Unfortunately, I have to stick to that Brady Bunch thing a little bit. In this one, I really wanted to surprise the audience and have an element where we break out of that. I came up with the concept of one of the worlds, being that of Gaston, that we actually go into the real world. I tried to surprise the audience, that all of a sudden, on one of those close ups, you then pull out of it and all of a sudden, you’re in Belle’s town and you’re in that city. That was something we tried to pull off. Then we actually ended up going back into the good old cookie cutter Brady Bunch thing, and that was the whole thing.

Joe: Nice. There’s a couple of follow up questions I have there. First of all, I love asking this question. What’s the microphone and stuff that you use?

Peter: I have a lot of mics in my cabinet. Right now, I am really loving Telefunken mics. I actually am lucky enough to have one of 13 unreleased AK477’s. It’s a mic that they started to make, and then they decided was going to actually jeopardize their revenue off of their top end mic. They decided not to release it. I have that. Then I have an AR52 that they made, but I modified the capsule so it’s kind of like a Neumann, but really bright. I have this really dark, vintage sound that I can get out of one of my mics, and then a very bright contrast to that. Obviously, this is a podcast, but you can see it. Right when the proximity of about four inches, I can record one part, move my mouth over, and record another. Then I have about six or seven different amps that I go through to modify my instrument, because of course, as a one man a cappella guy, I only have one instrument to play with, but I have a bunch of different things to run it through to slightly adjust it.

Then of course, once I’m doing a background part, if I’m like, “I’m going to sing like Peter, or I’m going to sing like a dramatic opera singer who has been in the head with an anvil five times,” and then I modify where I’m placing my tone and I do that. You have to do a lot of playing around to get a really full sound with only one voice. I’ve had a lot of experience doing that.

Joe: Absolutely. One of the fantastic parts of your videos is that you do have a lot of different vocal styles. There are sometimes where I can’t really tell that it’s you singing. I think one of the other videos that really highlights that is the Ultimate Aca-Battle that you did with 10 second songs. You did all sorts of different cool voices in that one.

Peter: Honestly, that’s another example of a shtick-y fan acquisition type of a concept, but a really fun one. All of those ones that you make to be shared with the entire standpoint of, “How do I get somebody that doesn’t know me to share this,” that’s how I build a lot of those from the ground up. That’s fun. It’s like, “How do I make this song be done in as many genres as possible and be kooky and cool?” When you go to the visual standpoint of it as well, not just the audio standpoint, it’s like, “How many ways can I dress up to back up visually what the person’s actually also hearing audio-wise?” That specific video to way too long to put together. Oh, my gosh.

Joe: The Aca-Battle one?

Peter: Both of the ones you brought up, actually, are very time-consuming, but so much fun. They’re great. The cool thing about the villains medley that you brought up, is that actually really succeeded. I was at VidCon and we had released it the first day. I have never had a number one trending video. It was number for almost a full day. That’s pretty cool, and pretty cool timing when you’re at VidCon with everybody else and you’re like, “Oh, yeah. My video right now is trending. That’s pretty cool. Nice to meet you. Also, check out my video. It’s trending. It’s number one.”

Joe: That’s awesome. You mentioned the costumes. Another weird question that I had about this is, do you rent the costumes, or do you have a closet full of Disney prince costumes?

Peter: Actually, that is a yes, but that’s also because we build some of them and then we do rent some of them. It depends on how quickly I need them, if they do exist somewhere that I can rent them, and if they don’t, then can I afford to build it really quickly. Some of the times the costumes are super legit where you could take them to a cosplay convention and look totally legit. Other times, it is so cheap and so crappy and horrible, and it looks great on camera, but if you were in the room you’d be like, “Why are you wearing this?” In the end, it only depends on what the lens sees. That’s the beauty of the camera sometimes.

Joe: That’s awesome. The videos that we just talked about are super time-consuming, as you mentioned. Sounds intimidating to somebody who wants to start on the path that you have. Are there videos where you have where you get in front of a mic, like you’re the Ed Sheeran Game of Thrones video? What was it like shooting that? That seemed like it was one longer shot. Was it a little bit easier to shoot than the Disney villains one?

Peter: Audio-wise, that was more tricky because we really only heard 46 seconds or 47 seconds of actual material. Trying to come up with a concept where I could elongate that to make it an actual song and utilize the words and still be able to pay the publisher money for the lyrics that I didn’t own, and then not change the composition so much that I would get in trouble, and still be able to offer it to someone and be like, “This is a full song, even though it wasn’t a full song when we started.” That was time consuming. The actual layering of that, because it is so simple to the ear, anyway. Maybe there was only 36 or 38 or 40 tracks of vocals on that, which is very few for me. That was much quicker. Even from a visual standpoint of just doing the cloning, where pretty much you set up a tripod, you don’t cross, and then you feather between this fifth and this fifth and this fifth. Pretty much that video was shooting in 4K, pulling in close on a 1080 and then zooming it in digitally back and forth. That was actually pretty easy.

I have these fan acquisition videos, and then I have these passion videos. It goes in between the two. In my head I’m like, “My [inaudible 00:14:46] is this much.” If I keep doing fan acquisition videos, I start turning into a zombie and I don’t care about my life. Then I do something that I love, like whatever, if it’s a folk song original and I get refilled again. It’s like a dorky gamer. That’s how I think of it. This was cool because you take an Ed Sheeran name and SEO and song, which is because it’s Ed, so everybody likes it except for the Game of Thrones people, whatever. Anyway, then you mix it with Game of Thrones, which is another fandom trend. Then you hit it while it is a trend, and so that actually in and of itself becomes something that’s shareable. That was a win-win from a “I lucked out, it was topical,” and I happened to watch the episode right when it came out and so it was moving on it quickly.

It was funny, because I actually watched that one live instead of watching it later like I usually do, because I have no time. As soon as it came on, my buddy who was in the room, I looked at him and I was like, “I have to do this.” He was like, “You don’t have to. Come on. It’s gimmicky.” I was like, “No. I have to. I have to. It’s Ed Sheeran and he’s singing a melody that’s pretty. I have to do it. I have to. I’m doing it.” Then we moved on that, and that was fun.

Joe: Cool. We talked a lot about putting together your videos. I happened to mention three fan acquisition ones. What’s one of your passion ones? I don’t want to keep shooting-

Peter: Sure. Yeah. Honestly, I’m a huge fan of folk songs, so stuff like “Shenandoah” or “Loch Lomond,” or anything of Irish descent. I love that stuff because it’s pure and the melody’s there. I’m a huge balladeer. I like singing pretty ballads. Right now, in the pop world, that’s not a popular thing. Any time there’s anything that falls in line that works like that Ed Sheeran one, I jump on it. I want to bring popular, old folk songs back, the ones that were popular a century ago. I want to offer it to my audience, who have most likely never heard it, because they’ve started following me because of all the other songs you already mentioned. I like making beautiful versions of that and then showing it to them, and hopefully I actually get to turn a fifth of them onto music that I find to be very beautiful, and that moves me.

Even doing something more along Christmas music or spiritual stuff that I find is beautiful, and moves me, and may or may not be something that a normal person would click on, but since they’ve seen my name and they go, “Oh. ‘O Come, O Come, Emmanuel,’ maybe I’m not Christian, maybe I’ve never gone to church, but I want to hear what Peter did with it, and be like, wow. That’s actually really pretty.” I love that. I love helping people stumble upon music that they might not have ever listened to. That’s one of the things I love about being so eclectic and always having been so eclectic, where you could listen to my Pandora and you could hear a Skyrim theme or Star Wars, and then all of a sudden you could hear “The Prayer” by Andrea Boccelli, or Jason Mraz, or Disney villains medley. I think that’s fun.

A lot of artists would be like, “You’re not a real artist.” I’m like, “I am and I’m making a terrific income, and I get to do and make music that I want. Any time I write an original, I have millions of people that could listen to it. Can you say the same thing? I don’t think you can.” It’s funny. I’m stealing your podcast over, but that’s one of the reasons why I want to be able to teach all of the things I’ve learned the last seven, eight years to people, and not just musicians, but be like, “This is how you build your business. This is how you can build your career on whatever product you’re making, whether you’re a musician or whether you’re an animator, or whether you like vlogging or doing Minecraft videos, or podcasts.” We have so much possibility. There’s no excuses anymore. I just want people to wake up and realize it, because like right now, we’re such whiners. You get out of college or maybe you don’t have enough money to go to college, or maybe you messed around in high school and you never had the chance, but everybody’s like, all these excuses. I’m like, “But the Internet’s there. You can learn anything you want now by typing it in and watching and learning and doing.”

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Let’s dive right into that. We both make online courses for stuff. You have a relatively new, at the time of this recording, website called Creator Academy. Is that right?

Peter: Yeah. It’s my last name, Hollens Creator Academy. I thought that would be the best way to launch it. Initially, it’s a macro course that basically teaches anyone making anything how to really do it. We cover everything from production to licensing to building a community to how to pick your content and how to start everything. It’s a lot, but it’s really, really, really high production. We have illustrations and animations. It’s a three camera shoot. All the audio’s been mastered. I’m already teaching at universities. If you can take it an universities and get credit for it and pay upwards of $1,000, then you should pay $100 and take it from me and start living your dream, you silly person listening to this.

Other than that, I’m really excited about going way more in-depth on teaching people video and teaching people audio, and the person helping my video course. Every single person that’s going to be teaching these courses are people who are simultaneously doing it. Somebody’s going to be teaching it who has millions of followers or has made millions of dollars doing this thing. It’s not like you’re being taught by a teacher, but you’re being taught by the person who is still doing it. I’ll be constantly updating in the course. It’s not like, “I just read six books and now I’m going to tell you how to do something that I actually don’t really know how to do, but I’m really good at telling you because I’m an Internet marketer and I’m going to make you pay $1,500 for it.” Those people kill me.

Joe: Right. People say, “Those who can’t do, teach,” but in your case, you are doing it and then teaching people how you do it.

Peter: Yeah. I’m totally fine telling people I failed at school. I wanted to be a teacher. I wanted to be a choral director, my choral director might’ve saved my life. I wanted to be able to give that back to kids. Then I couldn’t pull it off. It’s not in my genes to be able to pay attention in a normal school setting. I’m too ADHD. I don’t have the capability. I don’t fit the cookie cutter mold. It was a dream I gave up. Then about 18 months ago, I was bound and determined to do this, and so I’ve been researching and developing this initial product in this course. Out of all the companies that I advise, I have all these amazing CEOs that are on my board of advisors that are able to guide me along the way, and teach me that no, I can’t start an education company and make it a non-profit because I won’t be able to make a difference because this world is built on capitalism, and yes, I have to charge something, and yes, I need to make money so I can pay my employers to make more content and make it better.

I’m learning a lot. The ethos and the heart that I want to have can still live on through the capitalist crappy world that we have to live in. I want to teach people how to make a living and make a difference in the world doing what they love, because the more people doing what they love is honestly, the only way I see us normal people … I’m still bound and determined that we can still change the world and I’m never going to give that up, because what kind of life is that to lead? We can actually make the world a better place by allowing people to follow their passions and their ambitions, and inspiring people to do what they love. I want to help them do that.

The coolest thing is now that it’s out there and seeing all of my students and seeing my class fill up, like at University of Oregon that’s starting on Monday, in two hours, and seeing how excited people are, it’s crazy. It pushes me even more to build more and make more content, and get more incredibly intelligent artists and creators on there to help teach other people and try to exponentially do it. Oh, my gosh, it’s a lot of work, but it’s so addicting and fun.

Joe: It’s a crazy amount of work. You’re obviously passionate about it, which I don’t think anybody would be able to do something that includes this much work without being passionate about it. It also sounds like you have a team of people.

Peter: Oh, gosh, yeah.

Joe: I usually interview programmers. We’re very much like, “We’ll do it ourselves.” Field of dreams marketing. My online course platform is built on WordPress and I built that because I’m a programmer. Sometimes I’m like, “I should’ve just used Teachify or something.” I like owning the platform. When you built out Hollens Creator Academy, is this a platform that you own or did you use something like Teachable?

Peter: Initially … I already deleted it because I was upset, but initially, I had an entire app built. I wanted it to be mobile. I wanted it to be gamified. I wanted it to be built on community elements and have this entire thing that isn’t out there and wasn’t available and still isn’t available. I know now why, is because it’s so dang hard and costs so much to build a mobile app. I had it set up so the more you engaged, the more you were rewarded with badges. Those badges were connected to B&H discounts and Adobe Creative crowd. It all worked. In the end, I realized that even though that model is awesome and all those things are great. It’s fluff on top of the fact that it has to work and it has to deliver to all of these different people and all of these different platforms, whether or not they’re Android or IOS or on their iPad or on their desktop.

I learned quickly that I couldn’t build it because I didn’t have enough money. If my functionality was around 65%, that’s completely and totally not okay. I have a front end that’s built and adjustable. I have a programmer like you on my side to adjust it and make it unique. I’m currently using multiple platforms, like Kajabi and the infrastructure to be able to deliver it and have it work. Still learning the best of what else is out there, and I’m playing around with everything right now to see what’s best. Lucky enough, I do have my own designer and I do have my own programmer, and I want to be able to make it 100% unique to me. It’s such an incredible sigh of relief to be like, “This just works for everybody. All the content’s up there.” You can watch all 78 episodes and you’re having no problem. This is lovely.

Running support for even my beta group of 115 people, I was like, “Oh, wow. Yeah. Can’t make it from scratch.” Why go to market with a Ferrari? You have to go to market with your tiny little tricycle that barely works. Then you learn. I knew I should’ve done that, but I still got too big for my britches and I thought I could follow. That’s why I’m stubborn and you learn and you move forward.

Joe: Absolutely. You mentioned it just works. People get to consume the content. That’s the main reason that you created this. You have a teaching background. What was it like putting together the curriculum? I think a lot of people go, “I’ll make an online course,” and they’ll talk at-

Peter: Oh, my gosh, yeah.

Joe: They won’t structure it pedagogically, to use that educational word, in a way that aids learning. What was it like building the curriculum from your end?

Peter: First and foremost, it was a huge, huge learning lesson, because my first intuition was to “Blah, blah, blah, blah” and vomit it all out there. Thankfully, I took the advice of people who had been doing this for over a decade, and I structured it all out. I initially vomited and then I organized, and then I organized, and then I got somebody else to organized because goodness to gracious, I am not the best organizer. Then I had a professor to look over it, and then I had other people who make eight figures doing this to look over it. It was great that I was like, “Okay. I have this all written out in these modules that make sense, and this order.” The cool thing now, when I’ve created online for anyone, and then taking it to a university and making it work in their quarterly system, and looking at the benefits of the two is now that when I get through this first term of teaching it at universities, I’ll be able to A and B and see what works best for both, and then make a hybrid. I’m really excited about that.

Honestly, it’s constantly learning. It is very streamlined. I’m never going to stop trying to make it better. That’s the best thing about always wanting to get feedback from people and always trying to better the product, because it can always get better.

Joe: Absolutely. For a while I taught an intro to computers class that all freshman at the University of Scranton had to take. Somebody made a comment to me, “So you can take on a couple more classes, right? Intro to computers is basically on auto pilot for you now. You’ve been teaching it for a couple of years.” I’m like, “No, it’s not.” I redo that course every semester because it’s so important. It’s freshman who don’t care about the material. They have to take it, but it’s how to be a good Internet citizen. Don’t talk on the phone when you’re also giving your sandwich order at the deli. A lot of professors, they have the same thing that they’ve been teaching for 10 years, and they don’t revamp it. That’s a little disheartening to me. The cool thing about teaching in the classroom as well as online, is you get to see people’s faces. As you say something, you realize what sticks and what doesn’t. It’s really nice to bring that feedback loop back to your online courses as well.

Peter: Exciting.

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. You mentioned that you have 78 videos. Is that one big course, or is it a couple of courses with different tracks?

Peter: Yes. It’s 76. I said 78, because I forgot. It’s as micro as I could. Some of the more intro to production of video and audio are a little bit longer, because you can’t get through anything that fast in either audio or video. They’re usually between four and 15 minute digestable lessons with illustrations and animation. It all sounds good, it all unfortunately, looks good because you’re staring at my face, which doesn’t look that good, but you got to love shooting in 4K. You’re like, “God dangit, I’m almost 40.” I think it’s a really good first time, first lesson for someone who has never made it as far as me making it, and then I think it also is a really incredible offering to the general public. I forgot your question because I’m ADD.

Joe: It was, is it broken up into different subject matters. My follow up question to that is now, we are coming up on time, but I do want to ask you, if I were to start today, what’s the experience like? Do you say, “Here’s where you start,” or do you say, “Here’s my catalog. Pick where you want to start”?

Peter: To actually answer your question that you asked that I didn’t, it’s built out exactly like that. The first module is where to start. That’s the title. Then we take you through the four or five lessons that exactly how to do that. It goes into my philosophy that I believe saves people years on their journey and actually gets them off their freaking butt to start and fail. Yes, fail, because you out there listening, if you haven’t started, you want to fail. You’ve been taught that failing is bad. It’s actually very good because then you learn and you improve. It’s where to start, reverse engineering your big idea, becoming self-taught, creating your content, production like audio and video. I go through everything. How to distribute your content, why you have to collaborate. The power of collaboration. Building and engaging your community, because if you don’t have a community, you don’t have a career and you don’t have an infrastructure to succeed and be able to continue it forever.

Then leveraging social media. That could be its own 50 hour thing, but it’s concise and important. The four or five specific ones that you have to pay attention to. Then monetizing essentials, because you need to make money. Then building your dream and blah, blah, blah. Obviously, it’s a little bit of get off your butt and go at the beginning and end, and a lot of concrete, “These are the things you have to put into action” in the middle. Anyway, for me, putting myself back to the 2011 me that was just dabbling in this, I would give anything to be taught this from me in 2011, because I would now be so much more successful and skip so many problems and errors.

Everybody thinks that their course is great, but I’m super excited. The coolest is that, I’m so super pumped to make this one better and make tons of others ones that are more specific exactly to the needs of my community. The coolest thing about having millions of followers is that you can pull them and you can crowdsource what do they want and what do you want to create, so that my R&D is quick and free and I get to just create it, then. It’s exciting.

Joe: That’s amazing. I’ll have two more questions for you, then. The big one that I like to ask everybody at the end of every show. We skipped the research question, because we were talking about so much other stuff. You mentioned that a lot of your research just now comes from your millions of followers. How do you determine what is good and what’s bad? I have four YouTube followers. Somebody commented and was like, “Bro, we’re 15 minutes in and you haven’t even started the demo yet.” I’m like, “That’s very good feedback. Thank you.” How do you weed out the bad stuff and know what’s a good idea to run with?

Peter: What I tell people is that you always going to have top of the funnel and bottom of the funnel. The top is like, “Oh, my God, you’re amazing. You changed my life.” I’ll take that and what you’re doing is saving my life, and that’s amazing. I can’t really let it sink in because it doesn’t make sense to me as an individual that’s just a dorky dad making music, but if it has, awesome. Then I ignore the stuff at the bottom that’s like, “Oh, my God, you’re so stupid. You’re the worst singer in the world. I hate your face. I want to come and …” There’s horrible stuff. You get polar opposites. There’s so much great stuff in the middle, and it behooves every single creator on the Internet to pay attention to what your com is saying and read your comments.

Some people are too vulnerable and too emotional to do that, but I think there is so much gold in there that you need to. Also, truthfully, in my opinion, if you’re building the kind of community that’s going to help you succeed for life that you’re going to be creating and fostering a community that isn’t just going to be a bunch of trolls, unless you are a troll and that’s how you get your following like some people out there that I’m not going to name that are very popular in the general public right now for apologizing for doing horrible stunts. Anyway, you want to create and foster that community. If you do, and if you put yourself out there and you’re making that positive, inspiring, family-friendly stuff, that your resounding loop of communication on all that social media is going to be so beneficial for you to pay attention to, whether it’s you reading it or your team reading it and getting feedback. That’s so important.

Polls and all that stuff is great, but just reading the comments is important as well. Also, to answer your question on the research level, it behooves you to always find those five to 10 people in your niche, in your vertical that are succeeding and surviving and thriving online, and see what they’re doing, how they’re innovating, how they’re making their money, how are they talking to their community, how are they running their business. You need to take that and you need to copy that. Steal everything they’re doing that’s working and make it your own. Steal is such a terrible word. It has all these negative connotations, but that’s what humans have been doing for centuries, and that’s why we are so successful, because we learn from each other.

Honestly, being copied is one of the biggest compliments you can possibly ever have, and was it Mozart that said, it’s like-

Joe: “Good artists copy, great artists steal.”

Peter: Right. Everything in the world is a remix. Get over yourself and start doing that all the time. I pay attention to those people that I see in different verticals and different industries that are the best. I copy their ideas. Maybe I could be at something, the first person to do something and great for me if I do that, but I want to be the fastest early adopter of every new innovation that I possibly can. That’s why it behooves me to always have my tentacles out there and why it’s so important for me to be advising all these different companies so I can talk to these brilliant people that have graduated from Yale and Stanford and all these different industries and be like, “What’s going? What’s happening? Who should I be following? What should I be reading?”

That’s my research. Not only do I have my amazing supporters, because they’re not fans. If I said fans, it was an accident, because I hate that word. I have them to listen to and speak with and communicate with. At the same time, I have this amazing ability to talk to these CEOs that I should never have the ability to, but I feel so fortunate. Then I used Facebook and all these different social media platforms to filter out and listen to just the people I want. I don’t even really follow my wife on Facebook. I have unfollowed all of my friends, I’ve unfollowed people that don’t really provide value directly back to me to be able to succeed. That sounds really rude and rough and disheartening, but I don’t have enough time to do that. If I want to talk to them, I’ll text them.

Joe: I know exactly what you mean.

Peter: I think Instagram is the only thing I actually have that’s just my friends and family, which is why it’s the only place where I only follow 150 people. Everything else is like, I want to pay attention to the thought leaders. If I want to know what’s going on in VR and AR, I’m listening to just Robert Scoble and a couple of his friends. If I want to listen to what’s going on in crowdfunding, I’m listening to just Jack Conte. Thank God, because he’s the CEO of Patreon and he’s brilliant and I have a man crush on him. Thankfully, I advise that company so I can text him any time. You have all these different people to listen to and I only listen to them. When you get their posts, you actually read them because it’s teaching you.

Instead of me necessarily picking up a book that’s been written and published, by the time it’s been published and written, a lot of the information is too late because that’s how quickly everything’s changing and innovating now. I just read everything from blogs to people’s Facebook posts and tweets and that’s how I do my R&D.

Joe: I love that, because let me tell you, I get caught up pretty easily in the Twitter fodder of my friends. I gratuitously use mutes and filters now for tweet bots.

Peter: You have to.

Joe: It’s like a God send.

Peter: I’ve been using TweetDeck forever. I follow my fans because it makes them happy and it makes them feel really special that day or maybe that week, or maybe for some reason, longer than that. If I could turn this around and show everybody, it’s the private thing that I have that says, “People that I follow,” and it’s just the people that are providing value back to my life that I need to pay attention to. It’s not like it’s just business, but it’s emotional overall too, so it doesn’t sound like I’m just some Cretan that is only trying to … You know what I mean?

Joe: I know exactly what you mean. If we’re going to talk about social media for a minute, that’s an important thing to do because recent studies are showing that people are more depressed being on social media.

Peter: Oh, my God. You can’t listen.

Joe: If you are following people that you presumably care about, why are you depressed? I have 900 friends, I talk to 50 on a regular basis. That’s a vanity metric. I feel bad unfriending people on Facebook, so I just unfollow a bunch of people.

Peter: I think it’s for a healthier life if you do. It’s the same thing that we’ve been told always growing up. “Only surround yourself with the people that help you be a better person.” That should be the same dang thing on your digital self. We have our physical self and we have our digital self. What you’re taking on digitally is just as important as whoever you’re inviting to your dinner at your house. You don’t want to be caught up in a bunch of drama, you don’t want to be caught up in a bunch of gossip. There’s nothing positive that ever comes of that. The same stuff happens digitally. Honestly, if somebody you look up to or someone you want to be or look up to and you know for a fact that what they’re putting out there is this fake life, don’t you surround yourself with that.

That’s what this whole fake loophole is. You go down to Starbucks or whatever, I’m going to use L.A. as an example, because I think it runs rampant there. People are only using their social media to create this fake life for themselves, to make themselves feel better so they can get likes and comments. I’m like, “Don’t follow those people. If you know who those people are, you got to do what’s best for you. What makes you feel good? Does it make you feel good to follow the cutest dog Twitter on Instagram? Then do that.” This is us. We pick up our phone. We’re like, “How do I get my endorphin hit?” Make your endorphin hit positive for your life, not like, “I wish I was that person. I wish I was in Hawaii. Look at how cool that person is driving his Ferrari.” If that’s what you want, we can talk about money and fame and how that’s stupid. You should stop your podcast now because we’re well over your time limit.

Joe: We are, but I need to ask you one more question. That is, do you have any trade secrets for us?

Peter: Trade secrets. Did I not give you any already?

Joe: You gave a million, but I always like to ask this because the guests always says “Trade secrets” like you just said. That’s my favorite part of the show.

Peter: Gotcha. Trade secrets. Sure. You want to know a trade secret? It’s 2018. Stop paying attention to anything other than attention. You want people’s attention. You don’t care about likes. You don’t care about subscribers. You don’t care about anything. You care about getting that person in Indiana, Joe, with his four siblings and whatever, you want Joe to watch you for 22 minutes, because after he has, he’s going to follow you to the ends of the earth because you provided value to his life. If you’re creating valuable things into the world, whatever you’re creating, you want that person to watch you for that amount of time, and you want them to fall in love with you, the person, not you, the product. Be a person first, a product second, and attention is the metric you pay attention to. That is powerful.

Joe: See? There was a pause there, but that is excellent. Likes are a vanity metric. Retweets are a vanity metric. How many people are engaged with you? That’s really want you want. That’s the people who are going to buy your course or continue to really promote what you’re doing. Man, that was an excellent trade secret, so I’m really glad I asked that question. Peter, thank you so much for joining me today. I had an absolute blast talking to you.

Peter: Thanks, Joe. Nice to talk to you too.

Joe: Where can people find you, before I sign off?

Peter: Oh, gosh. Everywhere on the Internet. Peterhollens.com is me. If you want to learn how to do what you love for a living, you have to go to the Creator Academy. I want to teach you.

Joe: That’s hollenscreatoracademy.com, right?

Peter: Yes. H-O-L-L-E-N-S creatoracademy.com.

Joe: Excellent. I will link that in the show notes.

Peter: I can give you, just for Joe, a special discount just for your listeners if you want.

Joe: I would love that. That would be fantastic.

Peter: That would be awesome. Cha ching.

Outro: Thanks so much to that and thanks to Peter for Joining me! That code is going to be BUILDIT, good for 25% off! Head over to buildpodcast.net/hollens to take advantage. What you heard is just a small fraction of what Peter has to offer. Peter, thanks again for joining me!

And Thanks again to our sponsors – make sure to check out Liquid Web for managed WordPress hosting. I use them on all of my important sites – they are that good! And they recently rolled out Managed WooCommerce Hosting too. They are at buildpodcast.net/liquid. If you want to save your clients (or yourself) money through recovering abandoned carts, check out jilt. They are over at buildpodcast.net/jilt. And finally, if you need amazing event management for WordPress, checkout Event Espresso over at buildpodcast.net/events.

For all of the show notes, head over to howibuilt.it/65/. Finally, If you like the show, head over to Apple Podcasts and leaving us a rating and review. It helps people discover us! And until next time, get out there and build something!

Episode 16: Jackie D’Elia & What We Learned Podcasting, Part 1

December 6, 2016

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