How Not To Start An Online Business | Modern Wisdom Podcast 279

Jonny 0:00 You don't need an office. You don't need a 25 grand startup loan. You don't need loads of stock. You don't need a factory or production line or any, any of that stuff. Uh, it can literally be you and a laptop, and, uh, the information that you have or some kind of service that you're looking to provide.

Chris Williamson 0:15 Feels like we're missing something today.

Jonny 0:17 I know. I know.

Chris Williamson 0:18 What is it?

Jonny 0:18 The, the third square.

Chris Williamson 0:20 Missing a, a, a scone-shaped-

Jonny 0:23 That's normally on the call.

Chris Williamson 0:23 ... like the, like raisin and almond scone-shaped hole.

Jonny 0:27 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 0:27 Uh, Yusuf is saving lives, uh, whereas me and you just spend all our time on the internet. So I thought I'd get a hold of you today and just record a, a rogue podcast. What are we gonna be talking about?

Jonny 0:38 Well, the internet, basically, or how, how people make money using the internet. So, I guess the, the broad subject would be online business, building an online business, starting an online business.

Chris Williamson 0:50 You can't make money anywhere else. There is no money to be made in real person at the moment.

Jonny 0:55 (laughs) Yeah. Yeah. Well, I suppose, like, e- even people who go to offices or have worked in an office their entire life are now basically living the same life as someone who's been a, like a digital entrepreneur their entire life, so everyone's working from home, there's a lot of remote working. Um, but yeah, so I suppose, uh, this is something that I've been doing with Yusuf for quite a while, um, since 2010-ish, officially. Um, I think we actually incorporated the business, I don't know whether you know this, Chris, but I think we actually incorporated Propain in your flat in Jesmond.

Chris Williamson 1:32 Yeah. I seem to remember that. So you've been running an online business for over a decade, and now the main source of your business is teaching other people to run an online business. So if there is anybody on the internet that can tell us what ... how to start an online business-

Jonny 1:47 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 1:47 ... how not to, it's you.

Jonny 1:50 W- well, I mean, that's very kind of you. (laughs) I can, I can certainly talk about the, the, the pros and cons and the kind of the common mistakes. So we do, uh, fitness coaching, and then the other side of what we do is, I guess, teaching people who do fitness coaching to use the internet to teach fitness coaching.

Chris Williamson 2:08 (laughs)

Jonny 2:08 Um, and that's (laughs) that's kind of the ... so, you know, helping, helping PTs. A lot of personal trainers at the moment are, um, obviously they can't train clients, so a lot of them are using the internet, u- using an online-based service to coach clients. And that, I think a lot of them have run into this problem of like, "Oh, I'll just do a Zoom thing. I'll just get people on a Z-" and then, you're like, "Ah, actually, there's quite a lot to this. It's quite complicated." Um, and then we step in to help.

Chris Williamson 2:34 Got you.

Jonny 2:35 So that's kind of our, our, or, or what gives me any kind of right to talk about this, I guess.

Chris Williamson 2:39 You've got, you've got license to talk about it, man. So where do we, where do we begin? Like, w- what are the ... why would someone even want to start a business on the internet?

Jonny 2:50 It's a good question. I think why did I want to start a business on the internet is probably the best place to explain that from. So, um, I started out of university. I went into a, like a typical nine-to-five gr- well, it's not nine-to-five. Supposed to be nine-to-five, but you have to sign that bit of paper that means that you're o- that, that can basically make you work as many hours as you want. Um, and I was driving to work listening to I think the book that every, anyone with a hint of entrepreneurial desire has read, which is The 4-Hour Workweek. Um, and in that book, if you've not read it, by a guy called Tim Ferriss, he talks about basically starting a business as this kind of way to, um, live the, live the life, live life on your terms, so you have more command over your, uh, when you work, where you work, how much money you make, et cetera, um, the multiple currencies. And, uh, he refers that, to that as a muse. So you build a business that's kind of small. You're not trying to build the next Facebook. You're not trying to conquer the world. You're trying to earn a living selling something, um, typically through, like, uh, maybe through, like, a dropshipping process, which I guess we'll talk about s- shortly, um, or selling information. Getting it to the point where you can actually leave the constraints of the typical employed life and work for yourself. And, uh, I guess a lot of people, even as they progress through a career, um, realize that they're basically in this cycle of, "Um, I am working for a salary. I have to go to a certain place, um, and I get paid a certain amount. And I have to work for this amount of time, otherwise I, I don't get a paycheck at the end of the month." And I think you only need to know one person who doesn't fit that mold. And I, to be honest, I think it was you for me, Chris, who was like the, the one friend who's like, "Yeah, but he, he earns more than, than my friends. And he doesn't have to go, he doesn't have to put a tie on. He doesn't have to wear a shirt, and he doesn't have to travel to Stockton every morning to go and, uh, audit a manufacturing plant."

Chris Williamson 4:52 (laughs)

Jonny 4:52 Um, so like (laughs) you know, everyone's ... you just have to know one person that you start to question these things when you read these books. And I think now, um, a lot of people are, are having similar questions when, you know, they're been forced to work from home or perhaps even lost their job for various reasons. It's like, "Well, what else could I do that's maybe less reliant on somebody else or, or another company?"

Chris Williamson 5:12 Why do online business rather than just progressing what you're currently doing in the real world?

Jonny 5:18 In terms of?

Chris Williamson 5:20 What's the reasons for it? What are the benefits? Why not just be, start your own accountancy firm?

Jonny 5:25 I see. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 5:25 Leave the accountancy firm you're at and start your own as opposed to becoming a, like an online accountant somehow or-

Jonny 5:30 I see.

Chris Williamson 5:31 ... selling online accountancy, how to be an accountant courses?

Jonny 5:34 (laughs) Or how to be a coach to coach accountants, of course, yeah.

Chris Williamson 5:37 Coach accountants to move online.

Jonny 5:39 Yeah. Well, uh, to be honest, I think one of the easiest ways to do something like this is actually to take a skill you already have and just do it for yourself o- online. Um, so I suppose the, what I immediately think of when I think of online business and why someone would want to start it is, it's usually some kind of informational, in- information transaction, right? So it's a service or it's selling advice or it's selling information. Um, there are others, but that's a very common type. And the reason for that is it doesn't really involve...... the traditional, uh, structure that you'd think a, a normal business would, would require. So, you don't need an office, you don't need a 25 grand startup loan, you don't need loads of stock, you don't need a factory or production line or any of that stuff. Uh, it can literally be you and a laptop, um, and the, the information that you have or, or some kind of service that you're looking to provide. And the missing piece of that puzzle is clients, I guess, um, and a way to help them. But if you get yourself into the pos- position where you have clients and a business like that, it can be extremely profitable because the costs are nothing basically. All the costs are you, your time, and the software, and the technology that you, that you need.

Chris Williamson 6:48 So, the low barriers to entry in terms of not needing massive amounts of investment financially, and the low skill barrier to entry I suppose as well, that you are, for a lot of people with their online business, repurposing existing knowledge that you already have, and then just putting it out into the universe to see... I think it's... Was it you that told me everyone is an expert in something?

Jonny 7:13 Yeah. So, that... (sighs) There's a, there's a few people online that really promote that, that message. That like, if you... The more you think about it, if you had to... So, I think we spoke about this on maybe a life hacks episode, where one of the bits of advice I gave was try, in some way, to think like, "How would I monetize myself?" And I don't mean, like, set up an OnlyFans account. (laughs) I mean, how... although that, you know, arguably that's likely to be as well-

Chris Williamson 7:37 They're making, they're making more money than all of us so yeah, who are we to complain?

Jonny 7:40 (laughs) They're the ones winning. Um, but yeah, like, I, I know some people personally who, who worked as, like, an engineer, or something that you wouldn't necessarily think, um, could be translated online, but they were receiving a salary and then they left that, set up on their own, and now they're kind of consulting, uh, in the same capacity, earning three, four times the amount. Um, so I suppose it's going from taking something that you're maybe doing for somebody else in the con- the confines

Jonny 8:10 of a business, and they're paying you kind of what they think that's worth. But the market may think that's worth more, right? Someone else, or multiple, five, six, 10 customers may think, "Well, I'll pay a monthly fee for that advice, or I'll pay, uh, a fee for access to help and, and consulting on that specific thing." So, yeah, there's... The, there is still a barrier to entry, I think, that... just to quickly cover the, the misconception here, and I think the... Mike Winnet who you've had on twice now?

Chris Williamson 8:40 Yeah.

Jonny 8:40 Once or twice. So his, his YouTube channel and the idea behind the Contrapreneur is there is a big movement in the online world that if you buy some course and set up a webinar or something like that, you can suddenly have an online business. And I, I, I get the idea of it, and obviously the people selling the course I'm sure make a lot of money out of it, but I think just because a business is online, it doesn't mean that demand and supply and, like, the basic principles of why someone purchases something don't apply. They definitely do. So, if you have something valuable or you have a service or some knowledge or some expertise that is valuable to someone else, in the sense that you can shorten the gap from A to B. Like, I'm trying to learn to slackline, right? How do I slackline? I've got no idea. Well, I could just work with someone who's an expert in slacklining, and they'll make me slackline in 12 weeks, for example. Right? So that... I mean, that's a service that you could be... turn into a course or a service. And I don't think anybody could say that, like, if that's your goal, you want to learn to slackline and you learn to slackline, that you've done anything wrong by selling somebody that information or that help. Right? You've, you've delivered a valuable service. And you can use the internet to do that in a very highly, like, profitable way that doesn't... You don't have to sell to people on your street or in your town. You can sell to people anywhere in the world.

Chris Williamson 10:03 So, the scale and the ability to leverage are two of the main points, I think. Uh, people entering the online world won't necessarily be familiar with those words, but the Naval Almanac has certainly helped, and people like Jack Butcher talk about it an awful lot on the internet. Um, you can only do one PT session at a time, but if you make a course that people can follow passively, you can have a million people do it. It's not like you need to say that word a million times to every single person that's watching. Uh-

Jonny 10:33 Yep.

Chris Williamson 10:33 ... you, you don't get a call in the middle of the night at 3:00 AM like, "Right, Johnny, such and such is doing some chest press over in Adelaide. You're gonna have to get up at night-"

Jonny 10:40 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 10:40 ... "and Skype him so that he understands what he's doing." So, that's certainly one of them. And y- y- you touched on kind of the dark secret of the classic nine-to-five world, which is that the amount of security that you get from your job is offset by you not capturing the upside of whatever the transaction is with the person that's paying for you. And that really is, like, for so many businesses, especially looking at COVID this year, the people who w- should have been the most worried were the totally use- useless, fluff filler, middle management, like the, like the-

Jonny 11:16 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 11:16 ... r- the regional manager of HR. Like, why do you need... You've got a guy in each town and you've got a director of HR. The guy that's in between is basically there to make the guy at the top's life easier and the guy at the bottom's life harder. But the person that actually delivers the value is the person who is cranking the widgets, and the person who coordinates everything is the guy that does strategy up at the director's office. So, very often there is, within a business, the person at the bottom can't be afford- they can't afford really to pay that person much more because they have all of these different layers of bureaucracy to make sure that that person at the bottom's actually doing their job. So, if you as the person at the bottom who can do the job and knows that you're reliable and maybe has the business acumen to think, "Right, I, I can go to the market, maybe I understand branding, maybe I'm quite good at copyright, and maybe I've got a bit of an eye or I've got some existing contacts within the industry, I can perhaps try and pivot this online." So, what are the, what are the common types of online business? What are the most common ones that people use?

Jonny 12:17 ... so I think there's a lot. There's, there's common types that a lot of people try that don't necessarily last very long and that might be-

Chris Williamson 12:22 What like... What are those?

Jonny 12:23 So I think, eh, like, everyone's seen an ad for, like, forex trading, for example, or dropshipping is a very common one. Um, you know, like making money through dropshipping stuff on Amazon. And you hear that and you're like, "I don't know what any of those words mean-

Chris Williamson 12:37 (laughs)

Jonny 12:37 ... but it sounds great." Um, (laughs) so you know the... stuff that, um, I suppose is easier to, to conceptualize, so you think, "Okay, I'm gonna buy something from overseas and ship it and then sell it, and I can run it all from my laptop." And obviously there are businesses that run like that and they're immensely successful, but m- I'd say most people who try that don't succeed because there's, there's like operational risk with that. You've got to actually... you're moving physical things around and you can get that wrong. Forex markets, um, we've just released a, a podcast of Yousef having a bad experience with stuff like that. I think it was, uh, on Life Fails, Life Hack Fails, Yousef spoke about that. So that has its downsides as well. Um, so I think the most common type of online business that I see consistently succeed is basically exactly what we, what we spoke about where, um, copywriting or, uh, consulting, uh, larger businesses or obviously personal training. Right? Things that can, can quite easily, to be honest, be taken from an offline, here I am in the flesh speaking to you, telling you what to do in a one-to-one or maybe a one-to-three or four if you're doing group based stuff. Now I'm gonna package the, the knowledge that I would typically deliver in that session, I'm gonna put it into videos, text, like stuff that appears on a screen that anyone can access whenever they want, or I'm gonna do the same coaching but, but virtually. That's a very, um, especially if you've already got the knowledge and the expertise, it's a very low cost, very like, despite what a lot of people think, there's a lot of technical know-how there. At this point there really isn't. Um, so that, I'd say that was the, the most common. So, and that, I would even argue that people who... you don't have to have a course, right, or an e-book or something like that for it to be an online business. I think if you are using the internet to deliver the service, and you are doing it remotely, and you are working with a client or multiple clients, I'd say that's an online business, right?

Chris Williamson 14:30 Okay.

Jonny 14:30 You don't have to have a members area or an e-book to sell. Um, so I know people who are accountants who do this or, as, as I say, engineers who do this, who, who do consulting based work, but they work for themselves and their businesses are all remote, all online.

Chris Williamson 14:45 Yeah. So I guess that kind of changes the dynamic of an online business a little bit. You're not necessarily delivering... I mean, my accountant delivers his product to me via email.

Jonny 14:54 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 14:54 I wouldn't consider him to be an online businessman, despite the fact that Chris probably hasn't been into his office for a year.

Jonny 15:02 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 15:02 He doesn't need to. Um, so yeah, that- that's an interesting way to look at it. What about principles? Say there's someone that's listening that thinks, "I have some expertise or maybe I'm a PT who's consider..." I mean, go to propanefitness.com/modernwisdom if you're a PT that wants to pivot online. But if you're just someone who's thinking, "Right, I want to get started in the online world," what are the principles, what should they focus on getting right first?

Jonny 15:27 Yeah. So that's, I suppose, when people... it... this is the most common failure point is the starting point, and it's the, the rabbit hole. The one of 10 rabbit holes that you can go down and spend months down without actually gaining any kind of traction. And that's the common stuff like online business needs. That means I need, um, a, an expensive website, worried about whether it should be purple or green, um, or maybe even building out a program or building materials, doing cashflow forecasts and all this sort of stuff. And I think e- basically you can have all of that right, but ultimately not have a customer and not have any revenue. You, you technically don't really still have a business to speak of. Um, so the example I always give our students is like, Yousef and I ran, uh, Propane Fitness for quite a while from Microsoft Word. Like that, that was it. Um-

Chris Williamson 16:14 How did that work?

Jonny 16:15 ... and email. Well, and email obviously. (laughs) We weren't just typing-

Chris Williamson 16:18 (laughs)

Jonny 16:18 ... typing documents for ourselves. So we, (laughs) we were... yeah, I wrote this really long document and I just kept paying myself-

Chris Williamson 16:23 (laughs)

Jonny 16:23 ... and it was, it was great. No, we, uh, we would email clients from our personal email and it would all be done through Word. There was not really a website in place. Everything was terrible but-

Chris Williamson 16:31 Payment through PayPal or something probably. Manu-

Jonny 16:33 Exactly.

Chris Williamson 16:33 ... manually submitted invoices.

Jonny 16:35 A nightmare. Nightmare. Um, it's the sort of thing Yousef has recurrent nightmares about now. But, um, the point is, is that like the... why did it work? I have this thing that I'm trying to do and I'm struggling, or I have this thing in my life that I'm trying to get rid of or solve and I don't really know how to do it myself. So I'm looking for a solution. And that's everything down from a consumer, like a you and I looking to solve a, a problem, or a, a business or an organization looking to solve a problem and want to get someone in remotely. If you're solving something like that, then someone somewhere will pay to have that problem solved or that goal process accelerated for them. And that's basically where you step in as a, as a, as a business, as an offering. And if you get that bit right, you can make a lot of mistakes and still kind of succeed. Like you can, you can get a lot of the technicals wrong and still have happy clients basically.

Chris Williamson 17:29 What's the question that you're asking yourself to try and work out whether you've got that right? Is it, is there a market for the thing that I'm trying to give?

Jonny 17:38 You have this hypothesis, which is like, I think this kind of person wants this kind of thing, right? I want... I think this sort of person wants this pro- wants this problem solved or wants to reach this goal. And oftentimes, and again this is four hour workweek advice, scratching your own itch is a pretty easy way to start, right? Like I like... so Yousef and I started Propane Fitness because we were really into fitness and we'd had a really elongated struggle figuring it all out, and we knew we could compress five years into five months for someone else. So that's a quite an easy one- easy way to start. So we knew there was already a demand there 'cause people were asking us for it. Um, or it's like, how can I test that assumption? So asking friends and family, asking your- on your social media, you know, "I'm thinking about doing this for this sort of person. Do you think anyone would be interested? Do you know anyone who would be interested?"

Chris Williamson 18:22 What's, what's an expedited way of doing that? Just posting online?

Jonny 18:26 ... I think going to your social circle, yeah, like your personal Facebook, your personal social media and saying, you know, "I'm going to start this new thing, this new venture. It's going to be doing this sort of service for this kind of person or this kind of business. Do you know anyone that might be interested?" Just have a conversation with them and see if it's right, because if one person's got the problem and they're like, "You know what? I'm happy to just pay you for that."

Chris Williamson 18:47 Mm.

Jonny 18:47 That tells you something pretty important, that, you know, if there's one person, there's, there's probably going to be more than one.

Chris Williamson 18:52 Chris Sparks has an interesting heuristic he uses for this where he says, "What do people often ask you for advice on?" So a lot of the time, you might be the, the tech-

Jonny 19:03 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 19:03 ... techie guy, the guy that understands what the new gadgets are that are coming out, or how to set up your iPhone properly. Or you might be the guy that's in good shape, or the guy that can cook interesting meals, or the guy that raised his kids to not be complete brats.

Jonny 19:16 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 19:16 All of those things that people come to you and say, "Man," like, you know, "I, I love how Charlie and David are just so well-behaved. Like, what did you do with them?" And then you look at someone like Sevan Matoss- Matossian, who I had on the show a couple of months ago, he was raising children, then decided, "I quite enjoy raising children and people like my methods. I'm going to document it on Patreon." And now him and his wife have a business. That's a business.

Jonny 19:39 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 19:40 Like, I know it's run through Patreon, which is, again, you're- it's not the most flash of websites. You've involved a third party, they're taking a commission, they're doing all the right... There's no fancy landing page or retargeting. But it's making money on the internet selling expert knowledge.

Jonny 19:56 Exactly. We- we've been in programs where, you know, you'll kind of interact with other people who are also running a business online. And I think a lot of people assume like, "Oh, everybody doing this is selling how to make money online," right? "And that's the only business that can work." There was a guy on this, on this call who was- he had the biggest business by anybody, by quite a margin. And he was teaching guitar teaching. Like, he was just teaching people how to play the guitar on the internet and doing like multiple hundreds of thousands per month doing that.

Chris Williamson 20:25 (laughs)

Jonny 20:27 And you're just like, "How?" You know, but, but at, at the core of it, it's like, well, why is he successful? Well, a lot of people want to learn to play the guitar. Probably in 2020, this kind of time, maybe more than ever, it's like it's ............................ home, I've got a guitar, I never played it. I'm going to take a gi- guitar playing course and he's doing really well. So, it doesn't even have to be the thing that you do professionally. It doesn't have to be, "Well, if I'm an accountant, I'm going to..." Loads of the examples you mentioned there, um, it's often like the passion or the thing that you have that you're, you're like obsessed with.

Chris Williamson 20:56 Mm.

Jonny 20:56 That a lot of friends would ask you for help about. And if you were to turn that into a product or an offering, because you know so much about it and because it's the thing that you're always reading and learning more about, it ends up being pretty good-

Chris Williamson 21:08 Okay.

Jonny 21:08 ... the thing that you produce.

Chris Williamson 21:09 So, that's the first principle, make sure that there's an actual market for what you're going to create and don't-

Jonny 21:14 Absolutely.

Chris Williamson 21:15 ... obsess over fancy website, fancy branding, getting an office, getting a backdrop, getting a flower wall, none of that. What's next?

Jonny 21:24 I think the next thing would be... So ideally, you, you don't want to get into a, a one-to-one based business if you can, um, just... But it's a great way to start, but y- you are very constrained long term if you want to try and grow that, you're limited by hours in the day. It's kind of the same problem. However, if you're going to produce something, you're going to make a course or make anything that you're going to sell, I think the best way to do that is to do it with customers. So try and ac- try to get into conversations with a few people through research, through figuring out is does this problem actually exist, even if it's for free, um, and they're not paying you initially. But build the thing that you're going to offer to the market with the e- the help and input of people who are actually that market, because I think if we assume it's a s- a s- a standard kind of information-based business, so the, the area we know the, the most is, is fitness, right? So if someone- if, if Yousef and I had just made a lot of our fitness programs from what we found interesting, it would have been way over the heads of a lot of our customers. And the example I use a lot is like we do get people join the program and say, "Which foods have protein in? Like, which food should I eat that have protein?" And you're like, "Surely, like, surely no one's ans- asking that question," right? But if we don't cover that in the program, it's a bad experience for the customer. So, I think making the service, if you've got the expertise, the challenge is what is it like to not have the expertise? Like, what was that like again? How, how does it feel to completely not understand all the stuff that I ex- uh, understand now and how can I help someone acquire the same information? Well, I'm going to work with someone who doesn't have the information. I'm going to try and figure out what the best way to do that is. And what you end up with is a really good offering for the customer, not just what you think is interesting or what you think's the right thing for you.

Chris Williamson 23:13 That's-

Jonny 23:13 If that makes sense.

Chris Williamson 23:13 ... that's a common error that people make, right? Making a product that they think that they want themselves.

Jonny 23:19 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 23:20 That doesn't fit the market at all.

Jonny 23:22 Exactly. And it's either too basic or too advanced a lot of the time.

Chris Williamson 23:25 Mm. Yeah. I, I guess another online business that we haven't touched on yet is becoming some sort of creator, whether that be Instagram influencer, starting a podcast, starting a YouTube. Um, and I can say from personal experience that if you're starting a podcast with the hopes that it's going to be the thing that you make money from, like, just do something else. Because-

Jonny 23:48 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 23:48 ... (laughs) it's-

Jonny 23:49 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 23:49 ... it's such a slow, long burner to get yourself to the stage where you can even begin to monetize, where you can even get advertisers to take one look at you, and then to move from that stage to the stage where the amount of money starts to remotely be worth your time on an hourly wage. Again, that's not a thing. And if you're doing it for the money, you're going to run out of gas pretty quickly. Whereas if you're just doing a thing that you enjoy, it doesn't really matter. The money comes, the money comes, it doesn't, it doesn't. And that's kind of what I found. But I think we made, on YouTube in the first year, the ad revenue that we made in total was somewhere in the region of about 75 pounds and we'd done-

Jonny 24:30 Wow.

Chris Williamson 24:30 ... we'd done-... 50 episodes, maybe more than 50 episodes by then. Um, and there's this sort of rule, uh, urban myth rule that's floating around on the internet that it takes 150 episodes of a podcast before you can monetize it. Now, you can actually hasten that. Obviously, you could do that in a year if you were doing three a week, which is where I'm at now, then you could, you could do that in a year. But most people are doing one a week, which means you're going to be doing a podcast for three years before you can even start to sell ads. So, again, Joe Rogan getting a many, many million pound deal from Spotify is amazing, and Logan Paul and Russell Brand getting taken off, off normal podcasts and put behind a paywall, and Sam Harris monetizing in another way, all of that stuff's great. But the typical way that people make money from podcasts and from YouTube is with a combination of baked in, i.e. the, "Hey guys, this episode is brought to you by..." and the ad revenue, uh, adverts that you have to skip on YouTube on the way past. You need to be doing an awful lot of plays before you can get to that stage, which means you're going to be very, very disappointed and unfulfilled for a long time before you get there. But, again, as I said, the beauty is if what you're doing is something you enjoy, it kind of doesn't matter. You're just going to be on the treadmill, ticking over, ticking over, and if and when the money comes, then fantastic. But yeah, it can be, it'll be a miserable, miserable process if you weren't, if you were doing it for a cash return.

Jonny 25:56 S- so the, I think there's two... In like the online business world, there's two camps really. There's, there's like the direct response world which is, have a product or an offering, get someone to click a link and, and to enter their email address and then buy it. And that's the way that you build your business. And then the other side is more the branding side, which is pretty much what you've spoken about where, you know, you spend five years building this audience, this interested audience, and then you sell something to that audience and it does incredibly well. And I think where we sit is, is somewhere between the two. I think there's value in, in both of those and I think both of them done to their extreme have a lot of downsides. Um, but I think, isn't YouTuber is still like the most desired career, right? When they survey-

Chris Williamson 26:40 Number one, num- number one career that children between the age of five and eight want to be is a YouTuber. It used to be like doctor, policeman, firefighter, um...

Jonny 26:48 Astronaut.

Chris Williamson 26:49 As- yeah. Like none of that. It's like YouTuber's number one. Uh, and, and little do they know that what they're going to spend almost all of their time doing is looking at a camera and forgetting the line that they just wrote below it on a, on a laptop-

Jonny 27:02 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 27:02 ... and going, "Ah, fuck, Dean." Like, and that's it. That's what you do. You spend your time thinking of ideas. I'm currently, the big push for this year is to do what I can with the Modern Wisdom YouTube, start trickling some of those proper monologue videos out. And, um, it's only when you get really, really deep into the weeds of the video creators, Tim Schmoyer who's this YouTube affiliated coach. Uh, Seth's done his course, I'm going through it at the moment. Um, or, the, uh, uh, any one of a million... Ali Abdaal, even him and his course. When you get really deep into the weeds you realize just how sophisticated YouTube is. Like, MrBeast-

Jonny 27:38 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 27:39 ... if you've seen his videos-

Jonny 27:40 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 27:40 ... very, very successful YouTuber. I know it might appear like most of the videos just like, "Hey guys, we're going to see what happens if we put one million footballs in this park." But that has taken months of planning. MrBeast has two people that work for him, and all that they do is give him 300 video titles every week, and then he goes through and goes like, "No, no, no, no, no, no. Maybe. No, no, no, no. Maybe, maybe." Like, that's it.

Jonny 28:10 Wow.

Chris Williamson 28:11 300 video titles every single week, and then from there they just iterate down, iterate down, iterate down.

Jonny 28:17 That is... Oh my god. I mean... So that, I've se- I have seen those videos where it's like, "Everything you can fit in this circle, I'll pay for." And my first question is like, how is he funding that? But... (laughs)

Chris Williamson 28:27 I mean, ad- o- uh, the, the ad revenue he'll be doing-

Jonny 28:30 Ad- ad revenue-

Chris Williamson 28:30 ... will be, uh, fairly insane. But yeah, it's not just the sort of thing that you tumble into. But that being said, if you have the passion to talk about politics or football or philosophy or cooking or whatever, like, happily start a YouTube channel or a podcast about it. Personally, if it's a business, if that's the goal, I just think that you are starting off on such a back foot.

Jonny 28:56 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 28:56 Because the metric of success that you have chosen to judge your project by is the final thing which is going to arrive into your project way, way, way after late nights and awkward conversations and your partner saying, "What the fuck are you spending time on your laptop for again?" And all of those different things, all of those are going to occur first. And while I think that in four years' time I might be able to start charging like 10 pound CPM for adverts on my channel isn't going to cut it, and it's also not going to motivate you. So yeah.

Jonny 29:28 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 29:28 It's, it's a fantastic thing to do as a hobby. It's also a fantastic thing to do to, um, further enhance an existing platform. Here's an interesting thing. I, I can't remember the podcast, but George put it in our Modern Wisdom chat, talking about the reverse direction now of people who begin with audiences and then create a product for the audience. Did you see that?

Jonny 29:51 Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 29:52 Can you...

Jonny 29:52 It's... So this is kind-

Chris Williamson 29:52 Can you explain what it means and, and kind of just give us your thoughts on it?

Jonny 29:57 So I can't, I can't explain the... I haven't read the art- full article, but I'm aware of like the, the general concept.

Chris Williamson 30:03 Okay.

Jonny 30:03 So I think the... It's kind- it's linked back to what I was saying before. So you either view it as, um, I'm gonna... What I was, what I was talking about, like build this product to solve this problem, and the audience will kind of build around that. So as you get customers and you get leads and you get people becoming aware of what you've done, that creates the audience as a result of like the, the economic activity, the buying, the sales, the revenue. And the other way round is the, is the opposite, so you make a channel or some kind of platform where people are...... have this common interest or this common problem, and then you solve that problem for them with a, with a product. And it, I suppose the difficulty is, is that with, with just making and with trying to make content to build an audience, there's a lot of guessing involved, and there's also, you still have to live somehow in the, in the interim. Like, you've still gotta pay yourself from s- from something. A lot of people you see... So Ali, Ali Abdaal's a great example, right? He's recently... He was quite public about it. He released his YouTube... uh, I can't remember the name of it. YouTube Co- Creator something, is, is his course. Seems to have done extremely well from it, right? But when he started his channel, he wasn't doing it to try and earn a living. He was working as a doctor and was working as a doctor for most of the time that he was doing it, which has allowed him to put in two, three years of just regular, high-quality content, almost without even mentioning the financial side of it. So what he's really done there is he's built this audience of people who, a, a lot of the time, probably look at him and think, "Oh, I want to create a YouTube channel. I want to create a YouTube channel. I want to do this too." He's built this audience with a common problem, and then he's swept in with the, with the solution to the problem-

Chris Williamson 31:42 Mm.

Jonny 31:42 ... and been paid very, very well for it.

Chris Williamson 31:45 Very handsome.

Jonny 31:45 So, yeah. There are, there are pros and cons to both, and I think the way, the way we do it is we have podcasts to, as you mentioned, we have podcasts to support an existing business, and the podcasts aren't getting anywhere near modern wisdom number downloads. Um, but they do very well in bringing customers into the business. And it's weird. Like, we, we make w- way more from the podcast directly attributed than we'd ever make through, through ad revenue, just by chatting about the subject-

Chris Williamson 32:13 Mm.

Jonny 32:13 ... right? 'Cause people like to listen to it. So it, it does really... I think it really depends on what, as well, on top of, like, what are you going to do and who you're gonna work with. It's ki- it's kind of like what... how do you want to spend your time, right? How do you want to spend a day? Because as you mentioned, the reality of being a YouTuber is probably a little bit different. It's not just going round supermarkets with a trolley and giving it to someone and saying, "I'll buy everything you have." You know, there's a lot of prep, there's a lot of monotony, there's a lot of saying the same sentence ten times and getting it wrong ten times in a row (laughs) , and all that sort of stuff. Um, but that's, so that's... I would k- kind of start with that. Like, how do you want to... if you've got an idea in mind, how do you want to spend a day, an average day? What does that look like? And then which platforms or which, um, business models but most suit that?

Chris Williamson 33:00 Yeah.

Jonny 33:00 Um...

Chris Williamson 33:00 So if you're, if you're the sort of person who likes to be wordy and likes to talk and has things to say and is kind of outgoing-

Jonny 33:07 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 33:07 ... then a platform where you end up talking face to camera might be a great idea. But if you're-

Jonny 33:12 Yep.

Chris Williamson 33:12 ... someone who's more analytical and introverted and wants to tinker with figures, then perhaps creating a course or selling an e-book and then retargeting and using ads may be a little bit more up your street. That's a... b- starting with the end goal of what is the sort of life that you want to live in mind. Because very much, the degrees of freedom you have when starting an online business are much greater than those when you go into a typical job. Like, do you... "What, what do you want to do today?" is not a question that your boss often asks you.

Jonny 33:41 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 33:41 Like, you don't get that when you walk in. "Right, mate, how are you feeling today? Do you wanna do a bit of analytical, a little bit more sort of creative?"

Jonny 33:46 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 33:46 Like, you don't get that. Um, but when it's you at the beginning of whatever entrepreneurial side hustle, main hustle, online business it is that you start, you are putting yourself onto a particular trajectory. And presumably, as well, the longer that you go down that road, the more difficult it's going to be. It's, it's either wasted time or a, a direction that you're gonna have to turn round and come back from.

Jonny 34:11 Yeah. Um, and it's, it's interesting actually, 'cause I... hearing you say that, like, your... I remember when a big chunk of your week was spent driving from Manchester at three in the morning to, back to Newcastle, and then getting three hours sleep, and then waking up and having to go and take the blowup T-rex down from the club and m- moving the flower wall down. And now, your day is very, very different.

Chris Williamson 34:37 Yeah, massively.

Jonny 34:37 So I suppose... I know... I realize, obviously, nightclubs are one of the, one of the businesses that can't, can't really be done online. Um, but you've very much... I, I guess that the way that an average day looks like for you now is a lot more... is certainly a lot more enjoyable. There's a lot fewer late nights.

Chris Williamson 34:53 S- sleeping pattern's a hell of a drug, man. It's, uh-

Jonny 34:56 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 34:56 ... it's wonderful to wake up and go-

Jonny 34:58 Helps a lot.

Chris Williamson 34:58 ... to bed at the same time. Yeah. Honestly, crazy. All right, so w- what are the most common mistakes? We've talked about someone not understanding that they have a, um, product-market... well, that there's a market for their product. Also, product/market fit. Is the product that they're creating for the market actually what it wants in terms of that delivery? Don't fuck about getting an expensive website. Don't spend ages building yourself an office. What else? Where else do people... what, what do they think is going to make the difference which completely does not?

Jonny 35:25 I think, um, there's a... there's definitely an assumption that "I'm just gonna post on Instagram and it'll work." Like, I, I've even heard that sentence, or variations from that sentence, from people who... um, it's pretty common if someone's, like, outside of the fitness industry. So they're... maybe a, a personal trainer. They worked in a gym for a bit and decided the 5:00 AM start wasn't for them. They now a- are working somewhere else in s-... a different industry, and they think, "I wanna make online a go. I'm gonna build an online business." And we have a chat with them, they go, "I'm gonna... I'm just gonna post on my Instagram and I'll get, I'll get five or ten clients, and then, then, uh, we'll work together." And you try and convey how it's really not that simple. But if you don't... if you've never tried that before, why would that not work, right? 'Cause in- influencers do that. You see people doing swipe-ups and link in bios and all this sorts of stuff, and it seems to work for them. Why would it not work for me? So I suppose thinking that it's, um, thinking that this, this... just because you start talking about it, that people are gonna care, thinking that you have a link or you have something, that you've made something, that people are gonna care, um, is probably the next stumbling block. And I think that this is the point where people start giving up, when they've been posting on social media-... for 30 days, set themself a 30-day challenge in January 2021. "I'm gonna post every day, on my in- my bu- my business Instagram." And they don't make a sale, and they think that they're doing something wrong. Um, so th- that sort of thing, um, lots of busy work, lots of, uh, copying someone who's famous, doing similar things to them, thinking that that's all there is to it. That's common.

Chris Williamson 36:59 What's the assumption there? Is it people, people being mistaken around how hard it is to get others to part with their cash on the internet?

Jonny 37:07 T- y- yeah, I think so or more that, like not maybe appreciating the gap between, you know that what you've got is good. You know that your service is good and that you can really help someone, but no one else knows that. And actually, someone's less likely to trust you on the internet than really any, any other part of your life. So, you know, if you, uh, the, the advice we give our clients is, you don't need to in ... If you're, if you're solving a problem, you don't often need to convince the, the customer that they need the problem-solving. They kinda know that. Like I kinda know that I wanna lose weight or whatever it is. It's just that I, there's 10 reasons why I don't want it to be you.

Chris Williamson 37:44 (laughs)

Jonny 37:45 Like there's 10 reasons. (laughs) Like, "I don't tr- I don't trust you. Who the hell are you? What's this? Why should I ... You know, this is a scam." So, unless you're going to overcome those somehow, I'm just never gonna pay any attention to what you're doing. So, there has to be something online, uh, as part of your process, and this is what's often referred to as the sales funnel in a business or the like, the sales sequence, the customer journey that starts to help somebody else see why you might be able to help them. Um, 'cause the, like the build it and they will come strategy of, "I've got a website with a product on and a, and a link to buy, so I'm gonna post about it on Instagram and hope that people kinda find their own way through." It works for some people, if they, something they do goes viral for some reason, so they've got huge audiences, and they get 1% of that audience to purchase. But most people don't achieve that, and most people will always fall short. So, I think just thinking basically what you're doing in online business if you're reaching someone who doesn't know who you, who you are, you're walking up to someone in the street and saying, "Here's a link, can I, like can you just give me a-"

Chris Williamson 38:44 Give me your money. (laughs)

Jonny 38:45 "... card?" Yeah. It's not gonna work. So you have to treat them like a, it's the, the dating analogy is used a lot, right? You don't ask for marriage on the dance floor. So, there's steps in between, and you've gotta create that experience online. And that's where it starts getting like, "Oh, there's quite a lot of work involved in this, and this is actually quite difficult," but that's the reality. There is quite a lot of work involved. It's a very nice way to live. It's a very, um, rewarding outcome to have, like a high profit margin business. But it, it isn't as easy as a lot of people imply it to be.

Chris Williamson 39:17 What about if it's a lower ticket product? I'm selling an e-book on Gumroad about how to save money or something like that. I know Yusuf has some very strong opinions around this. Do I need a big fancy sales funnel for that, or can I just post on my Instagram?

Jonny 39:31 So Gumroad's got a bit of a, got a bit of traction on Twitter. Uh, I don't think anyone really knows why. There's like a trust issue, I think, (laughs) on, on Twitter in some places. Um, it's certainly easier. Uh, but the other side of that is, just because it's a lower price doesn't mean that it's a lower percentage of what someone's willing to spend, if that makes sense. Like if I, if I want to achie- like I'll, back to the weight loss example, if I want to lose weight and I really want to lose weight and I'm serious about it and I've got some money to invest, I'm gonna look at the 7.99 pound e-book as like, "Well, the answer's not gonna be in there," right? (laughs) Otherwise, I would have found it already. So, but the person who might be considering that might have 10 pounds to spend. So you've still kind of got the same, at every price point, you've got someone who thinks it's too expensive.

Chris Williamson 40:16 (laughs)

Jonny 40:17 At every price point, you've got, you've got someone who will complain. Um, so, and there's a, there is a, a lot of research behind, like lower price point sales tend to generate a higher percentage of complaints and problems and, and all that sort of stuff, which we've seen ourselves as well. Not to say that you can't have a 7 pound, not a, a, an 8 pound, 10 pound e-book, but I'd start at a higher price thing first, personally, and figure out the selling part. Fi- 'cause if you can't sell something to your customer, there's, there's probably something going on deeper level rather than it's more than 10 pounds.

Chris Williamson 40:50 One of the things that's interesting there that most people don't realize is, price isn't just the transaction of how much the customer pays. It's also a massive signaler to that customer of what they're paying for. That price is an indicator of quality. That's why a pair of Nikes cost 100 pounds, but a pair of like Hi-Tecs costs less. I don't know how much a pair of Hi-Tecs cost.

Jonny 41:12 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 41:12 Done. So I was truly like going back to like what, what are the shit shoes I remember from 20 years ago. Done. Um, yeah. You, you get what you pay for. And that is another piece of information. You have to think that the way that customers look at your website, they're looking at everything. They're looking at the sales copy. They're looking at the imagery. What does it look like? What are the colors like? Has someone put a ridiculous soundtrack over the top of this? Is the video well shot? And then the price is also another ... Okay, so all of these different things tell me something about the business and person that is trying to take my money from me. The price is also another indicator of that. And I think that you're right. The presumption on the internet, even if people like your mum and my mum aren't explicitly aware, I think everyone knows that the costs on the internet generally are lower, which means that if the amount of money that's being charged is still super, super low, you've just got this, this sort of ick factor, this level of, of mistrust. And I get it as well, even having seen, taken the red pill and sort of seen through the, the, the other side of the curtain about this stuff, I still see something. I'm like, "That's 15 pounds. That can't be worth any value." You go, "Hang on a second. Like may- maybe, maybe it is." But that compulsion, that, that sort of sense that you get, the response as a customer should tell you everything that you need to know. So yeah, I would, I would agree on that. Um, what are the markers of a good and a bad sales funnel? Let's say that someone

Chris Williamson 42:43 who's now been convinced, they say, "Right-o.... understand the product, I understand the entire product market fit. Worked with a few people, so I started to build something up. And now, I'm going to maybe start converting some slightly less hot leads, some warm leads that I've got that I know of some friends or maybe even starting to post up to the wider internet. I need to build a sales funnel. What are the principles around making it good and making it bad?

Jonny 43:05 It's a big question. Um, so I suppose the, like the most important thing about anything like that, especially if you're thinking, "I'm going to try and live off this," is just repeatability. Um, like if, if a sales process works because like you're, like a guy who you met once, his mate went through it and bought from you. And you're like, "Oh, my sales funnel worked." Like, there needs to be some aspect of, you know, once a, every month I get about this many customers or I make about this many sales when I do these things. And then you get, that's like a foundation to build on. So, repeatability, does it consistently work? Um, it's quite hard to say, like, this is the best sales approach or this is the best way to do it, because that, that's very different market to market. Some things might just require a page that explains what it is, with a video that explains how it works. Other things are a bit more of a commitment, might ex- might require a bit more contact with the person. It might involve a phone call, it might involve a, a group call or something like that. So, I think I would, to, to start of where should I, where should I begin? I would think about who's the person that I'm trying to sell to, and how do they normally make decisions? Right, so if it's a personal trainer in a gym, like how does this person normally make a decision? Well, they might go to the gym for a trial session. It's like, well, okay, I can't do that on the internet. So, how am I gonna create this same feeling of like, I'm always getting a, a walkthrough of what it might be like, or an experience of what it might be like? So you're mimicking a customer's decision, right? So, that's, uh, probably the best way of giving a general answer is it should be, you should be able to rely on it, really. And if you can't, it's not really doing the job that it needs to in, in running the business. And it should, as closely as possible, match what the customer needs to make a decision. If someone needs longer than a day to make a decision, but you try and make everyone to make it, you try and make everyone make their decision in a day, it's not gonna work. So, uh, uh, that's how I would think of it. Try and match...

Chris Williamson 45:00 So for instance, in, in that situation where someone takes longer than a day to make the decision, you could perhaps have an email sequence over seven days or over 14 days that would slowly explain to them the different benefits or perhaps even provide some free advice around whatever it is that you're talking about.

Jonny 45:18 Exactly, yeah.

Chris Williamson 45:18 Uh, and that might convince someone. Whereas creating a 14-day, uh, set of email sequences for a 10 pound ebook on something that's very transactional and someone can learn in half an hour kind of makes a lot less sense.

Jonny 45:32 Yeah, that's spot on, and I think like you and I have both bought courses, books, programs online before, right? So, we are probably both of us on the side of the spectrum which is skeptical, need quite a lot of convincing, or, like, I need you to come up to me and say, "You should buy this thing." Right? I'm not the sort of person who's gonna make a decision very quickly, but some people do. And I think generally the way that we operate is, there's usually 3%, 5% of any round of people who are just looking for someone to help them, right? They're not, they're not in the browsing phase, they're in the, "I'm going to buy one of these, I'm just picking which one." Right?

Chris Williamson 46:13 Yeah.

Jonny 46:13 I'm just, I'm literally shopping.

Chris Williamson 46:14 Best online weight loss program.

Jonny 46:15 Exactly.

Chris Williamson 46:16 Best online PT course. Best...

Jonny 46:19 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 46:19 ... whatever.

Jonny 46:20 Just literally looking to buy something, right? So, those people probably don't need six months, right, because actually if you wait six months, they'll have bought from somebody else. If someone's looking for a consultant, a program, a product, anything, and you are there and you speak to that person in a way that kind of makes them feel like you're a good, you're a good choice, you can make some sales pretty quickly. But there are also people who will just click on something 'cause it's the internet and people do it passively while Netflix is on in the background, right? They'll click on something and opt in, but not really make a decision for a year. So you need the, the shorter window, but also a way of kind of keeping in touch with people. So as you mentioned, email sequences or that would be when a podcast or a YouTube channel or something like that comes in handy. So, there's a lot to this, but basically it comes down to what does my customer need from me to make a decision about this? Whether that's now or in six months time and how do I create that experience in my business so that if someone is just browsing, if you imagine a, a sh- a shop r- situation, if every person came in the shop, the shop assistant went up to them and pushed them against the wall and went, "You've got to buy this now, otherwise the timer's gonna run out." They'd probably go to jail, right? I imagine eventually they'd go to jail. Um, whereas if it's like, "Hey, can I help you? Do you want a free sample? Like, have you seen this, have this brochure? Can I get your email address? Do you want to be on our email list?" Like, oh, what a nice experience. When I am ready to buy, I'm going to go back to that shop. It's just, it's thinking about it like that. There's not, there's no magical three-step script that makes this all work. It's just people buying from people. So you've got to mimic that as closely as possible.

Chris Williamson 47:57 What we've talked about a lot so far has been, I would guess, mostly conversions, product market fit, making sure that people come in at the right, that they, they understand what you're trying to sell them, that they don't get too put off. What about traffic? I need people to actually see the thing that I'm trying to sell them. How can I drive traffic?

Jonny 48:15 So this is something that Chris and I have like discussed on and off for, since I've known you. So I'm, I'm Mr. Ads and Chris is Mr. Organic, basically (laughs) . So for people who don't know what those terms mean, like ads, paying for, I pay Facebook, Instagram, Google, whatever, for something to appear. And everyone's seen the words "sponsored" underneath an Instagram post, right? Organic would just be using a following that you have. Um, and I guess they require different approaches and different, um...... different strategies and tactics. So, you can basically do one of those two things. You can run ads to something. You can pay to target a specific type of person who has a, has a specific interest to come and visit your customer journey. Right? Or, you can take a, a, a less, uh, direct approach and try and build things organically by getting, getting traction. So, you can have platforms and channels online. Instagram is, I guess, maybe slightly, slightly on the downhill. It's hard to say. Um, a lot of people are building platforms on Twitter these days. YouTube channels, podcasts. And you send that traffic, those people, those clicks, to where you know if I send a hundred people here, one of them will buy, generally speaking. Or, you're so confident in the sales sequence that you've built that you know for sure from the last thousand people that one in ten people buy. Right? And if one in ten people buy, and I know if I spend a hundred pounds I make a hundred and fifty, then there's a pretty strong argument to then use advertising to just get people to come in through the door. 'Cause you know you can very closely control who comes and sees you, right, who comes and finds the sales sequence, 'cause you can basically select interests and demographics and, and all that sort of stuff. So that, that's the traffic side of things and, and all of these, uh, words like conversions and traffic and the optimization of them are worlds in, in and of themselves. There's lots, there's lots to them. Um, we opt more for paid because it's a bit easier to control and I guess Yusuf and I, quite introverted, don't necessarily want to post our, pose our tops off all the time. I'm, like, suited to being behind a, a spreadsheet and a graph. Um, whereas I guess Chris has been very successful with the opposite. So those are kind of two examples of, of how you might go and get attention to your business once it's built, once it's functioning.

Chris Williamson 50:38 What's your current opinion on the online platforms for organic? And six years ago everyone wanted a Facebook page, and three years ago everyone wanted an Instagram, and now TikTok's taking off. Sort of where are we at at the moment? What do you think is useful to use now and then what's your predictions for the next sort of five to ten years in terms of where the, the power for organic's going to be?

Jonny 51:02 I think we probably agree on this, I think, in that I think search-based content is gonna be the, the dominant thing. And by search-based, if you imagine Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, they're feed-based social media. So like, you don't necessarily search on Instagram for something or search on Facebook for something. A podcast, YouTube video, an article, blog posts, that sort of stuff, um, is, like someone types something into YouTube 'cause they follow someone on YouTube or they follow a podcast or maybe they read a blog regularly, for example. Um, you can make something once on those platforms, and it, I mean, I'm sure you got some crazy stats of your, some of your videos, the higher performing ones, where it's, it's been made a year ago and still every day a thousand people are finding it, a thousand people are finding it, and those are new people every single day. Um, I think there'll always be a feed-based social media. I think there'll always be, like, something that's in vogue. I know, like, Clubhouse is the, is something that's gradually gaining traction. TikTok's obviously replaced, always going head-to-head with Instagram Reels and stuff like that. That, I think it's a dangerous game to get involved with because those platforms can, can die overnight. Like, we saw Facebook pages, Facebook business pages were the thing, like six, seven years ago, and now you can barely get anybody to see a post if you post it on Facebook. So, I, I think it'll be a long time before people stop searching for things on Google, people stop searching for things on YouTube. Whereas I think people can leave social media platforms very, very quickly-

Chris Williamson 52:37 Mm.

Jonny 52:38 ... with a bad bit of press.

Chris Williamson 52:39 I've never, I've never thought about it like that but that's a s- such a good i- um, way to put it. So do you see almost the search-based stuff which would be articles hosted on blogs, um, going through Google, YouTube, which is also owned by Google and also the second most popular search engine in the world, and also appears within Google results, so YouTube's also kind of somehow a, a Google, um use-

Jonny 53:03 Yeah, they're, they're the same thing really.

Chris Williamson 53:04 Yeah, essentially. Um, podcasts aren't wonderful on SEO but they're not bad and they sometimes appear in there. You would put that stuff into one particular side of the internet and then that, that's moving at a slightly slower place. The, the turnover, the attrition rate, the churn rate of that is moving slower than Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Clubhouse, Twitter, et cetera, et cetera.

Jonny 53:25 I'd say so, yeah. So like it depends on sort of the age, the age of people listening but, um, I can remember when all anybody spoke about was Facebook, and then I can remember when all anybody spoke about was Instagram. And then things gradually die. And now actually most of my friends have deleted their Facebook account 'cause they saw some like woke Netflix documentary that makes them think they're being manipulated.

Chris Williamson 53:47 (laughs)

Jonny 53:47 Right? So (laughs) you know what I mean? But, but it's amazing, isn't it, how that can happen, how there's just a little bit of bad press about something and people are like, "Right, I'm o- I'm off Facebook." But they don't-

Chris Williamson 53:55 Isn't it interesting that no one, no one's deleted their YouTube account? Like no one has stopped watching YouTube.

Jonny 54:01 Precisely. Precisely.

Chris Williamson 54:03 Yeah.

Jonny 54:03 So like-

Chris Williamson 54:04 I just tho- thought this the other day. It wouldn't surprise me if Elon Musk doesn't have a, a Facebook account. Um, and he deleted Tesla's Facebook page on a whim.

Jonny 54:17 Yep.

Chris Williamson 54:17 And yet him and Jeff Bezos when they're sat somewhere at 3:00 in the morning 'cause they've got jet lag because they've just traveled halfway across the world on their private jet will 100% watch videos on YouTube.

Jonny 54:30 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 54:30 There isn't, there isn't a chance in hell, but there is a pretty big chance in hell that they wouldn't watch TikTok. So yeah, it seems more ubiquitous, the-

Jonny 54:39 Th- platforms...

Chris Williamson 54:41 ... search-based platforms.

Jonny 54:41 And you've got to consider, like, uh, you know, people have bad things to say about Google but they also have Gmail and Chrome. So, for like those behaviors to stop-... it's gonna take real shifts 'cause, 'cause what's interesting is when someone deletes their Facebook account, they don't then spend no time on their phone. They just replace that habit with Instagram or TikTok or something else, right? Whereas if you're searching for something or you follow a YouTuber, you just follow their content, right? 'Cause it's interesting. And you don't, you don't go on YouTube with this, like, "Oh, this is..." I mean, yeah, it's easy to spend five hours on YouTube, but it kinda feels better than spending five hours on Instagram. Like, it's so hard to explain why, isn't it? Like, it feels like time better spent.

Chris Williamson 55:24 So here's my, here's one potential proposal for that. The number of people who have accounts versus the number of people who create content for the platform on YouTube is more, uh, there's more inequality in that than probably on anything else.

Jonny 55:41 Great point.

Chris Williamson 55:41 Almost, almost no one that's listening has ever uploaded a video to YouTube, and yet no one-

Jonny 55:48 Wow.

Chris Williamson 55:49 ... no, no one that's listening hasn't ever watched something on YouTube. The same can't be said for Facebook or Instagram. Like, you know, sometimes you wish that your dad would stop posting on Facebook. You're like, "Dad, not again." Like, but the-

Jonny 56:01 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 56:01 ... (laughs) the, like-

Jonny 56:02 You're like, "Dad, stop, stop uploading to your channel, man. You're-"

Chris Williamson 56:05 Yeah. Stop, stop putting vlogs on YouTube.

Jonny 56:08 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 56:09 (laughs) Like, that do- that doesn't happen. So I, I certainly think that basically what you have is a, a channel with more higher barriers to entry to create the content for it, 'cause anyone can take a photo and up- upload it to Instagram. But because this race to ever increasing quality, says the guy shooting this on a DSLR camera with a, a studio-quality microphone, um, the race to ever higher quality, because there is so much money to be made on YouTube and other similar platforms if you get it right, has meant that it, it's almost if you were to say to someone, "Hey man, like, I need you to film a vlog." Like, "Are you being serious?"

Jonny 56:47 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 56:47 Like, film a vlog of myself. That's Logan Paul territory. That's Mike Thurston territory. But if you were to say, "Hey man, take, put that on your story. Take a selfie and put it on your story." But that probably highlights where the value is felt and also the evergreen nature of the platforms. So the, that thing from David Perell, almost 90% of the content that you consume today will have been created within the last 24 hours, like that statistic-

Jonny 57:15 Crazy.

Chris Williamson 57:15 ... should terrify everybody because it just means if it's easy come, it's easy go. It's probably pointless. You're not gonna remember. You're not even gonna remember that you consumed it. Whereas if you've got something which has been around for a little bit longer, it's most likely going to be of worthwhile content. If it's popped up on your radar after having been on the internet for three years, you're like, "Oh, right, well, you know, it's accumulated half a million views over three years. Perhaps this is actually worth my time." And it probably is because it's been selected for by other people, as opposed to another booty selfie photo from, like, that girl that you follow on Instagram.

Jonny 57:52 I think the, and I'd say I, I never thought about the, the comparison of most people know someone who uploads to Instagram, Instagram regularly. Whereas, like I, I literally can think of you in terms of my, my social circle, who posts on YouTube, it's, it's you. So I think part of that is p- podcasts and YouTube are like a step down from TV and radio in terms of how it's perceived. So for someone to think to be on YouTube, that's like, whoa. Like, I can't put myself on YouTube. That's like being on TV. Same with a podcast.

Chris Williamson 58:22 Mm.

Jonny 58:22 A lot of people have nerves about being on a podcast. So I mean, it, it's just one of those things where I would happily spend all day on YouTube 'cause of the amount of stuff I can learn. And I think because of that and because you can find a video that's 10 years old and it'll still be really valuable, the incentive is to s- is to pour your heart into this, like, piece of art that might still be here, exist in 10 years time. Whereas your Instagram story isn't gonna last more than 24 hours.

Chris Williamson 58:50 Im- imagine, imagine if you watched someone's Instagram post or if you'd got delivered someone's Instagram post from 10 years ago. You'd go, "What? What is this doing on my phone?"

Jonny 58:59 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 58:59 "Why is this here?"

Jonny 59:00 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 59:00 "I don't want to know, I don't want to know about that meal that they had a decade ago." Like that's pointless.

Jonny 59:05 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 59:06 But the Insta- the video that they made on YouTube might be different. Okay, so organic and paid, we understand that. We understand that traffic is getting people to see the thing, and conversions is getting people, that see the thing to buy the thing. Is there anything else that we haven't spoken about? Are there any loose ends to tie up here?

Jonny 59:23 So I suppose the, the part that we've not covered is, is actually providing the pro- the product or the service. Um, which is harder to, to speak generally about 'cause that, it's gonna depend, right? Um, I, the, the, the traps that I would avoid are, um, view it as, yes, this is great when I've got three customers. I'm gonna put everything into these three customers. They're gonna get the most bespoke experience. I'm gonna call them every morning. I'm gonna make sure, you know... But that, at 30 customers, starts actually becoming a worse service, a worse way of living your life. The 31st customer's got to wait for the 31st email reply. And if you're answering the same questions over and over again or delivering the same service that gets watered down all the time, you just start to resent it. Um, and I think where, where we nearly got to with Propain was at the point where it was like, we just don't enjoy doing this. Which circles back to my point of like, what do you want your day to look like? If you build your business and how you work with your customers around that assumption and the platforms you pick and... You end up enjoying it, and you end up doing it for a long time. So I can't really say this is how you run an online business 'cause the, the specifics of the delivery will vary a lot. But I would always consider what would happen if I, for some reason this did really start succeeding and I had double my customers by this time next week. Would I be able to actually fulfill that? 'Cause if your, if your systems aren't scalable, then it'll just break and you'll hate it basically.

Chris Williamson 1:00:48 Is there an argument to be made that at the beginning being a little bit closer to the customer is a good idea to get more of that quick iterative feedback?So, I know that you guys did this when you first started out. Although I- you look back on it now and cringe at the amount of time that you'd spent/wasted, I also think there is value in that because it gives you such a, uh, close up, highly magnified look at the inner workings of a client customer- a, a, a client/coach relationship. Or this could be for anybody. This could be someone who is helping someone to start up their own small or medium-sized business in the real world. Like-

Jonny 1:01:27 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:01:28 ... understanding the pains that that person goes through as they begin to do it helps you to see down the line. So perhaps, do you think that might be a, a, a way to not-

Jonny 1:01:39 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:01:39 ... not necessarily look to future-proof yourself to the 10-year goal, but to maybe just have a trajectory of how you could start dropping things away?

Jonny 1:01:48 D- Definitely, yeah. So, I think there's, there's absolutely n- there's nothing wrong with working closely with your customers to get feedback and ideas and, and all that sort of stuff. Gen- generally, like what we advise now is if you're working with someone closely initially and they say, like, "I don't understand how this works," or, "Can you explain this a bit better?" Or, um, "What do you think about this?" see that as an opportunity to create a resource for that question or something that is a, "I'm going to answer this question once to the best of my ability and then it's the best answer to that question ever." Um, or, "It's the, the best explanation walkthrough of this ever." Rather than, "Oh yeah, good question, mate. Uh, let me just write a long email for you and press send and it's just going to disappear forever." Um, so yeah, absolutely. Like the more you can know your customers, the better your service is going to be, the more- the happier everyone will be.

Chris Williamson 1:02:34 Did you see-

Jonny 1:02:35 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 1:02:36 ... did you see Derek Sivers when he talks about what he did at CD Baby with customer inquiries?

Jonny 1:02:42 No.

Chris Williamson 1:02:43 So, CD Baby was the- one of the biggest online stores selling music CDs. Derek Sivers, who has been on the show, multi-multi-multi-millionaire, also friend of Tim Ferriss and just generally interesting human. Every time that a customer rang, this is after he understood this particular problem he was coming up against, that he was constantly spinning his wheels doing the same things over and over, he made a decision that he was going to create a, um, operating procedure for the whole business, for everything that he did.

Jonny 1:03:13 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 1:03:13 Um, and every single time that a customer rang, "Excuse me, my CD's arrived and it's cracked. Excuse me, my CD's being delivered to my neighbor. Excuse me..." Whatever, whatever, whatever, whatever the issues are. "I can't play it, I've put it in upside down, I don't know," whatever. Every time that that happened, he stopped the whole office and said, "Right, everybody, this is how it's going to happen. This is what this- the answer is. These are the particular routes that you go down." And he had someone write it as well. And over the course of some months, I can't remember how many months, he'd created this How to Be Derek.doc booklet.

Jonny 1:03:48 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:03:48 Which was all of the things that he ended up encountering. And then he left the business. He left the business for six months and, and nothing, nothing went wrong. And he was ringing them and they were like, "What are you ringing for? We're fine. Like leave us alone, we've got work to do." Um...

Jonny 1:04:01 (laughs) That's very Tim Ferriss.

Chris Williamson 1:04:03 Yes. So, that, that's such an interesting insight and it's one that me and Darren learned later than we would have liked, but still earlier than we could have done, that most of the problems that you're going to come up against in any business actually, forget just online, most of the problems you're going to come up against are consistent challenges that you're going to face not just once, but probably monthly or every couple of months for the rest of the time that you run this business. And the person who will inevitably end up sitting below you or to the side of you, it is easier for you to write the perfect way in the s- in the fewest number of words and the most precise language possible how you deal with this thing and then you can just give it to a person. And it's basically like taking your knowledge out of your brain and giving it to them. I can't remember who it was that I was reading that said, "The job of a owner or managing director is basically to be a complex decision engine that can never be matched by anybody else." So, if you actually think about what your role as a business owner is, you're taking in st- a million different inputs, like the, the, the way that that customer looked when he walked into the nightclub and how the DJ played his last half hour and the, the amount of mess on the floor of plastic glass waste and whether the- this many people went home with the inflatables or without. And none of these things, using my industry as an example, I'm not noting any of those down. I don't have them quantified anywhere, but they do appear in consciousness and they will aggregate together to give me a sense of what is going on. And then when we sit down and we talk about the event the next day, I can say things that stayed in consciousness. "Um, I actually did notice quite a big wait at the bar sort of between 12:00 and 12:30." "Oh, yeah. Actually, what had happened, we'd run out of ice." So, it's, "Okay, can we fix the ice machine f- ready for next week? Is there a way that we can get bags of ice in already?" Utilizing all of those different things is your job, but what you find is that more and more, that is the only place that you add value, especially as you move up through the echelons of a business. That's the only place you can add value, because there will be someone half your age in a decade's time that can come and do the thing that you used to take pride on, to do with-

Jonny 1:06:17 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 1:06:17 ... optimizing Facebook ads or writing copy or doing whatever. That thing you used to think that you were the best at, you're now going to be not even halfway up the company at. The thing that you-

Jonny 1:06:27 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:06:27 ... the thing that you can't be competed out with is your experience and your ability to take those multiple things in. And by writing the document, it permits you to get other people to do what they can do and leaves you to do what only you can in the business.

Jonny 1:06:42 It's the, the thing that like every time you go through a McDonald's drive-through, you get given a Big Mac that's largely the same as the last Big Mac and the next Big Mac, and that's the same in London, Manchester, New York and like... But it's not Ray Kroc...... making the Big Mac, right? And that's really, like when you really think about that, that's incredible that like there is such a process. Like even the way McDonald's is laid out and the way the drive-through works, and the window that you pay out and all that sort of stuff. So that- that's someone taking this is how to run a McDonald's out of their head and making a document that can literally be copied and pasted around the world. Um, but it- it's so, I mean there's a book called The E-Myth Revisited that- that goes into this, and it's so hard to do. It's so hard to- to come to terms with the fact that what you think you're good at is actually just a recipe that you can write down and give to someone else, and they might even be better than you.

Chris Williamson 1:07:34 (laughs)

Jonny 1:07:35 And- and- and all you have to do is like, actually, my, the challenge for me is just picking a better person than me to do the thing that I thought of-

Chris Williamson 1:07:41 Mm-hmm.

Jonny 1:07:41 ... and then just gonna-

Chris Williamson 1:07:43 Slowly step out of the room.

Jonny 1:07:45 (laughs) ... creep away.

Chris Williamson 1:07:45 That's a, that's a good point. If there's someone listening that thinks, "This sounds all right, I might give the online business stuff a crack," other than going to propanefitness.com/modernwisdom, what are the books that you think would have the best impact on someone's insight?

Jonny 1:08:03 So I thi- I think you've got to read The 4-Hour Workweek, to be honest. I think it's- it's such a, the way of, it's a way of thinking about it, I think that's- that's very important. And- and Tim talks about exactly what we just spoke about, this idea of working towards taking mini retirements. So he uses an example of when he, I think his business was called BrainQuick and I think it was a supplement business. He built it up and he- he gave virtual assistants thresholds of like, "You can spend up to $200 to solve this problem. Do not ring me unless it is absolutely, like it's above a $200..." And then he went on, just went away and left everything, and proved that this could be done. So I think that's a very important way to think about it from day one. And then The E-Myth Revisited walks through this example of pretty much what we've spoken about, although not online, of a lady who has a passion about baking, so she sets up a bakery and then before she knows it, she's spending more time like filing her taxes, doing the accounts, cleaning the services, and actually doesn't do any baking at all, and hates it, right? And part of that is- is realizing that in setting up a business, there's- there's not just the core thing that you- that you like doing. It's not just training clients. It's like all of the other su- support stuff. So probably those two books. They're very- very commonly, uh, very commonly recommended, but they're- they're very good, like founding sets of principles, um, that...

Chris Williamson 1:09:22 They're both quite accessible as well, right?

Jonny 1:09:24 Yeah. Yeah. There's a, there is a book that I've not read yet, which is on my list of things to read. I think it's called Made in America by Sam Walton, I believe, who's the... I- I may have got those names wrong. But he's the guy who founded Walmart, who talks about this idea that's then been popularized by Jeff Bezos, which is this idea of a- of a flywheel of, or kind of how Amazon... The bi- the bigger Amazon gets, the better Amazon gets. And it's on this like runaway snow- snowball that... So like people buy from Amazon because there's loads of choice on Amazon. The more people buy from Amazon, the more people sell on Amazon, which means there's more choice on Amazon, which means more people buy from Amazon and the whole thing just gets away from itself. Um, so I think like that sort of stuff as well, learning from big, uh, CEOs, like watching interviews with- with people who've done it is always really interesting. They always have recommendations as well. But I'd start with those two books, I would say.

Chris Williamson 1:10:17 Cool, man. I like it. I- I- I wish that I'd, uh, had the insights that I do now, and hopefully it's cut through some of the bullshit for people today. Like all of the stuff that you spend time when you start a business, especially if you're young, especially if you're listening to this and you're 20 years old and you've never done a business before, and you're thinking about, "Do I need to be a limited company? Do I need to register for tax, and- and VAT, and an accountant?" It's like you have a PayPal. The internet doesn't need you to do anything more than that. Start iterating on what it is. And here's a- a quote. I read a couple of these from yesterday, I don't know whether you saw them on, um, on my Instagram. Uh, Tiago Forte, "A paradoxical thing about people who consistently choose the most high leverage activity is their efforts have a rough edged, half-assed quality, because polishing things to perfection is a low leverage activity." And someone commented underneath saying, "Perfectionism is a nice way to hide from shipping at a pace necessary to find what works."

Jonny 1:11:21 I love that. I really, really agree with that. This is something that, um... So the- the thing we spoke about right at the start of like, just, if you've got an idea, like sell it and then build it with your customers, and you'll end up building a better product. That's something that I'm always pushing Yousaf's limits on. It's like he always wants to have something half perfect and then sell it. But I, you hear so many people talk about like just... Like anybody can sit and procrastinate, anybody can sit and try and perfect something, anybody can sit and tweak the color scheme, but if you just launch it, if you just get it out there and you do it quicker than your competitor, you'll probably be ahead in a year's time.

Chris Williamson 1:12:00 The o-

Jonny 1:12:00 I love that quote.

Chris Williamson 1:12:00 ... the other thing as well is, you run out of motivation usually at getting something from 90% perfect to 100% perfect far more than doing another