Implement the Ideas of Proven Entrepreneurs
Established entrepreneurs have new business ideas. Aspiring entrepreneurs are in need of them. Run With It bridges this gap, connecting you with actionable ideas, concrete steps, and potentially a powerful mentor.
continued from previous post...
Just yesterday I committed to working with Marketing 360 to convert my website to wordpress and potentially begin managing marketing. The CEO, JB Kellogg has guested on our podcast. The cost will be around $400/month as we begin the relationship and could increase if/when we add more than Website/SEO. I'm hesitant to start paying for marketing like this but at the same time, I wonder if it is the lack of taking significant steps like this that has prevented the business from growing. My fingers are crossed that this will be a meaningful step.
2.c Piano Technicians Masterclasses
Here is another project where I see oscillations between slow growth, stagnancy, and high-growth punctuations.
Here is my Stripe data for all-time revenue:
That most recent revenue spike is for 13,868.25 for the month of November so far. This has occurred because I decided to organize and online convention. I also have noticed that it helps me to create teams of people to work on projects. We set up regular meetings and these meetings keep me accountable and on-task, with the added benefit of having assistance. For this convention I have a team of apprentices that I hired from Acadium
Here's a rough idea of what the primary team is doing:
I'm also trying to incorporate members from another team on this project:
Here is my Stripe revenue graph for the most recent 4 weeks:
(The baseline revenue comes from some onoing subscription products I have created at price points of $8/mo, $39/mo, $79/mo, and $129/mo. The majority of that income, about $12K, over the past 4 weeks is from selling sign ups to the convention.
I'm optimistic that we'll raise a good amount of money for the convention. Our modest goal was $10K in revenue (we've already hit it, yay!). Our intermediate goals is $30K in revenue. Our stretch goal is $100K in revenue. I think having these goals helps anchor and focus our intentions. I've also promised a 1% revenue bonus to some of the team members. I think this will help them stay excited and engaged as we continue. The convention dates are Dec 10-12 so we have to hustle to meet our objectives!
So, here is another argument for taking on significant initiatives as part of overall gradual growth. If I had not initiated this convention, my numbers would be stagnating, but now there is a potential to grow significantly, even in the remaining few weeks of the year.
Finally, here is a snapshot of my profit first reports since the end of August.
I'm feeling great about this recent jump in revenue, and in the amount of take-home pay. The next period stands to be as large and perhaps we'll event have a better period after that.
There's an update on the podcast and the entrepreneurial journey of one of its hosts. Remember the takeaways:
Feedback?
I initially reserved about 20 minutes to write this post. That was about enough time to create an outline of my thoughts. Then I spent about 2+ hours fleshing it out. I sacrificed time, but I got more satisfaction in being able to present my ideas clearly. I'd like to still aim for time-limited update posts, if only just to keep this habit manageable and achievable. Let me know what you thought of the post. If it was shorter what would you trim and what would you keep?
Chris and I decided to create some weekly updates for the podcast. He just posted his. I'm posting mine.
1. Update you on the podcast growth.
2. Update you on our individual entrepreneurial journeys.
We decided to commit to posting weekly, but limit the time that we spend on each post. Given this simple format, we agreed that we can at least get started, probably start a little rough, but get better over the course of several weeks/months...
On that note, the theme of this post will be my reflections on how "slow growth" actually manifests itself.
TL;DR?...
Many, many, many successful people I've talked to and read about claim that the key to success is just keeping at something. The factors that will contribute to growth and progress are not obvious upfront, but if you continue, the idea is that you are bound to encounter them.
For references on this idea see:
Atomic Habits by James Clear
The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy
Growth in the past 60 days...
All-time Growth...
As I look at the graphs I see ups and downs but a general upward trend. In addition, I notice that there are "spikes"—even if they are small—along the way. But there are also places where we weren't not growing and significant events happened. That tells me that sometimes you see an imediate outcome to intential events but sometimes they are just part of the slow growth.
Significant events.
In summary, I'm still a believer in the idea that slow growth happens when you apply consistent effort. But I think it is important to note that effort must be put into novel opportunities along the way. Doing the same thing over and over may lead to plateau or even stagnancy, but venturing to try new and different things will contribute to that slow, steady growth.
2.a Profit First
First, a quick shout out to Profit First. A methodology for managing Bookkeeping and Accounting for small business owners that I came across a few years ago. It is helping me to properly compartmentalize where my revenue goes. The biggest takeaway I got was to compartmentalize as follows:
You split revenue into the following compartments (individual bank accounts)...
You also make these bank transfers 2x per month, on the 10th and 25th.
Here is a snapshot of my Profit First reports for the past two weeks for Floating Piano Factory (FPF)
2.b Floating Piano Factory
Here is the profit first report for the period ending Oct 25:
Here is the profit first report for the period ending Nov 10:
In the most recent period, my personal pay over about two weeks was only about $600 versus about $900 in the previous period. My two-week income fluctuates throughout the year. It could get up to around $2000 but it usually doesn't get much higher than $1500. I run this business very loosely. I only really need to put in an hour or two a week to maintain it. I let the people who work with me have a lot of freedom. I try to grow the business but it hasn't grown significantly.
continued in next post...
Our show's trajectory changed when @csallen selected us to be part of the Indie Hacker's Podcast Network.
Our focus shifted dramatically after being selected. We no longer had to consider hundreds of ways to grow the show. All we had to do is pass the bar to be featured in the Indie Hackers feed.
We got there with an "inside the business" episode about how an Italian restaurant and wine delivery business can keep the doors open during the pandemic.
Our episode was downloaded ~9k times on Indie Hackers, but we barely saw a bump in internal downloads. Even worse, most listeners dropped off within the first couple minutes of the episode.
We were obviously disappointed by this but also a bit surprised. Courtland thought this episode was good enough to be included in his feed but maybe his judgment is biased because he's gotten to know and like us. According to the listeners, it doesn't stand up on its own.
Courtland often uses the word "remarkable" when describing podcast marketing. What makes your show so good that someone would literally remark upon it to others?
We're experimenting with ways to get there.
We've cut our intro down and made it more casual (inspired by the My First Million guys).
We're doing much more research before every episode, both on the guest and the idea they are bringing.
We're cutting down on fourth wall breaks of explaining to the listener and instead we're just having the conversation that we find interesting.
Will report back once we get more data on these changes.
Raising money from VCs is not easy for anyone, but it's especially difficult for social impact entrepreneurs, women, and people of color.
https://www.pnas.org/content/111/12/4427.abstract
On this week's episode, we hash out a business idea that helps underrepresented group get funding.
We threw out several angles an entrepreneur could take this and some concrete action steps to get started.
Curious to hear what you think!
Had a call with Craig Constantine who's been doing the Movers Mindset podcast for several years now.
https://moversmindset.com/podcast/
He extended an open invite to ask him any questions for all members of Seth Godin's The Podcasting Fellowship.
I'd been frustrated with my audio quality for several episodes now, made worse by the fact that I wouldn't be able to change anything for weeks, since we still have a few unreleased episodes.
He jumped on a call with me and for 30 minutes helped me test various microphone positions, giving me real-time feedback on what sounded best.
Sure, I could have recorded myself and figured it out asynchronously, but this was much faster. Plus, it gave me assurance from someone who's been in the game for a while.
As a bonus, my setup no longer covers half my face, so I feel like I'll be able to connect with guests more readily!
After some extensive research on how and where to publish our podcast we decided to use transistor.fm from indie hacker @mijustin himself! It offered a place to get started easily while allowing us to post to multiple platforms simultaneously. It also provided us with a nice, simple website to send people to with our own domain.
We messed around with creating a WordPress site for a few days. Too much hassle and too much to consider and keep track of!
We continued to work as a team, with Chris finding the platform and setting up the account and eathan editing the profile and updating the details.
Lessons:
Make choices decisively.
But pivot as needed.
Find a good partner that can fill in the gaps.
Keep up with consistent meetings so that there is accountability on moving forward.
We've been reaching out to potential guests. We connected with some people we know and some peopele we don't. We both committed to reaching out to folks that we thought might be interesting guests. We wrote messages to those folks and copied eachother. Each time we sent a message we tried to think of ways we could improve it, based on our own reflections, the small variations we saw in each other's style, and the type of response we were getting from potential guests.
So...
We booked our first guest! Dave Kosciusko.
He's an old connection of Chris's that has built 7 figures in revenue out of his knowledge about repairing and reselling used phones online.
We set out to recruit our first guests and in the absence of any specific advice we just decided to get started. Eathan and Chris would each send out a few emails and cc the other one. No guest was off-limits per se, but we decided to focus on entrepreneurs that probably had 6 figure revenues or beyond. We were happy to speak with guests at the small and very large ends of the revenue spectrum beyond that threshold. We would each take a look at the other's messages and modify our own messages according to what seemed to work well or seemed to be an improvement in the message. We'd also each keep a basic message template and slightly tweak it with each new message.
Both of us have some marketing and copywriting experience so we came up with pretty good messages to start with. The basic structure consisted of A. An introduction commenting on something specific that the potential guest would appreciate us knowing about B. A transition to explaining why we reached out and an explanation of the podcast. C. An invitation to join us.
The methodology of continuously tweaking the emails and looking for strong points to incorporate from each other meant that we'd continuously evolve and improve on our outreach strategy.
We made sure to read at least an article or listen to a podcast to understand each potential guest. So inherently our strategy was to reach out to fewer people but to have more understanding of each person that we contacted.
Lessons learned:
It's great to have a partner in all this and we probably wouldn't have gotten as far as we have without each other's support.
Just getting started and also using a template that you can iterate and improve upon are both key strategies that helped us make progress so far.
@chrisjustin and Eathan Janney had been participating in a business Mastermind together for several months. Both were enjoying their business projects, facing challenges and growing. But Chris started to feel a nagging lack of fulfillment. He'd achieved the dream of working from home and gaining flexibility with his time, but craved more connection with others and desired a sense of contribution to a wider community. He shared his idea of starting a podcast with Eathan and they started to percolate the idea.
Foundationally, the podcast would be about discussing business ideas. But after further discussion, Eathan and Chris came up with some cool modifications. What if you got already successful business owners to share ideas? That would be cool because they'd probably be pretty solid ideas. What if the listeners were encouraged to try the ideas out? That would be cool because there would be more engagement and it would highlight the action-taking ethos that Chris and Eathan wanted to share with the world. It wasn't long before Run With It was fully fleshed out.
"Without the bandwidth to implement every one of their great new ideas, already successful business owners can't realize their full potential by launching each new one. At the same time, many driven people want to run a business but don't know how to start.
Run With It bridges that gap. Established entrepreneurs share one of their new ideas or brainstorm a new project with us. In the process, we share with the audience some exact steps they could take to start it. We encourage our listeners to take massive action on that plan. They report back, and we connect the person who's impressed us most with you for one mentorship call and if there's promise, a potential business partnership."
Chris and Eathan decided to meet regularly to see if this podcast idea could take off...
Established entrepreneurs have new business ideas. Aspiring entrepreneurs are in need of them. Run With It bridges this gap, connecting you with actionable ideas, concrete steps, and potentially a powerful mentor.