I’m creating and launching a paid course, this week.
I'll be documenting the entire process right here on Twitter, including real revenue stats + actual time invested.
So far, I've generated $2,054 in presales.
The course: starterstory.com/lean-seo
BACKSTORY
We just hit 500k/month visitors at starterstory.com, mainly through SEO. I figured my approach to SEO might be valuable to others, and I wanted to see if there was any interest:
- It’s everything I know about SEO - It's a framework for how you can win SEO - I called it “Lean SEO” because it pulls many concepts from the famous startup book “Lean Startup”
PRICING
I priced the course at $129.
To incentivize preorders, I added a $50 discount if you buy early.
You can also get the course if you're a Starter Story Premium Plus member.
.
SS ACADEMY
In 2021, I'm planning to launch dozens of "mini-courses" like this at Starter Story.
So this came at the perfect time.
This will be the first course of many, converting all sorts of topics.
(interested in creating a course / getting in front of our audience? lmk)
FIRST SALES
Going back to all those emails...
I just started emailing everyone back personally to (1) hear more about their SEO situation and (2) let them know I was doing a course.
I want to make sure I don't miss anything for the course!
.
Honestly, this took quite a long time, and I still have many more emails to get through.
But just from replying to emails, I've generated over $2k in preorders.
This is really motivating to deliver something great!
EMAIL LIST
But not everyone will preorder.
For everyone else, I’ll use an email list to:
- Send teaser emails, free content & to build hype - To notify when the course is live
Took a break from work, writing, and tried to unplug.
Unplugging was hard. I caved a few times and checked Twitter, email, etc.
It was nice taking a few days off, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the work that was on my plate when I got back.
This SEO course feels like it will be a big project. Not only will it take a lot of time, but it’s new. And new things keep me up late at night.
I can’t rest until the new is not-so-new. Until I’ve learned it. Until I’ve tried it.
If I was an investor, I’d only invest in entrepreneurs with this quality. Because they have a bias for action. They experiment and iterate with urgency.
But with a bias for action myself, it’s mentally painful when I can’t take action right now. It’s a blessing and a curse.
Excited to be back, and get back to work. I’m also back to writing every day.
Over the next few weeks, I’ll be writing a bit about SEO. Mostly, to help me think better about the course I’m working on.
I’m still going through each email I’ve received (over 200!) about the course and sending a personalized reply.
Two people have doubted my approach or said this wouldn’t work for them. This gives me a bit of self-doubt, but it’s also motivating me to work and think harder about how I can make the best course possible.
Anyways... it’s helpful to write more about it...
I have no secrets about SEO. I just have a framework for moving quickly and dominating it.
As a small or bootstrapped business, SEO is the most important channel because it’s free traffic, or more importantly, free money.
But on the flip side, the hardest thing about SEO is lack of time/bandwidth.
Writing a great article takes 8+ hours. I might be able to use sheer willpower to do that a few times, but it’s never going to be scalable.
So, you might get stuck in this scenario:
You vow to “do SEO”
Set up an elaborate plan
Work hard on a couple of articles
Publish them
Not much results...
Life happens...
You stop writing and publishing
“SEO doesn’t work for me”
I’ve been there many times.
The issue with that approach is that it’s missing two key things (1) experimentation and (2) tracking results.
Just like a "lean startup", you win by experimenting & trying new things, getting feedback from the market, tracking results, and pivoting based on that.
I really started to see results when I started approaching my content this way.
I put it in quotes because I don’t like that word too much. The word meditation comes with too many preconceived notions, like to “focus on your breath”, gurus, specific techniques, etc.
Common meditation advice says you shouldn’t think about anything, but I don’t like that because not thinking about anything is actually a thought itself.
Today, I just sat there and did nothing for 15 minutes. Just sat there. I let thoughts come to me, and I processed them.
And the craziest thing happened to me.
I had this one thought come to me: “I should share XYZ on Twitter”. It was a simple and typical thought for me. Nothing out of the ordinary.
But the crazy part: I actually visualized this thought enter and leave my mind. The timeline:
I saw the thought enter my mind.
I watched it become stronger and stronger
It reached the center of my mind and hit a “peak” for a few seconds.
Then, it slowly started getting weaker.
And then it faded away, and I was unable to bring it back!
I thought maybe I could pull it back.
I tried to pull it back, but I couldn’t, no matter how hard I tried!
I was in disbelief.
Once it was gone, my mind moved onto something else.
What happened? I fully processed a thought! It sounds so simple and obvious but it feels revolutionary right now!
I’ll do this again tomorrow, and I’m actually really looking forward to it. I guess this is mediation? This feels more fun.
I will release the "SEO For Developers" course on December 8th. You can preorder now.
Along with this, I launched a very early MVP of the "Starter Story Learning Platform".
The course has a landing page. You can buy the course as a one-off, or you can subscribe to Starter Story and get full access to it and all future courses.
Eventually, we'll have dozens of courses. I won't be the only one creating courses.
What's also cool is that the course content will live on Starter Story, which will see its own SEO benefits.
It was fun coding this up today. Now I'm excited to put together the course.
I’m excited about this whole SEO course thing going on.
I’m going to use this to create the first course for the “Starter Story Learning Platform”.
The next big play for Starter Story is selling courses and more specific learning. The goal was to start working on that in 2021, but seems like something serendipitous is happening in the last few days.
Here’s what I’m thinking.
I’ll set a deadline for early-to-mid-December when the course will be launched.
I’ll build out some of the “Starter Story Learning Platform” features (won’t take too long) and I’ll take preorders for the course.
This will help me commit to delivering a course quickly because I’ll already have taken people’s money.
People can buy the course as a one-off or they can subscribe to Starter Story Premium Plus, which will give them full access to Starter Story and unlimited courses in the future.
I think this is a great medium for a course, because I have a lot to say, and I do so many Loom videos anyways, and I’m quite fast at that.
I’m actually quite excited to get all of this out of my head. There is so much to go over.
Eventually, I can convert the videos into text / blog format as well, which could see SEO benefits in the future.
I will also write about this process of creating a course here on this blog, and maybe talk about it on Twitter. Maybe people will find that interesting, as it seems my tweets have been doing quite well.
The other benefit of sharing this process publicly is to find other people who want to create courses for the “Starter Story Learning Platform”. If you want to build and sell a course on Starter Story, email me!
My stretch goal is to get the preorder page up by the end of the week.
All of this is subject to change, I’ll keep things updated here on the blog. As always, send me your thoughts and feedback and questions.
I received over 120 emails, DMs, and even text messages about my SEO approach.
Conventional wisdom would be to do a whole course, right?
I really don’t want to do that. But it sounds boring, and not really up my alley. I know that I could make some money on it, but it really wouldn’t be the right use of my time.
Here are a few ideas I’m thinking of:
Consulting: Find the people that really need this and build out something rough. Help a handful of people in a pseudo-consulting role and have them pay me a lot of money.
Really expensive course: Charge $1,000+ for this information. Sell less, but better clients. The money will motivate me to get it done quickly.
Use this as the catalyst for Starter Story Course Platform: On Starter Story, we’ll start working on a ‘learning’ platform, where we have loads of different courses. Maybe this could be the first course?
Create a small community: Slack, Telegram chat?
48 Hour Course Launch: Set a really short, hard deadline, spend two days, heads down and crank this out with a bunch of Loom videos and PDF and sell it as a package.
I’m not really sure what I’m going to do. Since this is a side project, it needs to be fun for me and I want to be motivated.
The first step: start emailing people back and learning more about what they need.
What I like about Austin is he's an optimist. Most of his sentiments and tweets are positive. He stays in his own lane. While everyone complains about how negative Twitter is, he seems to ignore it and have a grand ol' time.
He also just sold his company Morning Brew for tens of millions of dollars.
I have a unique strategy to grow search traffic through code, data, automation, outsourcing, and UGC.
I don’t see this talked about in SEO land, because mainly it requires some technical ability (need to be able to code).
Starter Story will do 300k+ uniques this month, and forecasting 500k by January 2021.
I know this strategy can be applied to other niches. Starter Story is about starting businesses. But this would work in pets, plants, fashion, food, travel, and hundreds of other topics.
What you’d need for this:
Ability to code (or to put a full-time engineer on this)
Time / patience / long term mindset (can take months to rank)
Some money (to pay for tools / engineer / data / outsourcing)
Would this be valuable to you?
If this sounds interesting, please reach out to me, and let me know what blog you’re trying to grow. If you want to start something, that could work too.
(my email is the mail icon at bottom of this post)
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Update: I've decided to do a course. You can preorder here. I'd still love if you emailed me :)
As I’ve gained a small following on Twitter, I’ve become more and more afraid to tweet stuff and be myself. Why? Many reasons, which I'll outline some in this post.
This is what's called a fear setting exercise. I’ll write about my specific fear about why I don’t tweet, and then write about the reality, and why that fear is actually not valid. Here goes...
Fear: I’m afraid people will ‘out’ me as an impostor. Running a business is imperfect, and if people look close enough, they’ll uncover the truths I’ve stretched, things I’ve said and haven’t fulfilled, and the weak points in my business. Reality: Overly self-imporant. People aren’t looking that closely at your every move. If they wanted to find it, they would have already.
Fear: I’m afraid I won’t get any likes, and people will unfollow me because they see I don’t get many likes. Reality: Most things you say won’t get likes. People won’t unfollow you for that, they’ll just keep reading their timeline. More important to be authentic. It’s better to be authentic than get lots of likes.
Fear: I’m afraid to broadcast and overshare. Reality: Overly self-important. Nobody looks at your timeline like you do. People follow you for a reason. People follow you because you did something cool like build your own business. Even the little things you share have a lot of value.
Fear: I’m afraid haters will attack me, find holes in my business, and exploit them. Reality: People will just unfollow me. There are always haters, but haters just say mean things, but don’t actually execute on anything.
Fear: I’m afraid people will tell me I’m wrong. Reality: This happens all the time, and it’s actually a good thing. There is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, that's the point. As long as you're honest and clear, you can't be wrong, or right. You're just being you.
Fear: I’m afraid to lose followers. Reality: Followers are not worth much. If you lose them, you’d probably lose them anyway. If you polarize, you’ll gain quality followers which lead to more quality engagement, which will lead to a healthier, more engaged audience in the long run.
Fear: I’m afraid to tweet things unrelated to the topics for which people followed me in the first place. Reality: People change and evolve. You may lose followers in the short term, but look at people like PewDiePie: he constantly changed and evolved but that’s what made him authentic, and why his success has lasted longer than everyone else’s.
Fear: I’m afraid of IRL friends judging me. Reality: They don’t follow me on Twitter. And if they do, why would they judge me for being authentic? Maybe they are not good friends.
Fear: I’m afraid that my boss, customers, investors, etc will judge me. Reality: I’m lucky to be my own boss and can say things without the risk of losing my job. That is more than most people can say. Again though, this goes back to being overly self-important. Nobody is watching my ‘moves’ as much as I think they are.
Fear: I’m afraid of not being able to one-up myself. Reality: One-upping yourself is impossible. But you can one-up yourself by doing things differently. Like Pieter Levels… He’s launching small fun apps and having a great time. He doesn’t have to create a unicorn startup after his success bootstrapping, he just does different stuff. That’s still leveling up, but just in a different direction. His audience still grows.
Fear: I’m afraid to be judged by ‘smarter’ people. Some people follow me on Twitter that I really look up to. I’m worried they’ll judge me and stop following me. Reality: Same logic as losing regular followers above. People that I look up to people are no more special than anyone else, and also change just like I do. I probably have a skewed perception of these people anyway. It’s better to build relationships than think about who’s following who.
There are a million ways to make a million dollars.
Call it hubris, but I know how I could make a million dollars in six months if I did a few things.
I’m not saying these things are easy, but they are quite simple. They’d just be time-consuming. And it would mean going in a different direction with my company.
If I had investors, I might be labeled as ‘fiscally irresponsible’. I’d be doing them a disservice by not following the money.
But I don’t want to do those things! I know that I should, but I’m not motivated enough to work really hard on them. They don’t sound like any fun, or what I’m excited about.
I asked my founder friend about this:
“Do you ever think you’re a ‘bad’ entrepreneur because you don’t always follow the money?”
His response:
"Yes, I go through this. I could be rich if I did [REDACTED]. As an entrepreneur, you realize there are unlimited opportunities to make unlimited money. But, we became entrepreneurs because we love to build things. Because we wanted to build our own things. If we were only in it for the money, we’d be better off working salary jobs and investing our profits.”
You can always follow the money more. But the more you follow it, the more you sacrifice in other areas. Your time. Your fulfillment. Your vision.
You’ll never be able to fully maximize money following. There’s always more money right around the corner.
So, keep a balance. You’ll still get rich, it just might be a bit slower.
Make a million doing the things you love. That’ll feel better in the end.
