Today's episode is the first of a seven-part series I'm doing on how to validate, create, market, and launch a product.

Here's some of the problems you're running into:

• You're creating products before you validate them.

• You invest all this time into making something before you even know whether people will buy it or not.

• You've launched a product in the past and it failed. Nobody bought it or only a few people did.

• You've launched to crickets. Nobody cared at all.

• You've tried to launch before, but you ran into issues and never ended up completing the product or the launch.

• You've launched to some initial sales, but after your launch, sales plummeted and you're not sure how to keep them going.

Maybe you've never even tried to launch a product before but you're looking for a blueprint to follow so you don't launch to crickets.

I could teach you one skill, it would be writing. All of my success I owe to writing.

It all starts with writing.

Writing turns into videos, which turn into courses. Writing turns into blog posts, which turn into books. Books influence people. They create leverage. That leverage lands you speaking engagements which increase your influence, which leads to even more opportunities.

Writing is the single greatest tool for growing your business. When you boil it down, it all starts with writing.

That's why I write a million words a year now. I've seen the results and there's no going back.

But that's a lot of words. Even the idea of writing a thousand words a day can seem intimidating. What do you write about? How do you use what you've written? What kind of publishing commitment should you make? What if you run out of topics? Do you give away free content or do you charge for it? How do you charge for it? How do you use writing to sell? How can you use writing and selling psychology to reach the right people and solve problems that people will pay you for?

I've condensed all of my knowledge into an intense, 2-hour workshop: Supercharge Your Writing.

Your hustle level isn't predicated on your age.

Every age level has its own challenges, but that doesn't mean you have excuses.

We all have the same 24 hours in a day. Some of us have more responsibilities than others. It's not about comparing to anyone else. It's about making the most of the time you have.

You’ve got to audit your time. You cannot afford to waste time. You’ve got to optimize your schedule. Think about every single thing. Audit your day. That might mean journaling. Where is every minute going? You need those minutes back.

Today, I turn 27.

Years are just arbitrary markings, but if I'm not careful, they feel like deadlines.

There's this implied question: "What have you accomplished since the last time your age changed?"

Was it enough? Did I make the most of my time?

I wrote a longer birthday post today. You can check it out, it's called: 27 Things I've Learned. Every year on my birthday, I write one of these posts. You can check out my birthday post this year at seanwes.com/27things.

I go into a bit more detail on what's changed in the past year, but it's been a lot.

It hasn't been easy. I've worked really hard. A year ago, I hired Cory as my first employee. Now there are 7 of us at seanwes. There's a podcast network, I've launched 3 courses, we launched the new Community chat system and mobile app, just announced seanwes conference for next year, I spoke at conferences, we held numerous meetups across the country, I led workshops, launched new physical products, all while producing literally hundreds of podcast and videos episodes.

The amount we've accomplished is almost incomprehensible.

How is it possible?

This is episode 100 of the daily video show. I'm pretty excited about that milestone, but this is only the beginning. We're just getting started.

I am fully convinced seanwes tv will be the biggest thing in 2016. If you're watching back in the future, I want to give you a bit of context, because I have no idea how many views this will have when you see it. Right now, as we record episode 100, seanwes tv typically only gets a few hundred views per episode.

The seanwes podcast has 7-figure downloads. I have 60,000 newsletter subscribers, my website gets 6-figure visitors every month. So why am I pouring so much into a daily video show when it's only getting a few hundred views?

Simple: because online video is where it's at. This is where the attention is. Attention is the game. Attention is the currency of this age.

If I ask you to stop right now and think of the people you follow who are big online, who do you think of? Immediately, I think of the people who I can see. The people who come to mind are the people whose faces I can picture. And the people whose faces I can picture are the people whose faces I've seen over and over again through exposure on video.

You can write, you can record audio, and you can do it every day, but the people who leave an impression are the people who are on video. We are hardwired to connect with human faces.

Where do you want to be? Have you taken a moment to think about where you see yourself in 5 years?

What do you want to accomplish? What about your current situation would you like to change in that time?

That change is not something that's going to happen automatically. You're going to end up somewhere in 5 years. Hopefully you'll be around. Hopefully I'll be around. We're going to end up somewhere. It can either be a place we end up by accident or a place we seek to be.

What does that place look like?

Now the important question I have for you today:

Is what you're doing right now taking you closer to where you want to go?

I was convinced that the sharing of the new content was the most important thing. I was convinced that recency was king.

I was wrong.

Recency is not king; people do not care whether you wrote this thing last night or last year.

RELEVANCY is king—and recency does not equal relevancy. If it did, I should just delete this video tomorrow. But that's absurd.

I struggled with this when it came to podcasts and other content I was producing. We used to put out shows the very next day. I don’t even know how I edited it, wrote the shownotes myself, and put it out the next day. I was convinced that it had to be fresh.

Here's the biggest thing I've learned after hundreds and thousands of pieces of content:

It’s not about sending the NEWEST content to the GREATEST number of subscribers in the LEAST amount of time. The most powerful thing is sending the most RELEVANT content to a SINGLE person at the RIGHT time

If you can grasp this concept now without learning the hard way like I did for years, you have the potential to be well ahead of me.

I talk a lot on the seanwes podcast about establishing a reputation for yourself. That reputation enables you to do things like sell courses or consulting. A great way to build your reputation and establish your expertise is to speak at conferences.

Now I'm a speaker, so as someone who is also an organizer with seanwes conference, I have the opportunity to set a precedent for how speakers are treated. How I treat speakers will be how I want to be treated as a speaker.

The first thing to note is that covering expenses related to traveling and hotels should be the responsibility of the conference, not the speaker.

The speaker's time is valuable. Covering their expenses should be a given. They should not have to spend their own money to fly somewhere or stay in a hotel. It's also not cool to only pay for one night of hotel rooms.

Take care of your speakers. Allow them to be present and encourage their participation at your event. Paying only for one night of hotels does not incentivize participation and engagement. The speaker's accommodations should be completely taken care of and practically invisible.

Covering expenses is the baseline. It's the bare minimum. It's literally just so that they're not losing money. Now, you need to actually compensate them for their time.

You want to grow your business. You want to double your revenue. You want to launch your product. You want to be charging more. You want to be stressed less.

You want to be doing the best work of your career. You want to be doing less work you hate for people that drain your energy. What's the solution?

Mindset.

Everything begins with changing the way you think. The fastest way to change the way you think is to get around people who think that way. Immerse yourself in a culture of people who are where you want to be. Absorb their thinking, learn how they speak, get to know their language.

The fastest path to getting where you want to be is by getting around people who are already there.

Successful people think differently. The reason the majority of people are not successful is because the majority of people are not willing to challenge the status quo of thinking and change their mindset.

seanwes is an entrepreneurial learning community. We deliver high quality education from people who start from a standpoint of values.

On the front end, seanwes is a media company. Every single day, we publish numerous pieces of educational content on seanwes.com.

seanwes is a podcast network with a growing number of sponsor-free shows providing tremendous value for free. That's one of our mantras here: full price or free. We don't ever discount unless we're rewarding loyalty.

The podcast network is 100% sponsor-free because everything we do on seanwes is sponsor-free. We don't do ads because we don't believe in selling your attention. We value your time too much to do that.

We're able to do what we do because of the Community. The seanwes Community is a paid membership site. It's essentially the hub of everything on seanwes and it's where the magic happens.