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In this episode of LMSCast, Chris Badgett reunites with longtime collaborator Kurt von Ahnen to dissect the core patterns that determine who wins and who fails in the online education space. Drawing on decades of combined experience—from WordPress trenches to corporate training rooms—they explore what sets high-performing education entrepreneurs apart from the rest. Spoiler alert: it’s not flashy tech or funnels—it’s mindset, clarity, and grit.

Kurt Von Ahnen is an expert in LifterLM. He is from Manana No Mas. Kurt emphasizes how crucial it is to recognize your real customers while developing courses—not only end users or students but also the companies or groups that will be paying for your instruction. He describes how, after making the misstep of first aiming his Power Sport Academy instruction at technicians and service managers, he discovered that the true consumers were bigger companies that oversaw many dealerships or dealership owners.

One of the biggest takeaways is the power of intention and mindset. Too many aspiring course creators fall for the passive income myth or assume their expertise alone guarantees success. Chris and Kurt call this “mechanism-first thinking”—where creators obsess over tools and course content, but neglect the human they’re trying to help. The ones who make it focus first on who they serve, often building solutions for a previous version of themselves. That clarity eliminates guesswork and builds authentic connection.

Curriculum design is another major pitfall. Many creators overbuild, launching “giant courses” that overwhelm learners. The better approach? Keep it simple. Chunk lessons into small wins, design for clarity, and think about your learner’s level—beginner, intermediate, or advanced. Don’t skip levels. Build bridges. And remember: tools like AI can help you fill in gaps, but they won’t replace doing the hard work of thoughtful design.

Sales and marketing, too, require grounded expectations. Chris lays out four proven strategies: content marketing, relationship-based outreach, outbound prospecting, and paid ads (as a later-stage scale lever). Kurt reminds us that selling to many—through groups, businesses, or institutions—can be far more efficient than chasing one-off buyers. They share real stories of clients using LifterLMS Groups to deliver training at scale, from safety certification to corporate development programs.

Finally, success requires personal discipline, continuous improvement, and the humility to keep showing up. Whether it’s updating your course yearly, listening to student feedback, or time-blocking your calendar—this work is more marathon than sprint. Chris and Kurt close with a simple truth: your learners will come for the content, but they’ll stay for the support and the community. That’s where the real transformation—and real business success—happens.

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Chris Badgett: [00:00:00] You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMS Cast. I’m joined, or I should say rejoined by a special guest. His name is Kurt Von from Manana Nomas. He also does some work over here at Lifter LMS, and we wanted to have a conversation around some of the patterns we see among the education entrepreneurs that create great success for themselves, and then also the ones that end up.

A unsuccessful or failed situation. But first, welcome back on the show, Kurt.

Kurt Von Ahnan: Thanks Chris. It’s good to be back. I always enjoy chatting with you. [00:01:00]

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And we’ve been doing this for a long time. You’ve been around WordPress, I think, longer than me, since 2006 or something. 2004. Four, okay. I came in 2008.

And and you’ve been a educator and a leader. You’ve done projects, you’ve worked with clients. I also have done those things. But I wanted to start out first talking about mindset and intention. If somebody wants to create an online education company, and let’s say they’re charging money for your, for their courses or their coaching or whatever it is what patterns do you see that are those that become successful have and those that it never quite works out have when it comes to mindset and intention?

Kurt Von Ahnan: It becomes a multifaceted question, right? So obviously there’s gonna be multiple answers for this, but I see I’m gonna run the risk of sounding judgmental, [00:02:00] right? But that’s part of how this show’s gonna end up. Some people come to the game with an expectation that is very much beyond reality.

They make an assumption that they are. Known, or they’re a celebrity in their field, or they have knowledge that no one else has or that it’s an assumption. So the assumptive of, I’ll just build it and they’ll come, whereas, there’s that cliche, right? All things worth doing take work and there’s sometimes.

The real labor, the real work of launching something successfully has not set in. And so when they have their launch, they get excited, I’m gonna launch a new site. And you go, great. Have at it. And then they launch it. But their launch doesn’t include any, I. Superfluous stuff on the outside. It’s just I made the website live.

You made the website live. How did you think people were gonna get to it? How did you think people were gonna make a purchase? What? What copy do you have on your website that inspires someone to [00:03:00] make a purchase? Do they even understand that you have an offer on your page? And I think that’s. To, to me, we could get into the nooks and crannies of actions, but the question is about mindset and intent, and I think there’s too many.

There’s too many scammy things online that are saying, e-learnings a trillion dollar industry. Get your piece of the pie now make a new course. And you could drive a Lamborghini just like mine and it, and they’re skipping the whole part about it takes work. You have to be committed. Build a community, you have to moderate it.

You have to constantly, it, it’s a job.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Solid points. I see a common mindset. I call it us versus them. Focus. So if somebody’s really focused on themselves and like they want to make money online and have location freedom and financial freedom and all this like freedom you gotta help people.

So like the ones that really work out, their intention is to go [00:04:00] help somebody. And the ones that are the most successful, it’s often like a previous version of themselves angela Brown who teaches house cleaning and maids, how to start and scale their companies. Yeah, she was a house cleaner.

She’s, been walked a hundred or a thousand miles in those shoes before, and she had done education in the offline world to that industry. But she also wanted to make money online and she wanted to be able to retire and have location freedom. So that stuff’s not bad. But she knew very well that she would have to help a lot of people.

Get what they want. I, you probably know that, I think it’s Zig Ziglar or one of those lines, if you help enough people get what they want, you’ll get what you want.

Kurt Von Ahnan: Yeah, exactly. That’s very

Chris Badgett: true.

Kurt Von Ahnan: Very true. Yeah. And you mentioned an interesting thing. I’ve learned almost the hard way that you can have a passion point for a subject.

Maybe you don’t have access to the right audience. Maybe you don’t have, the purchasing power to the right audience is the right way to say that. [00:05:00] And so then you need to get creative and say, okay, am I really working on a B2C product? Or is this really a B2B product or is this a and that comes back to mindset and intent, right?

If you’re intent add value to people, one person at a time, quality connections. But that’s one thing. And then there’s the, b2B model, right? I’m gonna sell one to many. And so then who are you making that relationship with and what’s the intention and mindset there? They’re two very different models and they take a different perspective of attack.

Chris Badgett: I think moving on to another topic, one of the most important issues or questions is literally one word, and it’s who with a question mark, who are we making this for? I see a lot of people get caught up in what I call mechanism first thinking. It’s all about the process and the knowledge, and this is what I do, but who are you actually helping with that?

Oh people who want this process, but no. Who are they? We know this whole thing about the customer [00:06:00] avatar, the ideal customer profile. But definitely the projects I’ve seen with people using Lifter lms, where it works out. The audience is super tight. It’s I think if KPC with her active Campaign Academy, yeah.

These are like marketing automation people using active campaign who are, various levels of tech. It’s very specific who she helps, just like Angela Brown with house cleaners and maids or funk Roberts with men over 40 who are trying to get in shape and, worried about low testosterone and stuff like that.

It’s super specific and Yep. I think u is the, it’s the fundamental most important question. Once you have your why and your mindset and your intention, who are we gonna help? My biggest pro tip is just help a previous version of yourself. ’cause you’re, there’s gonna be less guessing. You already know where you came from and who these people are.

But you can also branch out, but get [00:07:00] really clear on who that is. What do you say about audience and finding product market fit?

Kurt Von Ahnan: I have such a diverse background in training, e-learning, corporate models versus, course creator models, and they’re two very completely different markets. And so you nailed that who thing, but who are you helping?

Who are you adding value to? The next question is who has the purchasing power? And then that kind of changes might change the content flow, might change the user experience, might change some tools that gets into the mechanism side of it. But I think of this a lot and I’m very involved at church.

I’m a person of faith. A lot of times we’ll say, oh, invite someone to church. Invite someone to church. Oh, that feels so awkward. How would I do that? I don’t wanna, beat people over the head with a Bible. And then you have to think what got you to go to church? Someone invited me, right?

And so then it’s okay, that is a previous version of yourself. And so many times people forget [00:08:00] on the, they got so involved in becoming the expert in their field that they forget how they got started in their field. You have to go all the way back to the roots of it. At fear of running long I’ll tell you, I created a master level course on electronics diagnosis for motorcycles, and I was so excited to teach the course.

I was actually a little scared to teach the course ’cause I thought the students knew more about some of the topics than I did. And we taught the course and it was, some of it was online and some of it was live. So we’re doing the practicum where we’re live and I’m. eScribing, the courseware, and they’re all shaking their heads.

And then I handed each of ’em a multimeter and I said, okay, let’s go see how many volts are in this line. And I thought that’s the dumbest, simplest thing I could ask them to do. And not a single person in the course did it correctly. And I was like, wait a minute, I’m giving a master level course on motorcycle diagnostics with electronics, and nobody knows how a multimeter works.

That makes you realize that wherever you’re at in your level of [00:09:00] training, that previous version of yourself that you mentioned, you have to go all the way back to the first square. You can’t start on the 10th square and go up. You have to cover everything from the beginning and then get people to a level of engagement and take ’em to the next level, which is awesome.

Chris Badgett: And I also have a car, a really simple for you, car battery question that I’ll ask you after this call. Let’s go into like actual course creation or product creation. The design of the curriculum. Not so much the tools yet, but this is an area where I see a lot of pitfalls. One of ’em is, like you said, creating a master’s level course.

All of a sudden we have, I just call it a giant course. This thing is just a monstrosity, right?

Kurt Von Ahnan: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: So we’re not thinking about levels like are we working with beginners, intermediate, advanced? Do we need to do several courses and bundle those as a membership instead of trying to overwhelm people? Do we need to use prerequisites to you gotta [00:10:00] kind of master this area first before you move over here.

So think about it. And oftentimes the best advice is just to keep it simple. And this goes back to the avatar, the person that you’re helping. What’s the problem they have? What’s the result that they want and what are the minimum steps required to get them from A to B and overcome any challenges along the way?

Don’t overcomplicate it. I personally find AI helpful at this stage, particularly if you’re not trained as a teacher or a designer, like you gotta do the work. Don’t just ask the AI to design a course outline for you, but go ahead and try your best to design. Sections and lessons yourself, and then ask AI to fill in the gaps.

And that’s where you can get some back and forth and get really a comprehensive and uncover some blind spots in your curriculum. But what would you say about like curriculum design?

Kurt Von Ahnan: It’s a fickle beast. There’s a lot in the l and d spaces, learning and development. So in the l and d spaces.

[00:11:00] There are a lot of professionals that will talk about chunking and micro-learning and all of these topics, meaning like what you said, take a big topic and break it into consumable chunks. And there’s a lot of reasons why it. Think of like social media, right? We’re all hooked on short videos, short things, short attention spans.

And so the idea that someone could jump into a mini course, knock out five or six lessons real quick and say, oh, I got that done, and go on to the next one. It, there’s an energy, a dopamine hit that comes from doing that, and that’s the science of it. But let’s not forget. We all talk about short form content and then the number one podcast is Joe Rogans with three hour interviews.

Yeah, so people do have an appetite as long as the value is there to go and do long, long form content. I have a client that has, I think, 96 lessons in one course, and they’re selling one course. And I thought she was crazy. ’cause originally it was gonna be four [00:12:00] courses and then a bundle, right? And then she said no, I wanna do all one.

I’m gonna do that. I’m gonna redo all the videos, I’m gonna make everything professional. Da. I thought she was crazy. She’s launched and she, I’m gonna say she’s launching successfully. I’m seeing new clients. I’m seeing people complete the course. ’cause that’s the next obstacle is course completion.

But if we get into brass tacks. She knows her niche, she knows her people. The content is stellar. The videos are awesome. They’re all professionally made, so the media is great. And the overall design of the site the colors they chose, the vibrance they chose, it’s all engaging. And they have a CRM employed that encourages people at multiple stages to get to the next step.

And your question, product creation strategy, what’s the best way to go? It’s whatever suits your audience best. And are you willing to do the work to keep the engagement?

Chris Badgett: Yeah, and I love that story about your client. I. I call that a like [00:13:00] a signature course. Yeah. And I know people that use Lifter and other LMS tools and they just have one course.

It’s always been just one course, one problem, one solution. It’s pretty comprehensive. It might take six weeks for somebody to complete and they just make it better and better and keep doing it. And that’s cool. And that can actually be a solution for people with. Entrepreneurial A DD, and they start thinking membership library of courses, and they have a hundred courses envisioned in their mind.

The signature course can be a powerful tool, but you’re right, it’s not a one size fits all in terms of curriculum design. It’s whatever your learners, what you can do that your learners are gonna get results with.

Kurt Von Ahnan: Yeah, and it takes us to the next section to talk about what, ’cause we talk about technology and tools, but I think it’s so important to recognize that no matter which course you build three short ones, four short ones versus one big one versus, six of one, half dozen the other.

However you get your content in the pages. You still need to leverage some kind of [00:14:00] interaction tool or mechanism to keep people engaged to the content and convince them to finish what they’ve paid for or invested in. Absolutely.

Chris Badgett: And that’s like the milestones chunking thing. Okay, they want this big result, but first is there like a little win here?

Little win here, and you talking about the dopamine and stuff like that. Ideally every lesson would have would feel like a win. Yeah. And satisfying in some way gratifying.

Kurt Von Ahnan: But that takes you right back to the engagements features with lifter LMS. If you want to give people a badge when they get done the first section or whatever, you can do that, you, hey, you’ve earned a badge.

Chris Badgett: Absolutely. Yeah. And transitioning to tools, we could probably do a whole episode about this. The biggest mistake I’d say is just over obsessing about the tools and the tech and maybe even falling in love with it. It happened to me. That’s why I’m a software guy now. I love tools. I love messing around with technology and building websites, and people fall in love with it.

They fall in love with automation. [00:15:00] They fall in love with producing videos and things like that. But at the end of the day, a tool is just a tool. And, some of the most successful folks I’ve seen. They’ll often launch the course without an LMS. They’ll just do a PayPal link, do like the six weeks.

We’re just gonna deliver it live on a Zoom call, and then later they turn that into a course. But they’re always focused on getting the students the results first. Then they get the WordPress website, then they get going with the tools and just, I think it’s just a fact of life. Everybody overcomplicates it as a beginner.

And then once you get some time in the trenches, you tend to simplify and really just, get as few tools from as many different companies as you need to. And then just keep it simple and never forget. The goal is not to have a fancy website and automate everything under the sun. It’s to help your learners learn.

Kurt Von Ahnan: Sometimes when I’m working independently with a client. I’ll [00:16:00] actually share stories with them about my experiences working at Suzuki or working at Ducati or working at BRP or one of these larger companies. And they’ll be like, I gotta automate this and I gotta automate that. And they haven’t even sold, they don’t have one paying customer yet and they wanna automate all these things and I have to slow ’em down and say, are you aware of how big?

BRP is, or how big Ducati is or what, you would be amazed at how many manual processes are involved in operating and running that business, right? Think about like even people that wanna change their subscription to their bundle at lifter LMS. It’s not so like this crazy automated thing, it’s like we have people that go, oh, you don’t want this one, you want this one. So many people getting involved in the tech space for maybe the first time have these unrealistic expectations that everything is ai, or everything is automated or everything. Is this odd thing that it’s not.

And then to your point, they get distracted by shiny objects and they think. If they’re gonna have a course, they need to have [00:17:00] community, or they need to have forums, or they need to have discussion groups. And it’s man, if you don’t have a thriving community already of 50 or 75 people on some Facebook page, or active users in your site, or something like that, the chances that you’ll launch a completely cold community to nobody and then have it be successful in three to six months.

Pretty slim. Pretty slim. So you, you’ve really gotta monitor yourself on what you decide to activate.

Chris Badgett: Let’s talk about sales and your, and marketing as well, which are different things by the way. I often to say, marketing is like getting the lead and sales is actually closing the lead and them becoming a customer.

And by the way. What happens after the sale? IE the delivery of the program is just as important. Some people get a little over obsessed with marketing and sales and making money online, and they almost forget they gotta deliver on the other side of that. But speaking of not automating, I [00:18:00] was on a customer site the other day and I noticed they, they had their, and they’ve been doing it for a long time and are very successful.

Multiple six figures a year, and I saw they still had their cell phone on the contact page. Their cell phone number.

Kurt Von Ahnan: Yep. You

Chris Badgett: know, the easiest way to sell something on the internet is to do what we do at Lifter and like jump out from behind the internet and be a human being and talk to people.

Yeah, that’s a pro tip. But marketing and sales, I would just say at a high level you have to do it. There’s three types of marketing. There’s content marketing which is just pick one, blog, YouTube podcast. Pick one of those three if you’re gonna do the content marketing route. The other thing you can do is relationships where you leverage other people’s.

Audience. So if you’re an expert in something but you don’t have an audience, but there’s somebody else who does go speak on their podcast, do a webinar for their audience, like leverage other people’s audiences. Ask your existing [00:19:00] customers for referrals, like work the human relationships. The third is outbound, which is not used very often, but is underused in my opinion.

If you’re clear on who your ideal learner is. People are easy to find on the internet. If you’re very specific, if you help chiropractors as an example, you can find chiropractors on the, you can find how to contact ’em, you can find their websites. If you help real estate agents, you can find them on the internet and all kinds, link into

Kurt Von Ahnan: the rescue

Chris Badgett: and just reach out to ’em, give ’em a free resource and let ’em know if they wanna learn more about your program.

That’s prospecting. And then the fourth is paid advertising. Which people get in their head, oh, I just wanna put a dollar in and have $2 come out. But in my experience, paid advertising is the last thing you should do. It’s more of a scaling strategy. Once you already have some more organic in the streets, like getting leads and closing sales.

Once you figure [00:20:00] that part out, then you can scale with ads. But I definitely recommend not starting with it.

Kurt Von Ahnan: I have always been amazed at people that are too shy, too prideful maybe is the word, to share what they’ve done with their inner circle.

So if you build a website and you come out with this really cool course and you don’t have 10 friends that you can put in that course.

Maybe five of ’em for free, but five, that’ll pay you for it, right? If you don’t have five people that say, oh yeah, I’ll take that course for me. That sounds cool. Then are you really secure with what you’ve built? You know what I mean? If you’re expecting the strangers on the internet to make you six figures a year off this product how come people that you know won’t buy it?

How come you won’t share it with people, and that’s where I’m very cognizant, like there’s some projects where I’ve put stuff out and then I realize, oh, it’s not as successful as I hoped it would be. And I [00:21:00] say wait a minute, who in my inner circles even knows that I’ve put this out?

And then I reach out to people, go, Hey, I don’t know if you know this or not, but I released a course on this, or I published this book last year. And people are like, oh crap. I didn’t know you published a book. Yeah. Do you want a copy of it? And then it’s amazing, right? You can get a, you can get an ebook right off the website for five bucks.

So do you want it or not? And then people will sign up and take it.

Chris Badgett: Excellent point. Another part of getting students and having them refer you is for them to actually be successful and tell their friends. Yeah. So in terms of guaranteeing results, or at least increasing the odds or the success rate the biggest mistake I see is that people just literally have no plan.

They think it’s just passive income, sit on the beach. Let the sales roll in a hundred percent completion rates and everything’s just gonna happen magically. But one of the [00:22:00] most overlooked things that the successful people figure out, I call it designing a support mechanism, and you can have multiple kinds of it.

I think of it. We actually have a chart of this on the the course plan challenge, which is on the sidebar of the LMS Cast podcast and on the blog sidebar as well. But it’s basically, there’s two lines. There’s the group in private and then the asynchronous and synchronous. And asynchronous means the support happens not in real time.

Synchronous means support happens in real time. So I’m just gonna lay out a menu of nine support mechanisms you could add and just pick the ones that resonate with you. ’cause you don’t have to do all these. You could do group coaching calls. We do that a lot at lifter LMS peer Masterminds. You can connect students with each other in little groups.

You can actually host a live event. Like you said, your course was [00:23:00] mixed and you had a in-person practicum. If you’re teaching mechanics, it’s really nice to actually be there and get your hands on tools and machines, right? Not just watching video

Kurt Von Ahnan: action.

Chris Badgett: And then you can do so a social learning group on your website or somewhere else.

You can do peer review where students review each other’s stuff. You can turn on comments on your lessons and let people ask for help and read past requests for help. You can do private coaching calls. This is where you can up the price of your program if you’re giving one-on-one time. An in-person VIP day is extreme, but some people do it.

That’s where they, this is like a high ticket course where you fly. A plane to the client or they fly to your office and they get like the white glove personal in-person experience. You can do a red phone service where you can, they can call you when they have challenges. You can do email support that’s [00:24:00] totally overlooked.

Easy to do. You can do private website content like with lifter, LMS private areas to, have a place for private one-on-one support on the website. I. And then I also see a lot of creators these days doing text-based support. So they’ll they’ll give unlimited texting. My wife’s a running coach and she gets texts from her clients with questions.

And sometimes you people do like group text threads with I forget the names of those tools. There’s some community one. Which one? One’s called community. That’s what Gary Vaynerchuk uses. Yeah. There’s. And telegram. I think that’s the one I was thinking of. But yeah, so like I just rattled off nine ways to support your people in addition to like lesson content, videos and PDFs and stuff.

’cause not all humans are exactly the same. So part of holding space for your clients or your learners, just a physical classroom has walls and the teacher’s there to help you. You can do that in the online world as [00:25:00] well.

Kurt Von Ahnan: And I think. Even if it sounds a tad negative, I think it’s really important to, to recognize if you create a course and you invite people to pay you to take your course, there is a certain responsibility to make sure they find success in finishing the course.

If they paid via Stripe and they want to file I want my money back chances are they’re gonna win their money back, right? I didn’t complete the course, I didn’t this, I didn’t, that I didn’t get value from it. And Stripe says, here’s your money back. But if you have. Success mechanisms in place, the request doesn’t even happen, right?

And so getting people to finish and getting people’s positive results documented is super, super important for the ongoing success of your environment.

Chris Badgett: Let’s talk about continuous improvement, persistence, and iteration. This is definitely if I had to pick three. Things that all the people that I see that are super successful with lifter LMS, [00:26:00] they all take forward and perfect action. They continuously improve. They still have imposter syndrome just like everybody else.

I. But they’re constantly like refining and learning. Like a lot of people who wanna teach are also above average, like curious learning type people.

Kurt Von Ahnan: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: So you have to use that. And that’s what entrepreneurship is. It’s really just error correction. You’re constantly like optimizing and fixing errors and claiming opportunities and continuous improvement.

What does that look like for a course creator? If you do a signature course after two years, burn it down and redo it from scratch. We’ve redone the lifter LMS Quickstart course on our academy three times, maybe four. And that’s because times have changed. We know what people need even better than we ever have.

The tools have changed. The times have changed. So we redo it, we [00:27:00] continuously improve it. Yeah. And that’s just important.

Kurt Von Ahnan: I was just thinking, I just moved a lot of our motorcycle dealership training over to a new platform, working with a business partner, and one of the things that occurred through that process was what areas of learning in the course.

Didn’t fully hit. ’cause we follow up with live sessions and we end up having a lot of discussion. And so I had to think of where are the possible gaps at? And then I worked really hard to create additional assignments or quizzes to go into really drive home the learning material. And but that’s a delicate balance because you’re like, you don’t wanna give people too much to do where it becomes overly burdensome, but you also wanna make sure that the learning points get, action to them, right? And so I went over it with my partner in the project and we added a lot of assignments and quizzes to it, and we’re getting better results. But that comes with, you have to be willing to experiment and look at the [00:28:00] results and then make the acknowledgement of, did this go the direction I wanted or do I need to curve it back a little bit?

But you can change it as you need as you go.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And going back to our previous point about, getting some live time with your students, whether by email or Zoom or whatever in person, you need to have a feedback loop. ’cause if you’re not hearing from them, you’re just guessing. But when they’re like there and raising their hand Hey, I’m struggling with this part, then you know what?

You have to improve and you can take some responsibility to do that. This is one you know a lot about, which is business to business or business to customer B2C versus B2B. So selling a course or coaching program to one person versus to a group of people. I think the big mistake here is that I think it was somebody like Les Brown who would say that the problem is that you’re just, your dreams are too small.

Like you’re aiming too low. But if you really expand your mind. If you could [00:29:00] sell your courses to a company, and let’s say it’s a, if you sold your course like to a Fortune 500 company that like all their employees needed it, you just have one customer, that big company and you’re done, you’re super successful, right?

Yep. And that’s a, that’s a dream to do that. But that’s why we built Lifter LMS groups because people kept they’re like, I need to be able to, offer this training at scale, and the company needs to see the progress and the reporting on the students and so on. But my advice here is to think of a world where you do both, like you sell to individuals, but you also have a way to get into groups like.

I believe Angela Brown might do that where she’s has training for individual house cleaner entrepreneurs, but also for house cleaning companies that have lots of house cleaners and maids within the organization. So think big like that. And it [00:30:00] might not be a company, it could be a school, it could be like a nonprofit group.

It could be a hospital or some kind of public works thing. And maybe you have a course for like the individual, but then you have a different one for the company. But just think big and just know that option is floating out there.

Kurt Von Ahnan: That opens up other avenues, right? So just because something doesn’t look like it’ll do it out of the box. Don’t make the crazy assumption that you’re outta luck. So in a B2B world, maybe you do make an agreement with. A university or some kind of company that’s doing continuing educational credits and you go, oh, I don’t know how to manage that through Lifter, so I’m just gonna pass, this would be a great opportunity if my software would, and then not ask, because we have a ton of people doing continuing education credits through Lifter LMS.

We have, we, we’ve got custom fields. You can add licensing to the [00:31:00] certificates. You can do expires a year from this issue date. You can do recertification. With cohorts. There’s a ton of opportunities within the platform that when you first see the platform, you might make an assumption you don’t have the capability to do.

Don’t think small just ’cause you think you have to think small. There are all kinds of ways to do things. I personally, I really get a kick out of the, the idea of do I want to sell to one or do I want to sell to many? I love the example of selling to many. I love the idea of, let’s say I wanna sell the course for a hundred dollars a person, and then 10 people wanna buy the course through a group.

That’s a thousand dollars. I’ll make ’em a deal. You can buy it for $900, right? They save a hundred bucks and then you think did I lose a hundred dollars or did I just gain $800? Because it’s one transaction. So for me, I’ll do one to many all day long. I just think it simplifies the process [00:32:00] immensely.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And I want to give people an analogy. If you think about books. Courses are like a modern version of books. And where have you done books in a group before, like in a classroom, like a course can be like a virtual textbook. We have lifter, LMS users who sell their course to professors at different universities that have like however many students per class.

And it’s not the whole semester, it’s just like one part of that professor’s like curriculum for the year. Is this online course? Or you could think about a book club. Imagine a bunch of women who just had a baby and they’re like, oh, let’s, and they’re in a group with the new kids and stuff, and they’re like, oh, let’s, postpartum yoga thing.

And then they take this course together and then they do it at home. They do it in the group. Like people read books in groups all over the place. [00:33:00] Think about that for.

Kurt Von Ahnan: Courses when I worked at Ducati, the CEO of Ducati put the, a copy of Strength Finders on everybody’s desk.

And just expected everybody to magically read it, ’cause the book showed up on our desks.

The same thing very much happens with a course. Sometimes the CEO sees something, they like, boom. They buy it for 80 or a hundred people and everyone gets access to it. And Lifter makes it really easy to make that kind of transaction very actionable.

Chris Badgett: Sometimes by the way, people have knowledge and skills that may not be the most exciting thing, like workplace safety, osha, whatever.

But if you’re in those safety niches, I see a lot of people signing up for lifter in safety niches in various industries, and they’re doing this at scale. So let’s, a course is cool, but let’s talk about coaching and having a community. For both as a creator, but also [00:34:00] when we’re designing our program, and I think for course creators adding at least some element of coaching, it allows you to charge more.

You’re gonna get better results. You’re gonna have that feedback loop open, so you’re gonna learn where you need to improve or what’s working well, what people like, what they don’t like, where the gaps are. And the easiest way to do that, my pro tip is to do in office hours. We started doing office hours at lifter LMS and people started coming and we’ve been doing it for seven years or something like that.

But imagine just doing one one hour time box call once a month that accompanies your course. And PE people can show up in a group. And you don’t even have to prepare If it’s like a ask me anything, open office hours. Yeah. You’re basically just creating the digital version of like office hours a teacher might have at a university or something like that.

And it can add a lot of [00:35:00] value. And then I would just say as an entrepreneur it’s good to surround yourself with other people doing this whole crazy thing of figuring out online business and. Creating information products and coaching programs. So join the communities out there and we’ve really focused on that at Lifter to provide some community as aspects.

We have a large Facebook group, a Slack community office hours for our top customers. Ask me anything for people that have questions as they’re new and getting into it and trying to figure things out. But don’t do it alone. Both as an entrepreneur and also don’t expect your students to do it alone.

I remember one of our first lifter, LMS customers said his students felt they said they felt like they were in a ghost town. And that really resonated with me. Like especially if you come in, you’re really excited. It is nice to be on a journey with some other people. We were a part of Dan Martel’s SaaS Academy and it was cool to be [00:36:00] in that community of like software entrepreneurs.

It’s not just. The value wasn’t just Dan delivering coaching and trainings, it was the whole community aspect of it all.

Kurt Von Ahnan: When I did live workshops, I actually thought the best part about the live workshop was the interaction between I. The attendees not me, right? I’ve always and that’s not imposter syndrome.

This is just being very real. I always felt like my role was to be the best facilitator to, to extract the information from the attendees and get them to share with each other rather than put the spotlight on me and just give like a lecture. And so I’ve always liked that type of training. And I once, once you get that nailed, the engagement goes through the roof.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Yeah. Once when community done well, it’s a, there’s a saying that people come for the content, but they stay for the community. Yeah, that’s really true. I’ve experienced that as a client before. [00:37:00] It’s community is super valuable and it’s becoming even more and important in a online AI kind of world, like community matters.

So let’s close out. Talking about this is definitely something I see with the successful course creators and coaches and education entrepreneurs and people building LMS sites for clients, which is personal discipline and habits. I think about it like this, a lot of people. Have a dream to write a book.

And I’m in this camp. I have written a book that is 95% done and I have not finished. But that’s because I’m really busy with lifter LMS. He is finished. See if you’re listening, Kurt is holding up one of his many published books. But to be an entrepreneur, to be a content creator, to be a, invested person trying to help your clients. You gotta have habits and [00:38:00] discipline for me personally I’m a, I know there’s these two ends of the spectrum. Some people love planning and all this, and other people like to be more improvisational. I happen to be on the scheduling end. I’m not saying that’s better.

But the improvisational end is also good and you can build discipline and habits around that as well. For me, time boxing is really important. I use the calendar heavily to make sure I’m touching the various parts of what I do and content I need to make. And even just administrative stuff that I need to do.

For example, today there’s a block of time on my calendar where I run payroll every other Thursday. Like it’s just, it happens. If I didn’t have that on the calendar, like I’m, it just creates mental overhead. I don’t need to deal with oh wait a second, is today payday or whatever. And I have like content creation time blocks.

I have other blocks for getting into various high priority projects and things [00:39:00] like that. But at the end of the day, I think the discipline comes from just having a strong why and believing in what you want to do and then and also taking care of your health. I think burnout is an extreme problem and entrepreneurship and it’s very easy to burn out.

I’ve been there. You’ve probably been there, Kurt, you out there listening has probably been there before. And just because you burned out, it doesn’t mean it’s over. It just means you let your discipline, your habits, and your health get away from you. And those are things that you can, you can’t flick a switch and have amazing habits, discipline and health, but you can work on it and be on a upward spiral instead of a downward spiral, or at least try to stabilize where you are.

And I. Spending time, just getting outside and being with your family and also doing all the business stuff you need to do it’s important to do it all.[00:40:00]

Kurt Von Ahnan: Yes. I don’t, I’m not sure how else to respond to that other than to say yes. For me it’s physical activity. Yeah. If I feel locked into a locked in or unproductive, or writer’s block or however you describe that unproductive feeling when you’re working. For me it’s physical activity. Get out, do a short bike ride, take the dog for a walk, something, come back, reset, and and get back to it.

But those. Those daily habits are super important. Like I, I still use a digital calendar. I still have people can set appointments with me through an appointment setting link, and it puts it on a Google calendar, which shares it to my Outlook calendar, which gives me notifications in my phone and all of that.

But my daily routine is I get up. I do my daily reading a little bit of prayer time, and then I review that digital calendar and I actually write it down in my digital tablet. [00:41:00] And the act of writing it down is what solidifies my expectations for the day, and then I just make sure that I hit those days marks.

What I mean and people can’t schedule an appointment with me more than less than 24 hours in advance. So I know that I don’t have any incoming appointments for that same day. So I’m able to really monitor and manage my calendar well that way.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, that’s an awesome, and I read a book, it’s an old book, but it’s a classic called Getting Things Done by David Allen from a productivity standpoint, and that was written before digital.

The book’s probably been updated to be more digital, but. The concepts in there are super powerful. So I definitely recommend reading the book getting things done. And what’s the Big Habits book by James Clear? I was thinking of the Seven Effective

Kurt Von Ahnan: Habits of Successful People, or whatever

Chris Badgett: that is.

That’s also good. That’s also good. I’m gonna get that book real quick here. ’cause Habits Serve You, atomic [00:42:00] Habits is James Clear’s book. I. Habits are just like a superpower. And I don’t think people realize, or they underestimate how much mental load and stress you take away by letting the habit or the calendar block hold that space for you so you’re not running around like a Yeah, with a monkey mind of chaos in your head and feeling overwhelmed.

And the last thing I’ll say on that is. To go easy on yourself. I call it calendar integrity. So I’m really scheduled person ’cause I’m trying to, I’m juggling a million things and sometimes I miss something on my calendar or something else expands over something else. But I don’t beat myself up. As long as I’m like hitting at about 80% calendar integrity, I’m good.

And if I fall off or if it’s worse, I just try to get it back to AD and I’m not too hard on myself. So just because you may have some setbacks. It does take time to build that, but then once you can count on your systems [00:43:00] and your routines, habits and tools, the stress goes way down.

Yeah. And that comes later in the journey. It takes a while to learn those lessons. I think it does. It does. This has been a great discussion, Kurt. I appreciate it. I wanted to get together with you ’cause we’ve been doing this for a long time and I know we’ve seen patterns just over a decade plus in our own lives and also in, the tens of thousands, of course creators we’ve come across and interact with.

So we want to share some top, success patterns and patterns that don’t always work out and to watch out for. But thank you for coming on the show. I really appreciate it. Is there anywhere. You’d like people to connect with you.

Kurt Von Ahnan: Just two, two main things. Anything that’s business related for me is gonna be on Ana Nomas.

So Ana Nomas on x on Facebook our own website, ana nomas.com. And if you wanna make that personal [00:44:00] connection I really hold that up to my LinkedIn account ’cause I’m the only Kurt Van Onan on LinkedIn. So when you find me, you know you got the right guy, hit connect and and we’ll see what we have in store for each other.

You’re muted.

Chris Badgett: Thank you. Thanks for coming on, Kurt. Go connect with Kurt. He is an awesome guy to have in your corner. You can find me over at lifter LMS and on Twitter. For this episode, I wish you all the best success building your online education company. Reach out to us if there’s anything we can do to help join our communities and we will catch you in the next show.

Take care.

I.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you [email protected] slash gift. Go to lifter [00:45:00] lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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In this LMScast episode, student confidence coach Anita Van Rooyen describes how she used LifterLMS to target groups rather than individuals in order to effectively sell over 5,000 course enrollments.

Instead of promoting to students individually, she collaborated with educational institutions and schools to provide her confidence-boosting activities in large quantities. She made it possible for companies to enroll and manage whole student cohorts using LifterLMS’s group enrollment functionality, with group leaders managing registrations and monitoring progress.

By designing unique access plans for various institutions, Anita customized her services to better suit their unique requirements and financial constraints. Additionally, she monitored student participation and results using LifterLMS’s reporting features, which assisted her in improving her classes over time.

Her strategy demonstrates how coaches and educators may effectively reach a wider audience by leveraging technology in conjunction with a strong value offer.

Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

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Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS Cast. I’m joined by a special guest. Her name is Anita Vanian. She’s from Australia, she’s a student’s confidence coach. And she’s built a cool platform with lifter LMS. We’re gonna dig into her story as a coach, as someone who helps people and cares deeply about the people she’s helping.

But first, welcome to the show, Anita. Thank you so much for having me, Chris. I’m so excited to be here. Awesome. I love your excitement and your energy. I’ve seen it on social media where you’re pumped when things are going and it’s a lot. It gives me great joy to see that stuff. I. But tell us what is student confidence.com au all about?

Anita Van Rooyen: Yeah, so we help students and mostly international students to build confidence, wellbeing to then help providers, so universities, colleges student accommodation providers. To help their students to what we call stay, play, and pay. So there’s a lot of attrition rates in universities and colleges, so helping the providers support the students in their wellbeing so that they stay, hang around, getting engaged and involved in things, and then pay their fees, which is the important part.

Chris Badgett: So is it is it like the college and the schools that have international students, you’re helping them build the confidence of international students? 

Anita Van Rooyen: Yes. Yeah. So we, like our client is the university’s, the colleges and then the user is the students. 

Chris Badgett: So the students are in your courses? 

Anita Van Rooyen: Yes.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. What are some of the biggest challenges that those students have? I know I’ve traveled a lot around the world, like it’s really hard to be in another country, but tell us more. 

Anita Van Rooyen: Yeah, it’s super difficult and especially with students where, obviously English isn’t their first language and there’s a lot of cultural differences.

So a lot of students that may have even been quite confident when they were back home in their home country. Come to a whole nother country and start freaking out a little bit because there’s, they’ve got no certainty. There’s nothing that they have that is. Normal like they were back at home.

So even things like that we take for granted jumping on public transport or going to the supermarket or going to the movies or anything like that is a really different experience for them. And so they oftentimes, lose a lot of confidence in that that journey.

Chris Badgett: Is there a particular role at the university that, is that you reach out to, to provide the resource to, is it like a guidance counselor or a professor or like the admissions department? Who is it? 

Anita Van Rooyen: It is all of the above okay. Universities are notoriously siloed, so yeah, everybody kind of works in their own little bucket, so that’s hard, but also full of opportunities because it means that you can sell the same program into a number of different places.

For some universities it’s the wellbeing counselors. For some universities it’s also. Different faculties. For some universities it’s also like the admissions team and the student success team and the and. 

Chris Badgett: Tell us about, did you do this before, like in a kind of in-person format, or how did you, how did this niche develop for you?

Anita Van Rooyen: Yeah, look, it’s it’s really interesting. I started, I retrained about 10 years ago as a life coach focusing on confidence. I used to be the shyest person in the universe. Which I also find difficult to believe myself sometimes. But super shy retrained as in coaching and through that, wanted to have some online courses as a, an offering, a free offering to get people to go, oh yeah, okay.

She sounds like she knows what she’s talking about, to then take on my in-person, one-on-one coaching services, things like that. I started with Lifter, I think maybe eight years ago, something like that. I put my, yeah, I did my first course about that long ago. And I looked around all over the place to try and find, okay, I am not a tech person.

I need something that I can manage to do by myself as a new founder. No, no experience in the tech world at all. Looked at a lot of different platforms and found lifter and went, oh, I can actually do this. I don’t need to have technical expertise. I don’t need to build a platform myself. All that kind of thing.

So created some little videos. I look back and go, oh my God, they’re terrible. It didn’t matter. It was really important just to. Make that start point. And that was, as I said, I think about eight years ago. And look, it’s been this kind of a, as in business, it’s this up and down ebb and flow of am I doing the right thing?

Am I selling the right thing? All that kind of stuff. So I still do in-person programs and workshops with universities with Covid. Then we went to live. Online in where I live in Melbourne, we had very long lockdowns, insanely long. So everything got transferred to, live by Zoom and that kind of thing.

And I also still had prerecorded content as well and always through lifter. 

Chris Badgett: Did you start with international students or were you in love with the confidence kind of mindset, coaching niche? 

Anita Van Rooyen: Yeah. Look, I started working with dancers and performers. 

Chris Badgett: Okay. 

Anita Van Rooyen: I used, yeah, I used to do a lot of Latin dancing and I could see that there was a really big.

Space, a really big gap there between Stu, people that would come and learn how to dance, and then those that would go take the next step and do social dancing, and then those that would perform and all of those confidence challenges that sort of came around with that. So started working with dancers and performers.

Realized I didn’t love it. I loved the confidence in building the professional and personal development for people but didn’t love working with dancers. And I think it was they wanted to be shiny on stage for three minutes, four minutes. And if their, like rest of their life was went to the dogs, that didn’t matter.

I wanted people to have a great life, not just a great sort of four minutes. So finished working with them and had another moment of, I don’t know who I’m working with, and like I meditate most mornings, and in one of my meditations I literally ask myself, who, like, why did you start this in the first place?

Why did you go down this path of wanting to do this? And. Answer came back straight away. You wanna help people with life skills. And to this day, I still don’t know how I went from that meditation to coming into this office, typing into my computer, student accommodation near me, getting on the phone and saying who looks after the wellbeing and resilience of your students?

They said, no one. And I went that’s what I do. I had no idea what I was doing, but that’s what I do. ’cause I could tell that there was a whole lot of stuff that was relatable from, performing to performing in exams, for example. And there was a lot of correlation there and transferable knowledge.

And that’s how I started. I knew a total of zero people in. International education and in universities. So started from an absolute standing start. Wow. Yeah. That’s amazing. That’s amazing. And finding your niche is often a windy road, so it makes you so windy, and curl in the loop for loops and all kinds of things.

Chris Badgett: I love that insight too, I’m not a great dancer, but like I understand there’s that moment you have to perform and it’s a slice of life. But if you can do your thing for like the whole slice of life, it just has more impact in a way. Not that dancing confidence isn’t important. That’s really cool insight.

Yeah. And I’m glad that meditation brought that to you. 

Anita Van Rooyen: Oh, it was. It was the best meditation I think I’ve ever done. 

Chris Badgett: Just in this subject matter expertise, just for anybody who may be struggling with confidence, what are some of the core things that you unlock and help people figure out and find their way?

Anita Van Rooyen: Yeah, I think, look I’ve also worked with a lot of entrepreneurs in my work career, and what I noticed is that. Belief, self-belief, the beliefs you have about who you are, what the world is, all that kind of thing. So much impacts either in a positive or negative way, whether you proceed, whether you move forward in life, whether you move forward with your idea, with your course, with whatever it may be.

And so like I’m a coach, I have a coach, and we work on beliefs. A lot about, what are the beliefs that I have and are they helping me? Are they serving me? And I now do that with the students that I work with as well. So take them through exercises around identifying those beliefs that are not useful.

Oftentimes it’s stuff that we, even as adults, we inherit from our parents and we just keep a hold of them and don’t ever. Really explore what they’re doing. And so helping people explore what those beliefs are that hold them back and allowing them if they choose to make a decision to dump them if they want to or if they keep them knowing what the impact of that is and then deciding on what the beliefs are that they want for themselves and becomes a really powerful space of.

Becoming the boss of yourself. And I think for a lot of us, we have, there’s a really, it’s really easy to start, go, oh, my parents, or oh, my boss, or, oh my this or my that. And starting to take that ownership of your life and your results and your non results becomes. It’s scary thing because when you are responsible for things, then it can become really scary, but it’s also fantastically empowering when you have those results and you know that it’s on you as well.

Chris Badgett: What’s an example positive belief that you use? Like just going a little meta, as a course creator, as a coach. Then what’s an example of a negative belief you had to discard to be effective and create the impact you want to create? 

Anita Van Rooyen: I’m gonna go the other way around ’cause I always like to finish on a positive.

Okay. So the one that I needed to dump, which was deeply entrenched in me for whatever reason, was the belief that I’m not good enough and. I’m not good enough to speak in front of people. I’m not good enough to record myself. And ‘m not good enough to, for people to pay me to do stuff. I’m not good enough to have friends.

I’m like, it just was this pervasive and invasive and insidious kind of thing that was taking up a lot of space in my life. So moving through that, and I had to do that a number of different levels in life. And then. Shifting that one out. And I think shifting it up to, oh, literally like I’m not kind like the opposite.

I am worthy. I am worthy of having nice things and I am worthy of having results and I am worthy of all these things and I have put in the hard work and I’m worthy then of receiving the results from that. That was, that’s I think, been the. Biggest Chunkiest one. Yeah, lots of other stuff, but that’s been the most impactful.

Chris Badgett: Speaking of beliefs, it sounds like eight years ago there was a moment where you had a belief like, I need to get a website. I need to take control of my online presence or whatever. How did you get into WordPress and like having a website that you could drive? 

Anita Van Rooyen: I literally knew that I needed to have something that was.

Non-techie friendly that had support built into it that was a low or no cost entry point so that I could. Test stuff out and see if this was actually even a thing or not. At one point I will let you know that I swayed I swayed from the fold and went and tried out another one. Am I allowed to say which one it was?

Learn. Is it Learn Dash, okay. Yep. And oh my God, like it’s so complicated, so overwhelming, so complex. And I just went I put some time and energy into it and then went, this is like lifter. Let me just go back to Lifter. Let me just go back to Lifter. ’cause it’s simple. Simple is good. In my world. I don’t need things to be over complicated.

There is that ability to add and modify and all the different add-on bits. And it’s on a, on that platform where other developers have come in and been able to create bits and pieces that you can add onto it. So it’s so totally customizable. The support that I have got from the team has always been super on point and.

I love that. ’cause as a, an individual, like I now have a guy that helps me with a couple of little techie bits that I just, I know that, needs to happen. But for the most part, like I still upload all the videos. I create all the stuff on the platform and. And it’s easy. And that’s what I love.

’cause easy is good in tech world. And yeah, and it’s just, it has literally been like an eight year journey. A little swim off to the left for a moment with Learn Dash and then come back and I don’t regret it for a single second. 

Chris Badgett: Do you remember how you first found lifter LMS or discovered what you wanted to do with your, for your LMS aspect of your website?

Anita Van Rooyen: I look, I remember, I think like most people, jumping on Google and going what’s a good learning system? I didn’t even know. What to call it like that? It was an LMSI just was like, how do you make course, how do you make a course? Look through a couple of different sort of, review sites and, and they’d have 10 different options and reading through them and having a bit of a look.

And it did become quite the job to work out which one but the name lifter kept coming up. And it kept coming up and it kept coming up. As, recommended. And the more then I looked into it and I think also what I really loved was that space of being able to try it out for free.

Yeah. As a micro micro business with zero budget not even really a beer budget on a like zero budget. I wanted to have something that I could try out just the base, see how usable it was, see what it could do. And I love that about Lifter and how you guys. Work things and how you guys make your business.

Because supporting entrepreneurs at that really early stage when you have no money, but you’ve got energy and you’ve got all that kind of stuff and you just want it to happen. Having that space where you can try things out and have a go and. It still looks really professional without having to pay huge, like monthly fees and all kinds of stuff like that.

I love the intention behind that of wanting to help others, wanting to help entrepreneur entrepreneurs to start up and be successful. And so that was really what got me over the line is the sense that you are in it with us. That made me just okay, these guys get it. And that was just that, that sold me.

And so I love that. Like I’ve, checked out some other stuff over time but always come back to Lifter for its simplicity for the way that you run your business. And I love it. 

Chris Badgett: I appreciate that. We do feel strongly about that in the sense of no course creator left behind.

Like we’re trying to help as much as we possibly can. And I 

Anita Van Rooyen: think that comes through in everything that I’ve seen and everything. I. Even when I’ve been on the free not paid, you a thing for a number of years, then you guys have still supported, you’ve still, like when I’ve sent support requests, you’ve still rep replied to them, you’re still giving me good advice, all that kind of thing.

And that makes your business really sticky. I appreciate that. I’m glad to hear all that. Is there any like specific features in the product that you really love or use a lot as an example? 

Look, I don’t use quizzes but I have now got, I’m gonna sound really like a bit of a wally, but I’ve got like a tech stack now, which I feel fancy saying.

’cause I use Lifter. I’ve now I use bunny.net for storage. Yeah. And Presto player. Yeah, to have the overlays and some fancy kind of fun things like that for the students. It took me, it did take me a hot minute to work out how to make all of that kind of work together, but now it is and it’s just, it’s fantastic.

It’s, I don’t know, what do I love about it? I think the ease. That’s, I know there’s not really a specific feature that I use so much, but the ease of being able to create content, create courses, just make stuff happen without the need for a developer. I was literally had a meeting with a lady the other day that I’ve known for a couple of years, and she went down the path of creating a whole platform.

Herself. I’m like, from scratch. Like, why would you do that? Why would you do that? She told me that she spent well over a hundred thousand, she thinks is probably closer to 200,000 on developers, on the on all sorts of stuff. And I’m like, girl, what are you thinking? There’s so much out there. And I told her about Lifter.

I tell everybody about Lifter. I couldn’t believe that she’d spent that much money on a platform when there are these amazing platforms out there that have got support built into them, all that kind of stuff. So yeah, I’m a, I feel like I’m now super fangirling on you, but I’m just, I love what you do and I’m so grateful.

Chris Badgett: We appreciate it. I’m glad it’s working out for you. And you mentioned like. Selling to groups? Are you using the groups add-on? Are you, tell us about what you’re doing from the groups aspect, because a lot of course, creators are going one-to-one, but it sounds like you’re going one to many. So what are you doing there?

Anita Van Rooyen: Yeah, look, I started one-to-one and realized that was a really hard slog. Even tried, I think I went on to Coursera. For a moment, put a couple of courses up on there. And again, you just, you don’t have control over stuff. So decided that within the university and higher education space that I.

Rather than students having to pay for things, the universities and colleges can pay. They’ve got budget for these kind of programs. So the groups add on that I bought has been incredibly useful. I now make a different group for each different provider and then within that, even each different semester.

Because then I can do reporting on this provider, these students in this semester and it just works. I use that combined with the membership area. So create different memberships that then the groups have access to whatever level membership that they purchase. So that has proven to be really successful.

We’ve now sold, I think 5,000 registrations. One, yeah. I’m, I’ve made it intentionally really cost effective. So like the base, like what we call the base kind of platform is $2 per student. When bought in bulk I’ve now got like a minimum amount that people need to pay. So even if they’ve got a hundred students, there’s a minimum sort of spend required because of the setup and.

$2 a student is super, super cheap, right? Then I’ve got other content that I’ve added on in collaboration with some other entrepreneurs as well. Small business owners who are experts in different areas. One in job seeking, one in financial literacy, another one in for like Asian students.

Do you need to have an English name? Because. There’s all of these different things that international students really need. So having that space of being able to collaborate with other other content producers as well, and put their content on my platform, and then we have a profit sharing arrangement, it’s win.

And I love that. 

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Are there any other tools you mentioned in your tech stack that you love, like you mentioned presto player bunny.net. Like what do you use for hosting, what do you use to manage your email list? Any other plugins you use, what theme do you use? That kind of thing. 

Anita Van Rooyen: I would love to be able to tell you what plug what theme we use.

I can’t exactly remember because my. Tech guy put that on there. When at the moment we are not using the, what’s the one you’ve got iPilot? Yeah. We’re not using that at the moment because I just recently bought the Infinity bundle. Okay. So going through all that different stuff because because I set the platform up to be for group sales.

It’s like almost now working backwards to make things accessible for individuals as well. Okay. We’re just about to do the, like a stripe add in that’s part of the bundle. And some other different things. We’ve also got the advanced videos. We use that as well to make sure that students aren’t just going complete.

’cause we have that. With some students who were like, who were given an incentive to watch the videos by their provider and just went ding. So added on the advanced videos. So yeah, and now as I said, working backwards to make the courses available to.

Individuals. So students that are like home, say home stay students or students who are homeschooling, where it’s an individual family that can then purchase this to get access to communication skills and stress management and confidence skills and those kind of things that are on the platform.

Chris Badgett: Are you mostly focused on Australia or is this branching outside of. Oz 

Anita Van Rooyen: the great thing because it’s an online prerecorded on demand, all of those things with and now, ’cause there’s certificates, we call it micro microcredentials ’cause that’s what universities love to hear. It is universal. So we’ve started in Australia because that’s where I am.

And obviously now looking at. Other countries where there is, English speakers. We’ve also, through bunny.net, have put on captions in a number of different languages, including Chinese Hindi and Spanish. So there’s all these kind of bonus, extra things that the providers get that make it super global.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. That’s awesome. Yeah, I noticed. I know. It’s 

Anita Van Rooyen: very exciting. 

Chris Badgett: I, it’s a big issue. That’s why I love when people find international student confidence is a niche, but even where I live in Maine, my daughter goes to a private school. There’s a lot of international students, and I’m thinking about like how important the student confidence thing is.

It’s, yeah it’s very important. 

Anita Van Rooyen: And it’s really it’s really interesting because like I’m in this niche of international students, but really it’s the same for domestic students around the world as well. A lot of them are struggling with, mental health challenges, confidence challenges, all kinds of things like that as well.

So I’m hoping that also we can expand into domestic students, high school students and build lives. 

Chris Badgett: It’s a big issue. Yeah. And just to double click on that a little bit we’re of a different generation, you and I, but like maybe shed some insight on confidence issues that younger generations may have these days that are a little different from the world we came from.

What’s changed or what’s emergent these days? 

Anita Van Rooyen: I think the biggest one is this horrible, terrible disease I call comparisonitis. Social media and stuff. Social media, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. That comparison between, the perfection of filters on screen and what people see in themselves.

And, that comes from comparing the brightest, shiniest outside of other people to the darkest horriblest, idea of yourself and going, oh, they’re so amazing and their life is fantastic and they’re doing all these things and I’m just me. So I think that one is the biggest challenge.

Chris Badgett: I can only imagine because I came from a world, pre-internet and my comparison set was like, whatever, 5,200 people, not 2 million, a billion, two, 2 billion. It’s, that’s so different. 

Anita Van Rooyen: Yeah. Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: For a developing mind and Oh, 

Anita Van Rooyen: absolutely. Absolutely. And look, I think the other one that we have, I have to talk about is the impact of Covid and lockdowns.

And, we’re seeing now I was talking to a couple of university providers and they were saying that I. This year for students and that’s domestic and international, that this year has been the worst for mental health and behavioral challenges. And I just, with my human behavior hat on went, okay, so let’s go back.

So these students that are in a university now, first year we’re in year eight. When Lockdowns first happened, where is the biggest amount of behavioral challenges in school is year eight students, year eight and year nine. And again, from that human behavior perspective, when trauma happens, which Covid was a form of trauma development, shuts down.

So for those students who were okay, COVID is actually great, they’re doing pretty well. For those that really struggled during lockdowns without seeing their friends and being at school and all that kind of thing, this is a trauma. And so their like adult development prog progress shuts down.

So there is these really huge challenges and it’s only gonna get worse ’cause. There’s still a whole lot of students that are going through, getting older in school, but their development level, social development, emotional development level is shut down. So I think there’s a lot of stuff to, to come.

Chris Badgett: That makes sense. Tell us a little bit about your team. I believe you have other coaches as well, and you have a tech person, so an education entrepreneur, they do as much as they can, but then they start, it seems many times they start, filling in team members and, building a business of a community of folks to help.

What does your team set look like? 

Anita Van Rooyen: Look, they’re all part-timers or casual, so like I don’t have a massive team around me. I am still very bootstrappy cashflow conscious, all that kind of thing. Yeah. My tech guy is a guy that I literally. Call when I need to send him an email and say, Hey, this is going wrong.

Can you help me fix it? Or Can you upgrade this or can you do that? So yeah, and the other coaches are also people that I call on as need. Still a teeny tiny business. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Tell us a little bit more just about the impact of your platform. Is that you’ve helped like about 5,000 plus students, which is amazing.

What are some of the success stories or just impact you’re seeing from your work that brings you motivation to keep going and doing this project? 

Anita Van Rooyen: I think. Like in the within the course, I have an area after each lesson that’s what’s the, use the usefulness of this piece of content like for each lesson and.

I wanna make sure that the content remains relevant as time changes. And what we’re finding is that students consistently rate the content really useful to them. It’s short bits of content, five to 10 minutes long maximum because short attention spans so that’s been really. Great.

And then also at the end of each kind of course there is a space there that’s open for free text of what’s been the biggest learning, what have you loved, what’s been the biggest takeaway for you and the students. Then I. Not all of them, but we’ll oftentimes put in some content around how they now feel more confident to talk to other students, or they feel more confident to start engaging with the next door neighbor, that they’ve been living next to for five years and have never spoken to and now.

If they’re talking to them or it’s helped them to feel more more confident to want to volunteer in the community and those kind of things. Other students have said that they now feel that they can contribute in class, whereas before they were sitting there, they might know the answer, but they wouldn’t add to the conversation in class.

And now they’re. Putting their hand up and wanting to contribute and those kind of things and those stories of a student that’s now moving forward in their life more easily. They’ve got themself, the job, all that kind of thing. That’s the reason I get outta bed. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. That’s amazing.

Anita Van Rooyen: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: In terms of courses or instructional design, curriculum design, is it like one main course or you have a bunch of different courses and you mentioned using memberships and groups as well, but what’s your like kind of framework for the architecture of the program? 

Anita Van Rooyen: Yep. So there is the kind of what we call the base platform is three mini micro-credential.

Courses. One is communication skills, one is stress management, and the other one is around building confidence in life. Then there’s the, there’s add on. So universities have to buy the base platform and then they can add on other modules as well. So they can add on a module called I just need a Job, which is to help students.

Get a job. ’cause they, we hear this all the time. Oh, I just need a job. So we called it, I just need a job. And then there’s financial literacy as well because it’s another really big challenge for students. And then that third one of, do I need an English name? Because that’s what students ask. So the providers can just by the base platform or they can then choose to add on any of those modules that they choose.

And that’s just an extra kind of couple of dollars. Per module. But then that goes across the board to their students. So the way we’ve set it up is that with each new intake of students, so whether it’s semester or trimester that the universities work on that, they report back to us and say, this is how many students we’ve got coming in this semester.

Invoice us for this many people. 

Chris Badgett: Wow. That’s very cool. And you’re a very talented copywriter. I know because the, it’s all about feedback loops. So if this, you keep hearing, I need a job, I need a product named, I need a, 

Anita Van Rooyen: I just need a job. Yeah. And it’s using, it’s like, it’s literally using the language that the students use and that creates.

Then that stickiness with them. The other thing that we’ve done also is with a number of the add-on courses, especially with the one I just need a job because that’s a very popular one with students, is to then cross reference other content that I’ve got on that base platform. So when we’re talking about I just need a job.

Okay, when you’re going for an interview, you may also need these confident skills. So have a look at these lessons and put hyperlinks into there, into the other content so that there is that double space of getting in results because the universities wanna see that students are using it, how they’re using it.

That kind of reporting. So having those courses cross-reference each other a bit means that then there’s more likelihood that students will go and have a look at other content that they may not necessarily look at. 

Chris Badgett: Wow, that’s amazing. What, how long does it take you as an example to make the module, I need a job?

Like when you realized there was a need for that, what was the process and timeline for, okay, we’re gonna add this Add-on mini course. 

Anita Van Rooyen: Yep. So that was one that I did with a career coach. So some of that was, we literally did a Zoom meeting that we recorded together. She. Planned out a bit of a a broad script, and we went through that.

For the ones that I did myself, I literally just went, okay, in communication skills, what are the things that students would need? And each of those lessons is each of those courses is 14 lessons so that you could do it in. Over two weeks if you did one at one every day. And it was literally started off as a brain dump of this is the questions that students would ask about.

Okay, if I was looking to build my communication skills, what is it that I would need? So some of it was based on what I know students want. And then other parts of it was what I know that students need. Because they are not always the same thing. Yeah. And it’s one of those challenges ’cause a lot of providers, a lot of universities say, oh yeah, we’ll ask the students, you know exactly what they want and we’ll give them what they want.

I’m like, sure. I also need to give them what they need that they don’t know. That they don’t know that they need. So having that insight means that then we can give them both of those sides of the coin. And for me, when I’m creating content I love to wing it. Probably shouldn’t say that, but I love to win it.

It’s art and 

Chris Badgett: science, right? There’s art too. 

Anita Van Rooyen: Totally. Totally. So I will have a couple of dot points of the things that I absolutely wanna cover. And I’ve got some examples and some stories and stuff that I weave into it, but I don’t have a script. I don’t work that way very well. I love free balling it, and just seeing.

Where it goes and then edit it as need be. But I’ve found having that intention of making them really short, really sharp, having a review point at the end to cover off. Okay. These are the main things that we looked at has been really helpful. And it’s meant that I haven’t needed to go into like overwhelm of, oh my God, this is all so much.

I have to have everything scripted and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Although what I can say, I look back and the first couple of courses that I created were very scripted. Very scripted. And I didn’t put my face on the camera. I had slides because I was, it was a slideshow and I was, ’cause I was still really in that space of.

I’m not very confident. I’m a confidence coach, but I’m still not very confident in this level of stuff. And so I, it was a slideshow with a voice record behind it, and there was nothing wrong with that. I look back now and think, oh, that’s a bit lame. But I pulled that out. I had a provider a couple of years ago who was like, oh, do you have something that’s really short?

I said, oh, actually I’ve got this program that I created, eight years ago, whatever. And the students still got value out of it, so I was like, you know what, like we don’t have to have perfect content. It doesn’t have to be super polished. The lighting doesn’t have to be perfect. The microphone doesn’t have to be perfect.

Nothing has to be perfect if you go in and deliver some stuff with passion and enthusiasm about any topic. Then that gets received really well. 

Chris Badgett: You mentioned one of the qualities I see in people that are successful with these types of projects, which is consistent and perfect action and continuous improvement.

Anita Van Rooyen: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: And you’ve great, given some great advice there. Is there any other advice you’ve been at this for eight years for somebody, sometimes it’s slow in the beginning or it’s hard to get started. Any other tips around. Just keeping moving on and, finding your way. 

Anita Van Rooyen: I think the biggest tip is get out of your own way.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. 

Anita Van Rooyen: Our mindset is so powerful. It’s the one thing that will stop us more certainly than anything else. At all. If your mindset is in that space of whatever happens, I’ll just keep going, then it doesn’t matter if the technology doesn’t work or if the microphone doesn’t work properly or anything doesn’t happen.

If you don’t get sales immediately, when you put more work into your mindset and yourself than any other thing, everything else works out for you. 

Chris Badgett: This is a popular question. It is around like getting students, or in your case, like getting providers ’cause you’re selling to groups mostly. You got some sales initially, but what is your, what powers your marketing engine?

How do you think about growth and like getting new sales? 

Anita Van Rooyen: Yeah, that’s always the challenge is, the world domination ever growing expansion. And look, I’m probably one of the worst people to ask ’cause I am the least business person I know. And run a lot by the seat of my pants rather than a lot of planned things.

But like I put content out regularly. I 

Chris Badgett: what type of content? Like videos or blog posts or what newsletter? 

Anita Van Rooyen: I use Link. I use LinkedIn a lot. 

Chris Badgett: Okay. 

Anita Van Rooyen: Because all of the people that I’m wanting to connect with are all on LinkedIn emails, I found that LinkedIn has been more. Useful than emails even than bulk emails because emails, when you’re talking to the vice chancellor of a university or a dean or something like that, they oftentimes have their gatekeeper, and so your emails don’t necessarily get through.

LinkedIn is more of a personal thing. It’s on your phone. People are looking at it on like weird o’clock, like Sunday night at 8:00 PM. I will get people except my LinkedIn requests, because the end of the weekend they’re sitting watching TV or something and they’ll have a bit of a scroll and go, oh yeah, I’ll add her.

And so you know that you’re getting to directly to some decision makers. What’s also been really useful for us is. Going and putting ourselves out there for a number of different awards and things like that. So we’ve won a couple of innovation awards and student Services awards, and we just were listed recently in an Australian Government Department of Education, best Practice Guide for International Student Wellbeing.

So that gives us some of that gravitas of. Okay, we’ve been recognized by somebody else rather than you just beating on your own chest saying how wonderful you are. There’s people outside of that have said, yeah, okay, you’re doing some cool stuff. And, which is great ’cause the stuff that I do is a little off center, right?

It’s a little, it’s a little, Mindy and it’s experiential and all kinds of things like that. It is a bit left of center and that means that sometimes it’s seen as a bit fluffy. I always get student testimonials when I’m doing things. Use those a lot because the student voice is really important.

The biggest thing that I learned in my business, which I only learned a couple of years ago, was. That when I am selling to universities and colleges, rather than telling a story about student wellbeing, which is what I do, and student confidence, it’s what is it that the university, the person who’s buying it, what is it that they need?

So I think we started, I started off saying about how we work with providers to help them. Helps students to stay, play, and pay because retention, engagement and completionis their number one driver. That’s their 

Chris Badgett: metrics. 

Anita Van Rooyen: That’s the metric that they have. Yeah. Yeah. And it took me ages to work that out.

And I ended up getting advice from another guy who works in this space and he said, Anita, like all your website is talking about is wellbeing and wellbeing, and what they care about is. Student retention, engagement, and completion. How you do that, they don’t care. There’s some legal requirements that they have to have some stuff, but retention, engagement, completion, that’s what they care about.

So make everything related to that and that has super helped me with getting more sales. 

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. You say you’re not that salesy, businessy marketing, but you’re like a brilliant copywriter. I’m reading the headline on your homepage and it’s helping your students to stay, pay and repay or stay play and repay.

And 

Anita Van Rooyen: repay. Yeah. And that’s 

Chris Badgett: yeah. That’s brilliant. That’s. Talking to the buyer directly and their  term. Yeah. And how you do that. You have your secret sauce and your method. 

Anita Van Rooyen: Yeah. And it’s, it’s, that’s through innovative wellbeing, confidence, progress, blah, blah, blah, blah. But this is what you want.

This is what we deliver. 

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. 

Anita Van Rooyen: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: Results based learning. Anita, this has been an awesome conversation. Thank you for being a shining light. I’m so happy you’ve been around for eight years and, I think what makes me the most excited is the, the students you’re helping with their confidence.

That’s such a impact and a positive ripple you put out into the world. So good on you for doing that. And keep up the amazing work. That’s Anita Van Ruen. She’s a student confidence.com au. Any final words for those out there listening in terms of building their confidence or getting out there and teaching online?

Anita Van Rooyen: Give it a crack. I think the biggest thing that, the one that was the hardest learning for me was get out of your own way. Do more work on yourself than on your business because it repays thousands of times over and connect with other like-minded businesses, entrepreneurs. It’s the reason why I have.

Come back to Lifter any time that I’ve gone, oh, let me just check that out. I’ve always come back to Lifter. ’cause it’s really, I love it. I love it. And I think that, I do feel, it does feel like you’re in, that you’re in the, you’re in it with us. You’re in the trenches with us. And creating a group of people around you.

Collaboration is the new black. 

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Anita, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Go check out student confidence.com au and Anita, thanks again for coming and we’ll have to do this again down the road in a couple years and see the more impact you’ve created in the world. 

Anita Van Rooyen: I’d love to. Thanks so much, Chris.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you [email protected] slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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James Kemp’s genuineness and depth in this LMSCast episode, which discusses what it truly takes to create and develop a product that serves millions of people, is what makes it so ideal and genuine. In this LMScast, James talks about how he went from working as a web designer at a small business to being the Core Product Manager at WooCommerce. His tone is really accessible and grounded.

He candidly discusses the difficulties, trials, and epiphanies that molded his journey rather than only highlighting his accomplishments. James provides insightful information about how WooCommerce strikes a balance between usability and complexity, particularly for novice and expert users, demonstrating a thorough comprehension of both product design and user experience.

He adds a welcome element of candor by being open about the platform’s present shortcomings and areas for development. James discusses his personal drive to make a significant contribution to the open-source eCommerce industry in addition to the technical aspects.

All of this, together with the organic flow and respect between him and presenter Chris Badgett, makes this LMSCast episode not just educational but also really motivating and real.

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Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS Cast. I’m joined by a special guest and friend. His name is James Kemp. He’s the core product manager at WooCommerce. I’ve known James for a long time. He has an awesome Twitter. You can find him at James C. Kemp on Twitter or X. But first, welcome to the show, James.

James Kemp: Yeah, thanks Chris. Good to be here finally. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Awesome, man. It’s, we’re gonna have an exciting conversation around WooCommerce and just your life and what you do with Woo. But first tell us about [00:01:00] your role at WooCommerce. What do you do there? 

James Kemp: Yeah, like you said core products manager and that’s yeah I wanna say a fairly new role, but it is a new role at WooCommerce.

Prior to that, I was a product manager. I. At WooCommerce and the difference there is that a product manager focuses on specific they tend to have specific focus areas. So my focus area prior to being core product manager was order management. So I would focus on products that enhance or features improvements that kind of enhanced the order management experience.

Whereas now the core product manager role is working alongside all of the other product managers and creating a more cohesive vision of every aspect of WooCommerce and. Joining the dots between the different teams within [00:02:00] WooCommerce and what each each product manager and each subsequent engineering team and design team are working on, but also connecting the users and, the merchants, the builders and their experience and what they’re expecting from WooCommerce on the whole, yeah, and I’m also I’m helping out a little bit with some platform stuff. So we separated between product and platform. And product is essentially the experience that either a merchant or a user or a customer on a WooCommerce store would have. And platform is more like behind the scenes kind of stuff.

Like performance and things like that. I’m helping it a little bit with platform at the moment as well, just because the person who usually leads that is on sabbatical. So yeah, that’s that’s me at the moment. 

Chris Badgett: Very cool. And similar to Lifter LMS, which has a free core [00:03:00] plugin.

WooCommerce has a free core plugin and then tons of extensions. Do you have any sense of how many add-ons for WooCommerce exists? It’s thousands, I’m guessing. But 

James Kemp: yeah, I would say thousands. I did have the number on our marketplace. So WooCommerce has a marketplace typically, or Yeah in the past.

Primarily that is for premium extension. So it’s a marketplace where you buy a product to enhance WooCommerce. They also had they would list SaaS, software as a service based products as well in the marketplace. And I think they’re looking at listing free products now as well, which will be interesting.

But yeah, I believe on the marketplace and I have this number somewhere, but I did not bring it with me. There’s thousands on that marketplace alone. Then not all, WooCommerce extensions are in that marketplace. So yeah, there’s definitely a big collection of extensions available

Chris Badgett: Going back to Core, I know from the LMS space, it sounds easy, like in the beginning it’s like for the user, they just wanna put some of course together, put some videos in it, sell access to it. But over time what happens is people start asking for more and more. And I know the same is true in e-commerce.

The beginner user, in their mind, they’re just like, I just wanna be able to sell a product for my website, which on the surface sounds pretty. Straightforward in the sense that okay, there’s a product and we can take billing, and then they’re either gonna get it mailed to them or it’s a digital product, but it’s not that simple.

And there’s a lot of complexity that grows over decades. But you still wanna protect the user, particularly a first time user or beginning beginner user, or in your case store owner to be able to get in there and get started without getting overwhelmed. So how do you think about complexity [00:05:00] but also protecting the beginner user?

James Kemp: Yeah, I think this has always been the biggest challenge, like you say, and I think WooCommerce’s approach previously has always been to be quite a lean core offering. And I think that is still the case, but over time. What merchants expect from a lean offering has changed. That there’s things that merchants and even builders expect now that maybe they wouldn’t have five years ago.

So yeah there’s definitely like an evolution that happens. And my view is to still keep the core as lean as possible. But we want to make sure that what we are offering are the essential tools that, the majority of merchants or builders would require in order to get started with [00:06:00] e-commerce.

Chris Badgett: WooCommerce has always been, or at least in recent years positioned against Shopify as like a software as a service solution. In some ways, software as a service solutions can be a little easier to get started in, but they’ve become much more limited in flexibility, customizability, they often get a lot more expensive over time.

But as an insider inside of WooCommerce, how do you think about Shopify versus WooCommerce? 

James Kemp: I think everyone has different views on this. One of my views is. That they’re serving for slightly different user types. I agree with what you’re saying, that it appears easier to create or to launch a very simple store on a software on a software as a service, products like Shopify because you can just.

[00:07:00] There’s no decisions to make. You can just go to the website, create a login, create an account, and your store is active. Whereas with something like WooCommerce, you’ve got to think a bit more where am I gonna host this? How much is it gonna cost me? And that cost differs depending on where you has it.

So there’s definitely like a barrier to entry there. But I do feel like. And you touched on it with, as you progressed down the line, you realized that a platform like WooCommerce is a lot more flexible and extensible than something like Shopify, which is much more strict and rigid in the add-ons and customizability that you can put into it.

And I think many of the people. Who come into WooCommerce are looking for that flexibility out of the box which makes the whole decision process of, where am I gonna host this a bit more palatable to them, I think. But yeah if you had someone highly non-technical wanting to spin up a store, then.

WooCommerce is a hard sell for them at the moment. And that is something that we’re trying to improve. And that’s not an improvement at the products level. That’s an improvement at the marketing level. We need to build a better path into just spinning up a WooCommerce store and then having them be able to take that and set it live and use it.

But we’re also trying to like, cater that experience to any host and, any preference of where you want to host this thing. So it’s a challenge for sure, but like I say I think they’re slightly different user types. And maybe they shouldn’t be and maybe they won’t be, further down the line once we, enhance the path into WooCommerce. I think there’s definitely there’s scope there to improve that process.

Chris Badgett: I’m looking at WooCommerce on the WordPress repository, the free core plugin, and it has over 8 million active installations. So tell us about your story. How did you go from a guy who found WordPress to building WooCommerce add-ons to core product manager at Woo responsible in, in a way for eight, 8 million plus users?

Tell us about that journey. 

James Kemp: Yeah, there’s an interesting stat actually. We update what we call the newsroom every month typically which is woocommerce.com/newsroom. It gives some statistics about WooCommerce and where we stand in the grand scheme of the internet. And currently and we we make conservative adjustments to the numbers that we get.

The statistic right now is that 33% of all e-commerce stores are powered by WooCommerce. Which is a huge [00:10:00] number. And it ties into my story a little bit, which yeah if you aren’t aware, which I’m sure many people aren’t. I started with WordPress back in 2009 when I was working at a web design agency.

WordPress was their tool of choice for. Actually, when I started we were just using HTML not even PHP, just HTML. Then, yes, PHP started making its way into our workflow and we’d have, like dynamic copyright dates in the footer and template parts for headers that we could carry across different pages.

And then WordPress made its way into that. Process as well for content management. I think it was used a little bit for specific sites that maybe required a bit more. And we were using Magento at the time as well for e-commerce. WooCommerce wasn’t I always forget when it was first launched, [00:11:00] but it was around that time, but it wasn’t, a big thing yet.

Jigo shop was still a thing back then. Which WooCommerce was a fork of. So yeah, we were using WordPress and Magento and I have always, so I started my role as a designer what they called a web designer, which was someone that would design and then build the website. So it was a mix of design and development.

And I’ve always been keen to experiment and just build things. So one of the things I built at that time was a plugin that for WordPress, that integrated Magento elements into your WordPress site. So we could bring in like the Magento cart and put it in the WordPress header and carry, that cart session across the whole site.

I built that as a free plugin released it on.org as a free plugin. And then I built some add-ons for that [00:12:00] as premium plugins. They were things like single sign-on and some other things that I can’t recall right now. And I sold them on Code Canyon, which is a, an Invato product.

Invato have like. Different marketplaces for different types of products. And code Kenyon was their software or, code code snippet marketplace. They had not just WordPress related products that you could buy there, you could buy scripts for PHP and things like that.

So yeah, I put those products on there and at some point we shifted over to. Using WooCommerce. And I had left this company by then and started my own web design. I call it an agency. It was only two of us building websites for clients and we started using WordPress and WooCommerce, and this was like 2011.

And just in that. Interaction with [00:13:00] clients, they would ask for features that weren’t available in WooCommerce. And my proposal to them would be I can build this for you for a lower price if you allow me the license to then sell this as a product. So my first WooCommerce product was called multiple images per variation for WooCommerce.

So it was quite a practical tongue twister name. Eventually renamed as woo thumbs and is still selling today. But that’s where my, love for selling software and selling products. Started over the course of the next. Seven to eight years I built up a collection of WooCommerce specific plugins eventually rebranded from selling under my own name to selling under iconic wp which is still the brand name today, iconic wp.com.

And yeah I built that up [00:14:00] into a business that, provided. My full-time job, provided income for myself and my family. But also we hired, we had three developers. We had a support team that we outsourced to level up. We had a designer, we had a content person, so we had a. A business essentially selling WooCommerce plugins until 2021 where that business was acquired by Liquid Web Stellar wp which is where it still resides now.

And then I worked there for a couple of years, still running iconic and doing the same stuff that I was doing prior to the acquisition, but with. A bit more backing from Stellar and that the interactions you can then get from other product based companies. And then I got to a point where felt like I’d done as much as I could for iconic, and, the majority of our products [00:15:00] were like utility based.

Not solution based. They were enhancements to WooCommerce. And I wanted to be able to take my knowledge of WooCommerce and my kind of understanding of design, of development, of marketing, of product, and place it somewhere where I could have more impact. So I reached out to Paul, who was the CEO of WooCommerce at the time.

I just said, is there any job for me that would satisfy those needs to put my skills to a products that would impact more people? And then, yeah we went through the process and here I am. Like I say, that kind of ties back to that 33% figure that now I can that what I’m doing feels more impactful.

Feels like it’s, it’s valuable to that number of [00:16:00] people. And that’s a big responsibility. But, a satisfying feeling when it goes right. 

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. How do you keep your cool just with 33% of e-commerce, impacted by your decisions? I feel the same way on a much smaller scale in the LMS niche.

There’s a lot of people who depend on the software, but I guess I’ve just gotten used to it, so it doesn’t bother me. But does that, do you ever feel that pressure of all the people out there 

James Kemp: just, yeah, I mean there’s definitely, pressure. I think the way I counteract that is previously I think WooCommerce would develop features, develop things in WooCommerce, and they would release it and people would find out about that stuff as it was released.

I think one of the things that I’ve tried to bring to the table since, since being in my [00:17:00] role, is to be a bit more open with the community, with the users, with the merchants and the builders about what we’re working on, and get feedback, right at the beginning of the process rather than, and then using that as a tool to make a decision rather than just making a decision.

Assuming that, I know best or the team knows best and then dealing with the consequences. I feel like it’s counteractive a lot more because I’ve validated those decisions before they’re actually rolled out or implemented. And that’s not to say that, we won’t get things wrong sometimes, but I think being where I am now, I have the ability to, ensure that if a decision is made incorrectly, that we’re able to reverse that or remedy it in some way rather than this is out there now and deal with it. That’s not the kind of approach that I like to take especially with, with the user base that we have. [00:18:00]

Chris Badgett: It doesn’t surprise me.

But great product people use their, use, the products that they work on. So you’re also an awesome photographer. I bought one of your grease prints for my mom for Christmas. 

James Kemp: Yeah. How did she like it? 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Yeah. She loved it. It’s up and its up in the house. But you have your photography site, which is at James Kemp photo, and then you did a physical product.

I think their wooden puzzle site called puzzles unlocked.com. Tell us about those pet projects. 

James Kemp: Yeah, I think, and I touched on this earlier actually which is quite nice that I have a desire to just be creative and build, and I think that comes through in, just doing photography in general but also wanting to build things in code and wanting to solve puzzles.

Like all of these kind of tie into that creative aspect would [00:19:00] just having that outlet to be creative in some way. So one of the things I wanted to do that I hadn’t really done before was to actually use WooCommerce as a merchant. I. Previously I had used WooCommerce as a builder building stores for other merchants.

So I understood the needs that they had in terms of what they needed from the product, but I didn’t have the understanding of how they would experience WooCommerce as a merchant, with the day-to-day, like managing orders and shipping stuff and, taking payments and.

Dealing with refunds and things like that. So yeah I wanted to dog food it, which is what they call that process of using your own product. And the first experiment with that was the photo site. So I set that up with a essentially a drop shipper. It’s a UK [00:20:00] based printing. Place that they do framing as well.

So they’ve got quite a good selection of services that suited it quite well. And also the print quality that, that they produce is really good. So yeah, I set that up as a little demo a little trial of, using WooCommerce as a merchant figuring out. And approaching like the product of WooCommerce from a different mindset.

So that was quite nice. But then I wanted to experience what it would be like to have a WooCommerce store that is shipping physical products and is not essentially a print on demand. Like the other one say, yeah, I set up a puzzle store. Puzzles unlocked.com, which like you say, sells not jigsaw type puzzles, but puzzles that are more like escape room in a box type puzzles.

And that was quite a different experience that required. And this isn’t necessarily like a difference in, [00:21:00] in WooCommerce. But more like setting up a business like that. Because it required some upfront funds. I had to buy the product and store the product and sell it. Buy it at cost and sell it at profit.

And also deal with shipping, which I didn’t have to deal with on the photo site. Yeah, it’s been interesting to. To try that. And I think in both cases the biggest stumbling block for me is marketing and, just not having traffic to the site. So you can, and this would be the case on any platform, right?

You can set up a store, but if no one’s there, then you’re not gonna sell anything. And I feel like that’s something that. That we try and help with, but I think there’s things we could do there that, that could improve visibility through like partnerships with, TikTok and Google Ads and like all these different kind of marketing channels.

But [00:22:00] again, that kind of stuff requires money. And not every. A person setting up a store has money. They just want somewhere to sell stuff. And maybe they already have an audience and they can, publicize it that way. But yeah, that, that was a, that was the biggest challenge for me.

I think. 

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Woo is so flexible. You mentioned a print on demand store, physical product store. We use WooCommerce. Been using it for over 12 years to sell Lifter LMS, like a digital software product on a subscription. You could sell event tickets. I do some running and I’ve played around with minimalist shoes and I know the Zero shoes guy sells his shoes with, from a WooCommerce store.

Is that Patrick? I’m trying to remember his name. I can see his face in my mind. He is really good at marketing, by the way. Yeah. But it is so flexible. Tell us about just like all the different options you can do [00:23:00] from physical products, print on demand, event tickets, whatever courses like Lifter has a course product, a membership product that integrates with WooCommerce, so does paid memberships pro, like it’s just.

It’s huge. Like you can sell anything with WooCommerce. I haven’t seen anything you couldn’t sell, but I think it was originally designed for selling t-shirts, if I’m not mistaken. But 

James Kemp: yeah, I think you touched on it there, that it’s flexible enough to sell anything. And the beauty of the ecosystem of WooCommerce and WordPress in general.

Is that most of the things that you could think about and, the methods of selling have already been thought about and there’s already like a solution somewhere that you can either just use straight out of the box or build on top of. And I think, that’s one of the best things about WooCommerce is just how flexible it is and something that, I particularly like to think about when we’re [00:24:00]discussing new features, like how could a third party extend this particular thing that we’re building? Because I think that’s why WooCommerce is as successful as it is because it is that flexible. But yeah to answer your question, I think it could sell just about anything which is, very powerful. 

Chris Badgett: During the pandemic there was like online restaurant ordering, like that’s a whole other niche. That’s huge. There’s so many. I think WordPress, one of its strengths is the international aspect of it. Multi-language. And Shopify is from Canada and I think I would, I’m guessing, but I would say the majority of their users are in North America.

Or Europe maybe, but WordPress is everywhere. And one of the strengths of WooCommerce, different countries have different like payment gateway situations and laws and tax issues and all these things. And WooCommerce is right there with solutions for all that around the world. 

James Kemp: Yeah, [00:25:00] exactly.

And I think that’s also one of the challenges, right? Because we have solutions for. A lot of these things in Germany they have very specific e-commerce regulations and the things that we need to think about, like at what point should that be a core feature to support merchants in Germany or merchants in Australia or China, or, wherever they are.

And that’s a tricky challenge like. Like you say, payment methods is, one thing that not everywhere accepts the same type of payment method. Majority of these different places, and even down to the individual will host in different, they’ll host the website in a different place and they’ll have different regulations about security and things like that.

So it’s a it’s a blessing and a challenge. Like how flexible it is. But I think one of the key things is, and I touched on this [00:26:00] earlier as well, we, we wanna have the essentials for the majority of users. And then anything else should be, we should have the ability to extend it, to meet the needs of those specific you know, environments or locations.

Chris Badgett: As a product manager, creative person, visionary where do you see artificial intelligence interacting with the WooCommerce project or for merchants and store owners? Like how, where are we going with AI and e-commerce and how will, or how could Woo be a part of that story? 

James Kemp: Yeah. It’s a tricky one with WooCommerce because.

AI costs money and WooCommerce is inherently free. The core of WooCommerce is a free offering. So rolling AI based things into core is [00:27:00] not really viable because someone has to absorb that cost. What I do see as an offering is. More like hosted solutions that interact with WooCommerce.

And I think specifically, and this ties back to like my challenge when creating a store I think that AI can act as an assistant with knowledge of your store and the specifics of what you’re trying to sell and give you, proactive advice. So you’re not, you don’t need to go to the AI and say how can I do X, Y, and Z?

It would come to you and say, if you change this, you’ll convert X percent more people. Or, if you update these meta things you’ll boost your traffic by X percent. And I think that’s like a valuable, way that AI could be used alongside, the typical things that you might expect, like enhancing product descriptions and editing photos and [00:28:00] interacting with an AI to, carry out store admin tasks for you.

I, I think the proactive insight side of things would be one of the most valuable things. But yeah, like I said, I it is not something that we could put into court because there’s a cost to it that, you know and we have thought about how we could do that. And yeah, it’s there’s ways but yeah, I it needs exploration.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. The proactive, WooCommerce assistant would be amazing. I think about, I use a. Reporting SaaS integration with our WooCommerce store called Merick. I really love it and core WooCommerce reporting has improved a ton over the years. But all that data is just sitting in there that I know in ai particularly if it could, if it’s not just looking at my data but has like a language model or whatever of all. Yeah. Like of many stores or whatever, and it’s oh, I think the [00:29:00] easiest like magic wand thing to think about is something like pricing. So Yeah, exactly. Based on this pricing and based on what’s happening in your store, cross reference across millions of other sites.

I think you should charge this much or raise this price, lower this price, do this price localization thing. By the way, do you want me to set that up for you and install the plugin and just handle all that for you? That’s a dream scenario. 

James Kemp: Yeah, that would be awesome. I think one of the challenges as well as all the other challenges I mentioned is just having people share that kind of data.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. 

James Kemp: Sensitive data. Yeah. Because yeah, when it becomes e-commerce data, it does become, sensitive. But also sharing that data does benefit them as well, because they’ll be able to get the same insights. But yeah I think that’s a challenge and a hurdle that would need to be overcome in order for something like that to be successful.

Because like you say [00:30:00] I think the value of that is in the AI knowing. Based on data, what works. And that requires data. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. I think the part too on that is a conversion rate optimization assistant. So hey, maybe you should put a testimonial here by the button or whatever. Or this thing’s broken on your side or based on the like.

Hotjar user interactions and stuff, like there’s a blind spot over here and all this stuff. Yeah. 

James Kemp: Yeah. I think there’s tons of cool stuff that you can do, and I think as well, like AI is advancing so quickly. Yeah. That I think there’s use cases that we haven’t even considered yet. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. In five years, it’ll, who knows what we’re gonna be doing and if it, the tools just get exponentially more powerful.

James Kemp: The other thing and it’s not something that we would do, but the, AI assisted coding [00:31:00] has made it a lot easier for people to create their own solutions to a specific problem that they have. You can get AI now to spin up a plugin to do something. And it will pretty much work out of the box.

So I expect to see that improve over time. I think code quality and like code security will become more essential in the output on those types of things. But yeah, I think that’s. It’s quite a different landscape now than from when I started, which is interesting. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Last question for you, James.

Like, how do you think about the future of Blue, like the vision for it, because it’s an established product, it’s used by 33% of e-commerce, like where to go from here besides ai? What else? How do you think about the future? 

James Kemp: Yeah, I think I. Again, we’ve led in, in our conversation here to my answer.

I [00:32:00] think WooCommerce outta the box needs to offer the essentials and that’s gonna evolve over time as different things become more essential. I think. There’s a modernization that needs to happen with WooCommerce and is happening. We rolled out our new brand recently which will, align us a bit more with being able to market the product more effectively and like having this brand message that, that we can put forward.

And just really knowing who we’re targeting there, whereas I think. The previous brand other than the colors hadn’t evolved much from when it was originally created, and I think it was quite a developer heavy like branding that we had previously. So yeah, I think there’s modernization that needs to happen and the making sure that the core product offers the majority of, offers the essential tools to the [00:33:00] majority of users. Also, performance is something that we’re massively focused on at the moment. Just making sure that every part of the product is performing and product quality is something that we’re, keeping in mind for anything that we put into WooCommerce, how.

How how does it affect the experience for different types of users? And is it, does it have what they need? Is it fun to use? Is it good to use? All that kind of stuff. So yeah, I think that’s like the short term focus. And that’s the 2025 focus. And I think what we will see as time goes on is how can we offer more advanced tools to, to WooCommerce users potentially like outside of WooCommerce.

So that we have more capabilities to. Offer functionality in a consistent way. One of the challenges that we have with WooCommerce as a product is making it work consistently across all the different environments that you can host it in. So I think offloading some of that to a controlled environment.

If, if the user wants that is a good way to do it. Yeah and I think that, aligns well with being able to offer things like ai and, have have that kind of data model behind ai based things as well. 

Chris Badgett: I just wanna highlight something you touched on earlier that helping store owners sell and do marketing basically, and sales.

I think about that a lot at Lifter LMS and customers literally ask for it all the time. I’m like, cool. I built it. Now how do I sell it? Or how do I market it? And I’ve helped users like develop, kind of ad funnel pages that lead into a sales call and things like that. But in my mind, I’m thinking, and I, you would probably agree that it’s not part of [00:35:00] WooCommerce core.

We have coupons, right? But that’s if you open up marketing and WooCommerce, there’s coupons and that’s it, right? But there’s there’s a lot of other ways to do marketing and I think that’s not necessarily part of the WooCommerce core. It really depends on what the product is and what the niche is and what the personality of the store owner is.

But helping merchants sell, not like actually sell, not just open a store is like a greenfield opportunity for add-on developers, service providers and stuff that could really do something. 

James Kemp: I think it’s a challenge because. Typically like marketing costs money. Yeah. I do think there’s, SEO is still a big thing and I think there’s an era of ai, SEO that these AI tools that people use are recommending products and services and [00:36:00] people are using, AI instead of Google to.

Determine, what kind of product they want to buy. So I think what we can do as a product, as a platform is to make sure that we have rich schema like the meta that you need on product pages and things out of the box. And as much. As much of that information and data for things like Google and AI tools available out of the box with, little to no setup required.

I think that’s the kind of stuff that we can help with. And hopefully that will see some improvements. But yeah, I think marketing is tricky because it costs money. You even need to have an audience. You need to know where your audience is or you have to pay to, capture the audience via, Google ads or Facebook ads or TikTok ads and all that kind of stuff.

And I think a lot of merchants like me particularly, didn’t [00:37:00] really have funds to, to put in straight away. I wanted to launch a store and. Make some money and then put that money back into marketing and things like that. So yeah the challenge is once you’ve launched your store, what’s next?

Chris Badgett: Yeah, I agree. I think there’s a big opportunity with TikTok. I. Like having your feed go into TikTok, just like the WooCommerce Facebook plugin would put your products into your Facebook business page or whatever. Yeah, 

James Kemp: that’s, and I guess the question is like, should those type of integrations be something that comes in core?

I would say probably not in core. Just, yeah. That’s the. Ties back into different people requiring different things. Like not everyone’s gonna require specifically a TikTok integration. But what we should be able to do is let them know that [00:38:00] exists. Yeah. And make it easy to install separately.

Which I think is another part of. How we could improve the core offering. So we’re not necessarily adding the feature to core, but we’re saying like this is a one click install type thing. You don’t need to go finding it. Yeah, 

Chris Badgett: stuff. That’s James Kemp. He’s the core product manager at WooCommerce.

You can find him on Twitter at Ja. James C. Kemp. Thanks for coming on the show, James. I always enjoy our conversations. I could nerd out about e-commerce and woo and WordPress forever. Thanks for doing that with me for an hour. Really appreciate it. Any other final words for the people? 

James Kemp: Just if you have any questions about WooCommerce or suggestions or just want to be heard, want to be directed to the right place, then you know, feel free to reach out to me on Twitter slash x.

And I will do my best to accommodate. Thanks for coming on, James. [00:39:00] Yeah, thank you.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you [email protected] slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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In this LMScast episode, Chris Badgett and Michael Wolf share a passion for online education, technology, and personal transformation.

Michael Wolf left his job in corporate sales to co-found Golden XPR, a learning platform devoted to personal change, and Empowering Now. Through the use of ancient languages and systematic research, he explains how his goal is to assist move the world from “greed to grace” by getting deeper insights.

With more than 3,000 lessons and 33 courses developed on LifterLMS, Michael highlights the value of fusing technology with purposeful learning. He also emphasizes the fruitful collaboration with his co-founder, Maha Jolene Louie, who combines his technical and structural approach with her creative and language skills.

Michael wants to make selling coaching services online and online education a vehicle for genuine change by combining philosophy, self-awareness, and real-world application in his comprehensive learning method.

Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

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Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Oh, there we go. Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest, a longtime friend, and lifter, LMS community user community member. His name is Michael Wolf. He’s from Empowering Now and Golden. XPR Michael’s got something special for you. To check out, go to golden xpr.com/lifter.

He’s gonna tell us more what that’s all about in a little bit. But first, welcome to the show, Michael. Thank you, Chris. It’s a privilege to be with you. It’s really awesome to do this episode. The cool thing about running a software company, we’re both super passionate about education but there’s a community that builds behind it, and you’ve been around for a while.

So I’m excited to get into your story what you’re doing with the tools, how you got there. But let’s start now like current state, like what are you doing with teaching online, and then where did it start in the beginning? 

Michael Wolf: Thanks, Chris. Great question. Yeah. What are we doing now? We have a pretty extensive lifter site.

Our entire learning management site is built around lifter and we’ve got. In the neighborhood of 33 courses, and that’s with over 3000 lessons. So quite extensive In terms of the teaching content, we have probably around two dozen inquiry tools, featuring a random number generator to assist in doing inquiry.

We have six memberships. We’ve got basically all. Lifter’s core functionality deploys custom fields, notes, videos, social. We’ve integrated with Groundhog, WP Fusion Astra and Elementary for the front end plus gravity forms. So we’re pretty much whatever lifter recommends kind of house. We do it and we stay with the latest updates consistently.

In terms of students, we’ve got roughly 60 registered students. We deliver one-on-one services with extensive use of private areas. We also are in the process of a Train the trainer program using lifter groups in a beta mode at the moment. And we have, wow, what else am I forgetting?

We’ve got it all deployed. Trust that gives you a flavor for what we’re up to. 

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And it’s cool to see when, lifter’s extendable, so you could just have one free course on your site or you can get complex with coaching and community and all kinds of stuff.

That’s so cool to see. You’re using the majority of the tools. Tell us a little bit about. What empowering now and Golden XPR is all about like your subject matter and what is this niche? 

Michael Wolf: Thank you, Chris. Yes. It goes back to the early two thousands and at that point I was a high tech sales guy.

My background is in corporate sales, worked for Xerox Parametric Technology, I-B-M-P-T-C. I’ve always been a software sales guy. Going way back to the beginning and. I had a life changing experience and that’s really a longer story. But after that experience, I really did an about face with my life and I began to open to receive a business plan to help our planet.

And that sounds lofty and perhaps on the strange side of things, but the mission that had come to me was to help transition our planet from greed to grace. If we look at greed it’s more than just money hunger. It’s like any place where I’m not enough, there’s unfelt, greed, and it’s really insidious how for me in my life, greed has sourced so much unconscious behavior.

So I went through a deep experience. I said, look, I’m really committed to bringing forward something impactful and real, and. That’s when I wrote the business plan for Empowering Now, which was, as I mentioned a learning idea. I knew that I needed to develop a curriculum. I knew that we needed to build out the courses and train trainers, all of this idea.

So that was the vision is to provide something meaningful for the healthcare system, the political system, the monetary system, without being. Just another woo training option. Something that was practical and real well as soon as the business model was written. Interestingly, I met my business partner, ma Jolene Louie, and she’s an artist and an author from France and has spent her entire life essentially revealing.

Codes that have been held in ancient language. So that comprises the business model and the beginnings of the curriculum, which we’ve been now working on close to 17 years together. Very long-term project. This is our life’s work, both from a business model and from a curriculum perspective. So we we really need it and have depended upon.

A strong technical foundation so that doesn’t plague us as we do grow. 

Chris Badgett: So how did you like start with, you said how many courses, now 

Michael Wolf: we’re up to 33 courses. 

Chris Badgett: So did it start with one, or, I’m sure it did, but like, how did you get going? 

Michael Wolf: Making lots of mistakes would be the practical answer, 

Chris Badgett: but 

Michael Wolf: the that, what that’s not saying is that, that there’s probably been 200, 300, maybe 500 books that have been written that have been synthesized down to the current 33.

So Maha is one of these really gifted creative types that, if something doesn’t work or if we make an error, we take that in, we assimilate that, and that becomes, okay, let’s do it differently next time. Fail off and fail a lot mentality. But in 2018 we published the first 22 courses, and that was after three years of development on the backend.

Writing, editing, publishing, changing. So we went through lots of changes, which involved the initial mystery school launch, which had 22 courses, and that was introductory courses. We have a, an application called Expired Tarot, which uses the Hebrew letters in order to gain insights for inquiries.

So those 22 courses were what we launched with. We just decided not to launch till we were happy with it. We’re we knew that it, yes, we could have launched sooner and that was what we were advised to do, but we didn’t. We waited till the first 22 were prepared because that’s what we needed to do. 

Chris Badgett: Tell us about the partnership ’cause some of the most successful lifter LMS projects I see it’s often like a couple people or more behind the project, how do you all divide and conquer and think about making that partnership successful? 

Michael Wolf: Good question. There’s two sides to that answer. One side would be the interpersonal side, which is we’re both completely committed to one ideal, which is know thyself. So any problem I have with my partner reflects something that I have not yet understood about myself without that agreement.

Nothing else works. And what I would say in terms of my partnering with Maha is the two of us are quite opposite. I’m your traditional male archetype south Texas country boy, business guy, and more recently educated obviously, and all of the modalities that were associated with transformation and workshops.

I’ve been through lots of. Lots of different mod modalities there. Maha’s the artist and she’s, she thinks in terms of beauty. And if you look back at the gates to the eternal Maha has gifts, literally the touch all three, the good, the true and the beautiful. And really it’s that kind of synthesis that produce experiences tat are worth having.

That would, that’s be one big part of it is the, working through the interpersonal side of realizing that my partner is me and the other is that, I’ve largely focused on tech and editing and, ideas and structures for how we deliver the content. And that goes hand in hand with what she’s receiving relative to the written materials that source the mystery school.

Chris Badgett: I know you’re big with language, so if there’s better words than what I’m going to use, but is it a an artist and a producer kind of dynamic? 

Michael Wolf: Similar. Yeah. The other part that she’s clearly the artist and the author and she has a deep relationship with ancient language, not just Hebrew, but Greek and is schooled in virtually all modes of ancient scripture and revealing patterns that are common to all modes of let’s just call it human development.

And from my perspective, less of a producer. But yes, I’m an editor. I also say, Hey, look, just this doesn’t make sense to me. Can we, and so that editing role is part of it, and increasingly I’ve noticed that this material somehow lives in me, not as if I’m the author, but I can feel things when I’m opening to this sort of, language concept, and it, again, it’s not like Spanish versus French or c plus versus, some other Java scripting language. What we’re speaking into is the understanding that language is life. In other words, what I see an experience represents patterns and ideas that flow through archetypal.

Archetypal elements that give us what we call life. And so when I begin to look at the a language that’s alive, many people will say, oh, language is only a symbol. Yes. And there’s a realm at which when I am real life is language. That would be a summary. 

Chris Badgett: Lemme see if I can ask this in the right way.

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This is interesting. A lot of folks, whether they’re want to teach online or they’re building websites for clients, they wanna make more sales, you have a background in sales, but you’ve also taken this path with transcending greed. The word that comes to mind for me, like you strike me as a gentleman.

A gentle man. And how does a gentle man sell? So I’m so take us through the kind of how to look at language and what’s inside that question 

Michael Wolf: that’s sourced. My initial idea, the, and then the idea started, if I might go back one second. In 2006, I quit my corporate job. I was making a lot of money.

Way more than I needed at the time. And then I started working on donation and I had a large child support payment and lots of bills. Long story short, I went broke. 2010 I went back to work and I worked for IBM for another 10 years covering corporate accounts. But in the time where I was off, I recognized that as a healer.

I still had to buy groceries and I still had, there’s this thing called money that people struggle with, and so I really was interested in knowing that I was enough beyond the amount of money in my checking account. And so what my idea for the business model was that if the business model delivered the sense of enough as a product.

I wouldn’t have to worry about, I got nothing to sell. And I have what I know is that for me, my own development is worth more than all the money in the world. I am not for sale. And that’s really the core idea that I wanted to transmit as a concept in leadership. A way in which I could interact with world other.

Family, food, sex, money from the perspective that I’m enough. And so that’s the business model and the way that it developed was out of a lot of failures. We’ve for a long time I really thought that I needed students and that had me showing up as. The, I don’t know, the overbearing teacher that needed to find students and needed to find that’s not happening anymore.

I’m in service to people that are interested in making the decision. So the business model is structured as that. While we do have some things. Where folks are given an opportunity to contribute. The clients set their own tuition and that’s very cool. Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: Tell us just for people that are interested in the subject matter here. What’s at golden xpr.com/lifter.

Michael Wolf: Thank you, Chris. Yeah. On that, and I have to go back and thank Lifter, and especially you, Chris. You are one of those. Influential people that when you, when I first got this plugin, I listened to every LMS cast out there and I was, everything that you would recommend, I would say I need that, don’t need that.

So anyway, I’m happy to provide the offer of two different things. One is a course that we just completed recording. It’s called The Small Print of the Law of Attraction. It is a very rich. Teaching and it’s not pro faint of heart. It’s not it’s a very beautiful teaching. The overall number of recordings, I think there’s over a hundred recordings.

There’s a 120 some odd lessons in it. We’re offering it complimentary. No need to pay. If you find value out of it and you decide that you were. You’re interested in learning more. Reach out, but that is complimentary. The small print of Law of Attraction. And the other is a complimentary ebook, which is from one of our latest publications.

It’s sample chapter of the Love that has no opposite. Which was published last year on Amazon. Awesome.

Chris Badgett: That what the whole book. What tell us at a high level what is the love that has no opposite about 

Michael Wolf: Whew. It’s about something that’s everybody’s written about over the generations. It’s the first sentence of the Bible, and it has six chapters that unfold essentially a code.

That demonstrates the difference between what we call primary communication. There’s this Genesis chapter one where God says, let there be light, and there was light, zero delay, zero unconscious time. Genesis chapter two has a different atom. A different name for God in Hebrew and introduces Adam that’s lonely and disobedient and guilty and ashamed and punished ultimately.

And so those two stories of creation really demonstrate two ways of creativity. One is instantaneous where there’s zero delay, no unconscious time, and the other which demonstrates. A pattern, if you will, of the collective unconscious. So the love that has no opposite unfolds that and is a it’s a very deep study of language, of power and how we keep ourselves in what we call scare city, where not only do I not have enough, but I’m afraid.

Chris Badgett: Wisdom and I don’t know if I’m saying it the etymology or of words like scarcity. You’re a master at unpacking those and teaching those. On the language front, what’s the, let’s say our, we only speak English as an example. What do we learn from, ancient languages. That doesn’t necessarily translate, or maybe it does. But like how does this study of language. Tell us about the richness of that and how we may be perhaps limited. If we are just in our native tongue and what does that mean in terms of our worldview and stuff like that? Big question.

Michael Wolf: Think about language as not only. Spoken, but also consider the idea that numbers must be involved. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Sounds must be involved.

Michael Wolf:  Linguistically structured information is a small fraction of language. And so when we get into the discussion of a meta language and what.

What’s interesting about what we’re doing is that we’re bringing a resonance between the ancient language of Hebrew, which we call she, because it’s the feminine receiving, Maha being essentially in my view the world’s most powerful woman rabbi that has come to bring a woman’s view. Of male scriptures.

So truth be told, we all have a male and female component, those sides of us that give and receive. And truly, I cannot be total unless I am in harmony between my giving and my receiving. Thus the sense of enough. But coming back to the idea of language, what we’ve discovered and what we continue to witness is that there’s a very deep resonance between the English language, which is the most spoken language on the planet right now, and the oldest language with, Hebrew is an alphabet that has not changed form and has been preserved in its original method.

Original way since the initial revelation of the Bible way back when. So we’ve got something that is dancing together to highlight perspectives that really come back to an an embodied sense of integrity. I said a lot. Thanks. Yeah 

Chris Badgett: That’s amazing. I remember digging into some of your stuff around the different, the four different missions of being a coach, a seeker, a emissary, and a visionary.

How does that play into all this? 

Michael Wolf: Yes. The way I would say that for myself is I’m not gonna engage in this kind of work unless I am really interested in bringing forward full potential. It’s likely that it’s likely that the. This is not just about finding a parking space on Main Street.

It’s not about, it’s about understanding the difference between where what I say I want and what I experience in reality are different. So I. What we found in our work is that most of the people that are engaging are folks that would claim to have some sort of initiative to be an emissary between one group or another, or folks that are coaches.

They’re here to help and of course. Going back to Socrates Healer, heal Thyself. That’s really the program we have for coaches and mentors and some folks are just unlimited seekers. And we have a program of infinite depth that addresses those folks that are seekers. And many of our clients are visionaries.

They see new ways of doing things, and clearly in order to really be a visionary in our climate today. I had to reconcile the money issue with my vision of a business model. So visionaries are stressed with a future vision that have constraints in the now. So to reconcile that, what, those are the kinds of people that most of our clients have ended up falling into.

Chris Badgett: Tell us about the the actual mechanics of the platform in the sense of what’s in the stack. It’s, you’ve got courses, there’s books, there’s coaching calls, like what all comes together to facilitate the learning and the transformation? 

Michael Wolf: Good question. Yes, we have, on Golden xpr.com. We’ve got six memberships, and those memberships are marketed to individuals and they support our one-on-one work with clients.

So when someone signs up for the one-on-one program, they receive access to the entire mystery school. All of the 33 courses we have extensive use of private areas there. So when we. Deliver our coaching sessions. At the conclusion of the session, we have something called an ecap. That ECAP gets published on lifter private areas. Then prior to the next session. They’re invited to fill out a form.

How did you do with the last session Since we were looking at this particular area and it keeps those. The, that learning alive we couldn’t operate without private areas at the moment. That’s one of our most powerful capabilities for one-on-one work. We also do a group course every Monday night, and anyone who’s interested can go to our events page check out the Paradise Circle.

The first month is free. We invite you to contribute after that if you’re interested. But Paradise Circle is similar to a inquiry game where one person gets in the hot seat and we. I come up with a structured inquiry and then go around the circle and everybody says, oh yeah, I can relate to that.

This is how it applies to me. So we do a group class that’s not recorded, but it is live. And then we have recorded several offline courses. Most recently the the small print of the Law of attraction using lifter videos. So custom fields are huge for us. We have a ongoing inquiry tool, which. It’s called the seven by seven tool that someone picks out something. That they’re gonna make alive over a seven week period, and every day they go through and complete the lesson.

And so that, that’s available using custom fields. We use Groundhog extensively integrated in a number of our inquiry tools. We have WP Fusion, Zapier Acuity. And then as I mentioned earlier, going down the path of lifter groups as well. 

Chris Badgett: For those that are thinking about getting into coaching, how do you like what’s the structure?

Is there does somebody come with challenges or do you come with something specific to focus on? Or both? Or how do you coach? 

Michael Wolf: Before we invite anybody into a long-term coaching agreement, we do a three month kick the tires because. We may not wanna work together. They can quit anytime.

There’s no shoulds. But the way that we focus on it is we’ve got a very specific introduction to all of that. It’s called the Power Conversation that we start off with. And then once they’ve entered the three [00:26:00] month trial period, and that’s, lifter access plan with three months, then we sit down and we discuss, do we resonate, do we wanna move?

And as we do. Basically from week to week, the issue of the day develops and we’re using the curriculum and all of the pages that I mentioned before with the private areas to, to allow for studying in between sessions plus the group course. So it’s all integrated. One place to go, one place to interact from one-on-one group and on your own.

Very cool. 

Chris Badgett: What kind of impact is this work having in the world? What are either anecdotally or stories of 

Michael Wolf: We’ve done no advertising. We’ve done nothing really public and everything has been word of mouth up until now. And I would say that what speaks for where we are now is all of our students have decided to become at one level.

A train the trainer, they’re all interested in becoming that. That’s a hundred percent of our clients are interested.

Chris Badgett: Writing message. Yeah. That’s a pretty good conversion rate, if you will. 

Michael Wolf: Yeah, that’s what I think you were the one that taught me that, Chris, I can remember you said don’t focus on how much money you’re gonna make, half fun doing what you do and focus on the impact.

Yeah. And that I took that to heart. And that’s exactly, that’s where exactly where we are. 

Chris Badgett: That’s when people become raving fans and wanna spread the message and train the trainer, there’s no higher form of success or signal of what’s going on in the platform. That’s awesome.

Michael Wolf: Yeah. I took you at face value on that. 

Chris Badgett: Cool. What do you think about the future? Like, where do you want to go with it? For somebody who’s, you said you launched in 2018. What you’re committed? Like you’re the, it’s inside of you at this point. What where do you want to go with it?

Michael Wolf: From the beginning, from the very beginning. The program was designed to scale. It was designed to offer learning that could scale. That wouldn’t require a development team of, hundreds of people. So scaling yes. In, in supporting our clients is really right up there without, because if we do a good job there.

Then everything else is gonna happen. If we can make it easy for those that are working with us to gain results and to share the content, it’ll happen naturally. Our work is strange. In other words, the, if you look at the material from a marketing perspective, it’s. It’s not the kind of thing that in my experience, that you can just read and say, oh yeah, I wanna buy 10 of those.

It’s just not that, it’s not that kind of messaging, but scaling is part of it. Impact is part of it. I do see that the, there will be a day coming where we will have a global stage. I’m imagining. Folks like Jordan Peterson would be very interested in what we’re providing. And others I can’t wait till we meet Ken Wilber, for example.

I’m just, if So those are the kinds of conversations that when we get further down, I’m imagining there’s gonna be more interaction. But folks who are out there in this community doing big things on the global stage I’m imagining that we’ll be in that position. 

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I remember it was a long time ago, maybe 15 years ago, I was at a, like a a fair for organic farming and a bunch of stuff and there was like this book area and I picked up a Ken Wilber’s book on the theory of everything or something related to that.

And I went down that rabbit hole and I. I’m not, I’m the kind of person that’s into this kind of stuff and I know there’s a lot out there. ’cause I remember when I look at Ken Wilbur as an example, or Jordan Peterson’s work, there’s a lot of people that go deep into. These [more visionary seeking transcendent things.

So it’s, and like you said the platform is infinite. It’s infinitely particularly with the train the trainer thing, it’s, it can go as far as it could ever go. Before we started recording, you mentioned democratizing education was important. You mentioned you had sold websites for a million bucks or something, and.

And lifter has a free tool and some add-ons and all that, but obviously it’s free to much cheaper than a million bucks. Tell us about democratizing education from your perspective. 

Michael Wolf: Yeah, thank you Chris. And I’m going back to the days where I’m sitting in my apartment listening to LMS cast and the vision of democratizing education coming from.

In 1999, I got hired by a company called Vignette. And Vignette was based upon TCL tools, control Language, and it was a scripting language where you would build a content management app and a content delivery app. And it was a very. High performancewebsite, and back then you could go to the dot coms, which were booming up everywhere, and it would be half a million to a million dollars for a simple website.

That continued for years where, you know the web was just launched. It wasn’t that long ago. And then WordPress and Jumela were. Adversaries for a while. We built our initial site based upon Jumela, which was difficult, and we went down what is the one that you know yeah, a Moodle.

A Moodle, I was interested because I do see our curriculum would be able to leveraged for universities at some place. I was looking at the whole Moodle approach and. As soon as the business model became clear, the next point was, nobody’s going to invest in this idea. It’s too weird. So we gotta do it on our own.

And when you were back in your early days, way more talking about this idea of democratizing education, and I’m thinking about what I wanna do in terms of the sense of enough, it was a like a perfect marriage. You had my listening straight out of the shoot. That’s been the reality for us in terms of really looking at what we’ve been able to do in terms of a life work and to put it onto something that I can trust, we can trust and it works and secure all of the things that you would need for a strategic platform are there.

That’s a, there’s probably more. I may have left something out. 

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. That’s Michael Wolf. He’s at golden xpr.com/lifter. He’s got some free stuff for you. I love getting into Michael’s work. Take some time, set it aside and get into the book and the course. Highly recommend it.

Any final words for the coaches, the seekers, the emissaries and the visionaries out there 

Michael Wolf: fail often. Invite failure. Fears are a path to sacredness and any fear that I can understand offers a new relationship with what life is really about is to come into the sacred. Fear is not something to be resisted, but to be embraced and understood.

And that’s been in our backend in terms of doing something as radical as what we’re up to is. Daily, am I enough to do this project, and taking a step anyway, in the face of the fear, in the face of the overwhelming size of it, and the lack of support and the lack of money and all of that. Just don’t give up.

Get clear on what it is that you’re here for and reach out to other communities. Go to the lifter, office hours and share and talk and listen and give yourself. Space to do it in in your own time. 

Chris Badgett: Thanks Michael. It is great to have you on. We’ll have to do it again down the road. 

Michael Wolf: Look forward to it.

Chris Badgett: Go to golden xpr.com/lifter and I hope you have a great rest of your day. 

Michael Wolf: Thank you, Chris. Thank you everybody.

Chris Badgett: That’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you [email protected] slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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In this LMScast episode, Chris Badgett and Jill Schulman discuss leadership, bravery, and overcoming fear in both personal and professional growth.

Jill Schulman is an educator, business leader, leadership specialist, and former U.S. Marine Corps officer who places a strong emphasis on both professional and personal development. She entered the business sector after serving as an officer in the Marine Corps, where she swiftly advanced to leadership roles but soon came to understand that leadership is a talent that needs constant learning and improvement.

Her next book, “The Science of Bravery”, which will be published in the summer of 2025, examines how courage is acting in spite of fear rather than avoiding it. She offers research-backed techniques to help people overcome their fears, especially those related to self-doubt and impostor syndrome.

Jill stresses the significance of mentality, which includes cultivating optimism, controlling self-talk, redefining stress as a tool for progress, and adopting a growth mindset. She uses studies from positive psychology to assist leaders who have experienced defeats rethink their challenges and restore confidence.

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Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

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Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMSCast. I’m joined by a special guest. Her name is Jill Schulman. You can find her [email protected]. Check out her newsletter. We’re gonna dive deep today into bravery, into leadership and Jill story. She’s a US Marine Corps veteran, she’s a corporate leader.

And she’s been involved in academia, she’s done a lot of things, and she’s out there to help a lot of people. But first, welcome to the show, Jill. 

Jill Schulman: Thank you. Thanks for having me. 

Chris Badgett: What lit the bug for you for leadership? Like where did that, there’s always a seed for that story. Yeah. Where was that seed for you?

Jill Schulman: It. I think it started as a Marine, ’cause I was a Marine Corps officer, so they teach us a lot about how to be an effective leader in the military. And then when I got outta the Marine Corps and I went into corporate America I got promoted pretty quickly into a leadership position. But you know what my biggest aha was?

How? I didn’t know crap about leadership. I thought I knew it all. And I was with a large pharmaceutical company that invested a lot in leadership development and they had us go through classes and I kept having these moments where I’m like. Whoa. I’m doing it wrong. So what I learned about leadership is just that L like leadership just isn’t something you’re naturally born with.

It’s a skill that’s learnable and practicable and you gotta be like open. You gotta work on your craft. Like your job as a leader is to not. Do the thing not to deliver results. Your job is to now take care of the people or lead the people who are driving results. So it’s about leading human beings who are complex with emotions and skills and all that stuff.

And so as I was going through a lot of those leadership classes for myself, I had these, oh. I always call ’em, oh crap moments, oh crap. Like I’m doing it wrong. It made such a profound impact on my development. And then I thought I was a good leader, but then I realized I wasn’t a great leader. Then I learned all these things and I think I became a much better leader.

Or, I don’t, I wouldn’t say great leader, but I kept learning and getting better and better as a leader. And that ended up leading to my decision to dedicate my career to like leadership development, to create these aha moments. 

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Yeah. Leadership is really a, it’s like a lifelong journey.

You never arrive. It just keeps going. It’s a skill with no bottom. You have a book coming out in the summer of 2025. The Science of Bravery. 

Jill Schulman: Yeah. And I 

Chris Badgett: know it takes bravery to be in the Marine Corps. It takes bravery to be a leader. But tell us about. The big ideas and inspiration for the book.

Jill Schulman: Yeah. So the inspiration from the book really came when I went back to school to study the science of happiness and wellbeing. So positive psychology is the study of how can you elevate happiness and wellbeing to live your best life. And believe it or not, there’s a scientific study of it.

There’s all the science behind that. I went back to school because I was really curious about. How positive psychology can really help organizations. Because I was in the organizational space and what I discovered as I learned, and then I decided what I was gonna do my capstone on, which is like your own little research project at the end of a master’s program, is I was really interested in how bravery, which is defined as.

Not eliminating fear, it’s not becoming fearless. That’s not what bravery is. And people think that oh, to be brave, you’re just fearless. You’re just, you’re not afraid of anything. Like actually that would be the opposite. If you’re not afraid of anything, then you’re not brave. ’cause bravery is taking action despite fear, toward things that align with your values or things that you really want intrinsically, right?

And so I started taking a deep dive into that research and found that so many people, they end up living sometimes a life of regret or they don’t accomplish what they want because fear holds them back. So this is something that is so common out there and I’m like, whoa. Like if people are letting fear hold ’em back and they wanna be braver.

And there is research that says that bravery is one of the top two strengths that people wanna increase based on the research from Ryan Anemic from the from the Via strengths organization. But people just don’t know how. I just, I wanted, so I took a dive, a deep dive into, the science of it and what emerged is there are evidence-based things that you can do to build bravery.

And a lot of people think like either you’re bravery or not, but you can build. The skill of bravery, just like you can build any other skill or I like, I call it like a muscle, right? And when you do, here’s the exciting thing. This is what I get really excited about, is when you do like your self-confidence increases your self-belief and you feel like, wow, I did that.

So it has a profound impact not only on people’s success in business. Which is important, but what’s really even more important is your overall happiness and wellbeing. And there’s all the evidence to back it up. And there’s not a lot, there’s not a lot out there on teaching people how to be brave.

So I feel like there’s a gap. There’s kind of a gap in what people are teaching to organizations are out there. There’s a lot of people that. Are out there, they’re motivational speakers. Look at me. I was really brave. And just go out there and do it rr, and it’s really inspiring and it’s really entertaining.

But then you leave there and you’re like you don’t do anything differently because we don’t have the evidence-based strategy. So I’m like part like. I’m part academic geek, ’cause everything I do is scientific based. So I’ve got all the research behind it, but then I find that my message is very motivating for people because I help them realize what’s holding ’em back from getting what they really want.

I’m on now a mission. So the book is gonna be on that written as a parable. It’s like entertaining and I feel like stories make things stick. But I feel like this is what I’m called to do, is to help people understand the science and apply it so they can, they can. Avoid a life of regret.

Chris Badgett: One of the big challenges in the education entrepreneur space, people teaching online and starting coaching companies and things is imposter syndrome. How would you apply? This science of bravery to that fear of being, fear of failure. Fear of being on stage, even fear of success. 

Jill Schulman: Yeah. Yeah. Great question.

So one of the three dimensions that, that are in my book, in my research is on what I call brave mindset. But let’s dive into that. ’cause what you’re talking about in terms of imposter syndrome is that people feel like, I’m not good enough. I’m in this position, but maybe I’m not someone people should be listening to.

They don’t feel like. They deserve to be there. So I wanna just expand instead of just imposter syndrome. What happens when people just don’t believe that they can do hard things or that they’re gonna be successful? What if their mindset isn’t supporting their success?

Under brave mindset, there’s four different skills that I teach. Everything I do is very practical. I’m not gonna just be up in the clouds talking about, just believe that you can, that doesn’t work. That doesn’t work. We need to give people like tangible evidence-based strategies to do this. So the four that I teach the first one is growth mindset, which everyone’s heard about.

It’s Carol Dweck’s work, but it absolutely makes an impact. So I teach the power of yet, like no one is going to come to my online program to listen to me teach yet. So just using that word like, ugh, I’m just not a runner. Yet I could never speak in front of 500 people on a stage yet. So using that power of yet, it really what it does, it opens the door of possibility and it makes people recognize that our skills and abilities are not fixed.

They can grow with hard work and effort. Now it’s not gonna be easy. Wthin growth mindset too the journey to get there won’t be easy, but it’s possible. Just helping people understand it’s possible. So I always start there. That’s the first step. And then we build on that and go, okay, so if you believe it’s possible and the journey isn’t gonna be easy, then we get into the second mindset, which is stress is enhancing the mindset.

So there’s a lot of work that’s newer in the world of psychology on the psychology of stress, right? Kelly McGonigal, Aaliyah Crumb and others, they’ve done research on this, and what they found is if you believe that challenges and stress are bad, then they will be bad and they will hold you back.

But if you believe that challenges and stress. Challenges make you stronger and stress is your body responding to perform at its best. You’re literally what, how you appraise challenges and stress predicts your response to them psychologically and physiologically. And there’s so much science.

I could go on for probably three hours on just that so things are possible through the power of, yet it’s not gonna be easy. There’s gonna be ups and downs, but when there’s downs and challenges, it’s learning. So now we’re getting somewhere and then we layer on top of that. And I won’t go into these in much detail, but we get into optimism versus pessimism and how you can move from being pessimistic to optimistic.

This is Dr. Marty Seligman from the University of Pennsylvania. All of his research on learned optimism and that just in general. Our emotions don’t necessarily just happen to us. We have the power to generate the emotions that will best serve us, our families, our customers, our communities, the world.

Like it just drives me crazy. Everyone’s I’m just a victim. Like I just feel sad today. So I’m just gonna go sit in the corner and have a pity party. That’s a choice, but you have the power to change your emotional state. You wanna recognize the emotions you’re feeling, be curious, name them, and then decide what type of emotion do I wanna be experiencing today to support, that comes from Barbara f Fredrickson and her book on positivity that she wrote.

And then the last one is we talk about the voices in their heads. So if you have imposter syndrome, you’re saying horrible things to yourself, you’re saying you’re a loser, you shouldn’t be here. All these, if you’re saying these things to yourself. That are not helping you, we should probably try to change that.

So then we get into how can you change the self-talk and it’s possible. And I always cite Ethan Cross’s work on his book on Shatter. He’s got a brand new one called Shift. But his book on shatter really something that I teach a couple of those strategies. So tho all those things together, if we can just change like our.

Our mindset in those four ways you are gonna be like off to the races. It starts with mindset. If you believe that you can’t, then you’re right. If you believe that you can, you’re right. So those are some evidence-based strategies that I use with my clients to help them with that 

Chris Badgett: word. Specific context of where, let’s say somebody’s not becoming a new leader, but let’s say they were leading strongly in their career or whatever, but then they had some setbacks.

Maybe they got a divorce, maybe they had a business partnership breakup. Maybe their business isn’t growing like it used to. How do you like, get somebody back on track? And I’m guessing it’s the same strategies, but any particular nuanced advice for the leader who lost their way? 

Jill Schulman: So in that case, I would go to, that’s more of a when adversity strikes.

Sometimes our natural reaction is everything is ruined. I’m not gonna be able to change it, and it’s all me. So what you’re describing is a pessimistic, explanatory style. When things happen to us, we explain it to ourselves, and this is happening in our head. So if we just say the sky is falling, everything is ruined, it’s never gonna change, that is pessimism.

And that is not helpful. So we need to get into a optimistic mindset. Optimism does not mean Pollyanna. If I just pretend everything’s okay, it’s gonna be okay. No, that is not it. We need to be, we need to be realists. This really sucks. I. This divorce, I never saw it coming or this partnership breaking up.

So we need to be real and go what is going on? Let’s recognize the adversity that strikes, or the thing that’s going on. That’s really hard. But then we need to look to the future and be optimistic about our ability to overcome it, to be able to have a better future. And Marty Seligman has this like a, B, C, d, E like model.

And I don’t remember it off the top of my head, which I should, ’cause I studied under Marty Seligman. But the way I simplify it is he just says, you basically almost have to argue with yourself and say if you say like everything is ruined, is everything really ruined? No, this is it. This isn’t everything.

It’s actually isolated. This is one thing and I have the skills. And abilities where I can overcome this. He’s got this formula this A, B, C, D, E. And if anyone were to Google it, like Marty Seligman, learned optimism like his A, B, C, D, E model, it’s these five steps to change your viewpoint in terms of everything’s ruined.

I’m not gonna be able to do anything to ever change it, to be to saying this really sucks, but. I am optimistic that I can overcome this in order to be able to, have a great life or get my business back on track. If you believe it’s possible, then what happens? Chris if you believe there’s nothing you can do and everything’s ruined, then what action are you gonna take?

Chris Badgett: Much. 

Jill Schulman: You’re not gonna take it. You’re gonna go sit in the corner and cry. You’re gonna go to the bar and drink or but you’re not gonna take any action that’s gonna help you. But if you believe that it’s possible that we can overcome this. And to have a better future that causes people to take action.

So the reason why pessimistic to optimistic from a psychology perspective is people who have optimism, even though it’s really hard, will take action. People who are pessimistic don’t do anything. So we just need to be able to get back in the optimism like again, it really sucks. This is not very good, but I’m optimistic.

There’s things I can do, and we, and then it allows us to start taking action.

Chris Badgett: Part of the education entrepreneur goal is to do what you’re doing, which is to take your life experience, your career, your things you learned in school, and put it all together into a body of work like you’ve done with this book. How do you what do you think? Came together for you to be able to create this body of work and stay focused and, lead the project, manage the project, get it done.

Jill Schulman: Yeah I’m just, now I’m speaking outside of my expertise ’cause I know a lot about leadership, psychology, science of bravery. Now I’m just telling you like my experience here. I know for me just was so interested in this. It was fascinating to me, and it seemed like there was a need.

So for me it was like my passion project. So I don’t know if it’s the same for your audience out there, but they’re probably super passionate about. Their coaching business and how they can help people, whatever they, they have on their platform to be able to help people with.

So for me, it was just finding the thing that I’m really passionate about, and this is supported by the literature, by Angela Duckworth. She writes, grit, how are we gonna have the grit to actually get this thing off the ground? And she says, then grit is the long-term passion and perseverance to achieve a long-term goal.

And. What she teaches is if it’s not really meaningful, if it, you don’t feel like it’s a passion project, that’s a calling, you’re probably not going to have long-term like, passion, perseverance to get through the rough stuff. So for me it was like, I’m like, this is it. This is maybe this.

Sounds a little bit like pie in the sky, but I’m like, this is the impact I wanna have on the world. I feel like I can, so I think I found that, and then and then as I started building it, Chris, I wrote the book. I wrote the first manuscript, and then I started realizing that there are so many other people.

That tell a similar message, and I’m like, oh, I thought it was all original, right? And I went through this little oh gosh, did I pick the wrong thing? But then I came to this aha moment, which is if I really believe in teaching the science of bravery so that people can really overcome their fears and get what they want, if there’s more people other than me sharing this, that’s good for the, that’s good for humanity in the world.

I like use the analogy of, if anyone you know goes to church and they have any type of faith, whatever, like there’s not just one pastor, like there’s lots of pastors preaching the same word, and that makes the world better. So I just have to realize like now I, I connect with and try to elevate their platform, they elevate me because like we all like.

I just feel, I believe in an abundance mindset. So I think I went from like kind of scarcity oh my gosh, I wanna be the only one of going. No, we need as many people as possible talking about this, because there’s a lot of people that let fear hold him back, so I can’t do it on my own. 

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Love that. I love that. Tell us something about that you learned about leadership that for somebody who wasn’t in the military, like what did you, what’s something that military uniquely teaches about leadership? That civilians may not. Know about or at least have as easy access to training on or something like that.

Jill Schulman: There’s two things that come to mind. Number one is the comradery that we feel in the Marine Corps. I. Is so unique. It’s like going through really hard things together makes you bond like nothing else. So I think sometimes when you can do how do you create that same experience sometimes in a corporate environment or with a team that you lead If you have a small business is, sometimes you gotta get outta the office and do something, that’s.

Maybe challenging or like physical or something like that. And it’s amazing how that can create some bonds. So I think that’s just you go through, I didn’t go through bootcamp. I was an officer, but I went through like officer candidate school. I went through the basic school just going on missions, deploying with other people like it, I think that’s one thing.

And then the other thing that comes to mind, I had it on my mind. This is this is the other thing is, the Marine Corps in all services, we are taught to always first share Commander’s intent. And it’s what is that? And Commander’s intent is really just making sure every single time you task someone or give a mission, you always talk about commander’s intent is the why of the mission.

That way it allows agility in execution with your Marines. So instead of my Marines just saying go attack the hill, I’d say the commander’s intent is we’re trying to secure this area to be safe for the local civilians, and to eliminate the threat. That is the whole intent, commander’s intent.

Right now your orders, your mission is to attack the hill, right? And get the enemy off of it. I need to give them the why, to give them agility and execution. Then you need to trust your, for me is to trust my Marines. If my Marines are moving over to the hilltop and the enemy moved off and a bunch of kids are flying a kite on top of the hill, do they still attack the hill?

So just, taking the time to. Communicate commander’s intent, which is just, it’s really the why, like why am I asking you to do the thing? Because when they understand the why, they’re more motivated intrinsically, and they’re gonna make better decisions. They’re gonna be more innovative and more agile.

And I don’t see that enough in corporate America. I think we just say just do this thing. But when you just take that extra moment to tell ’em the why, they feel like, Chris, if I was doing it to you, first of all, you’re gonna feel respected. I’m like, let me tell you the bigger picture on what we’re trying to accomplish here.

So this is really the intent behind what we’re doing. Your job is you’re this little piece, and this is what we’re asking you to do, but I want you to understand how it plugs into, so then you already feel like more respected and valued. ’cause you’re like, oh wow. So you’re motivated, you’re more informed.

And then when. Murphy’s Law happens or like something, they actually understand how to make the best decision to fulfill Commander’s intent. 

Chris Badgett: Cool. Very cool. Tell us more about the, the decision to do parable for the book. I love it. ’cause story is such a powerful teaching tool. But particularly when you’re coming from there’s all this science, right?

Yeah. And this study and this resource, and this long list of like sources for the book or whatever. But yeah. Tell us about the parable and story teaching through story. 

Jill Schulman: Yeah. I think stories make things stickier. And I think of some of the books I’ve read over the years on leadership. Like I love the One Minute Manager.

I think one of the best leadership books ever written was a one Minute Manager by Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson. I don’t know, have you read it? 

Chris Badgett: I have read it. You have read it? It’s been a while. Yeah, it’s 

Jill Schulman: been a while. But it like, it literally teaches you the basics of how to be a good leader and it’s a story.

And it just, it sticks. And so when I go to companies and especially when I have new leaders, I make that required reading. I should be getting a little commission or something from the Ken Blanchard company, because I’m selling so many of these books, but I love it. I just, I have them read that and then they come in and then we do some skill building on the things that he teaches in the book of setting expectations and, giving praise and feedback.

But and the other. Personal motivation. So I love the one minute manager who moved my cheese, the energy bus, like all these, like John Gordon is a master of of parables. And when I pick up a John Gordon book, when it’s a parable, guess what? I read the whole thing. Have you ever picked up a story and not read the end of it, but how about business books that have all the science in it?

Do you pick it up and read it cover to cover? I don’t, and I know that’s gonna happen. So I, so in my parable, I, I. I’m sharing all the evidence-based strategies and then I say in the beginning, author’s note, like all the sciences in the back. But I think if I present it as a story, more people are gonna read it.

They’re gonna read it to the end and it’s gonna stick. And hopefully you guys just trust and if there’s any nerds out there like me, ’cause I’m a nerd, like I, if someone tells me something, I’m like, I want the studies behind it. So I want it, but I actually, what I personally want is give me a story and then gimme all the science in the back.

But don’t make it boring. Don’t make it a boring book and, ’cause I’m not gonna read the whole thing. So I don’t know. I, so I followed, I followed the model, I followed the lead of Ken Blanchard and John Gordon. And I don’t know, fingers crossed, this is my first book. So I hope it’s successful.

Chris Badgett: Modeling’s a part of leadership, right? You gotta model the leaders you love and admire and respect. 

Jill Schulman: Exactly. Exactly. And you know what? The fact that you just said that when you look at the science of bravery, I’ve got three different dimensions that I teach in my book and my speaking and all that, and one of them is what I call brave relationships.

So find people who have done the thing that you wanna do that you’re a little bit scared of for me, like writing a book and then surround yourself with people that have done it successfully or get. Maybe, find two or three people that you can approach and ask for their help and their advice.

Don’t just feel like you’ve gotta do things on your own. And this might be the opposite of what you think. Bravery. Bravery. I could just figure it out on my own and I’m just like, oh, I’m gonna I’m like, that is. People being scared to be vulnerable. So a couple brave things is it takes a little bit of bravery to walk up to someone that you’re a little intimidated by because they wrote a book and it’s, but go up and ask, right?

I used to lead sales, so I’m like, you just gotta go up and ask, right? So go up and ask and you’ll be surprised at how many people will help. And then you need to also be vulnerable and say I don’t really know how to market a book like you did so well, can you give me some pointers? So being brave is.

Not is admitting when you have questions, you need advice, you need support and asking for help. It’s a lot of literature on the science of social support. If you have the right social support and you ask for help and you get the support, you’re more apt to achieve your goal. I’m telling people to do this, not.

Just because I found it successful. The literature, the science supports it that if you have people that can help you in the journey that have done it before, you’re gonna be more successful. 

Chris Badgett: It’s like the comradery and the military, but there’s also the community of elders and things like that.

Jill Schulman: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Totally Tell us 

Chris Badgett: sometimes, a point of view builds off of mistakes or outdated things. Perhaps. I’m trying to keep it positive, but what do you think of are some like common leadership or bravery ideas that are. Not quite functional, that don’t really work, but are accepted in society that, that your work perhaps challenges or path?

Jill Schulman: Yeah. The biggest one that comes to mind is the misnomer that we should desire a life of comfort to be the happiest and have the most fulfilled life. People think that the key to happiness is I don’t want any challenges in life. I don’t want any adversity and I just wanna be comfortable.

Wouldn’t it be great if I just won a million dollars and could go on vacation every week? And we think that’s, would make you happy. That is not what will make people happy. There’s even studies that people that win the lottery, and of course they’re elated for a while ’cause all that stuff they get to buy makes them, but within a year their level of happiness.

Measured as subjective, wellbeing is at the exact same level it was a year before. So getting things handed to you doesn’t so the misnomer that I wanna avoid adversity or I want to seek the comfortable path to make me happy, that is not true. And. And I’m on a mission to change that. I want people to realize that, ’cause there’s when adversity strikes or when we experience challenges, there’s, it can happen different ways.

Sometimes they happen to us and when they happen to us, we gotta deal with them. And a lot of people call that resilience, right? , I can help people with resilience. But I’m, I don’t wanna just help people like get back up when they’re knocked down. I want people to go after. I want you to seek discomfort.

Seek adversity and challenges, but the meaningful kind, right? What do you really wanna do? What do you want to achieve? And that’s, you’re a little bit, that you’re a little bit scared of. And for me it was writing a book, getting on all these live podcasts, right? Getting on big stages. These are the things that I’m like, it’s a little scary, right?

But, when it comes to this misnomer that, comfort leads to happiness, it is not true. And I can, prove it scientifically. And what I want people to realize is that seeking challenges that will have, sometimes a rocky road will lead to the highest levels of success, happiness, and wellbeing.

But it sounds counterintuitive, right? You’re like, wait, I’m supposed to do like the hard thing. Yeah. I want you to do the, I want you to be uncomfortable. Like in the Marine Corps we have a, so two little phrases from the military. You might have heard these. So in the Marine Corps we say pain is weakness, leaving the body.

We have it tattooed on our bodies that actually, I don’t know, have any tattoos, but a lot of my fellow Marines did, or we have it on t-shirts, that pain is weakening, was weakness leaving the body. So not necessarily physical pain, but discomfort in terms of doing things we haven’t done before. So discomfort is weakness, leaving the butt, making you stronger, more confident. And then in the, I have a lot of friends who are Navy Seals and they just say, embrace the suck. Embrace the suck. But it’s not just, like even if you look at the stoics ancient Greek philosophers, they knew this to be true, right?

They say the obstacle is the way, you know the reason why, you know things are. Difficult. What’s the quote? I’m not, I’m trying to think of the quote, but there’s a quote, but I believe by Marcus Aurelius that says, the reason why things are hard is not because things were easy, it’s because things were too easy.

Things are now difficult, so it just so I totally botched that one. You’ll have to figure, you’ll have to look it up and put it in the show notes, but. We have known these universal truths for a long time. Even in, in religious, text, and there’s stories about this over and over again.

But in today’s day and age in 2025, we’re getting a little soft. Technology’s advanced so much that everything is so easy. So I think the pendulum is swinging a little too more like comfort and just take more self-care days. If you take a self-care day, six days in a row, you are lazy. You are not doing the right thing for yourself.

You wanna take care of yourself, set a challenging goal and get the hell out of bed and get to work. That is the real self-care. So I just wanna write the ship here ’cause we’re getting a little too soft 

Chris Badgett: word for that. Set is fun, comfortable is one I’ve heard before. So comfortable. I have not 

Jill Schulman: heard that before.

I love that. 

Chris Badgett: Let’s double click a little bit more on stress. I love the analogy of there’s the comfort zone, the stretch zone, which is where you get fun, comfortable, but then there’s like the panic zone where, yeah, you can go there, but maybe don’t spend too much time up there. You might get some long-term negative impacts, but tell us about how to lead. Use bravery through stress, particularly leaders. Most of the ones I know, like they have higher than the average stress loads. And I know a lot of it’s self-inflicted and mindset, but how do we better manage stress? 

Jill Schulman: You started off talking about the three zones so I completely agree with that. Like we want the right amount of stress. I wanna cite the original researchers that looked at the relationship between performance and stress, and that’s Dr. Ys and Dotson, who originally published it in 1908. So let’s give credit to the original researchers. But what they found is that when there’s not enough stress, it leads to boredom and complacency.

So we don’t wanna stay in the comfort zone even though it feels very alluring to stay in there. So we if, unless you want a low level of performance and complacency, and actually that can lead to things like depression. Because you just don’t feel like if you wanna stay there, I don’t think anyone wants to stay there, right?

So too little stress is bad for you, bad for your professional wellbeing bad for your happiness and wellbeing. So we don’t wanna be in the comfort zone, too long. On the opposite end of the spectrum, what they found, if the level of stress was too high specifically, or if people feel like it’s impossible or there’s never a break.

Then that can lead to lowers a level of performance and wellbeing because that, that leads into to that chronic stress, which can lead to burnout. So we think of this as Goldilocks in the Three Bears, right? You don’t want too little, you don’t want too much. You gotta find the middle. And really the middle, and this is where bravery comes into, is you gotta figure out like what is a little scary for you?

But with hard work and effort using the power of yet, I can accomplish it really in the next six to nine months. So like for me, like getting on a stage of probably 500 people, that’s comfortable for me getting on the stage in terms of in, in front of 5,000 people. Now, that’s uncomfortable for me, right?

That would be a good challenge for me. But people who have never spoken before so for me. It’s in the comfort zone to be speaking to a, an audience of 500. But for people who’ve never spoken before, they might, that might be in their. Like panic, overwhelm area. They, maybe for them they would the top of their curve would be, I’m gonna speak in front of 20, people like to start off.

So it’s just realizing that everyone has their own curve, and that’s what bravery is. It’s your perception of how challenging it is for you and it’s different. And then I love that because I live in Southern California, like you gotta ride the wave. So if this is the. Curve, which looks like a wave, right?

When you get in that curve, right? Or when you’re at the top of that curve, which is kinda like the top of the wave, you can ride that wave moving forward and do more and more challenging things. And that’s really the research by Chiney High in his book called Flow. Have you ever heard of people say, get in the flow?

That’s flow. Flow is you’re right on the edge between you’re doing something where you’re challenged, but it’s engaging because it’s like you’re trying to get a little bit better, but it’s not too far where it feels impossible. So you wanna get in that flow state. That is a sweet spot.

So that would be my advice. Are you just think of that curve and go, maybe I need to like dial back a little bit, right? So I’m in that healthy curve, which leads to happiness, higher levels of wellbeing and physiological physiological health. If I’m too bored, should I challenge myself a little bit more?

Yeah, so hopefully that helps. 

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Last question for you, Jill. If you out there watching or listening is really inspired and there’s, they’re waiting on the book, but what’s one action or one project or one mindset shift to focus on like today, immediately, like after this episode ends to start moving in a Yeah.

More brave, leading direction. 

Jill Schulman: Yeah, I think the most foundational one is the power of yet, which I’ve talked about. But you can believe and dream and create a vision board and manifest in all this stuff. But if you don’t take any action, you’re not gonna be able to accomplish crap. So I want them to believe they can.

But then the second dimension in my model that I teach is called brave action. You’ve got to align your actions with. Your goals and your ambitions. So this comes down to ruthless planning, prioritization, and focus. And this is the real self-care. I want your audience to make a promise to themselves. I want them to make a promise to themselves that they will.

This is literally where I want you to get outta calendar, right? And go what is this thing that I wanna do that I’ve been a little bit shy of doing? And then I want you to add the word yet, and I want you to develop a plan. What can I do over this next week to start taking little steps in that direction to start exploring it?

And I want you to put it on your calendar. And then here’s the hint too. It has to be the first thing you attack first thing in the morning. A lot of the research by Baumeister who talks about motivation says that we only have so much, so many psychological resources, to keep us motivated, especially if something’s hard.

What we normally do is we like, we look at our to-do list and the thing that we’re like, oh gosh, that’s the scary thing. We put it till the end of the day and we do all the easy stuff, and then we wait until the end of the day, and then what happens at the end of the day? We push it back to the next day, and then we pro procrastinate.

So make a promise to yourself. And if this is just one tip that will change your life, is keep your word to yourself every day. Get out of bed and make the promise to yourself, and then you get a dopamine hit, you’re gonna feel so great, right? Keep the promises to yourself and I’m okay doing a day of rest, right?

One day a week, just veg out and do nothing and do your rest. The other six days, get after it, get it to work, and it’s for you. It’s a promise you to make yourself. So if they believe that they can do it with the power of yet, and they make promises to themselves and they follow through on those promises that can change them their lives.

Chris Badgett: Jill, this has been awesome. Tell everybody how to connect with you a little more about your book and where to find you online. 

Jill Schulman: Oh, thank you. If you’ve actually gotten to the end of the podcast, you’re already thinking like Jill is quite a nerd ’cause she cites all the evidence. However, I promise the book.

And my website, it’s I try to make it something that’s interesting to all. If people wanna go to my website, or if you wanna follow me on really any social media, I’m on Instagram, I’m on Facebook, I’m on YouTube. I’m trying to think of all the things of my I’m, I’ve got my website, which is jill schulman.com.

And what I try to do is I try to give little tiny messages that give you that little bit of motivation each day. You and I talked about that at the beginning. So if you do use social media to help you achieve your goals. And so make sure you subscribe to people like Chris, and what he’s doing. ’cause it helps you in your specific business. For me, if it helps you and you want me to, give you some tips and I kick you in the butt a little bit ’cause I do that a little bit. I if you follow different people and when you go to pick up your phone, if that is your feed, like that is a positive use of like social media, right?

So I would love if it helps them, if you wanna increase your bravery and you can. It’s like a muscle, but you gotta keep doing it day in and day out. So that’s why I try to, I make a commitment to my audience and my followers that, at least three days a week, I give a message always with a little bit of evidence, but something that’s gonna motivate you to be brave to move toward your goals.

So go to my website. You can sign up for my newsletter. There’s a free assessment on there too, to take a bravery assessment and free resources. But if you follow me and sign up for my newsletter I think you’ll get a lot of value.

Chris Badgett: You can find [email protected]. Thank for coming on the show, Jill. We really appreciate it. Thanks for the inspiring message and all the strategies and tactics there. It’s been amazing and I can’t wait to read your book. Thank you. All right. 

Jill Schulman: Thank you so much, Chris. Have a great day. Bye.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you [email protected] slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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In this episode of LMScast, Chris Badgett talks with Nick Usborne about his initiative, Your Awesome Life Story, a website that helps people, especially those over 50, record and save their life experiences for those who come after them.

Nick Usborne has decades of expertise in the field and is a prolific author, educator, and course developer. In order to preserve family history and make sure that priceless experiences, lessons, and memories are not lost over time, Nick emphasizes the need of documenting personal narratives. He talks about how many people lament that their family’s legacy is lacking since they didn’t document their parents’ or grandparents’ stories before they died away.

Nick’s project provides a number of platforms for producing and disseminating life stories, such as scrapbooks, audio or video recordings, written memoirs, and even dynamic websites. Importantly, he reassures that one doesn’t need to be a professional writer to tell their story authenticity matters more than style.

Your Awesome Life Story encourages people to record their life, which helps close the generational divide, strengthen family ties, and leave a rich legacy for future generations.

Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

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Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program, I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co founder of Lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest and good friend. His name is Nick Usborne. I’ve known Nick for about six years and he is a prolific course creator. And writer, teacher he’s been in this industry for a long time. He’s got a new project called Your Awesome Life Story.

We’re going to dig into that today. But first, welcome to the show, Nick. 

Nick Usborne: Thank you. Pleasure to be here. Always fun to talk with you. 

Chris Badgett: Tell us What your awesome life story is it’s basically and by the way, I just want to say head over to your awesome life story dot com. So you can look at what we’re talking about.

And Nick, if it’s possible, maybe turn down your speaker volume a little bit. I can hear it coming through your mic just a little bit. 

Nick Usborne: Oh, all right. Let me have a look. So say something to me, make sure I can still hear you. 

Chris Badgett: Yourawesomelifestory. com. 

Nick Usborne: And does it sound any better now? 

Chris Badgett: Sounds perfect. 

Nick Usborne: Okay, cool. All right. All right. So what is it? It’s basically a service, for people who, boomers or say you’re over 50 and you want to create a record of yourself, of your life.

So it’s about writing your life story. It’s part of kind of the family history, scrapbooking, journaling, that whole thing where people don’t want to lose everything. Like I’ve spoken to so many people who say, Oh man, I wish I’d done that. With my dad or with my mom or with my grandma before she passed, because now I know she had so many kind of stories and lessons to share and she did such great thing, interesting things in her life and there’s no record of it.

So it’s lost to us. So the idea of writing and creating and then publishing a life story is you, it’s a legacy. It’s something you can share with your kids, with your family, it can be passed down so your grandkids can find out about your life and there’s so many. I started off when I started creating this was just, Hey, wouldn’t it be fun for people to create their life story?

And then the more I got into it, the kind of deeper I found the topic became I was talking to someone who does activities in a retirement home. And she was saying, Hey, that’s great. There’s so many people here who would like to report their stories, but so many other fringe benefits, like getting a group of people together to share their stories, to get to know each other better, there’s the, I don’t know it’s just such an adventure.

The more I dig into it, the more I see this as a kind of life adventure of, yeah why do I want. Everything that I’ve done, everything I’ve learned to be lost. It’d be, Hey, I got some particular stories that my kids just love. They just say, Hey, tell me the story about when you, and this is usually about when I was in my teens or early twenties, when I was crazy.

And they want to hear those crazy stories. If I didn’t share them, they wouldn’t know. And I’m sure my, from my parents, particularly my mom, my dad left some of his stories behind, but my mom didn’t. There’s probably so much there that I never, she was just like mom, but I didn’t know her before, she was married.

I didn’t know what her aspirations and what she did when she was younger. So I think there’s a lot of, there’s a huge loss within a family and it connects family. It connects generations. A grand, a grandson can say, Hey, you know what? Grandpa’s not so different. He had these same struggles when he was young.

When I think about Nick, I think about the story of you living in a cave in Turkey, I believe. It’s just, that’s such a cool story. Let’s make sure it’s not forgotten one day, 

I should have used that as an example in the course. And I haven’t, that’s not lost. I’ve written that one up with texts and the store and the photographs and everything.

Chris Badgett: You’re a writer, very talented writer but your awesome life story is for anybody. And how do you, what’s your approach to getting people that aren’t necessarily writers or YouTubers or content creators to capture that, which is particularly common, especially in the older generations today.

Not being creators, if you will, for the modern web. 

Nick Usborne: I think all of us have some capacity to write. Yeah, because even if we’re not writing for the web, we’ve written letters. If you’re old enough, you’ve written letters, you’ve written postcards. You, you know how to communicate. And one of the things I say in the course is, Hey you don’t have to have had a celebrity life to make your life story worth sharing, your kids don’t care about the celebrity stuff.

They just want to learn about you. And also you don’t have to write like you’re, John  Grisham or Stephen King. You can just write in your own voice. And sometimes you’ll get a younger person helping a grandparent. With their life story and they’re likely to just record them on video or audio and say, Hey grandma, tell us about, and then that can be transcribed.

If you don’t feel like, so there’s all kinds of different ways to do this. 

Chris Badgett: And what are some of the formats, if it’s not a book, it could be what? 

Nick Usborne: My dad wrote up just a part of his life because I was raised on a farm and my dad had that farm for 30 years. So his life story, he didn’t talk about his, when he was younger, he didn’t talk about when he was retired.

He just talked about those 30 years. And he actually did it just simply as a binder, like a scrapbook. And he typed up the story. He added photographs. There was like newspaper clippings, things like that. So yeah he just, he was retired when he did it and he just sat down and he’s typewriter and then wrote it up.

So that was a binder. There’s another member of my family, like a second or third cousin, he’s actually built a kind of family story as a website, which is also interesting because the thing about it, if you did on a website, it’s a living history. Is you can add to it, somebody has a grandchild or you suddenly remember something, or you find some photographs in the attic.

When my, both my parents have passed and particularly when my mother passed, she was the second to go. There were so many boxes of albums and photos and things like that. And it was fun to look at but the trouble was a lot of those pictures had no context. We’d love to, I’d love to say, Hey, mom, where was this taken?

And why did you keep this? What was this? We never really had, so we had bits and pieces and old letters and postcards. Old ferry tickets from vacations going, from England to France, just all kinds of stuff. So yeah, you can add all kinds of, I’ve lost track of the question now.

I’m rambling. It’s 

Chris Badgett: just a content. The different formats it could take. So it could be a 

Nick Usborne: website, it could be a binder. Another friend I have who he was actually, he originally set out just to write like a letter to his children. So that’s a format. You sometimes see that, letter to my younger self or yet letter to my children.

So he was going to do a letter to his children because his kids were leaving school, they were graduating, but that had no education in finance and money. At school. And you thought that’s not good. This friend is his, he’s, he went through all kinds of struggles and he tried different businesses and they didn’t work.

Then suddenly they did. And now he’s very wealthy and very comfortable. He wanted to share that with his kids. So he started off just as a letter to my kids. And then he thought hang on, there must be other parents out there who feel the same, that their kids get no education in money matters and entrepreneurship and stuff like that.

So he turned that into an actual book and it’s like a three, I got a copy here somewhere. It’s like a 300 page book he had published, by a big name publisher. So you can go that route or you can just do it yourself. You can publish it as a, just as a, an ebook, as a PDF, or you can take that PDF and publish it on the Kindle, Amazon Kindle.

So there’s lots of different ways of doing it. And, or you could do it just as audio or video. It’s. I guess through the mechanism or the, how you approach helping somebody achieve this, because I know it could seem like a big project, but how do you ease into it in your course of like process?

Chris Badgett: How does somebody get started and on the path and what are some of the milestones and methods in your course? 

Nick Usborne: So I take them through kind of steps, because like you say, it can feel overwhelming. Like I have no idea how to do this. So I said, okay, step by step. So step one is why are you doing this?

What’s your why? I want to hand this down to my kids or the why could be, it could be a journal of rediscovery for yourself. It could almost be therapy for yourself is Hey, there’s all kinds of stuff I went through and I just want to review that and get back through that. And so it can be therapeutic too.

And also the why is. Yeah. Like, why do you want to do it? Then there’s the who, but who are you doing this for? Is this just for immediate family? Is it really an intimate thing just for immediate family? Or is it for like extended family and friends? Or is it for everyone? Like my friend who published it, as a big name publisher.

Is it this for everyone? That matters too. And then I say, okay, let’s now gather together all your stuff, boxes of stuff. These are the building blocks, the kind of bricks of your story. And then we get into, okay, how do we structure this? Like, how do we find the beginning of the middle of the end?

And where do we begin? So I have a big beard on. So basically what I’m doing is I’m, I don’t throw anyone at the deep into the deep end with the course. I say, okay. Why are you doing this? Who are you doing it for? Where’s your stuff? Let’s put that into a structure. And then in the next session, we look at, okay, we’ve got a structure, but let’s do a bit of storytelling here.

Let’s apply some of the kind of theory of story to this and make it maybe a little bit more exciting to read, interesting to read. Rather than just dull pros, as it were and then there’s all kinds of tools that I talk about. And one of the things I do right at the end is a section that’s almost, I don’t think I titled it this, but it’s close to saying, Hey, I’m not dead yet.

It’s my story so far, but maybe my story so far can inspire me to do other stuff in my life. So I might, as I’m writing my story, I think. You know what? That was such a period of my life. You mentioned like I lived in Turkey for a while. I can say, you know what? I should go back there. I’m going to put that in the bucket list.

I’m going to go back to Turkey and revisit that place and see if any of the people I knew back then are still there. So that goes in my bucket list, or it could be something I haven’t done. I’ve never, Hey, I’ve never been further east. I’ve never been to the far east. I quite like to go to the far east.

So I’ll put that on my bucket list. So when you do your life story it’s a voyage of rediscovery for yourself and for your family. But. Can also be an inspiration for, Hey, here’s some of the things I want to do with the rest of my life. I’m not done yet. It could be volume two, somewhere down the road, or if it’s a website, then you just keep adding to the website.

Okay. Here’s the journal of our finally my trip out to the far East. Here’s the journal. And I put it on the website. Funny question 

Chris Badgett: for you. What if you’re feeling a little overwhelmed? Oh my gosh, there’s so many stories, so many different parts of life. How do you choose what to not focus on  part of it?

Nick Usborne: Again, I did, I go through this in the course is there are some things that you don’t want to, my brother was writing a book like a memoir and he was chatting to me and he was asking me about stuff. And there was a particular episode that he said, oh, I want to put this in. And he mentioned that and I was like, no way, because that particular episode was very personal, very painful for me.

Back in, in our early childhood, and I said, no, please do not, I do not want that shit. So there’s some things that you may not want to share. And definitely in terms of privacy, if it involves someone else, you should ask them before you decide to share that, or it could be, Hey, maybe I’ve had struggles.

Maybe I’ve had addiction. Maybe I had problems with her in any relationship. Is it good for me to go back through that? It might be. Do I want to share that with everyone? Maybe I do. If this is a story and part of redemption, maybe I don’t. So you’re going to go through stuff and it’s like any kind of editing of any kind of story or anything like that is, is the stuff you want to put in and the stuff you don’t want to put in.

And part of it, I talk about a push pin structure. Think of highlights, again, you talk about the trip to Turkey. Okay. That’s the kind of push pin thing. I’ll put that up on the wall. That’s interesting. It was interesting when I moved from England to Canada. That was a big deal. I’m going to put that in it, where, so there, there’s, you can do almost like a highlights reel. You don’t have to cover everything. No one wants to know everything, but it’s, think about what’s interesting to you, but also think about what would be interesting to your kids, to your grandkids, what would they like to know about you?

And also like one of the things that I’ve done and I talk about in the course is because the world changes so quickly I’ve got a. Even in the closer picture of a slide rule. So slide rule is what we used to use at school before there were calculators. But my kids and their kids, they wouldn’t, if I showed them a picture, a slide rule, they’d have no idea what it is.

So I put that in there because it’s interesting. Wow, think of all the changes that have taken place just over a relatively short period. So it’s fun and it’s. I hope at no point did I say, Oh, this is hard work. I really don’t want this to be hard work. This is fun.

This is exploration. And this is going back through. This is like ringing up old friends, someone you haven’t spoken to for 20 years and say, Hey, I’m doing this thing. And I suddenly thought, do you remember that trip we took? Do you remember that concert we went to? Do you remember that time we misbehaved, whatever it is.

And it’s you can reconnect with people. I’ve done that. I went back to England and I reconnected with one of my very first bosses after I left school like I worked in a quarry and they, he was a master Mason and he was a fantastic guy who had a huge influence on my life, I, when I went back to see him, I hadn’t seen him for over 20 years.

So that was again, part of rediscovering, rediscovering important times in my life, important people in my life. And I think we get, we’re always rushing forward. We’re so obsessed with the present and the future. And the past is gone and I think that’s a shame. I think it can be my process of creating the course.

I’ve necessarily gone through the process myself of creating this life story for myself. And. It’s really interesting and it is healing in a way. And it’s so interesting to look at those big forks in the road. Like when I came to Canada from England, what if I hadn’t? What if what stimulated me to come to Canada?

I wouldn’t be talking, I probably wouldn’t be having this conversation with you now. We wouldn’t have met the way we did all those years ago. So there’s these forks in the road, which are fascinating when you look at them. Wow. And I’ve spoken to that, about that with my kids of Hey, just imagine if, because I, my, my kids, I bumped into their mother.

Oh, I guess it’s always the case. It’s like almost by, I wasn’t looking for her. Yeah. I just bumped into her and all of a sudden we, we’re married and having children and stuff. What if I hadn’t, she was in fact the person who sold me my first. Flat, my first apartment in London.

What if I’d gone to another realtor? What if I hadn’t seen that ad, whatever it was, everything changes. So it’s fun. It’s really interesting. And I’ve involved my kids a bit in it. Because again, part of my story is my life with my children, raising my children. So I said, Hey, do you remember that time?

And sometimes we have very different memories. Of what, they’ll say, do you remember? And I’m like, no, what was that? And then they remind me and I think, oh, true. That was great. Anyway, 

Chris Badgett: let’s talk more about that therapeutic aspect. What are particularly, I think when you’re getting older.

There’s some pain of loneliness, boredom maybe looking for meaning and significance and you’re talking about how good it can be. But what’s some of the kind of the negative side of like where people are at later in life? That this could really help with I 

Nick Usborne: think 

Chris Badgett: it’s 

Nick Usborne: part of it and I talk about this in the course is, and this is when I was talking about retirement homes, the lady there who’s in charge of activities that say one of the biggest.

Issues there is that people become less social, that fewer social connections as you get older, you tend to have fewer people around. So she was saying that what she loved about the idea is that it gathers all the people together in a group and all of a sudden they’re talking with each other. And somebody says something and someone else just burst into laughter and said, Oh, that was me too.

I did that. Or I, I saw that band. Oh my goodness, we were at the same event and we never even knew. And it just brings people to life a bit, I think. And it’s and even if it’s not old people, it could be, I don’t, maybe I’m old, I don’t feel that way. But just like I said, get reconnecting with that boss of mine, having conversations with I, I got back in touch with the headmaster of my high school.

We had a conversation, so again it’s reconnecting with people. Again, for sure I’ve thought about and revisited moments in my life that were not wonderful. And again, that can be really helpful to revisit those moments where things were not great. So I just think it’s ever since as I’ve created lots of courses and they’re generally for the, in the marketing space, this is a new departure for me to do something outside of the digital marketing space.

This is just for anyone and everyone. It just started off as just this little tiny spark of an idea. And what generally happens with me is a spark of an idea either kind of flickers and goes out or it just starts this yeah. And it’s been like that for me with this is I find it so interesting.

I find it so fascinating. And I love like stories man, people, everyone loves stories, right? And stories are great connectors between generations, between cultures from across the world. I can sit down and laugh about something silly that has a thanks, it’s a story about Thanksgiving dinner.

Hey, you could go to Japan, go to China. They may not have Thanksgiving, but they’ll have those holidays and they’ll have the same experience and have the same funny stories, different language, different culture, different place. But stories bind us as humans and their stories endure. But Bible stories, pre Bible stories, ancient Greek stories, ancient Rome story, these stories are still alive.

They connect us with the past, they connect us with the present. Stories like, Hey, I remember reading my little kid, my kids stories of bedtime, they’re such a central part of who we are. And how we connect with others, whether it’s different cultures, different age groups, different, anything, everything like that kind of glue that hold us together.

So when I talk about your awesome life story, it, when I say awesome, whatever you may think, oh yeah, my life wasn’t that interesting. I bet it was, I bet you have some good stories to share. You don’t have to be a celebrity. You don’t have to be a superstar to have it. The story worth sharing.

So yeah, for me, this has just turned into this big roaring project. I, and like I say, everywhere, every time I turn everything I look at this, I just think, Oh man, that’s interesting. That’s interesting. That’s interesting. So it’s growing like nuts now. Like for instance, that thing of the retirement homes never occurred to me when I started the project that, that people in homes might be interested in me helping a group of seniors sit around and tell their life stories.

And it was only when I started talking to the kind of administrators and activities people there that I said, Oh, my goodness, this would be wonderful because it addresses so many issues of community of socializing. Of memory, it stimulates memory in older people. It’s really good for older people and their kind of brain health, as it were to, to remember stuff.

It’s really helpful for them. So it never occurred to me that when I started the course but like I say, the deeper I go, the more the applications I find and the more interested I become. And that’s important because as like starting and publishing and selling a course is not always easy.

There are bumps along the road. It never, I always think it’s going to take off, go viral. A gazillion people will buy it on day one. It didn’t happen. So you, there’s a grind. You have to keep on grinding, working at it. And if you don’t love it, it’s really hard that grind.

But if you do love it, then it becomes easier. 

Chris Badgett: So I watched the movie last night the new remake of Moby Dick. And the author had to work hard to get one of the survivors, as an old man who was a kid during the incident, to tell his story. So if you’re a kid, or a partner, spouse, or friend, and you’re trying to encourage The person you care about to that you think this might be really good for them, or you’re just genuinely curious and you want to get those stories captured.

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Chris Badgett: How, what would you say to somebody like that? Or it could be like the retirement home activity coordinator. To encourage somebody to buy into the idea of doing this. 

Nick Usborne: You can’t force it. There’ll be people who are very private and don’t want to. But I would say generally more often than not, we like it when people express interest in us, in our lives.

It’s Oh, you’re interested in me. You’re interested in my life. That’s cool. Let me tell you stuff. And I think particularly if there’s a strong bond there, like if, Hey, I’m just thinking if one of my grandkids asked me something like that, I’d just melt because my grandkids.

So I’d say, sure, of course, go sit here. I’ll tell you some, I’ll tell you some stories. And your dad can tell me to shut up when I tell stories that aren’t appropriate. But it’s I think most of us we like the idea of being asked cause it makes us feel not important, but it makes us it’s like our life matters.

It’s like an endorsement of likes it is. It’s like the subtext is grandpa, your life matters to me. And that, like I said, that makes me melt inside. Yeah, but like I say you can’t force it. Some people are very private and they won’t want to. They won’t want to talk about stuff like that or they’ll have had, a lot of almost insurmountable difficulties in their life.

And they just don’t want to revisit that. You got to respect that say, okay, that’s okay. And if you’re in a group, if you’re in a group setting, like in a retirement home, maybe out of a group of six or seven people, maybe there’ll be one or two who just like to sit there and listen. And that’s okay.

Chris Badgett: What what’s like a realistic timeline for somebody to go through this process, just in general, I know different strokes for different folks, but it’s somebody pulled us off in a couple months, three months. 

Nick Usborne: Yeah, I think you can, I think that’s about right. You can do this in two or three months.

One of the things I say in, I interrupt one of the sessions in my course. I say, okay, hang on. And that’s where I’m talking about the discovery process of finding all this stuff and maybe interviewing some old friends or school teachers or old bosses, or maybe finding, maybe your local paper’s still there and they have archives and you can go back to when you were a teenager or you played on a sports team and you think it might’ve been in the newspaper.

All this kind of discovery stuff. I say don’t rush this. The process of putting together the raw materials for your story, the journey is half the value. Yes, it’ll be great when you’re done and you can share this, but like the real value here is this journey of putting it together. Yeah, so don’t rush it.

Like you want to, and it’s tricky cause I also say don’t slow to a crawl and lose momentum, but don’t feel this like a deadline and enjoy and be present for those times when you’re discovering stuff or you’re interviewing someone, or you’re going out for a beer with someone that you haven’t talked to for 15 years or 20 years.

Don’t rush that stuff. Because even if at the end. You never put this down on paper, which I hope everyone does or on, whatever medium, even if, just the process, just going through the process up to that point has huge value, I think, of exploring, re exploring your life through the stories of your life.

Chris Badgett: It’s almost like a working vacation. It’s fun. But there’s some work aspect to it, but yeah it’s enjoyable. 

Nick Usborne: Yeah. And there’s no deadline. There’s no failing. There’s no, it’s just a, it’s just a journey. And I think like I say, it was, keep trying to think of what was the original spark?

And I can’t remember. I think it was, I think there was just like a page in a book that I read. Months of my life in the middle of last year that I just think it just, that was just the spark and I can’t remember the book and I but I’m pretty sure I was reading a book and I don’t think I finished the book.

I think when I had that spark, I stopped on that page and I thought that, and it wasn’t about life stories. It was about life, but I can’t remember why it sparked the idea. But yeah, sometimes you just never know where it’s going to come from, the idea. 

Chris Badgett: What’s your approach to teaching in the course?

Is it like videos, text assignments? How do you do 

Nick Usborne: it? Yeah, I do kind of video. First of all, I build PowerPoint because I want to show things. I want to illustrate things. And then I go through them. It’s as if I’m doing it. I record it. The course as it stands at the moment is pre recorded. So there’s nine different videos, nine, nine sessions.

And basically it’s me, my voiceover on PowerPoint slides, but at the end of each session, there is a worksheet. So this is part of the kind of teaching process that I go through. And I said, look, listen to his session one. Here’s the worksheet and this stuff for you to do. There’s an assignment that there’s lines where you write stuff down.

So I encourage people to go through, listen to the session, complete the workbook, the worksheet, before they go to the next session. So they’re internalizing and they’re participating because the, this, like with courses, sometimes we get into courses and we just we’re half present, half not, and we’re listening to it.

And then maybe we see something out the window and then maybe we’re halfway through and we don’t even go back for the rest of the course. And that happens a lot. So I don’t want that to happen. That’s why I have these worksheets in between sessions. to get people to actually participate and to internalize what they’ve learned and to build up, in the end, they’re going to have these nine different worksheets as a pile, as a little binder, as it were.

I also have some kind of bonus materials. There’s one of them is a prompting guide, where if you are sitting with your grandmother, How do you prompt her to remember? Hey grandma, like if, when you walked out your door, when you were 10 years old, what did you see when you went to the shops, what shops did you go into?

And what did they have? When you left school, grandpa what was your dream? What did you want to do? And then what happened? And so it’s one of the, one of the downloads, one of the kind of bonus downloads is 52 different prompts to, to actually, and that is those 52 prompts are really interesting.

Cause you can do it to yourself. You can go through them and get and do it yourself. And it’s really interesting to unearth stuff that you haven’t thought about forever. I did it. I said a while back, my wife said, Oh, do you remember that time we went to Pittsburgh? And I said, I’ve never been to Pittsburgh in my life.

She said, sure you do. We went together. I said, we did not. And she had to really prompt me and remind me of the specifics of that trip. And I said, Oh, wow, you’re of course you’re right. She could remember I didn’t. But then I did and it’s like we forget so much and it’s not like part of the prompting and part of this whole process is we, our memories, this back shelf, there’s the back room storage of our memories and there’s front, the front window of our memories.

And we often get lived through life just looking in the front, the store window, the front, the big memories that we hold in the front. But man, we got so many memories stored back there in the shed behind during the, on shelves back there. And that is where some of the amazing stuff is in those memories and stories that we haven’t thought about for a decade or decades.

And that’s what the prompts are for. Is it helps you unearth those and you go, ah, and you go back into the storage room and you pull out the, and it’s Oh man, I haven’t thought about that for so long. I should give that guy a call. So again, it’s enriching. It’s reminding you of the kind of tapestry of your life and the weave of your life.

Chris Badgett: Tell us about the free guide on your site. So if somebody wants to check things out, you have sign up with an email address and they get your life story discovery guide. Yeah. What’s in there? 

Nick Usborne: It’s basically, it covers a fair bit of what we talked about today. It’s basically a lot of it is the why.

So the course is the practical hands on step by step that, that free it’s, Hey, it’s 47 pages. It’s not nothing. It’s not like one of those three page freebies the substance there, but what it takes you through a lot of the, why the emotional journey of why this is important, how it can be good for you, how it can strengthen your family.

How it can. Bridge gaps in the family it can bring people together. So a lot of the reasons why in the discovery guide is to discover why you want to do this. And then at the end, if you think, you know what? Yeah, I do want to do this. I’ve discovered the one, then you go into the course and that’s the practical step by step.

Okay. Here’s how we’re going to do it. 

Chris Badgett: So if somebody out there is listening to this and what their curiosity is peaked, or they know someone like, let’s say they have an older parent and they see this opportunity, what would you say to them to encourage them to follow this thread? Get the, get, 

Nick Usborne: Get the guide.

The, anything you’ll pay for the, any payment for that is I’ll send you a series of three or four emails in the days to come. But even the emails are informative rather than pitching. Yeah, take the guide and talk about it. Talk about it with people in the family. Talk about it with, say it could be an elder relative.

Sometimes, I guess I mainly. Speaking to if I’m buying Facebook advertising for this, which I do to get people to see this, I’m targeting the 50 plus 55 plus. But like you say you could be 25 and you’re thinking of your grandma or your parents or that old friend who’s lived next door forever and used to babysit you when you were a kid.

And that seems to be, I’ve mentioned before, I think it seems to be a real motivator for some people. This is almost I’m not ready yet, but I’d love to help. I wish I’d spoken to, I’ve got a friend whose mother. And she had Alzheimer’s it’s not a lot of fun. And she was saying, ah, I wish I’d thought about this for my mom before that, that took hold that I’d captured her story in time.

Because again, like when someone’s diagnosed with Alzheimer’s or dementia or whatever, it is that fear, the horror of everything is lost. Everything in my mind, every memory, everything is gone. So it can be very powerful for them to invite them to let’s capture that. Let’s capture your life story.

So yeah, I’d get the discovery guide. That’s the starting point that, that explores the reasons why. And then you can get the course for yourself if you want to do it for yourself, or you can get it to help, to go through it with an older relative or friend. 

Chris Badgett: And I’ll just say, we don’t have to mention the price because Nick may change it at some point, but it’s very affordable and approachable.

So if you’re intrigued, I’d encourage you to check out yourawesomelifestory. com. Any final words for the people, Nick?

Nick Usborne: If you’re course creators, or you want to create courses do what I did, which is follow the spark, follow the flame. There’s lots of, there’s lots of people who will say, Hey, here are the hot topics. Here’s where you need to be. Here’s where you want to be. That’s okay.

But I, but but I think your greatest work will come and your most successful courses will come out of where it lights a fire inside you. It’s like I say, this is I’m ridiculous. I published a number of courses and I always think on day one, Oh my goodness, this is awesome. A hundred people are going to buy it in the first five minutes and they don’t, but it’s what kind of drives me.

Like I say, if you’re not in love with your topic, it’s really hard to keep going because it is a grind. You have to keep working it. It’s a business. You have to keep working it. So find something you love. You want to share that is important to you that has meaning for you and that you think has deep meaning for other people.

And yeah, now when you invest the time it’s important. It’s rewarding. So yeah, Jeff is something you love with a spark. 

Chris Badgett: I just thought of it as you were talking were to use a course as like the finished product, you could, for example, like I’m thinking about this, if if I went through a prompt hey, what lessons do I wish my kids knew When they’re my age or before they get here.

So they have an easier time or better time or whatever. Why would I teach them? And then is there a story that goes with that? And you can literally like use a core structure, which are literally called life lessons or lessons. They could be life lessons and do that. And then even one, there could be a whole course about finances and money as an example and then another course about love and another course about travel, another course.

Nick Usborne: To the point about the story thing, it’s say, if I say to one of my kids or grandkids, listen to me, I have years of experience. Let me give you some advice. Generally doesn’t work like, Hey, old person, just shush. But if I say, let me tell you a story and the lesson is embedded in the story.

Then that’s something that people want to hear about and that stories are teaching tools, the fair, don’t go into the woods. Cause the big bad wolf, we tell stories to keep our kids safe, don’t, don’t go out after dark into the woods. It’s a scary place.

The wolves will get you. So yeah, stories are fun. Sorry. Rambling. 

Chris Badgett: No, it’s good. It’s good. Yeah. Story is part of teaching. That’s Nick Usborne, yourawesomelifestory. com. Check it out. Get the guide. Thanks for coming back on the show, Nick. It’s always a pleasure to have you. I can’t wait to see where this goes as time goes on.

And it’s really providing a valuable service to the world and humanity and people’s. Hearts, minds, and memories. It’s very cool. Like you said, it’s a spark. And the more I look at this project, the bigger that flame keeps getting. It’s a good idea. 

Nick Usborne: Okay. Hey, and we should mention this is built.

I’d love my, the whole thing is built on Lifter LMS. Come on, man. You gotta, we gotta do a bit of promotion. 

Chris Badgett: And Nick is a serial creator. He has many core sites built on lifter help mess. So it’s always fun to see what you do. And I love seeing it when it’s something like this that can really put out a ripple of positive impact in the world.

One of the other things is there’s a lot of kind of negative ripples in the world right now, or all around the world. I love the idea of putting something positive out there as a bit of a counterbalance modest, but just a little thing. Going back, like you said, we’re really focused on the present and the future, and we have our recent window of memory, but there’s a lot of gems back there to go find.

Nick Usborne: Absolutely. 

Chris Badgett: Thanks for coming back on the show, Nick. We really appreciate it. You’re 

Nick Usborne: welcome. Thank you for inviting me.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMSCast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at lifterlms. com forward slash gift. Go to lifterlms. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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In this LMScast episode, James LePage from Automatic and Chris Badgett explore how AI is changing WordPress, online education, and coaching.

James LePage, who has experience in web development, entrepreneurship, and artificial intelligence, is a prominent figure in the AI and WordPress fields. From creating websites for neighbors to managing a prosperous organization that specialized in WooCommerce and online learning systems, he began working with WordPress as a youngster.

From creating websites for neighbors to managing a prosperous organization that specialized in WooCommerce and online learning systems, he began working with WordPress as a youngster.

In this episode, James talks about how he went from working as a freelance WordPress developer as a teenager to managing an agency. Exploring AI, and ultimately selling his firm, WPAI, to Automattic. He emphasizes how AI is revolutionizing automation, website building, and course production, simplifying difficult processes for non-developers.

The topic of formal education’s applicability in the IT industry is also covered in the conversation, with James highlighting the importance of experiential learning and incubator settings.

Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

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Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program, I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co founder of Lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMSCast. We’re joined by a special guest. His name is James LePage. You can find him on Twitter or X at James W. LePage. James is a leader in the AI space, particularly in WordPress. And we’re going to dive deep on artificial intelligence, WordPress, and specifically around courses and coaching and teaching and things like that.

But first, welcome to the show, James. Thank you very much for having me. I’m excited to be here. Awesome, man. I can’t wait for this conversation. We met briefly at an event, but it’s going to be really cool to dive deep and get into what you’ve been up to. Tell us about just your journey with WordPress and artificial intelligence, just to lay the groundwork for, where you are, what you’re doing and your area of focus.

James LePage: Yeah, I have been involved in WordPress basically since I’ve grown up. So I’ve grown up in this industry and I got started when I was a pretty young teen and working in a kitchen and realized I didn’t like working in a kitchen. There was a chef who was mean to me, threw knives at me. I was like, I don’t like this.

I need to go do something else. And that’s something else ended up being tinkering with WordPress and eventually realizing, hey. This is a really easy thing to break into and get started in. So started building WordPress sites for myself and the neighbors and. Started off on page builders, but grew into learning the basics of HTML and then CSS and then JavaScript and PHP.

And I think that type of story is something that I’ve seen a lot of stories similar in the WordPress industry. So I started and grew into a developer. Was freelancing for a little bit, ended up making an agency. That agency I ran for a few years. It went from just me as a credit credibility device to getting a first developer and then a designer and growing into eight people doing some pretty big DTC projects, specifically.

On WooCommerce, but also some course websites, which I had mentioned to you. So we have some of that course experience in the background of my mind ran the agency for a bit and ended up selling the portfolio in college. In college, I also was studying AI when a lot of AI research was coming out around transformers and gen AI and things like that.

And then left WordPress for a bit, did a venture backed startup. I was the technical co founder. It was called chair club based in New York city. And. That was a big idea that didn’t work out. So after it didn’t work out, trying to figure out what I wanted to do. And it was like do I go back to the agency world?

Do I go try to break into Fang and the more traditional software development, or do I do what I love doing and found something again? And I ended up taking option three and option three was really clear to me because. AI was becoming really powerful at that point, GPT two, and then GPT three were coming out and it was really clear to me that, Hey, I had a lot of problems in my agency building things.

And I think AI could be really beneficial on the code side to start. So launched the first product in what grew into WPAI, which was another venture backed startup. Specifically, as the super creative name suggests for WordPress and AI and launched the first product called CodeWP, which was a very creative name again, a code generator for WordPress ran that for a bit and then also started down the path of creating an AI agent for WordPress that did things for you before it was cool and Yeah, built that and then very recently in December ended up getting acquired by Automatic and still breaking into the role at Automatic.

But we’re thinking about big picture AI specifically in the context of WordPress and the open web and publishing and what that looks like in the short, mid and long term future. So that’s a long introduction, but that is my entire background in WordPress.

Chris Badgett: That’s a very well stated introduction is quite the journey you’ve been on.

I have to ask just because education is important to those who watch this. It’s interesting. You studied AI in college. What did you get out of that? And would you recommend that to somebody entering college years these years in 2025? How important is it?

James LePage: It’s an interesting question. So my approach to college was very anti college and it was difficult for me to actually go to college because I was running a very successful agency in high school that was, it was doing very well.

And we had really big projects and I was apprehensive of doing that and school at the same time, ended up going to school. I went to Syracuse university and they had a really great entrepreneurship track. So I actually, Ended up taking the major in entrepreneurship. And as a part of that major, it was college and you still did your classes, but it was entrepreneurship.

So you had your opportunity to work on your business and you were essentially mandated to study topics. And I was in school at the time that the AI was having a lot of research. Published about it transformers and then also the application of transformers around gpt2 and that grew into gpt3 and chat gpt in the systems that we see today that was happening.

So for me, it was logical. All right, I’m forced to study like I have to learn. Oh, no. So I ended up studying AI and that provided an incredible base and foundation. For me to be able to understand how these systems actually work. And I think that’s one of my superpowers where I can look at these systems and be like, Oh, this is how it works.

So it makes the actual thought of how you implement it. For example, with code WP, the idea of, all right, I can really easily. use one of these models fine tune an understanding of WooCommerce code into it, provide relevant code samples and get a really crazy system that takes my request and spits out a WooCommerce code snippet, which was the actual original idea behind CodeWP.

So the education was really important. And I don’t know, I don’t know the place of college in software. I think that I actually do know a lot of software developers who didn’t go to school and think differently. And they’re really effective because of that. I know many who have comp sci degrees and are really effective because of that as well.

So it’s an interesting question. My education is legitimate, but it’s a bit different than the path that a lot of other people took.

Chris Badgett: That’s really cool to combine your entrepreneurship, the business you’re actually building and working in with school at the same time. And that’s it just creates some synergy there or whatever.

That’s a pretty cool way to think about it. Like you’re not just, getting ideas and studying. You’re like working on your business and learning technology.

James LePage: It was almost more of an ideas incubator. And the most impactful part of Syracuse specifically was they had an incredible incubator and they had.

A lot of people, there were a lot of people in AI who actually run pretty successful AI startups at this point. There are a lot of people out of AI and everybody just talking and sharing ideas paired with the mandate to actually learn paired with the fact that a lot of my buddies in this incubator, we’re also running either services, businesses, or trying to raise for a startup, or in some cases, actually running a startup and that ecosystem and environment was really helpful.

So I actually would hope that. Education goes that way in the future, especially as we see more impact with AI. And there’s a whole nother podcast to do on AI and education, but I think that moving towards that collaborative environment is really helpful. And I actually see a lot of parallels with the course industry.

So I’m sure we can touch back on that in, in the future.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Take us into the future a little bit. The whole world is a gush with AI, my old parents are using chat GPT but like particularly around WordPress and publishing and building websites. What do you see the future?

That’s how the masses aren’t really seeing yet as a deep practitioner of AI, like the opportunity, like what is it?

James LePage: I think there’s a really big. And there are a million different answers. So I’ll try my best to do some of the answers. The first answer is us as people who build WordPress and the creators and WordPress and those in agency, those trying to do their own site, those freelancing and building for others.

I think that. There are a massive amount of AI tools coming out that are here to stay, and those who adopt these AI tools become super, super powered in terms of being able to code, being able to ideate on content, being able to ideate on images and designs and things like that. So I think the immediate opportunity for everybody is to really embrace these tools and look at how you can use them in your day to day lives and be a more effective creator.

And those who adopt that, I think, are really well positioned for whatever the future of AI holds. You’ll notice that I didn’t say write an entire WordPress site, or click one button and create a WordPress site, or paint a painting by clicking one button and creating an image. And I really think that In the grand scheme of things, human creativity is really important, and it’s going to become more and more important in the future, as we’ve already seen, I think, with these AI generated articles, and they all sound the same, and it’s all it’s content, but how beneficial really is it to us?

I’m already seeing people who are not liking this and like against the AI side of things. So I think that aspect of how do I augment myself? How do I improve my workflows, not replace them with AI becomes important right now, but also how am I creating and maintaining that human element of what I do in that near future.

So that’s the near future question. I think you can become really powerful. Especially in WordPress. So that’s why in WPAI, we built CodeWP and we built AgentWP. It was like, how do we provide these tools to the people who build to just be quicker? And I hated writing code snippets that were 80 percent the same for WooCommerce.

So we built the tool to fix that. I think that was like the real mentality behind those products. That’s also what we’re thinking about at Automatic. And I think the whole industry is thinking about this. Like, how do we build tools to be more effective on the web? So that’s the short answer. I can also do a long answer, but I’ll break if there are any questions in between.

Chris Badgett: I just, I’d say, I think GitHub Copilot has a really good name because the Copilot, the AI is there to sit beside you, not replace you or take your job. If you get really good at leveraging your Copilot. You’re going to be like 10 times more productive and save time and have more room for the creativity.

And a quick clarifying question for the technical folks out there. How does chat GPT as an example? Differ or get hub copilot differ from

James LePage: code WP started as this single turn prompt tool that you could say I want this functionality for my site and it would do its best to generate a single code snippet that you would install into functions PHP or like a plug in like code snippets to extend this little functionality.

So a good example is that in WooCommerce You have a WooCommerce subscriptions plugin and you want to add this like additional subscription term. I think it comes with 12 or 24 months and I want 36 months. And if I wanted to code that, I could go on stack overflow. I could go on the WooCommerce docs.

I can look through like the actual setup for this, but it’s simple enough and we can put it into this AI system and have this system output a really good. Piece of code for that specific functionality. And that was the origin of code WP. And it went through a few iterations. We ended up selling as we were working on the third iteration, but it really started growing more and more into an IDE.

Where you would be conversationally working with this development environment and creating multiple files. It wasn’t just a PHP code snippet, now it could create a PHP primary file for a plugin and then generate the JavaScript and the CSS and enqueue those and create like a little functionality plugin.

And that’s what it was really good at. It wasn’t anything to go and create the next lifter LMS with one button or gravity forms or whatever it was. And I don’t think we’ll ever have systems that really do that, but it was one of those things where it’s okay, I need this functionality for a client and I know what I need to do.

I just don’t know how to do it. Exactly. So I’m going to have this tool do it for me. And we saw a lot of people love it. It was awesome to ride that wave of growth and appreciation as everything else was happening. So that product was launched a week before chat TBT. So we just rode the wave on the WordPress side of things, which was awesome.

And that also allowed us to do a lot of real discovery of what people wanted. In terms of AI for WordPress where people were asking like, Hey, code WP, can you go and help me do a performance scan or a security scanner? Tell me why this page is blank and white. I have no idea. And that led to the second product agent WP, which was this thing in WordPress.

And it was like, okay if we have this agent in WordPress and we can give it access to the file system in a safe way, and the ability to run and execute code in a safe way. Then at some point, this thing can read your error logs and tell you why this page is white and sit beside you as that copilot and do things for you, but also use what WordPress has to offer, which is this framework for data and functionality, basically and help you do really anything.

So that was actually the motto is do anything WordPress and got pretty far along on that and then ended up at automatic and we’re keeping that mentality of. What can we do with AI and WordPress in a way that makes sense for the users of our awesome CMS? So that’s what we’re thinking about now

Chris Badgett: How do you think about that across different types of users, like the developers, the power users, the first time user, it seems challenging to make everybody happy, but maybe I’m not thinking about it the same way, or maybe somebody, one segment, you got to focus on first or whatever.

James LePage: It’s interesting because there are a lot of approaches that you have when it comes to AI and WordPress, because you have so many of these little user groups, and one approach is, AI is fairly robust and you can build a pretty robust system that. You can scale it up and down in terms of complexity and what it can do and what it has access to.

So for the really basic first time user who just needs to know how to change their homepage to home from the blogs page, it can just say, Hey, go click this link and it will bring you to the relevance settings page. And it will say, here’s the settings page. And when you do this will happen. But for the developer, it can identify, Oh.

This is a question that is not as simple as moving to a new page. This is a question that requires code. So I’m going to go and use that functionality that’s been built into the system to go and generate relevant code. So that’s one approach where you have a super generic system that adapts to the user base.

Another approach is. Using user interface to silo different products. So for example, code WP it’s actually, it’s up and there’s always going to be a reference of what the code WP product was because I’m really proud of what we had built. Same with agent WP code WP. Was million buttons, a million options, a code editor front and center, like really built for a developer built for somebody who is ready to develop.

And it was an AI product and it was still a conversational AI product, but that was built in a way where you had this tool bench to go and work on. And the agent. Was built with a single text input and it handled everything under the surface. And it was all using similar, actually it was using a lot of the same shared models and data infrastructure between our two products, but it was packaged in a way where it made it a lot easier for one group who was.

Less technical in one group. We were super technical to go and make it happen. Those two approaches, I think each have their merits and I don’t really have a clear answer because we have done both at this point. So it’s a, it’s an interesting thing to think about.

Chris Badgett: We paused after talking about the near term.

What do you see further out with AI and WordPress?

James LePage: I think it makes WordPress really important. So I think WordPress ends up becoming this. I mentioned this before, so there’s a mantra in automatic and throughout WordPress is the operating system for the open web. And I always looked at that and I was like, I don’t know, like I build websites with this. But I think that becomes much more true as these AI systems and AI content and AI, everything starts taking hold.

And I think. The place WordPress has in this is a way that you can build sites in the near term But in the long term this is a way that you manage all of your personal content all of your writing all of your videos all of your images and it can surface as a website, but it can also surface as A source for maybe a voice assistant coming from some speaker somewhere, some AR VR experience or whatever else AI pushes the interaction model towards.

So the WordPress product becomes super important because you need a way to manage all your stuff. You also, in the midterm, still need a way to manage your functionality, and maybe you still want a website. I’m not saying websites are going anywhere. I love websites. You still need that underlying system to make it all happen.

There aren’t too many underlying systems that are open source, that power 42 percent of the internet already, and are built for headless with a great API. With extensibility like wordpress. So I think it has a really big places that operating system such framework for the web as The internet does change because I think it will.

I think what will remain constant, which is what we started on is the human element. There’s always going to be the need for human created thoughts, human created ideas, images. It’s actually probably going to be way more important. And I’m hoping that at some point there’s going to be a standard, maybe.

at the browser level or the OS level to verify this image was taken with an iPhone. This content was written by James himself. There’s the stamp. So we know, and you can repurpose the content however you want. You can present it as a website, you can present it as an AI bot, whatever, but the actual content and the way you manage it and the way you handle it will be really important.

And I think The human bit will be the most important. I

Chris Badgett: like that. It’s a it’s like a much bigger vision of what a content management system means. Like that content is not just images and texts on a screen on a webpage, right? It could go a lot of places for the human. They need a central place to manage their human created content and maybe some AI generated content as well.

That’s really cool. Let’s turn the focus to the somebody who’s trying to teach online. Let’s say they, they want to make an online course and make money selling that through the internet all over the world. Maybe they have a coaching aspect where they do zoom calls or maybe that’s an upsell or whatever.

How can course creators leverage AI these days? And where do you see the industry going for the e learning website powered by WordPress?

James LePage: Yeah, I think probably the most important first thing is that I probably wouldn’t try to make a course with AI. I would lean on the human element. The reason why you’re making a course because you’re the expert in your domain and you want to Provide that knowledge to other people, be it for free or for profit or whatever it is.

So focusing on that aspect of the human bit is the first step. I’d say it’s probably really, I haven’t created a course. I actually always thought about creating courses, but never ended up doing it. And I’d probably be pretty tempted to. Use a lot of AI to make my stuff. I think that the general trend of where everything’s going is people are picking up on AI created content and when they do, they really don’t like it.

So in, in a specific scenario, so one of those scenarios would probably be education for those who are creating the courses and putting together this experience. that surfaces in a website or is an app or whatever it is. I think that AI is going to really help those individual creators who need to navigate WordPress and need to navigate complex data models and user interfaces that surface as really well built products like lifter.

And they can use these tools to be. Much quicker with what would ones take maybe like a day or a week. Now you can focus all on the content and you’ll probably see really smart implementations of AI on a plugin level, on the WordPress level, on a browser and a device level as well, to really assist you in the process of actually how do I put together this page?

How do I actually like. Assign this video content to this specific lesson. And how does this lesson play into a more general course structure? I think that type of usage of AI integrated, but also in systems like chat, dbt, where you’re trying to plan out I know how lifter works. I know how WordPress works.

Let me like think through maybe my structure of the course before I start or how I’m putting the actual content together in a logical presentation for the user. I think those are immediate things that we can do. And in the near future, there’s going to be a lot of tools around, let’s make it easier for you to create this website and create this experience and get this content out to people.

And then I think in the longer term, AI is going to modify and merge and you can probably use a I in the context of education where you have all this knowledge and you want to make it really easy for somebody to access that knowledge and There’s always the place for this structured style of education, but sitting next to that structured style of written content or videos, there could be an assistant, and it could be answering questions in real time, maybe anchored to the video providing that perplexity style search where you’re looking through things, and it’s like, Oh, James wrote about this in a community aspect of his course, or James had a lesson about this, and here’s what he had to say.

So I think that type of generative aspect of AI is going to be Pretty helpful in the mid future. And then again, like as the interaction model with technology and it’s whole starts to change the human aspect, especially like the video stuff, like I’m just speaking to you person to person.

Here’s what I know. Here’s what you want to know. I think that’s going to be really important as well. The concept of education online and the course online honestly, probably won’t be that disrupted by AI and I’m going to, like I said I’m going to be looking for people created content and hopefully there’s like actual verification.

James actually made this to be able to have that experience.

Chris Badgett: Can you talk us technically through this concept of an AI assistant for the student or an AI tutor? A course should work for everybody, but it should also work in challenging circumstances. And as we all know, in a classroom some people are doing better, some people are doing average, some people are really getting stuck.

How would an AI tutor work? It’s essentially trained on All the content and the student could be like, Hey, I’m stuck on this part of what James said over here tell us about how, an AI tutoring system would work

James LePage: technically. I think that there’s a lot to think about first the system itself.

So of course, you could look at a course, like just a repository of data. This is a lot of information. Yes. Like I put together all of these lessons and they’re the written lessons, plans, and maybe like quizzes and courses or quizzes and videos, and all of this results in the user purchasing this to fulfill their goal of learning this specific topic.

And. When you think about it, like a whole bunch of data, structured data, then you can think about, okay what does AI need to be really good? What does it need to answer the right questions? And if you go and ask chat, GBT, and it’s gotten way better over the years, but if you go and ask this thing, a super complex question with no access to the web, no access to anything, maybe it will answer it.

on a surface level. It’s not going to answer it in a super detailed level. It’s not going to answer it in a super personalized level. Worst case, it’s actually going to answer it and it’s going to be wrong. And it’s going to hallucinate this response. Now me as the student is going to be like, Oh, I know this crazy formula and it’s completely wrong.

And I think where you can implement this AI tutor in the context of a course is this tutor can draw on the information that the course has to offer. And instead of you can use it as this like artificial intelligence, or you can use it as a really powerful search tool that can present information in a personalized way to the user.

So I’m on a video and I’m learning about this specific topic. And I paused the video at X timestamp. And I’m like, wow, I really did not understand anything that was just said here and I can rewind it. I watched it like 500 times. I still can’t figure it out. At that point what does the student do?

If education, like being able to contact the instructors included, I’d probably call up the instructor and I’d be like, Hey, can you explain this in a different way? And that instructor would use the same information that was probably presented, but presented in a different way. That’s unique to my request, my, my request to understand.

And this assistant can do the same thing. It can pull in all of the information from the course. It can pull in information from that specific lesson. And I can ask about. Hey, can you dive a little bit deeper onto this specific point that maybe the video glossed over, but maybe the information is available in the course or something like it, and it can surface this in a really unique way, and it can actually cite the lessons, too.

So I see the interfaces like, let’s have this thing like a copilot sit beside you and be available to answer these questions, be available to repurpose the human content. And cite the sources. So we know that this is a relevant and accurate answer, but it’s an answer structured in a way that best matches your question.

And I think that’s a really powerful education device because you basically have that on demand answering aspect of the instructor. And the instructor always has the position in the education of, Hey, like I need to really understand what this user is. I’m the subject matter expert. I’m going to answer in this way.

I don’t think the copilot could ever really do that, but I think it can surface those immediately. Relevant questions, and that excites me a lot. And I actually already do this with ChatGBT, and I’ll take AI papers, and I’ll put it into ChatGBT, and I’ll read the paper, and I’ll bump into a problem, and I’ll be like, Oh, let’s talk a little bit deeper about that, and let’s reframe how this paper presents things, maybe in a simpler way, or in a different way.

And that style of education, paired with AIs, is really helpful to me.

Chris Badgett: Based on what you’re saying, it gives me even more excitement about WordPress in terms of being a educational content management system. So if a teacher is old school and has like folders of paper, lesson plans or whatever, their content is not digitized.

But the more people have their content digitized in videos. In courses or whatever, it could be often Google Docs and other tools outside of WordPress, but it’s making sure that as a teacher of the future that your content is managed and accessible by AI is really important and WordPress is going to play a significant role in that, I think.

James LePage: Absolutely. And that’s a lot of what I’m thinking about and focused on at Automatic, but also as a community member and somebody who’s been. With WordPress and AI since the start of all this generative stuff. It’s like, how do we make WordPress an easier way to take what you have and then surface it in a website?

Like, how do we make building websites easier? Because that’s the purpose of a website. How do I present myself digitally? But then in the mid future, like how do we. Get the right content for the right context and then present it to a user in a unique way and circling back to what you said about the education and maybe these professors or teachers have all of these like written documents and these crazy things.

I think that WordPress. Paired with AI can help the digitization process and help classify and tag and categorize this information and make it more accessible to users. So you don’t really have to take the super long process of Oh, I have all these paper notes. I have to go through them and type them out.

I don’t want to do that. So that’s a really interesting thought about how you make information more accessible. Then also another interesting thought is say you have this. educational system and you have 50 students and they all read and look through your course and There are a lot of questions that arise from it.

And how do you make this Educational system better for users in the future and for students in the future? You can have an FAQ or they append information on to Maybe has a new video like, Hey, here’s some common questions that popped up from the first cohort in this style of system. The teacher can go and answer these questions.

And now these questions are relevant and available to an AI assistant or however else you’re choosing to present information. They can also like scribble notes like if you have WordPress as this content management system and you have it integrated with AI, maybe I draw a diagram to better show the user that student.

A specific concept. And now that diagram is always available to the user and can be used as the A. I. To refer to or maybe make a diagram of its own to try and answer the question. So you have this ever growing collection of knowledge, and that becomes really powerful. And it’s a different way of presenting education, but it all comes back to you need the expert behind all of this stuff.

And it’s just how are you presenting content that comes from the expert? To the actual end user.

Chris Badgett: Speaking of subject matter experts, some folks don’t really understand AI agents yet. So how would like a course creator first, what is an AI agent? Second, like how would a course creator leverage an AI agent either for education or just for their business?

Like the thing that pops in my mind is if I build. A course that targets a very specific type of person. I would love to set an AI agent loose to go find all of my ideal students and send them this personalized email and invite them to my free training and see if they’ll be a fit for the paid course or whatever.

But tell us, riff a little bit on AI agents. 

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James LePage: I, so I started smiling when you asked for the definition because we started building this agent a year and a half ago and agents really picked up maybe like in the past three months and have really become a topic of discussion, but they’ve come from marketing.

So there was never really a clear definition of what this agent is. It’s this crazy AI thing that does things and it’s going to change the entire world, but it was always like if I can say that as a company, I can go raise. 50 million and try to figure out what an AI agent actually is. And that’s been the case for a while.

And for us, when we started working on our agent, our definition was, all right, we want this thing to live in WordPress and do tasks for users and start in a synchronous manner. I ask it to go and. Update a setting and maybe I don’t know where the setting is. So it goes to the settings page and it updates it and says, here’s what I did.

And in the far future, the goal with that agent was, all right, let’s have this proactively just exist in WordPress and help do the plugin updates and help do the performance and security scans and the stuff that I don’t want to do. I just want to push it off to this expert assistant. So that was our agent.

And I think recently the industry has converged on the same definition of it’s an AI system that does things for users. And it can do things in front of you. It can do things behind you, upside down, whatever it is. It’s a system that does something, an AI system that does something. And the reason we’ve come to these.

Pretty clear definitions at this point is because now there are systems that can actually do things for you in specific applications and industries. So like in WordPress, but also opening eyes, pushing systems like operator, they just announced this thing that can see a computer screen and click around.

And there’ve been systems like that in the past. This is probably the biggest marketed one. So we’re getting to systems like this. I think the way. People online should think about these systems is as right now, really powerful automation tools. Instead of building a Zapier flow or a Zapier flow, I’m going to go and think about, and then prompt this assistant to do something similar.

And maybe it’s going to work. Maybe it’s not. The thing with the operator product is the web is a wild place that is made of many different frameworks and. Sometimes accessible, sometimes not. So computers have problems with the web as people do. So it’s not the most stable right now, but at some point you’re going to have these things that do things for you.

You can automate away a lot of the busy work you can in the context of education, maybe I’m trying to do research for a new lesson that I want to push out. I can have this go and probably pull in maybe a hundred relevant articles and. Maybe pre scan them and say here’s why I think that this paper is relevant to your AI course.

And obviously not have the thing, read the paper for me. I don’t think it’s going to be good at that, but classifying and categorizing and then helping me go and say, all right, I should read this paper to make this lesson. That’s probably the way. That style of like general agent is going to be really impactful.

I think in the context of WordPress, I know in the context of WordPress, we’re working on things that can make the annoying parts of WordPress easier. So the maintenance, the updates, the security actually using WordPress, like how do you make that experience better so people can focus on what they’re good at?

Like course creation or website creation or selling physical products or running my bakery, which I need my WordPress site to go and link off to. So that’s probably high level how I look at agents. It’s really fluid. It’s something that there’s a lot of like grandiose ideas. If we’re going to have like swarms of agents talking to agents and the agents will do agent things, and then eventually it’ll tell the human that it just bought a car for a super great, like maybe we’ll have that. Maybe we won’t. My main thought about agents is there are probably some immediate automation benefits. There are probably some really fun industry specific applications. And it’s probably something that in the concept of an AI that does stuff for you, you should probably watch.

But I don’t know if we’re going to have like swarms of agents buying cars and piloting Tesla robots anytime soon. Who knows? We’ll see.

Chris Badgett: What do you think about like a website builder who’s not a developer and they start getting, more ability to create custom code using AI tools or doing it in future WordPress tools.

How do you, like the human is also still needed for example, you could build a whole app without being a developer. And now you have an app, but what if it breaks? What if there’s security problems? Like how should people think about using AI to code without having a human coder around?

James LePage: There are two sides to the question. The first side is the tools that companies make. So the tools that we made at WPAI, and now that we’re working on at Automatic, it’s up to. Us, the creators, to make these tools in a way that are safe and accurate and as good as we possibly can make them.

So when it came to CodeWP in the beginning, there was like no thought towards security, no thought towards accessibility. And as the product grew, we got much more focused on, okay we need a system that makes sure there’s a bulletproof sanitization of anything going in or out of these code snippets and these plugins eventually.

So that was our responsibility. And we had to build the tools to use the models to apply them to our specific products and use cases in a safe, accurate manner that was intended for our industry. So that’s one side of it. And the other side of it is. Just going and creating systems that actually offer value and tying that back into the responsibility of the builder.

I don’t think the responsibility really ever falls into the user’s lap, unless you’re using general tools and generalist tools. And eventually I think these systems will be so good that. We can move a lot of the crazy stuff towards the AI. So the user themselves is acting as the expert in their business and in what they do.

And they’re piloting this system, knowing that it’s outputting good stuff. Or it’s saying, no, I can’t do that. I don’t know how to do that. And that’s a really important system that we were working on with our agent. AI always says yes. So you have to create systems for it to say no, to not do something.

As opposed to doing something and blowing up your site or doing something and it not being what you want it to do. So it comes back to build really good systems. And then follow and subscribe to the mindset of the do it with me user. So I’m an expert. I’m, I like using the bakery example, because one day I’m going to open a bakery.

So it’s I run my bakery. I know the customers that come in, I know my location. And I know why people come to my bakery. I know we cook our bread in this awesome, incredible, specific way. I don’t want to build a website really, but I want to present on a website. So I want to have this AI do it with me.

I want to walk it through, like here are my needs and my requirements. And I want it to either build the site or tell me, no, I can’t build the site.

Go hire a real professional. I’m just a little AI agent. So when you build good AI systems that know their limits and are really accurate and you have the do it with me style user, I think that opens up the accessibility to.

A lot of people that would never create websites or pay people to create websites anyway. And that means more usage of WordPress. That means my bakery becomes more impressive. So at some point I need to hire a full marketing agency to create the brand, to create a better website. And it’s just, I think it’s beneficial for everybody.

Chris Badgett: Last question for you, James. One of the things that excites me about WordPress and AI is the open source. Nature of WordPress so that, the code is easily accessible to the entire world for like free open source software. Whereas like a closed environment, SAS application, it’s like a walled garden and things can’t, AI can’t necessarily train on it unless it’s internal inside that company or whatever.

What are the benefits of, Like open source software in the world of AI.

James LePage: It’s the most, it’s the most beneficial selling point that you could possibly have because specific to WordPress, it’s been open source for over 20 years at this point, I think. So the models themselves already know how WordPress works and that’s great in, in isolation, but for us who build systems that make WordPress more accessible to applied systems, that means that we already have.

A starting point that is miles ahead of things like Webflow the models already know. So when we build pipelines. When we fine tune these things, when we create these systems. They can be awesome. And they can be really impactful. I think you’ll see really helpful, impactful systems coming out of us and other people in the future because of it.

Then also like open source the mentality of open source. The ability to self host, the ability to own your own data, the ability to look through a code base, the ability to have say in where a project goes, so not making this API change that maybe a closed source company would just hit a button and now it’s version three, putting thought into how does this play into my needs?

That’s what WordPress is all about, and I think that idea going into AI and how AI impacts the open web and WordPress running 42 percent plus of the open web that’s the most impactful, most powerful thing ever. I could be building AI at any company doing anything, and I think that WordPress is really powerful, and that’s why I choose to build in WordPress.

That’s why I started the AI startup in WordPress. That’s why I’m at Automatic now. I think that’s everything. So I think that’s a good closer because I love WordPress. I think it being open source is incredibly beneficial in the AI sense. And there’s a lot of opportunity in terms of the human element of content creation, putting it into this open source CMS, adapting with the changes that AI will bring and moving into a glass half full and an exciting future as opposed to something

Chris Badgett: else.

That’s James LePage. You can find him on Twitter and X over at James W. LePage. Look for him there. Give him a follow. Thanks for coming on the show. This has been a really fun conversation about AI. I know you out there watching and listening have learned a few things and hopefully you’re excited as I am about the future.

Thanks so much, James. I really appreciate it. I can’t wait to do this again in two years and see where we’re at.

James LePage: It’s fun to be on an exponential curve. Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. And with that Twitter address, my DMS are always open. So if anybody has questions and wants to bounce ideas around and try to see where we’re going with AI we’re all in this together and I love answering these questions.

So feel free to get me on X James W the page. Thanks James.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMSCast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at lifterlms. com forward slash gift. Go to lifterlms. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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Chris Badgett and Jim Hankins discuss how Jim and his wife, Doreen, developed a flourishing e-learning firm in the firearm safety teaching area. Training was an important part of the company when they first opened as a gun store. They eventually discovered their love for teaching and switched to weapon safety instruction. Doreen swiftly rose to prominence as one of the best educators in the field. Using her knowledge to expand their company. To assist other instructors and other companies increase their web presence. She even penned a book called “The Firearms Marketing Toolkit“.

Realizing the potential of online education, they started providing weapon safety instruction renewal courses in Michigan. Opening up the procedure to a larger audience. Additionally, they created a real estate agent safety course that was authorized for continuing education credits, thereby broadening their scope. Their ability to strategically seek out to and cultivate relationships with regulatory bodies is a key component of their success.

They sought to have their courses approved by regulatory bodies so that they could become the preferred supplier of weapon safety instruction, as handgun training frequently entails both legal compliance and required knowledge.

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Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program, I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co founder of Lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS cast. I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Jim Hankins. He’s from cribops. com. Jim is a shining example of what I call an education entrepreneur who has found a niche successfully deployed e learning and repeated ways in the firearm safety niche.

And he’s done this business with his wife and there’s so much to unpack here, but first welcome to the show, Jim. Thanks Chris. It’s great to be here. So tell us about when I saw you, when you reached out or we connected and I saw you had so many sites. I was like, this is awesome. It’s hard enough for some people to get one site off the ground.

Tell us about the genesis of firearm safety training and how you were able to. Figure go into this niche, but also do it in a repeated manner in different contexts.

Jim Hankins: Sure. So my wife and I started this business firearms training business actually starting as a gun store, as a retail outlet with training as a.

Big part of the business, but yeah, so it’s, yeah, 17 years ago. Then we just over time decided that we actually really liked the training aspect of it and gave up the, the retail side of it and just went a hundred percent for training. Doreen is a marketing genius when it comes to just relationship building and local local marketing, cause that’s a very local business, and so she just became pretty successful over time. And in the firearms training business, there’s, certifying bodies that create the content that the States we’ll say, yes, this meets our criteria and and they oftentimes have other services that they provide that they sell to customers and Doreen became one of the top instructors in that space.

So yeah, long story short, she then wrote a book. There’s a book an Amazon called the firearms marketing toolkit, if I remember correctly. That’s focused on helping firearms instructors really, it applies to any local business on how to, how to be found on the internet.

And we started. Providing services, coaching services and hosting services for CRM, marketing, automation, those kind of things, anything to help them make the most of the time because they’re usually solopreneurs, right? Or there might maybe a husband and wife, team they oftentimes have a, main job and this is a side hustle they do on the weekends, right?

So anything they could do to help automate that process of, user sign up and those kind of things. We started recording content for them that they could in turn sell or give away to their customers to get them moving in the direction of using e learning as another aspect of their business.

Dream was getting pretty successful with that concept in the state of Michigan, she created a renewal class that could be taken online. So now that could be purchased anywhere in the state. She created a real estate agent safety. Class that actually she went through the process of getting it approved for continuing education.

And so now you get to see credits for that. She just started pushing that type of content out to other instructors. And then that became, a whole another business of hosting, web hosting and CRM hosting for the class. For the instructors. Yeah. Yeah that’s how we got into the, learning management as a service and providing it to other customers.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, you guys create the content or you’re using licensed content or a little bit of both.

Jim Hankins: We’re creating all of our own content. Then just literally providing that over to them as a white label and they can, sell or. Or give away as a lead magnet. In some cases, it’s really short just for the purpose of lead magnets.

It could be content that helps the students become acclimated to the vernacular before the class. They have a little, 30 minute class that they can take at their option. Before they join if they’re new to that world. And yeah, so that’s what we do.

Chris Badgett: What, like I see a lot of people who are in the mandatory education space.

It could be for a job like to keep a license or get credits or it could be like I’ve seen stuff in the court systems. But I think one of the biggest things you have to figure out and one of those is if there is a governing body, how to work with them or find them or help get them to promote you once you’re approved and just build that relationship.

What kind of general advice do you have about? Being seen and working with a, like a governing regulatory body. Yeah. So it’s

Jim Hankins: all about income producing activities is what I’ve heard others say. Yeah. So you have to look at what can you do on a daily basis to reach out and expand your business to be found, it’s hard to. For people to find you if you’re not doing anything to to make that happen. I’ll give you a simple example, as you mentioned, the court systems. There are people that uh, do things they shouldn’t have and get in trouble with the law. As it relates to firearms training, one of the simple things that Doreen did was she.

That can in fact, she just did this last night dropping off a bunch of mailers to the the bail bondsman’s and the, various court related folks to tell them about our court ordered firearms safety training as an option. And so the, and then she does that, right.

Those are typically live, but that’s an example of, just reaching out into your community and figuring out, what can you offer at, one to many. That that enables you to, satisfy a need and create a niche all by yourself. I’m pretty confident there’s probably nobody else doing that because they just haven’t thought of it and she’s able to, yeah.

Do those classes all throughout the week. And it makes it easy for the court system, right? Cause they’ve already had these court ordered, firearm safety training, but then the people go to the trainers looking for the offering and they’ll say, yeah, we don’t have that.

Yeah. So she doesn’t remote. And there’s no, no, obviously no firearms involved because these people are, have been now precluded from having, a firearm, but they still need to have the aim to understand what they did wrong. As it relates to the law. Yeah.

Chris Badgett: It sounds so simple, but find a need and fill it, do outbound sales and find the people that are talking to the people that need what you have and just develop that relationship and scale that.

It sounds so simple, but yes. It’s not like locals, local people.

Jim Hankins: All the things that used to work still work in local, like the tear offs printed on, cork boards and outside of grocery stores and things like that.

Business cards at the local diner. She still does all those things. And, when we go and frequent those diners, as we do. We look and there’s one tag left on the tear off up time to, put the new one, out there. So yeah, it’s just yeah, basic blocking and tackling on the local side.

Chris Badgett: Tell us about, you have a lot of websites in the firearm safety. Like why are there so many sites? I know you have ranges, you have. Trainers, individual trainers. Like how do you, how did you scale this thing and why are there different sites and all that?

Jim Hankins: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: There,

Jim Hankins: like I said there’s two kind of large training organizations that create the content that instructors then use.

And, they’re certified to be an instructor by those those organizations, and then they just, put the we’re open sign out front of their business and off they go. There’s about a, it’s hard to say that how many are active. There’s probably about 145, 000 instructors in the U S that do this and maybe, maybe half of that number are active.

I don’t, I don’t know. And, and so there, yeah, there’s no regional requirements. In fact, we had a, in our brick and mortar classroom, we had another instructor open up three doors down in a, like a strip mall area. So it’s a very competitive market, but there’s just, it’s predominantly the people states where there’s a requirement for for training to get a license.

Yeah that’s the bread and butter. Then there are organizations that just do training, just safety training in general. Families will bring their kids in and those kinds of things businesses will bring their employees and depending on the type of business, like if it’s a security business or really anything.

And yeah, the instructors are there to, to fill that need. And we’re essentially helping them with the marketing. Tool set the learning content and even the concept that they could have make their own content or use something other than what they’d been teaching. That’s for whatever, it’s funny.

The light go light bulb goes off in their mind. They’re like, Oh, you mean I could create my own content? I was like yes, you can. You don’t just have to focus on the state. The state license based content, you can do all these other things, like as the example, one of the courses we provide is that real estate agent safety class that they can use.

They don’t have to go off and get it certified in their state for CE credits but they could, if they wanted to but yeah, anything like that.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, I think it’s interesting how my, my, I got started in all this actually in a niche gardening niche. It made me realize, and this was like almost 15 years ago, I think.

We may be super technical people here on this call, but there’s a lot of industries that are still digitizing, still, figuring out scaling systems and automation and things like this. Can you give us a sense, maybe some figures of how big the niche is? Cause when I think of safety niche I’ve seen a lot of like martial arts, personal safety training on LFTR LMS and stuff like that.

Self defense, like safety is a huge niche and firearm safety is like a sub niche within that. But like, how big is this thing? Cause I, the human mind just can’t comprehend the scale of certain niches,

Jim Hankins: yeah. I don’t have those figures off the top of my head. But it is quite large.

And then you can extend out to facilities, security, and all those kinds of things. It just balloons just there, there’s so many different, yeah, sub niches of the of safety in general. So I, I came from. A fair amount of focus. I mentioned that I left my wife to run the firearms training business while I had one of my apps acquired and it was safety based.

So in fact, it was called safety grid. So it was a panic button that was I joined a company that did satellite emergency notification coordination. You pressed a button, a panic button on a satellite device, and it would, they coordinate the the response, right? Pull you outside the mountain, out in the middle of the ocean, wherever you happen to be, right?

And so I, I. They took the kind of intellectual property that I had for a group based alerting system that I called group safety. The reason why they brought me in was it was, this was post Sandy hook. And so I was listening to the 911 recordings and trying to figure out what kind of technical.

Solutions could have been brought to bear to increase the response time and to better coordinate the information because there was a lot of confusion as you might imagine in that event. And so when I and the company that I joined. At the time was my service provider to do the monitor alert.

I would send the alert to them. They would, do the the event coordination. And I called them and I said, Hey, I’d really like it. If you’d be able to facilitate me sending you a group based alerting so that I could tell which building somebody was in and coordinate that. And then I had.

Communication between all the parties that they could communicate themselves silent observation. Of what was happening those kinds of things. And they’re like, yeah, this is really interesting. Can you join us? Uh, we’re going to have a meeting here and we’d like to get more information.

I was like, Oh, I guess I could. And it ended up being in Morocco where they had their the meeting, the gentleman, one of the gentlemen lived there. And then, yeah, the rest was history. They asked me to join and, I, build a product in that space. So yeah, so I’ve been in the safety space on the technical side, building, life and limb services.

So I built their cloud infrastructure for that. And then Garmin bought them, bought the assets of that business back about three years ago, I had my exit. Now here I am one trick pony again building other messaging services.

Chris Badgett: Nice. And am I correct? All the, or most of all this, these businesses and projects have been just you and your wife one of the things I’ve noticed in some successful e learning businesses are that there’s often like a technical person and then like the marketing sales and expertise and stuff.

It’s just interesting. Tell us about the dynamic in that partnership on the business side, like how it how you guys complement each other,

Jim Hankins: right? Yeah, and you’re right. So there’s that whole, creative and marketing, brain side, which is not me. I’m more of the technical guy. And yeah, we just we leverage each other’s strengths and it’s tough as a a husband and wife to, kind of balance that okay.

Now works off. Sometimes that’s really hard to turn the work off. It never really is totally off, but yeah, we just, wake up and what are we going to do today? And, you’re going to do this and I’m going to do this. And occasionally we meet in the middle and then get things done.

Yeah.

Chris Badgett: As a technical person, I’m super curious, like how did you get into WordPress? For example, you could have built like a custom LMS solution or whatever. Yeah. How did you get to WordPress?

Jim Hankins: Yeah. So I did have a period of my life where I worked at an ISP and then I owned my own ISP.

I did have some on the hosting side I had, hosting WordPress, as they say, I think it’s, I think you could say that. Yeah, I was providing services that included. Hosting WordPress. So I had that some kind of familiarity with it as a kind of back end job or C developer, WordPress wouldn’t normally be my first thing I would reach for a solution, but in the context of the, like the firearms trainers, they already have a a WordPress site.

Many times, or they’re on Wix or something else. I’ll usually pull them into WordPress from that. It’s sometimes better to just. You know, accept the world that you live in and figure out ways that you can optimize it. With a very small amount of coding on my side, I can drop in something that connects their WordPress site to something else.

And make it happen. It’s great that Lifter because it’s of its existence. It makes it super easy for us to incorporate that e learning content, which is part of our offer. With, super, super easy, stamping those those solutions out and hosting them and centrally managing that stuff.

So you have a great product as it relates to, all the features and the API, which we leverage to to make it easier as we start to stamp more and more of these sites. Out there and each of them, have their own little niches in the. In and of themselves. If it’s a range, then they’re going to have a completely different, requirements than just a regular instructor.

Chris Badgett: Do you know can you think back to how you chose lifter LMS? And decided I think this is the option for us.

Jim Hankins: Yeah. So very specifically the, one of the requirements we had was we got approached by one of the national training organizations that had an underwritten product that they.

I wanted to start enabling ranges and some instructors to resell. And they asked us if we could do that, that the integration with them and enable it, be an enablement partner for them in that space. And so the product needed to be at that point WordPress based because we’d already cross that line. But it also needed to have a concept of membership. And I preferred not to have, to, to play with multiple products if I didn’t have to as for my, enterprise, days of knowing that, you know, having. One source as close as possible to have, the solution is, the cost of delivery is going to be less.

And yeah, you have that membership feature, the group feature, which was super interesting. And we just integrated with the the events that come from enrollment. To build a custom offer that did the integration to allow them to resell the membership. So we WordPress becomes a single point of truth for this national organization with hundreds of thousands of members today to enable their, many thousands of instructors to resell their product offer.

Chris Badgett: Tell us more about the unique way you’re using memberships.

Jim Hankins: Yeah so in, in the case of the the ranges. Many of them already have a concept of a membership and the national. To use their the range, get a discount, guarantee they’re going to have a slot or what have you.

So the national training organization obviously is looking. Helping them have more door swings, increasing their membership. And in most cases, the the ranges didn’t have an automated. Way of selling this membership. You came in, you had to go into the store and, they’d probably write you down on a, a three ring, VIP piece of paper, sticky note, the side of the cash register, who knows, they’re usually one or two person, shops, so they’re not, huge conglomerates. So we come in and provide an ability for them to sell those memberships online, which, they haven’t done yet. But then also have those memberships have more stickiness because of that that membership offers like an underwritten product that You know that the members would like, right?

And then their website becomes the single point of truth to come in and update their payment information, add more members to their memberships, et cetera. So we had that piece then. And then the next thing that, of course, that came, which we Surprisingly, I didn’t think of right off the gate because this move so fast was you have the people at the point of sale that need to be able to look up those memberships.

And yeah, we’re working on making that a little more less of a need to log in directly into the WordPress back end to. Just have that, checkout experience. So yeah, so it’s just central to the to the part of them being able to sell memberships both on premise at the cash register, point of sale.

One of the ways we did that was with a foo point of sale and using the WooCommerce integration and Lifter LMS, so that kind of, that, that kind of. Another example of trying to find something off the shelf that we could quickly get together and connect the dots. And so that it would check the box of, point of sale slash selling the service online.

So yeah, that’s a,

Chris Badgett: another. Such a small world. I was I literally had a meal. Both in Taiwan and in Portland, Oregon at a WordPress event with the founder of Foo. Okay, great. It’s neat to see people using the tools together. You mentioned memberships, groups. I know you’re using courses.

Are there any other key features of lifter? For example, are you using the certification, like certificates or anything, or

Jim Hankins: some instructors ask for those things, usually the, these certificates in their case are like really state governed. So they’re usually, their paper ink signed.

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Jim Hankins: And they haven’t started asking for that too much. We’re not using those features. It’s mostly around the the ability to event on when they’ve signed up so that you know, like for example, if they sign up for an in person class, we might use foo events for listing that event and then use that to trigger the.

The pre training that they’ll get, so we’ll auto enroll them based upon that to give them access to training, and then we’ll link those events to the CRM to do the suggestive sale after the fact for nurturing to, suggest either other in person training or, e learning training.

Yeah.

Chris Badgett: So as a prolific LMS website creator, what are some besides Lyft or LMS, what are some essential like plugins theme? What hosting do you like to use? What are like the key tool sets that you really love working with?

Jim Hankins: So we do our own hosting and we host on Amazon. I’ve spent, many years working on Amazon.

That’s what I built that emergency response system on. Yeah, so we’re huge fans of that mostly so that we have, more control. And if a customer raises a problem, we’re able to get right to, the root of the problem because we own the infrastructure in that case, or the, infrastructure is code, a thing.

Our, we’re huge fans of Jack’s WP fusion. So we use that quite a bit to integrate with our, with CRM and what do you

Chris Badgett: like for CRM?

Jim Hankins: So we’re actually, we resell GHL currently but we are also taking a, we have the Fluent CRM offer, and we’re looking to try to pull that in to make it a little simpler, so people aren’t bouncing back and forth between user interfaces the Fluent Community is super interesting as well, so we’re we’re taking a look at that and then, the kind of, Impetus of launching the new offering for crib ops for webhook processing.

We use that as part of our our tool set as well. We, used it ourselves internally, and now we’ve brought that out to the public for for sale as a software, as a service to so many, WordPress sites use webhooks, in inbound and outbound for various things.

And crib ops basically gives gives you the ability to have kind of a production ready. Place to send a webhook so that you don’t lose messages that are important to your business or to your customer order fulfillment, et cetera, right? So we take we give the ability for the message to be in queued when it’s sent.

So in the event that the actual service that’s supposed to be receiving the webhook is down or is overwhelmed because you got lucky and you’ve got this viral sale going on, right? We’re Production ready buffer in between where you’re sitting the webhook and where you’re you’re processing it.

And that also we call it crib ops tongue in cheek because it is, it also enables you to run those webhook processing things, automations AI enrichment, whatever it is you’re doing on premise you don’t need a you don’t need to open up your. Firewall and expose your network to the world.

It’s a, our software talks to that place where the messages are queued. And it pulls it in and then you send it wherever you need to send it. It could be N8N or things like that, that allow you to not only process, zillions of messages, but do so at, near, near zero costs because you’re just paying for whatever the wattage is of the compute stuff that you have, which could be old servers or PCs, et cetera, that are, laying around gathering dust, wake them up, blow them off put a fresh operating system on and make them.

Put them to work saving you money and providing value to the customer. So

Chris Badgett: for the non technical listener, could you just describe like a web hook and a simple example of how an LMS site might use one? Yeah.

Jim Hankins: So LFTR has actually inbuilt the ability to send a web hooks which are nothing more than you can think of them as notifications.

That’s of interest. And you basically you can go right into LFTR and and tell it, Hey, at the point of enrollment, I would like you to send me that notification because I’m going to go off and do other things in, in, in advance of them, attending or. Because of them attending an enrollment, right?

And that could be like in the firearms training world, that could be, they need to sign waivers or, those kinds of things in advance of, attending a course. And it’s important that the. that the message be delivered at the right time, right? So right within Lifter LMS in the settings there you can, set that up and then in there, it asks for a URL and that URL is the web hook endpoint, what we provide is a way where we give you the option to generate your own web hook endpoint, and then you’ll then be responsible for.

Taking the message in and doing whatever it is. The lots of people use services like Zapier that’s or make Linode those kinds of services that are public automation tool sets, but you’re going to pay. For the number of tasks that you run through, and they generally start with about like 10, 000, or so workflows a month.

But if you’re using the service for things like maybe a reactivation campaign, so you have many tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or a million. Customer contacts that you’re reaching out to on a regular basis that becomes a cost prohibitive to run it through a service like that, or as you could run a service, on premise doing all the same things, enriching it with AI or whatever it is you’d like to do using.

Local GPU resources versus paying for it in the cloud to process millions of messages. And yeah, we just sit in front of that to allow you to do that at scale and without losing messages Due to like momentary outages of your internet connection or, your computer tipping over cat takes out the network cable or whatever it is you have going on.

Yeah. So we’ll hold onto that message long enough for you to recover from that, let you know if there is a problem. And then once you get started back up, the message is there to process and do whatever it is it needs to do. Awesome.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Go check out crib ops. com. A few more just final questions for you, Jim.

Can you help describe like the kind of impact you’ve been able to have with your LMS projects? Like something like Number of students, number of courses, like lives touched, anything like that? Just, I just want to inspire people from somebody who’s done lifter at scale, what they’re doing.

Jim Hankins: Yeah. So like in the space with the the instructor field that is a, a passion project for many. And the, it’s the difference between them still being able to do it and not by giving them the opportunity to make additional income, additional revenue sources they hadn’t even dreamed of by taking what’s in their mind and putting it putting it in, into LFTR LMS and providing to the world and.

If you are, out there listening and you’re familiar with LFTR LMS and maybe you’re only doing your site maybe step back for a minute and consider, could you help others do what you’re doing in your niche and provide that as a as a coaching or hosting services to others to make a difference in whatever niche you’re in.

Chris Badgett: How has this impacted like this e learning at scale impacted just your quality of life. I’m assuming you have some like location freedom, like you just tell us about the impact of figuring this whole thing out with your wife.

Jim Hankins: Yeah. So. Obviously the one to many is amazing with e learning, and the re return on the investment of time is just silly. Because you spend more time avoiding creating the content than actually creating the content, you’ll vacillate over, does this just make my, hair look, look okay.

Or my lack of hair. So this is my audio. Okay. Should I put RGB lighting in the background? All these things that people vacillate over, I would suggest just create the content, right? In fact, most of the content she creates there she isn’t even on camera. She’s just doing a presentation recording and audio.

So good audio get the content out there and. And get going, right? You know that, I see that a lot of it on the lifter calls as well, where people are really struggling, with, kind of analysis paralysis of getting the the content out. And I would just suggest you just get the content out there, get get, fail fast, right?

If somebody doesn’t like your content, you’ll know, because they won’t watch it. After sign up, you’ll see how much they they watch. You’ll figure out where they’ve stopped and you can analyze it and iterate and improve. And the knowledge you have in your head is worth something to someone who hasn’t walked in the same exact path as you have, and you can help them and whatever it is you’re out there.

Chris Badgett: And my last question for you, Jim like what motivates you? It seems like you’re having fun and you’ve been doing this a while, like what’s the, there’s lots of different kinds of motivation, but what keeps you going and excited about the future?

Jim Hankins: I think it’s just one I’m blessed to have my family to, to work with me, so it’s super.

Amazing to be able to get up every day and, what are we going to do today? Who, yeah, what’s on our list and the kind of the collaboration that happens I really enjoy that. I like bringing technology to life and training to life and the magic of being able to press a button.

And all of a sudden an audience of, the size of the world can consume it. And I don’t know it’s an addiction.

Chris Badgett: It’s a healthy addiction. Yeah. That’s Jim Hankins. Go check out cribops. com. Thank you for coming on the show and sharing your journey with us today. I’m really proud, honored, and inspired at what you’ve been able to accomplish.

It’s that’s what motivates me to. Like our mission is to accelerate yours and your mission is to accelerate other people and it just keeps going. It’s like a ripple that goes out. And it’s a lot of,

Jim Hankins: it really is. And yeah, thank you so much. One for having us on and to your team for doing a wonderful job in answering questions. About LifterLMS and the business in general of e learning.

They’re super Professional. And I’ve had the opportunity to be a part of calls, watching them, just do an awesome job of helping people through the process as they come in. So

Chris Badgett: thank you. Thank you so much, Jim. We really appreciate it.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMSCast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at lifterlms. com forward slash gift. Go to lifterlms. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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For education entrepreneurs, Chris and Jason stress the value of community building as a long-term commitment and a development strategy. A free community may be a very effective marketing strategy by fostering trust and authority.

A community must, however, be focused on the areas where the target audience currently interacts, whether in person or online, if it is to succeed. They emphasize that social media calls for real interaction and active dialogue in addition to content posting.

A community may feel transactional rather than communal if material is delivered without interaction. Particularly in the beginning, when daily interaction and replying to each message promote involvement, consistency is essential. Support from teammates can help keep the momentum going over time.

Engagement should also extend beyond self-promotion; adding value, responding to inquiries. And taking part in conversations all contribute to the development of credibility and trust. Entrepreneurs may build a vibrant, active community that supports their educational company by striking a balance between content, interaction, and consistency.

Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

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Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program, I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co founder of Lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Welcome back to the education entrepreneur mentor series. This is a five part series that goes over the five critical hats. That you need to wear or have included in your team’s skillset to be successful as an education entrepreneur. Teaching online, building an education based company. Those five critical hats are becoming the expert, the entrepreneur, the teacher, The technologists and the community builder.

This is the fifth and final part of the series where we go over becoming the community builder. Enjoy this session and be sure to check out all five parts of the series.

In this session, let’s talk about community building, and this is really. I think the least understood, hat, if you will. And a space of courses, coaching, and community. Community, I think, is the least understood, has the highest failure rate yet. In fact, it’s one of the things that’s as old as humanity, this idea of community. But I think we’ve had trouble translating community to the online world in many ways. It’s pretty new to online in terms of building education and really thinking about intentionally and design it. Let’s start before the product.

Let’s think about building free communities is a form of marketing community based marketing. In my opinion, is actually one of the strongest forms of marketing. If you can, in fact use your free community. Or somebody else’s free community to get traction for your ideas, build authority.

But first let’s imagine planting a community, like your own community. You’re committing to this strategy, I want to build a community that I can leverage for marketing. But a community always has more than just being an ends, a means to an ends. It’s something you really have to commit to. And in terms of planting your community. I think the most important thing is to plant the community where your avatar is, predominantly.

And sometimes if you’re an advanced subject matter expert, you may have, quote, graduated to some other kind of community where the professionals hang out. But it’s important to not lose sight of where You know your learners are. I noticed this in the early days of Lifter LMS and building community.

A lot of the WordPress people and the course creators were really strongly in Facebook and in technology. We ended up in like these slack communities and these more geeky, techie communities like Discord and and so on. And just remember where your people are. It’s part of your avatar research.

Where do they hang out? Both online communities and person communities. What conferences do they go to? Where are they socially gathering in the real world and on the internet? When I’m helping people with community design. I often have to go back to first principles and explain what social media is from my perspective.

I think a lot of people get this wrong. So I like to describe social media as really being two words, like there’s social and there’s media. Media, when it comes to building a social media community, a lot of subject matter experts are. Like I’m going to post content like every Monday in my group, I’m going to post this type of content.

I’m going to post links to My new course launch or do other kinds of marketing content. I wrote a new post, I published a new video, but that’s just media. So that’s not an online or that’s not a social media community. Just have a community that you post media to. And then there’s the social part. Which I think a lot of people get wrong where you actually have to be social and. Your community members need to be social for it to not be a dead community or feel like.

a pitch fest. So I think of social as conversation. So it could be commenting on somebody else’s post. It could be posing a question and not just like, all right, cool. I posed a question as my post for the day and walk away. If people start commenting, you want to engage and not just be like broadcasting.

This is a conversation. This is social. Building a community is a really big commitment and it’s important to, especially as the leader to not just do media and not just do social and just like react and stuff, but not post your leadership content, if you will, consistency is the name of the game.

With community. I think the best communities, especially in the beginning, it’s really a daily commitment. So if you actually get somebody who’s excited about joining this group. It’s probably best that they hear from you that day from their first post or when they join, you can send them a private message, welcoming them.

And then do that every day. In my experience I built a 10, 000 person Facebook group of. Course creators and web professionals who serve this market. And that was over the course of 10 years, but in the beginning, I was in there every single day. I had a rule that I would have nobody leave a post and not have a comment no matter what for me or the community.

So I was really committed to every single conversation and being consistent posting. And conversating on a daily basis. And as time goes on, I could scale back a little bit. I had team members get in and help facilitate in the conversations and the content. So I don’t, I’m not in there every single day like. I once was in my free community, but it was a huge commitment that I didn’t take lightly.

Jason Coleman: Yeah, I think some of that I can relate to is. The idea of not just posting in these communities, but also engaging in the social and having replies and. I forget what ratios are good. And I know Gary Vaynerchuk has a formula folks should look up. I think it’s called 8 cents or 10 cents.

Like you spend, you think of it like you’re spending pennies or maybe it’s 80 cents or something like that. He’s got some kind of math of but the basic idea is don’t just post your own stuff. If you’re on Facebook or Reddit or Twitter, when the social media is like engaged with the community, answer questions. It’s important to not just answer questions about your own product or stuff you can sell. But like just be helpful in other ways to build trust and karma and affinity and stuff like that.

And I like your point about. Looking for your community where they already are, rather than trying to build something and bring them in. And I’m I think folks often either want to look for or build like the social network for blank. There are some, there are a few of those that are out there, but for almost every blank, Facebook is the social network for blank.

So you’re like, what’s the social network for car enthusiasts? Facebook, or Instagram owned by Facebook, something like that. It’s if they’re already on Facebook, meet them where they’re at is really useful. So I think when you’re building your own community when I’ve been building communities in the past, this has been the case.

And I think it’s true in some that I’ve, I’ve seen through our customers and stuff. We see that everything is support. People are going to use every communication channel for support, including your community that you built for them to talk to each other. They’re also going to ask support, like questions of you through that channel.

I think we mentioned this in an earlier discussion too. That’s like any way they can get ahold of you through a blog comment or a Twitter DM. Or they find your phone number and call you at two in the morning. Like they’re going to try to get ahold of you. And so that’s true in these communities as well.

And I know that we, so we. We struggle with that to just have our community and discussion forum devolve into another support forum. And what we do to combat that is we engage and redirect. So we don’t try to stop it. It’s going to happen, like it’s very natural and. It’s not every once in a while someone’s I don’t want to go through the official. I think I know better and not get faster support here.

But usually people are just, I’m here now. I have a question. I ask it. So allow people to ask questions and non support channels. Don’t try to like police that aspect of your community too much. And I think another tip there is to give the, once you’ve hit like a certain mass folks in the community. Give them a chance to talk about it amongst themselves before you come in as, the kind of know it all and say, here’s what I think.

And sometimes you’re surprised, like they’ll answer the question better than you would have. You’ll learn new things, like you don’t shut down the community to just make it like a really quick answer. And they feel good communicating amongst themselves. But sometimes it is like a kind of support question that only you can answer or you happen to be the only one watching in that case, like if you can give a short answer, like just a link, just one word answer, just one sentence answer, give it and move on.

Oh, I had a question. Here’s the answer. Cool. If it’s a more technical issue that like you would want to get on a call and coach them through. Or you need to follow up through some other. It means that you’ve set up for a support, just kindly remind people that like what the proper channel is for that.

And we get that, you use these phrases, like the best way to get help with that kind of thing is through this official channel. The fastest way is here. And and you can use this too. If you aren’t using that community for a kind of support. But people are still asking questions on Facebook or other social media, sprinkle in links. Back to your own community or the official community.

Thank you. If you’re in like a Facebook group that’s branded and has other goals, don’t, you gotta be careful about that. But if, push people back to your own community that you own. And then a side note here is to have a code of conduct. This is like a big topic that we could talk about forever too. But it feels related to this is like having a code of conduct.

About how folks should use your community, what they should and shouldn’t talk about. What kind of behavior will get you kicked out and enforce it. It can be tempting to try to have a very lousy fair attitude about things and it’s good to not crush the conversation and let it go. But if you let certain bad behaviors into your community. Like it’s going to be problematic and that’s another one where maybe we can share some examples of our codes of conduct that we use for our communities.

As a personal story the reason I’m thinking about this what happens, your discussion form becomes a support form is we went through that paid memberships pro support was originally like a, through a BB press online forum. Then we had the idea, let’s start a community forum for the folks to talk about like business issues and other things amongst themselves.

We’ll try to start a discussion. And we tried to. Participate every day. We weren’t going where people were like, so we weren’t on Facebook where there already was. We struggled to get the conversation going. And we were working on it, but even when it was going well, like eight out of 10 posts were just. They clicked the wrong button and posted support in the wrong channel.

Like it was very clear, like the support channel is right here and this is for non support things. We tried to enforce it no move here, go here. It was just confusing people. So we were like, we ended up shutting down the discussion community and we waited way too long to start it up again.

We have a version now that’s on Slack and going well. And we were motivated because we found like an unofficial forum on Facebook that we weren’t even part of that had hundreds of people and we’re like, someone else is running community. We should run one too. And now, so we, open that discussion forum and we’re doing a lot of the stuff you were talking about, the building community and being in there and spending the time for the whole team and just tackling the support issues because that’s a very common thing that’s happening with people who are trying to, build businesses and use tools.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, I think having the code of conduct. I just want to mention there’s this idea of having a safe space. So the main thing you want to do is protect your people. As a leader of the community, if somebody is, being insensitive or rude. Or any outside of your company values and a really negative way. You can pick them out of the community, particularly.

Any community, but the free community, there’s just no room for it. I see some folks get a little overly restrictive. When you join some Facebook groups, as an example, they’re often like, you can’t promote your own thing. No external links and it’s a, it gets a little restrictive. So I try to find the middle path of if someone like is helping somebody and says by the way. I actually have a business that does this cool, no big deal.

If somebody’s trying to answer somebody’s question and they drop a link to a resource that’s not ours, that’s. I’m not policing that. They’re not picking that out. It’s definitely a balance and something you have to learn by feel and a healthy community is like a, it’s a give and take. So you know, you’re figured this out well, when a solid community member will actually give more than they take.

Kind of like how we talk about email marketing, like value piece, and then maybe you pitch a product. So there’s like this overweight to being giving and helpful some to think about. And just one more pro tip is that. If you have an all star community member who’s doing really well in your community, doesn’t work at your company. You can deputize them and make them a moderator or ask them to do more. Potentially give them free access to your course, your membership, your software, whatever. Because some people just really shine in communities, both online and offline. And that’s a, it can be a real asset to your company.

Jason Coleman: It’s a good place to recruit from, even for more formal roles. And I think something I’ll say about that code of conduct that you touched on was. Making sure you preserve that open space for people to, so they can have discussions. And I think you might feel like if you’re writing code of conduct, don’t think of it as like we’re policing certain kinds of conversations just for the sake of it or because we don’t like it.

If you think there should be a goal for the forum. Have the water cooler random channel where you’re talking about, Netflix shows and stuff. Cool. But in the general section, it’s Hey, we’re all trying to build businesses here. Hey, we’re all trying to launch, courses here.

Hey, we’re all trying to talk about football here. There’s a goal for the community is if you keep that in mind. And then the second one is you want to encourage as much as possible discussion around that goal. That’ll guide you over the types of behaviors that draw away from if certain kinds of.

Yeah. Overly aggressive and, political or, different things that get posted, they discourage people from coming and participating. And that can guide you as you’re not picking I like these people, no, I don’t these people, I like this way of talking, I don’t this way of talking.

It’s I have a goal for the community, and if your discussion is pushing the goal forward, that’s good. And certain types of discussion that, like You know steal the air from the room and cause other people to be quiet. It’s you know, you want to handle that?

Chris Badgett: Let’s talk about paid communities as like part of the product.

Like it’s in the pricing, it’s a line item on your features that community is included in your purchase. The big idea here is a concept I call finding the others. So if you’ve ever, and I guarantee that anytime anybody has had the experience of Oh I found my people, for me, I’ve run in like entrepreneur circles, climbing circles.

Dog sledding circles. I like find the others like, Oh, there’s these people that have the same interests and idiosyncrasies as me. That can be like a huge benefit and it happens for free in life, but it can also happen by design as part of a course. And often when you find a really good, kind of customer avatar, there’s actually like some negative emotion there, like loneliness or nobody understands me.

Or, I’m happy in my family or my friend group, but I have this like weird little obsession or hobby or interest or whatever, and then you find those other people that are like really into drones or starting companies or a certain type of fitness workout or yoga or whatever it is, and there’s this like excitement and energy giving experience of finding the others.

There’s a saying in our industry when. You build a great community and it becomes like this real viable business and it’s growing over time. People will often say the subject matter expert will say they came for the content, the courses, the coaching, but they stay for the community.

We’ve talked about recurring revenue in another session and having a functioning community can be a big part of that. Like, how do you do that and create that finding the other’s experience? You can actually look to the offline world in the communities you participate in, whether it’s spiritual or sports or some kind of fitness thing or some kind of food thing.

There’s often this concept of rituals. A group will have their rituals, like at a sporting event, there’s a series of events. If you do religious things, there’s like these series of events that happens. So like creating rituals in your community can be very helpful. I was in a community once where, I think it was once a month there was a post in a group about what are your top three wins?

And the community members, the most engaged members would be like, I accomplished one, two, three, then the other people would do it and then they would comment on everybody else’s thing. And it was a big celebratory thing. That was a really strong ritual. The other thing you can do is in terms of finding the others, there’s going to be like, you’re the leader of your program or whatever, but these other leaders are going to emerge in the community, maybe with like sub subject matter expertise, like some kind of specialty, or they’re particularly good.

And they’ve become so obsessed with your content that they know what you would say. And they’ll answer on behalf of you or Oh, check out. His training on this, or, Jason has a concept around not using exclamation points here. Here’s why you should not use exclamation points too much in your copywriting and stuff like that.

And then you can like, as the like community leader if that, if there’s an untapped resource in your community, a helper, and somebody asks a question and you can be like humble, this is where you’re the guide and not the guru. Which we talked about in another session, is you can be like, Hey, here’s a couple thoughts on that question you just asked, but we actually have this community member, Sally, over here, who really knows this aspect really well, and you tag her, and she comes in and helps, so you’re conducting your community like an orchestra.

And then the other thing that happens when you build a strong community, it’s working, and that’s great, but one of the challenges that presents As part of your, the community aspect of your product is particularly if you have some long time members, they become power users. And they’ve been through all your material.

They love it. They’re here. They’re maybe at the next level of your training or whatever. So you get the graduate students mixed in with the freshman class. And sometimes the new people feel a little overwhelmed and it actually makes their imposter syndrome worse. So they’re like, Oh my God, all these folks in here are already so advanced in mind the right place.

I don’t want to look immature or I don’t know what I’m doing and stuff like that. So design around that, have a process for. Welcoming new members, making sure they feel welcome and seen, and set the expectation, particularly with your advanced users in the community that like, Hey, there’s an expectation to help the new people coming up.

Kind of like that little brother, little sister kind of thing. And I just want to mention that Jason and I are here as business partners because we met at some. Paid and free communities, events, pop up events, and things that happened over the years. We got to know each other by investing in paid and free communities.

It’s amazing. What happens is when you have a strong paid community. I’ve seen it in my free and paid communities where members become like. They do business together, potentially all the way up to business partnerships, so communities can be really powerful and focus on this concept of helping people find the others.

And I just want to spotlight a great book on this topic called The Business of Belonging. I forget the author’s name, but it’s something to check out to, dig deeper into this concept of intentionally designing community.

Jason Coleman: David Spinks.

Yeah. So the author of that business of belonging, how to make community your competitive advantage by David Spinks. So that was the book you were thinking about. I’d like to put a pin in a couple of things. One, like you talked to, we met at an in person event and we do so much work online. The majority of what we’re doing and we’re talking about is online communities.

And we even stressed how that’s amazing. Cause there’s, thousands of people for every niche. Around the world, but if you can get in person, there’s something about even if it’s just with some of those like key people who come up out of your community on a small scale, or you tag along to another conference, let’s all meet up at this other thing.

Like we did through WordPress events. Meeting in person is just obviously like another level and another level of attachment and friendship and, honestly, that, that happens with folks in your community. And then another part of the we talked to how like the free community, you can think of it as marketing.

It can be used as marketing for products. And then you specify like the paid community as a product. I found that’s important. And as we’re building up this community that we have now, which is free, but eventually have a pay component, I think about it like we have a bigger team. So there’s literally like a marketing team and a product team.

And because the marketing folks have communication jobs and. Online communities where you’re talking feels like a communication activity, the same people who do like marketing and sales are like leading the community. They have this like skill set that transfers, but we have to be careful about that.

It’s actually like a different, when the community itself is the product it’s a different skill set. And you’re like, you don’t have to sell anymore. I’m already here. You have to deliver. We, we potentially should have the same way in our, when we develop other products and, sprints or quarters or.

Sessions that we plan, what are we going to do, how are we going to improve it? We’re going to add features. So having that same mindset of we’re building the product itself and it will help you I think, really engage in a community in a constructive way to make it better.

What is the goal of the community? How do we make it better? What do we, we changed? And not that, marketing people are great and obviously like they communicate well, but you’re not just, you’re not marketing to them. They’re already there. Another issue that comes up with these paid communities is I don’t know, you call it like the chicken and egg situation.

So there’s a few tactics to, to help with that. And what’s, I guess a, another big idea to think about the spotlight’s a reason why these paid communities are useful, so that we, you can build content that’s one to one. That’s like coaching, like we’re talking together. Or one to many, that’s like maybe like a paid course and video that they watch and you distribute or through a newsletter.

Or you can have this kind of many to many integration, interaction with your users where they’re talking amongst themselves. And that’s also value that they get. So that’s the main value. That’s one of the values that folks can get out of the community. Maybe it is the main value, like that the people are talking amongst themselves.

And, but that needs a critical mass of people in there talking to make it, but then, and it’s the what is, it’s someone’s number, someone’s law for as the community gets bigger, it gets more valuable. But how do you do that in the beginning when you don’t really have anyone in there if you’re trying to build something new?

So a couple of tactics I’ve seen work are free trials for paid communities. And so either start up and say, everyone’s welcome to come. And at some point you say, Hey, we’re going to be free for the next three months and then we’re going paid. Probably better if you can do it up front as much as possible.

So people know, and it’s like a trial. So perhaps they purchase your course. They do the course, they get dumped into the community in some sense. And you’re like, Hey, you can hang out here for three months and then it’s X dollars per month. And that gives them time and give them some tasks and motivations to participate in the community, send them on a quest rituals.

I love you talked about rituals earlier. It’s so such a powerful psychological thing for humans. And so then they get addicted to the community and it’s not a lot of money or it feels like a good value for them and they stick around. Another thing I’ve seen that’s pretty cool as a way to get people into a pay community is that you can pay to get in or there’s some way to get in for free, either because you’re like a VIP or you seed it with certain people or like the first 200 are free and then you cut off.

One of the more clever things I’ve seen is Ian Castle, who has a community that talks about small cap stock investing. It’s called Micro Cap Club, and I’m not sure if he still does this, but he has like a, it’s quite, it’s investing at a high level. It’s a pretty expensive community to get into.

But folks can get in for free if they provide research. So I, I don’t know if he does it anymore, but it’s very clever. It was like either pay a thousand dollars or whatever the price was. Or if you give us five pages of research on a stock of your choice and we like it, we’ll let you in for free. So it’s Oh, like either you’re paying to get in or you’re volunteering to get in.

You could think of clever variations on that. And I’ll just finish these are some ways to build a paid community from scratch. And like a warning is that I’ve always seen this a couple of times and we have, we should get this guy on the talk about it because it’s wow, you made this work, but I’ve rarely seen at work where someone built a paid community for someone else’s community.

Like they have to be part of that community and also like in a pretty deep way, like already connected. So they know everyone or they’re like the ideal avatar. So they just build it for themselves and then make sense. Usually it’s a very extroverted person who can make all the connections and encourage people to join.

Sometimes you’ll see a community and you’re like, that’s a cool community and they have money and I can build this for them, or it’s adjacent to mine. I’ll build it and try to get people to come and there’s something about that. Like it, it’s just, it’s harder if you’re not building it for yourself.

Chris Badgett: And I know we’ve been talking a lot about consistency and showing up, but you can test this idea by doing a pop up community. Just have a one time event as like a market test. It could be an in person conference. It could be. Like a special workshop that involves working together. I remember Jason and I were at an event together called Cabo Press that our friend Chris Lemma put on.

And I think I went the second year it happened, and then I went, I believe, five more years after that. I enjoyed it so much. It was once a year pop up mastermind retreat in Cabo, Mexico. With a really interesting format. Like the sessions were in pools, half the day was scheduled. Half wasn’t some like lunch group seating assignments or whatever were assigned, other things were free form.

It was a really well done community, but it wasn’t like something that recurred every day or anything like that, it was like an annual event pop up event for a certain type of customer avatar. And that was just a great experience. And I remember when Chris said that. The first time he ran it, he didn’t know if anybody would come and 10 people came and then I went on year two and 20 people came and then on year three there were like 60 people and now he has a, like a application.

He’s always done it by application because he really wanted to protect like the want to make sure the right people were coming. It wasn’t just something that like anybody can come if you pay me, this is for this specific type of person. So he had his screening mechanism. At LFTR LMS one time I brought in a subject matter expert in instructional design and like creating MVPs, minimum viable products, where we they did the workshop.

I just held the space and we were using a software tool called Miro for groups to collaborate together. And we had a couple of people we built, platforms for and help them flesh out their idea as a group over the course of three days. That’s called a bootcamp. And it was a great experience, but it wasn’t like we were committing to doing that every month.

And it was, you’re getting on this treadmill of commitment. So think about you can test community in the same ways as you can pre sell and test other things without the recurring commitment. And let’s talk about community design and management.

Jason Coleman: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: There’s a saying. I like to say about community, which is if you build it, they will not come.

It’s not about getting a community software. Like I signed up for a Facebook group or I use, I have installed the Lifter LMS social learning plugin. I now have a community. It’s true. You do, but you built the house or you’ve scheduled the thing, but are people going to show up or are they going to keep showing up?

I think of it as like holding space, like you really have to, this becomes a part of your life. You have to lead it. And you got to make the space for it. You got to protect it. And in terms of leadership, what I mean by that is you this is one of those lead by example things. And you got to post useful content.

You have to like actually be social. You have to like help and highlight the people that are really outstanding in your community. If, like a spammer comes in or somebody’s behaving inappropriately, you have to kick them out. You have to protect the community. And I think it’s also cool to be human in community.

Like it may be like a professional business related community or athletic advice or health related advice community. Let a little bit of the humanity and sometimes you’ll see community members support each other, if something bad happens or helps, they might celebrate a birthday, even though they’re not, they’ve never met in person or anything like that.

And in terms of community design and management. I’ll talk about Dan Martell’s SaaS Academy community, which was really well done. He had a Facebook group. This was a two year program I was in for software founders. And there was courses and content and stuff, but there were also, the Facebook group was very active.

And like you said, Jason, Dan was very involved. He was in there, he was posting content, he was answering people’s questions. He was being that, doing that humble thing where you know what? We have this community member who’s really the best at subject matter X tag, that person, I think he called that signposting and it was a great experience.

And then the the in person events he ran big cities around the United States and Canada three times a year. We would fly out to that, stay in a hotel together the actual conference room had round tables, not just like chairs in a, auditorium style. And he would intentionally design, or he and his team design who sat with who for all three days.

So he’s trying to help develop relationships this person needs to meet this person, this person is at a similar revenue stage. This person is really good at marketing. This person’s really good at product. This person’s, really good at sales or whatever. And his group, his table groups were like, awesome.

I just remember being like, wow, I had that experience of finding the others. He had scaled his company, beyond his size. And he had a great team that was very much involved, like doing these duties of community design and management. Ultimately he brought in. It wasn’t just him talking from the stage, he had a top expert about pricing who we’ve both studied, Marcos Rivera.

That’s how I met Marcos. And he’s one of the top software pricing experts in the world. So Dan guided us to Marcos and held the space for that, knowledge transfer to happen.

Jason Coleman: Some of the key themes are like. Being intentional about it, being committed continuously working on it. I like how you pointed out being human in the community and especially for those like online, versions of community where it’s hard to remember that or you feel like you’re interacting or in a certain way.

But just remembering there’s a human on the other side of the screen will give you like the grace to work in moments, allow them to have mistakes and get closer. I mentioned outside these people, if you interact with them enough, they become your friends. Like we live like quite a bit of our life online.

And I don’t know, probably a few people like that. They’re just like, Oh, you’re friends with them. Yeah. Hey, when was the last time you saw him? I’ve never seen this person in my whole life. Like they have a frog avatar and I don’t even know what they look like or whatever. But yeah I’m, that’s a fan, that’s a core value of ours about being human that helps guide things.

Yeah, and maybe so something I’d like to talk about around designing your community because I’ve seen folks struggle with it is to make sure that you have a concentration of your discussion or put another way, don’t dilute the discussion. And what I mean by that is minimize the different channels or categories or forums.

Like until absolutely necessary. So if you’re familiar with a forum that can have multiple sub forums or Slack has multiple channels. Or you’re, if you’re using a posting mechanism and you have different categories what I would recommend is start with one channel or as few as possible.

And it’s okay if it’s noisy, you you want it to feel like there’s a lot of people here, it’s bumping, there’s a lot going on. If you spread that out across a bunch of categories too early, it becomes like the wild west and like I see like little dust balls flying by the, it’s like where are we?

And you also, if you have too many categories spread out too thin, too, it confuses people about where to post. They’re like, I have an idea, but I don’t know if that should be in general discussion or special discussion or, news. Is that news or is it discussion? I’m not sure. So let the new channels and forms or categories come up organically.

You’ll, if it’s noisy in that channel and there’s one channel where everyone’s talking, you’ll start, oh, this is a common thing, oh, every day. Or these people like to talk about this. We need a special, place just for this kind of conversation because you want to avoid what’s called like the paralysis of choice when you’re posting.

I mentioned there’s too many options. You don’t know where to put something. Another part of like channel category design that can throw people off as if you use. Like jokey, clever names. And we used to call this like a web design if your menu was like mystery meat. You remember that term?

You, everyone wanted to say what is this called? It’s called like Jason’s Garden. And you’re like, it’s your about page. People know these things are called about pages. Just say about, and that’s what the title of the link should be. It’s the same thing when you’re, labeling your categories and channels.

You want to use descriptive names that explain, what kind of conversation goes there and have a sticky post or some kind of note that’s this is what talks here and lightly police it, if you have a support channel or like a development channel and people start talking about development and you just quietly nudge them Hey, you should talk over here.

Yeah. Minimize the in jokes. You talked about how there’s like these like PhD level, after a while experts who are in your forum, they’ve been there and they start building like a cabal, like this, like force of nature. There are different, those folks who’ve been on your forum for a while are like, they’re, they work in the forums in different way.

And they have these like in jokes that develop. That can be a source of community, but you want to be conscious of like when new folks get onboarded that they don’t just get hurled into this maybe even just have a one pager, here’s all the jokes and terms, but avoid naming your categories after those things.

I guess like a personal story to like nail that home is I’m part of a, like a small investing group on a slack. And I think there’s six folks in there right now, but there’s 12 different channels. So it’s only six people talking, but 12 channels and and a lot of them do have this kind of like mystery meat name.

There’s stuff like the CFO’s office, rat race or big picture. And I’m often like sharing news about something and I’m like, is this big picture news? Or it’s about my job cause I found it while I was working or I take the CFO role in my business. So maybe it’s CFOs, like it’s confusing where they go and it’s confusing then even just literally the user experience of using the Slack app.

I get a notification, I’m like, that looks interesting. And if I click on it and Slack kind of breaks, it doesn’t take me to it. Then I go into the root of the form and I’m like, wait, I don’t know which channel that would have been in. And yet, so like you want to minimize that kind of like hunting and pecking and and this is like a small group of people who know each other, mostly offline anyway, and we’re willing to put in the work to talk to each other.

But if you’re trying to build a community in charge for access and grow it like this kind of friction is, it’s going to be counterproductive.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And just another pro tip. If you just do have one channel, like in Facebook, as an example. You can use, you still have, just have one channel, but you can add a hashtag and you can train members like, Oh, if this is like your wins post, put hashtag wins on it.

Or when you start the thread, put the wins thread on it. So you can create some filtering with hashtags. And another cool thing is some communities are more serious or focused than others. And one cool one that we do is called the water cooler. So for example, in Slack. Whenever you start a Slack instance, it comes with a general channel and a random channel.

So Slack knows this, that like these two will happen no matter what, likely. So

Jason Coleman: When I said one channel, I was thinking the one channel and the water cooler general random channel. Yeah. Yeah. It’s important.

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If you’re like if it’s really serious, you want like the subject matter to really stay focused in the general channel, you can use that random channel or that water cooler is the, not junk drawer, but like everything else over here, personal life over here.

If you’re like really on mission and you want to keep your main channel or main key channels really focused. Let’s talk about online versus offline communities, in my opinion, and experience as both a user or a member of communities and also a creator of communities, I think hybrid is the best where you have some offline and some online, now it’s really hard if you.

Sell training courses and coaching all over the world to create an in person event. But if you can, or at least do it in your home country, or if you’re big enough in your own city or geographic region I highly recommend it. You can all, one thing you can do to add an offline community, if you’re like small and you’re not sure if you can pull it off is you can actually tag on to an existing offline community that.

Your people are already likely going to. There could be like a professional conference that happens for the industry that your people are in, or maybe it’s a sporting event or something, so you can just like, either right before, during, or after, it could be as small as like a two hour let’s meet up at this location.

Grab some drinks or some food and, just get together and chat and meet each other in person. It can be that simple. So there’s ways to hack your way into the momentum of where these people are already hanging out. And that’s why it’s good to be clear on who your customer avatar is.

And you can. You can also test communities. So similar to marketing and doing pre selling and things like that. It’s good to run some tests. So you may think that your main community is in a Facebook group, like that’s pretty good guess. But there may be this other opportunity that you don’t know about crypto people are on discord a lot.

Techie people typically are working in Slack for their company, so you could have just like another Slack group. They’re already in Slack, so you’re right there. There’s all kinds of different ways to think about it. I do like the idea of staying focused, but it’s good to test. And one way you can do it is just test yourself as an individual.

Join somebody else’s community that has the same avatar, see how active it is. over there. And sometimes you will find oh wait, I could have two communities, or maybe my community’s migrating over here to this platform. I might want to try that. I might want to try having it on my website and see if I can make it work.

So it’s okay to do some tests, but I definitely recommend not. Just finding as many community platforms as you can and starting them all at once is too much to manage. It’s also not the end of the world to shut down one with heads up like, Hey, we’re, this community is moving here. You mentioned earlier you were on a forum and you, I think shut that down and moved over here.

We actually started at Lister LMS with a BB press forum as well, decided that it was better. Through a support ticket system and our live calls and things like that, our office hours. But I want to tell a story about the Lifter LMS community. Like our main original, customer avatar is a DIY course creator, coach, subject matter expert.

That’s where trying to wear all these five hats we’re talking about in this training. But what I noticed is no matter what I did. This other avatar was always here, which is, I build websites for clients, the, the WordPress professional, the agency, and then within that avatar is also on Facebook.

But within that, the people that were more engineering developer focused, they did not like Facebook. They weren’t that engaged with it. So what we ended up doing was testing out Slack channel, a developer community on Slack for Lifter LMS, and then that became like the developer spot and like the conversations are so different.

What’s happening over in the developers versus in the Facebook community. And to your point earlier about, marketing isn’t always the best to facilitate the product side of community, what is happening is like the marketing folks are better with the Facebook side, but the actual Lifter LMS engineers, the developers are engaging more in the developer community.

So it’s interesting how you get, you can try to control community, but it’s also just going to happen. Like you mentioned, there was a. Community about your product, a Facebook group that you or none of your team were even in and you found it and then you joined the community about your product.

It’s funny.

Jason Coleman: We’re like,

Chris Badgett: this is cool. Can we join?

Jason Coleman: Yeah, that was pretty awesome to discover. It made me feel good. It was like, wow, there’s like hundreds of people working on this thing. I don’t, I still don’t know what the status is though. We’re competing with them, but they’re on Facebook.

We’re on Slack. One thing I liked about your like the Lifter LMS developers community is it had a test or like a form you had to fill out to get in.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Jason Coleman: And Discord does this really well. They have these tools to build these like checkbox mazes. You have to go through to make sure you get it.

And Facebook groups will have questionnaires. You have to fill out an application process. I know I’m paid memberships, pros directory, or we have an approvals. Plug in and there’s ways to do that. That’s that’s an interesting tool and especially for these like online offline community hybrids where and we’ve seen some crazy ones like you have to live in one of these like 12 houses to be in the community.

So you had to prove you live there. We were like talking with someone. Over like the technical challenges of that. But yeah, it’s I find like the honor system goes a long way of just ask, you can ask people, we have an alumni association, Facebook group, and one of the questions is what year did you graduate?

And people like don’t answer or they don’t, it’s like they could, it’s very easy to make something up, just pick a random year. But people don’t do it. And then you’re like, you can filter on that. Like they definitely aren’t alumni if they don’t remember what year they graduated from or chose not to fill it out.

It was like an automatic spammer or something. Yeah. and that’s good enough. And then you police it retroactively if people come in and they’re not actually like for these I’ve seen lots of these communities that are focused on like a physical space or like the, mountain association or homeowners association or something like that.

And you want to make sure, or even on professional associations have applications are you actually a nurse? Are you actually a police officer? Another thing that comes up in my communication with these kinds of offline communities that are coming online for the first time. And I thought we could chat about it a bit is I remember having customer interviews with a bunch of these and the same conversation kept coming up where they would say, what I really want is a place for my members to be able to collaborate.

And I’d be like, Oh, cool. Like collaborate on what? And they often like, couldn’t really answer to Oh no, just like collaborate. I was like what does that mean? And I think a lot of times I. Back then I have a guess, but I was like, I really don’t know, they, a lot of people talk about collaboration, and it depends on the context of the organization, but I’m like, I think I I don’t know what it means, or is it like this weird buzzword that people feel like they have to have?

But one thing I do realize is it’s a kind of, a lot of them are part of an association where there’s one person who does all the work there, it’s a, it’s like a nature preserve and there’s people have membership and some people donate and some people are members because they bought a brick on the path or something.

But there’s really one person who organizes and maintains it all and does all the work and maybe what they mean by collaborate is get more people to help out here. And I was like, and I don’t actually have the answer for that. I was like, I don’t know how to have technology force people to participate more.

That’s a really tough question. I don’t know if you have no tools about that. And the other thing I could come up with then briefly is like in like a board situation, that same kind of thing that comes up sometimes one person is handling the technology and like they want to talk with each other about things.

And that’s almost Oh, I want to train them on how to use Google meet to or like a kind of web conferencing software to talk online and how to use Google docs or some other system to keep track of notes. So these are maybe like ideas for how to productize that, like within our scope for some of our customers when they, but I was curious, like if that came up with you, like what do folks mean by collaborate?

It seems like this fuzzy term people use. And these challenges of like offline communities, like trying to get more participation and like collaborate through online communication.

Chris Badgett: It can be unhealthy when the idea of collaboration is I want more people to work for free for me. Yeah. And I think this comes to that holding space and leading the community, setting expectations around.

All right, I want you to, you’re here, you can ask for help, but, for every ask try to help three people or just try to help one on one, like even the balance in the universe. Yeah. So it doesn’t become like platform. For where everybody’s just trying to take, cause then it’s not a healthy community.

Yeah. Do you remember like early

Jason Coleman: MIR, IRC forums and you would like share files. It was like you were a leech and you had to upload so many files before you could take. I’ve seen that and I’ve definitely seen in codes of conduct for communities. They talk specifically about like how to give back and give them back in certain ways or helping out.

If you’ve been here a while, help out the new folks. Make sure you do that. Like they encourage it.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And it’s sound like a Reddit, I believe you can’t do a post until you’ve commented a bunch of times. So they’re like getting you to, help or contribute. Before, posting your own thing, let’s talk about other people’s communities.

If you’re a subject matter expert, yeah, you’re trying to build a thing, but you’re likely not in a vacuum. There’s existing other communities around your idea, either very closely or tangentially related by communities of where people are before they’re ready for your community or where they might go after.

So there’s this idea like in marketing is an example where. You can leverage other people’s audiences. And so that means even if you have zero email lists, as an example, you can go to somebody who does have a big email list, create like a training or a free resource. And you take their stage and contribute to their community and maybe get Some people over to your community or your offer.

The way I think about this is just the general idea of being a helper give before you get, so for example, even in the Lifter LMS space, I’d be in like a general, let’s say WordPress community. And someone’s literally having trouble with one of my competitor’s softwares. And the question they’re asking is not like exactly about their software, but I’m like, okay, this is a website that a competitor has, but I actually know the answer to what this person is asking.

Like, where should I host my videos or whatever? I’m still going to help them. So giving with no expectation of return is super powerful. Joint venture partnerships are a really interesting one. And I’ll tell a story about that in a second, but what a joint venture partnership is in a perfect world is you have an audience or community.

This other person have an audience and community. They may be exactly the same or similar overlapping. And it’s like an exchange, okay, I’ll do a webinar for your community, you do a webinar for my community, we’ll both email our lists we’ll invite the people in, and there can be an offer at the end of the webinar to get the free thing or sign up for the paid thing.

And those can work really well. So an example that I do at Lifter LMS there’s two, the two audiences of the course creator and like kind of the website building professional. There’s some people that I do joint venture partnerships with that have like really just the course creator.

They’re not like techies at all. And I have a bunch of techies that you know, but also course creators. So we’re not, our products are not in competition. This person is selling. Coaching and courses and stuff. I’m more in the software side, but we have a lot of overlap in your audience. So once a year, we basically do an email exchange and email to whatever the the main offer is and some, something like that.

And we’ve, this person I’ve met with, I’ve been, I’ve gone offline and I’ve been to their house and your home. I’ve been to mastermind events that they’ve put on it. And we just developed. Partnership, we’ve become friends, we ask each other for just business help from time to time.

And we have this kind of business relationship where we just do this exchange once a year and it’s, I’ve probably done that for six or seven years at this point. So that’s a joint venture partnership. Then there’s affiliate partnerships, which are a little more straightforward in the sense that you can set up an affiliate program where.

If somebody promotes your course or your membership they get a unique link that’s trackable and there’s automated systems for handling this. So they can promote your program to their community the affiliates, the affiliate system man measures and tracks that link click. And if ultimately within 30 days or whatever, that person ends up buying something.

That person earns an affiliate commission, which in the core space is typically anywhere from 15 to 50 percent of the transaction amount. So that’s a way to introduce an affiliate program to your online education platform. It’s a way for other people to essentially sell for you to their audience. Collaboration point.

Story with LFTR LMS but around the same time as we introduced our Facebook group, there was another popular software called WP Fusion, which connects your website with LFTR on it and other popular software to CRM companies like Salesforce, HubSpot, ActiveCampaign, ConvertKit, and so on. And we’ve integrated our softwares together.

They work really well together. I help out in the WP fusion Facebook group. Jack, the founder of WP fusion, whenever somebody has like a marketing automation question or whatever, he comes over to our Facebook group, he helps out. So it’s just like this partnership where we’re leveraging each other’s community, but it’s a triple win.

It’s good for, me, it’s good for Jack and most importantly, it’s good for the user. They’re getting the help from that, that outside expert and the outside expert is also now getting exposure, potentially new customers. We recommend each other’s software. We both use each other’s software.

It’s just a strong partnership where two communities are working for the benefit of all.

Jason Coleman: So many good options there for how to think about these other communities. And you talked about adjacent communities that come before, after in the journey. And I think that like a phrase is like, what’s next is.

Is this one that can be used in a sense of if someone takes a course and at the end of it, they’re finished and you don’t have a community, if you don’t have your own, what’s next, it’s what’s next, maybe you pass it off to another community that, and you become an affiliate of theirs. Or you give someone sales leads for an even bigger course, or you could be on the other end of it where you reach out to some of these other products and communities.

That have that kind of what’s next moment, like they finish this thing, they graduate from that, but that person doesn’t serve that user anymore or have an upsell. And but you do, so it’s a good way to through these affiliate relationships. Cross pollinate between products and communities.

Yeah, I’m,

I’m thinking about interacting with community communities like Reddit in the subreddits in social media and places, or if you’re in someone else’s Facebook group and you, he gave some of the polite ideas around how you should interact there, like you should be helpful, you shouldn’t, always be promoting, you help people, even if they’re your competitors.

Another one. Like a way to think about it when you’re interacting in these communities online is to be yourself and very clearly make it clear, like who you are. I think there can be a temptation, for example, when you’re on a subreddit and someone says, what’s the best LMS to almost and you’re like, I have one to just like almost pretend you’re someone else or just answer and not be clear that you’re the owner of the product that you just linked to.

Because it, that feels more potentially more authentic to the moment or it’s like awkward to out yourself, but I think that’s troublesome if you don’t declare your biases and aren’t clear about who you are, these like internet sleuths will go through your history and be like, wait a second, this is Chris Badgett, you like, and they’ll think you’re up to shady stuff, even if you just felt a little awkward, you don’t want to make it awkward.

You just had a good answer for someone. So it’s almost yeah. Be a little obnoxious about it. I have a bias cause I’m Jason Coleman, the owner of this thing, but we have a really good product that answers that are really good blog posts that answers this question. Even on, on some sites, if they allow it in a signature or some point, put it in the footer, use your clear, your real name, stuff like that.

Declare that you’re biased about what you’re, how you’re responding. And I think people appreciate like on something on like Reddit where you can upvote and downvote. I’m always worried when I do this, it’s like, all right, I’m biased because I own this thing, but we have a really good solution.

Here’s how it works. And that, I think I’m worried people would downvote it. Cause yeah, you can’t trust that. There’s this, like in some of these forms, like Reddit knows the bias is there and they’re sensitive to it and they don’t want to talk to you. They want to talk to other people. But if you’re there and you’re like, Hey, I’m biased, but here’s, and you’re just useful.

I’m surprised you don’t get as many downvotes and people who know about your product might upvote it. And so people respect the honesty. So like another case of this is paid memberships pro, we have a bunch of free open source plugins and a lot of them are hosted on wordpress. org and wordpress.

org had their own support forum system and we had ours. And this has always been a little bit of a challenge because you. If you don’t support people in wordpress. org, it actually affects like your ranking, your search ranking, and there’s no way to disable it or just say, we don’t support it here.

We support it over here. They’re like, Hey, if you host on wordpress. org, you have to support on our system too. So actually there’s a support for them and I would pay people to monitor that and answer questions. But it’s still from time to time, as this happened, at least a couple of times, someone would give us a negative review either on wordpress.

org itself, or even on a third party type review site. And they’d be like, Paid memberships pro charges for support and they wouldn’t answer my question, but I went to WordPress and WordPress answered my question and I’m like, Oh, like WordPress didn’t answer your question. Like I paid someone to answer your question.

Like that person works for me, that person is part of, as part of paid memberships pro and it just wasn’t clear because it’s called wordpress. org. The website is a big WordPress logo everywhere and folks who, beginners mindset, they’re interacting with it. They’re confused about how they’re getting support.

So they just, all they saw was. When you go to slash supported payment, just pro we offer paid support. And now we, that forced us that feedback to we should more prominently focus on our free support. And especially now that we’ve moved outside the. org repo, we have to make our free support more prominent.

So we don’t lose people who just think you have to pay. But yeah, but what we did, so that’s one thing we did was like, Hey, made our phone free support through our our email and contact forms more clear. But we also on wordpress. org would put in our signature every time we help someone, Jason Coleman, owner of Paid Memberships Pro or your title at Paid Memberships Pro to try to make it a little more clear Hey, this is a Paid Memberships Pro person interacting with you.

There’s so many benefits to just like. Actually being yourself and being clear about who you are and being one human being per account rather than playing games and trying to, be a character or pretend you’re someone you’re not.

Chris Badgett: And that completes our session on community. And if you enjoyed this, I just want to say I’ve really enjoyed this conversation, Jason, and this has been a great conversation around community.

I’d encourage anybody who listens to this to think about. All the five hats in addition to the community hat, the expert, the entrepreneur, the technologist, the teacher, and the community builder. And if you’re really into this stuff, you’re not alone. So in many ways, Jason and I are really into this stuff.

We’ve been in it for over a decade. And finding the others, like we found each other through the internet. So if this is your niche and you’re feeling the vibe from, of this community you’re not alone. I just want anybody who hears this conversation to really think about that.

And Jason, I appreciate the great discussion we’ve had. Yeah, thanks.

Jason Coleman: Awesome.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMSCast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at lifterlms. com forward slash gift. Go to lifterlms. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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In this LMScast, Chris and Jason talk about how LMS technology has advanced and how LifterLMS revolutionized online learning by fusing course administration and content production in a seamless manner. In the past, educators had to produce structured material using independent e-learning authoring tools, which they then had to export and import into an LMS.

By developing on top of an already-existing content management system, LifterLMS, however, removed this unnecessary step and increased process efficiency. They stress how crucial it is to strike a balance between offering an all-in-one platform and preserving flexibility so that customers can combine LifterLMS with other tools they already use and modify it.

The platform’s inception may be traced back to their agency work, when they observed a notable requirement from customers who required a single solution to handle marketing automation and course management and delivery. Because of this necessity, they created LifterLMS, a system that not only makes creating courses easier but also changes to meet the changing demands of education entrepreneurs.

They also go over the more general trend of technology bundling and unbundling, in which software solutions either specialize in certain tasks or combine several functionalities onto a single platform.

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Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

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Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co founder of Lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Welcome back to the Education Entrepreneur Mentor Series. Where we go over the five critical hats that you need to wear or find skills within your team members to become a successful education entrepreneur teaching online. Those five hats are becoming the expert, the entrepreneur, the teacher, the technologist, and the community builder.

Today in my conversation with my business partner at LifterLMS, Jason Coleman, we’re going to get into Becoming the technologist. Enjoy this session.

So now we’re going to get into the becoming a technologist and leveraging technology as an education entrepreneur. Let’s start with a conversation around learning management system or LMS technology. The big idea I want to throw out here and how this world has changed with learning management systems. Which technically isn’t a new technology, the internet.

Was created by the United States Defense Department. And then educational institutions started using the internet to share research. So learning and education and research has really been with the internet since the 70s, I believe. But learning management systems sprung up to help people structure content and create learning pathways.

And it’s evolved a lot over the last 40 years where we come into the story is this idea. I actually had a customer at LifterLMS tell me this, who’s been in the e learning space for a long time. He said that, did you know, you don’t have a learning management system, which we call an LMS. He said, you actually have a LCMS and I was like, what is that?

Please educate me about the business. So it’s a learning content management system. So with the old days. What you would do is you would have what was known as a e learning authoring tool. And you would create, your structured content. Your quizzes, and it would at the end be exportable as a package of e learning in a file.

And then you would go look around the world for a learning management system to plug that into. But where we came in with. LifterLMS is we built it on top of an existing content management system. So that the act of creating the content was already baked into the software of the learning management system.

So it took two industries and combined them into one. Which makes our lives easier as technology integrates and becomes a super app of online education. You don’t need as many separate solutions to deliver the end product from idea to. The cool thing about technology, just like with the iPhone, a thousand songs in your pocket. You’ve just simplified a user experience into a more efficiently packaged, better design solution.

So the wild thing about technology is that. You can today there’s been basically over the recent history of technology, a lot of bundling and integration. But also unbundling. If you look at something like marketing software, there’s like these all in one solutions. And then there’s these points solutions like, Oh, this software.

Just does lead capture this software just does this other little piece of a technology stack that you need. So with Lifter LMS as an example at the beginning I was fascinated with this idea of well. Let’s just make it as all in one as we can let’s make it a platform and that’s really what the course creator the educator the entrepreneur wants is. They don’t really want to think about the details of technology. They just want a platform to, take their idea and just plug it into the platform.

But then with Lifter LMS as an example. We wanted it to be all in one. But we also wanted it to be flexible, extendable, customizable and open source. Yes, it’s an all in one, but it’s also exists within the ecosystem of easy other tools.

Technology that you can plug into it so that you can use the tools you’re already using.

So the way this all started back in 2013 as we were building the first version of LifterLMS is. We actually had an agency where we were serving clients and the kind of early days of the online course. The coaching business community at this time, a lot of our agency clients were using a marketing automation software called infusion soft.

And that did a lot of marketing automation stuff, but they actually needed the digital product. They needed a way to deliver the courses, have progress tracking and all that. So we, provided, we kept building actually with open source software, which Infusionsoft wasn’t, but everything else they needed with WordPress.

We kept building these custom early types of learning management systems. And our clients needed it so bad that we’re like, we just need to build a product that meets this need for all of these people to have an integrated learning management system that also included all the tooling you would ever need to create the content as well, all in one place that was both affordable, customizable, and, integrates with tools and technology that people also want to use.

Jason Coleman: Lister LMS is. an awesome platform. Obviously, I think that this one I got involved, I think it strikes that balance of all in one and flexible. It, it hits it in the right spot. It won’t hit it for everybody. I remember being at a conference at the ASAE, the Association of Associations. And it was within reference to the association management software, which is an adjacent type thing.

And but I remember Yeah. Yeah. A few people notice, but one woman in particular is I literally can only, I only want one login and one password and you’re like, Oh, like you still have to have a web host and you’re like, you don’t use it a lot, but you have to log in there once and you still have, or your domain and your email service, like we can automate it, but you still have to log in once it was like our services and one login, but what it is the most important stuff that you work with day to day, That stuff keeps going into the core product and it’s edging.

But if you, it is flexible that you can take out different pieces. If you’re like, I’d rather do email this way, I’d rather do video this way. I’d rather hosted over here. But I don’t know if like how you think about that in terms of where, how do you find the sweet spot or folks, how folks who are thinking about the tools I feel like that when I was like, you’re maybe a little too worried about having logins.

Things like one pass are around now. But yeah, how do you talk people through that? Like thinking about what does all in one really mean?

Chris Badgett: I think about it with if somebody just has an idea and they buy a domain name and a web hosting account. And they want to teach online. If they only had to get one more tool, what would it be?

And but then there’s like these power users, more people who are maybe pretty developed in the technology sector who want all this customizability and flexibility. So there’s this kind of this idea when you create a solution that if you take care of the ends, the middle will take care of your. So if you take care of the person that’s just wants one thing to buy after they get their domain name and their hosting and they’re happy.

And then on the other end, somebody who needs like a developer who has tons of technology and wants to customize the software, it being open source, as long as these two characters are happy we’re the most flexible and good to go.

Jason Coleman: Sometimes folks want the absolute simplest thing. And they’ll go for a fully hosted closed environment.

You can’t take your content with you type place. And it’s hard to tell early on why you need that flexibility. You either have to be creative or like know something. Take our word for it that so often you start out that way. And then when you have traction and success, like there’s going to be something about your, the website or the tool you’re using to host your LMS that you’re going to want to change, tweak, alter.

And if you’re in a closed environment. That may not be the case. And even worse things happen sometimes. I think like medium is like a blogging platform and they changed like their business model. And then all of a sudden you had to think about that with, you can’t have free content on there anymore because they’re trying to make money selling subscriptions and you’re like, wait, I was just using this as a free blogging tool and it’s now it’s not for you anymore.

And that’s like a risky run when you go with a fully hosted service, if they. Think, Oh, we’re going to become like masterclass and only focus on like the top tier celebrities and you’re not there yet. You slowly become less important to them. And, but if you use an open system, like Lifter LMS, on top of WordPress on, general hosting, you have that flexibility of, it’s something, it’s a little more complicated, but if something changes, then you can take your content with you.

Export it and move to something totally different, or more than likely, you can just customize what’s already there, swap in a component that you need.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, it’s there’s this idea of owning versus, versus renting. So on a hosted solution, you’re literally renting space on somebody else’s website.

But when you own it with a tool like Lifter LMS or Pavement Resources Pro, it’s your website, right? That’s a really big difference that people don’t realize they. Perhaps made the wrong decision earlier and they’re like, you know what, I do want to own my website and I want to own my data.

I want more flexibility. I want control over the future and the business decisions made about the software. That’s the power of

Jason Coleman: owning your website. The kind of flip side of using an LMS which has a lot of functionality, we’ve talked about various forms of it you can keep it simple. So I, and I see folks who want to get started and they feel like.

They have to organize it, into modules and courses and lessons and chapters and sections and or they, they need quizzes and assignments and tools and that they don’t have that stuff and they might have something simpler. And I always encourage folks definitely initially go lo fi like you can do something simple.

There’s. A lot of successful courses that made a lot of money and the course is like a single page or post on a website and you just have to pay for access to it, or it’s a single PDFs or like a PowerPoint is really popular. That might be a tool that you’ve already used to like in your, consulting work or like you’re giving a demonstration.

It’s just make that an even better PD PowerPoint or Google docs presentation and sell access that. So I definitely have paid like a hundred dollars for a marketing course. It was literally like a a PowerPoint presentation. That’s an awesome way, like to, you don’t have to use all that technology or a whole platform to get started.

You can sell something simple. And that said, like it’s sometimes it’s a start. So I’ve recommended, a paid memberships pro is a membership platform. And I remember I went to the podcast movement conference cause we had some podcasts as customers and I was talking to those folks and I was like I was thinking of ways of we could, have a premium version of your podcast and pay for the old episodes or the new episodes early or like an extra episode.

I was like, what are you guys trying to do? Let’s make a membership site. And like 99 percent of folks were like, it’s going to be a free podcast and I’m going to monetize through courses. I was like, Oh, so it was like the first time I was like, let’s do courses. And they’re like, how do you do it? And I gave them the spiel of you could be simple, right?

Your course could be a PowerPoint. And and I stayed there for a while, like as a business, like facilitating that and people would integrate paymericious pro with Lifter LMS and other LMS tools. That’s like part of the beauty of an open platform for WordPress. You can even take two platforms and make them work together and use the best parts.

But when I started publishing my own courses in that way, that started out as simple. Like pretty much single posts organized into sections. I realized, Oh, here’s the value of the LMS. I didn’t know if people were finishing the course I wanted to use some of those courses for like certification to make sure. Like I was training development partners to make sure they knew how to use our tool can help our customers.

I probably would want to write a quiz to force them. To both prove that they read the content and then also prove that they understood the content. And like piece by piece, I’m I started learning cause I got into it like, Oh yeah, all these things make sense. This is why we need video as well.

Like it should be multimodal and that kind of thing.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Keeping it simple is it’s a great place to start. Like I see a lot of folks these days, like pre selling a course that doesn’t exist. They create a Google document, like this is what’s going to be in the program. They’re making sure they get people and, but I think it’s important to, I’m a big fan of that.

Super simple, super manual. Hey, here’s my PayPal email address, send us much money if you want access. It starts in a month but also think about your iterative cycle. All right, first I’m just going to deliver it potentially as a live coaching program. All they’re going to get is like a calendar invite to a recurring zoom event for several weeks.

That’s the first version. And then, cool, we’re going to record those videos, and then that’s going to become the first version of the course. The, essentially replays of the coaching session. Then as you go further down the line, I think I’m going to re-shoot those lessons based on all the feedback I’ve gotten from my learners.

Maybe put in some knowledge checks like quizzes. Oh, I think I’m gonna add a certification program So it’s important to think like how far are you willing to go or do you want to go? you always just want to do like a Virtual meeting coaching or do you want to end up with something more robust in the end?

I think about that issue with web hosting a lot It’s great to save money and keep it low tech and get the cheap low cost web hosting But if you really think your thing is going to get traction, at least choose a web host that’s going to be able to scale with you and provide more features without this massive like infrastructure change later.

Let’s talk about e commerce. It’s never been easier to sell digital products and programs on the internet to essentially make money online. One of, one of my favorite stories about you, Jason, is you were one of the first, if not the first person to create an e commerce transaction on a WordPress website.

I’m sure it was a lot harder then than it is now. What’s happened, since that time, like 15 years later, is that your website, there’s there’s like a mindset change and kind of a reality changes. Websites used to just be like. A marketing info content. We call this like web 1.

0. They’re just, it’s like a brochure for a business as an example, but you still had to go to this different thing, like the actual business. And then we added web 2. 0, which introduced interaction, like social media, commenting systems, forums, and so on. And then that’s continued to evolve and we’re on the cusp.

Some might argue we’re at web 3. 0, which is the internet of value, which is like a totally kind of new thing. But e commerce has never been easier. You can create digital products and programs and services on your website. Accepting the money and offloading all the details of how somebody, the computer across the world and there’s a credit card and you get paid into your bank account and they get access to content or events or anything is now quite easy once you have a base level.

understanding of technology. And then the software, not only does it simplify like the actual selling process, but also the access. This is the beauty of like membership software and LMS software is the access. Do they get a free trial, do they get a paid trial? And do they get everything?

Does it drip out over time? What if they miss a payment on a recurring plan? Is this a course cohort that’s only for six months? All that are just, is just settings and software now. So if you can think of it, it’s now easily possible with tools like Lifter LMS and PayMemberships Pro. The other thing you can do is sometimes I think people when it comes to e commerce think a little too small in the sense that like you can, this is what made me fall in love with teaching online and what continues to motivate me today is that this idea that you could publish something on your website and then anybody anywhere in the world with an internet connection and a browser basically on a smartphone, computer or tablet.

Can access your content or, and potentially buy stuff from you. But when it comes to e commerce we love Stripe as an example. But PayPal is a way of also exchanging and buying things on the internet is accepted in more countries in the world, and that may change. So you can actually offer people different ways to pay you through your website.

There’s even crypto payment gateways and all kinds of payment gateways that you can use Stripe and PayPal are probably the most popular. So pro tip is if you’re doing the e commerce offer those two, and you might actually make more money, help more people because you’re. Giving people access to, to buy from you based on the country they live in and so on.

And one thing I just want to acknowledge, and I’ve seen this with every digital entrepreneur I know, is that it never gets old seeing a payment notification, however you get that. Like for me, I have a thing in our company Slack, a channel where I see the payments that have come in and I look at it every day.

And, while I was asleep. These people bought the software, this person paid with PayPal, this person paid with Stripe, and it just never gets old. It literally like, when is this going to get old? It’s been over a decade. And my very first one, just to tell the story I created an online gardening and permaculture course with my wife.

And and I started blogging about that too, like how I built the site, which is how I started, starting to form ideas about Lifter LMS. This, cause this was before it existed, but anyways. That first sale, I, published the course, went to sleep, woke up the next morning, somebody in New Zealand named Ron, who I’ve never met, never heard of had purchased the course overnight and here we are, this is like 12 years or 13 years later from.

Waking up and seeing that purchase notification from New Zealand.

Jason Coleman: I remember I used to get text messages every time there was a sale and we were having like five sales a day. It wasn’t that big a deal, but we ran our first really big sale in like 2017 when we digging in the pay mergers pro and we dropped the price and ran a sale.

And I think we had 150 sales that day. So my, my phone was. Buzzing every few minutes. I remember my son was younger at the time and he asked me he’s what is that? And I explained, sometimes I over communicate to the kids when they were younger and I was like, Oh, we had a sale. So he was like 47.

I just got 47 and we were grocery shopping. And then he wanted to get something at checkout and he’s you just got 47. You can afford this. And I was like, Oh, he’s getting lippy with me. And yeah, I turned the thing off my phone cause it’s too annoying. But yeah it’s awesome.

And I think of the person on the other end, it’s like, it’s a whole human being doing something awesome and launching something, building stuff and trusting. Yeah. Yeah. It’s amazing. And you thought about like all around the world. Yeah. So it’s this is related to e commerce. But I want to touch on that point.

To help motivate folks. That the internet is so huge. Like our user base is around the world. And I think of I forget exact statistics, but like every McDonald’s has like serves 20, 000 people or maybe it’s 40, 000 people in the United States. And you can think of like the McDonald’s and roughly only the people near it can go and get served by that McDonald’s.

But if you’re building, so if you built course content and people had to come get it from you in person, you can only serve the people like that you can touch on the, and no matter how niche your subject matter is I think you have. One of your early customers or successful customer teaches folks how to make balloon animals and stuff.

Yeah. And you’re like, it’s there’s a few balloon animal clowns and service folks. And there’s but it’s in the, the 20 mile radius that the McDonald’s serves here. There’s maybe one or two, like you can’t make a lot of money selling that course by hand. But on the internet, there’s thousands and thousands of these folks.

So that’s the same story for every single niche. And that gets me excited about like we serve folks in that same way through software and education we do, but every topic, no matter how small, has like a worldwide audience. And it’s pretty awesome.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And just to put a number to the balloon artist guy, his name is Ziv Raviv.

In his first year, I think he sold over, I think it was like 237, 000 for his balloon artists Academy. And a micro niche, this isn’t a major niche. I just want to add, there’s this social science concept called Dunbar’s number, which if you think before internet, before social media, just regular old flesh and blood human, we can only keep in contact.

Or keep up relationships with 140 people. Otherwise our brain just can’t handle that many relationships. So when you think about if you can do something at scale with an online education program, you get past that human limit. Like you said, like a teacher typically has 20, 30 kids in the classroom, but you can now have 3000, 300, 000 and it’s just wild, but the human mind isn’t really designed to even comprehend the scale of the internet.

It’s just too big. It’s like the number of stars in the sky. Like usually you can’t comprehend it.

Jason Coleman: We also, we’re talking about gateways for e commerce. So the gateway is that. Service that helps you collect credit card payments or crypto payments or bank ACH payments sometimes. And I think the big idea and my advice here is to use the very best payment gateway.

It’s such a core important piece of your business. I’ve been working in e commerce for 20 years now and early with WordPress e commerce, like you said, and did it myself and watched the tooling get better and better. Have watched some of these gateways come and go and popularity and service and deal with the changing tide of different rules and taxing across the world.

Stripe does it best, like ever since they launched until now, they’ve done it best and without calling out other gateways, like they’re so good that the other gateways are partnering with Stripe to use Stripe technology and their own platforms or like part, be hosted on by Stripe or bundled up with Stripe’s tools.

And you mentioned like offering multiple payment solutions. I think Stripe itself will do that in particular. There’s a few different ways to use Stripe, but if you use it, they’re offsite, they call it Stripe Checkout, so that when someone clicks the pay, they actually go to the Stripe window where it pops up on the screen, and the checkout experience is on the Stripe website, especially if you do that, you can enable all kinds of payment methods, and I think there’s literally like 150 across the world for your customers that way, and they’re, experimenting with crypto now, and some places are even wrapping PayPal through that method, but it’s weird business.

Thanks. I think so allow as many payment methods as possible also make use of their tax services and subscription services if you can they, if you’re only using stripe, it makes taxes a little bit easier because then you you have one source to send to your, your accountant of where the money goes and how to do it.

And they also can calculate sales tax with every rule around the world. And their subscription services like. Because at the scale they’re at, they have relationships with banks. This is a good thing and a bad thing. Sometimes people get surprised by it. When someone’s credit card expires, Stripe somehow automatically has relationships with the banks, where they’re like, oh, I got your new number, and you didn’t even have to update.

And it’s almost like a weird privacy thing. I think some people, when they get a new card, they assume hey, this is cool, all my subscriptions are gonna cancel. But Stripe is no, I got you, I already gave them your new number. So you gotta be careful as a consumer if you think, just cause you got a new number stuff isn’t gonna charge you.

But that’s the kind of thing that like other gateways and at the software level, we don’t have relationships with the banks to automatically get someone’s credit card number and update it. So using their tooling and their services around it are all really good. And, they increase sales, they reduce friction and the checkout in particular.

So got sold on the Kool Aid at the Stripe conference last year, Stripe sessions. Also because I deal with this right as a developer who builds the tooling around these things. I firsthand feel the challenge of handling credit cards and spam. Privacy and subscriptions with and even something as simple as. It’s called a zip code here, it’s called a post code and postal code in the UK or something. The whole country of India, I forget the exact details, I’m probably misrepresenting it, but they outlawed subscription recurring payments. And they’re like, oh, what do we do now?

So like, all these different rules, and Stripe had a presentation or slide where they showed all those, and then they demoed their offsite Stripe checkout. Automatically adjust. So if you’re buying from a certain country and Stripe knows you, this is how you usually pay. You usually, they remember, cause there’s at such a big scale, they call it link.

Some like I used you, even people may have run into it. You’re on a website, you say bye. And it’s I sent you a number. Is this it? Does your phone cool? I got you. And so the checkout is really fast. So all these tools make it easy to like both, serve to as much of the world that Stripe supports.

And also like they’re a huge company that’s optimizing and using like artificial intelligence to optimize the checkout form. And so some folks when they build a website and in many ways, including the checkout, like they, they want, like the experience to be part of their brand and the feel unique and special.

I think checkout, there are ways to like make, get your colors and your logo and make sure it’s clear this is your website, that branding is important. But the kind of feeling unique, you don’t want your checkout to be unique. You want your checkout to be as common as possible. Like they do this all the time as fast as possible.

You can do that with Stripe. There’s that’s my Stripe commercial.

Chris Badgett: And on that note, I think it’s really important not to overcomplicate it. For example, if you’re using Lifter LMS to power your learning management system, you don’t need to become a developer and learn about. The PHP and react code and everything that makes it work e commerce with all its nuance, like PCI compliance and fraud and everything, you get to a level where the software is so good that you just have to trust it.

Literally like with Lyft or LMS, install the Lyft or LMS Stripe connector plugin, press connect to Stripe, let it know which bank account you want the money to go in, and you’re good to go. But if you really want to learn the nuances of e commerce, you can, but the tools have never been easier and more approachable.

And you mentioned recurring payments and challenges in India. It just got me thinking about recurring payments in general. There’s this idea that a lot of us want. Recurring revenue wouldn’t it be nice to have recurring revenue? Of course it would be, but if you’re going to do that, you really need to have recurring value.

So just to, take a look back to what’s the easiest way to get recurring value in a topic we discussed in the last session. Is you may have a self study DIY online course, but if you just add one monthly office hours hour where you interact with people in a virtual meeting and support them, now you have recurring value.

That’s probably the easiest way to do that. So just think about that with your pricing and if you can do recurring revenue or not. Let’s look at kind of design technology. So in this world of online education, there’s three, three layers, I like to think about it. There is software, hardware, and what I call wetware, which is like human beings.

And we’re going to talk about that in the community aspect that’s coming in a little bit. But in terms of. Some people are really good at software, but then there’s also all this hardware, like your computer itself cameras, microphones, like we’re in a pro setup right now making this with some of the best hardware, but this can all be overwhelming. If you’re going to create multimedia content, what are the essentials? And the way I think about it is if you’re going to become an online education entrepreneur, you do need to become essentially a personal media company. And this is, has gone mainstream. What’s the number one thing a kid says they want to be when they grow up?

It’s a YouTuber. Yeah. A YouTuber. So video producer. And you used to have to be in Hollywood and have the set and the crew and all the stuff to make that happen. But now everybody can do it from their phone or their computer. So mastering, I say mastering, but just getting started with video production, editing, and publishing.

That the video content is a skill that every creator needs to have. I’ve coached many video content creators in the LMS niche. And if somebody is like super beginner, like what’s the absolute easiest solution, the place to start is you open up a virtual meeting, like zoom with yourself by yourself.

You hit the record button in zoom. You do your presentation, talking head or slides, slideshow and all that. Do zero editing and then take the video file and publish it to your video hosting. And you’ve got it. So that’s like the simple entry into video editing. And it’s an infinite well that you just work on upgrading your video over time.

I’ve been working with video. I’m 46 years old. I started working with video probably around the age of 16 and even still like we’re in a professional video studio that can do way better than what I could do as my own personal media company. High quality audio also matters. If I had to pick one, I would go for good audio before I went for good video.

And often, what’s the level one of that. is use earbuds that have a mic on it. If you’re recording, let’s say on your phone or on your computer so that you’re not using the stock computer microphone, which is typically not as good quality, although that’s also getting better and better.

There’s also so many great USB microphones that are higher quality, let’s say in the 50 to 200 price range that you just plug it into your computer. You’re good to go with like superior than most audio or audio quality. Then when it comes to visual communication, one of the things you want to think about too is branding and consistency.

So like when you’re creating images or you’re getting fancy on your videos and you’re putting your name under your talking head, it’s called your lower thirds or whatever. You got to develop your brand, like use the same colors, your brand colors, use the same font, don’t change the font, use the same typography, like just be consistent and nobody’s great at branding on day one.

I often recommend hiring a some branding service to help you come up with your brand guide to get you started, particularly if you’re not a strong designer. But designers are design is funny because everybody has an opinion and kind of thinks they’re above average, but it’s not the case. Even the LifterLMS logo, which you can see on the screen here, that was outsourced to a company called 99 designs.

That was about 300 or as a design competition. We picked the one we liked the most. And they came up with our typography and we’ve continued to iterate on our brand and you can always do a rebrand over time, but. And in terms of your visual presentation, consistency is really important.

Also being consistent with your quality of video and audio, but you can always upgrade and experiment with upgrading over time. Just get on the train, get the fundamentals and get started.

Jason Coleman: I didn’t realize that it was a 99 designs logo. That’s one of the best 99 designs logos. Yeah. And it’s in logo tournament and some of those, I don’t know what the popular ones are now.

You can get good stuff out of there. And, you often can take that and then take that to a designer, like they, the process is useful. They help you think about your brand and your logo. That’s a really cool tool. I I also, like you were talking about uploading video kind of rough edits on doing the zoom webinar and then just uploading as is.

I, it’s funny we’ve been doing some YouTube content for the past few years and I found we’ve been trying to produce and sometimes we’re just like, whatever, just record it live and push it. And it’s like a longer piece. And sometimes that content does better. So I don’t know what it is about the YouTube algorithm or like the YouTube viewer that, they appreciate that long form content.

And then another tool suggestion for someone like me who thinks more like a writer and also just a good video editor itself and has other useful features is Descript and we use that lifter and paid memberships pro and Descript basically what they do is you import the video and they create a real time transcription.

It can do cool things like remove ums and ahs and likes for you automatically and automatically edit. But that same process, then you can rewrite the transcript or delete things from the transcript and it will automatically delete parts of the video. Video editing is like splicing and you gotta find the spot and figure out, I’m like, was I really talking about this and play, pause and scrub?

But if you see the transcript, you’re just like, I don’t want to say that you delete the sentence and the video that corresponds to that sentence disappears and they have all this awesome technology to make it still sound natural and they have a good they also have a good studio sound which is like a filter on your voice, which is this kind of magic filter that makes bad microphone sound better.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, we’re in a, we’re in a professional studio right now. I, but I’ve been blown away with my amateur setup at home. And I just clicked the studio sound button, wait 30 seconds. It’s sounds similar to this. I tend to do a lot of ums and ahs and it it just cleans it right up. And it’s important to think about like the pace of technology change.

When I first started editing videos, I was using iMovie and this is back in around 2006 to even cut a clip, cut a piece out and then move it. It would then need 30 seconds to process and now they’re, it just, everything has gotten exponentially faster and it’s just getting easier and easier. You just need to start. It’s all about starting.

Jason Coleman: So we also can talk about some of the, design aspects of writing. I think it’s very useful to develop what we call like content briefs, a template every time you write something and publish something, try to stick to this format. We also have a writing guide, and that’s especially important if you have a team. Where you want to keep a consistent voice across all the content that you’re doing.

But it’s also important as a reminder for yourself if you’re small. I think I’ll find the ones we use at Paid Memberships Pro and open them up and share them somehow with this. But like the important aspects of the content brief. So it’s before you start writing you actually like before I say, if you like have a a moment of clarity and it’s like the writing is pouring out of you or the video is pouring out of you, lean into that.

That’s like number one, like you’re the, you’ve become an expert. And now you’re using technology to deliver stuff to the world don’t slow yourself down or if you typically operate like a faucet, and even if you don’t people have these bursts of inspiration, so lean into that when you have it, but a lot of the time you’ll have writer’s block, you won’t have inspiration, you’ll be like, I know I have to write about this, but I don’t know where to begin, I don’t know where to start, and having the content brief helps, we do them for blog posts, and it has reminders, so before you start to write, you’re like, who is the audience of this?

What are you telling them? What’s like the basic information? We have a sales funnel, so sales funnel is a huge topic we could talk about a lot, but basically at the top, you’re like reaching new people and getting their attention. And at the bottom you’re converting them into a sale.

And and in the middle there’s a couple steps depending on which kind of sales funnel you’re using. Knowing which part of the funnel they’re at changes the writing. Cause if The, you’re writing something that’s near the conversion stage of the funnel, that it’s like the bottom of your, what you’re writing should be like now buy it, or you should talk more about buying and the features.

And if you’re writing something at the top where you’re just trying to get attention you can’t, you need, you want to be more current topical, there’s a different form format and think different way that you’ll go about writing. We also talk about use case and we also think about SEO. Here, I’ll talk a little bit about SEO too, but in our brief, we say that keywords that we’re targeting and then we also have a writing guide, which is a separate document that just talks about style and I’ll find that so we can share it.

But basically parts of our writing guide is to be shorter, clear sentences like no contractions. So instead of saying doesn’t say does not and this is right, cause we’re a technical writing often and we have an international audience. We found that. Stuff that’s clear, fewer contractions translates easier, or if you’re a non native speaker, it’s easier to read.

 It’s weird like that, something as simple as a contraction, which like is meant to speed up how you type and speak, it actually slows down how you read. If you take doesn’t and turn it into does not. I think typically the typical reader, especially non native English reader, like reads it faster.

And so it’s this weird counterintuitive thing. And then another rule we have is like no exclamation points or as few as possible. It’s I think maybe I used to say no. And the marketing team has said can we have one? And you’re like, that’s it. Like per post per email, you get one. Cause it loses its effectiveness after the first one.

If everything is exciting and oh my God and Russian free save ship click. It doesn’t work. And I think you’ll find about exclamation points. Oftentimes you write them with the exclamation point. Cool. You were excited when you wrote that down. If you take it out, like periods are strong too. It’s like a stronger statement.

You’re not like, we’re running a sale. It’s you take it out of we’re running a sale period. Gotcha. And another point on search engine optimization, SEO, people often think about this when writing. There’s all agencies that write and they’re like SEO focused. They’re like, Oh, we do it like, they start with SEO.

That’s how they think about the writing process that can be useful. Some of them do good work, but I think it’s better to just the tactics and search engine optimization are always changing. There was a Google update yesterday and we’re waiting to see how does our search engine ranking change now that Google updated things, but what’s always true.

And Google says this, and you just have to trust them that they’re actually trying to get the best content in front of their users is just be as useful as possible. And a very clear way to make sure you’re doing that is to search for something that you would like to land on. We’re talking about, yeah, I don’t know, how to write a content brief and you want to teach people how to write content briefs, search for how to write a content brief, find the top result, maybe go past the ads, or maybe there’s a weird Reddit thread that’s not a real page, find that.

The first real piece of content, that’s a result and then copy what they did or copy it and make it better. Like you want to do everything they did. You want to make a better version of that resource. It’s if I was searching for this, what would I need? And we’ve found success that way.

So there’s a lot of like tactics and SEO strategy and there’s little things that you should do. It’s, and I won’t get into it. It’s it’s easy and you should just do it. If you’re actually like, I’m trying to rank for this, the best way I’ve seen to do that is to just find the number one result and make a better version of that page.

They have a video, you need a video, they have an outline, you need an outline. And they have this, you probably need that. But a better one, and sometimes you can do it it can feel overwhelming, but, you’re exceptional, and they’re probably sitting on their laurels And maybe not necessarily focused on your market or your target, niche.

Chris Badgett: That’s great. There’s so much in here. I have three three things to tie in here. One is that when it comes to templates, there’s this idea of thinking in systems. And we talked earlier in another session about having a teaching framework. Like key ideas, strategies, tactics, action items, case studies.

There’s lots of different teaching frameworks, but templates make your life so much easier. A content brief gives you a templated structure on how to approach a writing project. If you use a tool like Canva and you do designs, let’s say you’re doing YouTube thumbnails or video thumbnails for inside your course or whatever.

Do you have a template in Canva that’s on brand that you can modify and make different? Think about creating these systems that makes your life so much better. And then instead of always improving individual pieces, improve your system. And then the future just gets better faster. You mentioned funnels and we could probably have a whole section on that, but we’ve talked a lot in this, these sessions that about thinking through time and not delivering.

Just, Hey, here’s my knowledge. Here’s my library. Good luck. Now you can know what I know, but actually thinking about a user journey through time. So once I learned this concept, it really changed how I thought about education and marketing and helping customers and clients get the result that they want.

So I’m just going to lay out what a funnel is in the, from the stages standpoint. Whatever your course is about, I’ll use an example to make it so I’ll use a case study or an example to make the concepts more useful. So let’s say I was teaching people how to create their first online course.

The first stage is called unaware. So this is where someone doesn’t know the problem they have. This is the hardest stage to market to, but you can, if you think about it. So let’s say somebody’s in a job, they don’t like it. They feel creative, they don’t know what, what’s missing. And they feel like there’s something more, they want to make more money, but they’re unaware of what the core problem is.

But then the next stage is problem where it’s like, you know what? I want to work on line or I want to create a digital product. So they’ve become problem aware of I want to quit my job, I want to do this other thing, or I want to get a side hustle going in the experiment over here.

And then they become solution aware, where alright, there’s a lot of different ways to do online businesses. Maybe I think I want to do a course. So now they’re aware of a particular solution. And then they become product aware. Okay, what is, what are the tools, how can I create an online course?

And they come up with five or 10, Oh, there’s this company and that company and this company and that company. And then they become most aware, like they’ve made a selection. I want to move forward with this tool. And this is where like sales starts kicking in. You’re getting close to that conversion point.

And the conversion happens. So that’s like the top of the funnel all the way down to the conversion point. And then what a lot of people miss is like the inverse other side that happens, which is okay. In my hypothetical example of I want to create an online course. I’ve got the software, I’ve got somebody who’s going to coach me through it, help me through it and everything.

Then the other side, or the customer success side happens, which is onboarding. Alright, welcome to my program about how to build an online course. Here’s the community, go introduce yourself here’s how to get started with the tool that you’re using and so on that’s the onboarding to keep your learner, like the orientation, if you will.

And then there’s what’s called activation, which is, what’s that level that if I can just get them past here, they’re going to stick, and they’re, they’re making good progress, and they’re definitely not going to refund or have remorse for choosing this training. And then there’s retention, like what if it’s an annual program and we’re getting up to you’ve been with us a year, what’s it going to take to stay with us another year?

Or a lot of things are monthly. You have those monthly like retention and if they don’t stay, that’s called churn. And then there’s expansion where, okay, they’ve stayed, they’re staying. And now you have premium offers. Maybe it’s like private coaching. It’s an upsell. So there’s a whole timeline that, that happened right there.

So that’s the marketing funnel and the customer success funnel.

Jason Coleman: I think we need like one of those animated, of course things. Yeah, we’ll fund that.

Chris Badgett: They might upsell us at this recording studio to put that together. It might be a service they have here. And then SEO is also cool. I just wanted to throw in a quick pro tip.

I’ve been a student of SEO for a long time. Stands for search engine optimization. Like doing actual work to get your webpage, your content to rank at the number one for a search term. And I had a particular piece of content that I really wanted to rank number one. It was ranked 27 for a phrase. I worked with a great team that helped put together another piece.

It got to 23 or 17 in the search result. It was very competitive. And then I got some coaching, which we talked about earlier about being a lifelong learner about so I could study SEO and get better. And the coach made one comment, which was like, there’s this one article that if you just go read it and do everything in the article, I’m 99 percent sure you’ll get to number one.

So I did that. I went to that article, it’s by Brian Dean, the website is called Backlinko, and it’s called Google’s 200 ranking factors, the complete list. Then over the course of six months, I slowly implemented everything in that article. Now for the past year, this piece that I was trying to rank stays at number one.

It’s almost always at number one. I still continuously improve and tweak it. But just wanted to give a pro tip out there and that’s advanced SEO to like, go do all these 200 things. And like I said, I’ve been in it for a while, but it’s a, it’s definitely a nice skill to learn, or at least learn how to think that way.

So

Let’s turn the page in technology to one of the coolest parts, which is automation. So if you think about it one of the things that makes us human is our ability to use tools, right? Helped us invent. Agriculture, the industrial revolution, the information age, and it just keeps going on and on.

And now we have these tools that allow us to automate repetitive tasks or one off tasks that we no longer have to deal with our own inputs or reduce the amount of inputs. Automation is how you get leverage. So not only can you publish a course or membership. Online and reach the whole world. You can automate a lot of the processes involved in running that kind of initiative or business.

In the early days of LifterLMS, we had a saying that we wanted to scale the human touch with robotics. So what that means is use automation, use technology, but don’t forget about the human in the system. There’s this idea that, Oh, I make my online business, my course, and I’m on the beach and my, with my laptop for our work week, you can get there, but there’s nothing there’s passive income is a myth in my opinion.

But there’s so much you can do to do the work of five people, 10 people, a hundred people through automation and, reduce that demand on your. Individual human contribution. So I like to think about email automation as a good place to start. You can run an entire online business with just like a Gmail account, just manually reaching out to people, responding to people, sending them things that they asked for, but you can automate all of that, which the place to start, like we’ve talked in these sessions about.

Seeing patterns and frequently asked questions. So there’s two main places to start when you see those frequently asked questions, tying that this into the sales funnel or the customer success funnel side of the funnel. If you’re getting repetitive questions that like a lot of people have, you can create an email automation campaign.

Let’s say there they haven’t bought yet. So they’re in the prospect part of your funnel. Where you’re addressing this question in advance, even if they haven’t asked and email automations, you spread out over hours or days or weeks. So it’s like this drip campaign that just keeps running.

And same with onboarding Oh, anytime somebody starts this program, they always ask us. So after they buy maybe four hours later or the next day, there’s this email. Welcome to the program. Here are the next three things you should do next. Introduce yourself in the community, start with the intro course, and reply to this email with your biggest challenge so we can point you to the resource that would be most helpful for you.

That’s an example, by the way, of scaling the human touch with robotics, that last piece. Cause I didn’t try to automate that interaction away. I also said, reply to this email, which means a human is going to personal moment and like help that person in a unique way. So I definitely don’t recommend automating everything.

And then when it comes to e learning, the learning management system actually automates a ton of stuff like progress, tracking curriculum, delivery. You can get advanced with certifications, gamification, like achievement badges. Think about all the grading that teachers do in a traditional classroom, like on paper, like when we were kids, multiple choice quiz or test.

You can now have that be 100 percent automated. Just the website will do all the grading to instantly deliver the result. And the last thing I’ll just say tactically about not never is to never stop automating. It’s not that I’m obsessed with it, but I’m always looking for new opportunities to automate and get a little more leverage, a little more time back.

And when I have more time back, then I can be the human in the machine and be like, how can I create more value than anybody else for my avatar and deliver that really unique human aspect? And one of my favorite forms of automation, I’ve always been really big into video. When I was a high schooler, I was that guy in the friend group who had the video camera and take it with us, like rock climbing or hanging out and just filming stuff.

So I’ve been around video for a long time. I fell in love with the idea of video marketing. And so I see video as automation. I think of when you put yourself on YouTube as an example. And you’re just being authentically you and you’re just trying to help people. Maybe you’re marketing, content marketing.

Maybe you’re trying to help your customers, whatever you’re trying to do. You’re literally creating a digital twin of yourself that multiple people can be watching at once. So as Lifter LMS started to grow, as an example, I look at our YouTube channel as like multiple team members.

There’s a metric I follow called watch time. Not, likes and views are cool, but the actual amount of time somebody spent consuming your video content has far surpassed what I could do in real time without ever sleeping. So there’s like these, this group of team members are just constantly talking and created.

Over a thousand videos. And that’s how you get leverage.

Jason Coleman: Yeah. Yeah, every 40 hours of watch time is like a full time job, full time person. Yeah. Like just selling your stuff. It’s awesome. A couple of points on, when you’re, you said automate everything, which I agree with, and I think it’s related to a topic we talked about earlier about standard operating procedures and systems documentation for building a business.

And I always feel like an early version of like full automation, where like a human isn’t involved at all, it handles it, is like you write down the steps for a human to do that. And so these things are very related to me where you, I like starting with you write the SOP, here’s how I, as a human, do this thing, and now you have the guide, and are there steps in there that you can just automate a step, or you can, you learn how you can automate the whole thing.

But all you could also automate by outsourcing. So like another human can do this so you can hand over that SOP to someone and it’s as good as automated. So yeah it’s interesting thing how those two things are related. And then, we talked about email marketing and different kinds of sending emails in different forms and specifically answering like FAQ type questions by email.

I know when we do this in what we call email series of certain aspects. I generally tend folks as I’m working with them to email more than they feel comfortable with. It’s it’s almost always there because I spent like the FAQ is a great example because. If you say you had five really big questions people are thinking about before they convert about your course.

So that’s really five emails is probably best. It’s not, do you have any questions? Cause everybody just ignores it. But if the subject line is like, are you worried about X? You’re like, yeah, I am. Click and read. So each of those FAQs has to be a separate email. Say everyone only has one of those issues.

Those emails have a 20 percent open rate, which may or may not be good. But four out of those five emails won’t get opened. For the other one. And so if people are metric minded and they’re looking, they’re like, we send these five females, it feels inefficient. Most people aren’t even reading them.

It’s oh, but everyone who reads the one, focus on the conversions, and I think that’s good in general for a lot of the even YouTube stats is if you’re comparing yourself to like Mr. Beast, you’re like, you want like millions and millions of views. You’re like, nah, like hundreds of views, hundreds thinking of it and watch time.

But by email and most, anyway, so back to email, emailing, you should email more than you really feel comfortable with. People will get off your list. And Jared, I like to say, if someone’s like seeing your content and they want to get off the list, like they probably weren’t like a customer or they weren’t in your target market.

You, you can overdo it and be open to that feedback when you feel it and feel out if they’re actually a customer when they say you’re emailing too much. And you’re like, wait, is this like a real customer or my target market? Maybe I can combine some emails. But yeah, probably email more than you’re comfortable with.

Something else that, so when I think about automation, another thing I think about is artificial intelligence, AI, and that’s a big movement, it’s a big way. The end game of that is it’s automating almost everything a human can do. The tooling like the large language model chat, GPT, like tools are so good right now that you really have to be using these tools.

And I know some folks have like ethical concerns about the tools and how they scrape data from, artists and musicians and writers and. Who owns that content. I think there’s issues. It’s just like the MP3s where like it becomes so easy to share music that it’s just going to happen.

And you’re like, how do you, the world has to change to do this. It’s I think it was like if a robot is reading the internet faster than I can and learning, it’s just if I read the internet to learn too, it just does it way better than me. But anyway, so I think these tools aren’t going to go away.

So the best performers are people who are doing, doing the best and performing even in educating folks and getting the word out and running businesses are going to be using these tools. And so you should make sure that you, the people who work with the tools are going to benefit. So I think you should strategies to augment yourself with AI.

And so again, I’m talking about chat, GPT cloud, by anthropic perplexity is a good one for research, but these tools, you basically talk to the AI and they help you do things. And for writing in particular a method that you can use with chat, GPT, what I like to do is. This is an example of a good way to use this tool if you’ve only interacted with them sparsely.

So if I’m going to write a course, what I’ll do is I’ll write up my rough notes, really rough. Just dump out of my brain, don’t worry about punctuation, just space. I’ll take random notes from here, random notes from here. A conversation with someone else, so some of it’s my own words. I’ll put links in.

I’m like, I want the feel of this. So it’s very rough and it’s scattered and you almost have to fight it. And now I’m a writer, right? So I almost have to fight it, but the tendency to want to actually start writing and putting the thoughts together at this point, but if you dump that into something like chat GPT and you ask it, Hey, can you write a first draft?

And you even can update that content brief and that writing guide. And it’ll take that into account as well. It’ll write like a decent first draft and depending on what you’re talking about By decent, like it’s legible, it’s real English, and we’ve worked with some of these there’s good writing agencies, and there’s subpar ones, and it’s it’s funny sometimes you have a human write something before these, it’s like it’s it sounds like a robot wrote it, even though it’s a human who’s not actually engaging in the writing process doesn’t do as good of a job as these AI tools do at writing stuff.

So you get a first, a good first draft, then you edit the draft. And make sure and key point here is that you have to double check everything. I say, we also use AI tools for programming and we use AI tools for writing, and I would say every single line has to be checked and made sure it’s truthful.

It’s, if it’s code, it actually runs, it actually does what it says it’s supposed to do. Instead of writing you really have to. Go through and edit that draft a lot. You don’t want to just fix a couple things. Then, actually, after then, when you have a second draft that you wrote based on that first draft, you can ask ChatGPT for advice.

What I try to do is not just give it and say, hey, make it better, but say give it the thing you’ve written and say, can you give me some recommendations? And use your content brief for how I can do this better. Tell me what I should change. And it’ll say, it’ll give you like the advice and also make suggestions and then you can apply the suggestions because if you dump something in and just ask it to make it better it it can make changes you’re not aware of it, like does what’s called a hallucination or if you change things, it was, it gets confused.

But if you just ask it for advice and then you apply the advice at that stage of writing, it’s a good thing to do. And like another example of like how great AI is and like how it’s useful. I really try to, I use it in almost everything I’m doing to help me think. And used AI to help myself write the notes that we’re reading off of and using to guide this video.

So Chris has like a great outline. He went through it in one of the earlier sessions. And you had your talking points in a lot of these ahead of me. And so then I said, Hey, this is what the general topic is. This is the bigger overarching topic. Here’s what Chris said. And then ChachiPD knows about me.

There’s like a system prompt and it has this thing called memory where oh, okay. You run paid memberships pro. Now I know that you’re Jason Coleman. This is and then I can dump a little, and I would, we had, there’s a story part to this and I would write the story and be like, I want to talk about this.

And I’m like, I don’t really know, like what’s the right term for this. What’s this called? Did anyone else talk about this? I forget which website I heard this from first. And then chat GPT would take a stab at those notes. Here’s the topic points. Here’s the tactics. And here’s some information about other people who have talked about this.

And sometimes I’d be like, I actually don’t know anything about what you’re talking about. That’s actually not me. You’re, that’s something else. But sometimes it’ll nail it. It’s Oh yeah, that’s exactly how I operate. I know all about this. And thanks for helping me remember who, where I got that point from.

And it gave me a starting point for the, what is the strategy called? I was like, what’s the best way to phrase this? And I’m rambling about it. Like AI is good about. The zeitgeist and how people phrase things. So a lot of stuff we do, and that’s another way it’s useful for learning is there’s different ways to talk about this.

People use different terms, but that the AI is. Like literally programmed to be like the general, synthesis of everything on the internet. So it’s really good at pulling out this is how most people talk about this. So I used it to write these own notes.

Chris Badgett: We talked in an earlier session about the expert’s curse and not, being really advanced in the subject matter and needing to keep beginner’s mind in mind.

And that would be an excellent use of AI. Hey, I’m PhD in this topic, I’m making a course for beginners, help me, go back to the fundamentals and make sure I don’t get too advanced too quickly. Can you help me like focus? This is the outline I’m thinking, keep in mind is for beginners.

Can you help me like make sure I don’t gloss over any important fundamental information? That would be a great tool or a great way to use AI as an assistant. I also wanted to mention in our course plan challenge. Which kind of helps you figure out what course to make and come up with your course outline.

We use a concept called Ikigai, which is a Japanese term and way of figuring out your reason for being in the world, which is deep, but it essentially combines what you love, which is your passion, what you’re good at, which is your skills. What you can be paid for, like the marketability or financial possibility of this topic and what the world actually needs.

And we actually, Jason developed AI to help you in part of that training, some AI powered tooling to help you find your icky guy, which can then help you pick your course topic, which you can then outline with it. So use AI, just get started. It’s not a replacement. It’s a It’s a co pilot, it’s an assistant.

Let’s talk about productivity. AI makes you more productive, but productivity is an infinite well. I’m a fan of productivity. There is you can actually get too productive and burnout and there is some magic and like open space in your calendar or not having every, minute of your day planned out and stuff like that.

But, when you wear so many hats, it’s important to optimize and get more productive in the world, which we naturally do as humans as we move along in life. And, like for example, if you’re, if you become a parent, all of a sudden you have an entire new job that’s even more than full time and we tend to figure it out, but there’s productivity things that happen within that.

So I like to just continually invest in improving my productivity. I recommend people do the same. But also don’t over optimize there, leave some magic and space in your life. But with course creation and building these types of online businesses, the global theme I think about in terms of productivity is don’t let your brain.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at Lifter LMS. com forward slash gift. Go to Lifter LMS. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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