LMScast with Chris Badgett

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In this episode of LMScast, Chris Badgett and Alex Panagis explore how entrepreneurs and online course creators can use AI to improve marketing, increase sales, and streamline business operations. They discuss how AI is revolutionizing entrepreneurship by helping entrepreneurs produce SEO-friendly content, attract new clients, automate tedious tasks, and build more effective processes without sacrificing the interpersonal relationships essential to long-term company success.

Chris discusses his strategy for AI-powered marketing, emphasizing three key tactics: relationship marketing, outbound marketing, and inbound marketing. He describes how business owners can utilize AI to pinpoint client problems, establish content strategies, come up with ideas for blog posts, carry out SEO research, and provide useful instructional materials that draw viewers via Google and AI-powered search engines. Alex stresses the need of releasing unique, superior material that benefits AI search engines as well as prospective clients. They also look at how AI may help with relationship-building, lead creation, and tailored outreach while upholding trust and authenticity.

AI for sales and conversion optimization is also discussed, covering how to create successful sales pages, enhance messaging, comprehend client wants, and choose the best sales tactics for various pricing structures. Chris describes how course designers may utilize AI to create attention-grabbing headlines, convey the advantages of their products, include testimonials, and establish credibility with potential students.

Before devoting a substantial amount of time and money to development, Alex emphasizes the need of consumer feedback, testing, and business idea validation. Lastly, Chris and Alex talk about AI automation for company operations, demonstrating how business owners can utilize AI assistants to streamline customer service, record SOPs, oversee workflows, and boost team output. They stress that rather than taking the place of human knowledge, AI should work in tandem with company owners to decrease administrative tasks and concentrate on strategic choices, customer connections, and innovation.

This episode offers useful advice for online instructors, coaches, and company owners who want to use AI to expand their online course business, improve their digital marketing plan, and scale their operations more effectively.

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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 LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show

today, Alex, I wanted to get into the AI-augmented entrepreneur. So the entrepreneur is interesting because it’s almost like a product in and of itself. It’s like the business of being a coach, selling courses, having an education company. There’s a lot of entrepreneurship aspects to what we do. It’s almost like you have to build two businesses, your actual product, and then the business itself is a product.

And that’s what I’d like to get into with you today about building the business, b- being the entrepreneur. And within entrepreneurship, there’s three main areas I think about, which are marketing, you know, getting customers; selling, actually closing customers; and then the operations aspect, which is actually running the business.

And we’ll get into all that into more detail, but generating leads is something every business needs to do, so marketing with AI. And one of the interesting things I’ve found, both at Lifter as a technology or software company, but also I see happening with LifterLMS users who are building education companies, is the ground has shifted underneath us.

The main bottlenecks used to be commonly in the technology department. So in software, like we mentioned in the previous episode, actually creating software has really accelerated. So waiting for developers or engineers or trying to figure out how to build a website or a learning management system, if we’ve never done that before, has actually gotten much easier, less friction with AI.

So in my experience, the bottleneck in business has really moved off the technology to actually attracting customers, which has actually gotten harder Because of AI as well, because customers, they need more reasons to buy your product because of all the AI capabilities they’ve unlocked on their own.

So it’s an interesting thing. So tech- in my view, technology is no longer the main bottleneck. It’s actually getting customers or marketing. And we’ll talk about closing or selling in a little bit. But there– When I think about marketing or if I’m teaching marketing to somebody, I have a main framework I use, which is there’s three types.

There’s inbound marketing, which means content marketing basically, like creating content that attracts your prospects via search engines or even being included in AI results and things like that. Then there’s outbound marketing, which is actually going out and finding customers, so it’s more active.

S- so inbound is attracting, outbound is hunting basically, and then relationship marketing is the third, which is farming, which is, building relationships over time. That’s– It’s the least scientific, but in my view actually one of the most important. And we’ll go into these each in detail and how you can use AI in these different marketing contexts.

But before I get into it, I just wanted to say, in my experience, most business owners or education entrepreneurs are really good. They have a strength in one of those. I think my general advice is you should do all three, inbound, outbound, and relationship. But you’re gonna find similar to your personality type or whatever or just your experience, your– you– one of these is gonna be your superpower, but don’t sleep on the other two and at least put in some effort over there So inbound marketing is actually my superpower in terms of which one I’m the best at, that just works for me.

So creating content and attracting customers. And what you can do with AI, creating content, AI can really help you accelerate. And there’s lots of different types of content. We’ve talked about, media production in the previous episode, like videos and audios and podcasts and things. But before we get into things like creating blogging, blog posts or web pages or, putting content on other people’s websites, inbound marketing is something that can be extremely accelerated with AI.

But at the highest level, the challenge when you’re prolific, let’s say within your content marketing matrix, you’re also gonna find a strength. Oh, I’m more of a writer, or I’m more of a YouTuber, or I’m more of a audio person, podcast person. And again, play to your strengths, but don’t sleep on the other forms.

And for me, I’m more of a video guy. But it’s all changing because, like I mentioned, I’m a slow typer. So now using something like Whisperflow and then just brain dumping and getting AI to clean it up using the Chris VoiceWriter skill we talked about before, my, It’s not really writer’s block, but just my slowness in writing has actually been solved with AI.

But before, before we get into those kinda detailed tactics, one of the most important parts of content or inbound marketing, which ties into what we talked about previously with customer avatar development, is I like to build a content matrix f- of what we’re going to make content about. So for education entrepreneurs, to get really tactical here that’s built on…

In, in general, you can break these rules, but I like to find the five main pain points that my- whatever the target market is, has. And then I use a concept called mind mapping to kinda brainstorm, but there’s five hubs. And even this series we’re doing right now is using that content marketing five pain points.

Education entrepreneurs have challenges across subject matter expertise or being the expert, teaching technology, entrepreneurship, and community building so that you can see that… And that’s what we’re doing here to create video content. So that’s how I think about it And if you look at your niche, I’m gonna do an example on the fly to just give an example that’s not in software or entrepreneurship.

But if I was doing a content map to kinda build my container or my frame of what I’m gonna focus on I would develop the five main pain points which are often shadows of opportunity. So I’m gonna choose something I know a little bit about so that it’s a good example. So on the side I’m a beekeeper.

I’ve been beekeeping for maybe seven years, and beekeeping is actually a huge niche. I’ve actually done online courses for beekeepers before with a subject matter experts who are, like, exceptional beekeepers, and I would show up, I would film their in-person workshops at their apiaries, which is a bee farm, and then I would convert that into an online course.

So I’m, like, wearing the technology hat, showing up, helping, in my entrepreneur help hat, helping the beekeepers produce content. But– And that’s how I actually got into this course creation space. I started doing it in organic gardening and topics like permaculture and beekeeping and so on. But anyways, beekeepers, what are their five main pain points?

The first is just all the equipment. You’ve got hives and tools and suits. You don’t wanna get s-stung. So that’s like their version of the technology hat. There’s gear. The next thing is bee behavior. Like, understanding bee behavior. What’s going on? Why are they swarming? Why aren’t they building honey right now?

Or, where did my bees go? Or why are they being aggressive today but not yesterday? So that’s a major area. As a beekeeper too, a third thing is just business. Beekeeping is actually expensive and if you’re not figuring it out, you tend to spend a lot of money without getting a return.

So you make all this honey or other bee products, and then you need to sell them and build a business or whatever, so there’s like an entrepreneurship as-aspect to beekeeping. And then in addition to that, there’s other pain points like working around the seasons. What do I do in the winter?

What do I do in the summer? What do I do when the nectar’s flowing and they’re building honey really hard or whatever? So that’s four. I’m gonna s- I’m just gonna skip a fifth since I’m trying to create a content map on the fly. But within that content map, I- we found some major pain points: gear, behavior entrepreneurship, and weather.

And then within those There’s like basically sub-pain points. So like on the gear side just like the hive itself, like the wooden boxes. There’s different types of wooden boxes. There’s different sizes for different reasons. There’s different methods that you can choose to make different types of hives.

So there’s like this sub-pain point on choosing the hive setup you’re gonna use. And within that, like even what I’m doing right now, I kinda came up with four pain points. I could go to my AI tool and be like, “What’s– I need a fifth major pain point that has a cluster of sub-pain points.” And we don’t have AI in front of us right now.

We could spin it up, but I’m not gonna do that. We, It would help with that gap analysis and give me, oh there’s this other thing that beekeepers really need to figure out that you could create content around. And then, when we get to like that equipment or gear niche, I would brainstorm things like, okay, there’s hives, there’s the bee suits, tools, and like what else?

And it’s gonna give me like 37 more ideas, and I could literally create a content map of hey, I wanna commit to writing. I wanna publish like one useful blog post a week that gets… answers people’s questions and lets them know there’s more inside the actual membership or the course or whatever.

And AI can just help build all– They can help you plan the architecture, even project manage it. Like you can do all that in a spreadsheet, and then now you’re building a system. AI can help you write the content, make the featured image for the content, and so on. And then there’s, concept called a content brief.

Okay, we’re talking about hive boxes. What do we wanna cover? And this is where you can use things like skills To develop like, hey, to make a really SEO or search engine optimization optimized piece of content, I like this structure where I need a table of contents like a AI instant answers kind of intro to the post.

I wanna use examples and stories, and I need links to high-quality resources and other things. And I kinda do some competitive analysis, which I can accelerate with AI. Hey, what are the top three ranking pieces of content about beehive boxes? How long is their post? What are they talking about?

What did they miss? How could I make something better? And so on. And AI just f- really helps with that acceleration. And then you can get into the multimedia content and blend in other skills in the series. Hey, for a high-value post, I also wanna have a YouTube video embedded in the post. I need a script or outline or slideshow presentation for that, and so on.

But before I move on to outbound marketing, I’ll pass it over to you for content marketing and hear your thoughts. 

Alex Panagis: Yeah, I have a lot of thoughts. So I think I find myself more– the fight for attention is becoming more difficult. I think it’s a combination of people’s attention time being spent using the AI tools, as opposed to consuming content.

They’ll just consume content in AI. But then it’s also just a lot more people creating stuff because of AI. And I think– So I look at everything through, and I would encourage people to do the same. Depending on your target market, it might be easier to put yourselves in the shoes of who you’re targeting, depending on how well you know that audience.

Though I would hope that a lot of the people here are, like, listening and the people in this room as well we’re marketing to people who we can quite closely relate to. So I like to pattern match what I find gets my attention and triggers an emotional response for me. Like, when I’m like we talked about Jason Cohen’s Hidden Multipliers book.

He also recently started a podcast where he does an interview show, and he gets founders on, and it sometimes awkwardly, pushes them and asks them the hard questions. And I realized yeah, that’s the type of content that I like consuming. And it makes me challenge yeah, I’ve…

when we do podcast interviews, do we not ask enough hard questions? And whether or not could that format work? And I’m not saying that it’s a matter of, find something that someone else has done successfully and directly see how that maps over to something that would work for your business.

But I think there are elements of clearly people like that format. And even if it’s not a huge number of views, it’s just the amount of engagement and the amount of passion in the people that do watch that is definitely there. It’s another thing that we see at LifterLMS we’ll focus on producing content for very niche things that- from a pure numbers point of view, you might look at it like it’s not particularly important, but we know that that is actually our most important p- potentially one of our important demographics and least price s- sensitive segment.

So producing this, even if it doesn’t reach many people has outsized benefits. So I think that’s one element of it. And I think from a writing point of view I always think back to, … I used to, and I still am, but Gary Vaynerchuk was very much a prominent figure early in my business career, and I watched a lot of his content.

And I always thought, because I- when I started, I was a lot more of an introvert than I still am now, and my mindset was, yeah, the type of stuff that he preaches that you should be doing to fight for attention and the social stuff, that’s great for most people, but let me focus on the stuff that works really well.

And in comes strategies that work for the introvert. So technical marketing, like SEO, like what you can do to get pages ranked on Google, and that used to be a lot easier. Now it’s becoming much more difficult, but I’d also argue we’ve entered a stage where it’s table stakes. So a lot of companies think that, oh, what we really need this is our grand, new strategy.

We’re just gonna do LinkedIn, and we’re gonna try to have surround sound LinkedIn posts by getting everyone on our team to post on LinkedIn, which, to me, is also a great idea. Naturally, everybody on your team should be doing that, depending on whether your market is on LinkedIn or which- whichever social platform.

You should get your team engaging, talking, and behaving as members of a community and of an industry. That makes complete and total sense. But that doesn’t mean that the evergreen content that you have on your site and publishing in-depth resources is a strategy that’s completely gone. The same way some people like to read a book, some people don’t, read clickbaity posts on LinkedIn, but they do want to download a guide.

So if they’re reading about, WordPress hosting, for example, you might have … Y- or that’s such a … I think it’s a great example because you have so many different buyers on the enterprise side, you’ll have somebody within the organization that wants to have a one-pager or in some cases a more detailed technical document that covers how this specific thing works so that they as a technical or non-technical person can take that to the other person that they need to present it to.

And I think that’s, like in my view, producing this is foundational now more so than ever because you not only want to produce it for the customer, but you wanna produce it for AI. So you have the best chance at succeeding, I think f- from a marketing and generating inbound point of view if you produce as much high quality with human-in-the-loop review content as possible, because you can then cover all of the like nuances how your product or your course or your service differs from these other products and courses so that AI truly understands what it’s about.

And I, yeah, I’m curious in– Just to throw back the question a little bit at you, as I think about this through the lens of a course creator, I wonder how that manifests more do you cover how much do you want to expose? ‘Cause like my thought is, if I’m marketing a course now, I actually want to get most of the like curriculum and method, and I would publish a lot of like my own thinking to the point where a lot of the like ideas in the course are out there.

But again, it comes down to the information is readily available, so that’s not why people take the course. And the like level of packaging that you do in the actual end course that somebody would buy is obviously gonna be different than having hundreds of like sporadic articles that you publish over the years covering your method in detail.

Chris Badgett: From a modern times perspective, I think the biggest mistake that education entrepreneurs specifically make is they get really protective of what’s inside the course or the membership, and they think of it as intellectual property, which it is, but they get stingy on sharing information.

Like some of the best coaches online as, as an example in the business niche, like I mentioned Dan Martell, a guy I worked with for two years, all his stuff you can find on his YouTube channel, like most of it, like all of the best ideas and his strategies, tips, tactics and so on. But that’s not– I bought the membership and this was an expensive five figure a year kind of mentor coaching program.

So I’m not just buying access to the content. I wanted the coaching and the personalization and all the other stuff inside the community in addition to the content. I think- So 

Alex Panagis: that– Sorry, just to cut you off there. Yeah. I think exactly like that, that kind of is like in a way Dan Martell’s strategy now on YouTube, which we’re paying a lot of attention to because we love that type of content, is an offshoot of like what Gary Vaynerchuk did, which is like you put out so much free stuff, which is a, not only a form of generating inbound, it’s also a form of building trust because you’re not trying to say this is obviously an extreme example, come– Like this is my secret method and you’re gonna only get it for the people that buy the course and you don’t really talk about it. I think that’s a much harder sell in a world where everybody has AI at their disposal because yeah you’re not you’re, the, you’re gonna struggle to develop a human connection and I think that’s ultimately people make buying decisions emotionally, like at the end of the day.

Even if it’s like business products and not and software, regardless, the same is very much true for courses.

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And the the big mistake too, or the, the fire I wanna light under people is like the race is on. You’re not, like you said, you’re just making content. You’re not just making content for humans, you’re making it for AI.

So from an SEO perspective in the old world, and SEO’s not dead by the way it’s a compounding game. So you have to get it out there. The search engine has to index it, and then it’s looking for signals of how much people like it, share it, and s- there’s tons of ranking factors. But for AI and large language models, their AI is basically stealing everything it can find on the internet, so you need to get free stuff out there for it to steal, and that’s how you show up in AI conversations with people.

And the best time to start is 10 years ago, but the next best time is today. So it’s time to get on it, share your content, because AI, like the language models like Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, all these things, can’t see what’s inside your course ’cause it’s protected. That’s part of what a learning management system does is it protects you know, for us- enrolled users only or members access to what they’re getting, and the AI and the search engine can’t see that.

So you need to have some public-facing content besides just your homepage, your about page, and your contact page. 

Alex Panagis: I also, yeah, just like in the week before traveling to come to the US to meet up with you and Jason from Paid Memberships Pro is like the… I had three or four meetings with different companies which were building something where they wanted AI to essentially– I guess a kind of a parallel is like the LifterLMS MCP, but their tool is in-installable in a code base, and they, their whole strategy for an entire year, which is just leaning into why you need to use AI in, even if you’re a little bit resistant to it, because you need to be attacking at things on all fronts, which is they lean very much heavily into social and video and trying to go viral and do just lots of like short clips on LinkedIn and posts and yeah.

A year later of pursuing that strategy, which in hindsight, like obviously you can always say hindsight is 20/20, like in the time when that decision was made, a lot of people were skeptical over what, like the value of producing original, well-researched content where a human is in the loop because it was unclear whether, you’d really get much traffic from Google anymore.

Now, fast-forward to where we are today, that same product and company, when they want their users to install the tool with AI, they’ll plug it into Claude Code and with a prompt that is provided, and Claude will say, “Oh, it looks like you wanted to install this tool, but actually this tool is only doing this other thing.”

Like it has no idea of the new product that they’ve launched or the new feature that the company has because they haven’t spent that whole year leading up to the release of the feature basically becoming a leader in that, new industry that they’re trying to get into by tapping into long-form evergreen content with well-researched guides.

So I think, yeah, we basically need to feed the AI models as much as we can. 

Chris Badgett: The next form of marketing in my framework is outbound marketing, also known as prospecting. And this is something that you think of in enterprise sales, where these, these sales team people, men and women, get on planes, and they go out into the world and try to close customers or send emails or make cold calls.

Outbound has a really bad name, particularly because it’s mostly done poorly, and I would say of all the forms of marketing, this is the one that is most underused. It’s also done poorly, but the people that do it well literally print money because instead of relying on content, which obviously I’m a big fan of, you’re literally going out into the world, and it’s why I call it hunting and not farming.

You set your target on… This is why your customer avatar research is so important, but you know who it is you wanna help, and then you can– This personal development comes in here. You have to get over your imposter syndrome. You have to get over all the bad experiences you’ve had with cold callers calling your house while you’re eating dinner and all that stuff, and do it the right way.

Which the right way is when you reach out to somebody, don’t be pushy. Add value before you ask. You’re also kinda stepping into relationship building too. But… And try to… The, the main thing that gets people to get into outbound and do it well is to just add value first and don’t ask for the sale immediately.

And w- if you really believe in your product- The first sale you make is to yourself. So if you’re scared about doing outbound, first do some personal work and make sure you really believe in your product. ‘Cause if you believe in your product, you’re gonna have almost a moral obligation to go help people.

And if you reframe your mindset to that, then you’re not annoying or interrupting people, you’re actually just trying to help people and letting the right people know that you have the solution for them. 

Alex Panagis: Just a, a thought on that. It’s funny that for me it was really when people started debating the value of SEO and would content that you produce first that you wanna rank on Google or you just wanna publish your own will that still be as important in generating inbound?

It was very quick that the natural decision was outbound is the next form of technical marketing ’cause you can engineer it. You have, let’s say, oh, we get 1,000 prospects in and we have a conversion rate of this to get a reply, and then from the people that book a … how many of those people that reply do we eventually book a meeting with?

So people like the fact that it can be engineered and measured, which is also one of the things I like about it. But I think because it’s looked at as one of those forms of marketing that you can engineer, it is also one of the ones that people try to dehumanize and do at scale, and I would argue … there’s a great essay, like very old now, but from Paul Graham about doing things that don’t scale.

I think that’s applies more than a- anything to doing outbound if you don’t wanna destroy your reputation and your brand is instead of just thinking of … And I see it a lot in the companies that I’ve worked with and advised over the years. The typical mindset with some CEOs, they’ll see outbound as a strategy and they’ll start doing it and instantly, as in within a matter of one week of running it, they’ll be like, “Okay, so this is going okay.

We have a 1% reply rate. We haven’t booked a single meeting.” Obviously they won’t point that out, but they’ll then say, “How do we reach out to 100 times the amount of people we’re reaching out to now?” Whereas the point … that’s entirely defeating the point. You should focus on figuring out who you’re targeting, nailing the messaging really well, and also ultimately approaching people in the way that you would want to be approached.

Again- I talked about it like pattern matching with the media stuff of what you like to watch and what you believe your target audience will enjoys. What type of, what– Like I, I bookmark every time I, or put it in a folder in my email client every time I get a cold email. I’m like, “I know they used AI for that, but the targeting and the offer was really good.”

And most of the time that i- if the copy and the positioning and the way they get my attention, they go through all this effort, the only ti- reason it would then not be something that you’d go for is ’cause the offer or the pricing itself is just not good timing or too expensive and you wouldn’t go for it.

But yeah, my, my whole not to preach, but I would just say try not to get onto the completely u- use AI to automate the hell out of the entire process, basically. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. There’s a bunch of buzzwords in there that are really important, which is do things that don’t scale first, sell how you like to be sold, and garbage in, garbage out.

Alex Panagis: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: But, so long before AI, even though outbound was not my natural strength, I committed it, to it. Entrepreneurship is a consistency and commitment game, so I set a pattern more than a decade ago where every week, no matter what, I would do at least one cold outreach to somebody I thought I could help.

I might be listening to a podcast and hear somebody, and I’m like, “Oh, they would be a great fit for Lifter.” They might, whatever. And I would just s-send an unsolicited email, and it’s not like, “Hey, buy my stuff.” It’s, “Hey, I love…” First context, “Hey, I love that episode you did with or this, “I really got value from this one idea.”

“Have you heard of LifterLMS? That’s my tool. I’m the founder. D- it has this thing you were looking for in the episode. And by the way we have this free resource that like to help you explore, help whatever. “Hey, this is our comparison guide for the different tools out there,” or, “This is an article about, why WordPress versus closed SAS software for a learning management system.”

And I won’t even ask for a sale. I won’t put my Book a Meeting link in there. And then I’ll be polite. I’ll be like, “Hey, thanks again. I really enjoyed that content. Let me know if I can be of help,” or something like that. So I would workshop that and make it tighter, but that’s the general idea, and I would do that manually every week.

I’ve always done that just as a habit. But then when you bring AI in, like you said, you don’t wanna scale what’s not ready to scale. But first, when we’re doing prospecting, the thing that can be really time-consuming is list building, building your outbound list. Who are the people… imagine you have a s- giant sales team and you need to create a list of 1,000 people to reach out to that are qualified and a perfect fit that you could add value for.

That kind of research is now very fast with AI if you’re clear on who it is you help, and there’s a lot of people that it’s so easy to find how to contact them. For example, if you’re… Let’s say you’re teaching something about selling houses to real estate agents. Real estate agents, it’s very easy to find their phone number and email address.

S- every YouTuber, if you go to their About tab, there’s a button where they… You have to click it to make sure you’re not a robot, and you can get out their contact email, ’cause they wanna be contacted. And some people are hard to find, but you can you can build a prospect list easy- easier than ever before, and you use…

sometimes, people sell lists. “Oh, here’s a list of all the dentists in your state. It’s $300,” or whatever. I don’t recommend buying lists, but you can do stuff like that and it could be helpful. But then it’s also about the, the communication, like what you’re sending. This is an example of where I would use AI to create a skill for a pattern of communication I would use where introduce…

in the skill, I would have AI interview me until it was 95% sure the skill was fully formed, but interview me until you have a template of an outbound communication that could work. By the way, here’s 10 years of emails that I’ve done manually. Look for the patterns there. Add value. Don’t be pushy.

Don’t do what everybody else does and drop a Book a Meeting link or push hard for the sale. And I would just develop my system to, draft that communication so it’s fill in the blank, which then a human or the AI could, literally fill it in. And there’s systems… I know you use this system.

It’s called- 

Alex Panagis: Lemlist. Yeah. Yeah … 

Chris Badgett: Lemlist to do this And I will say every time I do something like that, move from something I do manually to automated with AI or human in the loop automated, I do sometimes feel like, I am– it is not gonna be 100% the same as if I sent that one email. But if I s- am able to send 100 a day, I may…

i’m consciously making a trade-off. 

Alex Panagis: Yeah. The pyramid of AI, the cost and efficiency argument. Otherwise it just wouldn’t happen, so yeah. 

Chris Badgett: But if you don’t do the work on the front end to really nail the… That’s why I have that filter to get all that stuff out, ’cause everybody’s doing it poorly, and I have a- a way in my skill to find the good ones. I don’t– It doesn’t move all the ones out, it just moves all the bad ones out. So that’s the the prospecting system, and then it’s just other tools you can integrate with AI For example, like if once you… Prospecting is not just like one-shotting, it’s like a conversation usually.

So eventually, if they do raise their hand and say, “I’m interested,” you can have your AI connected to your Calendly, you can have it monitoring your inbox. There’s a concept for, of like hot, cold, and warm leads. So like a hot lead in prospecting is somebody, “Hey, you’ve b- we’ve been back and forth many times.

This person keeps asking questions. They really wanna connect.” So you would surface like your hot leads. There’s a concept called lead scoring that you can use to figure out what is hot, what is warm what’s cold, or, what should you just turn off, and things like that. But meeting scheduling, your email integrating with other tools that may have a AI-native capability.

For example, like we, we do research at Lifter through a tool called BuiltWith, which is public information that has certain softwares that people use. So if you– if I wanna reach out to people who have are using like a competitor tool or using another tool that people always use inside alongside LifterLMS, I can, start doing that.

But some of those s- tools, those like lists, public list tools, and this is where I would buy… Like they’ll give you some contacts for free, but then you have to buy. If they have a MCP where you can plug your agent into it and you’re basically paying for access that way, instead of buying a spreadsheet or a CSV file, your AI is just plugged in and can just generate that and bring it in even easier.

So those are some AI tips around prospecting. 

Alex Panagis: Yeah, I don’t know how, in how much detail we can do more content on like outbound in future, because I think it’s a big topic. But like another Thing which relates to both the prospecting and also the copywriting of the email itself is using signals. So as one of the signals that you mentioned is like using built with data.

Another one that like more so in services and coaching works really well is monitor like job alerts. Oh, people are hiring for like a particular role, or funding rounds is like the most common I think that people will target like, oh, this company just, ran a funding round for this amount of money.

That puts them into the, like our customer profile and matches our ideal customer profile, therefore let’s reach out to them and, maybe at this point they’re gonna be hiring a huge number of team members if, Yeah, so I think that works. And then basically the, from the signal or based on what other information you have about a particular prospect, I like to, like whether it’s at the beginning or not really depends on how you’re trying to frame the email entirely and what you’re pitching.

But I love using the concept of a relational anchor, which is when I reach out to somebody, it’s not just anyway, the email is about helping them, but it’s why right now did you send this email so that the person has the context of, okay, they’ve, recently seen something.

And the most basic version of this, which is again, how AI would do it, is, “Oh, I recently read your, blog article,” or, “Oh, I recently saw your tweet,” which is obviously like the, the version of it that you want to stay away from because it’s very obvious to people that get lots of, cold email inbound that the person has clearly not pr- actually seen that or put the effort into it, or they’ve not actually listened to the podcast.

They’ve really just saying that they listened to it. So if we, yeah, if Jason Cohen is a good example, if we were to reach out to him because of something on his podcast, like you can’t just be like, “Oh, I recently enjoyed your episode of the-” Yeah … “this podcast.” Like that, that’s again, like a, a thing which requires, that’s the part which AI can get right de- depending on how you prompt it.

But I do think like it requires a human to be in the loop because it’s, at the end of the day, especially if you’re sending it as you from your own email, then it comes across as just low effort and potentially lazy. I think you have a note here about a specific like copywriting skill, the Cialdini skill.

Chris Badgett: The Cialdini skill- Yeah … is something I like to use, which is Robert Cialdini wrote a book called “Influence,” and he’s a social scientist, and he actually studied cults for decades, and I think he even embedded himself in cults as a sociologist. And he would interview people e- that exited a cult, and he he basically studied how cults recruit and retain members, and then figured out how to apply it to business.

Whenever I mention Robert Cialdini, it always comes with a disclaimer because what you will learn here could make you a cult leader, master manipulator, but that’s not what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to become an influencer or a good marketer. But some of Cialdini’s the principles of influence are things like reciprocity.

So when I say something like, “Add value before you ask for the sale,” that’s actually the principle of reciprocity. We have a free version of LifterLMS. That’s our biggest reciprocity play there is. We actually have a very functioning, successful business where most of our cust- our users are actually using the free thing, and they’re fine with that, and I’m fine with that.

But a percentage of those need our paid stuff, so that’s give before you get. Another one is authority. So that’s where you might mention in your outbound prospecting email, I’ve been running LifterLMS for 12 years. I have a YouTube channel with 1,500 videos, and a podcast that’s been going for 12 years, which I started at the same time as Tim Ferriss.

I’m just a lot less famous, which… So I’m joking. And by the way, you know what that joke does? That’s another principle of influence from Cialdini, which is likability. So another hang-up for education entrepreneurs is they think they have to put on an act to make a content or be a leader in their company or be on stage or whatever.

A funny one with me as an example is I’ve never owned a suit At some point in my career did I feel like I should probably get a tie or should I wear a suit jacket to a conference? I just don’t do it. It’s not me. And that’s likable. I wear the same fishing shirts from the same brand.

I’ve s- if you see me at a conference, if you see me at my house, if you see me out fishing or whatever, it’s the same shirt, and that’s just likable. That’s actually Likability is a big factor in generating trust, which is a big part of sales, which we’ll talk about in a little bit.

The other… there’s more Cialdini influences, so I would encourage you to study that, but that’s an example of a skill you could create. So if I was creating a landing page for a new course or membership, and I’m working with it manually myself as a human and with AI, then I would run it through my Cialdini skill to see if I’ve gracefully, in a non-manipulative way, incorporated all those seven factors.

So proceed at your own risk. Use use ethically and everything like that, and don’t start a cult. 

Alex Panagis: Yeah. Just to go back and take it, I know this is not really the section that we’re on, but it’s funny ’cause that Rob- Robert Cialdini is a good example of it. We’re not saying join a cult to produce content-

but it’s a pretty good example of really going the distance to do research to, to come out with something really good original. It’s h- how many people do you know that have done something, not necessarily joining a cult, but something that’s that level of like sacrifice to like research how to be persuasive and how to do persuasive writing?

There’s very few writers that have done that, and there’s also a reason why we’re citing this specific author as opposed to the hundreds of other people that have written books on copywriting. 

Chris Badgett: Move, moving on from outbound, I actually c-consider social media marketing a form of outbound, particularly paid ads, ’cause you’re literally trying to show up cold in front of somebody.

But social, even with the name social in it, it blurs the line between outbound and relationship marketing. But I’m just putting that out there, like I see social media marketing as a form of outbound. But the… particularly with paid ads. But the biggest mistake people make with paid ads is just like scaling an outbound prospecting outreach program with AI before it’s ready.

With social– with paid ads, whether those are Facebook ads, Google ads, TikTok ads, whatever particularly if you’re doing content, I’m a big fan of scaling what’s already working instead of thinking paid advertising is a ATM that just prints money in, where you put $100 in and you get $200 out. You wanna scale what’s already working.

But moving on to relationships this is the most fuzzy and also the most dangerous place to use AI, but I’ll teach this concept of relationship marketing from using a particular relationship strategy that also blurs the line with outbound. I’d give credit if I knew who originally came up with the idea, but there’s this concept called the Dream 100.

So if you think about your education company and you think about i- if I could get… Who would the top 100 people be that if I had a relationship with would really help my business? It could be another influencer with a related but non-competitive product. It could be a celebrity customer who you know is a, a course creator who, if I, “Oh, that person, if they were using Lifter instead of competitor X, that would be really good for the brand.

And by the way, I think they would be honestly happier over here because of XYZ.” So that’s the concept of the Dream 100, and it blurs into outbound because you would take that list and over time slowly do some outbound, try to build relationships. “Oh, this person’s speaking at a conference. Oh, they wrote a book.”

Like Jason Cohen is an example. A simple thing you could do is buy the book and then go the extra mile, which only takes two minutes, and leave a p- positive review for the book ’cause you read it and loved it, and that you’re just slowly building relationships. But relationships aren’t science.

It’s kinda messy. But at the same time, some people feel bad about doing things like, “Okay, I built my Dream 100, and now I’m putting these people in a spreadsheet or in a CRM, and I’m, like, kinda tracking what I’m doing.” Some people feel like that feels like it’s kinda weird or whatever.

But no, you’re just trying to stay organized ’cause you’re literally trying to develop business relationships with 100 people, which is really hard. There’s a concept called Dunbar’s number, which is that a human being can actually only maintain, with the way our brain works, 140 relationships, which in the old world was, like, kind of the maximum size of a tribe or a group of people.

But then as things evolve, like civilizations and societies and the internet, we live in a world now where if you think about social media, like I, I probably have 3,000 Facebook friends and, o- over the course of LifterLMS, 145,000 people have opted into our email list. I can’t the human brain can’t manage all that.

So it’s– all I’m saying is it’s cool to use tools to keep up with accelerating times. But in terms of using AI for relationship marketing, if we use the Dream 100 example, AI could help you come up with that Dream 100 list. Like you might come up with 12 or 25 or 50, but then now that it can see the types of people you’re finding, it can be li- it could propose 200 more, and then you could filter down to the 100 that you think you wanna do.

Another thing with relationship marketing is events So for example everybody– I, I’m more of an introvert, right? So I don’t… conferences drain me, as an example, and I actually prefer the smaller, like 50 to 200-person conference. But there’s– I met you at a conference. My business- 

Alex Panagis: After knowing each other for a while through the internet, but 

Chris Badgett: yeah.

Yeah. Yes, which is the loose internet- Yeah … like all these- Yeah … connections. And then our lead developer, Brian Hogg, I met at a conference in Mexico m- many years ago. Current business partners, Jason and Kim Coleman, I met at a conference. Getting outside of your office and from behind the computer and going out to the world, again, with a recipro- reciprocity and open mind mindset.

Just add value, build connections, break bread together, introduce yourself even try to put on a an event yourself. And maybe you’re trying to develop relationships, but you’re also helping hold the space for other people to connect to each other. And, when it comes to, like in the online community world, which we’ll get into in another session, I just wanna put out a word of caution.

You don’t want to over-AI your relationships. So a, a simple example of that would be if you have a Facebook group or you have an online community on your website, don’t just turn it over to AI to be your social media manager. ‘Cause it could help. It could surface things and like kinda, “Hey, you should probably respond to this one,” or, “Hey I need some ideas to get my community engaged.”

But don’t just like hand relationships to AI. It’s almost the most important area for human in the loop. 

Alex Panagis: Yeah, absolutely. And I also think, like even the– not to push back on what you’re saying, ’cause you’re saying like when you’re doing the Dream 100, to use AI to help if you get to a point where you can’t find any more.

But in a way, that’s like the type of exercise where Ideally, depending on, how new you are in the industry you’re in, you should be able to think of like at least 50 companies where they’re like an ideal, like fit for what you’re doing and who you’d like to go after without having to rely on other tools, ’cause you have some understanding and follow people in the industry and know of the companies in the industry.

So I think like there are, again, like with the relationship aspect, there’s like certain like strategic things where it’s ultimately you having to make a decision like is this a good fit client or not, or potential customer? And then, yeah, like the next thing that you wanna focus on here from my understanding is the sales and how you can use there’s so much, like from a software and tool standpoint, I think it was Gong, which did the sales intelligence like product with reviewing sales call transcripts to find out like common questions that customers would ask and things that people would like salespeople would say that get people to convert.

I think it’s like a– funny now looking back, because this is now something that basically all of us do using our meeting recorders and feeding it to our AI company brain so that it actually all lives in one place and it understands how often something has come up. So yeah.

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Yeah. So the first thing I’ll say is, to the uninitiated, people sometimes think that sales and marketing are the same thing, and they’re not.

They’re completely different. They do blur and overlap near the conversion point, if you will. And some of, like outbound marketing it might be a collaboration between marketing and sales, but sales is a, a very different thing. And the way I like to teach sales to somebody, and this is for education entrepreneurs in particular, they tend to be stronger in the expert hat and the the teaching hat, but sometimes weaker on the entrepreneurship and technology hat.

Though, but though it depends, like if somebody’s selling sales training, they’re already good at sales, they may need help with the technology or something else. But the way sales really clicked for me is when I understood a concept called conversion tools. So conversion just means, closing a sale, and there’s different types of conversions.

But in terms of a sales conversion, that’s when money comes out, goes through the internet or by hand or by check or wire or whatever, and the sale is closed. And sales has a bad rap there’s words like high ticket closer or, in the car industry as an example, which always has a bad rap.

It’s just broken in the sense in general. I know there’s good car sales folks out there, but many people have had a bad experience getting closed at the dealership. But conversion tools is the mechanism of which the sale is generated. And depending upon the price point of what you’re charging, different conversion tools make sense for you and your business.

And I’ll give some rough numbers here. If you have a lower priced course or membership, what we would call low ticket, you need a low touch, no touch sales conversion tool, and I’ll give examples of that. But just to get through the price points, if you’re getting up in, let’s say, the five hundred dollars to two thousand dollars, you can do a group sales conversion tool.

And then once you get into high ticket, which is like in general two thousand dollars or higher That’s high-ticket sales. That’s where an actual sales team or sales, one-on-one sales conversation is more required. Typically, people don’t pull out $30,000 on their credit card to join a high-end coaching program, so you actually need a sales team.

So first, know your lane. Don’t try to do hi- hire a sales team when your product costs 200 bucks. And if you’re s- you’re in the mid-market, y- you don’t wanna do no touch when it does sometimes take some conversation to close a $2,000 sale. And if you’re high-ticket, don’t think a single sales page is gonna work for you.

So to give some examples in low… What low touch, no touch means is Synchronous or at the same time communication isn’t necessary, or it’s very minimal with something like a email Q&A, we call that pre-sales email, is that’s all you need, and that’s what works at your price point. And in the mid-market, that’s things like, let’s say, $2,000 price point.

We need more touch in there, which means the you might need a sales presentation, but you’re not charging enough that you have a salesperson get on a plane and fly and give a custom presentation in a boardroom. You leverage tools like webinars and, online events. People register, you add value, not just sell.

And there’s a whole, way to do webinars that are totally non-pushy, value-adding, and also convert really well. And then the high-end sales is a completely different beast. That’s what people mean when they say things like enterprise sales or you’re on a website and it says, “Call for price.”

Book a meeting. That’s … Y- you’re getting into high-ticket land. But j- just to weave AI into that, I’ll get into that in a second, but go ahead with what you were thinking. 

Alex Panagis: Yeah, I was just gonna say, another advantage of doing that is if you do, let’s say you have a cheaper course, let’s say 599, which is not cheap by any means depending where you are in the world.

But if you then get on a call with people in order to sell that, and you do one-on-one calls, you set a, I think, a poor expectation because… And I’ve been sold to on coaching programs like this, which were relatively expensive, where they did loads of pre-sales work that was high touch, but for a program that was ultimately not high touch at all.

So then that sets a, in my opinion a huge expectation gap. So i- in a way, while it might be tempting, if you can and you have the time early on to do the one-on-one sales call and personalized demos for people, it, in a way, doesn’t make sense to do that because you’re then gonna set the expectation when the person becomes a customer that obviously now they’ve paid you, so why wouldn’t you get on a call with them again, and why wouldn’t you provide that one-on-one help?

So I think it’s useful from that point of view as well. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And one pro tip I just wanna put out there, if you’re new and just starting Break all the rules. I recommend acting like enterprise salesperson, even if you have a low-ticket offer, ’cause you need to feedback loop. If you just put up a, a landing page and a Buy Now button and and you’re, nothing’s happening you need to open up the feedback loop.

And what I mean by break the rules is in the early days- Yeah … one-on-one is key, but use these kind of levels to know where you need to end up. And feel free to break the rules at times. But like Alex said you have to manage expectations. If you sell so hard and it’s so great and you have a $10 course, and they’re like…

And they have your phone number they’re gonna expect a lot for $10. So it’s not really their fault. It’s your fault as the entrepreneur for not setting the expectations correctly and overselling in a way. But in terms of weaving AI into this, sales is really a, a conversation, and AI can help you flesh it out.

So even with a landing page A sales page, as it’s called, what you’re doing is you’re actually having a conversation in the mind of your prospect. They come with questions, they read, and they’re kind– Your, your words on the screen are basically having that conversation, and AI can help you figure that out.

So we could probably do a, a jam session on here on what makes a good sales page, particularly for somebody who doesn’t have a background in marketing or copywriting and, Robert Cialdini and things like that. So a good sales page, and this is where, you could take what you’re listening to here and create an AI skill in your AI to help you.

You could call it the sales page generator skill AI, ChatGPT or whoever, interview me until you’re 95% sure you have everything you need to make a great sales page and and then go from that and use the sales page generator skill, which is gonna… The re- This is j- I’m just trying to teach people about skills here.

By giving the AI some bumpers and some things to look for, it’s not gonna just in general create a sales page. It’s gonna create a great sales page. So let’s give people some things. This is– Like, studying sales page creation, even if you’re mid-market or plan on doing one-on-one high-ticket sales, the act of learning how to write a great sales page, in my opinion, is one of the most fundamental principles or skills of sales.

So a great s- And so I’ll give you my pro tips. Before AI, I would open up a text editor with no formatting, like a note-taking app, ’cause you can get distracted. You’re like, “Oh, we should put a video here. This, this headline should be bigger.” I’m like, “No, just go straight to the words first.” That’s why I strip out all the formatting and everything.

But what I’m trying to get are the components of a good sales page, so which starts with a headline. And this isn’t an exact science. There’s different frameworks, but there’s a headline which has what’s known as a, a hook in it a subheadline which kind of expands on the promise. So a, a great sales page, basically the– what you’re looking at, every component mo- compels the person to go to the next component and basically be sold to.

And if you’ve done your customer avatar work, it should feel like a great experience. So just spitballing here, we got our headline, our subheadline. I personally like to do a video sales letter next, wh-which brings in the likability, the human connection. Oh, there’s a real human here. It’s not just words on the page.

So that’s a In general, 45-second to two-minute video perhaps, talking head, so you’re humanizing it. So this is like the scale thing. Yeah, you could get on a plane and have that conversation in person, but you’re doing what you can do at a lower price point with a video version of yourself, which by the way, is infinitely scalable.

A thousand people could be watching the video at the same time. But then below the video, you have some things like social proof, which is another Cialdini concept. So it could be a testimonial or a collection of testimonials. Within Cialdini, there’s also another thing that’s different from social proof, which is just called proof, which is a whenever you saw those old TV commercials about where a doctor in a white coat makes a claim about something, that’s like proof.

The white coat is like authority. There’s a lot of detail into it. I could nerd out forever. But so we’ve got some testimonials. We’ve got trusted by these brands, works with these other fra- famous brands or whatever. Like these are all like proof components. And then we get into benefits. So there’s different frameworks in copywriting.

One of my favorites is feature advantage benefit. It’s called FAB. So like a feature advantage benefit of like a, a coaching program could be something like the feature is a weekly live training on Zoom. That’s the feature. The advantage is so you get the most up-to-date training in this part of what we do, and the benefit is so that, you can lose 20 pounds, find the love of your life, or make a six-figure income, something like that.

I’m talking in generalities, but that’s how you frame the benefits. Then the next section is what I call what’s in the box. So this is where you put in like what’s included in inside here. ‘Cause we s- we throw these words around like, “Oh, it’s a membership. It’s a coaching program. It’s a course.”

But what’s included? Do I get templates? Do I get live calls? Do I get, how many courses are in here? Is there one? Is there 57? Is there a community aspect? So it’s like, what’s in the box? Social proof is something you like sprinkle everywhere. So then like below that, I’d probably put some more social proof then I would put the call to action, which is like a buy now button.

In LifterLMS, we call that an access plan. And then below that, we do something called a risk reversal, also known as a guarantee. So that’s something like 30 days, 100% money back guarantee. It’s called a risk reversal because r- removing risk helps close sales. So if you really believe in your product, I’m a huge fan of the 100% time boxed, no questions asked, money back guarantee.

I don’t want your money if this isn’t a fit for you, and I believe in it so much, I’m willing to sell it to you, but you can get 100% refund if it– you find out it’s not for you in the first 30 days. So that’s the anatomy of a sales page. AI can help you with some of that stuff. Like for example, if you’re already in business and you have AI connected to your emails and you haven’t been like really capturing testimonials, you could just send AI out like, “Hey, read five years of emails and see if you find any testimonial, like relevant compliments or content that you can then repurpose.”

Pro tip there, it is good to ask for permission when you publish somebody’s private communication particularly if you’re gonna put like their face or headshot beside it and stuff like that but AI can help with all those pieces, but what would you add to the anatomy of a sales page as a conversion tool?

Alex Panagis: I think, the main thing I would add is doing all of those things well is an art form, and it’s har- it’s a mix of art and science, but the main thing I would say is the positioning and also experimentation of d- don’t get hung up on doing the perfect sales page, especially initially.

Experiment with different angles of positioning. I find myself doing that a lot. I’ll create different versions of a landing page, and without saying that this is what I’m doing to people, I’ll sh- share the different versions with different people to get feedback spec- from specific people I want feedback on.

And then often what I’ll do is I’ll share the other versions o- once they’ve given feedback on the first version to see if it, the idea just clicks more. So that would be my main thing is there is a certain number of assumptions that… aI will make a lot of assumptions, then you as a human, as the expert, can make other and probably more assumptions more accurately than AI will be able to make.

But then at the end of the day, the customer’s gonna see it completely differently. We get tunnel visioned when we work in an industry for a really long time, that we think that things that are import- like, non-obvious to the end user, that we j- we are just like yeah, obviously.” The main example that comes to mind now on the spot is the 30-day money-back guarantee.

A lot of companies offer that, but they just don’t put it front and center on the sales page. And they’re like yeah, obviously.” You have a 14-day or a 30-day wi- right of withdrawal, and in some countries that’s even required to offer. So why not use it in the marketing? If you’re, if in Europe you’re required to have I believe it’s 14 days right of withdrawal why not just use that as something, even if it is a requirement, use that as something that you put front and center to remind people like, yes, but look, you’re taking up your…

taking a bet is a perhaps a bold way of saying it, but you’re basically going out on a limb to that this is the right purchase decision, and if it’s an extremely high-ticket offer es- especially, at that point, you want to reassure them, like, that you’re gonna be there you’re gonna be able to refund them if they’re not 100% happy.

And I think the other thing I’ll just s- say on the money-back guarantee, I think some companies fight the feedback r- or the money-back guarantee requests, and I think that’s a ver- very much a negative thing that will leave people with a bad taste in their mouth. If somebody went through the decision to buy something, and then very quickly or before they see the value ask for money back, the…

I al- in almost all cases, if it… obviously, if it’s within the period, I would just offer it. I wouldn’t push back. And then in the time once you’ve offered it, ask them why or whether there was something that would change it, or again, maybe do some price research at that point. But don’t use it as an opportunity before offering the refund.

I’ve gone through that with a couple of companies. They’ll be like, “Before we issue the refund what was it about the experience?” And it’s I’m happy to give that, but just issue the refund, and then I’ll even get on a call and do feedback with why I just wasn’t happy with where the product is.

Just to be mindful of time, u- unless you have something else that you wanted to add to that I was gonna suggest we move on to the AI and operations side of things. 

Chris Badgett: One more just counterintuitive tip that almost nobody does that I think is the highest leverage thing for sales pages is to actually do that before you create your program, because it forces you to figure out You’re- you’ve done your avatar research.

You know what their three primary pain points and the benefits you wanna create. The what’s in the box is very important ’cause people just gloss over the details. It also forces you to figure out your price point, because if you’re putting all this stuff you’ve dreamed up in your head of what you want in the box, and you haven’t really studied pricing or anything you’ll teach yourself the lesson of “Hey, there’s no way I could deliver all that for $200, so maybe this is a $2,000 thing.

Or if I wanna do a cheaper thing, I n- I need to remove some of these things.” So it’s like a forcing function to force you to come up with your offer basically. Yeah. 

Alex Panagis: I just, and I know you said we’re gonna move on for the sake of time, but yeah, like that, that brings up I won’t go into specifics for the sake of time, but yeah, one thing I find myself doing more and more, and that’s partially because AI can lead you in the wrong direction like very quickly, is to do customer research before you actually do the thing, and sometimes don’t even make it obvious that you’ve not started doing the thing.

I’ve already made a start on it, but like just yesterday you saw me sitting down with your business partner, Jason, and we were talking about some AI thing and direction that I’ve like already started working on. But then I’ve reached the point where I’m like, “Wait, let me like take a step back instead of just continuing like full steam ahead and building that like new feature for a product that we are working on.

Let me actually ask somebody which is potentially a good customer or user, or also the type of person that would build that product themself. Does the positioning resonate with them? Does the– Like is the product the something that they would use, or this feature something that they would use?” To understand before I’ve actually built the thing.

And I think like the, the same thing applies to services, coaching and courses definitely. So yeah, I think now that’s for the sake of-

Chris Badgett: I just- Okay … wanna add one more, which is the concept of pre-selling. 

Alex Panagis: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: So y- this is why you should do the sales page first. You should literally sell the product before it exists, which sounds weird.

But even in the very beginning of LifterLMS in 2014 we sold it before it was ready. We already knew we were gonna like work on it, and those people are like, they got a great price. They got the ability to influence the product early and have an open ear to feature requests and things like that.

So y- if you do the sales page first and you actually pre-sell it, you’re vali- validating that this is a good idea. And it, if you do that and nobody buys, that’s a good signal you should like totally pivot the offer, and you just save yourself tons of time, money, and life energy. So I’m a big fan of pre-selling.

Alex Panagis: Awesome. So moving on to AI and operations, I think you have a big idea that you wanna start with. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah, so as an entrepreneur, we do a lot of things, but, the main things are marketing, sales, and then actually running the business or operations. And like I said, the, our course or coaching program or certification or continuing education business, whatever it is, that’s the product.

But you’re also building a business product. So inside of operations are things like building a team, if you’re moving and have the finances and ability to do that. You have to manage the team, you have to lead the team. Then there’s project management, like staying organized, ’cause the more advanced your business gets, it’s gonna kinda expand out.

You have to do bookkeeping, accounting, finance. You have customer support. You’re not just selling, you also have to do delivery and deliver the promise that you, you promised in your marketing. You have to build the product itself, which may require a wide variety of skill sets which AI can help you with.

But you might need to hire team members or a subcontractor, and then you need to manage those relationships, and who’s gonna do, this part or that part. So that’s operations. That’s the business product, and if You know, there’s a great book called Good to Great or Built to Sell.

I’m forgetting which one it is, but if you wanna ever be able to sell your business, it needs to have a strong not just product, but operating system behind that. And it– every day isn’t just everybody winging it at the company. There’s systems. And AI, by the way, is great at systems. So the operations load particularly, that’s the catch 22.

All right, I built a sales page. I pre-sold it. People bought. I got super busy, and I actually built some courses and memberships or certification programs inside. I got all this stuff together, and now I got all these people, and I’m like, customers who need stuff, and I’m really overwhelmed. And that puts a lot of pressure, particularly on the founder if you’re a one-person show.

It’s like becoming a parent where you, where for the first time you’re like, “Oh my gosh, I have another full-time job.” Operations is like that. My tip here with AI is to connect AI to as much as you can so that it can reduce the operational load and the overwhelm. So calendar integration, analytics, your help desk, like I mentioned in another episode, where the AI is like the first line of customer support, and it drafts responses before the humans even show up.

And one of… one of the interesting things at LifterLMS is we have a concept called a escalation, which is where, let’s say a support team member is doing tech support, and they have a question that they need to rope in a senior developer to look at. It used to be in our internal communication tool, the support rep would ask the lead developer like, “Hey, does– how does LifterLMS work in this way?”

Or whatever. But I’ve watched it happen. It started slow, and then it went like a tsunami where the support team member just asks Maurice, our agent, gets a better, faster answer. And what I mean by better is if you ask a developer or the founder or whatever, they’re so busy that they might have even forgot.

“Oh, I don’t even remember what we did there or exactly how that works.” But the AI knows ’cause it’s plugged into everything. It can see every line of code. So you get AI integrated in your learning management system. So one of the coolest things we did recently, when we look at operations in the business product- our business kinda has its own documentation.

You mentioned SOPs earlier, which stands for standard operating procedures. I call them business playbooks as well. So I- we have a whole site at our company called just team.lifterlms.com. It’s not available to the public. We actually have a feature in Lifter if you wanna create this kind of site to put the your business operating system inside Lifter and make it not publicly available.

So that’s like a… It’s called internal training. So like you– let’s say you hire a new team member, and they’re like “Hey, how’s it going? What do I do?” So in the old world, you would take a new team member and you would say, “All right, you’re gonna shadow Bob for five months and just figure out what Bob does.”

But when you actually document what you do and you structure it systematically inside your learning management system, it’s like a LMS for your company, and that’s super helpful. And one thing you can do with AI, the problem with creating standard operating procedures or business playbooks is it– if you’re a busy founder, as an example, or course creator, you’re like, “I really don’t have time for that,” and then it just doesn’t get prioritized.

But you can use an AI tool to b- to “Hey, watch me do this,” or, “This is how I did this.” Create a s- standard operating procedure so a new team member… Or I could pull somebody off the street, put them in this chair in front of this computer or whatever, and they would be able to review the process and execute on that.

So a lot of businesses do not document anything. It’s It’s like the sales page thing where people often do it at the end, but it’s so much better if you do it at the beginning. If you’re– Usually it takes a founder being like I can’t. I’ve gotten this question a million times,” and then I get on a call with a team member and they’re…

“i’m just repeating myself. I really need to systematize it.” And then they build the process. But if you can do it either at the beginning or early, like the second time you get the same question or you’re innovating and creating, say as a coach. Like what happens to successful coaches is they will bring in other coaches to help support, and that’s one of the ways they scale, particularly if it’s in the mid-market or higher-end price points.

They can’t do it all alone, so you have to train coaches on how to coach, and that’s like a whole other job. But if you systematize it and use AI to help systematize what you do. The problem is, if like you said, sales page design is a art and a science, and it’s hard to systematize it.

But what we’re doing in our conversation when we’re talking about sales pages is we’re actually sharing the system or the science part of it that somebody could take and then use. Developing those internal playbooks and using AI to get unstuck is so key 

Alex Panagis: I’m just gonna… I think for the companies that don’t document or the individual entrepreneurs that don’t document very much yet, I’ll just add that there’s an entire startup which is, I believe their ultimate objective is to get into robotics, but their current business is solely focused on having humans wear cameras to watch how they do things.

So they have Basically, they pay electricians, plumbers and people all over the world, cleaners all over the world, with the objective of having AI shadow what they do, and having basically data on how they do things so that they can use that to eventually train robots. And, think of that what you will.

Some people will think that’s a bit of a doomsday scenario. But it applied to, in a more more normal sense to a tech business or to a course business where you’re doing something on the laptop anyway, and you can have a, very easily do things and have use AI to therefore document what you do so that you can, get that documentation ready.

I think a big This may or be jumping ahead slightly, so stop me if you want. But one of my things that I think about a lot is that there are good employees that resist using AI, and they do so for very rational reasons. One of the m- the main reasons there is fear of replacement or unclear incentives.

A company trying to automate away a process, like we’ve spoken about in the earlier episodes in this serie- series where when we find extra time. So for example, me saying I don’t convert the LifterLMS weekly newsletter from a Google Doc to the active campaign markup. For you as a business owner and for me my thought is like, “Okay, great.”

Because I’m not doing that, I have more time to do stuff that is important and requires my manual l- effort and labor still. So as long as the… I think as long as you’re operating with that mindset you can put the fear of replacement and unclear incentives issues to rest And then the other thing is no t- little time to learn.

Like as as entrepreneurs, we’re usually in the business, you’re likely the person that’s at the forefront of how to use the AI tools because you’re the one building them, you’re the one experimenting with them the most, and if the AI tool makes mistakes but you’re, you as the entrepreneur are the one using them, it’s not as much of an issue.

Whereas if you’d have an employee that used AI and screwed something up, it becomes more of an issue because then it’s oh, they weren’t having the level of oversight required. So I think working on adoption is like a with AI is a really important part if you don’t want– Like essentially, if you want to take your team with you and make sure that they are leveling up at the same rate that you are by becoming faster, more efficient, and better with AI.

And there’s varying different opinions. I’m actually curious what your thought is. Like some– Like I, I think it’s Elon Musk famously doesn’t believe in the concept of change management at all. For anyone to have a controversial opinion, of course it would be him. But basically his mindset is like the whole theory of like having people worry or like HR think about oh yes, now this whole or like this whole process is changing in bigger organizations or supporting people to deal with the change shouldn’t be required because the people that should be with you are just good enough and will be able to deal with the change, and otherwise you need to hire new people.

I have a much, I think, a much more mellow like sense and approach, and I don’t think as, brutal of an approach is required in the, the businesses that we work with. Which is that you can like, to an extent, I think there are like certain employees which can be far more resistant, and it’s just difficult because they wanna bury their head in their sand, in the sand as opposed to adapt.

And the main last thing I’ll add as well, which I think about a lot, is in each company, it’s really good to have a c– depending on the size, obviously, but it’s good to have some people that are very skeptical and dislike using AI because it will then challenge… You’ll have it can be– Some leaders hate that, but I think I, I enjoy it because you’ll get on a call, and you’ll be like, “Yeah, I just did this like landing page,” and you’ll share stuff for review.

And those are usually the people that will be able to pick it apart with the most objective approach. Now, it’s somewhat frustrating because those tend to also be the people in the team that then don’t want to become more efficient with AI. But I think there’s an, there, there is like a lesson in there of how to structure an organization in an age where you have AI.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, just to land the plane, it’s interesting ’cause sales is in this conversation, but we’re talking about operations. When it comes to AI adoption inside of a company, you have to sell it, which it means if somebody’s AI resistant, which I appreciate, us, or at least at my age and having kids and being a parent, I see a younger generation that is really AI resistant, like in my kids’ age, and I’m really interested in that issue, and I’m sure they have valid points.

And there’s, there are risks and things to worry about that are legitimate. But like in an organization you kinda have to sell it. And if we go back to everything we’ve talked about sales, you have to build a relationship with the team member. You need to create content to help them learn how to use it, so it’s not as scary, particularly like if they’re not non-technical.

And you have to g- do outbound and go talk to them and do some training. You have to kinda create a sales page style of benefits. “Hey, if you do this, this will make the part about your job that’s repetitive, that you don’t like, automated, which then frees you up to be in your genius zone and do that.”

So you have to sell it. The last thing I’ll add is that the crazy thing, and this is kinda like the expert hat, if you will, is that we’re all walking around with a black box. A- And as an education entrepreneur, we’re so close to our strengths as entrepreneurs that we don’t realize, in general, we have above average systems thinking, pattern matching, risk-taking, and to expect like everybody on the team to have that same like kinda entrepreneur personality, you have to give people grace.

And by the way, they have other strengths you don’t have, like follow-through. They’re not as ADD or whatever the issue is. They may be more technical, may be more creative, artistic, whatever. But that’s why in a perfect world, if everybody is excelling or rating with AI and figuring out the systems and the patterns in their black boxes, and that makes it into the business product- when it gets documented or whatever, it’s, that’s how you create an incredible asset.

But any final thoughts from you on AI for operations? 

Alex Panagis: No, I think the main thing I’ll think of is you really want AI to be a multiplier. And a- again, not to cite the same thing over and over, but it comes back to the Hidden Multiplier book. I think that the main hook of that book is how to get more out of your existing team or with your existing team and product.

It’s like you don’t… U- unless you’re at a point where you really need to rethink everything and you want to change up the team. But generally speaking, if you have a business that’s already working, your idea and your whole the way you’re going to roll out AI and adopt it should be centered around how do I get more out of the people.

And I think your point is right. At the end of the day, you just need to work with the people. And we also need to be more as business owners and entrepreneurs, generally, you struggle with the element of being impatient and wanting to micromanage and seeing that thing over and over of people saying I could have just done it myself.

In the time I’ve had to explain it, I might as well have just used AI.” But that, in a way, isn’t the problem ’cause you still– Isn’t the point, ’cause you still want people to own and have ownership of a certain responsibility in the company, and you want the people to have the– Again, like you say, we are very prone to getting carried away by doing the new thing, and we need to keep our time freed up.

So I like to now that we have AI as a tool, it’s really nice to be able to get an initiative off the ground, like an outbound campaign, for example, and then the ongoing work related to the outbound campaign so that I can start the new initiative and get the new initiative off the ground. I can now explain how to continue doing that to a team member, which we’re, is something that we’re doing at LifterLMS, is a great very relevant example at the moment.

But that applies to everything. You really– A- and also goes back to the whole thing, like 10, 90, t- sorry, 10/80/10, where you spend time in the beginning, and it’s applying through through the lens of operations as well, in my opinion. 

Chris Badgett: And the last thing I just wanted to say, it’s like the Navy SEALs.

They have a saying, “Slow is smooth is fast.” But if you actually look at how an elite military operator operating in a team works, that whole system is full of standard operating procedures, training. They use technology to do incredible things. So you, what you’re doing with AI as a technology is you’re creating…

You wanna try to create a Navy SEAL style organization, but in order to do that, you have to slow down- 

… 

Chris Badgett: And learn new tools, experiment, deliberate practice, human connection and all that. So you have to s- actually slow down to speed up. Absolutely.

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/gift. Go to lifterlms.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, co-founder and CEO of LifterLMS, joins Alex Panagis, founder and CEO of ScaleMath, to discuss how education entrepreneurs can utilize AI to improve learning, better understand their clients, and expand their expertise.

Chris discusses his 10/80/10 approach to AI, which explains how humans may give the initial guidance, let AI do the majority of the job, and then evaluate and improve the outcomes. He also talks about building a personal knowledge base to assist AI comprehend your background and areas of competence. Instead than only depending on AI-generated solutions, Alex emphasizes that true knowledge is derived from hands-on experience, independent thought, and concept testing.

Using AI for consumer research, seeing market possibilities, conquering impostor syndrome, and making better business decisions are some topics covered in the discussion. Chris addresses why educators should concentrate on becoming guides rather than gurus and offers insights from LifterLMS’s use of its AI agent, Maurice.

Lastly, Chris and Alex talk about why individuals spend money on online courses for purposes other than knowledge. Students desire real-world outcomes, professional advice, quicker advancement, and deep relationships. Find out how you can produce more useful online learning experiences by combining AI with human knowledge. Chris presents a paradigm around speed, certainty, insight, and risk avoidance, while Alex discusses why consumers engage in courses for proximity and shortcuts.

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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 LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show

I’m Chris Badgett, CEO and co-founder of LifterLMS. 

Alex Panagis: And I’m Alex Panaes, founder and CEO of Scale Math. 

Chris Badgett: And you’re watching the AI Advantage for Education Entrepreneurs, where we’re taking you on a tour of the five hats you need to wear to be successful. We’ll go over strategies, tactics, and stories to help you level up as an education entrepreneur across the five hats, which are becoming the expert, the entrepreneur, the teacher, the technologist, and the community builder.

Alex Panagis: I hope you enjoy. 

Chris Badgett: So Alex, today I wanted to get into it with you on the AI advantage for experts as an education entrepreneur. And by expert, subject matter expert. And the first thing that really unlocks opportunity with AI is the ability to do deep research as a subject matter expert. The way I like to think about it is never before could you have a PhD-level team of assistants that help you.

But you still need to put your own human knowledge, I call it a human knowledge dump, into the course, into the program, into the school. Otherwise, if you just use AI, you’re just creating content that anybody can make anywhere in the world, and you’re also neglecting your own personal secret sauce, personality, your own ideas, the, your own sources and things that you’ve trained on.

And the way to do that, I like to do the 10/80/10 strategy, which I learned from one of my business mentors, Dan Martell, which is basically the first 10%, the human should always do, then AI can do 80% of the heavy lifting, and then you come in as a human in the loop on the end to clean up things, make sure it sounds like you, make sure you agree with everything.

But in the research mode, we only have so much working knowledge we can store in our brain. Our memories are faulty. But we do have a lot of our own context and personality that we can put in, and I call that a human knowledge dump. So if you’re researching your topic, which never ends as a subject matter expert, AI can, come in and augment that, but you should always be adding your own human context.

I call that a human knowledge dump. So when creating a course or something like that, I recommend just dumping all of your stuff into a Google document or something like that, where maybe it’s transcripts of videos you’ve made, it’s a book you wrote, it’s podcast episodes where you were a guest on somebody’s podcast, and even other sources that aren’t your own that had a big influence on your life.

When I’ve done that in the past for courses, I usually end up with about a 100-page document. And because you’re pushing it into AI, it doesn’t have to be formatted correctly. The spelling can be off. You can use voice-to-text tools like WhisperFlow and whatnot. But just to basically get it out of your head and dump it into a format that AI can consume.

And the cool thing about a human knowledge dump, building on top of that is what I call gap analysis. So you have gaps in your knowledge, and that’s where AI can really come in. So instead of asking AI to do it all for you have it come in and just analyze what you might be missing. Or if you’re not a trained teacher, help structure all this content I have so it’s actually consumable and not overwhelming, and maybe there’s more structure to it Another tactic I like to look at is called red teaming, which is where you challenge yourself or challenge your frame of view or your point of view and be challenged so that you can defend what you do or have an open mind and admit that, hey, maybe I was a little wrong or I had a big gap.

And for example, I created a course recently which was really just for SEO to get more clients for LifterLMS, but it was– I wanted to show people as an early adopter of AI how they could create an online course with ChatGPT. And it wasn’t just here’s one prompt you put into your AI and out comes a course.

It was actually a series of about 12 lessons that with different prompts per lesson to actually end up with a published course. But the most important part of that whole course was the human knowledge dump, which took me probably about a full workday to put all my ideas about how to create an online course onto the document.

I brought in sources from other course creation experts and things that I found super valuable that influenced my thinking, and I’m using AI as a co-pilot or as an assistant. I’m not trying to step out of the frame and just have AI do all the research for me. I’m a human being with decades of experience, so I wanted to make sure I put that in, and that’s what makes it, my course, not just a course that ChatGPT made for me.

Alex Panagis: Yeah. I think it’s really common among subject matter experts, and it varies a lot by field. But they’ll see like the output of what AI can do, and they’ll look at it and think there’s a lot of people that then think, what is the even the poorest of- point of putting together a course because the, the output of like the information being on the page already there is possible to basically do in a couple of prompts or even a single prompt.

But I think that human knowledge dump point is really important because we as subject matter experts tend to underestimate and undervalue how much we’ve actually learned over years of doing things repeatedly, trying, failing, and learning from the success of those of the things that we do and also the things that didn’t work particularly well and why that might be and thinking about it.

I think it’s really difficult, and I wonder if you have any more thoughts on how do you pull that information out in a way where– ’cause one of the things that I find AI can struggle with a bit is like pulling, knowing what is important in the human knowledge dump. Because it can often strip back you and I will talk and put in, in, information into AI tools, and it will somehow think that there’s one small detail that we ha- we mentioned for a very specific reason.

It will write it off as something that’s not particularly important. But from our view of As having worked in the industry for many years, we think that like one small like tidbit of information is really difficult. Do you have any like strategies or ways that you do that? 

Chris Badgett: AI is more like a scientist than an artist.

So one of the things I like to do to put more weight or importance on certain things is to actually share upfront or during the human knowledge dump, saying something like, “Hey, this is the most important overarching framework that all this is built on, and that’s some of my unique, viewpoint, secret sauce angle.”

For example, this series we’re doing uses a framework I developed over a decade ago called the Five Hats, which there’s– You have to be a good subject matter expert, an entrepreneur, a technologist, a teacher, and a community builder. And everybody I’ve seen who was successful with LifterLMS, e- either within themselves or in their team, had developed a base level of competency across the Five Hats.

And if something isn’t working, it’s a problem in one of the hats. But people are not robots, so most people are– you know, have challenges. We’re hardcore technologists, as an example, so technology isn’t our issue as course creators. It’s gonna be some of the other issues across the hats. But by telling the AI and the human knowledge dump “Hey, this is the core idea.”

And I’ll do that on… That’s a big macro framework, but there’s things around pricing or how I think about marketing, where I kinda have master frameworks and then sub-frameworks under that. And then by giving that AI the, that framework context, and then I’ll pull in resources and other things and past episodes and content and everything.

But it knows “Hey, that’s the core structure that the human’s trying to tell me to build around.” 

Alex Panagis: Yeah. And also that you have so much extra time from the time you save structuring the information alone, that you can use that to keep going through and even if AI misses out a point, it’s like, “That’s fine,” ’cause I’ve now structured it in such a great way where I can spend more time doing the stuff that requires the real human input.

I think a lot about, lately more that, AI is really accelerating this path to expertise, and whether we wanna put that in air quotes or not, because it– in, in a way I don’t know if this is the right way to refer to it or if it makes sense, but I often think of it as the idea of borrowed understanding versus learned understanding.

You can very rapidly do things and read summaries of what a- AI is telling you about how to use a particular technology or which technology is the right choice. But– And that information largely comes from if you’re asking super technical questions about which framework to use or which particular library is really good for doing something in your code base, that it will tell you something that it has information on, and for some reason, it wants to recommend this one library.

And generally speaking, it does a really good job of what it does. So you as a human develop this, idea that, “Okay, I understand this really well, and I know that…” It’s very easy to fall into the trap of thinking like, “Yes, just from that, I now have-” come to the conclusion that this is without a doubt the best way to do it because we’re not– oftentimes we’re not challenging and looking at the sources of said information anymore because it’s just too time-consuming, and we get used to the, like, slot machine behavior that you can get into with AI of yes, it gives me a response.

I’ll go with that response and then onto the next thing. So I find what I think is like a sort of like pattern recognizing how I u-use AI is I don’t want to– Like I– If I fall into the trap where I’m doing that and I’m delegating too many of the decisions to AI, what I always try to think about is I– if it comes to an area where I have subject matter expertise, I’m not trying to offload my opinion to AI.

I’m generally trying to have– come with an opinion and then let AI challenge it, because typically there’s a reason that people turn to AI, which is because they want to know something that they don’t know or they want to do something faster or more efficiently. So basically asking the right questions around the, the particular thing that I’m trying to solve.

But then actually, in the case of implementing like a feature in a software product is let’s say there’s multiple ways to do it, and because AI can do it so quickly, I’ll do both ways and then test, against something that is no longer qualitative, that is purely like measurable. Is this actually the better way to implement it or is it not the better way to implement it?

Which comes back to the idea of the only way that you can truly learn something is through real world application, trying, failing and experimenting, which is easier in some fields than in others, of course. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah, it’s that trying and failing, that iterative approach. There’s like a meme in the AI land of “Oh I just one-shotted this course,” or sensational YouTube videos about oh, this one prompt will build you a million-dollar business or whatever, and that’s just…

The way it really works is you have to iterate, go back and forth, challenge your own assumptions, and, do that deep research. 

Alex Panagis: Yeah. I often find also the, like, painstaking, like, process of getting to an end result is that the, like, actual process of doing it is what gets the good end result.

If you can just very quickly get to the end result. But AI kind of shifts where you spend the majority of the time, so you don’t no longer spend nearly as much time on structuring or even with LifterLMS entering the content into the LMS is now really easy to do with AI, ’cause you can use the MCP, for example, and tools like WP Vibe, where you don’t even need to worry about entering the content, structuring it.

Once you do that human knowledge dump, even in an unstructured way, and you have the actual content, it’s really easy to enter it into your the final form that it will take in your LMS. So a big, in, in my view, a big part of research is also understanding your learner. I know that you have some specific thoughts.

How do you think about developing a better understanding of your learner with AI? 

Chris Badgett: The most important thing that entrepreneurs really in any business, but in education entrepreneurship should answer is not what, how, it’s who. Who are we trying to help? Who is our target mar- market? Who is our ideal customer profile or ICP?

Who is our customer avatar? And I honestly love this part of AI the best, is to do true customer avatar development, like getting clear on the pains, desires, pleasures, demographics, psychographics of your ideal perfect customer, whether that’s an actual perfect client you’ve had before or an amalgamation of your best clients, and it is okay sometimes to do a hypothetical and like a, a crime sketch artist and who is this person?

What is their pain? They buy this product. They don’t just want the features. They’re literally hiring this product for some kind of outcome, and really going deep in all that- That is what I call continuous improvement on the avatar insight. So we may think we know who our customer is, but as time goes along, you learn things.

That’s why I love podcasting. If I could only do one kind of marketing, it would be case study marketing, where I just interview customers that are successful, and I learn so much every time I do that. I did four of those last week, and I’ve been doing this for 12 years, and I learn even more. But the cool thing with AI is you can do real customer analysis.

So I might do that interview with a s- successful customer that built a million-plus business teaching some niche I have never heard of, and then I can just send my AI out on the internet and say, “Oh, go tell me more about this person.” And they’ll find stuff. They’ll look at their LinkedIn, their website, other podcasts and content that person has created, and then you can go deeper.

“Hey, AI, find more people like that. What do they all have in common? What are the patterns and again, this is where we’re human knowledge dumping in. We’re saying things like, “I notice this pattern.” For example, in our customer avatar, there’s three things I’ve identified. One is that the people that are successful take forward and perfect action, which is more of a psychographic way of thinking or being in the world, whereas the perfectionists fail or they get stuck, or they never launch.

Another one is that they’ve already made money in their expertise. They’re not just chasing an opportunity or a business opportunity that they heard was hot or trending. Another one is that because our solution is technical, they have some technical foundation already. Like in our case, at least two years experience with WordPress You have those three things.

So I tell the AI that, but then I’m like why is this guy who teaches people how to t-tie animal balloons making $300,000 a year with this thing that’s there’s only 2,000 of these balloon artists in the world?” So it’ll go through my framework, and then it’ll look at the balloon artist entertainer niche, and I learn so much.

So that’s real customer analysis. The other thing you can do is we all, if you’re in business, probably have competitors, so you can analyze your competitors’ top customers and case studies. And I do something counterintuitive as a human, where I often sometimes will interview somebody using a competitor tool, and I’m not trying to steal the customer.

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Chris Badgett: I’m actually just trying to learn, what are they doing? Is there anything I could apply to this community that I have, and so on. But AI can do things that would take a human weeks or months. So you can send out an AI to analyze all of the public reviews on s- review sites, or maybe they, the there’s book reviews or Amazon reviews or Trustpilot reviews, whatever it is, and what would take a human weeks you can do in five minutes.

And that’s an area where one-shotting is helpful. You can just do some quick competitive analysis, and again, you can find gaps too. “Oh they have this one thing I don’t have,” and you never would’ve found that if you didn’t go digging. And maybe you never dig- dug before because you didn’t have the time, but with AI, you can just send that out, and that’s a great use of AI.

The other thing is for sales, prospect analysis. So for example, like on our website, we have Something like 30 case studies published, and, you can feed that into the AI or even just one in a particular niche or use case and be like, “Hey, find me 20 or 100 or 200 more people like this.” Traditional prospecting like that would require a lot of human work, but you can get to know your market and find your market faster than ever with AI, and I find that super helpful.

S- so recently within the past couple years, we developed our own AI agent at our company, which is not a simple ChatGPT shared thing or Claude. It’s an agent which plugs into multiple sources. We named our agent Maurice, which is named after Maurice in the Steve Miller Band song called “The Joker.”

But Maurice can connect to– I can feed so much data into Maurice, not just by copying and pasting, but actually through APIs and MCPs, which are just technical ways of saying you don’t have to copy and paste. You can just plug Maurice into every single customer communication you’ve ever had in your help desk software.

Maurice is plugged into our Google Analytics. Maurice is plugged into our store analytics. Maurice is plugged into our website and instantly has all of our current content. There’s– Maurice is plugged into our accounting and billing systems. Maurice is plugged into other data sources or exports from tools we use in business So giving an AI agent, I may be using this term incorrectly, but a data lake, like so much information that would be completely overwhelming to me as a human is a small job for AI.

And by doing that, I could analyze our– all this data from all these sources from over a decade of business, and then find insights that I didn’t realize. For example, recently I realized that there is a lot of legal and court system-related education platforms that were built with the tool. I had seen some come up f- over the years, but I started realizing when it was cross-referencing, oh, these type of customers, spend way above average of your average customer, and you’re not actually marketing enough to this legal court system, public safety use case.

I’m like, “All right.” So that’s, that’s– I’m getting to know my customer ’cause the irony of having an ideal customer profile is that in all businesses, you tend to get like a collection of avatars. You’re lucky if you just have one, but at least where a lot of people end up oh sometimes it’s this type of person, sometimes it’s that type of person.

So the AI just really helps us identify all our use cases within the ideal customer profile 

Alex Panagis: I think the beautiful silver lining of AI, which is a bit poetic because it’s also one of the things that is somewhat concerning, which is that people tend– A lot of people tend to take the answers that they get at face value.

But the beautiful thing about it as well is that AI more so than any human, which again, there’s so many psychological reasons for this, but if you’d speak to anybody about a particular topic, there’s a reason that they’re going to have a bias towards something. So when companies are talking about their own pain points, they will miss something that an outside consultant typically would be like, “Yeah I think you should focus a lot more on that one thing that you’re dismissing and you found a reason where you can justify why it’s a good idea to dismiss it.”

Whereas when you’re talking to AI, also as a per- the person using AI, you’re not thinking that the response you’re getting is based on anything other than the data that it has access to. And yes, sometimes it will– maybe doesn’t have enough context or doesn’t have enough data, but by and large, it’s not for any other reason, be it like a bad experience with a competitor or previously knowing somebody that worked at a company that it’s going to say that this solution is better than another solution because it’s completely unemotional, at least for the time being.

One would hope that’s the case. So I think the core thing that you’re– takeaway that I have from what you’re saying is that these first-hand customer conversations, experiments, mistakes, and original data will only become more valuable. And the thing that I like in the lens of– I look at this through the lens of is if everybody uses the same underlying models, and obviously we have our like– at LifterLMS, we have Maurice, which has essentially is a company brain and has access to more stuff, which makes it different.

But if every company, let’s say every competitor to LifterLMS had a similar system, the ultimate thing that becomes the most important thing is what are the users of that system doing with it that is somehow better than the users of the system in another organization. So how can you, as an educator, use the system better, get better output from it, and be a better human judge of the work that it’s producing so that you can– as an educator, you can help people get better results, or as a consultant, you can help advise more clients at a bigger scale more efficiently and also offer services at a lower cost.

I think a big aspect that people don’t think about is that because AI makes a lot of work faster, the expectation largely is that people are able to do more, which some businesses would look at as a negative thing. But from my operational philosophy behind it is if we can pass, even if it’s just some percentage of our savings of doing certain work down to our clients and make it more cost-effective and more affordable because we’re also using AI, which yes, in theory they could use themselves, but they still trust us to use it, then I think that’s something that is actually, should be seen as a way to earn even more trust.

I have a question which just comes to mind, like to turn it over to you is, do you think that this like original thinking will always be necessary? If you’re, let’s say if you’re a course creator that’s setting up their LMS, do you think that the, having like a fundamental understanding of how your LMS works is important or do you think with or will always be important with AI now just, taking a lot of that work off of your plate?

And then the second follow-up is like, is when you are interviewing people, be it an employee or you’re thinking of buying something from someone, specia-specifically an informational product how do you verify that person actually has the human judgment and isn’t just parroting AI and, yeah, I’ll let you take it away, but I have my thoughts on that as well.

Chris Badgett: I thought it was really funny. I’m 48 years old. When I went to college I, I actually have a minor in philosophy and I signed up for a class called Critical Thinking and I thought to myself, “Why didn’t they start teaching this in elementary school?” So you don’t want to just outsource everything to AI.

And to your question about understanding how an LMS works or understanding your customer, it’s in my experience for example since I’ve worked with a lot of engineers and developers, if I’m just like CEO business guy and I don’t really understand some fundamental development principles or techs, how the tech stack works, even if I can’t write a line of code, I still need to develop my own human-based knowledge so that I can communicate effectively, ask questions effectively.

In the human case like make sure I’m appreciating the employee or team member or my customer, my client because I have a stronger understanding. If I start outsourcing everything to AI I don’t want to actually lose intelligence. I wanna get smarter- 

… 

Chris Badgett: And faster because I’m using AI. So that’s like a critical thing.

And I think one of the most important questions, and I’ll throw it back to you is when you find a extreme efficiency gain, like what do you do with that extra time? So like in economics that’s called like a producer surplus, I believe. And some people will just be like, “Cool, I’m gonna take the rest of the day off,” which is fine if you’re tired, you’re burnt out, that’s great.

You should definitely do that. But you should also give back and make your business or your team more powerful. So for example, if somebody hasn’t done deep customer research and you find some efficiency gain with AI, use that time to now get to know the who better, your customer, your client, your student, and do that.

‘Cause when I ro- rock up to an AI tool, I’m not just trying to get work done, I’m also trying to get smarter myself. But what would you do with when you get a time gain? How do you think about that? We’re all entrepreneur workaholics a little bit, so but in a healthy way, like what do you do with that time?

Alex Panagis: I think the– Like I see it a lot and like this comes, and a whole other question comes out of it, but when AI makes us more efficient, a lot of this stuff is like you’re processing more information as a human being than you ever have been before, in a work context at least with what we do. So like whether that’s writing, so you if you’re using AI as do- producing content with AI, so AI assistant content, be it like more technical stuff which is becoming easier and easier to offload to AI, or stuff where you have your qualitative input and then you use AI for structure.

You’re reviewing more and more than you ever have. So like the thing I find more often is you’re basically, AI is this like junior employee or not even junior because it’s very good at certain things. But you’re reviewing a massive amount of essentially infinite work based on how much you’re prompting or how you’re automating what you’re doing with AI, and you need now better ways to review that work, which is very mentally taxing.

But I, and the way I try to think about it, and I think we think about it as a team in general as well, is you should look at the, like work that you get from AI in the same way that you get work from another team member and review it. And a lot of like my question that comes out of this is how do you– Like some people have the view that reviewing work from AI takes really long, and it takes just as much time as if they did it from scratch, which I think is a misconception on some of the like what we’re seeing now when people are starting to adopt AI, that they’re still getting used to it.

‘Cause they think, yeah, like AI has written this like 10,000-word article, but if I want to review it, I’m gonna spend more time than if I just, mentally sit down and do a deep focus work and write, 1,000, 2,000 words at a time in each session because it’s so mu- mentally taxing to review the stuff that AI has generated.

Chris Badgett: I find it the most mentally taxing when whoever’s bringing that to me did not do a human knowledge dump. So when I– If I look at it like, “Oh I could have just asked ChatGPT that,” it’s really obvious once you get into it what’s crafted versus just handed over. And we’ve seen this before if you’re a senior person at a company in whatever your role, and you’re working with other people, you’re– you have this idea, which is true a lot of the time “I could have just done that myself a lot faster.”

But the point is, we’re building an organization, and you’re trying– you’re also helping your team improve, and that’s important. And it takes time to teach and train, and humans sometimes need repetition, and a lot of things are learning opportunities. So if I got AI slop from a team member that was an obvious copy-paste from ChatGPT, that’s– I’m gonna use that as a learning opportunity.

But if it happens a third time after, I might– we might have an issue.

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Alex Panagis: Yeah, I think about it. I think the, like what it shifts and w- as business owners it’s easier for us to do perhaps than other people, but we like try to think more in systems because we like the idea that something can become systemized or become systematic, or the process of doing it becomes more clear-cut versus generally speaking, people have been used to working without AI, don’t like the idea that this process that required a lot of their involvement, like gradually requires less and less of their involvement.

But I think like we share the same mindset where we don’t– That like our goal then is have those people do more of the work that they enjoy doing as a result, as opposed to make them enjoy work less because now they have time to like focus on the details that they probably wouldn’t have had like time to even think about before because they were jumping from one task to the other and they like had to organize and plan what work to do and also keep like their project management system up to date, all of that, which is like like the administrative side.

Like that burden comes off as much as possible with AI, I think. So all that time can go back into like pouring your heart into making each like thing where you are putting your human input or the time into doing it much better than it would’ve been because you’re previously like stressed “Okay, I need to finish this by this time,” and then jump right over to the next thing.

So we’ve talked about how to more effectively and efficiently research and develop customer avatars, which I think is a really big part of succeeding as an expert and education entrepreneur. Take me through your views on like the personal development element of being successful, so like the inner work that needs to be done around being a subject matter expert.

Chris Badgett: So this is the most counterintuitive and surprising part of AI coming into all of our lives, which is using it for personal development, meaning using AI as a psychologist for yourself, a relationship coach, a leadership coach you know, getting over your own issues, whatever they are. And full like medical disclaimer, like if you have a serious issue, you should work with a trained professional.

But the interesting thing is it could be something that you’re just embarrassed to even ask, or you don’t wanna spend however many hundreds or thousands of dollars to go to a professional, or you don’t have the time, or you don’t have the access The AI can actually help you a lot, and it doesn’t neces- it’s a robot.

Know what you’re getting into. Also realize that there are, privacy issues, and sometimes the model apparently takes the information, anonymizes it, and feeds it back to the data set underneath or whatever. So you should always be careful with what you share or sensitive information.

But I heard my friend and mentor Dan Martell say once that entrepreneurship is the highest form of personal development, ’cause literally to do these things that we do you really have to become the best version of yourself, and that’s like its own project. So there’s three projects. There’s the actual business that you– or the, the product you make like a course or membership if you’re an education entrepreneur.

Then there’s the business product, like building systems, a team, a business entity, and growing and all that. And then there’s you, the individual. So this personal development part, I’m not the same person when I went into my business for myself the first time 15 years ago But in our niche for education entrepreneurs, there’s several things.

Not only in my customer avatar development do I study the great success stories, I spend just as much time looking at the people who their project didn’t work out, it didn’t launch. Maybe they bought our software for a year, never to return. I’m just as interested in figuring out what went wrong there.

Is there anything we can improve? Can I understand my market better? And I found certain things that are common in projects that don’t work out. And one- the most common thing of all of them is some form of imposter syndrome, which everybody has, myself included. It’s just an issue of whether you can get over it or not.

For example, we’re in a podcast studio. We’re going on the record. We have bright lights shining on us . And you’re, you go on stage, if you will, even if it’s a digital stage, wherever. Your high school friends, if you talk about your new startup education company, and y- you’re, you feel fear to put that on Facebook because it’s– maybe those people thought you were, be something else or maybe you’ve changed a lot over the years and, there’s this whole imposter thing, fear of failure, fear of success even, fear of being judged.

The number one fear in the world is public speaking, and that’s because you are literally holding up your hand, stepping on s- a physical or virtual stage, inviting the world to judge you. And that is uncomfortable, even for most people, except for psychopaths, I would say. But if you’re using AI, and you’re honest and open about your nervousness, your fear.

One thing you could ask an AI, particularly if you’ve been working with it for a while, and it has some kind of memory and context. Let’s say you’re getting ready to do your first video lesson, or you’re getting ready to do some kind of speech on a stage to try to generate clients, or you’re starting a podcast up, a podcast or YouTube channel You can just be honest to the AI a-about like, “Hey, I’m feeling pretty nervous.

I’m feeling like I’m not good enough, or that I’m gonna be judged. What would you say? Can you help me?” A-and it’ll do things like… i- AI can be a little bit sycophantic, meaning it will always praise you, every, all your ideas are good. I actually train my AIs not to do that, just when I’m trying to do strategy in business.

I don’t want it, I want it to tell me what’s wrong. I want it to red team me and stuff like that. But when it comes to personal development, the person that is the most negative to another person, in most cases, is ourselves. We’re very hard on ourselves. And if you get into a dialogue with AI in the privacy of your car or home alone or in your office, you can, start doing some inner work, some shadow work, which can be really powerful.

And, if I was… Let’s say I bought LifterLMS as a aspiring course creator, and I get an email that in one week my annual software subscription’s gonna renew, and there, there is no website, there’s no course made. And I’m like, “There’s a decision point there. Yeah, I s- I’m still in love with the idea, but I’m actually getting in my own way.

I’m… This is a failure to launch problem.” I might get into a dialogue with my AI “Hey, can you coach me through how to get through this? I still wanna do this. Something is blocking me.” And you might be surprised what you find out And then just a pro tip there, like I mentioned with privacy and everything, I like to sandbox personal development stuff.

Even the other day, I had some grocery store sushi, and the next day my stomach hurt really bad, and I thought I was dying or whatever. I was like, “Oh my God, something is really wrong here.” And I went to the AI. Again, this is like I’m not intending to give medical advice, so definitely consult a professional medical- a real medical doctor.

But I’m like, “Hey, these are my symptoms. This is what’s going on. This is how long this is lasting. I’m getting ready to fly to Philadelphia. I got a guy flying from the UK. I do not wanna miss this. What’s going on here?” And is… And there, it starts doing the kind of doctor diagnosis steps. Now that’s like physical health.

It’s like, “Yeah, you’re fine. You just don’t eat grocery store sushi from that place again, and it’s gonna take this long. If you notice this the next day, you’re fine.” And I’m fine. But you can do that with your inner issues. But to sandbox that environment, and what I mean by sandbox is if you have a business brain where you do all this stuff, and if you start growing and get team members and they’re sharing access and context, I like to use a completely different AI tool or a different account of the same tool I use that’s separated from the business so a team member doesn’t talk to AI, and AI says, “Hey, maybe you should check on Chris.

He’s having this issue from the grocery store sushi,” or whatever. Segment it out. And that can… When you do sandbox it, you actually get a little more confidence that you can be open and honest, and maybe you might say stuff that you wouldn’t say to a doctor or psychologist and explore stuff and, relationships, if you’re having trouble with a client or a student or a team member.

It’s amazing As a, a social science guy myself, one of my favorite things, it’s a nerdy anthropology thing called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which just means that we don’t perceive the world as it is. We perceive it as we are, and we perceive reality through the cultural lens of language.

Which just means is all of us humans are walking around in general thinking that everybody is like us, but we’re not. We’re all like super unique and different and oh, like maybe this issue over here, this client has a sprinkle of narcissism and I’m actually not that bad, or I’m being gaslit about this or that.

And then you start getting into areas you may not be an expert in, but oh AI, what is gaslighting? Or I have this c- coaching client who’s just not following through and, oh, this person, has this personality type likely, but you have this personality type and that creates friction.

Here’s how to find common ground between those types of people, which is really weird when you think about it ’cause you’re just talking to a robot that read every personal development book, the s- the medical DSM manual, all the psychology books or whatever. But it can be really powerful. And like one of the things, just a pro tip story from my life, I used to be a non-technologist.

I lived in Alaska. I was a professional sled dog tour guide for a decade, and I was a guide. I know what it feels like to be a guide, to take people into the wilderness who are scared or unsure, and I’m protecting their safety while also helping them grow and stuff like that and experience cool things.

But when you teach something online, there’s an identity shift. This is a personal development thing, like one of the most empowerful ones, which is moving from the idea that you don’t have to be the guru. I’m not the best mountain climber in the world or the best sled dog musher in the world, and I’m not even the best guide in the world.

But if I give my pr- myself permission to be a guide and go into uncertainty and help bring people along the way, whether that’s team members, clients, students- I can be a guide. I don’t have to have all the answers, and I can be honest when I don’t know and I have to circle back. But I’m a good problem solver.

This goes back to critical thinking skills. So that identity shift for myself, oh, you don’t have to be in the best in the world to teach something, but if you’re a really good guide, that’s just as good. And by the way, there’s only one you, and you are unique. And so for example, if I was working on personal development myself and hiring a coach, I don’t necessarily wanna be coached by Tony Robbins, who also coaches Bill Clinton and world leaders.

I might just want somebody who’s more like me that’s maybe 10 steps ahead, five years ahead. That’d be a better coach for me. And that person I would hire to be my guide, if you will 

Alex Panagis: Yeah. Going back to one of the earlier things that you said about imposter syndrome, if it’s any consolation for those of us that have imposter syndrome I think I ha- find a connection between people who have strong imposter syndrome and tend to be the better users of AI be- and get the most out of it, because they aren’t the type of people who, like, when they ask it for, tax advice or health advice we can discern, okay, I can use this information for what it is, which is information from AI.

It’s obviously not a medical professional, and I know that if I ask it the right questions, I can get information out of it. But I still am not by any means, a tax expert, which I find e- even goes back to what we were talking about earlier, which is that you can develop a really solid understanding of something so that, on our team, we can communicate better with Brian ’cause we’re understanding the technical side of things more than if we haven’t dug into the implementation behind something that he built, for example.

And in the case of your own business, there’s so many ways where you can use it, where as long as you accept that, for ultimate things where the stakes are really high, you probably still should go to a, a professional that’s, has experience in the industry. You can come to the professional with far better questions.

Previously, we would just have to take what lawyers would tell us at face value, but now we can, if we know how to use the tools well, and again, accept that we aren’t, like, becoming perfect lawyers just ’cause we know how to use AI really well, which I think we, everyone in this room does, know that they’re not going to become a lawyer just ’cause they know how to use AI.

We can then go to the experts with the, the perfect set of quer- hopefully a really good set of questions that leads to a much better outcome than if we didn’t ask those questions because it didn’t shine a light on the things that they actually should have known about in order to give us the best help possible.

I’m curious on the guide versus guru identity shift that you mentioned, if the expert, in the case of online courses, to bring it back to what LifterLMS does, if the expert is no longer, let’s say, just responsible for delivering all of the information, do you find as well that teaching someone how to apply the information is increasingly becoming more important, and therefore, the line between coach- coaching and courses is blending a bit more?

Chris Badgett: I think so. Information, in my view, has always wanted to be free So what are people actually buying? And if information has never been easier to access through AI as example, first it was the internet, then there’s YouTube. It’s the same story we’ve seen before. Like, why would I buy your course if I can find everything on YouTube?

There’s a billion videos on YouTube of varying quality, good luck. And it’s not, it may not be structured in a way that fits with your unique frameworks that you’ve developed to help people. So people aren’t actually buying information. Sometimes they are. Like, there’s some course creation frameworks like teach a process, like step-by-step.

There’s a, there’s others like behavior change, like I’m gonna help you lose weight or quit smoking or find the love of your life. Then there’s another type called a resource course, which is really dangerous, where you just dump in like everything and build a huge library of information that overwhelms your learners, which I don’t recommend.

But people aren’t just buying the steps or the recipes for behavior change or the checklists or the tools to help them, make sure they retain the information through quizzes or assignments and things. They’re buying a transformation, and humans aren’t robots, and one of the biggest opportunities for subject matter experts out there Is people are starved for human connection, and what they really want is a guide, not a guru.

In many ways, the information is already the guru. The YouTube influencers or social media influencers, the famous books in the space. You may have read all the stuff in whatever niche you’re trying to achieve, but you actually need a guide. That’s great, but why is this not working for me?

So that’s where coaching starts coming in and that human connection that is not just … I think the name information products that are solely just information, that is not dead, but it’s declining in value. But human fidelity or connection human to human, where humans can adapt to each other, different personalities, different challenges, even though they might all be, like, pretty close to the same customer avatar, different people will have different challenges, or they’ll be going through a life event that makes it harder to implement.

Or they may have a different personality type where your teaching method doesn’t quite fit perfectly and they need a little alternative path or different method. So they’re not just buying information, they’re buying access to you, the expert. 

Alex Panagis: Yeah. I think I also find, at least in the spaces that I look at the online course creators most in, is like you’ll find the thing that typically makes them most successful is they sell the ability to achieve said results and who they’ve done that for in the past more so than yeah, this is where all the information is.

In a way, like I, the w- I distill this down to there’s two main things, which is shortcuts. People want to buy a course ’cause they wanna learn the thing faster and from somebody that has achieved the result before. But then also the proximity is the main other thing, which is both the proximity to the person who’s achieved the results and in some cases with cohorts or with group coaching is other people all trying to also achieve that result, which I think we’re seeing like a m- is on the rise with LifterLMS and our customer base for sure.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And we’re gonna do another segment in this series on community, but they’re also buying access to other people like themselves so they don’t feel so alone in the world, and we’ll go deeper on that in another day. But, I’m a frameworks guy, so as soon as I hear a framework, I install it in my little framework library in my head, and people pay for

This I learned from a guy named Dev Basu- Is that people pay for four things: speed, certainty, insight, and the fourth one’s a little funny, which is to stay out of jail. So just to start with the funny one you hire your accountant not just to do your taxes, but to keep you out of jail. A shortcut, like you mentioned, is a speed thing.

Certainty is really answering the question, will this work for me? So that’s why we have things like guarantees and proven processes and all these case studies and reviews where we’re trying to establish that it works. And then insight is something that information can provide, but when you put the human element in you can adapt and make sure– The information will fall short sometimes.

That’s why nobo- as students in the physical world, everybody gets the same information, but everybody does not get the same score on the exam. And that’s that opportunity there as a guide to, help your winners excel even further help everybody else get as high up as they, as possible.

And that’s one of the challenges in the old world of the school system is we tend to teach to the average, which leaves behind the people who are doing really well and the people that are really struggling at the bottom. But if you’re accelerating as a course creator, coach, education entrepreneur, you can put your human element with some of that freed up time in to help everybody move up and, be more adaptive and teach to the individual.

Alex Panagis: Nice.

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/gift. Go to lifterlms.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode

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Kurt Von Ahnen describes how, through a project with Prestige Family Office University (PF University), he turned his WordPress firm, Mañana No Más, from a website-building service into a business consultancy and e-learning partner. In this episode, Kurt describes how, without the need for any new programming, he assisted in creating a membership-based online learning platform utilizing LifterLMS, FluentCRM Pro, Fluent Forms Pro, Bunny.net, and Presto Player.

For mentors, advisors, and ambassadors, the platform provides a distinct, member-only training site in addition to several schools, courses, and certifications. He also describes how the customer created hundreds of training films using AI technologies like ElevenLabs and HeyGen to transform existing knowledge and instructional content. Kurt talks on the significance of comprehending clients’ business objectives, offering strategic counsel, and developing into a long-term business partner as opposed to just supplying a website and moving on.

Kurt also offers insightful advice on how to build a profitable WordPress agency, such as how to employ a consultative sales approach, spot chances to add more services, price projects according to value rather than just time, and generate recurring income from hosting, upkeep, and continuing support. He discusses his preference for prepaid projects, how customers may acquire momentum by introducing a minimal viable product (MVP), and why agencies should concentrate on providing outcomes rather than waiting for everything to be flawless.

Kurt concludes by discussing how to overcome challenging business times, maintain consistency in marketing and content production, select customers who share your beliefs, and establish financial security so you can safely decline contracts that aren’t a good fit. He also discusses his goal of starting an apprenticeship program to assist young people in creating profitable WordPress businesses and transferring their expertise to the following generation.

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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 Badgett. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, 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 good friend and colleague, Kurt VonAhnen. He’s back on the show. Kurt does some work at LifterLMS. You’ve seen him around. He also runs an agency called Mañana No Más. Today, we’re gonna get into one of Kurt’s recent client projects called pfuniversity.org.

Go check that out. That stands for Prestige Family Office University. But first, Kurt, welcome back on the show. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: Chris, man, I- it’s always so much fun. We talk all the time, but it’s really fun when we get to do a show together. So I’m glad to be here. This is cool 

Chris Badgett: Let’s just lay the groundwork for people who don’t know.

What is a family office? G- tell us about the niche. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: I’ll be honest, I didn’t know much about the niche myself. I got the job because I’m an e-learning expert, right? And so this is one of those things that just kinda falls into our net, right? And- and we fleshed it out. And I gotta tell you, these customers blew me out of the water, ’cause it’s a couple of older gentlemen.

There’s a team now, but when it started, it was a couple of older gentlemen, trying out this e-learning thing, and they got heavily involved with using leveraging AI to make a lot of stuff, which was super interesting, ’cause like I said, they’re older gentlemen. And we started talking about family office management.

For the first two meetings, Chris, I barely even understood what family office management was. Like, and it’s weird, because I didn’t have, I didn’t have an entitled upbringing. I- I came up, I hate to say poor, we weren’t a family of means. And so this whole concept of family office management is like family is a business.

And typically, not all the time, but typically the patriarch of the family is the CEO of the business, and then that family has, multiple assets. Maybe different companies. Maybe it’s like they own a landscaping business, a distribution company, and they’ve got investments in stocks and bonds and things.

They’ve- they’ve got wealth acquired somehow, and that has to be managed, and that’s what this family office management thing is about. It’s about teaching everybody in the family how to run the family like the business, and- and secure the wealth for future generations, and not just a flash in the pan and it’s gone.

It’s kinda when you watch the movies and- and you’ll see someone talk about, “Oh, that’s new money,” right? “That’s new money. That’s old money.” That’s, yeah. I- I always think of this, this family office management thing to me is “Oh, that’s old money.” These people know how to manage their wealth, and they know how to- to protect themselves.

But I think kind of the purpose of the website was really to expand that concept and maybe introduce new money into this kind of circle of- of managing income and wealth and- and assets. 

Chris Badgett: So when it comes to things like investing and wealth preservation, that’s an area, or finance, personal finance, family finance, these are areas that, really require a lot of education, especially if you’re gonna try to pass things down generation after generation.

People need to learn how to manage things. So what did you build at Mañana No Más for pfuniversity.org? What does the site do? 

Kurt Von Ahnen: I think this is the part that other people might hear and go, “Oh that’s different.” I pride myself on problem-solving and being the professional in the room, and the needs assessment side, right?

Really listening to the client and figuring out, what are the root things that we’re trying to address on this project? And so we determined pretty quickly that, yeah it’s an e-learning project, right? So it’s e-learning. It’s definitely membership based, and they kept referring to what you and I would call a course track, they call a school.

They have the School of Family Office Management, the School of Stewardship, the School of… And th- that’s a course track with a certain number of courses. And so I was like, okay, so we’re gonna need course tracks. We’re gonna need courses. We’re gonna need membership. We’re gonna need, obviously, certifications and things like that.

Then we developed further and I quickly realized they’re gonna need a way, like you said, financial stuff usually requires additional training, so we’re building up mentors, advisors, ambassadors for this program. And so there’s actually a hidden training portal in this website that deals with people that wanna come into the group and be mentors, advisors, and ambassadors for other people wanting to get into family office management.

So it’s a two-layered site. There’s a front end of the site, and there’s more like a, a hidden portal that’s it requires a different membership to see that content to become a mentor or an advisor. So I think that’s pretty cool. The other thing that we knew was that we wanted a way to manage the email list, the email blasts, and some automations.

We wanted to do that within the website, so I knew that was gonna add the CRM, the form tool and go with our normal tech stack there I think to answer your question in a way that I think surprises other people when I say this, Chris, I didn’t custom develop anything. Everything in this website is, it’s out of the box, man.

It’s LifterLMS out of the box. It’s FluentCRM Pro out of the box. It’s Fluent Form Pro out of the box. W- we used the LifterLMS native payment gateway. We didn’t do any fancy shopping carts or automations in that way. And to do the videos, we- they have a ton of video. They’ve got over 30 courses.

Each course has multiple lessons. Each lesson has four videos. So there’s a ton of content. And so there’s like 840 videos or 850 videos or something like that in this website, just so far. I know they plan on expanding. So we did Bunny.net and Presto Player for that, and Presto Player runs that media hub in the site.

And when I turn this back to the client for any kind of, management or content management, it makes it really easy for them to not have to jump between sites to do stuff. 

Chris Badgett: And you mentioned something interesting that we can just park on for a second, which is these older gentlemen are, like, pretty heavy into AI.

And you mentioned, I think, that they were using 11 Labs to help with content generation. Tell us what these folks have been up to, and for those that haven’t heard of 11 Labs or whatever what are they doing? 

Kurt Von Ahnen: So let’s take the two gentlemen in, in question. And I’ll call them by name, Dan and Tom.

Dan and Tom. Dan and George. George, I love George to death. He’s like the CEO. And then Dan and myself, we make up the executive committee of this project now. And when I first started working with them, I thought George was in his 80s. For some reason, I had it in my mind that he was 84 or 86 years old.

Turns out he’s 92, and he is prolific in his content. Back when like– So you’re familiar with Myers-Briggs and DiSC and all those kinds of things. Before that stuff was released, he used a book written in the ’30s to make kind of his own kind of personality training traits training system, but it was before DiSC was out.

So he wrote a book on that, and he has a lot of content on that, and he’s just prolific in the content and the wisdom that he generates. So he’s basically generated most of the content in the website. And then Dan has taken that content, and he’s leveraged like Eleven Labs, HeyGen, things like that to create these avatars that actually deliver the training.

And in some respects, we would say maybe the videos are bland. Not just being, I’m not crit- I’m not being critical, right? I’m just saying it’s on purpose. They’re done very well, right? It’s financial training. You’ve got a plain background, a talking head, gives everything, gives all the information through a series of four videos for each lesson, and then each lesson also has the written version of it.

So it’s if you wanna read or study, if you prefer to learn that way or keep notes, we use the Lifter Elements, LMS Notes package for that, right? So you can copy and paste notes, add to notes, do whatever you want in your own account, and it’s all right there. I gotta tell you, I was blown away that they used AI at such a high level to make the content, but it goes deeper than that because this is one of my first clients where George will say, “Hey, I had a conversation with ChatGPT today, and I think it’s important I share this with you.”

And I think this is something agencies need to get ready for. The amount of content that comes to me for review, for like textual review, like I’m s- I’m supposed to familiarize myself with like what they’re doing now, right? The amount of content generated by AI that gets forwarded to me to like review is immense.

So I think as agencies, when we’re looking at working with people going forward, we should be like, “Hey, what are you using for ideation? What are you using like– What, what’s gonna be my role in how you want me to audit what you’re generating in AI?” ‘Cause there’s a big difference between a guy like writing a few bullet points on a napkin and then making a Word doc and sending you a sheet versus AI sending you 19 pages of a conversation.

Chris Badgett: Tell us more about the relationship as a agency with Prestige Family Office University i- in terms of a lot of agencies are like, “Yeah, I’ll build a website for you.” And really good agencies, what happens is y- like you said, you do the needs assessment, you listen. Oh, they don’t just need a website, they need these automations, these, you know, marketing or sales motions.

They need help just with their own organization internally and all these things. It, this doesn’t seem like a $500 website, and it sounds like you’re also a partner. You’re a trusted advisor and partner. You’re not just delivering a website, a great website, and being, “Thanks so much.

I’ll see you guys later.” So what is … Tell us more about the relationship with this client. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: Chris, I think I gotta give you credit for this again. You hit me with this a few years ago. We had done a case study, you and I, before on a … Inner Treasure Hunt was one of the projects we did a case study on.

And you pointed out then, you were like, “You’re not really just making the website. Y- you’ve become this working advisory consultan- consultative partner.” And in reviewing the work that Mañana Nomás has done over the years, ’cause I think we’re at 19 years now of being an agency, most of our clients are, we serve a consultative role.

In fact, when I introduce myself to people at the local entrepreneurial thing, I don’t say, “Oh, I own a WordPress agency.” That doesn’t even come out of my face. What comes out of my face is, “We’re a local business consultant, and a lot of times the product we deliver ends up being a website.” And it’s … ‘Cause n- not every consultation ends in a website. Sometimes it ends in I think you need to hire a salesperson first, or maybe you need to work on some internal training. Maybe you need to go get certified. Maybe you need to form an affiliation with the BNI group to get more leads or

There’s always something, right? But I really consider the work that we’ve done to be more from a business consultative and leadership perspective, and then the knowledge of everything we do with the web, with the internet, that just comes into that whole portfolio picture and it allows us to deliver, I think, at a higher level.

I use a, a contractor model as an agency. So I’m the face and the communication with the client for the agency, and then a lot of the work I end up doing myself. Admittedly, I should pawn it off to somebody, but I end up doing a lot of stuff myself. And then there’s times where we bring contractors in, especially on repetitive iterative type stuff.

If you’ve got 850 videos to put into a website, you put that to a process and you go, “Okay, here’s the process. I’m gonna hire you. Here’s the bunny.net, here’s the, you know, here’s the Presto player, here’s the list of courses, here’s the videos. They’re all segmented in the bunny.net account. I just need you to place all these videos into all these lessons.”

And then that frees me up to do what I think the real value of Manana No Mas is, which is run the consultative meetings, the update meetings, keep everybody informed, and then obviously keep selling and promoting the work that we do at Manana No Mas. In this particular instance, we used the good, better, best pricing strategy on the proposal, something that you’ve, you know, advocated for a long time, and pretty quickly they said, “This best option sounds good to us.”

And I was like, “Okay, you realize I put wish list in the proposal? I didn’t expect you to say yes to everything.” And they said, “No, we’re good. We’ll just say yes to everything.” And I was like, “Okay.” And so that already put us in, like you said, better than a $500 website. This is a pretty good package.

But then working with them, they said, “We really like working with you. You seem to have, good insight, good advice. You’ve really…” They were looking at some other things. They were looking at like maybe doing an AI course. And I’d said I don’t think I would do an AI course for this program.”

And they said, “But everyone wants to use AI and are all interested in AI.” And I said I get that, but at the rate that AI is changing, do you wanna be responsible to be up to date on AI training for people using AI and running this family office management thing tied to their family’s wealth? I don’t think I’d wanna, I don’t think I’d wanna put that kind of liability on myself.”

And they were like, “That’s really in- That that was really insightful. Thanks for saving us that time, energy and embarrassment.” That’s just one example, but so they said, “We want you to be on the advisory committee.” I said, “Okay.” Then they said, “We’d like it if you’d be on our board.” And I was like “Is this like a free thing?”

And they said no, it’s a paid board position.” I said, “Okay. Hey, that’s great. This is awesome.” And I gotta tell you, I felt a little out of place ’cause I’m not a college professor, I’m not in these roles, but I have working, world knowledge, right? So they wanted that. And then more recently they just said, as the two founders George and Dan were like, “We’re gonna form an executive committee, and we just want it to be the three of us.

We’re gonna meet once a week, and we wanna make decisions on the board, the advisory committee, the mentors, the people we bring on as salespeople, as ambassadors to the program. We want your help to build those programs, to build those processes, and to really vet the people that we allow into those circles.”

And it’s been a really great learning experience for me but it’s also it’s humbling, Chris, ’cause you don’t… Sometimes you’d say to yourself, “I don’t have the skill,” or, “I don’t have the, I don’t have the, I don’t have the certificate hanging on the wall.” You g- you, you let that what do they call that syndrome?

Imposter syndrome take over and you go I’m not qualified for this.” But then you realize, “I’ve already been laying it out there. I’ve already demonstrated expertise in a certain area that they feel they’re lacking.” So that just naturally fills that space, and it’s just we’ve really gelled to work well together as a team, and I really like the project.

So yeah, I’ll help them all I can. 

Chris Badgett: I know for the agencies out there listening or watching, they wanna know, how do you get clients like this? And so what, like how did this client, get on your radar or enter your world or you enter theirs?

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Kurt Von Ahnen: They’re gonna say, people listening are gonna say it’s an unfair advantage ’cause I’ve been in your back pocket for years already, right?

We do the we do the ask us anything call every Thursday. We do the the mastermind office hours call for Universe and Infinity bundles every Thursday. And since I’m on all those calls, I do get a lot of exposure to people in the LifterLMS circles. I’m not gonna take that away from anything. However there’s other people that are on the LifterLMS experts list that tell me they get a ton of leads from the experts page.

And when I ask people, “How did you find me?” It’s not usually like the experts page. So Chris Lasseter, for example, he said he got a ton of leads from the LifterLMS experts page. So there’s different exposure points I think that lend people to different things. I think because I’m so focused on this consultative role, I’m so focused on this, this idea that I’m gonna be a business consultant before an internet expert, I think where my net really thrives is in all of this other content that’s generated, right?

So I’m on the WP-Tonic podcast, the Membership Machine Show, the Agency Action Show. I have the Mañana No Más podcast where we feature, other entrepreneurs and creators in space. And so I think that whole broad network, and 20 years of being an agency, I think that’s where that net comes from.

So when people say, “How do you get your customers?” I honestly think it’s from adding the value or showing the value before I meet them and send them a proposal. I think there’s a certain, I think there’s a certain credibility, there’s a certain value that we’re able to put forth in our proposal that’s already demonstrated from the work that we do putting ourselves in the public face.

Whereas I think if I was starting over again as a freelancer, it might be a little more difficult to say, “Oh, I’m gonna go get me a 50, 60, $80,000 web project.” Like the, it’s hard to go from $500 websites to $60,000 projects. But it’s, I think if we apply ourselves and we put our personality, our face, our ethics, if we put all that out there in the form of, podcasting, social posts, blogs if we really create that content that builds the persona that we wanna represent ourselves as, I think that helps drive the business in the direction you’re really looking to go.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And I wanted to ask you about how these client relationships work through time. So I’m not asking you to disclose your exact, like, financial working agreement or whatever with PF University, but I imagine if I were to gue- guess, you did that thing we love to say to each other, which is land and expand.

If somebody’s looking to move upmarket in the sense of I don’t just build websites, I’m a business consultant- Yeah … and, yeah, a lot of the times it includes websites and e-learning, what is the flow of not just money over time, but there’s one thing leads to another. What are these phases?

You mentioned needs assessment. That’s phase one I’m guessing, right? 

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah.

I’m trying to break this down ’cause I’m trying to think of it from normal projects too, right? ‘Cause I, I know that we focus on e-learning stuff here, and it’s real easy to get into the weeds and talk about process. Yeah. But like even just from the standpoint of I wanna make a five-page marketing website, like that’s…

I just wanna be some dude that does th- those things. When I think about That process, that land and expand. So if I’m talking to someone about, let’s say they want a one-page marketing website, and then I go, “Okay, we could build that for you absolutely. What are some elements that you think should be on this page?”

And then they’ll tell me, and I go, “Okay how far do you want people to scroll on mobile? So if you’ve got a lot of content, that’s a lot to scroll on mobile. Maybe we should break this into two or three pages.” So that would be the homepage, the about us page, and the contact page. Let’s just go with those three, right?

And then I go, “Okay, so are you gonna use this page for the rest of your business?” That’s like the first question. They’re like, “What are you gonna use the website for? Is this strictly for marketing? Is it strictly for lead magnets? Or are you gonna use this for the rest of your business?”

And they go the rest of my business, what do you mean?” Are you paying for Mailchimp? Are you paying for ActiveCampaign? Like, how big is your mail list? Do you plan on growing a mail list? If you’re gonna grow a mail list and it’s gonna go over 5,000 people, you’re gonna save money to put the CRM in your website.

We could do that for you. We have that service. How do you train your new employees when they, when you hire somebody?” And tho- I ask those questions all the time, even just to marketing website customers, ’cause I go, how do you onboard people?” And they go even if we hire them in New York, we still have to bring them to the home office.

Two days of paperwork, a day of meeting all the other managers, and then, we have to train them on everything.” And I go, “Okay, what, it’s two weeks?” And they go, “Yeah.” I go, “But it’s a remote job.” And they go, “Yeah, we advertise it remote, but they have to come on site for the training and the onboarding.”

I go what if we could just set that up through your website? They can do all the HR paperwork, the filling things out back and forth.” We actually set that up, like I w- almost as a course structure where they just step one, step two, step three, step four, and then we take them right into online training, and then maybe you fly them in for a day or two of practicum so they can demonstrate that they can, execute what you’ve taught them online.

I said, “That would reduce your operating budget quite a bit, and it would make your customer that was sold a remote job a lot happier.” And they go I never even thought about that.” And that’s just an exhi- I, it’s just an, an example of land and expand, right? When we sell e-learning packages, so there’s e-learning that’s like somebody wants to teach somebody how to make ceramics, or somebody wants to teach people how to paint watercolors.

Those are typically small e-learning hobby-like projects. But if you get into enterprise e-learning, and there’s gonna be 1,200 students, 2,500 students, one of the things that Mañana No Más always offers is, “Hey, how are you gonna provide support to your students? Do you have someone internally that’s, assigned to that?”

And they usually go, “What do you mean support?” This is a job. This is a whole website. There’s gonna be, there’s gonna be members resetting passwords, there’s gonna be peop- you have things that don’t work, they didn’t get their certificate. How do you plan to manage that for a group of people this large?”

And they go we didn’t really think about that.” I go we offer ticketed support for each of our clients. So if you want, we can add a ticketed support tool to your website. Your students, if they have a problem, can fill out a support ticket, and we answer that ticket within 12 hours. And they go how much does that cost?”

And that’s, ding, right? Based on how many people, frequency, you can make up the number, but that’s typically, in the $30,000 a year range that we would offer that to an enterprise client. And that’s just recurring revenue that happens over and over again. And as a, as an agency owner, you can subcontract that out.

You can say, “Oh, I need a VA that’s gonna… Anytime a ping comes in on this email address, I need you to answer it,” and you put them on retainer 

Chris Badgett: So how do you just in general do, like the the expansion in terms of like you’re consulting and being like, “Have you thought about this? Have you thought about this?”

And when they’re like, “Oh yeah, I want that. I do want that other thing, but not right now. I’m not interested in that, and I also want that other thing you mentioned,” do you just do all this like project-based pricing or more like retainers where it includes a bunch of stuff ongoing and we can do add-on projects?

Like, how do you think about packaging your services through time? 

Kurt Von Ahnen: This is the hardest part of our conversation today, Chris, it really is. Because I always go back to working on cars. You know I have this large automotive background, right? Yeah. Technician gets started, gets out of school, he gets a job at a Ford dealership, and he gets his first brake job on an F-150 truck, and the job’s gonna pay him two hours to replace the brake pads and resurface the rotors.

So I’m using terms that everyone should understand. You need to put new brake pads on your truck. The technician’s gonna get paid two hours to put those brake pads on that truck, and it might take him three and a half, four hours. He’s in a brand-new shop. He doesn’t quite have all of his tools selected yet.

It’s gonna take him some time, right? He’s gotta get acclimated. Now, two years into that job, same truck comes in, right? Brake pads and rotors. He’ll have that job done in 18 minutes. He’s still gonna get paid two hours. That’s where I think we’re at right now with artificial intelligence, different tools for efficiency how good you get at using certain tools in your tech stack.

I am so confident and comfortable with LifterLMS and integrating like Fluent Form, Fluent CRM, and Fluent Support. Like that whole Fluent suite works really well with Lifter, and so I’m so confident in how we build those. We’re extremely efficient. Does that mean I only charge $500 to set that up, or is it still like a $6,000 setup?

So there’s a certain thing that you offer that’s value added, right? So there’s a value that comes with what we do. And a lot of times I look at if I create something for a client, do I know they’re gonna be able to 10X the value of whatever I charge them? And that’s a big consideration for me. So if I charge someone $6,000 to build something, am I relatively sure they’re gonna be able to convert that into 60 grand?

If they apply themselves, if they do the work, right? And I do that with the other training projects I have. So it’s like I wanna make sure that I don’t price people out of the ballpark so bad they can’t afford it, but we can’t give away our skillsets either. And so I don’t wanna devalue what other agencies and experts have put the work into building in our space just because I’ve figured out some shortcuts and can do things pretty quickly.

So it’s a very difficult conversation. For us, we generally look at… Now I’m gonna give away too many secrets. We have time tracked everything we’ve ever done over the last 12 years. And so because we have all these different projects, if someone says, “Oh, I wanna do a custom this,” I can go, “Oh, that sounds like what we did for Paula.”

So I can go back into Paula’s account and I can go, okay, we spent four hours on that. So our agency rate’s $190 an hour, so I go, that’s about 800 bucks. We’re gonna pad that by 10%, so it’s gonna be $880. I can figure that up quick math, right? And then kinda add those, those features in. But the way you ask the question also elicits another response, and that is, we want this but not till later.

We know we’re gonna want this, but we might not leverage it yet. We might… So what we’ll do is we’ll say, “Hey, our job is to get you launched.” Like for me, I’m all about momentum. At our agency, we’re all about done is better than perfect. We need to do a minimal viable product. We want people to sample any kind of learning content to build any kind of energy in your project before it’s perfect.

‘Cause if you’re gonna get hooked on perfect, you’re never gonna launch, and then this thing’s gonna die on the vine and you’re gonna spend money before we even get anything going. My main goal is to get you to make revenue, so you’re more comfortable in hiring me to keep doing things that make you more revenue.

And so we’re really focused on that. So let’s say let’s say that they go we really don’t have an email list yet. We’re, this is just really just a launch.” And I’m like, “Okay, so but as you build this, where are you gonna wanna put people?” How we… So we’ll build as the MV- MVP, we’ll build in the s- the CRM, the form tool, the, the e-learning, the memberships.

We’ll build all that in and not necessarily push it to the front end of the website, but it’ll be built and ready to implement when they’re ready to implement. And we offer all of our clients training. So we say, “Hey, this package is gonna come with two hours of Zoom training that you can re- record and use when you’re ready to implement these other features that are hidden in the background 

Chris Badgett: Very cool.

Very cool. And also for the agencies out there, walk us through the sales motion, like in terms of okay, you, you have the first contact, like they reached out to you, and then what do you do from there? And then there’s a discovery or needs assessment, which I think you charge for, and then it goes to like phase one or something.

What’s the cadence of what you do from first contact through, getting through needs assessment and actually booking version one of the project?

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Kurt Von Ahnen: We’re pretty dang quick at Manana Mas. Okay. I really shortcut a lot of that, what you just described. 

Chris Badgett: Okay. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: So in some ca- so if it’s a fresh project, a fresh startup project, there’s not a whole lot of lead, of needs assessment to really do, just to be honest, right?

‘Cause we have enough experience in the space. We can front-load the conversation and go like, “How many courses are you anticipating? What, how, how many lessons are in each course? What are the kind of assets you plan on putting in each lesson?” And it, and as those questions are getting asked, w- that ticker’s going in my brain, right?

So I’m like, “Okay, so I know I got, this much content, this many videos, this much to manage, this much to do.” We also charge so we offer the hosting, and in our hosting we give them access to our bunny.net hosting account on a separate kind of thing, sub account. And we can do the same thing with the email sending, right?

So we have a SendGrid account with sub-accounts. And so when we say our hosting includes, updates and maintenance for all of the thing put together, it’s one-stop shop. So we’re able to… They don’t have to worry about 16 other subscriptions, right? They just go through Manana Mas and we take care of that whole thing for them.

So if we jump back to the Prestige Family Office situation we’re doing their search engine optimiz- optimized content, we’re handling some of their social media for them, we’re creating their weekly email blast that goes out. So our agency creates the email blast, we stage it on Monday, they approve it Monday afternoon, it gets sent on Tuesday morning.

And so we’ve set up these processes. To go from the meeting to building the website though, I know that you described something that you would think would be like a month or six weeks or s- like you think of these stages. It was like 7 to 10 days. It was like we had a Zoom call, we familiarized ourselves with each other.

I really liked the guys. I thought the guys were really easy to talk to. They thought I was easy to talk to. It was a fresh build. In this particular case, they had a preexisting website that they were sampling with and playing with and I said, “Look I can tell that this has been a sample or a playground for you.

This will be more of a distraction than just starting fresh. So let’s just start fresh, and now let’s have the conversation. You wanna launch with four schools. Each school has this many lessons,” ba. And then we just, we architected a quick, five-page marketing site, put the LMS in the background, put the CRM in place, built the ticketed support to launch later, right?

‘Cause our goal was a, minimal viable product. We just wanted students to be able to come in and sample the first school. So that’s, the first school for them was the course track for family office management. So we just wanted to get that much done so somebody could come in and take a look.

And that somebody was, like, the guy that runs a college, and so that college already had students interested in taking courses. And so our main MVP goal was, how do we make the website look nice enough as an MVP and have enough training content in it that a guy that runs a college would go, “This is equitable.

This is worth investing in.” And we pulled that off. We got it done by the, under budget, on time. The college looked at it, approved it. The guy running the college actually joined our board, which is really nice. And then we leveraged. We put, another three schools worth of content in, so we launched with four schools to allow s- stu- students to start coming in.

And then we started really concentrating on mentors, advisors, and ambassadors, and built out that hidden program I was talking about for them 

Chris Badgett: Well, just to, tie a bow on it, and if you don’t want to give specifics, that’s fine, but just from an agency mindset, how many times have these folks paid you?

Or is it- Is it … I’m just asking for the agencies who are just like, “Oh, yeah. It’s a website. It costs this much. That’s it.” You have an ongoing relationship. You’re adding other services. Is it- Yeah … has it evolved to a monthly thing and it changes every month depending upon if there’s a bunch of new stuff coming or not?

Kurt Von Ahnen: This particular project we launched in phases. Mañana No Más always works on a prepaid basis. This creates controversy in the space. I have a lot of freelancers telling me, “I could never do that.” And I’m like- 

Chris Badgett: Hey, that … We did prepay all the way- Yeah … at Codebox when we ran our agency. That was the only way 

Kurt Von Ahnen: I used to do, 50%/50%, right?

50% deposit, 50% when done. Things never got done. Things always got drawn out. Things always … The, the … You always got, like, strong-armed for, “Oh, I, I … Now I want a custom slider, I saw another site that had it. All you have to do is,” and it’s like, no, you’re … This is way past the scope of what we discussed.

Now, regardless of how simple or hard something is, if it’s outside the scope, y- as the agency owner, you gotta make the decision. Am I willing to give this up to keep the customer happy, or do I need to charge them more for it? But if they’re sitting on the other half of the money now you’re being strong-armed in ways that you didn’t really sign up for.

So back in 2008, we changed our policy to be a prepaid thing, and that’s it, and people think that doesn’t work. We have a sister project called the Powersport Academy. Chris, you’re familiar with that. And when we train a dealership on how to increase parts and labor sales, it costs $45,000 to prepay for the year.

Yeah. And I had a lot of people tell me, “Oh, you can’t do that. That’s never gonna work.” Then we ended up subcontract, subcontracting that service out through a 20 club provider, and guess what? Everything we ever did for them was prepaid. And then over time, we’ve had other companies reach out to us and they say what our company does is we finance that type of corporate improvement.”

So- if you’re at a lower dollar amount, you might have heard of using Link or Affirm or something like that, right? Where someone wants to make a $3,000 purchase they use an Affirm account, so then the vendor gets paid in full and they’re making payments to Affirm, right? They basically took a loan out through Affirm.

When you get to higher dollar amounts in the enterprise training space, you basically form a relationship with financial companies that say, “Oh yeah, we’ll finance your clients to take this training,” because they already know that if a client successfully completes our training, they’re gonna 10X their revenue through their service department.

And so we’ve set up all these agreements where if a dealer says, “45 grand, that’s awfully steep. What if I– Could I just give you 20% down?” I go no, we don’t do that, but we have a financing partner.” So I’ll refer them to that financing partner. They set up the finance agreement with them. We get the 45 grand, and now they’re making payments to somebody else, and our training is giving them the benefits we promised.

So they’re gonna make that money back on the training anyway. 

Chris Badgett: As we land the plane here, I have two f- kind of final questions. One is it sounds like pfuniversity.org is a fantastic client, and I’ll just speak to some things I see from the outside looking in, and you tell me what’s also there that makes this a fantastic client.

One, it sounds like you guys had good chemistry, good communication. Two, they value your expertise very much even to the point of challenging your own imposter syndrome, which is awesome. And then they … Getting the content is sometimes a, a hard part about websites, but these guys have content for days, and they h- Yeah

they’re not shy to make content or whatever. You also took an active interest in learning their niche so that you could best serve and help and consult. And you don’t just deliver websites. You do all kinds of things from the support desk to marketing automation, email, social media web hosting, all kinds of services, and these guys needed all of it.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: But what else makes them a great client? 

Kurt Von Ahnen: We share the same faith. That really helps a lot. This is a faith-based organization, and while not all family office management, sources are faith-based ’cause a lot of it’s financial training they’re faith-based, which I found really attractive.

So they have conflict management and stewardship and, kingdom wealth subjects as part of their training, which really falls in line with a lot of my core beliefs. And that’s just Chris, that’s just a huge blessing. When you sign up to work with people and you share things outside of the work, I think that is that’s a really great reward.

The other thing is these dudes are old. I’m old. It’s funny I turned 59 this year. I’m, my, my beard is changing all kinds of colors. And but, like when the guy told me, when George said he was 92, I was blown away. This guy’s 92. He’s running multiple meetings every week.

He’s taking care of family that’s not well. His depth and scope of knowledge and his clarity of mind is absolutely commendable. And it’s just really fun to work with older people and see them, pass the baton down, right? Warming the bench as we go. And, I… We’ve mentioned it before, but not on this show, I- I’m trying to launch an apprenticeship program to teach other young people how to start their own successful WordPress agencies.

So I’m very much in that mindset of, like, how do we pay it forward? How do we educate younger people? How do we keep that bench warm? How do we pass these things down? And so for me to be able to work with these guys, passing their knowledge down, it’s just been a real treat. It’s it’s really a perfect fit 

Chris Badgett: And last question for you, Kurt.

In the kind of zeitgeist of social media or whatever, it see- it- there’s a lot of agency doom and gloom out there. So the big things are, oh people are just using AI to build websites. They don’t need me anymore. Or the economy is tough, which it is, and people just aren’t buying websites anymore, but there’s some people who are, and you find them.

But … And also you have the portfolio of services, like you position yourself as a business growth or business consultant, not just a website builder. But what allows you to not buy into the agency doom and gloom and also not only not buy into it, but just thrive anyways? 

Kurt Von Ahnen: So in true transparency, there’s good days, bad days, right?

Yeah. There al- there always is. But,

Chris Badgett: Feast or famine kind of thing … 

Kurt Von Ahnen: yeah, there, there was that famous comedian that was like I want to say it was Steve Harvey, who said, one thing to think about challenges is, if you’re alive today, you have successfully navigated every single challenge that’s ever come your way, right?

And it’s like, all right that’s one way to look at things. So like I said, good days, bad days. We went through an economic winter, like December through March this last year. To the point where the YMCA was hiring a, a membership director that’s local here, and I was like, man, I’d be really good at that, and I’m into fitness.

That would be fun to do. Like you start thinking other things, and that’s really dangerous, like when you find yourself being distracted by other opportunities. Not that… I say it in a weird way, right? But you know what I’m saying. You want to stay focused on, hey, if this is what I chose, I want to make sure I do this thing.

And- It’s really hard to explain, but I knew that if I just kept doing the work, if I kept promoting, if I kept the blog posts, if I kept doing the podcast, even when I was tired, I just knew that if I did the work, if I sowed enough seed, that there would eventually be a harvest. And so that was like December, January, February, March.

April rolled around, and it was like all that hard work for that whole fiscal quarter before, it all just culminated in this giant harvest in April. And when I say giant, it’s not, we’re not, web dev studios money, but we were… It was like it was a lot of money for our little agency.

And I was like, “Okay.” Now, in retrospect, you still gotta pay for the four months you didn’t do anything, right? You didn’t bring any revenue in for four months. But it was like April was so good, I was like, “Oh my God, if we could do this in May. Just imagine if we could do this in May.” I kept the energy going, kept the momentum going.

May was slow too, just to be really blunt and honest. But in June, everyone we talked to in May became a paying client in June. And like I said, everyone at Mañana No Más pays up front. We don’t do payments. I don’t chase people down for money. I don’t have a, an accounts receivable department to go collect for me.

So that made us real, revenue flush again, and it gave us that confidence to be able to execute on the things we know we’re really good at. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again on this show, we used to live in Southern California, and the economy in Southern California had me in this weird position where we had business, we…

I would do work all the time, but we had to say yes to jobs I never should have said yes to. They didn’t have the right ethical alignment. They didn’t have the right financial alignment. They didn’t have the right content alignment. But I had to say yes because we needed every bit of revenue just to hold the line when we lived there.

And when we moved to Kansas, our overhead shrunk by more than 50%. And so really quickly, we were able to pay off debt, get a house, take some of the weight off of our shoulders, and I think that’s should be the goal for other agency owners, entrepreneurs, freelancers in any business, is to put yourself in a financial position where it’s okay to say no to the jobs you know aren’t perfect.

And so the more we said no to certain jobs, certain requests, certain proposal opportunities, the higher the quality of jobs became available to us. So this PF University job is like perfect client, perfect setup, perfect everything. We made a business directory for a local town here. Again, small project, but margin was good, customers were easy to deal with, project went up quickly.

By all accounts, a success, and they’re on our monthly hosting and maintenance program, so it’s recurring, monthly revenue. Almost every job that we’ve brought in the last two, three years, Chris, has resulted in recurring monthly revenue. And so we’ve even given away websites here locally.

A guy came and cut down my tree and I realized he didn’t have a website, so I made him a website. Took me half an hour, so I made him a website and I said, “Here, th- here’s your new website.” And he was like, “Oh my God, this is amazing,” “Why’d you do this?” And I said, “Because you didn’t charge me enough to cut down the tree.

I should have paid you twice as much to cut down the tree.” I said, “This website, if you went to a agency, would probably cost about 2,500 bucks. I’ll take care of the hosting for the first year. If you like the website and it works for you and you want to keep the website and you want to keep it with me, it’s $79 a month.

If you want to take it, it’s yours. I’m giving it to you. You can go to GoDaddy or Bluehost or you can move it anywhere you want. It’s your website. But if you need someone to maintain it, host it, and help you with it, we can do that, and hosting with us is $79 a month and we take care of all the updates.”

So now he’s … You know he’s going to be a customer for life at 79 bucks a month. 

Chris Badgett: I think the biggest takeaway I’m taking from you is just stay on the field. Keep going. Help people. Hold your own personal boundaries. Working with great clients is awesome. Working with bad clients is not a lot of fun.

And- 

Kurt Von Ahnen: And you gotta cut those loose. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah that’s Kurt VonAhnen from Mañana No Más. You can find him over there. The website we’re talking about for family office training is called Prestige Family Office University. That’s pfuniversity.org. Kurt, thank you so much for coming back on the show. Thank you for being a shining example of everything Lifter.

You work here, you do agency work, you give us ideas that flow into the product and you’re an education entrepreneur yourself with all your own education ventures. So thank you so much for coming on. Go check out Kurt at Mañana No Más, and we will do this again, ’cause I can’t wait to see where you’re at and what you’re up to in 2027.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Nice. Thanks, Chris

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/gift. Go to LifterLMS.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode

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The founder of Kinergy.life, David Labuschagne, discusses his concept and practical methods for empowering individuals to take charge of their lives, enhance their physical and mental health, and rediscover who they are. David discusses how he uses dance, meditation, Eastern energy practices, and Western science to help individuals become more self-aware, energetic, balanced, and connected to their true selves in this LMScast episode with Chris Badgett.

“What makes you tick?” is how he presents his three-step method. Why do you feel ill? How can we repair it? Finding out what inspires and drives you is the first step. Finding the internal and external elements that interfere with your wellbeing is the second. Finding workable solutions to such problems is the third. He highlights that many of the solutions are already inside people; sometimes they only need the correct questions, direction, and viewpoint to find them again. Additionally, David presents his ACE framework, which stands for Awareness, Clarity, and Energy. Filtering information, seeing patterns, and figuring out what really important are all components of clarity.

Making meaningful action out of knowledge and understanding is what energy is all about. Developing all three, in his opinion, enables people to take back control of their life instead of letting outside forces overwhelm them. Developing all three, in his opinion, enables people to take back control of their life instead of letting outside forces overwhelm them. His concept revolves upon dynamic meditation, which involves being energetic, grounded, and concentrated while actively engaging in daily life as opposed to isolating oneself from it. Additionally, he talks on the significance of breathing, posture, circulation, movement, metabolism, and fostering the body’s inherent energy.

David describes how he integrates these concepts into his 12-stage Max Your Mojo program, a progressive course meant to assist individuals in reestablishing a connection with their bodies, enhancing their movement and coordination, cultivating awareness, and progressively reprogramming their behaviors and outlook on life. According to him, personal growth is a long-term evolutionary process that might take up to a year to strengthen one’s foundation and boost one’s self-assurance.

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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 LifterLMS, 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. His name is David La Bouchain. He’s from Kenergy.life. It’s the energy accelerator. We’re gonna talk about tech, but we’re also gonna go deep on life and the human experience. But first, welcome to the show, David. 

David Labuschagne: Thank you, Chris. 

Chris Badgett: I’m really excited to get into it with you. I love… The what I do is I see, with LifterLMS, I like to throw out a pebble into a pond, and it sends out ripples of positive impact. But it’s not me that’s driving that, it’s people like you who create training and help people in all kinds of different ways, and it lights me up to see the positive impact where people can reach more people and help them. But tell us about your core thing that you do. What is Kenergy.life all about? 

David Labuschagne: The essence of it is bringing people back home to themselves. Because it’s like this. We’re all self-centered beasts. Fine. There’s nothing wrong with a bit of ego. It’s just when it gets out of control, that is a problem. And we all seek to find out who we are, to affirm who we are, to impose ourselves on the world or whatever drives you But in the process of becoming oneself, discovering oneself, where do people look? Everywhere. They look up under every rock. They go to Tibet, they go and find the gurus and the other… In other words, they outsource who they are, their identity, their whole being, to a bunch of experts, be they the medical profession, the the church, all of the religious affiliations your psychologists, politicians, people who outsource their power. And that’s not where it’s at. It’s reclaiming yourself. And you’re not gonna get there by thinking about it, by reading a book. What, you’re gonna find the idiot’s guide to you? It doesn’t work that way. So it’s bringing people back home to themselves. And it’s not a matter of going, “Hey, I’ve got the way. Follow me.” For crying out loud, that’s not where it’s at. So what happens is you see people in the process of self-discovery, self-creation They find these signposts. What do they do? Oh, they worship the signpost. Or even crazier, they uproot the signpost and carry it over their back like a cross. No. We… Helping people find themselves. Guess what? That you are seeking, that you’re constantly creating is not a noun. Chris, it’s not a noun. It’s a verb. We are a process. We are a being, not a thing So how do I help people tune back into themselves, to find themselves, to be at home with themselves, to, in other words, to be their BFF, their best friend forever? Man, this is your body, this is your buddy. You better take care of it because You break that, where you gonna live? So there are different approaches I use, and this comes from not theoretical stuff. Chris, I’m only interested in outcomes. Wonderful theories make for great poetry that does not cut the mustard. So through a process of- Discover it. And that process of discovery has led me in many places around the world, in many… down many tracks, some of them dead end, some of them one ways, whatever. And it has involved a lot of research, a lot of trial and error. And my- I keep my guardian angels really busy. They have to work overtime to save me from myself quite often. And indeed I’ve been in some perilous situations. But along the way, I have discovered Not everybody else. Not the guru. W- and that’s why, I have a segment on subject in which I say, “If you find the guru- Kill him 

Chris Badgett: Kill 

David Labuschagne: the Buddha Because you can’t get out there. It’s inside. So bringing people back inside. And again, you can’t do it just by study, by thinking about It’s finding your own inner truth, your inner truth and it’s uniquely yours You can’t borrow it from somebody else and go, “Oh, the, the Holy Scripture says it’s like this.” No, it isn’t. No, it isn’t And in that path, I have embraced, not just studied and looked at, embraced the Western and Eastern aspects. And that’s taken me into some very interesting areas. For example, in the Eastern side, I even at one stage joined the Hare Krishnas and chanted with them and that was a revelation. That was a revelation. What of mystical revelation? It was a moment of enlightenment, and an enlightenment that wasn’t passed to me from His Divine Grace Sri Prabhupada the 23rd. No Because it just so happened when I joined in with the Hare Krishnas and was happily singing and banging and chanting and such, that His Divine Grace was expected to fly in from India. And in he came, and everybody was, “Oh-” Talking stories about how when he walks across the grass he doesn’t even leave his footprints there And so I’m “Oh, wow,” wide-eyed. In my more hippie days… By the way, I’m 78. I have survived and thrived. And here’s Divine Grace there, ready to give us the word. And he gave us the word, and the word, lots more words, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And my eyes were getting wider and wider, and I’m going, “Oh, my God.” Not really. And I got up and left, and I walked down the pier, and there was all the seagulls going quack.” And Chris, seriously, there was more wisdom, more God came out of those seagulls’ yaps than from his Divine Papa, Oom Pa Loom Pa. Anyway Yes. The process of discovery Western and Eastern. From the Western, from the scientific aspects, and this is how I describe myself. By day, I’m a scientist, a sober, serious scientist, utilizing all of those rules and regulations, birth laws of discrimination and such, in order to be able to separate out fact from fiction. Can you weigh it? Can you measure it? All of that stuff. By night, I’m a starry-eyed mystic. So putting the two together, and they don’t fight each other. They’re happily married to each other. This is the thing. It’s not left against right or any of that nonsense So from the West, yes, I got the understanding of the sciences, the physical apparatus, the chemistry, the biochemistry, the physiology. In other words, how we work And from the East, I got a different insight into all of that from the alchemical aspect. And I’m not talking about al- alchemy as a woo-woo. We’re talking about the real thing, the real lifestyle And out of all of that, I came to an understanding of myself and the human condition Because I’m not interested in being lost in myself. Oh, come on. Life is about sharing. Life is about caring. Life is about giving and taking and it’s not always friendly, and that’s fine. And out of all of that, I was able to condense A process a way of being able to determine How to help people in significant terms. And so out of that, I’ve created a formula A three-step formula. Step number one What makes you tick? What inspires you? What fires you? What drives you And that again is from a physical and a physiological aspect, is from the psychological aspect. What inspires you? What makes you tick? What drives you? Yeah. What compulsions or whatever. What makes you tick? That’s the first thing. And this is where the medical science has just lost the plot They’re focused on illness and they don’t have a clue about health . Seriously now so what makes you tick, number one and that leads on to number two what makes you sick? In other words, what is the world doing to you? What are you doing to yourself? Et cetera, et cetera. And it can be a host of things. It can be pathogens, it can be your friends. And quite often it is. Sometimes beware of your friends. So yes, what are the things that can disrupt us, that can throw us out of course? Which then naturally leads to the third step. And the third step is, pardon my French, WTF And what does that stand for? Not what do you think. What’s the fix? What’s the fix? And you cannot get onto fixing something without understanding the etiology, the consequences And so this is how I work with people. I don’t offer them necessarily solutions I treat my clients as the master and me as the student. What can I learn from you? And how do I go about that? By asking you the right questions, by listening intently ’cause you’ve got the answers inside of yourself. But things are muddy inside, you’ve lost the clarity, you’ve lost the perspective, you’re confused So I… Inside of yourself, you have your compass. And I’m part of mine. It’s your compass, but your compass is spinning around and in this modern day and age oh, people are drowning in conflicting input and data Yeah fine but you need to make sense with data. You need to be able to weigh it up, to evaluate it, to make sense It’s a game. Again, this is what I present to people. Look, mate, it’s a game And you’re not just in it to win it. And by the way And this is what I call the people who come here to, and turn to us for assistance. Players So player, are you winning? Are you losing? Are you in it to win it? What’s your aim? What are you seeking to do? And there’s all sorts of games. There’s relationship games, there’s power trips, there’s all sorts of stuff. But regardless, I’m here to remind you But you have an ace up your sleeve. And people go What’s he talking about? Yeah, you’ve got an eye circuit sleep. Let me explain it to you Because it’s like this 悉lock in ,郎, nam своё3

utas,бы락 Brick tills But what you are in control of is how you play those cards. So let’s come back to this ACE. What is this ACE, they say? Okay, the A Stature awareness. The first thing you gotta do is need to do Is tune in, become aware. Because by and large, you’ve tuned out. By and large, all the signals in the world are drowned out. There is so much noise and so little real signal. And even when there’s lots of signal there’s just clash of channels, clash of information. But first, and this is painful, you need to become aware. Why is it painful? Because becoming aware means to sensitize, to become sensitive And stop that. That hurts. Oh, that hurts. Stop. Let me re- retreat to my safe zone or to my comfort zone. And the doctors will happily prescribe you desensitizers. We call them painkillers, mood killers, whatever. Anything to switch you off. Anything to reduce your pain So this is what happens. You start to become… A, from awareness, you become aware. Oh my God, I don’t like what I see. I don’t like what I see. I don’t like the way I feel. I don’t like the pain that’s inside me. I’ve got to block that off. I’ve got to ignore it. I’ve got to transfer it. Oh, I’ll deal with that tomorrow, and tomorrow People wish to remove themselves. They wish to desensitize because we, we have this image of somebody, “Oh, I’m so sensitive. I’m so sensitive.” No How many senses have you got? A lot more than six. And it’s having to switch them on, become aware of them, tune them, tune up, own them. Own them And you don’t own them actually, you are them 

Chris Badgett: what causes the like for people to be stuck, let’s say, in anxiety or depression? There’s like a loop they’re stuck in. What is the loop?

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David Labuschagne: Oh, I love it when people ask questions Many things and one thing. For example, here I have in front of me Chris. And Chris For better or for worse, has a terminal case of cressosis or cressitis Yeah And it’s gonna kill him in the end. So how do you deal with it? A number of different ways. But okay, you want to know… But I’ll get there. Just keep that question on hold, and I’ll step through the ice, and then you’ll understand where this is leading, and you will straightaway know the answer to your question. 

Chris Badgett: Okay. 

David Labuschagne: So we’ve got awareness. Oh my God, and we’re all deluged in sensory input, particularly when I work with people to switch them back on, to re-sensitize them, and to tune them up So there’s the big A from your ACE. Next letter, C. Actually mirror image might come out that way. C and the sea Give me a second. Just gathering my thoughts here. The C is your critical aspect The C is the act of discrimination. It’s one thing to have input. It’s something else to be able to make sense of it. One is sensory input, that’s the awareness. The other is the ability to make sense of it And that requires sorting through the data, sorting through the input, seeing what’s real, what’s relevant In order to be able to deal with the, another key word, the consequences So the C stands for clarity. You’ve got awareness, you’re switched on. But okay Switch on your radio, switch on the internet, and you’ve got channels coming from absolutely everywhere. The clarity in order to be able to make sense of it, otherwise you’re just dealing with the information overload. And it’s the same with data processing on a computer You’ve got Chevrolet truck coming in And we say GIGO. Garbage in, GIGO out. Garbage out. Because you’ve got to be able to process it, make sense of it, and turn raw data into looking for the patterns, pattern recognition. This is the real science of intelligence. To gain the clarity and go, “Okay, I see what’s happening.” I’m tuned in. I’m able to make sense of it. I can see what’s happening around me. I’m not just drowning in data So we’ve got the A, we’ve got the C, and that leads to the big E. Einstein would love the E because it’s all about energy ‘Cause this is the situation. You’ve gained the awareness, regardless of how you’ve done it You gain the clarity. So you’re happily sitting there in your corner and you’re meditating. You’re going, “Aum. Ah, I see. I understand. Now I need to put a plan of action together.” Okay. Because we’re not interested in the abstracts, we’re interested in the outcomes. And how are we gonna do this? Oh, I’ll put a plan of action together. Great. So you see what’s happening around you, you understand the steps that you gotta take, and now you’ve gotta take the steps. And what do you need to do that? Energy Otherwise, you just drive yourself crazy You need to put it into action My company catch call is take care of the energy and the energy will take care of you It comes back to energy. The lack of energy makes you sick, makes you confused You can’t think straight if you haven’t got the energy. You certainly can’t shoot straight if you don’t have the energy. So there’s a zillion problems But more often than not, it breaks down to the energy equation. As Einstein said, everything is energy, and that’s all there is to it. Yes, and energy transforms. So I deal directly with helping people with their energy. First, you gain the awareness, and then you gain the clarity And how do I help them get the awareness and clarity? Through meditation. Ah, you’re going, “Ugh, what’s he talking about?” No. Dynamic meditation. I’m not talking about nihilistic meditation where you close your eyes, sit in the corner of the room, shut off the world for half an hour, and you go, “Aum. I’m all right, Jack.” But then you have to get up and get back into the world, and the world is not kind. It doesn’t care It will slap you around and you lose it. What I teach Dynamic meditation. Being in the eye of the cyclone. Because in the eye of the cyclone Regardless of what’s happening around you, you are centered, focused. Not de-energized, not- Trying to hide away from the world. It’s not a form of escapism. That’s running away. It’s coming back home into yourself. And how do I do this? How do I help people re-energize, become aware, become alert, find themselves, find their focus, and then plug into the world? And this is through my training, my studies. I have a 50-plus year background in the Eastern energy arts Tai chi, qigong, yoga, zazen, many of those things and also from the Eastern martial arts aspects In other words, training to heal and training to kill. It’s all the same thing. It’s a different side of the coin. And from the Western side, my engagements in biochemistry, biology, physiology, our internal wiring What is energy anyway? How do we get some? You go, “Oh, look, if energy’s gonna fix me up, maybe I’ll have another cup of coffee.” Yeah. All right. Yeah, and that’ll fix you up five minutes. Energy. Energy weighs two bases You wanna get the energy that’s inside of you. You- it’s not a matter of looking for it outside. Yeah, okay, there’s food that we take from outside in the sunshine and all of the rest. That’s raw material. We have to transform that raw material into bioenergy, something that we can use, something that fuels us, something that fires us up, and that’s called metabolism. Your metabolic processes are internal chemical processes in which we transform raw substrate, raw materials, food and drink and sunshine and herbs and all the rest into the energy that drives us, the energy that gets us through the day, the energy that repairs us and into our physical body. So that’s the first transformation Taking all this from the outside and cooking it up on the inside. Cooking it up on the inside. Because, Chris You are the cook. You are the kitchen, and you’re the main dish. Yeah, it’s cooking yourself up, right? So it’s that mindful aspect about what you consume, being mindful of the digestive process. In other words, it’s not, “I’m thinking about, I’m thinking about chewing and I’m thinking about digesting.” No. It’s being in the moment, being in it. That enhances it. That enhances the transformation of all of this external raw material into metabolic energy. That’s the energy that drives you. That’s the energy that provides your get up and go But when you’re sick, you get up and go, got up and went You go, “Oh, what now?” All right. That’s the Western biomedical understanding of energy, metabolic. And then it’s The Eastern understanding of bioenergy And it’s commonly known as chi or ki or prana or nefesh. A thousand different names for life force energy Where does that come from? That is the governing energy – And as an example of such, to differentiate between the Western approach and the Eastern approach. Because if I say to people, “Energy, it’s intelligent.” They go In Western terms, energy is just… I’m not exaggerating, this is it. Physiological energy is the flow of electrons. End of story. As simple as that Eh, that’s not intelligent So the electrons flow. Think of it in terms of solid state physics, a transistor chip where you have a power rail, you have the earth, and you have the high tension line. Okay? The power flows through it, flows through the transistor or through the valve, but it is governed and modulated by the central grid That’s the controlling mechanism. That is the soft power inside. I describe it as seed. For example, we have a little acorn. Plant it in the ground Take care of it and it grows into this monster oak tree The acorn is the modulating intelligence. It directs and shapes In a way, in a very real way, you can describe it as DNA. Okay? It’s an egg So a Western perspective. Take a piece of corn Throw it on the fire, you got popcorn. Okay? That’s metabolic energy. Eastern perspective Take that corn, put it in the ground, and all of a sudden you’ve got a field full of corn. That is your energy source. That is the seed energy you were born with. So what can you do without that? I tell you, you’re a gardener, Chris. What are you gonna do with that seed energy? 

Chris Badgett: Water 

David Labuschagne: it. You’re going to plant it, you’re going to nurture it, you’re going to invest it, and you put in that seed, and all of a sudden, from that seed energy, it sprouts all this other stuff you can eat. And also, it sprouts another whole bunch of seeds. So you go, “Ah, fabulous.” And welcome to living, being alive, being the life process, okay? And all of this comes out of a seed, comes out of an egg. But if you don’t, if you’re a terrible gardener and you neglect your garden, so You plant it that in the ground, and you don’t have much yields Maybe no yields. You’ve gotta keep living, Babs. So what are you gonna do? You’re going to raid your seed store you are going to burn your original seeds And do that chronically, do that long enough, and you’re bankrupt And the debt collector’s gonna come knocking on your door. It’s called being dead. But before you get dead, you get really sick So that would help you understand, I hope. It’s referring to about energy being key. If you take care of that energy, the metabolic as well as the control aspects, the life force energy, the chi, and they work together, yin and yang, left hand and right hand They’re not at war with each other. They’re married to each other, and that marriage produces who we are So what, how do I put this into practice? Because once again, sounds wonderful. Ah, great theory, mate Out of that, I’ve evolved a program by taking the best, the most relevant of Western and Eastern. On the Eastern side, we have all of these marvelous meditational arts. We have Tai Chi, we have Qigong, we have Choi Lee Fat, we have all of these things But you know what? They were all put together in peaceful times, in very different worlds Not like 21st century life And if something is not relevant, not directly applicable and useful in daily life, we don’t have time for that, mate, and it’s not gonna happen. So it’s got to be relevant. It’s got to be real. It’s got to be directly useful. This is why for me it comes down to dynamic meditation. Because it’s being in that state, whatever you’re doing, whether you’re working or goofing off, playing, whatever. It’s being there. So how do I have… teach people to be there? By, again, taking the best of Eastern and Western training. On the Western side, it’s about your posture, about building muscle, about getting your metabolism happening About breathing well. About being physically functional. About being fit On the eastern side It’s playing with developing the bioenergetics. Now, I may be taking you out into outer space on this one, but allow me to present to you the picture of how internal energy generation works. Because it’s not just a matter of everything that you consume and turning that metabolically into energy. You have inside of yourself a generator, and that generator is very much akin to the generator in your car or on your bicycle. When you pedal, the generator spins and generates energy If you stop pedaling, the generator stops and it’s no longer generating energy, and then you’re having to borrow metabolic energy in order to keep it all going. This internal energy Is generated how? Your body is built actually like a two-cylinder gasoline energy engine. You have your two pistons which go up and down, your legs. If the legs stop moving, your circulation stops Everything stops. So the legs of the first generator When the legs go, then the crankshaft, and your crankshaft is your center of gravity Here’s your pistons, here’s your crankshaft And the pistons spin the crankshaft which starts the internal energy generation I don’t wanna throw you in the deep end too far, so I’m going to use some different analogies And I will say this. Eastern energy techniques are alchemy in action. You’re going, “Oh my God, what’s he talking about now? He’s talking woo-woo land.” No, they… Like I said, outcomes is everything You are, whether you recognize it or not, an alchemical vessel Here’s your pot. This is your cauldron. This is full of fluid. This is all your digestive juices. Everything’s down here. It’s full of fluid, it’s cold, and it’s wet. Welcome to your guts So there’s the pot. To cook you need fire. But where’s the fire? Hit the play button. This is the passion there But this is what happens with people when they run out of energy and when they get old and when they die Water goes down Water drains down Fire and heat goes up and so it separates This is where the alchemy comes in We need to be able to cool the heart because we get overheated here. And when you overheat, you burn out. Simple. Burnout. Very common disease issue. Inflammation and all of the rest of the stuff Too hot When you’re too cold down your midriff, your digestion’s not happening. Your sexual powers are not happening right. Too cold and wet, too hot and dry. So how do we heat up the fluids and cool down the heart to restore that internal harmony. Chris Life is essentially made of fire and water. The sunshine warms everything up, and without the water there is nothing to live in. There is nothing to utilize. So that’s a reduction, but it’s not over simplistic. And this is where I start from Getting people’s circulation to happen, getting them to warm up and not to overheat. Much Western exercise approach is no pain, no gain, mate. That’s burnout Short-term gain, long-term pain as a consequence from all of that. And we do this, I do this through applied Qigong exercises. In other words, I’ve taken the martial arts, plugged them into the Qigong exercises, and made them a part of everyday living. So People have a resistance to going, “Oh, exercise. Oh God, no. Not that.” In some languages, the word exercise does not exist. Because if you think about it, what is exercise? I’m sitting there on an exercise bike or I’m lifting weights. What am I achieving? What am I achieving? Internal warming and global warming. It’s not, and not applied. It’s not useful. It’s not plugged in So if it’s separate from everyday life, it has no application in daily life, then we very soon discard it. We’re not enthusiastic, we’re not enthusiastic. It doesn’t last. So what I’ve done is I have created this program That breaks down to a number of exercises that you can utilize during the day. You don’t have to be in the gym. Wherever you are, you can utilize those. You can drop straight into them, and that’s partially what makes them valuable To break it down into nuts and bolts, what I’ve put together is a 12-stage, 12-step course. It’s what the Kinergy course is. It’s called Max Your Mojo and it works progressively. It takes you through a number of steps in order to get your body together, your breathing together, your neural network together, your mind, everything To repeat myself all that’s important is outcomes and how do we measure outcomes? Not on a machine. Yes, I can use a load machine. I’ve been trained in all of that. I have a background in exercise physiology and all of that stuff, the physical measurements aspect No. By the fact that people voluntarily keep coming back to it. They love doing the exercises. Why? Because they’re stimulating, a little bit challenging. They feel themselves growing. They feel themselves becoming aware, feel themselves becoming more stable More grounded, more solid, and at the same time more open This is not just a series of physical exercises. This is the whole shebang. This is the whole package. This comes down to Reprogramming yourself. Okay? For example if I’m dealing with Chris version 1.0. 

Chris Badgett: This is a big program. 

David Labuschagne: And not somebody else doing it to you. It’s the becoming aware. What’s happening inside of me? This is all part of the what makes me tick What makes me sick? Becoming aware of all the external programming that have been labeled on me or that I have adapted and adopted for ease and convenience. Now One of the bylines of Kinesy is viva la evolution. It’s the evolutionary art, the evolutionary act. Not just a matter of getting faster and more adept and all of the rest at what you’re doing. It’s not a matter just of returning you back to doing what you do that made you sick in the first place, being able to do it twice as hard and twice as fast. No. It’s about evolution. And then again, that’s where the awareness comes in. What– Who’s running this program anyway? And what am I gonna do about it That awareness allows you to take control of and rewrite your own program of life It’s a reprogramming thing. And like I said, nobody else can do it. Yes, you can outsource it and get somebody else to reprogram you. And this is w- this is the story of most people’s lives. Not on. Seriously, not on. And this describes the state of the world where everything is … People have completely outsourced and trusted their wellbeing, their future to who? Oh my God, look at the people in charge. Oh my God. That’s not the way to go. Let me put it in a different metaphor, a different category. One which you may be able to resonate with easier, or viewers, whoever catches this name. It’s about play, mate. Huh You’re a musical instrument. Ah. You’re not just any old musical instrument. You are a miracle of creation. You’re a bloody Stradivarius on two legs And it’s probably out of tune. Ah You wanna make some good music? You’re gonna have to tune it up. Now, the thing with Stradivarius, like a g- like a guitar and all the rest, if the one side is tuned up too tight, then the other side bends and comes too loose. Same thing happens physically, anatomically, physiologically. If one side is too this, the other side is too the opposite, and we call that harmony. No it’s just dynamic disharmony because we’re not calling it that, but internally it is calling it that. So first stage, awareness. Oh, my instrument’s out of tune. I have to tune it up physically psychologically, emotionally. And that means not just building muscle. Building muscle is easy. It’s rebuilding your fascial network And that takes time. So it’s not just a matter of move, it’s a matter of Move smart, be aware. Tune into yourself so that you can tune yourself up, tone yourself up. So that’s the first stage. And you go, “Ta-da,” and in tune I don’t hear anything Yeah. You got to play the bloody thing. Ah, okay. Plinkity plonky screech scratch. Oh, that’s terrible. Why is it terrible? I’m in tune. Because you don’t know how to play. You don’t know how to play your primary instrument. Oh, Jesus Christ You can’t hire anybody else to play your instruments for you. It doesn’t work that way So how do you learn to play this? Ah, technique. Oh, that’s so painful at first. Look, my body doesn’t want it. That really doesn’t want it. Oh, that hurts. Can I stop? No, you can’t stop. Sometimes you can stop and take a break from yourself, but basically it’s getting the technique, getting that understanding how to play this prime instrument and it takes time and you can see it Look, a horse is born, and five minutes later it’s up on its legs, and 10 minutes later it’s off running with the pack The human condition? Not so fast, mate. Again, some physiological facts and figures for you, neurological Your neuromuscular network is only finally wired up together by the age of about 27 And you look and you see so many people are just coordinated and such and blah, blah, blah. Okay, they may be really well coordinated and strong in one particular area, but the whole neuromuscular being that is you is not yet finished wiring up. It’s a slow process Takes a while. Okay. You’re having to retrain and restrain and do all of these things in order to become proficient on your instrument. And that unfortunately necessarily involves a lot of ho-hum boring routines. Playing scale da. Okay scale. And finally one day you go, “Hey I can play my scales. What about music, mate? Gaining a proficiency is just the first step. Mastering the instrument is just the first step. Because what is your life? Your life is A symphony and you’re only one instrument in it. But first you master your own instrument Whose score are you playing from? What are you playing for? Are you playing Beethoven over and over again? You’re not Beethoven. You may have played Beethoven beautifully, but you’re not Beethoven. Beethoven is not your life You are the Christian thing You’re the composer, you’re the player, the audience, the critic, the instrument. Mate, it’s all you. And once you’ve got all of that together, then you’re ready to step outside of your front door and play harmony. The art of harmony. First harmonizing yourself, and then you’re ready to harmonize with the rest of the world and with life in general. So how long does this take? And again, this is why I’ve put the program together, because I understand how long development really takes. You can’t put a seed in the ground and then tug on it, whereas the leaves come out to make it grow faster. It doesn’t work that way. You’re destroying it Essentially, it takes 12 months for you to come home, to have tuned yourself up and go, “Okay, I haven’t really mastered the instrument, but I’ve got a pretty good idea. And I can hear the songs inside of me. I can hear the symphony. I can make this my own.” So year one, as I point out to my clients I Don’t call them patients. The word patient is for passive. You lie there and, “No, I’ll do this to you. You swallow this and that.” No. Year One is all about you, bringing you home, helping you get yourself, your act together At that point, you’re then ready to step out of your door and engage the world and do whatever it is that you want to and with the world to make it a better place or a more interesting place, whatever. To engage the world. But until you’ve got yourself together, forget about trying to impose that on everybody else. So this is what I do. I’ve been doing this for donkey’s years I keep doing it. Why? Because it works. Because people keep coming back and they want more And it’s not what I’m doing to them it’s what they’re discovering themselves, growing themselves, evolving themselves to reprogramming themselves. And as such, it is This is not alternative medicine. This is mainstream. This is the total being, the total you. Now, all of that said, I can blow my own trumpet. I do a great job on. How do I know? Because people tell me. And they don’t just tell me, they show me. They s- they say They’re over the moon. Where I have issues, Chris, is that There’s me and my darling, extremely talented, devoted wife, and we do absolutely everything. All of the programming All of the stuff on the internet, all of the advertising, all of the research, everything. Two people And so we have a joke, a bad joke. We don’t live 24/7, we live a 26/9 lifestyle 

Chris Badgett: Yeah

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David Labuschagne: and there’s only the two of us. Yeah, we’re dead keen. We’ve got the talent, we’ve got the passion, we’ve got everything that it takes But the art of making the sale, the salesman, is something we’re a little bit shy of. We don’t like to Push. And so this is a part and parcel of how I came to be associated with LifterLMS. I went, “Okay, I can put these programs together. I can pre-record them.” Even though pre-recording something, getting something over the internet is not as powerful as, not as impactful as direct address, dealing directly with people But it’s something, okay? Here in Slovenia, we do a lot of dealing directly with people. But there’s a limit to how many people you can effectively deal with in live time. And Slovenians are very hardworking people. They’re spiritual But the pay here is very low. People can’t really afford much, so we charge according to what they can afford What it breaks down for us is we work in our bottle But we are scarcely remunerated for it. Pacar is 30 years old, mate. And we’re very happy that it still goes. This is the reality. So on this, I was looking for the scaling, the international aspect of it, presenting it in English to an international audience through online programming, through the LMS approach Once again, despite my best effort and even though I’ve worked in many jobs, I was a semi-professional musician for 30 years. I’ve worked in advertising. I’ve done all of this stuff. But there’s a limit to how much two people can do and so I’ve been seeking to gain that international exposure, being able to make some international sales, make some, make a ripple So let’s cease. Sad to say, Chris, and it’s not because of you guys. The service you offered is wonderful. Just you talking with me now it just blows me away. I go, “Oh, Jesus, this guy’s dealt with so many people, yet he’s found some time for me.” So I thank you for that I forget how long I’ve been associated with to the program. Maybe three years, maybe four? 

Chris Badgett: Something like that. Yeah, four years or so. 

David Labuschagne: Yeah. And you’re very kind to me. You don’t– you allow me to re-enroll without having to spend a fortune on it, and I very appreciate that. But Chris, you must know, in four years I’ve not made one sale And it’s not because of the product. It’s a, a complex arena. It’s not because of the product, not because of the lab and the efforts and the sort of going… if you do something that doesn’t work, you go, “Okay, let’s do it differently this time.” So it’s not just sheer repetition. [- Notre… le… the children, later in person_ s4. Leb ‘eea le଼ “偶 ‘ 되 later “ :B notiest…- on one irлкуing “.,..忽然亩 Давайте-bye « โอเค, l ‘ [o quite plump L. em Vちょ ( encara..-o2 humankind говоря. Is that I’ve had no contact. Nobody’s even contacted me and going, tell me more. And I’m active. I put out a lot of stuff And not just superficial stuff. I put out a lot of stuff and on LinkedIn, Facebook, Substack And I attempt to Use all of my nouns in it. In other words, if you’re gonna get somebody’s attention and such, you’ve gotta understand the psychology of communicating. How are you? Yeah. All right. A- and I’m not gonna be technical. Let’s lighten up and let’s present this in terms that you can understand. Let’s make it fun, and let’s make it through pictures through analogies and all the rest. That’s ways you can relate to this and go, “Oh, he’s talking about me. Yes, I can see that.” And so I work hard on that And like my last publication on LinkedIn 2,900 readers And I got two likes Then follow through about A. It’s not as if I didn’t have a CTA, a call to action or anything. It’s part of what’s happening out there. People are being absolutely deluged, and they’re dealing with shrinking attention spans. In other words, keep me laughing and keep me visually interested. Feed me eye candy, because if you don’t do that for five seconds, I’m out of here and onto the next. And even when there is valuable, beautiful information and articles all out there, you can’t sell it. You’ve gotta give it away. So it’s And much comes back to the filtering in the end again. What makes… What turns you on? What makes you tick? Looking to address all of that And then what makes you sick? It’s I can’t tell you how frustrating it is to have a dynamite mentality And not being able to communicate it, not being able to really get it across to… ‘Cause I’m not seeking to really make a killing and make a fortune And just seeking to make a difference, mate. Much like you . This is gonna sound funny to you. When people come in here, I say, “Guess what?” You’re not here to learn. You are here to unlearn To lose all of your preconceptions, lose all of your bad habits, lose all of your programming in order to return to the authentic, natural, healthy, vibrant state look, I’m sure I’ve drowned you in words. Make of it what you can, what you will 

Chris Badgett: David, this is awesome. And I love… You are, you’re a very powerful teacher, and the way you align all these things, it’s… I see the… it’s kind of mind-blowing really, just the way… I feel better after this conversation. I feel like I’ve come home a little bit more. 

David Labuschagne: Thank 

Chris Badgett: you. And that’s… What a great impact, you have. And I understand the the challenge to get it out there and to get people in, but your life’s work. You live your life’s work. It’s a beautiful thing. It’s a beautiful thing. And it’s a, it’s a legacy. It’s so many things. But as the poet Rumi says, “You’re dropping keys.” And that’s to the regular listeners 

David Labuschagne: Oh, I love… You just mentioned one, you just mentioned one of my favorite poets of all time. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Yeah. 

David Labuschagne: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: And keep up the amazing work and yeah, just helping people is what it’s all about. And the fact that you’re on here, helping, not just me, but the many people that are gonna listen to and watch this, is powerful. And that’s that’s the best marketing you can do. And Max Your Mojo is such a cool thing, and, people need to get on that. ‘Cause you’ve, you’ve given- You’ve been very generous in giving away a lot of your systems and values and insights, west ver- across east and integration and transcending and including all of that, while also, providing these frameworks like, what makes you tick, what makes you sick, and then what’s the fix. I love that so much. It’s so good. And and you’re honest about the long game. It’s 12 months, approximately, to walk out the door with your original eyeballs back on your head. That’s that’s so cool. That’s so cool. And I just say keep up the amazing work. This type of work really inspires me because people are struggling, and it feels like they’ve never struggled more. And then if you look at younger generations, the kids it’s hard out there. And there’s something that happens… we’re kinda up on time, but I really have one key question for you, if maybe you can answer it quickly. Oh, 

David Labuschagne: yeah. Sure. 

Chris Badgett: Is part of this coming home, it seems like with humans, a child is innocent and kind of home in a way, in a, in their immature young age, they’re home. And as we get older, we get further away from home a lot of the time. And, I guess speak to the parents in terms of- helping a child retain their sense of home and also being able to, go out into the cyclone, as you say, without losing center. And I’m sure it starts with the parent needs to work on themselves first, right? But like what do you say to parents? Like what’s your pearl of wisdom to parents when they’re holding this baby and what’s your pearl to, for parents? 

David Labuschagne: Oh, many responses. One is follow it and see what it eats. 

Chris Badgett: Okay. 

David Labuschagne: That’s… I don’t have any pat formulas, formulae that I can de- prescribe that way look And it’s interesting you’re talking about kids. Why? I walk down the street and I’m blown away. Why? ‘Cause on one side I see the kids all happy and jumping and skipping, making a noise, doing their kid thing And then I see the adults. “

Chris Badgett: What happened to your spark? What happened to your spark?” 

David Labuschagne: I don’t fly anymore And I see clearly what happens to people’s back. I’m afraid I’m going to have to wrap this up shortly. We’ve got a client coming through. 

Chris Badgett: Oh, that’s okay. 

David Labuschagne: So I can’t give you a, a pat answer to that. But it is An admonition. First, you know what a mantra is? 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. 

David Labuschagne: You know what my mantra is? Wow People would do well to embody that one. Look around and go, “Wow.” Methodologies, method, all the rest, keep it simple. Play. Don’t lose the play aspect. Don’t lose the play aspect. Like I said Olympians or their clients And as soon as you’ve lost that playful thing, as soon as you lose all of that, then it all becomes a grind. No, it’s a play. And it’s a tricky game, and it comes back to what I’ve shown you before with the ace, the hidden ace up your sleeve. Don’t lose- Whatever the game 

Chris Badgett: Well, that’s David Laboshane from kennergy.life. Check out Max Your Mojo, and thank you, David, so much for coming on the show. We really appreciate it 

David Labuschagne: Thank you for your time. Thank you for your ear. Thank you for your patience. Thank you for your interest. 

Chris Badgett: Thank you, David.

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/gift. Go to LifterLMS.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode

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Alex Standiford from Siren Affiliates, explains how AI-powered vibe coding can be used by non-developers, entrepreneurs, and course designers to create their own internal business tools, apps, and solutions without the requirement for traditional programming knowledge. Drawing on his more than ten years of expertise in software development, Alex argues that although AI makes coding more accessible, the proper foundations and development methods are necessary to produce dependable, scalable, and maintainable solutions.

He talks about typical issues including managing more complicated projects, technical debt, inconsistent AI-generated code, and losing context during lengthy coding sessions. In order to assist users in organizing their projects, reviewing AI-generated code, and avoiding typical development errors, he emphasizes the significance of coding patterns, such as adapter, factory, and registry patterns, as well as version control with Git and GitHub. Additionally, Alex provides real-world examples of how AI may be used to create bespoke dashboards, internet integrations, automatic podcast discovery systems, interactive product experiences, and internal business tools.

While highlighting the benefits of leveraging WordPress to create unique solutions through plugins and pre-existing connections, he describes how technologies like Docker, Railroad, DigitalOcean, and Vercel can facilitate the development and deployment process. He also talks about how his own job has changed from writing code to overseeing several development projects at once, coordinating AI agents, and evaluating their work.

Alex hopes to assist non-technical entrepreneurs in transforming their ideas into useful, dependable, and maintainable products with his new course, Vibe Coding Products for Scrappy Founders. He also expresses confidence about the future of open-source software like WordPress, outlining how AI makes these platforms even more beneficial for company owners looking to establish and expand their enterprises.

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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 LifterLMS, 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 good friend. He’s back on the show. It’s Alex Standiford. You can find him at sirenaffiliates.com. We’re gonna get into his course, which you can find at novatori.us, so that… The name of the business there is Novatorius, so novatori.us.

But first, Alex, welcome back on the show. 

Alex Standiford: Hey, Chris. I’m really excited to be here. It’s always– I always have a lot of fun on this show and always enjoy our conversations. I always look forward to it. 

Chris Badgett: Absolutely. And you’ve got a new course, which you’re really hitting something that the market desperately needs.

It’s called Vibe Coding Products for Scrappy Founders. Yeah. And, the w- the way I like to think about that is there’s just this crushing demand for people who are starting to build apps, non-developers, and, you can get far with AI, but you s- you need some help, and you need to do it the right way, and you don’t know what you don’t know.

So tell us the story of why you created Vibe Coding Products for Scrappy Founders, which, as of this recording, it’s about to launch. It hasn’t launched yet. Yep. But tell us about the course. Like, where… What’s the genesis of it? 

Alex Standiford: Yeah. The big thing is I I’m a product guy. I’ve been building products, I’ve been building s- solutions for, most of my career, and I realized that with AI, as it’s really taken off in this past year particularly I’m seeing a lot of people building things who haven’t had access to that before, right?

Who aren’t programmers, who don’t know how to do it or never had the education or took the time to learn how to do it, and they’re leveraging AI to build these entire products. And, but what I noticed was a lot of people… I was seeing a lot of problems. I was seeing a lot of commonalities where people were either, one, building something for themselves and weren’t really that worried about it ever actually becoming anything serious that other people would need to use or whatever.

And that’s fine. That’s a great use case for just vibe coding and not really worrying about the consequences ’cause it’s, as long as it isn’t something that somebody’s business or whatever depends on, it’s probably fine. But then I saw… I was seeing a lot of other people, especially in entrepreneurial circles and stuff like that, were building their products, intending to sell them.

And that’s a whole different thing because there’s no end to the coding, right? You don’t build something and then it’s done. It’s you build it, and then you’re adding new features, or you’re adding new capabilities, or people are running into all these different edge cases or all these other problems, and you have to maintain that code long term.

And AI, from my personal experience, is very good at writing code. It is not very good at writing consistent code that is architecturally sound. So in other words, that is something that can be maintained long term. And what I was seeing on a lot of subreddits and forums and conversations is that people were building these things and they would get 90% of the way there, and that last 10%, they couldn’t seem to get it right.

And it just seemed like everything was just falling apart and everything felt wobbly and kind of shaky, and people were feeling really frustrated by that. And then of course, there were other people talking about, running out of their usage limit or working like 20 hours in a single day because they felt like they couldn’t stop, because if they walked away from the chat, it would lose all of its context and now they have to figure out – they, they’re afraid that they’ll lose progress on where they are, the goal of this course is to combine my, decade plus of experience as a programmer and my knowledge in writing code and working with AI into something that is approachable for a non-developer, a non-technical person, to be able to sit down and learn how to build and maintain their products and help them get those products launched so that they’re able to actually make something that’s maintainable so they can get their business off the ground, and then probably eventually be able to offload that to a programmer and have the programmer be able to actually, work with it and not look at it and go, “Oh my gosh, we have to rebuild this whole thing 

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome.

And for the course creators out there, or if you’re running an agency and you’re of the more non-developer variety, one of the things I’m noticing in the market is courses by themselves are no longer enough. If you’re a course creator and you haven’t thought about it, maybe your course is gonna solve some kind of problem, and your course is mostly delivering information.

Today, information is getting disrupted by AI tools, where people go to AI to learn. So it’s like course plus. Yeah. If you’re gonna offer a course, what else? Are you gonna give community? Are you gonna give worksheets, templates, coaching? What else are you gonna add to that?

And sometimes people would really benefit from an app that helps them get the result promised in the marketing of the course. So if I was, teaching something like real estate sales and targeting real estate agents, I might also give them an app that helps with cold outreach or some kind of custom real estate agent CRM sales app thing.

Yeah. And I could– But as a non-technical founder, that person could Vibe Code that, and now they’re not just teaching sales techniques, they’re giving a tool that will help the learner implement what they learn. 

Alex Standiford: Yeah. And what’s interesting is it doesn’t even necessarily have to be a product, right? So the way it’s framed right now on the site is Vibe Coding products for scrappy founders.

But a lot of the stuff that I’ve been building has been around tooling and automations for my company to make it run more autonomously. For example one of the things that I’ve built was a tool that allows me to find podcasts to be on automatically, and it brings them to me and it sends it to me as a a list of recommendations or whatever for me to reach out to.

That, that is an internal tool that I’m using all the time and I’m making good use of. If you have the ability to work with AI and you can have a conversation with it to be able to build this stuff sustainably- It’s just generally a really good skill even if you’re not trying to build a product, right?

Because it allow– It just opens so many doors especially if you’re, budget conscious and there’s a few different tools that you don’t necessarily wanna, wanna pay for. I’m not saying you should go out there and build your own LMS or your own CMS or CRM or any of that stuff.

By all means, stick to what’s out there now. But maybe you create something that allows you to automatically connect one of those systems into your, an internal system or something like that, just to help take some of that friction off. I’ve seen a lot of a lot of, a c- of several of my clients, in fact, have already started doing that where they’re, they’re building out their own custom dashboards for their sales teams and stuff like that just because they can 

Chris Badgett: Yeah, I think those internal tools, we have so many dashboards and things now at Lifter, it’s awesome.

Yeah. And you’re right the internal tooling is super helpful. And you mentioned something which I think I’ve seen a pattern of, which is for somebody’s first tool, if you’re like, “What internal tool should I build?” Something that delivers I think of it a newsletter to yourself.

Alex Standiford: Yeah, 

Chris Badgett: a listening station. What- so that you can stay up to speed on what’s going on in your industry or across your, the key topics you need to be abreast on to just stay current and like a personal newsletter. Yeah. That could be a great first project, but what other kind of good first projects for internal tooling would you recommend?

Alex Standiford: Yeah. Obviously, like you just said, that’s a big one because you can find a lot of leads, you can find a lot of opportunities with that. So it’s really powerful in that regard. Another tool that we’ve built internally is a simple automation on our website, right? So we have several different extensions and customizations that we’ve made on our website that extends what it’s able to do.

Like for example our site now for these courses is using Lifter, of course, but it’s using it headlessly, which is a technical detail that doesn’t necessarily matter a lot here, but the point is we built that. That website I built was essentially vibe coded. It was built, steered by me, directed by me, but I didn’t write any of the code.

I had a system write that code for me based on, several weeks of iterating through design and stuff like that. But the the integration, for example, with Lifter, I have it set up to where it automatically connects with it, it uses it for access, it uses it for the purchase. Actually, we’re using WooCommerce on the back end as well, so it’s using the Lifter WooCommerce connection.

But then on top of that, it’s also leveraging Siren, which is my affiliate program product. But we have our own email system that we use, right? So that email system isn’t using like SendGrid or any- or Gmail or anything like that. We are using something that was way less expensive than what we were finding, and for us specifically, there was enough value to create an integration that allowed us to be able to work with that.

That’s not for everybody, right? Obviously, different people are gonna have different things there. It could depend on their kind of situation. But you could create more dynamic webpage demos, for example. So that’s been a big one for me, is I’ve been able to go a lot further on creating, Better web pages in general that are more interactive, that feel more like a team of 20 people did it instead of just me, right?

With animations and things like that. So that’s another big one that comes to mind for me, is just being able to promote your product better. 

Chris Badgett: Can you explain the concept of headless WordPress or headless LifterLMS? My understanding is it’s… I’ve, as a non-developer, I’ve always tried to figure it out, but I think my current understanding is the back end is powered by WordPress, but the front end website is not.

Is that- Yeah … what it is? 

Alex Standiford: Yeah. Basically it s- disconnects the front end of the website, what is displayed and presented, with the back end of the website, which is where, all the database queries, purchase orders, and all those details happen. And there’s a million different ways- 

Chris Badgett: Is that a static, is that a static site then, on the front?

Alex Standiford: Mine is, yeah. 

Chris Badgett: Okay. 

Alex Standiford: Yeah. And there’s a million different ways that you can approach that, right? Some people are using WordPress fully, CMS, all of its CMS capabilities, and having it generate statically. Some people are using a blend. I’m using a blend, ’cause it’s faster for my team and myself to be able to just generate the content with AI directly as files instead of using WordPress’s block editor today.

Or at least whenever we built it. That’s already, even that has changed in the last six months. I’m not e- don’t even necessarily think of that as a recommendation that you should do it that way. It just happened to be, with my background as a web developer, I’ve always preferred headless when I can, because it allows me to be it allows me to use WordPress when it makes sense, but if there’s a different service or somewhere else that I need to connect to that isn’t WordPress it just makes it a little bit easier in general.

That’s the real benefit of it. It adds, and it adds a fair bit of overhead, obviously, but most of that overhead’s been mitigated by AI. And AI’s really good at writing React code, which is a specific type of code that is very common on headless websites. And I just found that it was able, I was able, for my workflow with how much AI coding I’m doing I was able to leverage it headlessly more effectively than I was going through WordPress in the process.

That’s awesome. So for me, really it’s less about… I selected that workflow specifically because it was most compatible with how I work, right? If I was a person who preferred the block editor instead of being a programmer or any of that stuff I would probably have not gone headless. In fact, my own personal website isn’t headless right now for that very reason.

Chris Badgett: Let’s talk about your course a little more. There’s key pro- AI is super exciting, but- Yeah … when you start building an app for the public or for an internal tool, you kinda, in my experience, I’m thinking of a couple main problems. One is, as it gets complex, it’s really fun in the beginning, but then it starts getting complex and you lose context or, it gets really expensive ’cause it’s looking at everything all the time, and there’s that.

Alex Standiford: Yep. 

Chris Badgett: And then there’s versioning. Like- Yes … to a non-GitHub user, they don’t really understand the importance of versioning. 

Alex Standiford: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: And then the other one is just working on parts and I think you used the word scaffolding. 

Alex Standiford: Yes, 

Chris Badgett: scaffolding. So kinda, and that’s what you’re doing, is you’re taking, like, decades plus of developer experience and helping- Yeah

the vibe coder “Hey, we still need these fundamental software development things.” Like- Yeah … what are some of those problems and what are some of the solutions? 

Alex Standiford: Yeah. Basically what I’ve done you’re on the right track there for sure, is I’ve taken my decades plus of experience in coding and, working with big teams, small teams, everything in between, and said, “These are the things that you still need.

These are still the pillars of what, modern software development, with or without AI, you need to have. And here are the things that you probably don’t need.” So the, the biggest problem that I see with it is I call it like the Jenga effect. Jenga? ‘Cause that’s how it feels.

As you’re building, you’re it’s like you’re pulling out a block from the bottom and you’re sticking it on top, and it gets bigger and bigger, but inevi- but it becomes less stable as it grows. So that is what it feels like to build with AI, right? And the big thing that I wanna do is I help people make sure that they keep their foundation stable as they’re growing, right?

It’s almost like you’re able to take blocks from a different set and stack them on top and not give those up in the process. And developers call it technical debt, but basically it’s, things are becoming progressively less stable over time because we have taken shortcuts or we made decisions in the past that are incompatible with where we’re at now.

And that is the biggest problem, and what’s funny is that happens way faster with AI that is being steered by somebody who isn’t aware or hasn’t experienced the consequences of a bad coding decision, right? A, an experienced programmer can look at code. I’m at a spot where I’ll watch the AI agent working, and I’ll see code just flash on the screen for a second, and that’s all I need.

I see it for a second, I go, “Whoa, whoa, that smells funny. That’s a code smell. Stop. What are you doing? That’s… Stop. We need to…” But a non-developer doesn’t have that, right? They don’t have that experience, they don’t have that context. So a big part of my course is about helping them create the guardrails and put them on a setup that protects them from that as much as possible.

Chris Badgett: That’s really cool. And then there’s the re- code review is like a thing- yeah … where you develop something, but then you don’t just cross your fingers and hope it works. 

Alex Standiford: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: So how does a non-developer do code review on code they didn’t actually write? 

Alex Standiford: Yep. All of this leads to the concept of patterns, right?

One of the big things that I teach, the biggest pieces of this course, is a series of coding patterns. And you can think of these as almost like templates, right? That are not a specific programming language. They’re… Any language can apply these patterns, and you’re basically saying, for example, one of them is an adapter pattern, right?

And it’s saying, whenever you have a thing and it needs to become a different thing, you need a third thing in the middle that adapts those things together so they can connect and work, right? And that’s, that term is adapter, right? And then there’s other ones like factory and registry, and there’s several.

I think I have at least eight or 10, somewhere around in there. But these are all of the patterns that I have basically settled on where every problem I’ve ever run into from a programming perspective in web in my realm can be solved by a combination of these patterns. And the reason why patterns are so important is because it gives you a common language with the AI agent, right?

So instead of saying… Instead of looking at every line of code, you’re looking at the patterns. You’re talking to them in terms of patterns. You’re saying, “Okay, so here’s what I need. Here’s what we’re doing.” In my head, what are… You can ask the AI agent how do you propose that we build this?” Now, if you ask an AI agent that without the context, that language, right?

It would come back to you, and it would spit out a response. And to a non-technical person, that’s not gonna be easy to understand. But if you tell it, “How are we gonna build this? Here are the patterns that you’re allowed to use. Help me figure out how we’re gonna do this,” and then you’re able to have a discourse with it where it speaks to you in terms of patterns, and you’re able to say that doesn’t seem like that’s the right pattern.

I wonder if we should use this one,” or, “Why did you s- not select this?” It lets you have that conversation, and then whenever you’ve already talked about all that and you understand the patterns on how it’s gonna be built, now everything you need to build is effectively broken into small pieces, right?

Because now it’s like, okay, so we can now take this and break it into pieces because we know what patterns we’re gonna do, so we know what how that code is gonna be orchestrated, and we have a very clear way to break it into smaller pieces. So with that- Now you’re able to review that code in those small pieces, one piece at a time, and you’re also able to understand what that pattern is.

So you can take a look at it and you can say, “Okay, that looks like what that pattern is supposed to do. That matches my expectations.” Even if you don’t necessarily understand what every line of code is. And general- genuinely or generally a lot of the code review becomes less necessary because you are loading up front with that, right?

So most of it is just saying, did the AI agent use what we planned, or did it, go off the rails and do something weird? And usually that’s a quick two to three-minute glance. You look over, you go, “Yep, that looks like an adapter. Okay, as long as the test passed, let’s move on.”

And then of course, that process all happens in a version control system such as Git, which we can touch on that a little bit next. 

Chris Badgett: Before we go to Git- Yeah … since I’m learning for free here and getting a ton of value here- Yeah. What is a factory pattern? 

Alex Standiford: Yeah. So a factory pattern is basically i- imagine a factory, right? It produces widgets or a specific thing, right? So imagine a factory that does one thing. It’s spitting out sprockets all day, right? That’s effectively what that pattern is. It is a thing that produces one single type of thing. It might be able to create different ones with different num- like, different numbers of teeth or different diameters or things like that.

The shape of the thing it produces might be different. But generally, you look at them and you can go, “Oh yeah, these are all sprockets,” right? That’s how a factory works in real life usually. So that’s what a factory pattern does. So it says, it accepts inputs different things, different details on what it needs to know in order to be able to produce whatever it needs to produce, and then its output is the, the thing it needs to produce.

So it could be like, in a, in programming terms, that could be like a user factory. Maybe you have users on your product. Most products do, in fact. So you might have a user object, right? A thing that represents a user on your product, and a factory is the thing that helps you create that user object.

But what’s interesting is you could have multiple factories, right? So you might have one that is specifically for creating users from a LifterLMS plugin, right? So maybe I’m creating something that’s extending Lifter, and it’s also something that’s extending Siren, right? My product. You might have a factory that generates a user through a LifterLMS course person or a, a course creator or a customer, and that’s one factory, right?

It’s generating LifterLMS user factory, right? So it’s creating those users. And then you could turn right around and have the same thing from a Siren side, where it’s like Siren user factory, where it takes a collaborator in Siren and it generates it out as like a user. So those factories can do that one thing really well.

And since they’re both the same type of thing, then you can switch them out throughout your code and say, “Oh, for this one we need to use this factory instead of this one.” They’re all generating the same user object, but how they get there is different. 

Chris Badgett: So I know one big thing that a lot of people do with vibe coding is creating reports of some kind.

So would you have a report factory of sorts that’s- Yeah … it could be a different kind of report, but they all go through the same factory with similar output or whatever? 

Alex Standiford: Yeah, absolutely. So like an export of a CSV. So there could be a CSV factory that generates the CSV file whenever it’s being exported, or a PDF factory that generates it from a PDF, right?

It’s a single thing. It’s one job is to produce an out- an output like that. Exactly. 

Chris Badgett: And what’s… What happens when you don’t standardize these patterns? So- Like, how do people get off the rails with AI?

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Alex Standiford: Yeah. Th- and this is exactly why that is… That specific thing is important because now you’ve created one thing that does that one thing, and you can reuse that factory anywhere in your code.

But without that, what AI would do is it may not know that you’ve already created a way to generate users from LifterLMS, right? It may not know that, and it would just go, “Oh, okay. I need to go get the user from LifterLMS.” And this isn’t just AI, this is programmers, too. This is why we start… This is why whenever I’m, when I’ve wo- like at bigger companies that I’ve worked at, this is why we, as developers, as a team of developers, we speak in terms of patterns first because of this exact same thing.

So for example, they might say, or your AI agent might go, “Oh, I need to go get a user from Lifter,” right? And it will go, and it’ll get it, and it’ll create it, and it’ll write that code, and then three months later, you come back and you say, “Okay. I have this different thing of code, and it needs to create a user, too.”

So AI may not know or find that code where you’ve already solved this problem once, and it’ll do it again. So now you’ve got two different versions that are creating a user from LifterLMS or something like that, and they’re slightly different, or they’re slightly adjusted. And this is how you end up with those weird inconsistencies on your site where it’s like this thing created the user without any problem, but this thing over here for some reason doesn’t work.

Why is it not working here, but it works fine here? And it’s usually because of something like this, where the code has been created multiple times and there was some drift, or there was a bug that was solved in one and it wasn’t solved in the other one. So now the bug keeps on coming back in different places because you have to play Whac-A-Mole with all the different spots where that bug appears.

If you put it in a factory, it centralizes it all in one spot. So now that bug, you know it’s in that one factory, and you fix it there, and it’ll fix it everywhere 

Chris Badgett: I wanna give a specific example. As we’re talking, I’m thinking about Lifter users. A good internal tool you could create, particularly if you’re scaling, is you might have other coaches or tutors that work in your organization, and you may want some kind of custom app that you use internally.

Okay, this user ins- enrolled in the course, and you kinda create clients underneath these coaches or tutors, and it’s like this kinda separate thing that you manage your specific coaching or tutoring workflow. Yeah. That’s an example of a custom app you could build. 

Alex Standiford: And it’s funny you bring that up because that is a lot of the work.

So just real quick context for the listeners. Siren Affiliates is my is my product to manage and help people grow their businesses using incentive programs. And one of the challenges of my own product is it can build any kind of incentive program you can imagine, right? Anything from an affiliate program to you can have a course creator platform.

We did a video previously on how to create a clone of Udemy using LifterLMS Ninja Forms, and Siren, right? And Siren was able to keep track of how much money you owed to all of the course creators on your own platform-shaped course website, right? But the problem is that dashboard for that specific experience is absolutely gonna be tailored to that site, right?

I, as a product maker of Siren, would never be able to get that detailed because what you need from an experience standpoint is so custom to what you want that I will have trouble creating something that is as polished as you probably want it to be. And I think that’s what you’re getting at here, Chris, where it’s like, that front-end experience f- that, the user experience from that course, from the, the, the educator experience there, is absolutely something that is a great fit for this kind of thing, right?

Because you’re now able to create that extra polish on your website that allows your customers to be able to work with it. So in my case I have a customer who I’m working with who, who has this… They built this entire– they’ve effectively vibe coded this entire dashboard for a national p- pharmaceutical company that is selling, that has a sales teams and regions and all this stuff, and they used Siren’s system to, they use the engine behind Siren to make it work, but they aren’t touching my interface.

They built their entire, own entire interface on top of it, and it just connects to everything over the API. And it’s really, it’s actually really awesome. I’m actually a little jealous ’cause I would really like to have an opportunity to build something like that for Siren. But but it was really cool to see that.

But that’s a really good example of something that is such a good fit for this 

Chris Badgett: You mentioned Git. You didn’t say GitHub. And this whole thing of versioning control, and I think with the explosion of vibe coding- Yeah … there’s a lot of people starting to create GitHub accounts. But give us a general education on versioning Git versus GitHub and what, how it actually works and how to think about it for the, vibe coder that’s a non-developer.

Alex Standiford: Yeah. Git is– You can think of Git as, at its most basic level, the goal and purpose of it for a vibe coder, for somebody in this, in their situation, is to make sure that you always have an idea, or is to make sure that you always have a way to roll back to a previous version of your code if you need to, or to go back and look at what it was in the past.

Basically it’s history. It gives you a history of your whatever you’re pushing up there. So generally, that’s code, but it could be really anything text-based. It’s gen- it’s, agnostic in that way. It can be whatever you need. But the, at its base, that’s its core fundamental value and why it’s important, especially with AI, because if you’re ha- if you’re working with it and it made a whole bunch of changes to your code on your computer and you’re like, “Oh man, this is way off I just need to start over.”

If you don’t have Git or you weren’t using Git, you might not be able to, right? ‘Cause it’s been just changing files on your computer all day, and how do you revert? How do you get it back? You can ask the AI, “Can you put it back?” It’ll try, but it’ll probably make more mistakes and you’ll never quite get it back to where it was.

But if you’re using Git and your AI agent is, properly committing, in other words, adding updates to it and add- creating snapshots of your code frequently enough or at the right times you’ll be able to say, “This is really not working. Can we just roll this, can we roll it back to where we started this morning?”

And then the AI agent can roll it back 100% confidently without it needing to guess at what it’s doing. At the most basic level that’s the, the key thing. There’s also some other things, like it helps you with reviewing code a little bit because you can you can set it up to where it shows you the difference between where it was this morning and where it is now, and it’ll– and you can use GitHub or some other system like that to look at the difference between what it looks like now and what it looked like then.

And it’ll show you here’s all the code lines that were added, here’s everything that was removed. So you can get a really clear before and after picture and be able to understand what’s going on. 

Chris Badgett: Did you lay the foundational pieces for like what a beginner vibe coder needs? So for example, we’re talking about Git.

G- let’s say somebody like builds an app and they’re inside, ChatGPT or Claude Code or something like that. But you actually have to publish it somewhere. It may need a database. It may need a way to notify you or something like that. What… If you could just give a beginner vibe coder the essential stack of tools besides the AI tool, what do they need for an app?

When let’s say it’s internal, but it needs to be public-facing, like people at different computers need to be able to use it. 

Alex Standiford: There’s obviously many ways to approach that, but the simplest way to put it is they need a host, which is essentially somebody else’s computer that you’re borrowing, right?

And that computer is optimized. Not just some dude in the basement or whatever. It’s like an actual company that has a server, right? But you need a host to host that whatever your code is. In the 

Chris Badgett: cloud, essentially. 

Alex Standiford: In the cloud, yes, exactly. Yeah. You need a host for that. You need a way to get the code onto that host, which actually GitHub, which is which is essentially Git.

It is Git, but it’s like a service that allows you to give you… It gives you a UI in the browser. It lets you push code onto a server, their server, so that it doesn’t get lost or anything like that and stuff like that. So you definitely need that, but you need a way to push the code to your server consistently and securely.

You need backups, a way to be able to back up your stuff automatically, which most hosts provide. You need a way to be able to run the system on your own machine separately from on a server, so that you can build it, test it, work with it safely, create a s- basically a sandbox environment where you can tinker and figure out what’s going on.

And essentially those are the key pieces. It’s really those four pieces at minimum. Depending on what language your system is written in that might be… If you’re on WordPress and you’re building a WordPress, you could, that could just be a WordPress plugin, and what’s, this is what’s great about WordPress, is it collapses all of that into its own ecosystem.

That has been, been WordPress’s calling card. One of its best, most powerful things is it takes all of those four individual things and it just makes it a, a simple thing, right? So from a WordPress perspective, if you’re building a WordPress plugin, it’s literally- you would build the plugin locally.

You’d probably use something like Local by Flywheel or some other local w- WordPress development tool that basically sets up the environment for you locally. You would build the plugin in that local environment with your AI agent, and then whenever you’re done, you would ask the AI agent to zip it up, or you would ask…

Honestly, you probably should ask the AI agent to create a script that will zip it up for you, and then you can just upload it manually onto your site and update it to the next version, just like any other WordPress plugin. And then all of a sudden you have that whole stack. It’s all there and, taken care of.

But if you’re not on WordPress, then the process obviously is gonna be different depending on what you’re what host or provider you’re using. But all of them generally have pretty good workflows, and they’re all very motivated to make it compatible with AI. More often than not, you’re able to pretty safely just push to your deployment envir- your server without too much trouble.

Chris Badgett: Most apps collect some kind of data. So is the database, is that something that the host usually provides? Or how does- Yeah … how does one think about storing of the data? 

Alex Standiford: Yeah. I one… It, again, that one depends on the tool and it also depends on the app, right? Some apps can get by without a database, but you’re right, 9 times out of 10 you probably want a database.

So they all have the ability to do it to provide you with a database to be able to save your stuff to at varying levels of complexity, right? One of them, for example, that I’ve worked with that’s not WordPress is Railway. They have a… They treat each piece as its own little container almost.

So you have the, your actual app, and then you have your database, and then you have, maybe the front end of the site or whatever, and they’re all s- three separate concepts and you’re able to configure backups and all that stuff directly through there. But again, if you’re on WordPress, you get the backups, you get the hosting, you get all that stuff for free.

If you’re looking, if you are building with Lifter and we’re talking in terms of vibe coding something that extends your WordPress website you’re probably just building a WordPress plugin or extending or modifying your theme, which the benefit of that, of course, is you’re getting the backups for free.

C- not for free, but almost all hosts provide backups these days. That’s pretty much a standard thing for WordPress. You’re getting, the, the database is just a part of it, right? Plus an, a database schema that already exists, so you don’t have to design the whole database yourself.

It’s already built. You’re just using what’s in WordPress most of the time. And you also have a pretty clear process for deploying that feels very natural to anybody who is WordPress users, ’cause ultimately your plugin just becomes a zip file that you just upload onto your site, and then you can upload it on staging or a staging site to test it or whatever.

But all of that stuff is very familiar to a WordPress user, so it’s, if I was vibe coding a product as a course creator, which I guess, I kinda am I would be leaning on, I would be leaning on WordPress where I can, building plugins and building things like that. A lot of my internal tools are just WordPress plugins 

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome.

And just a quick related question, if somebody’s building an internal tool and it’s not on WordPress, what do you recommend for a host? And then you also me- recommended needing something for local development. Yeah. What would you recommend for those two? 

Alex Standiford: Yeah, so 

Chris Badgett: the- ‘Cause we all know that this audience will know WordPress hosting very well.

Yeah. But do you just still use the same one, or do you use DigitalOcean or something different? What’s vibe coder beginner friendly?

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Alex Standiford: Yeah. I’m really liking Railway right now. Yeah … it’s been, it’s just… It has everything I need. It’s affordable. It scales without me needing to mess with it.

I think DigitalOcean is really good as well. I have a couple things that I’m running on DigitalOcean, but it’s a little more hands-off than Railway is. I… railway holds your hand a little more and kinda makes that process a little bit easier. And to be honest I haven’t really interacted with the interface in Railway at all.

Very little, because my AI agent just did it, right? Because Railway has- It’s 

Chris Badgett: connected, 

Alex Standiford: right? Yeah. It has a, it has its own, command line interface that the AI agent is able to work with. I just authenti- I just get logged in, I get it set up, and then I’m like, “Okay, go do,” go make the site…

Go make this exist on Railway.” And it just does, right? Not saying you can’t do that with DigitalOcean and other things like that, but I just, I’ve really been enjoying that. Railway is particularly good with PHP, which of course is where most of my code is… Most of my code is written in PHP because of my background in WordPress.

Siren’s in PHP. I have a framework that I have called PHP Nomad which obviously is built very AI agentic friendly. It implements all these patterns that I talk about in the course. It can be used to build WordPress plugins. It can be used to build non-WordPress plugins. It can be used to be built, to build things that works both as a WordPress plugin and not.

In fact, that’s what Siren is, right? Siren has two different editions. It has the self-hosted edition, which is the WordPress plugin, and then it has the SaaS version, which is for people to log in and create the account. The software is the same between the two of them. It’s just using PHP Nomad, and it’s converting between WordPress and non-WordPress.

And guess what? A lot of that stuff are using adapters to adapt it to and from those different places. But Railway’s really good. If you’re talking in terms of JavaScript or something like that I use Vercel for a lot of my front-end stuff. Very easy. Very friendly for getting deployed and getting it out the door.

Those are great starting points. I could get into the details of why you might wanna move away from something like that in the future, but honestly, it’s kinda like buying your first guitar. It’s like you don’t know what you don’t know. Just buy a guitar and play until you realize what you miss, what you wish you had, and then that’s how you know 

Chris Badgett: What about local development?

What’s the difference between using the Claude desktop app locally on your computer versus local development of another kind? 

Alex Standiford: Yeah. So that line is starting to blur more and more as time goes on. Okay. But right now the, the Claude desktop app generally feels more like a, an assist- not just Claude, but also ChatGPT’s assistant.

They– It feels more like an assistant that can kinda help you do things on your computer, right? It can open your web browser and click through stuff and do things like that. But Claude Code and Codex, which are the two primary ones that I think most, most people are using right now at least,

Chris Badgett: Cursor’s another one, right?

Alex Standiford: Cursor’s another one, yeah. I don’t even use an ID- a code editor anymore. I’m just using my terminal, and I’m just working directly inside of it from there. But that’s, that’s a, just a personal preference thing. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with using Cursor or any kind of code editor.

The way I’m designing the course is it’s around the essentials and the fundamentals on how your… It’s about your relationship with the AI more than anything. I try to avoid getting too in the thick of those different tools. But most of the stuff that I’m doing these days, I’m just using Docker.

I’m using Docker containers and Docker Compose, which I woul, to be honest, because three years ago I would’ve never in a million years said to somebody who’s never written code, “Go use Docker.” But now here we are, because AI is able to use it. It just solves so many of those problems, because what it– So many problems, ’cause what it does is it basically creates like a bubble in your computer, like a container in your computer, and it installs everything it needs inside of that container, like p- all the dependencies that your software might need for your hosting environment and all this.

It installs them all in this nice little, this little bubble, this container, and it just works. You don’t have to install all this stuff on your computer that’s special for that software. It’s all installed inside of that container. And what’s really amazing about that is then once you do that, you can now, whenever the time comes to get that on your server or on your host, you just take, you just have it use Docker too, and it uses the same container configuration.

So now you don’t have to figure out how to manually install all the dependencies on that system. You just install Docker. You say, “Here’s the file that you need to set up this system. Go use it.” And it just does it 

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. 

Alex Standiford: Yeah, it’s so much easier. 

Chris Badgett: And one more question for you. I know we’re over.

Do you have a few more minutes? 

Alex Standiford: I’ve got nothing but time, Chris. 

Chris Badgett: We’ve been talking a lot about the, the beginner vibe coder, but you yourself as an advanced developer, I think people are curious, and I’ve seen this pattern where some of the best developers I know say things like you said before we started recording, where you haven’t personally written a line of code since January.

Alex Standiford: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: So how do you get there a- as a more advanced developer, and what does that mean, and what do you… just tell us about that transition, ’cause that’s a big change in society- … in the world of software development. 

Alex Standiford: Yes. I remember the ex- yeah I was dealing with an existential crisis in the month of December of last year.

Yes, I really was. And it’s,

Chris Badgett: So you’re more of an orchestrator now than a developer. 

Alex Standiford: Abs- 100%. Yeah. But- it’s orchestration, it’s review. The biggest challenge has been switching- As programmers, we are trained and the environment around us is built to protect deep work, our deep work. We are trained and our brains get wired, have been wired to go deep on a problem, be deep in the woods.

We like it there. We’re comfortable there. That’s why whenever you talk to a programmer, they always inevitably start talking about the trees, even though you’re looking at the forest. You know what I mean? Because they like it. That’s where they’re comfortable. That’s where they’re cozy. Everything about a developer’s experience is that.

And if you look at company infrastructures and setups and software companies, they’ve built the entire company around protecting the developer’s ability to do that as much as possible. And that that has largely gone away. That’s been the biggest challenge for me is I am no longer going really deep on one problem like I used to anymore.

I am going a little deep, deep enough, but still needed to be able to know when I need to pay attention and go deeper on different things. But I’m doing it concurrently across multiple things. It feels like I’m spinning plates, right? Or I’m juggling. And that is not something that I personally…

That was a strength of mine because I was a developer. And before I was a developer, I was a mechanical engineer for a decade before that, and it was the same exact thing. It was leave me alone, I’m creating a 3D model, I’m not gonna be available for four hours, and I just wanna turn on my music, jam to some heavy metal, and just make something, right?

And that’s largely gone, which genuinely is painful. That really hurts. It sucks because it was so satisfying to get to build, right? There was a lot of art in that, right? And, but so the biggest shift for me professionally though, aside from the existential crises and all the other things that come with, you know, why am I here?

Why am I a developer? What is my role in this world professionally now that this agent can do something that takes me months and, a day? And a lot of that has become learning how to context switch better, right? That’s been a muscle I’ve had to train and work on. And to be honest, it’s a muscle that I’ve really needed to work on in general as an entrepreneur, as a founder, as a business owner.

You’re wearing hats all day, you’re changing hats all day. Programmers aren’t typically that great at that. And that’s been the biggest change for me professionally is learning how to do that. It’s helping me in other areas as a result, but that, that was a pretty painful transition. I remember just…

even still now, I will just end my day utterly exhausted compared to what I was before because context switching is expensive. And, your brain has to get rewired to learn how to do that 

Chris Badgett: So it’s kinda like as a pure developer in the old world, you’re a specialist, and now you’re having to figure out how to be a generalist and then orchestrate all these s- plates at the same time.

Alex Standiford: Yes, exactly. 

Chris Badgett: But, you’re smiling now so I’m gonna- Yeah … ask, like, how did you solve the existential crisis? Like, how did you cross the chasm? 

Alex Standiford: As I was spinning plates, I realized that the problem I’m facing right now is I’m spinning plates. It the, the problem just kinda elevated to another tier, so now any of my technical stuff from a developer standpoint is being poured into…

my outlet for that is being poured into, how can I orchestrate these systems to run more effectively these AI systems? How can I push that envelope to where they are not forcing me to context switch so much, where they are doing things and going longer without needing me, where I’m able to figure out where I am essential and where I’m maybe not so essential and how to make sure that whenever I do need to be in that flow state, that the flow state is still preserved at the right time.

And honestly, a lot of those challenges are the spirit of this course, right? Because that’s a lot of the stuff I’m talking about is, how I overcame spinning those plates and feeling tired and feeling exhausted and getting frustrated with it being 90% of the way there and working till way past 5:00 because I’m afraid of stopping because I don’t wanna lose my context or what’s in my head.

Those, a lot of those problems aren’t new. It’s just they’re… All the shakeup is making them appear in new ways. The, a lot of the, a lot of the work in this course has been, is very technical in nature because it is me showing and teaching, “Here’s how I’ve overcome this. Here’s how I’ve been able to minimize my own context switching, and here’s how I’ve been able to make sure that, AI is working reliably, and here’s where I’m at right now.”

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I feel like we’re in a, what I call a WordPress moment. Yeah. So I’m not a developer, but when WordPress came around, I could build websites and s- web applications for people, and got bigger and started incorporating real developers and designers and things into the team. But now with vibe coding it’s that same moment just like WordPress was for me.

Oh, I can build a website. Now I can build apps- 

Alex Standiford: Yep … 

Chris Badgett: and do development essentially without necessarily needing to understand every single character and line of code. Yeah. That’s what WordPress did for me in 2008 or whatever it was. 

Alex Standiford: Yeah. And it’s funny you say that. I actually think that a lot of people in the WordPress space have gravitated to AI pretty fast.

I feel like a lot of the people I’m following on Twitter, a lot of my friends and a lot of people I’ve known for a long time have really stepped into AI pretty quick. They were all for it, excited about it, and I genuinely believe it’s because they recognize that pattern, right? I certainly do.

I saw it, and I see it in the same way. I see this as a WordPress moment. I see this as a, I told myself even back whenever I first saw AI, like the first moment, I r- you- I remember the day I used ChatGPT in like 2021 or 2022, I can’t remember exactly what year, but I used it and I was like, “Oh, this is it.”

This is that once every few decades disruption that, And I was a little late in WordPress. I didn’t really come in until 2014, 2015, and there was a lot of things that were already established. I told myself, I was like, “I am not gonna be late to this party.” I am, I m- I know where this is going.

I know how this is gonna work, and I know how it’s gonna play out broadly just ’cause I’ve already seen it. I watched it happen right in front of me, and I’m like, “I’m gonna be on the front end of this wave for sure.” 

Chris Badgett: Let’s put a little hope and optimism out in the world, ’cause- 

Alex Standiford: Yeah … 

Chris Badgett: I see some…

there’s some… I’m not talking about AI doomerism- Yeah … or WordPress. What I’m more talking about is oh, WordPress is dead, or websites are dead. Yeah. The whole economy’s gonna be agents or whatever, but- Yeah … I see it like WordPress is awesome because- Yeah … and it’s still…

It’s just saying email is dead or SEO is dead. Those things aren’t dead, but it’s changing, and there’s more things around at the party. But WordPress is open source, which means that, AI can see all the code in every WordPress plugin or theme or in WordPress core that’s ever been written.

That’s a pretty cool thing. Yeah. And by the way, there’s a lot of smart people like Alex and many others in this community that love this stuff. There’s this whole community. It’s not like a small closed company. But give us some WordPress optimism. 

Alex Standiford: Yeah. So I always in general, I just always bet on open source.

Even with AI, I’m still betting big on open models, like open source models and stuff like that because I think that they’re the future in the same way that I believe WordPress was the future whenever it first came out, right? And but I think that in terms of WordPress specifically, there’s a couple things there.

One if you think back to what I was just talking about, all the de- deployment flows and all the different ways you can do that, right? It’s pretty tough to beat, or you could just upload a plugin. You know what I mean? That’s incredible to me. And w- AI has definitely made working with WordPress easier.

I’m not working in it nearly as much as I used to, as much as with it. WordPress is still in my stack, and that’s another factor. I– After everything I’ve just told you, all my capabilities, I have not written a single line of code myself, but by driving and steering AI, I have written probably a decade’s worth of code this year so far that I’m using, that I have access to.

It is… i’m not even exaggerating at all when I say that is how much more code I’m writing, right? I am that far ahead, and in spite of that, I’m still using WordPress for large pieces of my site. I’m still using it for my backend, for my Novatorius website. I’m still using it, I’m still using Lifter to manage engage, like the access controls, courses, and all that stuff.

I’m still using eCommerce. I’m still using WooCommerce for that. And that’s… it may not be the way I work with it has changed drastically, right? I don’t work inside of the block editor like I did a few years back necessarily because I found that six months ago, whenever I built my sites, which, in AI terms was an eternity I was faster at cr- producing content without the block editor.

But that doesn’t mean that’s the case now. I don’t even know, to be honest. I guess I did build a site earlier this year with- for a client where we did a lot of AI stuff, building custom blocks and stuff like that. So it’s all still there, and it’s all still relevant and still good. There’s still huge companies that are still absolutely leveraging WordPress.

And there’s no even just like Gravity Forms, for example, is another one, or Ninja Forms or the forms plugins. They have so many integrations. They’ve already solved this problem, and if you’re using something like WordPress and you’re integrating with what’s already in WordPress, you’re still solving that same problem that WordPress initially solved for people, which was, I don’t have to write as much code.

And that has always been a big benefit for WordPress, and I think that the people who are saying WordPress is completely dead because I can write and maintain more code than I’ve ever been able to write and maintain are filling the wrong bucket, is kinda how I think about it. And what I mean by that is there was a vacuum in my availability as a programmer, right?

Because all of a sudden, I don’t need to review as much. I don’t need to write as much. This whole thing that I was having to do evaporated literally overnight, all of what do you do with that time? I personally don’t wanna just write more code. I have all these other things that have been holding me back because I’ve been writing too much code.

I don’t know, finding some customers, doing a little more marketing, getting on podcasts doing the things that I know I should be doing, but I don’t have time to do it ’cause I was too busy writing code. And I think that WordPress still solves a lot of that because it makes it to where you’re able to still get the same solutions and build those customizations without needing to reinvent everything in the process.

That’s still true today in WordPress, and just because the price of that is cheaper than ever doesn’t mean that the cost of maintaining that long term is as cheap as you think it is. 

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. That’s Alex Standiford. Go check out Siren Affiliates. It’s not just an affiliate platform, it does all kinds of partnerships.

Go check out pa- past episodes I’ve done with Alex on Siren. Go check out our YouTube video on how to build a Udemy clone with LifterLMS and Siren. By the way, if you’re… connect your AI tools and you feed it the transcript of that video about how to build a YouTube or sorry, a Udemy clone your AI tool’s gonna help you do that even faster, which is Alex’s point about accelerating speed and freeing up time to do more things.

And go check out his course. That’s at novatori.us, so Novatorius? 

Alex Standiford: Yep. 

Chris Badgett: And I wanna thank you for coming on the show, Alex. I can’t wait to see where you are in a year. It’s probably gonna be six months or even three months, we’re gonna do this again- Yeah … and the world will have changed again. 

Alex Standiford: No kidding.

Chris Badgett: But thanks for coming on. Any final words for the folks out there, or how to connect and how to get involved? And by the way, I just wanna say, Alex, one of the ways he was able to cross the chasm from developer to orchestrator is he’s always been an entrepreneur, so he’s always been spinning a lot of plates.

But now he can spin more plates. 

Alex Standiford: Yes. Yes, absolutely. That was a big thing. Yeah, I guess the only other thing that I might wanna add there is just just keep going. Things are off right now, and information is really in a weird spot. Even with my, the course that I’m launching it’s…

a lot of the information on that course is oftentimes things that can be done discovered or figured out through AI with a little bit of time. But to me, it’s all about being a curator, right? I’m curating good content and I’m bringing it together, and that is the fun- fundamental value that I think my course has, and I think that in terms of courses and course content in general, that still is true.

And information has always been accessible to us ever since the internet has been a thing, and don’t get discouraged by that and just, be a good curator and provide the right kind of content, and I think, if you find the right audience it’ll it’ll grow. 

Chris Badgett: So if you’re getting into vibe coding, put Alex Standiford in your corner.

He’s an excellent developer, but he’s also a great teacher and guide. So thanks for coming on the show, Alex, we really appreciate it. 

Alex Standiford: Yeah, thanks Chris.

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/gift. Go to lifterlms.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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Dr. Scott describes how he used LifterLMS to transform his expertise as a college chemistry professor into a profitable online learning company called Learn with Dr. Scott. He describes how, in order to have control over his website, courses, fees, and the entire student experience, he began with phone tutoring, switched to Zoom lessons, and ultimately built his own WordPress-based platform in 2019.

His approach to teaching is based on simplifying and making difficult science understandable. His classes employ mastery-based learning, in which pupils continue to study until they fully comprehend the material. Students do printed worksheets with pen and paper, accompanied by theoretical teachings and thorough walkthrough videos, rather than using automated quizzes or multiple-choice exams. In order to allow pupils to concentrate on truly comprehending science, he purposefully reduces difficult math.

Scott’s success was largely attributed to his discovery of the homeschool market. At first, his classes were designed to prepare students for college, but he was asked to develop scientific courses by homeschooling families. He came to the conclusion that parents required a well-structured curriculum without having to devote hundreds of hours to its creation and administration. His marketing strategy evolved into this: parents simply need to spend a few minutes per week ensuring their children are following the course, while Scott provides the curriculum, worksheets, explanations, and structure. He also discusses how he came up with his pricing and business plan.

He provides an economical $20/month subscription with unlimited access but no personal assistance, alongside higher-priced courses costing about $300–$400 that include lifelong access, grading, email support, and Zoom help. Over time, he discovered that families preferred the low-cost, flexible, self-directed option to traditional teacher-supported online education. His experience with AI and seasonality is among the most fascinating aspects.

Strong sales around September, some activity in January and February when families switched curriculum, and very little activity in May were the typical cycles of his homeschool company. However, he discovered that this trend altered very rapidly. Despite doing almost no marketing during that time, he observed purchases in May and July, and he thinks AI systems may have begun driving more people to his website.

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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 LifterLMS, 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. His name is Dr. Scott Beaver. You can find him at learnwithdrscott.com. Scott teaches hard sciences, I believe Spanish, meditation, and some other things. He’s a prolific course creator and provides a lot of value to homeschooling families as well as even college people who are behind on some of their chemistry and other things.

But first, welcome to the show S- Scott. 

Dr. Scott: Thanks, Chris. Nice to be here. 

Chris Badgett: I’m really excited to get into it with you. From my research, you started using LifterLMS in 2019. I know you were a college professor, and you ended up on a beach, and you really made- … a major change in your life. Tell us what happened.

Dr. Scott: Yeah, I was as Chris said, I was a, a college chemistry professor among other things. I decided to maybe take a month off and hang out on a remote beach in Mexico, and it was kinda time to maybe get back to work or something like that. And this was, like, 10 years ago. Somebody, a parent called me, asked if I could do basically a tutoring lesson on the telephone, which I had never done before.

And I said okay. Sounds, sounds, sounds fun.” I did it, and then it it occurred to me to use Zoom video conferencing to have classes online. And I was I was doing that for some years, picking up a lot of students. And it was getting to the point that I was spending more time with files, like sending kids videos, sending kids worksheets, checking emails.

I had… I was like, “Man I have a kind of a heavy lifting problem here with all these files.” And I started searching for different LMSs, and I really wanted something I could build my own website and have control over the thing, as opposed to, just using a platform where you end up at the mercy of the platform.

And I saw LifterLMS. It integrates real, real easy with WordPress. And yeah, it’s been quite a few years, and I’ve been quite, quite a happy quite a happy LifterLMS user since then. So 

Chris Badgett: that’s- That’s awesome … that’s just- Was that your first introduction to WordPress, or had you already been playing around with that?

Dr. Scott: That was also my first introduction to WordPress. The first website I’ve had a lot of web building experience. I guess when I was in when I was in graduate school, I was building just HTML, PHP websites, kinda, may- maybe kinda nerdy, but there was no no, no WordPress, no nothing, just kinda code.

And then, yeah, a lot had happened in the years. I hadn’t done anything web-oriented for probably 10, 15 years or so and started getting into WordPress about that time. So yeah, Learn with Dr. Scott was the first first WordPress implementation that I did. 

Chris Badgett: Did you find it easy to get started with because you already had the background in PHP and everything else?

Dr. Scott: Yeah, I thought it was incredibly easy. I was, dreading coding another website and, it was… I thought it was gonna take forever, and then I realized that the technology had kinda come to the point that it was sorta drag and drop and a lot easier to sorta develop products without having to worry about the actual website development.

More or less just kinda works, and if not there’s a plugin that solves that problem.

Chris Badgett: So tell us about your teaching method. What are the courses like? And I think you have something where the, the students do a self-evaluation- 

… 

Chris Badgett: Be- before you come back. Tell us how that works. 

Dr. Scott: Yeah. So the idea is basically to have the world’s easiest science classes that at the same time are rigorous.

And a lot of people think that rigorous means it has to be difficult or complex. It’s just kinda… It’s more about the structure of the thing, how one thing builds on another so that students can get basically experience learning how to create structure for themselves.

That’s the key skill I see that helps people have success in college- … understanding the format of a course, how it’s structured, learning how to learn. And then I do… As, as far as the website goes, it’s basically what’s called mastery-based grading, which just means that you go through the material, you just keep working at it till you get 100% 100% of the knowledge.

And as, as far as structuring things, I kinda have it structured a little bit like an old school college classroom where you had lecture and recitation. So during the lecture, there’s basically an hour of videos that are explaining things theoretically, and then they the learners get a worksheet that they print out and, work through with a pen and paper to get the hand-eye coordinated hand-eye coordination emphasized ’cause I, I think it, does a lot for helping develop the brain.

And then there’s basically a second set of videos where I’ve pointed the camera down. You tend to be looking at my paper in my hand with my pen writing out the answers and explaining every detail of everything so that I, basically do questions by email and telephone, but get very few questions from parents ’cause it’s complete.

It has the theoretical side of things, it has the practical side of things, and it basically kinda helps learners learn how they learn, some people like to hear the theory and figure out their process. Some people just learn by copying, that was traditionally Maybe considered a no-no in the education world, but the fact of the matter is a lot of, we’re, our mind is built to mimic what we see.

It’s obviously like a first step kind of copying until you get comfortable with it and then taking off on your own. But the idea is basically to kinda give learners that spectrum between theory and practice and find, the optimal point for them because everybody just learns differently and it’s, it’s important to find a, an online course that matches your learning style.

That’s the most important thing to me. And maybe just to point out too, so that’s the, the, the, the company is called Easy Hard Science, so that’s kind of the hard science aspect of it. It’s, quote, “rigorous,” it lets students find their learning style. And then the easy part of it is I made basically science courses with very little math in them.

We work with the numbers zero through nine so that everything can be counted on the on the fingers. So there’s no no like advanced math. That’s kind of a major stumbling block for a lot of people is that they wanna take a science course and then it ends up just being a bunch of math problems and neither the math nor the science gets learned.

So it’s it’s a nice easy format for people that, maybe don’t wanna end up being career scientists. They wanna get some science, but don’t need all the hardcore math. And then that kind of opened up a door to another market segment as well is like younger gifted learners, which I was one.

When I was young, I was taken out of the regular classroom and put in like the advanced classroom, and there’s a lot of, younger learners that have a lot of interest in science but they’re not ready for the math yet. So it’s it’s nice for the younger gifted populations, as well as those that just want a rigorous science background, without all the struggling through the math.

Chris Badgett: You mentioned a lot already, but the question is how do you make people fall in love with science? You’ve mentioned different learning styles, like theory, practice, copying. 

You mentioned removing the math part, which tends to hang people up. But what else do you do to just make it fun and enjoyable?

And yeah that’s the emphasis- I’m sure it’s really 

Dr. Scott: satisfying … is having a fun class, being interactive, with the learners when we’re on, when we’re on Zoom. And basically just bringing my personal story into the lessons as well, showing people what I’ve managed to do with science.

I’ve done a lot of hardcore scientific things, but also just, kind of globe trekking, setting up websites at the beach. Oh, y- you give people a, a look into the, the personal life and what’s what’s possible with teaching. A lot of people have this sort of very sort of static, rigid classroom in their mind, and that’s, that, it doesn’t have to be that way.

There’s a lot more to be, a lot more to be had, fun to be had with education 

Chris Badgett: Did you kinda deliberately target homeschoolers somewhat? Or did that just emerge as “Oh, I have a lot of homeschool families interested”?

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Dr. Scott: Yeah that actually just emerged. I was kinda mostly focusing on like college prep because I was I was a college chemistry professor.

I taught I taught some classes at c- community colleges that was like a chemistry, like pre-college course that we forced students to take it, but it was too preliminary. It didn’t actually count for credit. So I was basically kinda helping people like kinda save a year getting into college, being up to speed.

And then I started having homeschooling groups sorta ask me if I could put courses together for them, and then I started going more so in the homeschooling direction ’cause it was fun working with with the younger learners that really had an interest in science. And, as, as, as, as opposed to, to kinda elaborate on the last question about making people fall in love with science, it’s a little bit of little bit of a job with the older learners to kinda connect with them.

But the younger gifted learners just had this appetite, this love for science, and it was it was a vacuum to fill. So it made made my life really easy having such a motivated motivated group of families to work with. 

Chris Badgett: How do you, if somebody else is like a professor or a teacher and they’re interested in your journey- 

What’s your experience and advice for selling chemistry to like non-chemists, like to, to the parents? ‘Cause it’s one thing if like the student buys, but I’m imagining the parent buys often. So h- that sounds like a little tr- tricky to make happen. How did you do it? What advice do you have? 

Dr. Scott: Yeah. It’s very interesting that you said that because the, the product’s for kids, but we’re marketing to parents.

That was definitely a major optimization point that took some years to figure out. But ba- basically what I what I promise the parents is, I want five minutes of your time every week. If you spend five minutes to set a schedule, give the kids a block of time to work with, you don’t have to actually check the work, you don’t have to get involved in the nitty-gritty details of the periodic table or some chemistry reaction.

Just see that they’re working, see that they have the worksheet, see that the information flows. Usually people kind of email in the work every week and, basically take five minutes of responsibility and everything’s just gonna, just gonna happen. So it’s selling the possibility of an autopilot button to the parents.

A lot of them, as you probably know, is homeschooling parents. Some, some homeschooling parents put together the whole curriculum and they spend all summer looking for, looking for materials and it’s maybe doable, up to about middle school or something. But a- asking a parent to put together like a chemistry course or a biology course or, anything quote rigorous where one lesson builds on the next, it becomes more than a year’s work to put together a year’s worth of schooling.

So ba- basically saving, saving tons of time and having a really high quality outcome in terms of motivated kids learning the material. 

Chris Badgett: How about your pricing and bundling journey? It’s kinda hard to figure that, all that out I imagine. Do you know how many courses you have total right now?

And what have you figured out from a business model, pricing, bundle kind of strategy? 

Dr. Scott: Yeah. That’s a really good question. I’ve made a lot of courses over the years. Some that worked, some that didn’t work. Pro- probably like many course creators, I didn’t realize that, making the course is half the work and selling the course is the other half of the work.

So I was little too heavy in the course creating the first few years till I found the balance. But we basically have on the website now there, there’s three chemistry courses which could presumably be kinda like two years of high school chemistry. There’s a couple biology courses that are a year of high school biology.

There’s a couple of physics courses That are a year of high school physics, and basically parents use these for credit logging on their high school transcript as well is the other selling point to parents. Save time, get credit. And then there’s two algebra courses, Algebra 1 and Algebra 2 that kind of have algebra compressed into a half year.

So maybe not exactly for credit, but getting math done really quick. So we’re kinda, kinda focusing on like for-credit college prep things that younger gifted learners could work could use to, to to get ahead in school. And we kinda, ended up settling on two price points.

I do a monthly membership for $20 that’s unlimited access and also unsupported, so they can take as many classes as they want, and it’s basically like the parents are doing the grading, and there’s answer keys and explainer videos, like I said, that, nobody really gets stuck. And then there’s a course purchase where they can purchase the two years of chemistry, the one year of physics, the one year of biology.

Prices are between about $300 to $400, and that you keep the course for life. The whole family can use it, and it includes my grading services and questions by email and Zoom. It’s interesting because that was back when we started this before the pandemic, that was the, the preferred option.

People wanted a real teacher. They wanted grading. They wanted somebody to ask for questions. They wanted somebody to hold their hand, getting to class on the first day. And things have changed a lot. The, the, the online education market, especially for, kind of formal education is maybe saturated a little bit.

I had the advantage of being early before the pandemic. I think when COVID struck, there was, all of a sudden 100,000 school teachers that wanted to do the same thing. And I don’t know what, what happened. Maybe the market just kinda, k- saturated. I think people were kinda…

Families were maybe a little tired of having all these teachers. They just wanted the product, just wanted it as streamlined and flexible as possible. So we do mostly the kind of unsupported $20 a month membership. So I think that’s what I ended up doing. I’ve got the bottom and the top of the market.

It’s like the same class, just unsupported on your own for a low price. And then, for people that want like the personal support and tutoring and everything, there’s like a one-time, one-time price between 300 to $400 for a year of courses. 

Chris Badgett: You also have a thing or a stance where I think you don’t do multiple choice quizzes.

Dr. Scott: Do you? No. So it’s all it’s all literal worksheets. Yeah. The kids get a PDF and they print it out, and yeah, I want to em- emphasize the hand-eye coordination. So there’s no no, no sort of automated testing whatsoever. It’s all sort of old school worksheets meant to work with a pen or pencil.

Chris Badgett: Can you tell us about that moment from doing the telephone tutoring to realizing, “I think I’m gonna make it. I think I’m gonna actually have a- … online teaching career here”? Yeah. Did you ever, did you have doubts or it just kinda worked? 

Dr. Scott: Oh there, there was a lot of doubt.

Yeah, I had this I had this the phone call and I realized, I was traveling. I think I was at some, some remote beach in Mexico, and they maybe sent me $100, which was, enough to survive another week on tropical beaches. And that, that was when the light bulb clicked.

I was like this could work.” And then I started I started using some other platforms to teach Zoom classes. But I didn’t… Like I said, I wanted to have a situation where I could have control of the situation and build my own website, and I started investigating learning management systems WordPress plugins or WordPress itself.

Kinda decided that WordPress and a WordPress plugin were the way to go. And I guess it, it probably would’ve been, like, December 2019, because I remember things being closed down over the holiday break, and I was like, “Am I gonna do this? Am I gonna not do this? Am I gonna do this? Am I gonna not do this?”

And I had to, Fir- first step was to buy the domain. 20 bucks to buy the Learn with Dr. Scott domain, do- dot learnwithdrscott.com domain. And I was on the fence and waiting and thinking and, “Do I really wanna do this?” “It’s gonna be a lot of work once I start. I’m not gonna start unless I commit to it.”

And I think it was I think it was, like, Christmas Eve of 2019 that I must have finally bought the domain and got started. So it was, like, a Christmas, New Year’s gift to myself, a whole new life. And then I would have I don’t quite remember. But you guys do a free it, it’s free to install the LifterLMS, so I think I, I installed it and started setting up the chemistry courses.

And I was actually selling Through other platforms and just using the LifterLMS, giving them like a voucher to, to, for support to download videos and worksheets and everything. But then, within that first year, making the decision to really have my own platform with my own payment system and everything.

So that’s probably about the time that I went on the books, putting the Stripe and the, the PayPal plugin. It, probably about six months or so afterwards that I made the decision to to start it. So yeah, it’s, o- owning a small business is fun. I’ve done this a few times, but it’s it’s always a rollercoaster.

Do 

Chris Badgett: you have extreme seasonality with like school, like the times that people buy courses? Like what does that seasonality look like if you have it?

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Dr. Scott: Yeah. Very extreme- 

Chris Badgett: Yeah … 

Dr. Scott: seasonality. Ba- basically, it starts right about now between about September 15th and October 15th or so is when the, the homeschooling community gets started.

So as far as like just having the membership for unsupported the, the $20 a month membership. It’s like right about now that everything gets started. Now I start planning in March, six months ahead for the school year that’s gonna land in September, and then usually over the summer some more serious families, trickle in for the for, for the bundles of supported classes at the higher price point that I was telling you about.

So there’s usually like a little bit of movement in June and July of people preparing for September. All the people that are really starting school now start, and then sales usually dip off until about January or February, the second semester. A lot of people realizing that they’ve got like halfway through the school year with a curriculum doesn’t work, so they’re switching gears midstream.

So we get a lot of that in sort of January, February. And then, things are pretty, pretty dead in May. Everybody wants to be done. Everybody wants to be done with school, and then sometimes we do like summer session. It’s sort of June and July as well. So it’s been extremely cy- cyclical for 10 years that I’ve been doing this.

Until interestingly, this, this very interesting question, Chris, it maybe corresponds to another question. I don’t know if you’re gonna mention anything about AI or not, but I noticed last year the second half of the cycle completely killed by the AI. I got no… had no, no sales in, in, in January, February like normal.

And I noticed the online education industry was taking a nosedive in general. A lot of parents, you know, just using AI ’cause it’s free, as opposed to buying an online course And then in May and June and July, I started getting sales this year. Never happened before. I haven’t done anything different.

I don’t market this time of year. It’s not, it’s not even worth wasting a breath on usually trying to sell a chemistry course in May. So my assumption is that the AI likes the website and it’s sending me traffic ’cause I have no, no sort of increased traffic through social media or organic search or anything.

So yeah kinda went down and then up again. So we’ll see. I’ve been on- I’ve been 10 years of the school year cycle, and it seems like the AI is gonna start to dominate the traffic that I’m receiving, and I have no, no idea what sort of cycle it’s gonna be, but so far it’s been completely the opposite of what I have seen for the last 10 years.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome, and that’s interesting how parents and students may be turning to AI tutoring or whatever, but at the end of the day, AI is now referring you more, which is like super interesting. That’s cool. 

Dr. Scott: Exactly. 

Chris Badgett: Tell us more about the desire to own the platform. I’m sure there’s a lot of platforms you can teach on.

Myself, even at Lifter, I f- my first course was on Udemy. It wasn’t on WordPress. Oh. But, like why was it important to you to have your own website that you could customize and control? 

Dr. Scott: I’ve- Seen a lot of these things come and go. My, my understanding is a lot of platforms are really friendly.

They get lots of customers, lots of clients, lots of users coming in, and then they change the rules overnight to make it difficult and less profitable for the- Yeah … course creators. It’s a business. So one I wanted to avoid that. Two, is just a matter of basic quality control.

Yeah. One of these one of these platforms I was working on teaching Zoom classes, their sales point was that the teachers are always nice to the kids. Okay. They didn’t allow teachers to have rules- Okay … in the classroom, and it was complete chaos. Nothing that I would, wanna have my name associated with.

So it’s just a combination of quality control and business. So it, it takes longer to develop your own platform, but I really don’t understand how people do it not having any sort of control. 

Chris Badgett: Obviously I 100% agree with you.

What, what would you say… Like, how do you get customers? You mentioned AI s- recommending you more. 

Do you have some people coming from YouTube or is it referrals? What’s your strongest method for getting customers? 

Dr. Scott: For 10 years it was all SEO. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. 

Dr. Scott: So I got really into SEO.

Basically we have the, the webpage sorta has a homepage and it has a list of all the courses for sale that are kinda the two main pages. And I probably made 500 SEO-oriented pages picking a science topic and, picking a keyword. Basically having a free worksheet.

So that- Okay … that was traditionally a big thing before video-based learning is that parents were looking for worksheets to occupy their kids’ time. So I basically used SEO to give away free worksheets and then, you can buy the course to save the time to have me Do it for you and bundle everything.

So a lot of SEO and then a lot of word of mouth. Recently the AI, and I go- gonna have to admit I’ve never had any luck whatsoever with any sort of social media. So- 

Chris Badgett: But you can’t do it all. Like- 

Dr. Scott: Yeah … 

Chris Badgett: some people are good at paid ads, some people are good at content like you are. Some people are really good at social.

It’s hard to be all things, right? 

Dr. Scott: Yeah, so con- content and website 

Chris Badgett: You branched out a little bit. I think you have some Spanish courses, some art courses, meditation. Tell us about the broadening scope. 

Dr. Scott: Yeah. So I was, as I mentioned, I was a college chemistry professor, so step one was just having some chemistry courses on the website.

It was the- the not-too-technical chemistry was really popular, so I made a biology and a physics course, and then we started, This- this was a few years ago when we had more live classes on Zoom. We we had art classes, web design classes Spanish classes as well. So we were at the time kinda developing to be, have more like an arts and science program, being a host sc- being a whole school.

That, as I mentioned, that- that’s kinda, we- we don’t do the live classes anymore, so we’ve kinda backed off on, on the Spanish and the art. And I’ve had an interest in meditation for maybe 20 or 25 years or so, and people tend to tell me my voice works pretty well for meditation, having a calming video.

So that’s the, that’s- that’s the next step. My, my spot here in downtown Oaxaca is called Medium. We have some art. This- this is actually a type of art called a cyanotype. It’s a type of blue sunlight-sensitive dye that was used for blueprints. We- we developed this technology here and have different art technologies and teach classes here as well as we have some meditation in this spot called Medium.

And Medium was kinda reference to medium of art, but also like a quantum physics reference to the the fabric of the universe itself. 

Chris Badgett: Fun. If you could go back in time to the Scott on the telephone and the tutoring, is there what mistakes would you help yourself avoid, or what advice would you give to a younger education entrepreneur version of yourself?

Dr. Scott: Yeah. I, I had heard of SEO and kinda waited- 

Chris Badgett: Yeah … 

Dr. Scott: a year to start learning about it. I was very focused on creating lots of small courses. I kinda mentioned this earlier, but would’ve been would- would- would- would’ve been more strategic to just make one course and focus a year On marketing it. So I maybe, may- maybe lost a year or two not focusing on the marketing of the course creation.

So that, that’s one. Just know it’s half and half. Most teachers are pretty good at teaching. Most teachers don’t have that much sales and marketing experience. I tend to repeat that a few times ’cause it doesn’t always sink in. Teachers think, “Oh, it’s a good class. It’ll sell.” No it won’t.

You have to… you do have to sell it. And what was I gonna say? So second, there was a second thing I was thinking of here. What was the question again? Things I would’ve done differently. Like 

Chris Badgett: mistakes to avoid or just opportunities to chase sooner. 

Dr. Scott: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: So I would- That you would tell your earlier self

Dr. Scott: Aha. I would’ve got into marketing earlier. I also would’ve told myself to just do it like three years before I even ended up in that tropical remote beach situation with nothing to do. The one thing I tell people always ask me how have you managed to succeed in education?

It’s a tough thing to make money at.” And it’s just consistency. You just- Yeah … have to pick something and do it. It’s gonna take you 1,000 hours to get good at it, 10,000 hours to really master it is part of my philosophy, thinking and planning in terms of 1,000 and 10,000 hour chunks.

But basically, yeah, just to get, do it, be consistent, pick it and spend an hour a day on it for the next couple years and focus on marketing and selling, not just creating courses. 

Chris Badgett: You have like a reach in terms of international? Do people come from all over the place or is there kinda concentrations of where your learners or families or customers come from?

Dr. Scott: We’re mostly US and Canada- Okay … these days. Pro- probably about, eh, probably about 90/10 split US and Canada. I had mentioned a few times, the, the timing of the pandemic was pretty critical to all this- Yeah … ’cause I was at that beach and I wanted to do something with kind of online marketing, working remotely, and lots of friends were like, “Oh, you should do real estate or sell, Forex,” but I want- I wanted to do something that I knew how to do and and and chemistry was it.

And I was having pretty good success, picking up families here and there, but then the pandemic came and like virtually overnight I had 1,000 students because their- 

Chris Badgett: Wow … 

Dr. Scott: schools were closed. And we had we had people from basically every English-speaking country in the world.

It was very tricky, picking times that the teachers could teach in the American continents for the Australians and, you know- … there, there were- we started, there was this, this girl that like wouldn’t turn the lights on. It was dark. 

Chris Badgett: Oh. 

Dr. Scott: Eventually her parents said it’s 4:00 AM in the morning in Australia ’cause your class is 4:00 PM in the United States,” and I was like, oh, we need to we need to start planning around the clock a little bit more.

So that was it. It was very cool during the pandemic. We’d always start class asking hey, what time it is?” And we’d have, people rattle off five, six different time zones from around the world. But it’s kinda shrunk back to the core sorta US, Canadian audiences these days.

The, the, the school standards, for what it’s worth, are, aligned with US and Canada. 

Chris Badgett: Nice. What would you say is the major kind of transformation or benefit or impact that’s happening? Obviously you’ve, you help a lot of people, which is very fulfilling. 

You li- you h- you’re in a beautiful art studio and living in Mexico.

What is that transformation? Is it… I think of it as freedom, like your own personal freedom. But how do you see it? 

Dr. Scott: I was just gonna say freedom. 

Chris Badgett: Okay. 

Dr. Scott: Yeah. It’s real true freedom. Like I said own- owning a small business is a rollercoaster.

Sometimes the money’s good, sometimes it’s not, but you’re in control of your situation. You can do what you want. And I’ve done all done all sorts of interesting things that relate to online education, lots of stuff that doesn’t relate to online education. But yeah, it’s just really brought a lot of freedom and a lot of joy.

Little bit of stress when things don’t work out. But we just we just recalibrate every year. It’s an online business and things move fast, but it’s, I just, I love it. 

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. That’s Dr. Scott. You can find him at learnwithdrscott.com. Thank you for coming on the show, and thank you for being a shining example of what I call a education entrepreneur.

So helping people unlock freedom like you have in your life and helping others and sending out all these positive ripples in the world is what lights me up. So thank you so much for coming on, and thank you so much for telling your story. 

Dr. Scott: Thanks, Chris. It was a real pleasure.

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/gift. Go to LifterLMS.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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Josh Dailey and Aaron Edwards talk about how DocsBot has developed into a potent AI platform for agencies, companies, support teams, and course developers. According to Aaron, companies may develop AI assistants who can offer assistance via websites, Slack, WhatsApp, Help Scout, and other channels by using DocsBot to train AI agents on a company’s websites, manuals, support tickets, videos, PDFs, audio, and other information.

The use of DocsBot as an AI instructor for online courses is a primary emphasis. According to Josh, instructors may include data from a variety of sources, such as websites, podcasts, YouTube videos, PDFs, and course materials. In order to make the AI more tailored for students, Aaron also shows how DocsBot may link to LifterLMS to get course progress and other user-specific data.

They also talk about the distinction between AI that can act and AI that only responds to inquiries. DocsBot may be able to extract bills, assist with billing, make appointments, gather leads, and establish connections with other business systems. According to Aaron, companies may also develop internal bots for staff members, keeping confidential data and resources apart from helpers that interact with the public. Josh emphasizes the potential for agencies to employ DocsBot to create AI assistants and instructors for customers on a large scale.

Josh emphasizes the potential for agencies to employ DocsBot to create AI assistants and instructors for customers on a large scale. Before deploying a bot, agencies may test it against frequently asked client inquiries using DocsBot’s tools and MCP connection. He highlights that by managing the deployment, testing, and continuous improvement for customers, agencies may bring value. He highlights that by managing the deployment, testing, and continuous improvement for customers, agencies may bring value.

Lastly, Josh and Aaron stress that AI does not have to take the place of human assistance. Customers can escalate questions to a person as needed, although DocsBot can manage repetitive queries. They also talk about selecting more trustworthy data, such up-to-date software code over out-of-date documentation, and managing which sources an AI agent utilizes.

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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 LifterLMS, 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 some special guests. They’re back on the show. It’s Aaron Edwards and Josh Daly from docspot.ai. We’re gonna nerd out on AI for course creators people building internal training, for the agency professionals out there loo- looking to provide more value to their clients, for e-learning websites.

But first, welcome to the show, Aaron and Josh. 

Aaron Edwards: Yeah. Thanks for having us. 

Josh Dailey: Yeah. Thanks. Always enjoy being with you, Chris. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. It’s f- it’s fun to catch up. About two years ago, when DocSpot started or closer to the start, whenever it was you guys have done a lot since then. So for those that haven’t heard of DocSpot, what does it do today?

Aaron Edwards: Yeah. Essentially, it allows you… And the, kind of the name is a misnomer. Like DocSpot, really it’s like a bot trained off your docs, is what it is. And so we were one of the first companies that allowed you to create a AI agent that’s trained on your website, your documentation now your past support tickets, videos, almost any kind of content that your company has, and create kind of that company knowledge brain that’s used for customer support primarily.

You can deploy that as a chat widget on your website or merge it into your app using our APIs or connect with lots of different channels like Slack, Messenger, WhatsApp, things like that and provide those kind of AI agents that can help your customers 

Chris Badgett: So what’s like an example from some of your users?

No matter whatever they are, whether it’s a WordPress product company or like how’s it look out in the wild if somebody wants to see it? And I know it’s on your site too, but who- … who else is using it? Who, who else is using it? What are they doing? 

Aaron Edwards: Yeah. We have a lot of WordPress product companies, so a lot of big ones that you know are using us to help provide support.

Sometimes it’s like tier one, like front-facing support, like a chat on a website. Sometimes it’s just attached to their help desk, so it’s helping their team by drafting answers that they just approve and send, or maybe edit. And it’s kind of a surf- self-learning leap like that. But as far as like customers, we have…

It’s been really hard for us to figure out who to target because, we have all these like corporations in Japan, like probably 20% of our customers are Japanese. We have the State Bank of Venezuela. We have all kinds of things, telecom companies. Manufacturers, that’s a big one.

If they have a lot of like catalogs with tons of parts and things like that that can be really complex to answer questions for the customers or their sales team, and so they’ll use us for that as well. So pretty much any business that has any kind of incoming support load, they can help relieve a lot of that using AI with DocSpot.

Chris Badgett: Which is like almost all businesses, which is awesome and why I understand it’s hard to target ’cause people use it in all kinds of different ways. 

Aaron Edwards: Yeah, 

Chris Badgett: exactly. And it’s very different from putting just a chat widget on your site to connect people to people. It’s actually trained and available 24/7 without needing a break.

Tell us about the training. Because a well-trained, AI, it needs a lot of context, so there’s like web pages, maybe other information. How do you kinda get DocSpot trained up? 

Aaron Edwards: Yeah. Josh, tell us what you can train it with. 

Josh Dailey: I’ll do my best, and you guys can jump in where you want as well. But really so the, the elephant in the room kind of conversation that we get from a lot of people about DocSpot is, “Why don’t I just build my own agents at this point?”

We’re to a spot in AI where people can self-code things, and everybody’s talking about vibe coding and releasing new things. But some really big differences and where we see people still going like, “Oh we need a solution like DocSpot,” is people who have knowledge spread across multiple different platforms.

And so the amount of things that you can connect with now in DocSpot that early on might have just been like a website and a few sources, we have over 30 native sources that we’ve built in. Your web content, whole YouTube channel videos for off of YouTube or other videos that you wanna upload it, we’ll do all the transcribing and pull in all of that kind of stuff, supports TSV files, which would be really big for things like a, a online course.

People who are using online courses often are wanting to do media sources. Your audio type files, PDFs. When Aaron was talking about the manufacturing-type sites that use it we do both basic PDF extraction and advanced PDF extraction, so it maintains the structure- Yeah … images tables, all of that kind of data can be maintained.

And then some of the funner ones that we have too are like- Because it’s primarily customer support would be your help desk. Help Scout, Zendesk, Zoho Desk, like all of these different platforms we’re able to connect into as training sources, and they can update automatically. So this has been the if you’ve been in around AI or unless you’re living under a rock, at this point the, the real thing is that it’s not that companies don’t have a lot of knowledge already available, it’s that it’s spread across a lot of sources, and how are you aggregating and pulling all of that information together?

My personal favorite things that’s taken place more recently is we’ve added a skill builder that allows you to connect into a lot more sources than just what we have natively on the site. So now it’s moved from just whatever we can natively provide and how fast we can churn them out to whatever our customers can dream up.

And Aaron could talk a little bit about this because it’s super fun to, to play with and use. But it literally is spinning up a coding agent into the cloud and writing the code for custom integrations to be built back into the widget so it can access and provide answers based off of external information.

Chris Badgett: How does that work, Aaron? 

Aaron Edwards: Imagine, let’s say, you’re making a bot for your course, right? You’re using Lifter to power it. And Lifter I assume you guys have some APIs. Yeah. Yeah, or exposed endpoints and stuff within WordPress. So you can just tell our skill builder, “Hey, I have this online course using Lifter for LMS.

I want you to build the query live, like course status and maybe the progress and membership information about the person who’s chatting with the bot.” And so you just tell it, and it would build all that using its internal coding agent essentially, and create that integration for you. And then it would just say, “Hey.

All right. Create the WordPress app password. Here’s the link to get it, and paste it in here.” And then it’ll be able to do that live. Create those kind of like live integrations, and they can be just like informational. It can be connecting to some external data source, such as LifterLMS.

And it can be scoped to the specific user who’s chatting with the bot. So it’ll check that they’re logged in with the widget, check what their WordPress user ID is or whatever, and then from that, it’s able to look up information only about that user or perform actions in their course, whatever it may be that you want it to do.

Chris Badgett: That’s amazing. In the e-learning space, one of the things that is like the holy grail is having an AI tutor. But spoiler alert, it’s already here with DocSpot. You just have to get it and set it up- … because there’s a lot of things that, like you mentioned, the data in multiple sources. If a subject matter expert is teaching on a topic, sure, they’ve done their best to make the gr- a great course, and maybe those videos are on YouTube or Vimeo or something else.

So there’s like transcript data, there’s probably PDFs and other things in the media library. They may have a separate YouTube channel that they’ve been building for 10 years with all kinds of helpful data for the tutor. They could have a long-running podcast. They could have a blog somewhere else. And so to really try to represent the human expert, the data’s gonna be spread all over the place, and DocSpot is ready to grab all that in.

So for, let’s say somebody non-technical is watching or listening and they’re like, “Hey, a AI tutor sounds really good. I’ve got the YouTube channel, the podcast, my course videos, and a blog somewhere else,” how would they get started? 

Aaron Edwards: Yeah. Essentially you just on, in our dashboard, that we have common connectors for all those kind of things, so for web, crawling websites uploading document files, PDFs, whatever it may be if you’re using that in the course we are able to support. Also this is good for LMS type stuff is audio and video. So if you have like those files that you’re using in the course, you can just add those and we use AI to transcribe them and add it to the bot’s training.

And if it’s YouTube, we’ll actually preserve like the timestamps and everything. So when it answers a user’s question it’s actually able to provide like the timestamp where it got that information. And we do actually have a feature where it could link directly to that timestamp so they could play that in the video, whatever it may be.

Chris Badgett: What about scale? Like for example, you mentioned like a manufacturing company, they may have a ton of products with a ton of instructional PDFs. So like- … for example, it’s one thing if your website has 100 pages on it, including lessons and things, or you have 100 YouTube videos.

But what if somebody’s scaled out and they have 20,000 pages on their website and just like tons and tons of source material? 

How does DocSpot work at scale? 

Aaron Edwards: Yeah, we handle that pretty well. We do have plenty of people that have that many like website pages and stuff.

So you could just point, like for example, your site map to it, and so every week or whatever, it’s recrawling the site and it’s finding those new blog posts or content that you’ve added to add to your bot. All that kind of stuff. And now we have a new we have a full MCP server, and we have a agent within our dashboard, which has access to that same MCP server without needing any technical know-how, and so that’s the best way we’ve found to manage this stuff now, is don’t learn a new interface. Don’t learn how like the software works. Just drop it in your cloud or your Codex or whatever, and then say, “Hey, I need this AI agent that does this for me,” and then it will go figure out all your data sources, figure out the best way to train it upload and add all that information to your agent, and configure it to work for you.

Josh Dailey: Yeah. I think something that when you say a beginner who doesn’t, may not know how to do this stuff, I think they’re … When you start talking about all the sources that it can connect to and all the information that’s spread out across all these places, it b- gets really overwhelming fast. Like you’re like, “Oh, I’m never gonna be able to figure this out.

It feels like such a big task and a big lift.” And when we get asked “How quickly do you think I could have a bot up and running for my site?” And we’re … Literally within a- an hour you could be deployed and running something that probably is really knowledgeable and more knowledgeable than most people about the topic and the information that you’re providing.

Even faster than that, if you wanted to, you can be in the environment testing right away. The longest part of the experience is really, like people wanna refine that answer, the way that it’s answering and that kind of stuff. And we find people more reluctant about the, Wanting it to be able to answer more accurately more questions faster than we do about actually being able to get to deployment.

So within 24 hours generally if somebody’s working with us to deploy, we already have a bot that was created and ready for them to start testing, and then it’s, that human time where they’re doing their own testing that takes the most time in getting it to production. 

Chris Badgett: That makes sense. Like, when you work with AI, you It’s not just like everything’s a one shot, you gotta refine it. Yeah. So for example, let’s say somebody had an old blog post but there’s a newer one that has more updated information, and the bot references the old one. You can refine it and be like, “Hey, ignore that old post or whatever.”

What’s that called? Are those rules or, It’s not r- personality. What are those kind of fine-tuning you’re talking about?

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Aaron Edwards: yeah, there’s different kind of ways. So we give you full access to the instructions to where you can add kind of behavioral kind of instructions or maybe the way it handles your sources, like the way it prioritizes them and searches through them.

That can be easily added to the instructions for those kind of things. Another common use case is you’ll look at those chat logs. You’ll see, like, how the bot’s responding to your users, and then you can just go in, you can click “I’d like to revise this answer.” And just right there you can just type in the new answer or adjust it, and that kind of goes, recycles back into your bot training so it knows better how to answer those similar questions in the future.

And then we also have AI agents built into our platform. So if you’re, like, wondering why did the AI answer this way, or I didn’t want it to answer that way, you can just click analyze and that will spin up a full agent with access to everything, and it’s specifically trained on how to analyze and improve the responses.

So it’s gonna look out and see is there a problem in the instructions? Is there a problem in your training data, like the sources, like a conflict like you mentioned? Or is there… You’re just missing the training data to be able to answer this, and it’s able to identify that and actually fix it for you.

Chris Badgett: In terms of public-facing versus having it be, like, a, a resource internally to the company, like an employee, a digital employee that helps with- … training or onboarding, can you do both a public-facing bot and a internal bot for the team? 

Aaron Edwards: Yeah, that’s a very common use case. You can create, depending on your plan, you can create any number of them, and they can be trained on different content or the same content, and they can have different rules and different tools.

So often we’ll see the sales team or even the support team have a, a internal one that’s maybe trained on similar set of docs, but also private docs and information, and it may be connected via MCP to their internal tools, like their help desk or their billing system of record or whatever.

So they’re able … The AI bot is able to do more than just answer the questions. It’s able to actually do actions, like deal with billing issues and things like that. And that can be scoped to a private bot that’s only deployed, for example, in their Slack or something like that. 

Chris Badgett: So for example, if you wanted to automate a refund process, you could.

And it would be human hands-off if you were happy with it and good to go. 

Aaron Edwards: Yeah. No, and we have built-in integrations for Stripe and EDD and Freemius and WooCommerce and things like that. So you can just add one click or add your API key, and then it’s able to do some of those common billing actions that users ask for.

Chris Badgett: Wow, that’s really cool. And explain again, you k- you did, but I just want it to be clear for people out there watching and listening, the difference between answers and actions. 

Josh Dailey: Yeah. So in the early stages of AI it did a really good job when you would ask a question of agents. They would come back and provide an answer to you, but it usually gave you a list of tasks that you had to perform, and it’d be like, “All right, here’s your next steps.

Go do one, two, three, four, five, and then you’ll be a millionaire at the end of it.” That kind of output kind of thing that it would tell you to do. But it couldn’t go in and then perform those actions because it didn’t have access to your computer, it didn’t have access to the information that it needed to actually go in and do the whatever that one, two, three, four was.

Now, with an action, when you ask it to do something, it can actually check, do I have the skill or the tool that I need to go out and perform that behavior so that the customer doesn’t have to think about it and do that? So if I come in and I say, “I wanna get my invoice,” instead of saying, “Here’s your account.

Go- click on that, it’ll take you over to your account page, find this link, and then you’ll be able to download your invoice,” now we can actually say, “Oh, I have access to their account information in Stripe, and I can generate that invoice right inside the widget with a clickable link so that they can download that, never have to leave the conversation that they’re in.”

… Another one that we have common use case would be scheduling an appointment and somebody would say, “Hey, I wanna meet with your team.” Instead of saying, “All right, here’s the Contact Us form or the link to Calendly or TidyCal,” we can actually display your TidyCal, Calendly, cal.com right inside of the widget.

They select their time and date, and then they say, “All right, now we have context and awareness of the schedule and are able to make sure that you have a date and time that meets your requirements.” So those are some examples of actions that now have become easier over the last couple years.

I would even s- argue probably within the last six months or so where that became a natural thing for us to say, “Oh, look at my email,” where before it couldn’t do that, and perform those actions before y- for you. 

Chris Badgett: … Tell us more about, like, where the bot lives, ’cause it’s not just on the website.

You mentioned as an example the same bot could be in internally in the company Slack- … or is it, am I correct, it could be sitting in your Help Scout as an example drafting replies that you can review as a human in the loop and then send it? A- Yeah … tell us about those locations. 

Aaron Edwards: Yeah. Mind if I share my screen?

We’ll see. 

Chris Badgett: Go for it. Here, let me pull it up. 

Aaron Edwards: See that. Yeah, you pull it up. 

Chris Badgett: All right. 

Aaron Edwards: So here’s kind of a bot. As we were talking, I actually had a AI agent spin this up for us. And this is essentially what did it train with. It pulled in your LifterLMS quick start course so just to see what it looked like training from a course and a little bit on the website.

But you can deploy that bot in a lot of different ways. So we have our chat widget which that’s easy to just copy and paste code. Share links, so you can have a chat page that looks like this where it’s just a public URL that you can share with your users. You can connect your phone when we get into voice agents.

Slack, we have a native Slack app and a Teams one coming soon. Facebook Messenger if you wanted to reply to incoming messages to your business. WhatsApp, Telegram Help Scout if you wanna hel- connect it to your help desk to write draft replies to your users. A lot of different ways and channels to deploy it.

But voice is a fun one for sure. That’s something that we launched about a month or two ago, and so actually I’m excited. OpenAI today, they released their new live voice model. I don’t know if you’ve seen the ads with the grandmas that are, like, talking to it. 

Chris Badgett: Haven’t 

Aaron Edwards: seen 

Chris Badgett: it yet. 

Aaron Edwards: Okay.

They’ve been pushing those everywhere. I’ve been seeing them online and streaming and stuff, but essentially it’s the first voice model that’s agentic that al- allows it to talk and hear at the same time, so there’s no, like- 

Chris Badgett: Latency … 

Aaron Edwards: turn… Yeah, no latency, no turn-based detection. If you’re translating, for example, it can speak in the language it’s translating to as you’re talking to it.

There’s no turns which is pretty amazing. So I’m looking forward to integrating that, but we’re already using the previous generation model, which is only a few months old, which is their real-time API. And that is essentially the same thing as voice tokens in, voice tokens out. There’s no turning it to text and then back to audio step that most voice agents have, so it gives you a really natural conversation that you can have with users 

Chris Badgett: This is so cool.

And I’m somewhat of a Power AI user, and the idea of trying to build all this ourselves internally is- … even as a power user is complicated, and you guys are just there ready to roll with all these connections and everything. 

Aaron Edwards: Yep, that’s the idea. 

Chris Badgett: In terms of voice, like I, just for me personally, where I really wanna get into voice, I haven’t done it yet, I’ve d- I’ve tested some things, but is for sales, like pre-sales basically.

If somebody wanted to set up a 24/7 voice agent bot that- … was trained on the product, the offering, you know, all that, the, where sales… ‘Cause a lot of people don’t necessarily wanna get on the phone or have time, or they’re scared of sales. But if a bot can do it for you 24/7 in any language on Earth, why not?

Yeah. So how would somebody set that up? 

Aaron Edwards: Yeah, it’s the same process that we have. So you’re just adding your sources however you wanna train it. And then we do have separate voice instructions. So we’ve found that the way your bot behaves in a chat widget is very different than how you want it to behave, like, when you’re talking to it via voice.

And we have some templates that we’ll start up, and it’ll build that out for you, and then you can edit it from there. So for example we made this like a tutor, like we were talking about before the call. So it’s to act like a tutor and help users and things like that. And you can also add actions and things to your voice agent.

So we support all the same actions like web search, MCP servers, skills. If you wanna add a skill for it to do a specific task, like we talked about billing. Lead collection, you can add lead collection fields there. And we have a full form kind of builder. So you can say, “Okay, I want it to collect their phone number this text area about this,” or whatever.

And so it’s actually able to depending on if it’s voice in the widget, it’ll show you that form to fill out, or if it’s over a phone it’s gonna actually interview the user to collect the details it needs. And if it’s phone, you can also do things like call transferring, so have it transfer to your human phone number, right?

After it acts as a receptionist kind of thing. You can even put rules for when it’s okay to transfer you and even an availability schedule if you’re, like, a business that has certain hours. You only want it to transfer during business hours to that phone. So that’s some of the initial tools that we’ve added to our voice agents.

But it’s pretty user-friendly and simple, and our agent kind of sets it all up for you during the onboarding. 

Chris Badgett: In terms of the voice, in my investigation, one of the places I got hung up, and I understand the widget idea. It’s like kind of a web view of the voice. But then if somebody- … wants to connect a phone number even if it’s their cellphone number, or do they need to go to Twilio or something and buy- a number? How- Yeah … do you get to the actual there’s a phone number that peop- some people are used to calling phone numbers. 

I would say people are more used to calling phone numbers than interacting with voice agent widgets- 

Aaron Edwards: Yeah, on a 

Chris Badgett: website … at least today. Exactly, 

Aaron Edwards: yeah. 

Chris Badgett: Like, how do you get the phone number connected?

Aaron Edwards: Yeah. So we support right now, we support Twilio, like you mentioned, so you can purchase a phone number there. I think it’s like a dollar or two per month. Or you can forward phone numbers there, so if you have just your cell phone number, and you can turn on call forwarding, it forwards to there, and then we answer the Twilio number.

So I can see I have some numbers here that I bought. This one’s available because we made it for WordCamp US specific or this one is assigned to another bot, and so I just click assign to the bot, and now it’s gonna start responding to that phone number. Or if you have a business phone most business phones or PBNs, they support, it’s a standard called SIP, and essentially you just follow these instructions to put in the specific address, and then it will redirect any calls to that address essentially.

So we try to make it as user-friendly as possible. 

Chris Badgett: And a question which may be a feature request, I apologize. Is is WhatsApp an option if you wanted a WhatsApp number? Or if- 

Yeah 

Aaron Edwards: That’s a good question. I don’t know. I, we support WhatsApp via chat, and you can also send audio or image messages that way, and the bot will respond, but it’s gonna respond in that same text-based format.

D- WhatsApp phone number, I think it’s the s- same kind of thing, like a business phone number. I’m not sure if they allow forwarding or things like that. 

Chris Badgett: The reason I ask is, whenever I leave the United States, I realize that the rest of the world uses WhatsApp. And also you get around the long-distance calling fees or whatever.

So it’s just- Yeah … it’s just something I’ve been trying to figure out- … on my own. 

Josh Dailey: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: In term- in terms of the bots let’s say we want a sales bot, a tutor, a customer support bot, and a bot for our team. Is it better to just use one bot and let make sure it knows where it is? Or are we building four different bots which f- on the same account?

Or how do, what would you recommend there? Yeah. 

Aaron Edwards: I think it’s gonna depend on if it needs separate rules and instructions if it needs access to specific data that’s maybe restricted between audiences or certain tools that it’s connected to, whether that’s a skill or API or MCP or whatever.

That’s what’s gonna determine it. So you can have one for example we do allow if you create one bot for customer support, you can have different voice instructions for that channel. You can have different instructions for when it’s responding via help desk versus chat. But it’s still the kind of the same underlying core training information and stuff.

But we make it really easy to create multiples, and you can even copy it to create a copy of that bot with the same training content and everything like that. And you can adjust the settings and permissions of each one individually. 

Chris Badgett: Awesome. And then for an agency that’s building LMS sites for clients- 

Like as an example, like WordPress has an MCP, LifterLMS has 100 MCP end- endpoints that you can do stuff with. And let’s say we’re like a high volume agency and we’re doing tons of sites and getting lots of new clients, how could we leverage DocSpot as an agency? Are we like Slacking with our bot and it’s spinning up sites and building stuff?

Or what’s possible for the agency?

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Aaron Edwards: Yeah. Josh? 

Josh Dailey: Yeah. So this is actually one of my favorite ways to interact with DocSpot right now is we have our own admin MCP for DocSpot, so you can connect it into your coding agents, the places that you work from, however, wherever you wanna connect that into.

And then you could pretty much do anything that the operator can do that we have built in. So if you’re like, “Oh, I don’t know enough about MCPs, and that scares me,” you could just talk to the widget on the bottom. But if you’re talking about as an agency, I’m wanting to spin up bots, essentially you could just connect to the MCP for DocSpot and say, “Hey, I want to build a tutor like Aaron did for this customer over here.

Here’s some links that are really important to train off of. Here’s the sources we wanna train off of,” and give it those instructions. Then it will go out and do the work and perform that, that work for you and you don’t have to go in and do it. And then like I said, then that becomes more of an exercise around testing.

I will say we’ve got a really good case study on our site right now about, about this kind of what’s the best way to perform the, the, the tests. We’re building in a feature called Evals that’s coming out pretty soon. But the– essentially, the best mode is to come up with 50, 100 common questions that you’re trying to resolve, and then to feed those in.

And you can use something like Claude using your MCP connection to do that, say, “These are the questions you have to answer. Tell us how you would answer these.” It comes back and shows you. And if you say, “Oh, only 70% of these are getting right. I need these other questions to be changed. How can we perform that thing?”

Then you can keep running that same set of eval questions back through your system so that you have a baseline to function from, and then a way to improve the messaging. And we have essentially our customer said, “We made DocSpot earn its place on our support team.” We didn’t just release it, and we had it run through two months of rigorous testing against that, and it had to perform at, I think it was 80% or better before they would actually deploy it for themselves to, to utilize it on their live site.

And so that’s some of the stuff where an agency becomes highly valuable Where a lot of end users are saying, “Hey, I don’t even want to think about this.” It’s we heard this for years and years around website builders and, block editors and all that stuff. It’s like everybody’s just going to go build their own sites now.

Nobody’s going to use an agency anymore. 

And it would really quickly became, oh, everybody’s still going to need an agency because they don’t want to build websites. They want to run their business, and they want to take care of the physical pr- products and the needs for the, the customers, right?

And so it’s the same with this AI stuff is going I know I could probably go do this myself, but I need an agency because they are experts in this. They’re going to be able to do it faster. They’re going to be able to run the evaluations that I need and do the implementations. And so as a partner to our agencies, like as DocSpot, we think agencies are the mode for mass distribution and adoption of this agentic stuff.

It’s really important because they have the client relationships. So we’re trying to make our tooling as valuable to agencies as possible. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah, and that’s what- Hope that 

Josh Dailey: answered your question. 

Chris Badgett: That does. Yeah. And that’s what agencies have always done. Like they lead- Yeah … and then bring the clients along.

Yeah. And the client’s usually really busy and doesn’t want to become AI expert or coder- … or whatever. Yeah. 

Aaron Edwards: That hasn’t changed. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah it hasn’t changed at all. And I just wanna put it out there to somebody listening or watching, if you figure out how to build just a workflow and a process for spinning up AI tutors for a WordPress LMS website, that could be a huge business.

And for multiple agencies. It’s not just somebody might do well there. Tons of agencies could do well by solving the AI tutor situation with DocSpot, and then, going after the market of all the people that are already using these LMSs, not just Lifter in the WordPress space. That would be a huge opportunity, which is gonna help the students have higher completion rates, and- 

The, the site owner sell more. There’s just so much. You could- Yeah … then char- charge more if it comes with tutoring. It’s infinite opportunity there. 

Josh Dailey: We are working with quite a few education institutions, which is a huge value side of why people still use a DocSpot security. I think we covered that a little earlier.

But they don’t wanna deal with HIPAA, SOC 2, GDPR, all of those things that, that we- Accessibility … take administration and security risk away from the organizations to do that. And so 100% on board with you, Chris. If there’s somebody out there right now watching that wants to do that- … and wants to partner with us, we do have a partner program that we’ve put in place that we’d love to chat more with you about the implementation process of that.

But we could be a foundational layer. We’ve taken that kind of in two, two approaches. One is you can resell the service, like on our business plan, is to buy it and just pack a few different people on there, and you can separate out so that none of the other people can see none of your c- clients could see the other person’s bots, et cetera.

But then we also have our partner program where we do a, a pretty generous referral commission as well. So they could just set it up and spin out agents for for their customers, and then we’ll handle, help with kind of the support side and be more of a partner to them. 

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. When it comes to let’s say a human handoff, like where a we’re using DocSpot as a sales agent, but it’s doing the qualification step, and whatever happens, like there’s enough budget or the right person’s on the phone, it’s transfers it to a live human during business hours or whatever.

How would you do that qualification piece, train the bot to make sure the person’s a fit, then transfer to the live e- human? 

Aaron Edwards: Yeah. Honestly, I don’t know that, so I just type it into our agent in the dashboard and say, “Hey, this is what looks like a good customer and not.” Change the qualification based on that, and I’ll just let it decide that for me.

That, that may be a cheater answer. But,

Chris Badgett: But that is the answer … we- 

Aaron Edwards: Yeah … 

Chris Badgett: that is the answer ’cause you can just … if you don’t have all the pieces, just describe- Yeah … the solution you want. 

Aaron Edwards: Yeah. And we do have a template as, like lead qualification. And so essentially this is a workflow that we’ve done to where it first like asks the user their business website or about their business, right?

And then it actually is able to use our search tool, so it’s using search behind the scenes to actually get context about that business. And then based on your criteria, it can use that context to judge whether or not they qualify. And if they do, then it’s able to pull up the, their booking calendar to book like a call or submit the lead via the lead submission tool, that kind of thing.

And that can all happen over a phone channel. 

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Hopefully you can’t hear it, but there’s somebody with a chainsaw outside, so I’m gonna close my windows in a second. But I’m gonna queue up with a question while I close the windows, which is I know people get excited about this stuff, but then they feel overwhelmed about getting started.

What’s the best way and like first action steps to come into the DocSpot universe?

Aaron Edwards: Yeah, Josh? 

Josh Dailey: Yeah, I can go with that question. We actually try to make that super easy. If you go to our website, and we’re set up to be able to self-serve your plan. You just pick the plan that you want to be on. If you’re coming to us with a business, from a business, you can actually do a 14-day technical evaluation trial or f- for free, and so it will give you access to the business plan, and you can use all our features without paying a dime.

You just have to put your credit card information in to validate, to help us validate, like your organization. But we won’t charge that, and then if you cancel before the 14-day trial ends, then you obviously we’re not gonna charge you, and you- there’s no refund or anything necessary at that point.

So we make it really easy to get started for free and just test this stuff out and would encourage anybody to do that because we think it sells itself. As soon as people start playing with this stuff, they’re like, “Oh, this is a lot easier than what I thought it was gonna be.” The one other thing I was gonna add about the lead kind of qualification pieces, we do have…

I think you’re asking the hot topic questions, Chris. I don’t know if you intentionally are doing that, but it is the number one thing that people are concerned with is I don’t want my customer to get caught in a loop where they have to just keep talking to AI, and how do I make sure they have a way out of that?

So human escalation is a massive, important thing to us. We’re not believers at this point anyway that AI’s taking over every role in customer support. There’s still need for human support and it just, the repetitive questions that we get over and over, like billing, what you mentioned is a massive percent of questions that come through.

So if AI can answer that effectively, then you don’t need to. But for pre-sales, we also have not just that qualification one, we have what we call lead capture in there, and you can set it up so that your agent has a– We have a full form builder, and you might already have your form on your site somewhere.

You can just copy that information and say, “Hey, build me this form that shows up in the widget so they don’t have to go to somewhere else on my site.” And when they start the chat, say, “Hey, I wanna capture some information about you ’cause I– if we get disconnected, I wanna be able to follow up.” And that could be the first thing they see in there.

Or if you say I don’t wanna scare them away by trying to capture information. I want them to be able to chat with us you can select to not have that form appear until right before escalate, human escalation. Say “Hey, before I escalate you or connect you with one of our human representatives, can you provide your email address so that if we’re unable to assist you right now, we can help you later?”

And that has become a really valuable sales pre-sales kind of tool for a lot of our customers, so I think that’s the approach we’re taking at this point. 

Chris Badgett: Very cool. And this is a technical question, I’m probably gonna mess it up asking it, but as an example if I’m using DocSpot and I have somebody asking support on my website, I may have trained it on everything Lifter, but it’s running into a core WordPress issue.

Does it have the ChatGPT or Claude or whatever the large language models know a lot about WordPress? Or is it- 

Josh Dailey: Yeah … 

Chris Badgett: so there’s like the information we trained it on, and then there’s this like huge amount of content in the large language- Yep … models. How do we think through But of course sometime- like as a tutor, we want the tutor to be w- like, just focused on our material and not necessarily surfacing- Yeah

Wikipedia answers and stuff like that. So how’s- 

… 

Chris Badgett: Where’s the line of just the huge public data versus your private training? 

Josh Dailey: Yeah. By default, we’re pretty tight with that, so like it’s not going to go out and search the broader web. But we built in the option to expand that out, so you can actually enable specific websites or other knowledge sources that are public sources that you could connect in.

The WordPress ex- WordPress example is a great example because because there’s so much public information about WordPress as an open source project that you could say, oh, if somebody asks… If I’m a, a WordPress plugin and I want general WordPress knowledge to be able to help provide an answer, you could connect that as a source, the public documentation as a source, and then say, “Go search this if they ask for this, this question.”

Yeah. And you can actually narrow or expand depending on what you’re trying to achieve on the site. 

Aaron Edwards: Yeah. Or in your instructions you can relax its restrictions on only answering from your sources and saying, “Hey, if the question is about WordPress, it’s okay to answer based on your general knowledge, as long as you tell them to check that information is accurate,” or something along those lines.

And so you can relax the restrictions that are there to prevent hallucination for things, maybe your product, that the AI models have not been trained on very well and don’t know the facts, you know? 

Chris Badgett: And a question on I’m sure there’s probably a GitHub integration maybe.

For example, this would just be a question for a software company, which I imagine are definitely early adopters of DocSpot ’cause they’re- 

… 

Chris Badgett: Technical, is if we’re integrated with GitHub, and the agent can see all the code that we’ve written that runs our app and let’s say we have– we also trained it on our documentation.

A- and as it happens with software companies, sometimes the documentation gets out of date or stale- … or even might have some errors in it. 

How do we… I guess we’re looking at the response and seeing if, oh, that’s not quite right, and then we train it. But how does it… I’m just thinking about if you have two sources- Yeah

like past Help Scout tickets, it’s training on our docs, and the code in GitHub, and maybe those aren’t always lined up. There might be some conflicts. How does it- … how do we work through that to optimize it over time? 

Aaron Edwards: Yeah. Ultimately I think code is probably, for a software company, code is the greatest source of truth, right?

And docs maybe log behind lag behind that. And so we do have a GitHub live search integration, so you can connect to your GitHub repo and then… And this is especially good for open source software. So if it’s closed source, you probably don’t want users to be able to prompt inject and get them to print off the code to you,

but if it’s an open source thing and that code’s open anyway, then it’s fine. So it can actually go and search GitHub to read the code itself and answer questions based on how it’s actually built. And then in your instructions, you can have those priorities. If sources conflict Help Scout or code is the most accurate, and then Help Scout is the second at most, and then our docs are third most, or whatever it may be.

You can add kind of those things to help it judge responses or even provide caveats to users 

Chris Badgett: This is awesome. I’ve really enjoyed this, Aaron and Josh. I know as kind of AI tech people, we’re ahead of the curve, but I feel here comes everybody. We may be in the top 1% of AI users- 

But as the other 95 or 99% starts catching up, DocsBot, in my opinion, is just gonna take off when people get it, and you remove all that friction of where a regular non-technical business owner or whoever can just get going and leverage all these capabilities. It’s so impressive what you’ve built. 

Aaron Edwards: Oh, thanks.

Josh Dailey: Really appreciate it, yeah. 

Aaron Edwards: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: Thanks for coming on the show. That’s docsbot.ai. If you have any questions, just talk to the DocsBot, agent. But of course- … I don’t know. I’ll leave it with you guys to close it out. If somebody’s super excited, they can talk to the, the DocsBot on docsbot.ai, but- how else can they, get their questions answered and figured out how to move forward? 

Aaron Edwards: Yeah. You can talk to the agent on our site, and that can forward you to us if you need to. And we do– if you’re an agency or you’re you have clients of your own, and you’re looking to maybe add these kind of AI tutors or things to your courses we would love to talk with you and give you a demo and show you what’s possible there.

So please reach out to us. 

Josh Dailey: And social channels, Aaron and I are both pretty active on X. So I’m @JoshDailey, Aaron is @UglyRobot, and for LinkedIn, you can just search our names. But Josh Dailey is my last name is D-A-I-L-E-Y, which is right down here somewhere. So you could see that, but that’s the spelling of it.

But yeah, so if you wanna DM us or talk to us that way as well we’re pretty available. 

Chris Badgett: Thank you for coming back- Yeah … on the show. We’re definitely gonna need to do it again in about a year. As you said the past six months, a lot has changed. I can only imagine the next 12 months of where we’re gonna be at.

Yeah. Yeah. So- 

Aaron Edwards: For 

Chris Badgett: sure … thanks for coming on. I really appreciate it. 

Aaron Edwards: Yeah. Thank you. 

Josh Dailey: Right on. Thanks, Chris.

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/gift. Go to LifterLMS.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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JJ started EZ Notary Class in 2020 during COVID after working for years as a notary and instructing notary programs. His goal was to provide a more economical and useful substitute for costly notary programs, emphasizing not just passing the California state test but also teaching students how to carry out official duties in realistic settings. WooCommerce enabled him to sell tangible goods like notary stamps, journals, supplies, and insurance, while LifterLMS enabled him to provide the video course, monitor student progress, and issue certificates.

Customer experience and experiential learning are key components of JJ’s methodology. His training shows how to correctly notarize papers, confirm identity, finish paperwork, and use notary supplies rather than just imparting knowledge from government manuals. Students can retake the course for a period of two years, and they are given sample documents to print and fill out while following along with the courses. According to JJ, this strategy has contributed to the program’s 97.5% exam success record. Additionally, he established the company as a one-stop shop for aspiring notaries, including insurance, supplies, training, and individualized customer service.

From the things they receive to the emails they receive, he stresses that every customer connection should seem purposeful and beneficial. JJ also describes how he employed customer-focused growth and cautious marketing to expand the company. He started off with a modest budget for Google Ads and only increased it when the ads produced successful sales.

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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 LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show

Chris Badgett: Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest. It’s JJ Jones. Or JJ actually. It’s JJ. 

Jeremiah Jones: It’s fine, yeah. 

Chris Badgett: JJ. 

Jeremiah Jones: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: From easynotaryclass.com. JJ has built an exceptional notary training platform for their certification in California and with over 30,000 students, so it’s pretty awesome.

And I can’t wait to get into it with you and learn about your story and what you built. Sure. And welcome to the show. 

Jeremiah Jones: Thank you very much. Happy to be here. 

Chris Badgett: Let’s start with the journey. I know you worked in fast food. I think you were a notary for 20 years, or you’ve been in this industry for 20 years, a long time.

Jeremiah Jones: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: And- 

Jeremiah Jones: A long time ago when we start- I started this journey, yeah … 

Chris Badgett: and now you’ve built an education company in your niche in the space of notary. Tell us about- … the journey of how you got to here. 

Jeremiah Jones: It was… It did start with me becoming a notary, which was the best thing I ever did yeah, because I was, working in fast food and different, jobs and that kind of thing.

I, not to disparage the, the jobs or people who work in the jobs, but it definitely… I definitely wanted to make a little bit more money. And and I found out about becoming a notary through a family friend, and it was just like okay, that sounds like it’s pretty easy to do, and it doesn’t cost much to get a license.”

In California, the demand is… The de- demand’s always really high in California for notaries. So I said why not give it a shot?” And then I did, and I wound up doing that for several years. I was doing notarizations for home loans, and I was doing notarizations for other types of real estate documents and that kind of thing.

And it worked out really well. And the thing about being a notary is… Look, here, I don’t know how to say this. Nobody wakes up one day or nobody dreams one day, “One day, I’m gonna become a notary,” it’s not… even when I tell people, that what I do, or it’s just it sounds a little bit boring on the surface.

But I’m okay with that because it’s an essential need, and those essential needs can make a lot of money because it- it’s something that people… Everybody needs to get something notarized at some point. And especially in California with all the property, there’s always demand. It’s something that wor- that it was easy to do and was easy to scale, and I was able to build up a good clientele.

And I was just doing that for a long time. And I had also been, Had a, a little bit of a foray into teaching. Not like anything like this, but I was teaching like these, these other kind of classes, and found out about teaching classes and got into that and started to, ’cause I thought it’d be really fun to teach the notary stuff. And then so I started actually teaching notary classes, and I did that for a very long time. And I taught a lot of people. And then in 2020, actually it was right around during COVID, is when I decided to take what I had been doing for all that time with teaching classes and do it in, under my own company.

And that’s when I created easynotaryclass.com because I wanted to create… I knew what the ind- I knew what notaries needed I knew where I was when I first got a license. I knew that there are a lot of companies, there’s a really big brand, they’re like the number one in the nation, and they were just way too expensive.

And I thought there were other resources out there that were just trying to take money from notaries is really was my point of view. And I also knew that they weren’t really providing notaries with the skills necessary to actually turn it into a career. And so I thought, “I can do that,” like I know how to do that.

I know how to teach that. I know how to teach people not just how to become a notary, but how to turn being a California notary into either a side gig or a full-time career, ’cause I got a lot of people who took my program, and, they’re now notaries f- and they just do it on the side, on the weekend.

And then some notaries, they do it full time. And and I knew how to teach that. What I didn’t know was necessarily the technical aspect of it. I didn’t know really how to cr- create a website, actually. I didn’t really understand how to host the videos. I didn’t understand… I knew I could make a video, but I didn’t know how to host them.

I didn’t know how to, check lessons or anything like that. And so when I was first putting it all together, I was just kinda, this is before ChatGPT, so I was just like on YouTube trying to figure this out. And then through the research, eventually I found LifterLMS, and I was like, “Okay, this is good,” because now I don’t really have to worry about that part.

I can just make the videos and post them, and then let LifterLMS handle all the stuff that I don’t… to this day, I still don’t know how you guys do what you do. I don’t know how it works. So I just know that somebody watches a lesson, and they get the credit, and they get their certificate, and that’s what matters to me.

And that’s good, ’cause then I can focus on the other aspects of my business, which is helping my customer turn their dream of turn, becoming a notary into reality. 

Chris Badgett: So what’s the the training? Is it is it kinda two things from my understanding, you help somebody initially become a notary, and then you keep them certified, which is called a commission in your case.

Is that right? Is- Yeah … so what’s on offer exactly? 

Jeremiah Jones: So to become a notary in California, you really have to do two things. You gotta take the class. It’s a six-hour class. And and then you have to take a test. So we don’t handle the test. The state does the test. We handle the class, and that was the part that I had always done.

I had always taught notary classes in person, and then when I went online and made easynotaryclass.com, I said, “Okay, I’m gonna turn it into a video course. You can watch at your own pace.” And then, 

Chris Badgett: So that’s like test prep, is that right? Like it’s preparing- It’s sort 

Jeremiah Jones: of- … 

Chris Badgett: for the exam? 

Jeremiah Jones: Test prep is part of it, right?

Chris Badgett: Yeah. 

Jeremiah Jones: Because that’s the end of the course. 

Chris Badgett: Okay. 

Jeremiah Jones: The, the bulk of the course is really everything about being a notary. So it’s how, what is a notary? How do you actually notarize documents? How do when you have your stamp, how do you stamp a document correctly?

All the different… what do the documents mean? How to fill the documents out, that kind of stuff. And it’s really how to actually be a notary and perform your notary duties. And then from that you’ll be tested. But n- now there’s a second, there’s a second part at the end where we like go through, okay, now you know this information, now you’re gonna take a test.

That’s where a lot of people get scared. So I have a special test prep focus on how to get through this test. But the test really covers all that, like notary procedure information. So in a sense, yes, my class teaches them how to be a notary and then preps them for the test so that then they go and take the state exam and they pass.

We have a 97.5% pass rate, so I’m, I feel really good about that. And and then they be- they get their notary license. Yeah. And then there’s more things too, like for instance th- there’s a couple other things like you wanna actually buy your stamp, and your book, and your, and insurance and stuff like that.

And we sell all of that too. But the initial offering is, yeah, the $79 for the class. And we have a bonus class, which is how to then notarize loan documents specifically. And what I like about that is we are the only notary class that offers that for free. Every other notary class, they charge a couple hundred bucks or whatever.

All of our competitors do. And I can tell you that I go into way more detail in our class than they do. And our class is it’s included for 79. So we try to, I try to keep everything as absolutely cost-effective as possible. ‘Cause that was the goal, the mission from day one was to make the most affordable notary class possible for what you’re getting.

Chris Badgett: I think I saw on your website somewhere you said something like you took every online California notary class so that- 

Jeremiah Jones: Yeah … 

Chris Badgett: your customer doesn’t have to. And then when you say 97% completion rate, what was the gap or the, the optimization you put in to have such high success rates? Well- And you also mentioned earlier a lot of notary things online felt like a money grab of some sort 

Jeremiah Jones: they are.

I can tell you what my, a lot of my competitors do. A lot of my competitors are, what they’ll do is there’s a book, there’s a… I don’t have it with me, but the, the state, they have this little booklet, and it’s the notary, like a book of notary law, okay? And it reads about as exciting as you would imagine.

It’s, like, all government code, and it’s… if you can’t fall asleep, that’s all the melatonin you need. Just read your notary book from the state. And what some of my competitors have done is they just take the text from that course- And they put it on the website, and they charge people whatever they charge, 20, 30 bucks.

And then you open up the course, and it’s really just text from the handbook with a timer, a six-hour countdown timer, and then you’re supposed to read that in six hours. So to me, that’s a money grab. That’s… You’re not teaching anything. I wanted something where we… I really teach you how to do it.

I really wanted to teach you how to put your stamp on a document, how to fill… We show you the documents. We show you how to fill it out. We show you how to actually take ID. It’s not as simple as you think because there are certain parts of the ID that you have to be aware of that you can only know if you see about, if we show you in, in the picture.

And and the other part-and-part is out- physically filling the documents out. So I have, as part of the program, I give you all the sample documents so you can print those out and follow along with the program. So you’re filling the, the documents out while you’re watching us do it, me do it in the class.

And that’s really important because you don’t just get some vague academic, explanation, from a government handbook. You’re actually getting an e- an experiential, learning activity so that you can really cement this. So you’re not just understanding notary law for the sake of notary law, you’re understanding how to actually be a notary and how to actually notarize things.

And, sure, my competitors will sell a course for 20 bucks. And I can’t possibly compete with $20. I try to price it as much as I can, so mine is $79. But the difference is you’re actually learning, and you’re actually gonna get prepared for the test, and that’s why we have such a high pass rate.

I say we guarantee you pass the test or get your money back, and I stand by that. And I think this year I’ve only refunded two people that’s not bad. And so I think the thing about… that makes what we do different, it’s one of the reasons why we consistently have only five-star reviews on Trustpilot.

If you look at the review, it’s just five-star, five-star, five-star, five-star. And it’s because of the amount of care that we put into it. And then there’s the customer service aspect of it, like I said, I have a really large competitor. They’re the national brand. And I’ve had people call me and they say, “Look I’ve, I went o- I called them and I was on the phone for, I was on hold for an hour.

When I call you guys, you pick up the phone.” And that’s part of being a small family business where we can give that kind of an attention to our customers so that they can really, be a partner with you as you’re moving forward in your, in your notary your notary goals.

Achieving your notary goals. 

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I love the focus on experience, not just information and practice. Yeah. Getting people taking action and stuff like that. That’s awesome. But- 

Jeremiah Jones: It’s a big deal because, it’s y- we all been in… let’s just take college, for example. We’ve all been in a college course where, you’ve got a teacher that drones on and you’re just, y- and then you walk out of there and you don’t remember it.

Or book reading, yeah. For instance, I’m one of those kinds of people that I don’t retain a lot from what I read. So if I if I’m reading something like, whether it’s like a, a self-help kind of a book or e- or if, especially if it’s like a technical, manual or whatever.

If I’m reading it, my retention is gonna be pretty low, but if I’m… And if you’re just watching it too, right? Your retention is higher. But if you’re watching it and you’re experiencing it- Doing it … at the same time- Yeah … your retention’s really solid. And that’s what I mean by I knew I could do this.

I knew I could create the most superior product on the market. Nobody beats me. The national brand, I get so many people that come to my class and they chase, they say, “I took the n- the big national course. It’s $200, and it was so boring I was falling asleep, and I learned nothing.” So I get that question.

I get that a lot, too. Nobody can beat our course. It is the best notary course on the internet. And I’m very proud of it. It, not just on the internet, a- anywhere. And I even think it’s better than the w- courses I was teaching online. I m- I’m sorry, the courses I was teaching in person.

Because when I was teaching classes in person, here’s the other part of it. Is that when you teach a class in person, once the instructor says something once, that’s it’s gone forever. You never get to hear it again. But we give access to our class, to our students for a long enough ti- two years actually.

So you can go back and re-watch it and and re- go through the information again. Some of my students, they’ll watch the class a couple of times before they take their test to really get that information, cemented in there. So yeah, all those kinds of things. There was a lot of forethought that was put into the class.

It took almost a year to make the whole thing. And and but then here was the problem. I knew I could make the… This is going back to what we were just saying with you guys. I knew I could make the class and make the videos, which took forever, but then when those videos were done and I had that six-hour-long course, I was like, “Okay, now what?”

How do I put this online, and how do I turn this into a course that records student progress and everything else? And that, s- brings me back to LifterLMS. 

Chris Badgett: On the technology front, had you already had experience with WordPress, or was this your first thing? ‘Cause it I think in the history, you bought a $1 demo site from us in 2020 or something like that to try it out.

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Jeremiah Jones: Did I? I didn’t know that. It’s funny. 

Chris Badgett: And then, … pretty quickly I think- Sounds 

Jeremiah Jones: like something I would do. Yeah … 

Chris Badgett: in 12 hours, you bought the Infinity Bundle, which was our top plan, and you moved forward. But, like, when you’re starting to set this up, and you’re doing WordPress, and you’re doing LifterLMS, and you’re figuring out video hosting, was this all new to you at that time, or had you had some experience in some of those things?

Jeremiah Jones: Yeah, it was mostly new to me. I knew a little bit about WordPress because I had helped somebody create a website before, but it was really archaic, and it was just basic posts, that kind of thing. I really didn’t know. I didn’t know anything about WooCommerce. I didn’t know anything about integrations.

I… The other thing is, to me, graphic design’s really important, so I’m really involved in the look of everything, and I didn’t really know how to do that at first until I found Elementor, which worked out great at the time, and I wound up making everything in Elementor. I’ve sw- I’ve since actually switched to Gutenberg, but it’s the same.

Because Gutenberg wasn’t out at that time. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. 

Jeremiah Jones: So Gutenberg gives me a little bit more control than Elementor did, but at that time, Elementor was really good because I can control the look of everything. But again, I know, to answer your larger question, I really didn’t know. I had no actual idea what I was doing.

I actually had no idea what I was doing. That’s the truth. So 

Chris Badgett: how’d you do it? How’d you figure it out? And I’m just saying, I, I’ve done a lot of these- 

Jeremiah Jones: Yeah … 

Chris Badgett: and this is a common pattern I see, is people will, they just refuse to not try and keep going and learn and try to get help. 

Jeremiah Jones: Yeah. I think that’s that’s something that my fiancée makes fun of me for it sometimes.

I think it’s one of those things where there’s a book about entrepreneurship, and I think the book, the title of the book is Ready, Fire, Aim. Ready, Fire, 

Chris Badgett: Aim. Yeah. 

Jeremiah Jones: Yeah, Ready, Fire, Aim. Yeah. And I think that’s pretty much how I operate. Or there was someb- someone else that talked about a true entrepreneur is Somebody who jumps off of a cliff and figures out how to make an airplane on the way down.

And I was like, that kind of exactly exemplifies how it is. And I just knew that I would figure it out. And so with this course, it was, I di- I didn’t know what I was doing at all. And then I started going into YouTube and just re- watching everything that I could reading everything I could. Just I didn’t really outsource.

I got, I hired a couple of people that helped me put a few things together. But for the most part, I try to do everything on my own. And I don’t know, I just, I did it. But I’m still doing that. There’s stuff that we’re doing right now with the course that, you know, stuff that I wanna do that I have no idea how we’re gonna do it, but we’ll just figure it out.

I don’t know. I, the knowledge is out there. I, I know I can find the knowledge, and it’s one of those things where I feel like if you don’t try, if you just wait until you’re ready, it, I found that was more of an excuse to procrastinate because of fear. And I’ve always been more afraid I’ve always been more afraid of not trying than of failing.

Failing is never really been something I’ve been really afraid of. Not trying has been something I’ve been really afraid of. So I think that’s the balance, right? I’m more driven by, than s- saying I didn’t give it a shot. 

Chris Badgett: You’re an entrepreneur through and through. Yeah. That’s that’s awesome.

You also introduce some complexity in the sense that you’re like a one-stop shop. You have training seals, journals, kits. One of your students said that they passed the exam, received their package from the secreta- Secretary of State, and ordered their bond and supplies from you, and they didn’t have to worry about getting scammed.

So not only are you. Yeah … doing training, you have retail and shipping, which is, I’m assuming, why you’re using WooCommerce. So tell us about- 

Jeremiah Jones: Yeah … 

Chris Badgett: that. 

Jeremiah Jones: I think I I started using WooCommerce actually from the beginning. That was just what was available to me. And then but I needed to… Oh, no, actually you’re right.

That’s why, I think that’s why I started to do it, ’cause I wasn’t using WooCommerce at first. I was using some other gateway, but it doesn’t matter. So yeah, I wanted to start selling physical products, so that’s when we really, I really ramped up on the WooCommerce. There’s another thing I didn’t know to do.

I didn’t know anything about physical products. I didn’t know about fulfillment. I didn’t know how to make a label and pay shipping and, I have no clue about that stuff. I didn’t even know where I was gonna get the stamps, and then, but I knew I wanted to make something really superior, so so I made everything custom in-house.

Like the book that we sell which, it’s over there. But the book that we sell, yeah, I don’t have it here, but it’s okay. The, we have this notary journal and I knew it was out there, because I had a notary journal because I was a notary, and I knew what was wrong with them. I knew what could’ve been better.

So I designed my own journal. Had no idea what I was doing. I just designed it in Illustrator, and then found a company to, print them and ordered 500 and just gonna, kinda cross my finger, hope that people would buy it. And then and then I found a stamp manufacturer, whi- which was a little bit easier, because I knew who made the best stamps, and then was able to work that out.

But I didn’t know how to make a stamp. You have to p- just so you know, like there’s this big machine that you have to purchase, and then you get blank stamps, and then you create each stamp individually. It’s a really laborious process, and then create each stamp, and it flashes this laser.

It’s a whole thing. And I didn’t know any of that. But I knew that w- we could figure it out. That’s, was the whole end thing about WooCommerce integration, and then that was a whole thing, and then shipping, and then collecting sales tax, and then paying the sales tax. And so all that was totally brand new to me.

But it wound up being a little bit easier than I thought it was gonna be. I still have, there’s still It’s still not that easy. Like fulfillment is its own thing. Actually, just an hour ago, we were talking about somebody who their package was lost in the mail, and it’s just a, it’s a headache.

And obviously you want to make sure every customer gets their, their deliverables. So you want to, and, but it’s okay. We’re going to send another package. It’s not a big deal, but unfortunately I got to eat that cost. But for the most part, we have a pretty streamlined system. People order the supply, they, or they get the class, they’ll order their supplies.

And then we’ll put in those fulfillments for them and send them out. The other aspect is the insurance. I wanted to offer that because I knew that insurance was really expensive. A lot of our, a lot of our competitors sold insurance, but really high prices. I knew that I wasn’t able to legally sell insurance because I was not an insurance broker or, or anything like that.

So I just started researching. I called pretty much all around the country looking for insurance companies that would partner with me to make for the cheapest price. And I found a company and they’re great. They’re Swift Bonds and I, they’re great people, but I mostly chose them because they also have the cheapest notary insurance possible.

It’s like $38. So I said, okay, great. That’s perfect. So then we set up a partnership program where we sell their insurance through our website. And then that way I know that my customers are getting the best insurance at the cheapest price. So I’ve always tried to, that’s what I mean. Like between the insurance and like the book and all those little touch points for our customer, I, my goal has always been making each of those touch points as premium as possible, because you can, Even an e-, as even as something as simple as an email.

You can, what we my fiancée and I work together. We’re, she’s actually doing emails right now. And, when the email comes in, we are very intentional with the way that we are communicating with our customers, y- you will not find a very cut-and-paste customer support style answer, if, Mary sends us an email, that response is gonna, starting with “Hi, Mary!” Exclamation mark. “How you been?” We are trying to create every single touchpoint we have with a customer, whether it’s through a product or through a communication, is trying to enhance that customer’s experience.

Because every single one of those touchpoints creates an overall picture of their opinion of our customer. And then hopefully that gets passed down through word of mouth. And, and then of course the customer’s average, lifetime value as they, stay retained with us and renew their notary license with us.

So we’re always trying to create the best experience possible for everybody that comes through our program. 

Chris Badgett: That’s amazing. I have this saying that you wanna put your customer at the center of your business, not your product. And you obviously do that, ’cause you’re like- Yes … “Oh they need training, but they also need the stamps, and the journal, and insurance, and to feel well taken care of in their experience.”

So it totally makes sense to me why this is working well. And in terms of the business model they pay once, but then they need to come back to renew or get more supplies. So- 

Jeremiah Jones: Yeah … 

Chris Badgett: how does it work in notary? Do they have to recertify every year, every three years, or how does that work?

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Jeremiah Jones: So they recertify every four years.

Chris Badgett: Okay. 

Jeremiah Jones: And, we try to make that really easy for them. It’s not like- with our particular product, it’s not I don’t know, like a hand cream or something that you order once a month. You know what I mean? So we’re not getting… And we don’t have a subscription. That’s the other thing.

A lot of our other cust- a lot of our other competitors, they’ll have some sort of a subscription model that, you know, $20 a month for something. And I’ve always really been hesitant to do that because I don’t really… I only offer things that I know are gonna add a tremendous amount of value.

We’ve talked about it, like some sort of a subscription model for support or whatever, but I… And we might do in the future, but I, only if I know that we can provide the most value for the dollar. So as far as a business model we’re, primarily focused on, new people who wanna become notaries.

And then when they get their license, we put them through our program and give them all the tools they need, whether it’s supplies, insurance, whatever. And then, we probably more than likely won’t see you again for another four years, unless you need something, just give me an e- an email and I’ll help you out with something.

But more than likely, you should be good for the next four years, and then we’ll see you then 

Chris Badgett: If there’s somebody in another industry, like I’ve seen this movie many times before where you were a practicing notary, and you got into education, and then you got into- Yeah … scaling education online.

But then there’s all these state requirements and things like that. Do you like, when you think about ex- expansion, do you think about getting more of the California share, trying to figure out how to get into other states? ‘Cause there’s notaries in all 50 states in the US 

Jeremiah Jones: yeah. So- 

Chris Badgett: But they all have different rules, right?

So how do you even think about that? They do. Yeah. 

Jeremiah Jones: Yeah, they do. Part of it is a balance between wanting to expand and really being able to capture the market at affordable price, right? So the, the customer acquisition cost is really, that’s really what it comes down to. So I can expand, for instance, into, Nevada, but if it costs me more to acquire a customer than the cost of afford- than I would charge for an affordable class, I’m not gonna go into a state and start charging $200 to acquire, for a class.

That being, so I o- right now we’re focusing on, if I focus mainly on California and how we can reach as many people as we can for, the best price. And the reality is, as far as the metrics I’ve seen, we’re number two in California next to the national brand. As far as the amount of customers that are signing up and the amount of c- we’re capturing something like, from what I understood when the, the numbers are shown to me, we’re capturing 25% of all of California’s notaries every month.

That’s pretty exceptional when our largest competitor is a giant mul- multimillion-dollar company that, spans all 50 states. And, we’re a team of three. So I’m pretty, pretty proud of that. Now that being said, we have tested going into the state of Texas. Texas is a different animal though, because like you said, that every state is different.

So for interest for for instance, in Texas there’s no state requirement to take the kind of class we’re teaching. Whereas like in California, in order to become a notary, you actually have to take a class legally a state-certified class like ours. If you want to become a notary in Texas, that’s not a requirement.

So it’s a different, sell. In, in Texas, I have to say, when I, when we’re advertising, I have to say, “Hey, if you wanna be a notary, I can teach you how best to become a notary and how best to notarize documents. But you’re not compelled to purchase this course in order to be a notary.”

And so just based on that alone, it’s gonna cost more to acquire that customer. And so be- because of that it’s going into each state is a little bit more difficult and requires very precise calculation on cost per acquisition and, how we can scale. So our plan definitely is to go into the Texas expansion again 100%.

We have the, the Texas books all ready to go, but I wanna make sure we do that without spending too much money on advertising. Speaking of getting clients I would imagine there’s a lot of different things. I’m sure you have some SEO and articles and content and pages and Google search. There’s paid acquisition through ads.

Chris Badgett: I imagine with a business like yours with 97% success rates and just a top-shelf customer experience, word of mouth and referrals is a big part of it, ’cause notaries talk to other notaries, I’m guessing. But like- Yeah … how do you how do you get clients? Like- What’s the, How do we get 

Jeremiah Jones: clients? 

Chris Badgett: Yeah, like what’s the method that seems to work?

‘Cause I think it’s a really inspiring story if you’re going up against a national brand and you’ve got 25% of the market. The somebody would wonder “Hey I’m in this other medical niche or legal niche, there’s a big national brand or another trade.” Like, how, what would you advise them to do to, get clients starting from zero?

I guess you were already teaching in person, so you already had a reputation and there, but- 

Jeremiah Jones: Yeah, but that reputation didn’t translate. It didn’t scale- Okay … to this at all. Because when I did it all on my own, on a brand-new company with a company that nobody had ever heard of before. I designed the logo, at home on my computer.

And and so any reputation I had didn’t matter because, the random person who wants to become a notary on a Thursday doesn’t know who I am, that they were taking my course. So they’re just gonna Google how to become a notary. They’re gonna Google notary class. Yeah. I knew… What the one advantage I div- I did have was that I knew- I knew how big the market was, and I knew how much I could acquire.

I knew what success looked like. So I was able to set a metric for myself in terms of okay, this is how many customers on average I think we can acquire a day and in order to be profitable. And so I knew I had that North Star. And so going into, It kinda goes back to the customer, ’cause I- everything’s focused back on the customer, and that is trying to understand their psychology.

So if somebody wants to become a notary, what are they gonna do? They’re gonna go on Google, and especially, five years ago, they’re gonna go on Google. Now they might go to ChatGPT, which is not bad, ’cause we show up in ChatGPT every day. But I knew they were gonna go to Google. So I knew I had to have a very well-optimized site for SEO.

And I I didn’t know how to do that, by the way. And I knew I had to run Google Ads and I didn’t know how to do that either. But somehow I got a Google Ads account set up, and I figured, okay, if my price was $79, if I, What was my metric? I think I put $100 in on the first day. So if I spend $100 today, and I get two sales, then I’ll spend $100 and f- $150 the next day.

And that’s actually exactly what happened. And so I started- I was always… Like I never went into this saying, “Oh, I’m just gonna invest a bunch of money, go into debt, and then hopefully make it up at the end.” I wanted to stay net positive the entire step. I wasn’t ready to, risk it.

So maybe that’s, maybe another entrepreneur would, and they’d, throw in $200,000 into it and whatever, but I wasn’t ready to do that. I wanted to step this in very carefully. So we started with a very small ad budget and then just stepped it up, and stepped it up, and stepped it up. And always making sure, were we, by the day, the week month, quarter, year, were we profitable from in, going from the Google Ads?

Chris Badgett: Very cool. 

Jeremiah Jones: Yeah. And that’s, eventually that scales over time, and it scaled pretty quickly, by the way ’cause Google Ads will love to spend your money. So it scales pretty quickly. 

Chris Badgett: That’s like product market fit. You just see it. If the ad works on the first try for 100, a hun- 100 in, 150 out that’s awesome.

Jeremiah Jones: Yeah. That worked. That worked really well. That, now here’s the thing, though. That’s one aspect of it. The other aspect of it, like the Google Ads aspect is really important. Then the next part of it that’s re-

Really important is cut-off rule. And if you don’t ha- Hang on, give me one second here. We are about to lose charge. Shoot

Okay, one second. If you’re there- Sorry about this, Chris. 

Chris Badgett: It’s okay. 

JJ: Cut this part

Chris Badgett: My internet went down yesterday, so I know it- 

Jeremiah Jones: Sorry … 

Chris Badgett: it happens. Yeah. 

Jeremiah Jones: All right. All right. Yeah, sorry. I just didn’t realize what my charge was.

Chris Badgett: All good 

Jeremiah Jones: Anyway yeah. With Google Bus Step, the other part of it was customer referrals. Yeah. So the thing about customer referrals is they only exist because you’re creating a great customer experience. So I knew that from day one that we just had to create the best customer experience possible in order to get those referrals And now here’s the thing though, I will say ‘Cause you’re at in a different industry.

And I think it was identifying the types of customers that you have available to you. Because the customer that I just talked about, which is the customer who is googling becoming a notary that’s a warm lead. That’s somebody who wants to become a notary, and so they go on Google and they like, “I wanna become a notary,” and they’re ready to go.

They’re a higher intent purchase. They wanna become a notary, and that’s why they found you. So the other customer is the kind of person who doesn’t know much about being a notary. They’ve never really researched being a notary. And that’s a completely different customer because i- in some of the cases, they don’t even know what a notary is.

And those customers we’ve been finding on social media. Oh … I started to post TikTok and Instagram videos. And to be honest, I didn’t think it was gonna do very well. I’m like, “Who’s gonna watch a video of this bald guy talking about being a notary?” And we’ve got, like n- like 900,000 views, a million views, 800,000 views.

Wow. Some of our views I just looked the other one. I pulled up TikTok before this call, and this one is almost at a million views, and I just posted it not that long ago. The interest is there. And that really changed the game for us because now we’re targeting people who, again, let’s face it, nobody, you know, wakes up in the morning and says they wanna become a notary.

The reason why you w- wanna become a notary is because you can make extra money. And so we’re advertising this message of look, you can actually, like what I did, you can go from fast food and start to be a notary, start to notarize documents and, make money. And that is really resonating on social media.

And I it doesn’t surprise me because the thing about being a notary is you’re starting your own business. And I don’t know any business in the world that you can start for $79. Yeah. So giving people that option of… ‘Cause I have a lot of people who are, they don’t necessarily have the same opportunities as other people.

I have a lot of people that are under-educated. I have a lot of people that are coming from all kinds of different financial situations. And, they don’t necessarily have a master’s degree or, I don’t have a master’s degree, but they don’t have the credentials it would take that, it would take somebody that they would normally traditionally think to get a high-paying job or just even to make extra money.

But they don’t necessarily wanna work fast food. They don’t wanna drive for Uber Eats. They don’t wanna drive for Postmates. If this is an option to them that they may not have thought about, they’re already searching for different side hustles or whatever. Here’s something different that not everybody’s doing.

And so when I started posting on social media, I was very surprised. When our first video got like 150,000 views, I was like, “No.” And then we got 500,000 views, and I’m like, “Okay.” And then we’ve just been going up from there. And that’s been really great because we’ve been able to, like I said, we’ve been able to capture the attention of a completely different customer than we’ve ever have captured before.

Because there, it’s always been warm leads on Google, people that already knew they wanted to be a notary. And so now we’re capturing a whole different avatar, and we have some more expansion ideas on that whole department because it’s worked so well, so we’re really excited about that. 

Chris Badgett: I love that.

That’s awesome. The the idea of the top of the funnel where it’s not just people who are already looking for your solution. The, creating marketing for people that aren’t even aware. They’re problem aware. Like they want- … a different job or side income or more flexibility or whatever.

But just exposing them to the notary option that’s awesome, and that’s a huge top of funnel play, which is very cool. I’m really excited for you that it really hit- Thanks … on social media. And the power of TikTok- Yeah … and the way the algorithm works there where it gives everybody an equal chance to get eyeballs, and you happen to be talking about something that, is in the mind of people looking for different career paths and things.

It’s awesome. And the other thing I gotta say is it’s really fulfilling when I get… I just got this message yesterday, an email, and it was a really long email. I was like, w- I was like, “Oh, my God, is this a customer complaint? What is it?” And then I read it, and it turns out, no, it was a customer talking about how this course changed their life.

Jeremiah Jones: And and that she actually signed up with our course years ago. And just completely turned things around for her, and she’s now a full-time notary. And she really just wrote an email to say thank you, and that really, that really means a lot. It tells you that what we’re doing is the right thing because- Like I said, I knew that there was a better way.

I knew that there, that other companies were more interested in taking money from prospective notaries than actually helping people become notaries. And I knew that we could really help people in that situation. A lot of my customers are in a tough financial situation. That’s why they wanna become notaries.

They say, “I want to do something to make extra money, but I don’t know what that is.” And we present this solution to them, and the best part that makes me feel good is that we present them this solution for the best price possible. It’s a… See that it really ha- does have an impact for people means a lot to me.

Chris Badgett: JJ, thank you for being a shining example of a education entrepreneur, and you’re not just, selling training and supplies, you’re actually creating a transformation. You’re helping people find a new career and become a better version of themselves or get in a better financial position, like that long email that you got where you literally changed somebody’s life at an affordable pri- price, $79- Right

while caring a lot about their experience throughout their entire journey. It’s, that’s awesome. So my hat’s off to you. 

Jeremiah Jones: Thank you very much. 

Chris Badgett: So that’s JJ at eznotaryclass.com. Check it out. And again, JJ, thanks for coming on the show. Thank you for sharing your story, and keep up the amazing work. 

Jeremiah Jones: Thank you, Chris.

Appreciate it.

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/gift. Go to lifterlms.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode

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Richard Dunbavand describes how MDR Training first offered in-person training for the heavily regulated transport sector in the UK, where drivers, transport managers, and company owners must meet certain requirements in order to be compliant. When classroom instruction ceased during COVID-19, it was the most significant turning event. After one of his trainers found LifterLMS through a YouTube video, Richard swiftly transferred the instruction online.

He taught himself WordPress and LifterLMS and created the complete training portal on his own, despite the first learning curve being difficult. Approximately 15–20% of the UK transport management training market is served by MDR Training, which now has about 5,000 students on the platform with 200–300 new students enrolling every month.

The significance of assignments, tests, active learning, and teacher feedback is a central topic in Richard’s narrative. MDR Training incorporates multiple-choice tests, case studies, homework, and hand graded assignments with live classroom and Zoom instruction, as opposed to just recording class sessions and posting them online. Through the LMS, tutors may receive student contributions, evaluate them, offer comments, reset tasks, and keep track of students’ progress. According to Richard, the first-time pass percentage for their self-study students is less than 25%, whereas the rate for students who receive classroom or online teacher supervision is about 86%.

Additionally, Richard describes how LifterLMS has enabled MDR Training to grow outside the confines of traditional classroom settings. They can now train over 150 individuals each month in online sessions, with students coming from Saudi Arabia, Nepal, and all throughout Europe, as opposed to just a few people in a classroom. Assignments, tests, reports, alerts, certifications, cohorts, and the Sky Pilot theme are among the features that have grown to be crucial components of their operations. He especially appreciates reporting as it enables the staff to spot pupils who are struggling or falling behind and take action before the final test.

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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 LifterLMS, 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. His name is Richard Dunbavand from MDR Training in the UK, which is compliance training in the transport industry. Richard has been using LifterLMS for a while. It’s really cool what he’s done. He’s self-taught himself WordPress and LifterLMS, and made a really interesting training company that’s very needed in his industry.

Richard, welcome to the show. 

Richard Dunbavand : Chris, hi. Thanks for having me on. And you didn’t hash my surname quite as badly as I expected you to, so that’s good. 

Chris Badgett: I had a little bit of practice. 

Richard Dunbavand : Yeah. But yeah. Well- No, thanks for having me on. 

Chris Badgett: You’re at mdrtrainingportal.com. And- Great … tell us we, LMS we’re always around three letter anacronyms.

What is MDR stand for? And just tell us, like what a transport manager, CPC, and all these things are. Give us the context- Sure … of the type of training you do and what it is. Yeah. 

Richard Dunbavand : No worries at all. So MDR isn’t very exciting, I’m afraid. So originally, we were a recruitment agency years and years ago, and the recruitment agen- agency was called Midlands Driver Recruitment, MDR.

We set up a training arm of the recruitment company, and the logical thing was to call it MDR. Sadly, what we didn’t realize is there’s a medical qualification called Medical Devices Regulation. So initially, my SEO was borked because everybody was searching- Ah … was searching for that, but thought we were a medical devices company.

It’s not the best in the world, but so we specialize in transport training. Okay, so in the UK it’s a highly regulated industry whether that be the driver, the transport manager, the business owner, whatever it may be. And it’s very easy to fall foul of that compliance, in which case you lose your license, you lose your ability to drive, ability to run your business.

So we’ve set up a, a range of courses to help people stay compliant and stay abreast of the rules. The, the biggest course is our Transport Manager CPC. It’s the equivalent, and I don’t know what the equivalent would be in the US, but it’s the equivalent of an A level- Sort of between college and university, which is tough for guys. Most people who sit our course, the average age is roughly 40. A lot haven’t been at school for a long time, haven’t learnt for a long time, and some of them haven’t been in front of a computer for a long time. So it’s interesting. But we were del- w- we delivered classroom courses originally.

People would come to us within an hour or two’s travel time. They’d come to our classroom, and that would be about, about as far as we could grow. COVID hit. As with a lot of provider, training providers, the world stopped. It got to… It was a bank holiday here, so it would’ve been mid-March, and Kevin and I sat and had a conversation, and it was, “We’ve got nothing left,” so I cobbled together an online course and we put it out there. Not using LifterLMS, just something we did ourself. Cobbled it together and that was the beginning, we picked up Lifter– When did we pick up Lifter? So one of the trainers actually watched one of your YouTube videos.

Watched the video, and he said, “Look,” “we should have a look at this.” So I did. We took a trial. I think it was a £1 trial or something along those lines. Took… Oh, the dollar trial, sorry. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. 

Richard Dunbavand : Took the dollar trial. I looked at it, panicked, thought, “I’ve got no idea what I’m doing here.”

But slowly, over the last Three years. We’ve built a portal and a, a, a product or a group of produ- products that we hold about 15, 20% of the UK market for transport management. So it’s going well. Lifter was key to that because with any learning, the only way you can confirm that you understand something is by practicing it, and the courses that we do, they’re exam- there’s exams at the end. So they would do case study exams, written answers or assignments using your plugin term, multiple choice quizzes. Again, quizzes is perfect. So it’s grown from there. I, I think we’ve got just shy of 5,000 students on the portal at the moment, and it’s growing. We, there’s 2 or 300 joining us each month, so it’s positive. We’re getting there slowly. 

Chris Badgett: Wow that’s awesome. And tell us take us back to the beginning. I think this started around 2007, if I’m correct. 

Richard Dunbavand : The 

Chris Badgett: business? 

Richard Dunbavand : And- Yep, yep … 

Chris Badgett: and you had- So that was-

like real classrooms as well. And that’s what COVID threw a, a challenge towards. 

Richard Dunbavand : Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: We, we- But like how did it begin? 

Richard Dunbavand : We were, like I say, we were a recruitment agent first, so we were supplying drivers to companies, and then the EU brought in a a regulation that every driver had to do a day of training every five years.

One, a day, a year, every five years. So f- five days over five years. And initially we thought, well- If we get our drivers trained, they’re more saleable, they’re trained, they’re qualified, they’re good to go. So we started doing that, and that was classroom. We were hiring rooms, we were hiring village halls, we were hiring whatever we were doing which isn’t really scalable.

Y- it isn’t scalable. You could, you … how many people can you fit in a classroom? 20, and that was about as far as we could grow. And then somebody approached me, one of our customers approached me and said, “Can you do transport management?” Being a salesman, I said, “Yes,” without actually knowing what it was.

So w- within three months, we had to scrabble together and put a course together, get our approvals, get the regulations up which we did. And we ended up with three people on the first course, and two out of the three passed, so we had a 66% pass rate, which compared to the national average of 40, we were in the sort of upper echelons of what we’re doing, and it’s just grown from there.

Like I say, we now have around about 150, 160 people a month sit their exams. And then there’s all the courses that come off the back of it. They have to do refresher courses. Business owners have to do awareness courses, and it’s just grown from there. And again, every course has got its space on the portal.

The testing’s done through there. They’re accessing their course material, course notes. We’ve created … We- audio files have been fantastic for us, because people can listen to that in the car. You listen to a live session with a tutor, and then on your way home, you press the but- press the go button, play it through your car And you get it back.

So we’ve… it’s exciting at the minute. It’s ever so exciting, i’m still waiting for the wave to crash, because that’s, I’m mildly pessimistic, but, it doesn’t seem to be going at the moment. 

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And you do things a little differently. Sometimes, particularly in a COVID situation, people try to film the classroom and then just b- basically- digitize everything, but you do something different, where… I’m g- what I wanna get a sense of is, like, all the different ways you make content or training, and then- Okay. Yeah … what your team looks like. So for example, y- you do live training, virtual Zoom, or some kind of- Yeah … meeting training. Yeah.

And then you have tutors, and then you do assessments with LifterLMS. What’s the stack? 

Richard Dunbavand : Okay, so how it works is, So we still run classroom courses as well, so we’ve got a team of tutors, trainers, who a- who are delivering the courses on a day-to-day basis. Whether that be in the class over Zoom.

We have quite a few distance learning students as well, so I guess you’d call it a, almost like a correspondence course, where they get feed- fed back again through the portal. So they go from, once they’ve had their tutoring, whether that be in the class or whatever we then set them homework to do.

We set them multiple choice c- practice papers. We set them case studies, which are long-form answers. And all that’s done through the portal. It’s, they the great thing about this is they can submit a piece of work, whether that be right or wrong or whatever, it’s submitted.

The tutor gets it, so the tutor that’s taught them will then get their homework, he’ll get their homework, and he’s able to mark it. He’s able to feed it back to them. He’s able to get them to redo it if they’ve, if they’re making mistakes. But the, the feedback is so important, and that’s the how people learn is by doing, you can t- you can talk to somebody until they’re blue in the face, but until they’re practicing, until they’re making mistakes, because you make mistakes, that’s how you get better. And that’s what this has enabled us to do, it’s enabled us to, each block of sessions we can test it. We know that they’ve understood what they’ve been taught, and they can apply what they’ve been taught into an exam.

And that’s the key. 

Chris Badgett: So the tutors, how do they give the feedback? 

Richard Dunbavand : That’s all done through the portal. So they’ll receive an- receive the assignment. We’ve not twiddled with the plugin in any way, shape, or form. Chris Badgett will do his case study on driver scheduling. That will come through to Richard.

I’ll get an email. I’m able to go… I click a link in the email, it takes me straight to the portal. I can review what they’ve put. I can tell them whether it’s good, bad or horrible, and then we can work from there. Do they need to do it again? I can reset it. They can do it again. Have they got the, the required marks?

If they have, then we can move to the next. It’s that engagement that’s key because we do sell one of the courses, which is a straight home study course. You buy the course material, it’s about 130 pound. You buy the course material, you’re on your own. You get access to the multi-choice through the portal.

But the case studies, you’re on your own. The pass rate between that, the first time pass between a, a, a self-study course and our classroom or the online course, self-study is less than 25% of the people that buy it go on and pass and become a transport manager. With the classroom and online, it’s 86% because we’re supporting them.

We can see what they’re doing. If you study on your own, you don’t know you’re ready for an exam until you sit the exam, and invariably you find out you ain’t, but using this system that we’ve got here, we can… We’ve got the engagement with the students that we can get them to a position where they understand they’ve seen everything that the examiners can throw at them, they’ve made those mistakes and it’s like I said earlier, mistakes are key because that’s how you learn. 

Chris Badgett: That’s really awesome. It shows the power of feedback loops. Absolutely. Like self-study is great, but you’re gonna do a lot better with tutoring and feedback and, getting busy with assignments and case studies and things like 

Richard Dunbavand : that.

There’s no comparison, Chris. There’s no, there’s no comparison at, at all. So yeah, it’s, What we’ve got it’s working, always needs tinkering, always needs a bit of playing with, and we can always evolve a little bit, but w- we’re getting there slowly. We’ve got we’ve got a, a, a new person that’s joined us, and she’s really taking on the creation of these assignments, which is fantastic because, again, it means the more we can offer people, the more they can see, the more they can physically do through the portal, the better they’re gonna be. 

Chris Badgett: That’s fantastic. Take us back to the the moment where you were… you decided to go with LifterLMS and WordPress.

And I’m also super 

Richard Dunbavand : fascinated- I prefer not to ’cause it was hellish. 

Chris Badgett: Why was it hellish? I’m curious. Is it 

Richard Dunbavand : because of- it wasn’t. That’s not true. Oh, okay. So it, One of the trainers, Brad, he watched one of you guys vid- YouTube videos. It popped up in a, I think… I, it was… we’d been talking about e-learning.

We were using… I forget who we were using before, but we were using somebody and it was very basic. Very basic. And anyway, Brad showed me this video. I thought, “I like the look of that,” obviously, you had a fully-fledged system with, bells, whistles. I thought, “That must be easy,” so we took a trial. And I forget the length of the trial and I knew nothing about WordPress, I knew nothing about LifterLMS, I knew nothing about plugins, anything. So it blew my mind, it literally blew my mind initially. But watching, picking up YouTube videos, picking up, things that I read online, you slowly start to get an understanding of how to build.

The… When you guys changed to the… I forget the new tem- the new theme that came out. Is it- Skypilot … Skypilot? Yeah. Skypilot. Yeah. Fanta- absolute game changer because it just… Everything felt easier. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

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Richard Dunbavand : Everything felt easier. And again, that could just be because I was learning more as I was going, but that, when that came out, all of a sudden the site looked more like how I wanted it to, I felt like I could, it, it… we could match it to the brand, we could match it to how we want it to be. So yeah, it was… I say hellish, it was great fun, I made a huge amount of mistakes. I deleted courses by mistake. I lost quizzes. But that’s part of it, and it’s…

I can look back now and say it was fun. My gray hairs wouldn’t agree with me, but, so yeah it took- It probably took about three months of prep to get us, to get to the position where we had a course that we could put out to people, we the, there was there were enough quizzes, there’s enough assignments, and we knew what to do with those assignments.

Yeah it’s … If, i- if anybody’s curious about anything I’d definitely, I’d say have a go, because what’s the worst that can happen? The worst that, the the it changed our business completely,

Chris Badgett: it sounds like it took you about 90 days to really kinda give yourself permission to learn and figure it out.

It’s not like- Yeah … it just, you understand it all in the first day. It takes a while. 

Richard Dunbavand : No, there’s a the, the learning curve from, just for WordPress itself was quite steep, yeah. I was used to, I’d used Squarespace and Wix, and the, as website builders before.

I’d never had any sort of contact with, a plugin system or that sort of daunting back end when you see a dashboard that none of it makes a huge amount of sense. So y- I, you just have to play. You have to play with things. The good thing about- W- WordPress, Lifter and so on, you can’t really break it.

Yes, you can make mistakes. Yes, you can delete things, but everything’s recoverable. Play with it, and y- if I can do it, most people can do it. 

Chris Badgett: That’s what I would say If in terms of like building the site, not doing the tutoring and reviews and things like that, is that all you or is there somebody else on your team or did you get outside help or it’s all- 

Richard Dunbavand : No

Richard 

Chris Badgett: right here? 

Richard Dunbavand : I do no tu- I do no tutoring at all. Yeah. I’ve never done it. I I’ve jumped into one or two courses especially during COVID when, all the staff were furloughed and, or off or whatever. And it never goes well. I’m much better doing this, doing a…

i’m a salesman and a self-taught web person, yeah. But no, we’ve got a team of trainers, so we’ve got six, six people that train for us now. I do all the building with the site, with the LMS because that’s it’s become my favorite thing to do strangely. 

Chris Badgett: I can totally relate- ’cause when- … when I first got into WordPress, which was a long time ago it was around 2008, which is ancient, but I became… I wasn’t trying to, but I became obsessed in the best way. “This is fun. This is really fun.” “And by the way, I’m building something very useful that helps a lot of people.”

That’s- 

Richard Dunbavand : Mass- massively. And it is rewarding. You see these guys come through this course, and a lot of time, a long, a lot of the time, for us particularly or for this industry, if these people don’t pass this, their business is gone. They can’t operate without it. We’re kinda keeping people going, which is, it’s a good feeling.

It’s a great feeling. And you’re right about WordPress. You’re always looking at it going, “Can I make it better? If I do this, will this help? If I add this, will this help?” And it’s almost addictive in a way. Yeah … in a good way. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. That’s awesome. Is there what, which parts of the LifterLMS tech do you find the most useful or that has the most impact?

I’ve heard you mention just the core LMS system, of course. For sure. Then you’ve mentioned assignments quizzes- … and then the Sky Pilot theme. Is there any other area features or any of our other add-ons that you find essential? 

Richard Dunbavand : Some that I’m playing with at the moment.

I’m just starting to play with the new new events. I, I- Yeah … haven’t got my head around it yet. That because at the minute we send out a list of Zoom links to people. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. 

Richard Dunbavand : Bit messy. It’s messy. What I want is, for each module that we’ve put together on the portal, each module there’s a link there, so that’s gonna take some toying with. Certificate generation, that’s one of them. We use that a lot, because for the smaller courses, they’ll they get a certificate at the end of it. It’s a case of click a button, you get a thumbs up notification, you’ve completed a course, download your certificate.

It’s done, it’s templated, it’s tidy. I really like that. What else do we use in there? Obviously, payment gateways are a, an essential part, but for us the biggest thing by a country mile is the testing ability, I still have got lots to play with, do- 

Chris Badgett: Are you primarily doing multiple choice and then when you say assignments, are they doing the essays or uploading PDFs or what are  they doing? 

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Richard Dunbavand : It, I use the essay template, for want of a better word. So they will be asked a question. So I type out the question. I don’t know schedule a driver’s time, driving time from point A to point B.

There’s a basic schedule, and then they’ll be t- they’ll be typing that out through there. And that, and again I’ve tried to structure it in the framework that I can. I’ve tried to structure it to match their final exams, because there’s no point in me giving them practice work to do without it looking and feeling like the final exam that they’re gonna sit.

So yeah, they’re key. Trying to think which other elements that I use. They’ve probably just become natural to use now. I don’t really think about what, which, which ones I’m using. You know- 

Chris Badgett: It sounds like you’re using the notifications somebody submits something- Absolutely

you click the link, you go right to it. That’s- Yeah … a feature. You’re probably using the reporting a little bit just to check in on people. 

Richard Dunbavand : Reporting is essential because- Yeah … if, so on a Monday the trainers will walk into several hundred assignment submissions, the multiple choice or the the quizzes, they’re all self-marked, as which is, again, that’s another great thing. It’ll give them feedback at the end. It’ll tell them what they’ve got right, what they’ve got wrong. We can give them pointers. But with the assignments, we have to mark it by hand because- If a system couldn’t mark it because you’re asking somebody to translate their understanding onto a paper, so you could get 15 different answers to the same question.

So with the system, the tutor gets, or the, the trainers get emails to say, “Chris Budget has submitted his financial management case study. Richard has submitted his,” whatever it might be, case study. You can literally click a link in your email, it opens up this, opens up the reporting tab, and you can see their submission.

You can mark it, you can grade it, you can feed it back. And like I said, Eddie, that feedback’s key. So yeah, reporting is really important. Y- without it we’d be stuck. I I with the, a system that we used before, we tried people submitting PDFs to us, and it took away from what we needed.

You know what I mean? I can see s- I can see how that can work, if it is a very structured thing. But that engagement on the site, it works for us 

Chris Badgett: You sound a lot like me, where you fall in love with technology, and you’re, like, a self-directed learner. But it sounds like you, you also have trainers that need to log into the LMS- 

Richard Dunbavand : Yes

Chris Badgett: who may or may not- And 

Richard Dunbavand : that’s fun sometimes. 

Chris Badgett: Who may or may not be as technical or enjoy it as much as you do. Like, how do you help onboard your team into using the system? 

Richard Dunbavand : I give them as little access as possible. 

Chris Badgett: Okay. 

Richard Dunbavand : No but in all seriousness, yeah. The guys with WordPress, and again, this is something that I discovered after a while that you can, you can give d- people different account levels, account access, and so on.

The, the trainers have an instructor-level access, which means they can see what they need to see. We’ve actually white labeled this. Eh, they used it for about six or eight months, but it didn’t work for them. But I white labeled our portal for a, a training company that we’d worked with before, and was able to give their trainers the training to be able to use it, and it doesn’t take long.

For somebody as an instructor, an- as an instructor to use this system, it’s a piece of cake because it is email, click in it, click a link in an email, answer what you need to do, click submit, you’re done. So they don’t need to have any real technical know-how. Barring the training that I’ll give them, which like I say when we did it for the other company, probably took me two hours to get them to a position where they could mark their own work, they could gauge their students’ progress.

That’s the other key thing as well. With this, you can see Chris Badgett has only done 1% of the course. I can know then, I can say, “Oi, come on, you need to be getting on, you need to be doing this stuff.” Or you can see who’s engaging, who’s struggling. Y- and you can pick those people up, or you can spend some extra time with those people to make sure they understand it.

So yeah, reporting’s key, and we’d be nowhere without it. 

Chris Badgett: And that’s the difference too between the 25% completion rate on the self-study versus the 85% when a tutor or a trainer is looking at it and helping people get unstuck and learn from their mistakes. Absolutely. 

Richard Dunbavand : Yeah, ab- absolutely, because it’s adult education, a- and as I said at the beginning, some of the guys that come to this course, they may have driven a truck for the last 40 years and haven’t been to school for 52 years. What- whatever it may be, different… Everybody’s different. Everybody needs a certain level of massaging to get to the right position.

Some people, reasonably hands-off. You can let them run with it. As long as you’re telling them what they’re doing right and wrong, they’re good. Other people, they struggle, and that’s, it’s part of the job, it’s part of adult education. It’s getting people to a level where they can get this qualification that they need, yeah. 

Chris Badgett: Do you have a sense… people like you and I we’re gonna do most of our work on a laptop or desktop computer. Do you know if the students, are they mostly on laptops and things, or are they taking classes on the phone or on the iPad or whatever? 

Richard Dunbavand : I try and dissuade them from using a phone.

You can, th- they can do multiple choices fine. If they’re using LifterLMS, do that on your phone. In fact, it’s a great thing you do. You’re having your lunch, you can have a sandwich and you can do a multiple choice, we try and stipulate that the… And again, because we’re trying to replicate the final exams, you’re on a laptop, you’re on a PC, you’re on a m- whatever it might be.

And it- the system’s scalable enough that you can, you could, they could do a case study online or on their mobile phone or on the cell or what- whatever you guys got, a mobile phone. They could do a case study on there, but it doesn’t give them the same- experience as their exam.

So I try and d- I try and dissuade it, but for the most part, yeah, you’re in front of a computer, you’re in front of a laptop with a webcam, with a microphone, and they’re able to access this as they go. But with, like I say, with the courses, the basic courses where it’s just multiple choice, mobile phone’s perfect.

You can log in, you can see it, they get their feedback, everybody’s happy. 

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I wanted to dig into an area, like the reason we built LifterLMS, like our core thing we’re trying to create is impact, income, and freedom. And what I mean by that is freedom is like creative freedom.

That’s you. That’s somebody who loves messing around with technology and- … creating automation and scaling a business. And you get to- … work from wherever and, … do, do your thing. It sounds like there’s a lot of impact. I think you said something like 5,000 students and 20%- … of the industry in the UK maybe.

Richard Dunbavand : Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: And then- 15, 

Richard Dunbavand : 20, yeah … 

Chris Badgett: income i- is interesting ’cause it’s it sounds like once you get a customer, they have to come back for refreshers over time. So that’s like a very sustainable way of doing business. Absolutely. But maybe unpack more income impact, freedom types of things. I- Like what have you achieved there?

Richard Dunbavand : There is… if you take where we were- What would it be? Four years ago. Pre-COVID. Let’s go pre-COVID, ’cause that seems to be… It’s like AD to BC, that, that’s the change. But pre-COVID we had small classroom, we had, we could hire places, but we were so limited on what we could do.

We were limited by volume, we were limited by everything, we were limited by everything. Fast-forward to now, and that, obviously there was income expectations for that, you could only have, let’s say you could only have 10 people in a classroom, you earn the equivalent of what 10 people do.

Now I can have 150 people over online sessions, in a ve- in… We do three times that. It… So we used to do 10 people in a classroom once every quarter. Very little, but now we’ve got 150 every month. I’ve got a, a lady with- in Nepal studying with us. I’ve got two guys working on the NOOM project here in Saudi, or were working on the NOOM project in Saudi.

You we have a lot of guys, European guys, because they can come to the UK. Online training has enabled us to do that, because it doesn’t matter where you are, you can sit in front of a computer, like you and I are now, we’re halfway across the world, but this works as a training medium, it’s, it ju- it’s opened so many borders. Financially, for us, there’s no com- it’s worked really well. We’d be… I’d be in a much smaller room if I was still doing the classroom. 

Chris Badgett: And on the impact front, you, you’re creating careers for people, which is a very satisfying thing to do, right?

Sure. That’s gotta feel fulfilling to help somebody get an awesome job and maintain their job and grow. That’s pretty cool. 

Richard Dunbavand : And that’s the key, it is… the industry that we work in, or the industry that we train in is hugely run by compliance. Because- The, the reason is you’ve got people in a large truck, which who knows what can happen in a large truck, things can happen, things can go wrong. So there are a huge amount of rules, regulations that these guys have got to adhere to. Now, most people come into this, a bit like I did coming into LifterLMS and WordPress. I didn’t really have a clue. I knew what I needed to achieve, but didn’t really know how to do it.

We can give the guys the structure, the scaffolding that they need to be able to go from one truck to three trucks to 10 trucks, and it is it is satisfying, if you get feedback from… or the trainers get feedback at the end of the courses and, it’s pass or fail.

They’re happy with the service that they’ve had, they’re happy with the resources that we’ve provided them. Yeah, it feels good. It feels good. 

Chris Badgett: And there’s only so much that Richard can do, so you have a team. At a- … for a training company, compliance company of this size- 

Richard Dunbavand : Yeah … 

Chris Badgett: how would you just…

There’s you and there’s trainers. Is there anybody else, like- 

Richard Dunbavand : Yeah … what’s- So we’ve got ad- so we’ve got admin teams as… We’ve got admin guys as well who are, sending out course material, who are doing the, everything that comes at the back end of the course. Obviously the accounts and so on.

So it’s… we’re taking on one or two members of staff a year, which considering we were a team of three for 12 years, it it’s, we, it’s enabling us to grow. It’s enabling us to keep moving forward and offer more courses, w- we’re always looking at the next, what can be the next addition to this, it has to be transport-related ’cause that’s what we’re known for, but what’s next? And being able… This level of growth is enabling us to take on more people, take on more trainers, take on more students. Whatever it might be. It’s a good snowball to be in. 

Chris Badgett: What what advice would you give somebody else who’s in a regulated trade industry and they’re ki- they’re in the classroom situation and they’re looking to figure out online?

What would you recommend based on your experience of figuring all this out? 

Richard Dunbavand : Just do it. Yeah. Just do it. It’s as si- it’s as simple as that. Don’t sit on your hands, it’s, it is the difference between, as I said a minute ago, the difference between a semi-regular class of five or six people to, innumerable numbers of people on courses, you know.

You’ve, obviously, your infrastructure’s gotta grow with you. But the, there was only Kevin and I, during COVID when we started doing the started doing the online courses, I was delivering them really badly. But we needed to have something, because that’s the way it wa- And we, we put it together and it just it gets easier, it’s really daunting, but get in there, get your hands, get your hands mucky with WordPress. Get your hands mucky with Lifter. There’s so many… You guys are brilliant for YouTube videos, Feature Fridays, those types of things that come out. When you’re sitting there scratching your head thinking, “I haven’t got the foggiest what I’m doing here,” I can put something in- into YouTube and your face pops up, and all of a sudden, 10 minutes later, I’ve got that little bit of direction.

So yeah, don’t be scared of it. Get into it. Get into it because the rewards are there. 

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And you mentioned earlier, I think, you may have done, you don’t do a lot of customization outside of what the tools do, but maybe you’ve done some custom things. Yeah, 

Richard Dunbavand : sure. Sure. Have you done 

Chris Badgett: any mods, modifications 

Richard Dunbavand : or anything?

I have. Yeah. We’ve done quite- Yeah, tell us about those … They’re a- and it’s becoming more and more. Mostly so the, the biggest one is and it’s a follow-on from the assignments, but so what I took is I took a, an exam paper and created that as a, a standalone plugin that the guys…

And again, along the assignments route, but they were able to do that, and it mimics the it mimics that online exam. A lot of stuff that we’ve modded is really to enable me to link students with the CRS that we u- CMS that we use, with the notification systems that we use. There’s so much you can do with it.

And that’s one of the great things about WordPress that I never knew was how much you can… Y- you can do what you want with it, you can create pretty much anything, as long as you’ve got- A vague idea or support or whatever it might be, but barring the core, nothing…

We’ve not really modded barring looks, the you- how we brand things, the core is the core. Any modifications that we’ve done are to to build on that core, to build it, to enable me to know who’s doing courses who’s contributing, who’s not, to enable me to bill people properly, because a lot of ours, although you can purchase through LifterLMS obviously and purchase through the website, a lot of… Because it’s a relatively expensive course, people wanna talk about it first, so people will ring me up, “I, I wanna do this course,” and sometimes it’s a two, three-week process to get them to that position.

So I can then go to the, go to Lifter. We’ve got cohorts of stu- oh, cohorts is something that I didn’t mention earlier that’s essential. Okay. The Lifter cohort. So we have a master 

Chris Badgett: class, 

Richard Dunbavand : for want of a better word, okay, and then each month or each course, I’m creating cohorts from that.

The beauty of that is it just copies what you’ve got there and puts in… It puts a new month on it, so you know you’re putting the right students in the right place. And that, co- cohorts is fantastic. But it just… Yeah, the ability to mod and to add extra things is, it’s great.

It’s nice to have,

Chris Badgett: a question for you. S- sometimes people in the compliance niche or continuing education niche are practitioners who are looking at a second act in their career where they wanna move from being practitioner to building an education company, and- 

… 

Chris Badgett: So since you guys were already doing in-classroom training, you were approved by whatever the transport governing body- is. 

Richard Dunbavand : Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: Could you give some general advice if somebody’s just stepping into it without that approval yet? Like, how do you become an approved provider in general? What’s some general advice there? 

Richard Dunbavand : Obviously, my, my experience is UK-based, but in the UK, so it starts with, for us specifically, you’ve got two.

You’ve got two main bodies that we need to be approved by. One is the exam board themselves it’s called the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport. And again, approval is daunting, it’s another thing that people look at and think, “I don’t know whether I can do this,” “i don’t know whether I’ve got that.

Have I got the structure in place? Have I got this? Have I got that?” What you’ve gotta remember is these people will help you, they want your money, ultimately. They want you to pay to be able to get that approval, so they will support you. And it, for us the, the transport industry, the DVSA y- the, m- most people are terrified of them because, they rule the roost.

They are the rule makers, and if you break the rules, they will come down on you like a ton of bricks. But ultimately, these guys do not… They’re not there to take your license away. They’re not there to stop a training company p- training, they’re there to support you to make the industry better.

So again, don’t be afraid. There are… there’s so much support available to people to enable you to get where you want to be that just do it,

Chris Badgett: I love your attitude, Richard. My last question for you is d- are you using AI at all these days? And if so- Yeah.

Yep … what are you using and what do you do with it 

Richard Dunbavand : in your- So- … training company? I I use Claude. Yeah. I use Claude, and I use Claude a lot. It’s become… One, it saves me a huge amount of time. Huge amount of time. I don’t use it for course creation as such, because I l- we need to do that, yeah. We need to do that. We need to know what we… I don’t feel I get enough from it. But if I wanted, like the modding we talked about- Yeah … I c- I can ask Claude to create, help me create a plugin. I know what I want, but I haven’t got the skills to do it. So I say to Claude do this.”

And what would either take me several hundred pounds through Fiverr and, places like that to get a custom mod done or many months of me banging my head against the wall trying to work, trying to learn JavaScript. I can just say to Claude, “This is what I want to achieve. This is why I want to achieve it, and this is how I want to achieve it.”

And, it can… It reads, it takes information from what you guys have created. It uses that, so everything… It links everything together. It’s incredibly clever. Incredibly clever, and I think if you are gonna get involved in this sort of thing, don’t be afraid of that either.

Because, although although there’s a lot of fears with AI, what’s it gonna do next? Are we all gonna have a job? Are we all gonna do this? And A- AI can only be as good as the person that’s controlling it, the person that’s telling it what it wants to achieve. So use it. It’s a huge time-saving tool, 

Chris Badgett: yeah. That’s awesome. Good on you. Thank you, Richard, for being a shining example of a education- I 

Richard Dunbavand : don’t know about shining. I’m getting a bit old for that. 

Chris Badgett: You’re doing amazing, and it’s, I just love the story. You just have a like a nothing’s gonna stop you, no fear, just learn on the go attitude, which is awesome.

That’s what it’s all about. But again- Yeah … thank you for being a shining example of- No worries at all … what we make LifterLMS for. And I’m so glad it’s been able to have the impact for you and the business and everything that it has. 

Richard Dunbavand : I genuinely think that without it, we wouldn’t have been anywhere near where we are, so it’s key. It, it really is key. And I’m ever so grateful that, And I’m glad I found you. I’m glad I f- I’m glad Brad found that video on YouTube, ’cause it made a huge difference,

Chris Badgett: that’s Richard Dunbavand. And that’s at- Oh, then … ndrtrainingportal.com. Thank you so much for coming on the show, Richard.

We really appreciate it. 

Richard Dunbavand : No worries at all. Good luck, everyone.

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/gift. Go to LifterLMS.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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According to Brian Casel, AI is changing how company owners develop software, produce content, and manage their companies. He talks about how incorporating AI into everything from software development and strategic planning to writing, design, and content production helped him become more “AI native.” Brian talks about his experiments with AI agents, such as creating a virtual company where a chief-of-staff agent manages specialist agents for product creation, expansion, and upkeep throughout his companies.

By fusing AI’s engineering capabilities with their current subject expertise, he thinks AI is also opening up new chances for non-technical entrepreneurs to create their own software. Brian now concentrates on product strategy, architecture, user experience, processes, and verification rather than developing code by hand, with AI agents handling the majority of the execution. He is investigating new methods for entrepreneurs to become AI native, automate their processes, and produce more autonomously through Builder Methods and solutions like Flywrite and Mimeo.

His main point is that AI is transforming the way businesses are constructed and enabling a small, highly skilled team or even a single entrepreneur to achieve significantly more than previously. It is not just a tool for speeding up old labor.

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 LifterLMS, 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. He’s back on the show. It’s Brian Casel. Brian is a prolific creator, software entrepreneur, designer, teacher, community builder. He does it all. You can find Brian over at briancasel.com, buildermethods.com mimeohq.com, Flyright, and many other places.

We’re gonna get in it, into it, but first, welcome back on the show, Brian. 

Brian Casel: Hey, Chris. Yeah, great to connect with you again. I don’t remember how many times I came on your show here. It’s been at least two or three over the years? 

Chris Badgett: This is probably three or four, something like that. Okay. And we’ve known each- Yeah

other for a long time. Yeah. And I do wanna say Brian’s YouTube channel is one of my favorite YouTube channels. Can you tell us what it is, how to find you and your approach to making videos? 

Brian Casel: Yeah, thanks. It’s been really interesting c- because I just took a little bit of a breather on the YouTube channel o- just in the last three or four weeks, but I’m trying to get back on it this week and record something.

But yeah, the, the YouTube chan- youtube/briancasel. I’ve been talking about AI and, building with AI, and also just how myself and others are adopting AI in e- everything we do. What I like to call, like, becoming AI native, because it really is in literally every type of work that I do at this point, from building software, to creating content, to even strategic thinking and planning designing, writing, all that kind of stuff I’m doing it with AI in, in the process. And obviously, we’re living through this time right now where it’s extremely rapid change and new stuff is dropping all the time.

The models and the harnesses and the products are getting so much better so fast. Literally just within the last six to eight months, things got so much better. And that’s a lot of rapid change, and we’re used to fast change in our industry, but not like this. This is a new level, and I think a lot of people are trying to deal with that, and it can be scary. It can be exciting. It, there’s a lot of anxiety out there, and I’m trying to… What I’m trying to do is just tr- identify workflows and mental models and patterns and business systems for how we can start to adopt things and change how we work, I think- And it’s been fun but also hard, especially on the YouTube channel where things change so fast. Literally a, a video that I published a month ago can easily go out of date that fast,

Chris Badgett: I think your channel is really cool. It… I look up to you.

We all… I bet you do, too. You feel like you’re behind. Everybody feels like they’re behind in AI, but I actually look to Brian as a leader and, in the early days of what’s OpenClaw, what’s… How do we think about agents? And you had this awesome video or how to use Claude to do this, and I look to you to for me to see what’s next and to shorten my learning curve, and it’s been extremely helpful.

Yeah. And one thing I saw on your channel, I was looking at your views and I saw that, They’re all over the place … oh, I need to make some more con- content about Claude, and put the giant splash on the thumbnail, and those videos get three, four times the normal views. Little things like that.

Brian Casel: Man, it is it is quite a game that the YouTube- Yeah … the YouTube thing. It’s, and I… And I’ve learned a ton. I’ve only really been serious about it for about a year and a half now. The channel went from almost nothing, like 1,000 or two subscribers. I think it’s o- over 70K right now.

It’s, it’s good, but it’s not massive. But I learned a lot. It… And that happened over a 12-month period. At least in this space of AI one of the things that I found as you… If you look at the views on a bunch of videos of mine from the past within the s- the last six months, some of them are…

went crazy. I did one on OpenClaude. Did over 800K views, and then I’ve done a bunch on around Claude Code, done a bunch on, on other stuff, and they… And a lot of… These days, a lot of my videos are back down to Earth, around five, 10K views. And I did find that, like, when I… When I’m chasing the news, when I do videos about something that is new, especially if I hit it within the n- the first week or two or three of it being around, the video is gonna go crazy.

Yeah. It’s gonna do… it’s just gonna catch that wave, but at the same time it falls off a cliff, like, two weeks later. Yeah. And I f- I found that added a lot of pressure for me. Number one, I always felt like I’m on this treadmill that I have to get… I have to, first of all, even have systems for me to stay ahead of it and research the industry, and then know get familiarized with stuff fast enough so that I can then record a video and then figure out my whole editing and production process to get it out within two days, hopefully before Claude Code or Cursor or whoever drops the next thing and the thing becomes out of date.

And that was just a, a treadmill that I got a little burnt out on. But then I also found that that game didn’t really send the best leads and traffic to my business. And so in the, in my more recent videos, like, in the last month or two- I’m trying not to chase the, the news stuff, although I’m still interested in new things.

But I’m just trying to teach. I’m just trying to be helpful and and take lessons that I’m, and patterns that I’m learning and share them. Even if it’s not gonna ride some wave. Hopefully, it’s a little bit more evergreen and a little bit more future-proof. And that … It’s lower views in general, but I think it, it brings better quality people into Builder Methods, 

Chris Badgett: totally. Totally. And your videos are so useful and refreshing. It’s not like how to make a million dollars in a week with Grok Bot. You show actual “Oh, this is how I use this. This is how I set this up. This is my strategy. This is how I work around this issue,” or whatever. It’s super refreshing in all the AI hype content out there.

Yeah. 

Brian Casel: That will probably be my next video, though. Like something about- Sure it 

Chris Badgett: will … 

Brian Casel: maybe not that title, but I am playing with … I’m going down deep in the rabbit hole with Grok Bot right now, so I’m gonna do something about what I’m learning there. There, there are a few patterns that I’m noticing, 

Chris Badgett: it’s … I’m overly simplifying it, but in my experience in watching the market, there’s like ChatGPT and OpenAI started it, then Anthropic and Claude, everybody got all up into that. We have an agent named Maurice that’s all Claude powered and all that. And now Grok Bot’s on the scene.

So I think that’s what’s going on. But it’s just interesting. So what- Yeah … on, on the Grok Bot front, I actually haven’t played with it yet. It’s on my list, but I keep hearing it’s the way it should work, and it’s so much more intuitive and all this. What do you love about Grok Bot, or how do you think about it?

Brian Casel: Yeah, I’m still very new to it, just a few days in, so I’m still setting it up and experimenting a little bit. But yeah, it is a lot easier and just a better overall product. The … It … So y- folks should think about it in comparison to OpenClaw or Hermes, whatever they s- however they pronounce that.

So it’s like those, it’s like a, a bot. The main difference is that it is hosted on on Cursor’s cloud infrastructure. So as soon as you fire up GroqBot, like it already has its own computer. And it’s persistent too so it can like save stuff to its computer. It is powered by Groq’s model which can be good or bad.

It has… they must have some sort of special sauce in the harness that makes it be a little bit more like helpful and proactive, and it helps and it does stuff. One of the patterns that I’m do- A lot of people are like excited about it, but also you’re seeing a lot of people tweet about like how they burn through their usage credits- Yeah

Very fast. And I know that like they, they’ve been, changing up the plans and the usage limits and stuff a lot lately. But one thing that I’m doing with it is like I’m not really burning through the usage at all because I’m not having GroqBot do a lot of the work. I’m using GroqBot as the orchestrator.

So if it’s like coding or design work or even like writing now I’m also playing around with this, this tool called Amp Amp Code for at… It’s like an alternative to Cursor or or one of these. And I’m having GroqBot just delegate to Amp. You can do the same thing with Cursor as well.

So in that way it’s like whenever… So I’ll chat with GroqBot, it’s like, “I wanna build this new feature in my app,” and then it’ll go and spin up the cloud coding agent and do it and then get back to me. And I have a much more complex process where I’ll, spec out a product a, and feature and whatnot.

But that’s the idea is I kinda wanna like delegate to the bot and then the bot will go use whatever tools or agents on my behalf and then get back to me. Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: What do you think about org chart design for AI agents? So as an example, like it’s one thing just to get your own business second brain agent going, but then explain the value of sub-agents and having a chief of staff or orchestrator on top.

Brian Casel: Yeah. And this is also like a new pattern with GroqBot. ‘Cause I previously, I had OpenClaw at first, and then I switched to Hermes. But with those, I just had the one bot for everything. And I didn’t really use it in like a large scale way. It was… Like, I had Hermes just running in the background and doing some like maintenance tasks for me.

But yeah, with GroqBot, what a lot of people are doing and what I’m doing is, like I, I do have a chief of staff bot that’s like my primary go-to person, bot that I talk to. And I’ve been experimenting with different team str- like organization structures, right? So right now what I have is for each of my products, so I have Builder Methods, and then I have Flywrite, and Mimeo, and Clarityflow.

And so for each one of those products, I have a head of that product bot, and I have a growth bot which will be in charge of running like growth experiments for that product, and then I have a maintainer bot, so any sort of recurring, like admin work that needs to happen for that product. So it’s like those three.

Like that’s like a pod for each product, and each of them technically reports up to the chief of staff. Or if I say “Eh, I want to build a new feature on Flywrite this week,” I’ll say that to the chief of staff, and then the chief of staff will delegate it down to that head of product.

But I… that’s actually what my project is this week, is like figuring out those operations and who hands the baton off to who, and how do w- where do we document stuff, and how do we have the bots run different projects, whether it’s like building out features or running like growth experiments.

‘Cause o- one of my goals with this is like it, it’s easy to get i- like into the weeds of redesigning and playing with all these new, fun tools and stuff, but like what’s the point? Why even play with it? And for me, the big goal f- of mine right now is to move from- Being like, I feel like I’ve been very like one-to-one with Claude or, whatever agent I happen to be working with.

I’m usually only doing like one thread, maybe two or three- Yeah … in a couple different tabs, but like my brain can’t handle more than that. 

But my thought with GrokBot is if I could develop an actual team operation very similar to how I would build a real team of humans I c- we can be running on multiple cylinders multiple bots doing multiple things all the time if I have reporting structures and bots are running on their own loops and things.

That’s the goal is to make it… is to actually s- try to scale the team and I’m ki- I’m getting a little obsessed with this idea of building a company of one now. I’ve- Yeah … histor- historically I’ve built real teams, but like I, I kinda like working solo now. I wanna see how far I can get with actually scaling in a way.

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Chris Badgett: So the… It makes sense with three different business products to have the context not all mixed together. ‘Cause they d- they’re different products. But so do each of the sub-agents, like the growth agent, the maintainer, do they have different skills repositories, or they all, they just know when to pull a skill from the main one?

Th- or how does that work? 

Brian Casel: The way that I’m setting it up right now is they share the same skills. Yeah. Because I only have a, a small handful of like core skills that they’re all gonna use, right? So like- 

Chris Badgett: Yeah … 

Brian Casel: like today I’m developing my product development skill. It’s actually like a set of two or three skills for like planning a new feature, and then building it, and then reviewing it, and Q&A-ing and that’s a skill that will happen on Builder Methods, that will happen on Mimeo, that’ll happen on Flywrite.

So all of those bots should be able to use the same process,

Chris Badgett: and then, but some of them have their own skills that aren’t cross- 

Brian Casel: Yeah, a few, but yeah, the- so I do have skills that are built into specific repos. Okay … so if there is something that is specific to the Mimeo…

okay, so like for Flywrite I do have a couple of skills that are specific to pushing out a new feature update on Flywrite, like like releasing a- Yeah … a new feature, deploying it and pushing it out to customers. That’s very specific to Flywrite’s code base and how we do it there. So that is a skill that lives inside of the Flywrite repos not like part of the global skills.

And and so then it’s just available there,

Chris Badgett: that’s awesome. And what have you been able to automate that you would have thought three years ago would have been impossible using AI agents? 

Brian Casel: Everything. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Brian Casel: It’s… And dude, like you, I try to explain this to my fr- friends and family like normies in the world- Yeah

who are not in the tech industry, and I don’t know how else to explain it. Everything about how we work has changed, like 100%. It’s yeah, okay, we still do podcasts. That basically looks the same. But like- Yeah … everything else about how we write and code and design and ship, it’s all different now, at least it is for me. I don’t write code anymore, like I don’t write a single line. I, I’m in, I’m very involved in architecture. I’ll plan stuff and I’ll… And I’m still obsessed with UI and UX, but even that I’m giving my rev- re- my revisions to the coding agent to have them change it, content is- I create a lot of content obviously with YouTube, and I write a newsletter and stuff, but it’s always, it always starts with a raw brain dump, and then I have an agent write the draft for me. Yeah. And then I tighten it up a little bit,

Chris Badgett: yeah. It’s am- it’s amazing. Do you, when you work with your your GroqBot set up, are you only ever talking to the chief of staff, or do you sometimes go direct to a sub-agent?

Brian Casel: I’m still working this out, but I think I will be talking to most of the… both the chief of staff and the head of products. So it’s like, “Okay, this week let’s build a new feature in Flyright,” and I’ll probably just kick that off with the chief of staff. Then the chief of staff will get the head of Flyright involved, and then the, the skill has Fly- has that Flyright head starting to do the things, get the process going, all right. Still working out those logistics, but I think I do want them all talking to each other, and I saw a thing the other day that I haven’t implemented this, but the idea of having the, the bots have their own stand-up meeting. Oh, yeah. And and report and I don’t know document what, what happens, yeah. I’m like, I’m still, like, experimenting and really interested in all these different patterns, and we’ll see what actually sticks,

Chris Badgett: yeah, the one-person business thing has always been a thing, but now it’s supercharged with AI. Tell us about there’s this idea that if you vibe code a product or a feature and you don’t actually know how it works or whatever it could be dangerous.

But you’re here as a developer saying, “I don’t write code anymore, and everything’s fine.” Like, how is it fine? 

Brian Casel: Okay, so I know this is a hot topic for a lot of people. There are two camps. There are the technical people who are, like, career developers or builders and they’ve had to transition from writing code to using coding agents, and then there are the non-technical business owners who are just discovering how to build their own tools for the very first time.

They’re… These people are gaining superpowers that they’ve never had. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. 

Brian Casel: I’m– I, I love both of the- those groups, and I think that it’s an incredibly exciting time for both of those groups. I guess I’ll speak to the technical people first, which is if you’ve been around and you’ve been hand coding your code base forever yeah it could feel hard to let go and let go of that trust, especially if you’ve ha- if you’ve had a bad experience w-with, you know agents writing sloppy code.

That can turn a lot of engineers off and cause them to say “Nope, didn’t like it. I’m gonna shut the door on Cloud Code or Codex or whatever it is, and I’m… It’s not for me.” I… i’m sorry if you’re a professional in this industry. That type of attitude may fly a year or two ago. It doesn’t fly in 2026.

It… If you wanna do real work in the real professional world you have to get on board. That– Whether you like to hear that or not that’s how things are built now. But the other misconception if you have been a a skeptic of using AI- y- that, that could also cause you to fall behind the technical on like having the technical chops of managing coding agents.

You can go deep technically with managing coding agents, and we should. We sh- i- if you don’t trust the code, it’s your job now as a professional engineer to design the skills and the processes and the verification loops and the QA checks and the prompt techniques and the training material for how you want your agents to do things predictably so that you can not only have one single agent do it, but there are actual professional teams now that are scaling to a single engineer managing like 50 agents at the same time, and we– like that doesn’t mean 50 tabs across your screen where you have to go through and QA check each one. It’s actually engineering systems that can self-check and verify and actually ship like 50 PRs a day. And like that’s extreme and I’m not even there yet myself, but there are teams doing that, and that’s where it’s going. So it’s like the sooner that you can start to really embrace and lean into buil- becoming like a more agentic engineer I think the better, I just wanted to speak to the non-techni- like the, the business owners, ’cause I see a lot of these people come into Builder Methods where, guy runs a dental practice or a law firm or like an accounting firm or something, and they wanna build their own practice management software for their own office because all the off-the-shelf SaaS tools are either too expensive or they don’t quite fit the way that their business operates, or their industry has some special needs, or they do sales a certain special way.

They have superpowers now, and yeah, they don’t have the engineering product design experience that a seasoned SaaS founder or entrepreneur builder will have, of course not. So in that sense, we are at an advantage if we choose to use it. But, a lot of those people, th- they have the domain expertise that we don’t have.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. 

Brian Casel: The, the dental practice owner knows the nuances, the, the actual workflows, and the actual pain points that a dentist and their admins are dealing with that we will never even know. Y- we can interview customers all we want, but we won’t really get it unless you’re actually in that industry, and they know it.

And and to me, building software is learnable now. The… You don’t have to learn how to code. You do need to learn the process. You do need to learn patterns. I teach some of that in Builder Methods, but And you won’t be the world’s best engineer, but you can build a simple tool for you and your office to use.

That’s totally possible now,

Chris Badgett: so let me give you a specific example. I know actually in the LifterLMS ecosystem some dental office training platforms for hygienists in various roles at a dental practice. Quite a lot, some large LMS’s in that niche. 

And I’ve always said that you should put your customer at the center of your business, not your product, which means okay, maybe you’re a course creator and a trainer, but these, dental office owners would also benefit from other tools like perhaps software.

So are you saying that today an entrepreneurial dental business practice owner who’s getting into the training game, and they do all their training and continuing ed training and everything, could also add a dental practice management software with their own unique angle to their offer? It’s possible without a developer?

I know you’re saying it’s one thing to use it internally for your own unique bespoke company, but are we entering a period where, a product-minded person who’s an entrepreneur in whatever niche could actually build software even if they’re not a developer and commercialize it? 

Brian Casel: I think so, yeah.

I mean- Yeah … I I think they’re s- probably still the mi- minority. Most of those types of people in my experience, they’re really just more in- interested in building their own internal tools. But there are some that I’ve met that are entrepreneurial and they’re also at an advantage there too.

They have distribution. They know their industry. They know people. They know influencers. They, maybe they are influencers in their industry,

Chris Badgett: yeah. 

Brian Casel: You and me come from the software, SaaS, WordPress entrepreneurial circles, and we know the classic thing in our world is yeah, you can build a SaaS, but can you market it?

And and that’s always the hardest thing is getting that distribution, and it… theoretically you would like to be able to build a… for me, like to build a tool for some foreign industry that I’m not a part of, but it’s gonna be such an uphill battle for me to sell that tool to- HVAC companies, if I’m not an HVAC operator and I don’t know anybody in the industry.

But there are people who do. And look, the vast majority of HVAC owners or construction firm owners, yeah, they’re not gonna get their hands dirty with software. They’re not interested, of course, it’s probably 99% of the world and I’m not saying they’re all gonna go out and start using Claude Code tomorrow.

But there are some, like they come into my world, and they’re like they- they’ve heard about this thing called Claude Code or Codex. They heard about it on CNBC or one of these, and they start googling. They start open up- o- opening up ChatGPT, and all of a sudden a, a weekend goes by and they’re down the rabbit hole and they’re building actual tools.

And again, like they’re not… That, that person is like the minority, but like they’re… Once you start to learn a little bit, you learn a little bit more, and you l- learn a little bit more and then it’s that’s, th- that person is dangerous. They can… In a good way, like they’ve got connect- And also, like I, a lot of these people have resources.

Like they run really successful businesses. They’ve got cash. They’ve got marketing chops. They are systems minded, they just haven’t written code before, but you don’t have to write it code anymore, so you know.

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Chris Badgett: So correct me if I’m wrong, but I think back in the day you built something called Restaurant Engine- Yep

which was a, a website as a service for restaurants. But I think what you’re saying is like a restaurant entrepreneur who’s wanting to get in the software game today with AI without being an engineer could potentially build a better restaurant platform because they have all that knowledge, connection, resources.

Brian Casel: In my opinion, yes, but not most restaurant owners. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. A, 

Brian Casel: a very special breed. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. 

Brian Casel: But someone who is a little bit technically minded and curious and motivated they can absolutely build and launch and get customers in a way that was not even remotely possible for them to do j- just a couple of years ago.

I was speaking to a dental practice owner two months ago, and he said that two years ago he paid $800,000 to- Yeah … a, a software development firm to build a dental practice management software- … that di- that didn’t end up working. And then here he is in my system, he paid a couple of hundred bucks to, to learn Claude Code with some people and and he’s this works so much better,” a- again, like I don’t wanna like- Paint the picture that every single small business non-technical person in the world is gonna start doing this tomorrow, but they are there. There, there’s a certain subset of people who are curious and technical enough to be dangerous, 

Chris Badgett: you know what I think it is? This is a huge gap in my opinion in the education market, which is, I would call it the art of product. You can go to school for engineering or design or business, but product is the least understood discipline. But there are those people, like you say, it’s one in 1,000 dental practice owners or whatever, who might have that product DNA.

They just need to develop- Yeah … the skills around that, and the engineering- I- … piece can help, AI can help with that. AI can help with, the business side and prospecting and all kinds of things. But product is you can’t go to college and get a master’s in product. 

Brian Casel: Y- yeah, you’re right. I think, and there’s different elements of being good at product, right?

Yeah. W- the part that I think they are really good at, I, and I th- I call them domain experts, right? Yeah. Your den- your dental practice owner or some- someone like that. They’re really good at the domain expertise, so they really know the pain points and the things that are expensive that they are trying to solve, and that is

We can be really good product designers. We can r- we can create great interfaces. We know the patterns of how to build software. So we might be good at that side of product, but to really understand your end customer and really know how to solve their problem better than anyone else can figure out that is probably worth more.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. 

Brian Casel: But also I would say that w- while that person definitely has the capability to go from zero to one or call it zero to 100 first customers w- without much help beyond AI- Yeah … yeah, at a certain point if you’re getting customers coming in every day you are probably gonna need to team up with a technical person or someone to make this thing real, I would say.

If your business is scaling to lots of customers, you’re definitely gonna need some sort of engineering help to, handle servers and whatnot and and may- and maybe redesign the, the interface and stuff. But validating a, a new product is totally possible now, 

Chris Badgett: tell us about Builder Methods. I’ve watched you build that over the years, and you’ve got the workshops, the tools, the training, the community. What’s it all about, and who’s a good fit for it? 

Brian Casel: Yeah, Builder Methods r- is really only one year in now a little bit more than one year, and it- it’s gone through a few iterations, and I’m, and right now I’m working through what, what year two is gonna look like.

But it has some training in there. I, I did a couple of big courses. One is called Become the Builder, which is aimed at hel- at helping non-technical business owners learn how to learn just enough to be able to build a real piece of software without needing to learn how to code. That’s the idea b- with behind the builder or Become the Builder.

And then the second flagship course that I just recently launched is called Become AI Native, which is… which gets into writing agent skills and us- weaving AI into your workflow. Not necessarily building software, but just anything you do, whether it’s sales or content creation or, bookkeeping.

You can create agent skills to start to help you automate and scale that side of the business as well. That’s like the training side. But yeah, we’ve got a really great community of other AI, interested AI-pilled builders of all types. Some are very technical, some are non-technical.

That’s been a wide range. One thing I’m learning, I know that you’re in the, education space and LMS space and I think going forward, especially in my space with AI, I think I’m gonna be getting a, a little bit away from doing these big training courses and leaning back into these workshops.

And I did a f- a lot of workshops a few months ago. I wanna bring it back because they’re much more timely, right? I’m overhauling the way that I build now. I’m getting into cloud agents now. That’s like a new thing. And I kinda wanna do a workshop on my updated process for how I build stuff in fall of 2026, right?

And then I’ll… I wanna– So the way that model has worked with Builder Methods is the workshop itself might be low price, like 50 bucks, and then you have the option to upgrade into becoming an annual member of Builder Methods, which, gives you access to all the workshops, gives you access to all the training, the community.

And I’m releasing th- these tools. Whether I have a bunch of free open source skills and tools and frameworks, and then I’m developing these new paid software products, but, members get discounts on those as well. 

Chris Badgett: That is awesome. And does the what are the advantages and disadvantages?

You’ve talked about it already, but a non-technical versus a technical member I think it’s really awesome you have both, but are they both doing equally as well? 

Brian Casel: It’s been a… it’s been, like, because I’ve shifted my focus on, it started out a year ago really focused on the technical builders, like the- Yeah

the actual software engineers, how to adopt Claude code and stuff like that. And then in the last couple of months I started to shift focus toward those non-technical people, and so now we have a pretty healthy mix, and it’s pretty cool. We… There’s a Discord community in there and it’s been pretty cool to see the, the more technical folks helping the non-technical folks understand ba- obviously, I’m in there every day answering questions too, but so that’s been fun and I’m still figuring out right now what, h- what is what are the most valuable things and where should I focus the framing of it all. I think, more technical people really just come for the community and to talk shop with other builders who are really interested in adopting AI.

And the non-technical people, they do engage in the community, but they’re here to learn and really upgrade their skills and unlock things that they were not able to do before. So that’s been interesting.

Chris Badgett: And one of the things that I know makes you a great teacher is you practice what you preach.

You’re learning on the ground. So tell us about Flywrite and Mimeo HQ. 

Brian Casel: Yeah, and that’s why I want to get back into these workshops, is like I, I feel like every couple of months I have something new that I’ve learned just from my actual work that it didn’t make it into the last course so I just wanna do a workshop on it.

So yeah, Flywrite was something that came out of my work every day. I think I mentioned that I’m not really writing code anymore, and a lot of professional engineers are not really writing code, and that has resulted in most of today’s coding tools Moving away from the IDE, the editor, right?

So today’s agentic coding tools are really just focused on speaking to agents, and you have a list of a- of agent chats that are going on. And most, most of these newer tools are either pushing the file list, like your list of files and being able to read and edit your actual files, they’re either pushing it off to the side, or some of these tools don’t even have it.

You’re just talking to agents, which is great if you’re working on software. Yeah. And I use tools like that where I’m … I don’t need to look at the files anymore. I’m just either in the terminal or in an agent chat of some kind. That’s great, but the other half of what I do is content.

I’m writing newsletters I’m writing scripts for YouTube videos I’m, creating courses and stuff. And that stuff I do need to put my hands in the file and draft and edit stuff. I still use, agents to help me draft stuff, but I still wanna hand edit and highlight and comment on and stuff like that.

And so- 

Chris Badgett: So it’s like Google Docs’ benefit of- K- … collaboration. 

Brian Casel: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. 

Brian Casel: A- and it’s c- it’s also it’s more like a traditional software IDE, except the markdown editor is really nice really nice formatting and you can completely customize the fonts and the sizes and how markdown files are presented.

But then it has, the big thing is that it has a built-in terminal. Yeah. So with the terminal you can run Claude Code or Codex or, any, any coding agent right there integrated with your markdown files. Whereas again, like if you’re in like something like Cursor or VS Code or one of these, you can look at your markdown files, but it looks like code.

At least Flywrite gives you like a really nice readable customizable editor. Or there’s always like markdown tool- note taking apps like Obsidian or any of these, but they don’t really have the built-in coding or the built-in agent to help you draft and stuff, so this brings those together, 

Chris Badgett: I love it. As a non-technical, like as a non-engineer myself, I’ve recently gotten into VS Code with our agent and stuff, and I know exactly what you’re talking about. For me, when I see the markdown, I’m converting things to PDF way more than I should- … just so that I can- Just 

Brian Casel: so you can read it, right?

Chris Badgett: Yeah. 

Brian Casel: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: And get a feel for what it’s actually gonna look and stuff like that, but that’s super cool. Tell us about Mimeo HQ. 

Brian Casel: Yeah, this is a new, newer one. I’m just starting to open the doors to it right now, but I’m using it myself. It’s email marketing software.

So if you use, Kit or A- or Active Campaign or, any of the many other email marketing software, like some of them are really great. A- and they’ve been around a long time, and they can do a lot of things. And for the mo- for most people, I think that they’re still gonna be a good fit.

What I got a little frustrated with has been, and I’ve used them all two things is obviously the, the cost. As your list of email subscribers grows, your monthly bill for your email marketing software or CRM, whatever you call it, is just gonna get really expensive. But more importantly for me, it’s been just more and more difficult to run the automations and the flows for how I want to communicate with my customers through email.

I’m not talking about one-to-one, like this isn’t like a Gmail alternative. This is like drip campaigns automated sequences to nurture new people in the list, get them into my workshops, get them into my products and things like that, send out my we- my weekly broadcast newsletter. I wanted my

More and more, m- more tools in my business, I just wanna own them and self-host them and have the code base so that I can run them with my agents. So now everything I do with email can run through my agents. I can have them draft up and send email newsletters. I can have them design a really complex automation sequence for people.

They’re plugged into my whole account and it just makes it really easy. And the nice thing about Mimeo is that you can purchase it, download it, self-host it, and you just plug in your own sender. So it works with Postmark or Resend or Amazon SES. And so you do pay for those to send out emails, but it’s much more cost-effective than paying for that through your own provider.

And it’s a little bit more, like- It works if you are good at emailing, which means if you’re sending quality emails to people who have actually subscribed to you and you’re not spamming people, then it’s not, quote-unquote, dangerous to have your own resend or your own postmark sending your emails.

As, as long as you have a quality list of people who’ve subscribed and they expect your emails, then deliverability is great. I my deliverability is up since moving to Memeo. ‘Cause that’s the other thing about sending through these big providers, right? The Kits and the and the Active Campaigns and all these.

They’re gonna put all these accounts on these big sending pools. We know that Chris sends high-quality emails to his audience, but the next customer or the next account that’s on the same s- Is a spammer they’re a spammer, and so then your list deliverability suffers from that, so I like to kinda… I think we’re seeing this in general. Most tools we’re now gonna get into this phase of unbundling, yeah. And I think Memeo is one example of that,

Chris Badgett: that’s 

Brian Casel: awesome. That’s really what I’m interested in now.

Like, all the tools I’m doing now, it’s not just about replacing the SaaS subscriptions. It’s like I just wanna unbundle stuff and Take it back in-house and have my, me and my agents run our own operations,

Chris Badgett: it kind of rhymes with WordPress, like the whole- Yeah … thing of owning versus renting and,

Brian Casel: Totally.

Yeah … 

Chris Badgett: infinite customizability and open source and all that. 

Brian Casel: Exactly, yeah. I 

Chris Badgett: agree. That’s very cool. Brian, it’s awesome to catch up. You’re a prolific builder, and it’s so cool. And I’m serious, man I learn… I keep an eye on your YouTube channel, ’cause I’m like, “You’re ahead of me.” And I’m like, “All right here’s what’s coming next.”

And you’re such a great teacher, and you don’t skip essential parts in what you talk about. For Builder Methods, how should somebody listening to this get started? You have a newsletter, you’ve got some workshops. Like, how should they dip their toe in the water of Builder Methods?

Brian Casel: Yeah, if you’re, if any of this resonated, come over to buildermethods.com, and there are two free workshops there that you’ll see. One is on building apps and one is about becoming AI native. And both of those are, like, hour-long free trainings. It gives you my best current ideas on that kind of stuff.

So that’s a good place to start. And yeah, the, the YouTube channel is great. You can see what I’ve been sharing over there as well, so yeah. Well- and Chris, thank, thanks again for having me on. I’m such a fan of yours as well. And you’ve been doing this, for so many years.

It’s awesome to see Lifter continuing to thrive and adapt in these new, th- this new era. And anytime you have a podcast going for 13 years it’s like, man, that’s impressive. 

Chris Badgett: Thanks. I appreciate it. One final just bonus question. If somebo- Because I get this question a lot, and I would actually, in my mind, I’m like what would Brian Casel do?”

If somebody wants to get started with a AI agent today, would you recommend just getting ’em started with GroqBot today? This is August 31st, 2026,

Brian Casel: yeah. Yeah, so this might change by September, ’26. But the, okay, like it, it really depends on where what your starting point is.

Grok Bot is good to dabble with if you really wanna get into the bot team- teammate thing. But if you’re totally new to really using AI in any real way, I would really just more encourage you to move away from just… ‘Cause there’s a lot of people in the world who are just using ChatGPT as like a Google replacement.

Yeah. That’s fine. That’s a good start, but you’re not really using it in a real way. Yeah … and what I mean by that is yeah, pay the 20 bucks, get a pro account, ’cause that’ll give you the latest models, much smarter than whatever they give you for free, and start to u- start to use it for real tasks.

If you need to write something this week create something, or I- my favorite thing is to use it as a thought strategic partner. I do deep planning with with multiple, chatbots. You could start to use it in more real useful ways. That- that’s the big thing. And then you can get into, like, how do I actually incorporate this into my operation and with Grok Bots or, whatever other tools are out there.

But yeah, move away from being just a dabbler and make like a fun game and start doing some real work with it. You’ll be amazed. 

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. That’s Brian Casel, buildermethods.com. We’re gonna have to do this in a year ’cause I know so much has changed- … will have changed in the next year, and it’s- I’m sure, 

Brian Casel: yeah

Chris Badgett: moving exponentially, so it’ll be interesting to see where we land. But thanks so much again, Brian, for coming back on the show. We really appreciate it. 

Brian Casel: Yeah. Thanks, Chris.

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/gift. Go to lifterlms.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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