153 - New year, new goals! The big picture in 2023 for us...

Caroline: Welcome to What Is It All For? A podcast designed to help you grow your online business and pursue a spacious, satisfying life at the same time. We are your hosts, Jason and Caroline Zook, and we run Wandering Aimfully, an unboring business coaching program. Every week, we bring you advice and conversations to return you to your most intentional self and to help you examine every aspect of your life and business by asking, What is it all for? Thanks for listening. And now let's get into the show.

 

Jason: And I'm here too.

 

Caroline: I missed our friends.

 

Jason: Wow. We are back in the podcasting saddle, and our legs are getting chafed because we haven't been here for a while. When you haven't been in a saddle for a while, your legs get chafed.

 

Caroline: You're saying that to me, but I'm with you.

 

Jason: Ow, ow. It's chafing. I'll keep that joke going throughout the entire episode.

 

Caroline: Oh, no, I just realized when my iPad is in low power mode, the screen goes dark.

 

Jason: It does.

 

Caroline: No, that's bad.

 

Jason: So you're not going to do low power mode?

 

Caroline: No.

 

Jason: So you probably should have charged your device before we started recording for an hour.

 

Caroline: I don't know, I'm feeling like I'm a lot more risk-tolerant these days. I'm just going to risk it.

 

Jason: Okay, well, when your power runs out and you have to ask me to lead the charge and then you're upset with the way that I do it, you got no one to blame, but ya self.

 

Caroline: Lead the charge on your saddle with your chafed legs.

 

Jason: Friends, we traveled all of last year, but we are no longer traveling. If you haven't heard, if you didn't catch our...

 

Caroline: If you came to this podcast for all the cool travel stories, they're gone.

 

Jason: If you had no idea what's going on, very quick update. 2021. We lived in Southern California. Carlsbad, to be exact. 2022. We traveled to eleven countries in Europe and we decided to move to Portugal.

 

Caroline: I thought it was 10. What's the 11th?

 

Jason: 2023. We now live in Portugal, and we are becoming Portuguese citizens of the world. Not really. We're just expats who live here, but we're trying to do our best to blend into the culture in some ways.

 

Caroline: Yeah, I don't think we're in any danger of blending in, for sure.

 

Jason: Well, I'm too tall.

 

Caroline: You're very tall.

 

Jason: The Portuguese are not a tall, unlike the Dutch, who are tall. They're the tallest.

 

Caroline: Yeah, you fit in great in The Netherlands.

 

Jason: I'm just like, walking around like, whoa, everybody, I can see your eyeballs.

 

Caroline: You're Norwegian. Is that correct?

 

Jason: Thank you. Yes. Thanks for coming out. I just appreciate it.

 

Caroline: I just wondered to myself, like, maybe he's Dutch.

 

Jason: Yeah. No, I'm not. So now we live in Portugal, in the Silver Coast of Portugal, which is north of Lisbon.

 

Caroline: North of Lisbon. It's sort of the middle west coast.

 

Jason: And we have some exciting news. So we're going to do a little life in Portugal, part of the podcast to start, which was normally like our pramble, if you've been listening for a while or last year, it was our pramvel.

 

Caroline: Yeah. Can we just back up for a second?

 

Jason: Yeah, what's up?

 

Caroline: I feel like you're really coming in so hot.

 

Jason: That's what I do.

 

Caroline: Everyone's like...

 

Jason: Ooh, ouch, it's chafing.

 

Caroline: Yeah. My leg's are chafing.

 

Jason: Now you're getting chafed. See? Told ya.

 

Caroline: No, I just think in order to avoid the chafing.

 

Jason: Okay.

 

Caroline: We just need to ease into the saddle, and you're coming in so hot, you're going to chafe your legs.

 

Jason: This is a real metaphor for our relationship.

 

Caroline: Let me apply some inner thigh lubricants first. Okay?

 

Jason: No one said that it was thigh chafing. I just said it was chafing. And you immediately thought it was your inner thighs are getting chafed.

 

Caroline: What do you think is going to chafe in a saddle, babe? Your what? Armpit?

 

Jason: Sure. Belly button could get chafed. I don't know.

 

Caroline: Whose belly button gets chafed? Okay, so I just think you're coming in too hot is all I'm trying to say.

 

Jason: All right, I'm bringing that new year, new me energy.

 

Caroline: Yeah. Less. Okay, do less.

 

Jason: All right, what's up, everybody?

 

Caroline: No, I just wanted to say let's back up for a second. Okay, so, yes, it's a new year. We are now living in Portugal. We will not be doing a... so for those of you who are new, we usually have a segment at the beginning where we just do this, and it's just like, a lot of, like...

 

Jason: Gobbledygook.

 

Caroline: There's no value really here.

 

Jason: Yeah.

 

Caroline: Just pure entertainment. Gobbledygook. That started out as what we would affectionately refer to as our pramble.

 

Jason: You know, I already said these things?

 

Caroline: Really, just not well.

 

Jason: Okay.

 

Caroline: So I'm doing it my way now. Okay?

 

Jason: Everybody's hitting that plus 30 seconds. I understand. Go for it.

 

Caroline: Okay, so it was a preamble. Also a ramble. There you have the pramble. Okay. I just like to just re.... catch everyone up.

 

Jason: Sure.

 

Caroline: It's like in Netflix when it's like, "Last season on..." Let's just catch everybody up. Okay. That's the pramble. Then it got changed into the pramvel when we would travel. We're not doing that anymore. So the pramble is back. This is where we will do about ten minutes of what it's like living in Portugal. If you're interested in that life, and sort of like what's going on in our world, that's where we'll have that. And then for the remainder of the podcast, because people might be wondering, Is the podcast changing this year? For the remainder of the podcast, what we have decided as of now is that we are really going to record these episodes. We're going to go back to kind of the beginning and record them very much in real time and kind of share with you whatever the business lesson is that we've learned kind of the week before, what's the theme? And just give you behind the scenes updates on what it's like running, Wandering Aimfully and Teachery, our two businesses. And our hope is that you glean some value in terms of how to grow your business while also trying to balance living a good, satisfying, beautiful life.

 

Jason: Yeah.

 

Caroline: Okay. I just wanted to catch everybody up and I think...

 

Jason: Did we shut a bunch of stuff down? Cliffhanger. That's the end of the recap.

 

Caroline: Did we do what?

 

Jason: Did we shut a bunch of stuff down? Throw a cliffhanger? Because we're at the end of the recap where they leave a cliffhanger and then we get into the episode.

 

Caroline: I love that.

 

Jason: Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

 

Caroline: I love that.

 

Jason: So there it is.

 

Caroline: Okay. Did we shut a bunch of stuff down?

 

Jason: No, we talk about that later. It doesn't start with the episode with that. Now we go back in time and we, like, bring everybody through. Yeah. So now that everybody's skipped around, can we talk about our life in Portugal update?

 

Caroline: I'd love to.

 

Jason: Okay, fantastic. So we've been here for two and a half weeks, but the big news for those of you who've been...

 

Caroline: Who've been here for two and a half weeks after the holidays. So we were here for six weeks.

 

Jason: We already we talked about this.

 

Caroline: Not on this episode, we didn't.

 

Jason: Come on, man, just get in the saddle. Tighten up. Clench your legs. Really hunker down here.

 

Caroline: Loosen the reins.

 

Jason: Yeah, we've been here for two and a half weeks. The big news, though, what I wanted to share is that our...

 

Both: D7 visas got approved.

 

Jason: So we are in the next step of that process of becoming Portuguese residents, which is basically a five year journey to having citizenship here. So the next step in the process is our passports. We're not even going to tell you all that silliness that we went on, but we sent our passports into the embassy when we were in the US for the Christmas holidays. They stamped them, they sent them back to us. And now we have an appointment in June that we will meet with the Portuguese immigration office, it's called SEF, and we will have a little interview with them, basically, really, just to go over our paperwork.

 

Caroline: It's like a confirmation of, like, oh, you're here.

 

Jason: And then we get...

 

Caroline: You are who you say you were.

 

Jason: A, quote unquote, permanent resident card that only lasts for two years, and then we can renew that in two years, for another three years, blah, blah, blah. But that's a big step in our process that our visa has got approved.

 

Caroline: Because we're official, so we're no longer on tourist time, for all intents and purposes, like, residents of Portugal right now, and that feels so good.

 

Jason: And for those of you who were very much keeping track of the D7 visa process, or, like, how long did it take? Because there are some people who I know were like, oh, I'm clued in. Like, what's going on? It took 39 days, I believe was our total. Yeah, I think it was 39 days from the day that we mailed in our applications to the day that we got the email saying that we were approved.

 

Caroline: And what's fun about it is way back in September, when we were planning out all of this, we were trying to do all the calendar things, and it varies so widely. And so we were like, okay, our best case scenario is, like, this date. And the date that we said was two days before we actually got them officially approved. So I can't believe that the real timeline was only two days off of our ideal timeline. We're very lucky.

 

Jason: Very fortunate.

 

Caroline: Yeah.

 

Jason: So as I mentioned, we went back to the US. And we did the holiday, Christmas holiday season with our families.

 

Caroline: So both of our families live in Jacksonville, Florida, so that's where he flew back to, the hot metropolis of Jacksonville, Florida. Go Jags.

 

Jason: Actually, Go Jags, because they're in the playoffs and I'm pretty excited.

 

Caroline: Instead of saying, Go Jags, I should've said, Blake Bortles. Any Good Place fans will appreciate that. But we did the thing. One thing I do want to share, just because I know there are some people who clue into this and have been along for many years on my sort of anxiety journey.

 

Jason: Yeah.

 

Caroline: And this is the first Christmas in, like, I'm talking years where I have not experienced intense anxiety around the holidays.

 

Jason: Yeah. And we had a pretty jam-packed schedule, too.

 

Caroline: And we had an extremely jam-packed schedule. So that is just, like, full proof that our year of travel really rewired my brain. Not by itself. Like, it was also therapy, and it was also, like, nutrition, and it was all the things, but I really feel like this past year of travel has, like, officially rewired my brain. And I know that I'll still experience anxiety in the future. I'm not saying that I'm, like, magically healed, but the fact it was such a clarifying thing for me, the fact that I did not experience anxiety. And even last night, like, we'll jump ahead. Like, we hung out with new friends last night, and I told Jason on our walk today, I was like, wow, in the past, I would have had so much anxiety meeting a new person, like, going to someone's house, like, all these things. Did not even phase me.

 

Jason: That's awesome.

 

Caroline: I know.

 

Jason: While we were in the US, you actually stumbled on a fun statistic. Do you want to share your statistic about your average heart rate?

 

Caroline: Oh, here's a funny thing. If anyone's wondering what the physical effect of being perhaps around family that can sometimes... and also just I think I don't know what the factors were, but anyway, my Apple Watch, my resting heart rate when we were back in Florida, just for that week, for the holidays, was, like, almost ten units higher.

 

Jason: So, like, 60 was the average.

 

Caroline: Yeah, let's say my average resting heart rate is 60. My average was 70 when we were back for the holidays.

 

Jason: And you can see the spike. It's hilarious.

 

Caroline: That could be a combination of, like, sugar...

 

Jason: Sure, it's a lot of things, but just in general, it's just fun to see, like, all our life in Portugal is, like, keeping the resting heart rate nice and low and then just go back up. It would be fun. I'm guessing the data goes back through when we were traveling. It'd be interesting to look back at the months of travel and to see which ones were like, the highest of your resting heart rate.

 

Caroline: Yeah, I did look at that. I just can't think of it of...

 

Jason: No, you don't have to know it. I'm saying for later. This is like, a fun thing we're going to do together. We're not going to bring everybody else to the journey.

 

Caroline: Okay, great.

 

Jason: But anyway, I thought it was fun. I got the flu that's been going around that so many people have endured, both in the US and in other places. Unfortunately, my sister's kids were sick, and we kind of just assumed that someone in the family is going to get sick. I got sick, so I ended up getting the flu and was basically, like, for the day after Christmas and beyond was on the couch having Gatorade, eating saltines.

 

Caroline: And I'm very grateful that somehow I didn't get it. And also that nobody else in our family that we were exposed to got it. So that's really good.

 

Jason: Actually. I will say, being back in the US, it was helpful because Gatorade, saltines, Theraflu, like all those things you're used to when you're sick.

 

Caroline: Although you would have found those versions.

 

Jason: Totally. But it would have been like an extra step to figure it out. So, yeah, it's just one of those things that if I was going to get sick, I kind of got sick at the perfect time.

 

Caroline: Oh, my God. Once again, we got lucked out on the timing. By the time we had to go back, you were fine.

 

Jason: But I was sick for, like, four days, which doesn't happen for me very often. So normally I'm sick for, like, 24 hours, my body...

 

Caroline: And you're going to forget it so quickly. And so the next time I'm sick, you're going to be like, why are you...?

 

Jason: Why is this taking so long?

 

Caroline: And you're going to be like, remember.

 

Jason: Hurry up. Hurry up.

 

Caroline: Exactly.

 

Jason: Yeah. So that was our time in the US. I think we were there for, I actually just did the math, 13 days.

 

Caroline: 13 days.

 

Jason: We were gone. We were originally, our plan was we were going to be in Florida for, I think it was nine or ten days. Then we were going to travel to Mexico for two weeks. Then we're going to travel back to DC. So we had like, three weeks of additional travel. We canceled all of that and just came straight back to Portugal because the D7 visa happened earlier.

 

Caroline: Got approved earlier than we thought.

 

Jason: We're going to save you the hours that it took to figure all of that out, but just know it was quite a whirlwind of, like, end of year travel planning, changing plans, moving things around.

 

Caroline: And it was honestly pretty risky because we were really banking on sending in our passports the second we got back onto US soil, not knowing that the day that we flew in the next day was like the so called bomb cyclone that totally shut out...

 

Jason: The winter storm. When we got to the US, yeah.

 

Caroline: We didn't know anything about the storm that was coming. We land.

 

Jason: We missed it by a day.

 

Caroline: We missed it by a day.

 

Jason: We were really lucky.

 

Caroline: And our passports did get held up for two extra days in Tennessee because of the grounding flights, and, yeah, we buffered in some time.

 

Jason: All that to say, like, we got very lucky with our travel planning. Things worked out very well for us. Knock on wood. Like, 2022. We didn't have a single canceled flight. We had a couple of little delayed flights, but, like, this really got lucky with travel in 22. So we are not going to travel

 

Caroline: in 2023. We're going to take our chips off the table, and we're going to go cash them in.

 

Jason: Hey, I have a question for you before we get to this actual life in Portugal thing, because really nothing that we've talked about is life in Portugal and the life in Portugal section, but that's okay because we get people caught up. What was your favorite Christmas present that you received in our stocking gifts that we did for each other? Yeah. So for those of you who are in a relationship and you find it difficult to give gifts to your other person, we do this thing, and we've done this for a couple of years. I give you all the credit for this idea. We set a small budget, and then we fill a stocking with, like, just little odds and ends.

 

Caroline: Little odds and ends. Bits and bobs.

 

Jason: Then we open them on Christmas morning, and it's like our little fun thing that we do together.

 

Caroline: Especially if you're someone who goes, you're not in your home on Christmas morning like you're going somewhere. It's a really nice thing to be able to do because you can pack it in a suitcase and you have a stocking and you just can open it.

 

Jason: What was your favorite item that I got you in your stocking?

 

Caroline: You got me these custom coasters for my Fart Studio.

 

Jason: Nice.

 

Caroline: Which I don't even have a table yet to put anything on, but I love the design of them, and it's my first little kind of trinket to build back up my art studio to have fun and artsy little things. And they were on Etsy, I think.

 

Jason: Yeah, found them on Etsy. Just searched, like, funky design coasters.

 

Caroline: And it's also a thoughtful gift because not only are they artsy and they have a cool design to them, but also I love to collect beverages down there.

 

Jason: Yeah, you do. And I'm looking at a pile of two beverages right now.

 

Caroline: First of all, two is not a pile.

 

Jason: Two is a pile in my world.

 

Caroline: But I thought that was really thoughtful. Okay, now what was your...?

 

Jason: Also, that was the cheapest of the gifts. I couldn't believe the price of those. Like, that woman needs to charge more for those. They were, like, literally $6. My favorite gift in my stocking was the cinnamon roll socks. Yeah, the cinnamon roll socks were the favorite, for sure.

 

Caroline: Yeah. The year before, I got you, I think, Mario.

 

Jason: Super Mario socks.

 

Caroline: So now that's going to be a recurring...

 

Jason: Unfortunately, the Super Mario socks didn't make the cut in the we-sold-everything, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle ones did, because I'm a child and I had to pick between the two, and I chose turtles over Super Mario.

 

Caroline: Yeah, that tracks for you. You have more of an affinity for the turtles.

 

Jason: I do love the turtles.

 

Caroline: You love the turtles.

 

Jason: Now, there is a Super Mario movie coming out, so it might change. I might now have a movie with Super Mario besides the original Super Mario Brothers movie, which is good, but not as good as, like, four to seven Teenage Ninja Turtles.

 

Caroline: It's so bad that it's good.

 

Jason: Hey, let's talk about Portugal, because we live here, and that was actually the point of the section now that we're 15 minutes into the podcast.

 

Caroline: We're rusty. We're chafing.

 

Jason: Yeah.

 

Caroline: Give us a break.

 

Jason: Yeah.

 

Caroline: So the one thing I did want to say is I'm surprised at how quickly we hit the ground running. Like, we were ready to do Portugal life when we came back here because I had set aside some goals for January to kind of like all the things you have to do to reestablish life in a place, and we just blew through them in the first week. So some things that we have accomplished, we've gotten the ball rolling on getting private health insurance. I'm not going to go too far into it, but they do have a public system here.

 

Jason: Which is free.

 

Caroline: In Portugal, which is free, which we will have access to. We technically have access to it now, but to officially get your number to be in the system, we need to wait for that appointment that we talked about. But you can supplement with some private insurance, which is roughly, like, what percentage of the cost of American insurance?

 

Jason: I can give you the exact amount. Okay. We were paying like $1,500 a month in the US for our medical insurance for the both of us, which I know some of you listening, that might be high. Some of you who have a family are like, wow, that's amazing to be able to pay that amount. We're going to pay $1,500 per year for private insurance.

 

Caroline: That's a twelfth of it.

 

Jason: It's wild.

 

Caroline: Which is wild.

 

Jason: It's basically the same coverage, essentially, that you get.

 

Caroline: Right. In the private system, that's where you do... it's less for emergencies. It's more for your routine care.

 

Jason: Picking your dentist. And that's the thing. It wraps everything into it. In Portugal, you don't have to have separate dental insurance. You don't have to have separate eye insurance. It's all in the private insurance.

 

Caroline: So we got the ball rolling on that. We have yet to pick it out, but we are working with kind of a company that helps us navigate that system, which is great. So we got that. Then we needed a Portuguese phone number just to have for certain things, like checking out online and buying things and signing up for our grocery store loyalty program, things like that.

 

Jason: First of all.

 

Caroline: What?

 

Jason: You're not telling us in the fun way that you...

 

Caroline: I am. I'm telling it in a different way.

 

Jason: Can I tell it in the way that's fun?

 

Caroline: You can tell it in your way. But to be clear, you did interrupt me before I got to the fun part.

 

Jason: I know, but you should have just started with the fun part. Guys, we want to sell some drugs in Portugal, and we need a burner phone to do it. So we got a burner phone in Portugal. I'm so sorry. I stole your thunder. I just thought it would be funny to make a joke.

 

Caroline: I'm accepting your apology. But you should feel bad that you interrupted my story because it could have been fun and you just didn't let me get there.

 

Jason: Okay, that's all right. Sometimes that happens.

 

Caroline: So we got a burner phone and we're drug dealers in Portugal now.

 

Jason: It's hilarious.

 

Caroline: We went into a store because, again, we just needed a number. And we're like, just give us your cheapest phone because we don't need to use it for anything. And she's like, oh, I have the perfect phone for you. She was fantastic. Brings out this, like, first of all, it's too light, I'll tell you that right now. It is like a plastic.

 

Jason: Think of the Nokia 8000 series.

 

Caroline: And you can only text using, like, T9. And the buttons feel like is it a play phone? Like, I'm not sure.

 

Jason: The screen is the size of my thumbnail.

 

Caroline: And so we got that phone, and we feel very like we're doing something illegal.

 

Jason: I was going to say the funny part about it. So it's just a pay as you go phone.

 

Caroline: It's the pay as you go, which is... such as a burner.

 

Jason: Yeah. Obviously, you're selling drugs. You don't want people to know. So we loaded it up with €20 worth of messages and things because it actually doesn't have any data because it's not a smartphone. And I just love that every time we get a text, it's really just for confirmation numbers on the eating out app and buying something online, whatever. So every time we get a text, we're like, that's five cents. Five cents. Stop texting us. Stop texting us. And I just love, like, I have to go into a menu and click into a message and then read it. I texted myself once, and then I was like, it cost me $0.05. I'm not going to do that. But it's just a hilarious little small thing, and now we just have it in the cupboard. And every once in a while you'll just hear like a ring. And it's like, we got some order drugs. We got to get out there. Just for everyone to know, we are not condoning doing drugs, stay in school, be cool, all those things.

 

Caroline: Like certain drugs.

 

Jason: Yeah, whatever you want, you know what I mean? Listen, recreationally...

 

Caroline: Don't do drugs, but if you do, it's okay.

 

Jason: Next up on the Portuguese life stuff is figuring out our car situation. For those of you who've been keeping track of this and are interested, we have just been continuing to rent from rental companies, and we've been trying to decide where we're going to buy a car. Where we're going to do a long term rental. We cannot really find a long term rental that makes sense for us.

 

Caroline: Right.

 

Jason: And then we can't get really approved for, like, a lease on a car because we don't have any credit in Portugal. So what we're going to do is we're going to buy a car used, and then we're going to have a car that we just own outright because it's really the easiest way for expats. It's unfortunate because you have to put up a chunk of cash that you don't really want to in a depreciating asset. But we've just done a ton of research on it, and it just feels like the next best thing.

 

Caroline: Yes. And the way that I have, I've been very much resisting this because it is a chunk of money, and I hate seeing what we think of as our savings depleted. But then I had a change of mindset yesterday where I was like, oh, but we sold our car before we went traveling and got basically this big check of money.

 

Jason: Which went into our savings.

 

Caroline: Which went into our savings. And so the way that I'm just thinking of it now is just rolling that money into this new car.

 

Jason: Wouldn't it be nice to have someone just like, we just have an extra car just sitting on the lot?

 

Caroline: Yeah, I would appreciate someone just rolling up, giving me a car. What about those commercials where there's like the red bow on it and everything?

 

Jason: Yeah.

 

Caroline: Who does that? Santa?

 

Jason: Come on.

 

Caroline: Did we miss that?

 

Jason: We have also been running into some people in our neighborhood, which is exciting.

 

Caroline: My plan for January was literally in my Notion. I said, make connection plan. And so I wasn't under any expectation we were going to actually have friends for a while. But my whole plan was like, okay, make a list of ways to maybe meet some people. Right. That was my only goal for January.

 

Jason: Yeah. Not to actually meet anybody.

 

Caroline: Not to actually make friends. And lo and behold, we have had the most bumping social calendar of any time in our lives.

 

Jason: Yeah. Which is not a lot, but for us, it's usually none. It's been really fun. Actually, a woman who lives in our little area here, she came over one night, and then just last night, we went over to her place and she made us dinner, which was so fun. And then we have a lunch out next week with some people who live, like, right around the corner.

 

Caroline: And then we have a lunch, like, probably the week after that with a couple who lives like 30 minutes down south of us. We're going to meet up with them. They actually used to live in Encinitas, funny enough.

 

Jason: My college roommate.

 

Caroline: College roommate.

 

Jason: All the way back in the year 2000 when Nelly and 50 Cent were just bumping in your radio is looking to buy a piece of land in Portugal.

 

Caroline: They live in Berlin.

 

Jason: They live in Berlin, Germany. And they're coming over here. And we've been chatting all since last year because we've been traveling. And so it's obviously very interesting when someone who is an expat himself. So they're going to come to Portugal. We're going to meet up with them. So my college roommate.

 

Caroline: It's so weird how life works.

 

Jason: Yeah. I have such a funny history with him because, just very quickly, basically kicked him out of our shared dorm room because I was just a jerk in college, as some of you can maybe imagine. But then we rekindled our relationship a couple of years later. We shared an apartment. We started a design company called Ginseng Design because one of us liked tea. I didn't know anything about tea, but I was just like, all right, cool, and...

 

Caroline: What year is this, Jason?

 

Jason: Oh, this is 2003 or yeah, two.

 

Caroline: This is before...

 

Jason: Yeah, this is before Thought and Theory, which is my other design company.

 

Caroline: After the ATP?

 

Jason: No, before the ATP. This was like, in college, had a part time.

 

Caroline: You never talked about this.

 

Jason: Yeah, but we didn't do anything. We started a design business. I think we just designed our own stuff. Like, we didn't have a single client.

 

Caroline: Okay, well, maybe mention that part.

 

Jason: Yeah, I was slinging eBay phones at this point. That's how I was making money. They were burners.

 

Caroline: They were burners.

 

Jason: So anyway yeah, lots of good...

 

Caroline: Anyway, yeah.

 

Jason: Social connections.

 

Caroline: We have been very pleasantly surprised with how social it feels. We found a cool new restaurant. So we kind of set this intention to really get out and about at least once a week to try to explore different areas because we very much, being people who work from home, can get into... And also we don't like to eat out that much because we inevitably eat worse and spend more money. So we eat at home, but once a week, at least, we try to get out and explore a new area. And I think we've done a great job with that, trying a new restaurant.

 

Jason: Yeah. And I think, like, for anybody who's wondering, you live in your normal place that you're so used to, and you have, like, all your go-to restaurants. But I think if you really sat down and ask yourself, how many restaurants do you really go to on a consistent basis? And it's really probably, like four or five. We've found four or five great restaurants. They're all a little bit different in the cuisine. They're a little bit different in, like, the type of restaurant. The one thing I did want to mention is well, two things. One, there isn't really well, there's definitely not any drive thru fast food in Portugal, like, that we've really seen.

 

Caroline: No, definitely not, yeah.

 

Jason: Which is very interesting.

 

Caroline: There is one Burger King in Lourinhã.

 

Jason: So there it... that probably does... does it have a drive through, though? I don't think I've seen.

 

Caroline: Yeah.

 

Jason: It does?

 

Caroline: Yeah.

 

Jason: Okay, so but, like, that's it. Like there's nothing else that does a drive through.

 

Caroline: Now that I'm saying that it might not have a drive through.

 

Jason: I don't think it does.

 

Caroline: I think I just assumed because I saw Burger King.

 

Jason: Yeah, I don't think it does. So that's a very interesting, just, like, different thing that you don't see very often. The other thing I was going to say is I have been thwarted twice on trying to get some wood fire oven pizza.

 

Caroline: I know.

 

Jason: Which is I think it's just something like, we're going to have to get used to of, like, smaller restaurants because that's, like, these two pizza places are, like, very small places. They're just like, we showed up one day, and then when we're like, yeah, sorry, we're not making pizzas today. We're like, oh, okay. And the other place we showed up, and they're on a winter break. That's, like, not mentioned anywhere else.

 

Caroline: But every time that you've been thwarted, we remind ourselves what we love about this culture is the slower pace.

 

Jason: True.

 

Caroline: And so if that's what you love about the culture...

 

Jason: You have to accept.

 

Caroline: You have to accept and be happy for... My perspective on it was like, oh, they're on winter break. Good that those people are taking time for their life and to have a break.

 

Jason: Totally.

 

Caroline: So that's just a change of mindset, too, is every time you're confronted with an inconvenience, you have to remember that inconvenience is a part of what you love about this country. So, yeah, it's easier to...

 

Jason: Cool.

 

Caroline: But I do hope you get your pizza.

 

Jason: I as well, at some time in 2023, would like some wood fire pizza from a Portuguese business. That would be great.

 

Caroline: Please and thank you.

 

Jason: Yes, thank you. All right.

 

Caroline: That is the pramble.

 

Jason: That's the quick five minute, 25 minutes update on everything that we've been doing. But listen, we've been... the podcast has been on a break for a while. We had to get everyone caught up. We had to argue about the best way to talk about our burner phone.

 

Caroline: About interrupting people's stories.

 

Jason: I mean, what is a podcast with us if that's not going to happen?

 

Caroline: Exactly.

 

Jason: All right, let's get into some 2023 goals and plans and what we're thinking and doing.

 

Caroline: Listen, we know this is not an original idea by any stretch of the imagination, but we find it fascinating to know what mindset people are in at the top of the year.

 

Jason: Oh, I love it. I love listening to people.

 

Caroline: You might be wondering, what are those Zooks going to be up to in 2023? And we're going to tell you. So, thankfully, first week we got back, had a bunch of planning meetings, so we actually have an answer to this question because we have thought about it. So where we start with planning. And again, if you're someone who's like, I don't even know what I want to do this year, maybe our process can help you think through some of this.

 

Jason: Sure.

 

Caroline: Also, I want to give a quick shout out if you want to kind of dive even deeper into this process of how we plan out a year and how we set a vision for what we're going to invest in in our business. We are doing a newsletter series at the top of the year called Invest, and it's an eight week series. And so you can sign up for that at wanderingaimfully.com/newsletter.

 

Jason: Are you asking me?

 

Caroline: No.

 

Jason: Okay. Yeah.

 

Caroline: Period. You can sign up for that at wanderingaimfully.com/newsletter. And so if you are interested in this type of content and you want to read it, you can sign up for that series.

 

Jason: Yeah. And if you sign up in the next, basically it's two months because it's an eight week series, you'll always be able to get the previous emails because we're going to link to them all in the email. So if you were to listen to this episode at the end of February are like, oh, I wish I would have been able to get all this. You can hop right on and you'll be able to get the rest of it.

 

Caroline: Exactly.

 

Jason: Cool.

 

Caroline: So where we always start is by reevaluating our enough number. And if you haven't heard us talk about this concept, it's really just the idea about not setting arbitrary financial goals, but setting goals that are based on the ideal lifestyle that you want to live. So it's like envisioning, okay, here's the life I want to live. Here's what would feel really spacious. Here's what would feel really good. Here's what I think that would cost. And it's completely dependent on you and your lifestyle and what you want to live. It's not just like, here's the type of house I want to live in and how much the mortgage would be, but it's like I have aging parents, and I might want to save up for care for them. Or I have health concerns, or...

 

Jason: I want 900 burner phones.

 

Caroline: Or I want six months of business expenses buffer in my savings. Whatever those unique financial things are for you that make you feel like you can be at ease. Your enough number is 100% unique to you, and we're not here to judge you for it. And hopefully you're not here to judge us for it either.

 

Jason: Yeah. And we also like to start the year by reevaluating that number, because it can change, and it will change based on your goals.

 

Caroline: And we'll share with you, actually, how it's changing this year for us. So our lifestyle last year of traveling was so different than living here in Portugal, right?

 

Jason: Yeah.

 

Caroline: So we started with evaluating that number and kind of checking in on our lifestyle and going like, how does this number need to change? And so for us, a couple of big considerations that are different this year versus last year are the next big thing on the horizon for us is we want to save for a house. So we have rented for...

 

Jason: Almost ten years.

 

Caroline: Almost ten years. We would really love...

 

Jason: We've been kicked out of three places.

 

Caroline: There are so many positives to renting. We're definitely not here to say, Oh, you have to buy a house in order to be an adult. That's not it. But we would love to have a place that's our own, where we could do whatever we want to it and really live there longer term.

 

Jason: Yeah. And I think having kids is also a consideration too, because it's like, you want the stability. You don't want the, in six months, we might have to move, and then it's just there's a lot of... all of you parents out there know it's nice to have the stability. And so I think for us, now is the time to think about that. And one of the things that we have learned is being an expat here in Portugal, this is very specific to our situation, is that you can only get approved up to 60% to 70% in some cases, of the home value in a mortgage or in a home loan. So just a very round number just to give you an idea. If you buy a million dollar house, the most we could possibly get a mortgage for is $700,000 at the most. Most likely, it's going to be less than that. Just because we have no credit here.

 

Caroline: Which, quick math, that means you need $300,000.

 

Jason: We don't know what type of price range we're buying a home in, but we just know that there's never going to be a better time than this year and maybe the next year to start stockpiling for this big purchase. And so over the past couple of years, we've had savings, we have an investment account, we have all of those things, but we haven't really built up, like, a chunk of money that's just like sitting, waiting to be put toward a house. That is the thing that then builds equity. So that is our big thing that's on the horizon.

 

Caroline: Right. So if you're just zooming out the lens in general and following kind of our priorities and values the past few years last year was very much enjoy the fruits of our labor, spend and be okay with spending and just enjoy and savor and live life. The year before that was very much more like coasting and kind of like being able to balance work with investing in our personal lives. And this year, in contrast to those two, is very much more going to be a more business focused growth year for us. And so you just go through these seasons, right, and you establish at the top of the year, at least for us, I like the year kind of construct of saying, where do I want to take my life this year? Is it a pull back season for me? Is it a focus on my personal life season for me? Is it a go all in on a business thing for me? Is it a saving year? Is it a spending year? Like, all of these things are kind of what you want to establish in order to know, here's my North Star. And so for us, that's our North Star. We want to do the house. There are some different financial considerations with like, we live in a different continent now than our families. There's going to be international flights, but we want to pull back on leisure travel, I would say, because we really filled up that bucket last year.

 

Jason: We used all of our coins.

 

Caroline: We used all of our leisure bucket coins last year, also kids in the future. So having a buffer there.

 

Jason: Yeah, I think this year for us, as we sat down and started to think about everything was just like, okay, this is a big year for us to save money. And I think it's worth just taking a quick second to talk about the mindset of doing kind of like a growth year for us in a quote unquote recession, the time that we're in. And I think that it's just one of those things that's, like, we can only control what we can control.

 

Caroline: Exactly.

 

Jason: We can't control the economy. We can't control the stock market. We can't control people's spending habits. But what we can control is our marketing efforts. What we can control is our output and content. What we can control is honing in all of our products and making them tighter and better. What we can control is trying to experiment and do different things. And so I think for us, if it's just an example for you, as someone who might be really worried about the recession in the economy right now, is to just see two people and we'll find out the end of the year how it goes. Like, maybe we have all these lofty goals and the recession really did affect our ability to hit them, but we're not going to start out the year going, Well, we're in a recession. Let's not set goals.

 

Caroline: Totally. And I definitely have shifted my internal beliefs about the value of worry in the past few years. And for me, I've arrived at this place where I just, from a very practical mindset, go, Okay, the worrying did not help me. Trying to think through every scenario, the fear about what the worst case scenario is. Oftentimes it never unfolds the way you think it's going to anyway. So I ask myself, like, is worrying about something that I can't control? Is it demotivating me or is it motivating me? And it's almost always for me, demotivating me because then I get swallowed up by the fear. I get swallowed up by the limiting beliefs of like, Well, it's a recession. My business is going to go down. No one's going to buy. All those things, right? That hasn't happened yet. That's just a prediction you're making based on news articles you're reading and things. And so that's not to say that it's not real. It is real. But worrying about it, for me, is not practical in terms of my motivation. And so if I can just focus on exactly what you said, focus on what you can control, stay in your motivation, stay in the things that fuel you, not the things that add to your resistance. And for me, that's my strategy going into 2023, even with all of this uncertainty swirling around us.

 

Jason: So getting back to our enough number. So we sat down and we really just kind of ran a bunch of different projections, a bunch of different ideas. How many customers do we currently have? How many customers did we get last year or the year before that? And then really just said, Okay, well, what are our goals for savings, for this down payment on a house? And what that brought us to was our enough number that our businesses, we would like both of our businesses to make combined in total revenue is $534,000. It's a very specific number, I just realized, but essentially that's our goal. And again, that's revenue. So that doesn't take into account paying taxes, paying expenses, all those other things, WAIM affiliates, like, that's a big chunk for us because...

 

Caroline: That number is to cover all of that as well, right? So it's not that doesn't just go to us in terms of like, oh, we take home 530...

 

Jason: That would be nice.

 

Caroline: Yeah, it's like, it's that in order to cover the cost of those businesses, to cover paying our affiliates, to cover taxes, like Jason said, to cover the savings goals, to cover all these things. But that is the number of pure revenue sales. And so once you get to that number, whatever that number is, for you, that number, it could be 5000, it doesn't have to be 500, whatever that number is. The reason I think that is so empowering is because you start to use it as a guide to make decisions. So then you go, okay, well, what's my offer? What am I selling? And how much of that do I need to sell in order to hit that number? And you kind of reverse engineer it from that way. So for us...

 

Jason: Oh, sorry, before you get to that, real quick, I just think it's also really to remember because I know as the person listening to this podcast, you can hear that big number and you can be like, Whoa, that's a huge number. Remember, we're two people. So if you're listening to this and you're a single person running a single business, we're also running two businesses. And we've been doing this for five years, just together with Wandering Aimfully.

 

Caroline: But in general, we've been doing business for...

 

Jason: 15 years. So it's like, I just like to put those things in perspective because so often you hear someone have this multi six figure goal and you're like, I'm just getting started. Great. If you're just getting started, then your enough number cannot be that. I mean, it can if you really want to. We're not here to tell you what your number can and can't be, but it is important to know that your enough number needs to start at a more reasonable goal.

 

Caroline: Yeah.

 

Jason: So sorry to interrupt, but I just want to get a little caveat.

 

Caroline: Yeah, for sure. And also my caveat is that Jason and I often have these conversations about the value of transparency and is it helpful to be transparent when we know that not everyone is going to be able to be in business for ten years? And we go back and forth on that because also the second that you open yourself up to your numbers, you open yourself up to judgment. And I know that that's a risk that we take in sharing numbers, but we hope that and we believe that the transparency is more important because the real numbers, we hope, is empowering to you to go like, Okay, this isn't just some abstract. This is actually what they're talking about, and this is actually how they're getting there. And as long as you can take it all with a grain of salt and put it through your own filter of your own life and your own enough definition and your own numbers, hopefully it's like going to, again, going back to that motivation, hopefully it's motivating to you and not demotivating you.

 

Jason: So, yeah, the way that we get to that number is we break down the sales of our offer to help us get there. So we set low and high goals because we think it's always important to have a low goal that feels like this is achievable with a little bit of effort and then a high goal that's like, this is a stretch goal. It's going to take a couple of awesome things to kind of work out for it to get there. But it's also one of those things that it's realistic, it's not within our control, really. Like, there's no way to really guarantee that if you will. So we start with those low goals. So our low goal for Wandering Aimfully is 120 new customers for each launch of the year. So we have two launches, Spring and Fall. So that would be a total of 240 new WAIMers for the total of those two launches for the year.

 

Caroline: Something important to also just note that I do think sometimes the way that our business works is our program is $2,000 and it ends and then you're still a customer for life. And so it's a lifetime pricing model. So it's important to remember that after most people are on a 20 month plan, after 20 months, we're still servicing those customers, but we're not getting any more revenue. And we've done an entire episode about why we like that. It's not for everyone. But if you're wondering like, Oh, but you said enough, and now you're trying to get 100 customers in every launch. And it's like, well, because we always have to replenish our revenue. So that's just something to note.

 

Jason: Yeah. So the low goal, 120 per launch. Our high goal is 150 per launch. So it's not like we're doubling each launch. It's nothing super crazy. And we do feel like that's a realistic, achievable number, but it will take work to get there, which we're going to talk about how we're getting there. So I think that just shares kind of how those numbers break down. That's going to be the biggest chunk of our revenue that comes in for that number because Wandering Aimfully makes the majority of our money. And then we also, for the first time in running Wandering Aimfully, we're going to do some experiments with some mini launches.

 

Caroline: Yeah. For the past few years, all we've sold, the only things we've sold, are the two launches of our WAIM Unlimited program. And simplifying down to just that one offer has been really helpful in being able to hone our system that's extremely repeatable, which has been great. But now we're sort of, again in a phase where we're like, Okay, only launching for two weeks, twice a year. There's so much more time in order to experiment, and we really want to try that. And we've had people ask us, there are parts, there are products and resources inside of WAIM Unlimited that you can only get by being a part of the program that people have asked for access to one off. So a good example of that would be like our Notion Starter Pack, which is our entire Notion system for running your small business. It's got a content calendar, it's got a finance tracker, it's got a habit tracker, a task... like all of these pieces of basically running your entire business. And when we launched it, people were like, Can I get this by itself? And we said, unfortunately for now, because simplicity, you can only get it inside the program. So we are going to experiment this year with what we're calling mini launches, which are basically, instead of our program, just doing one off products two times throughout the year, probably like two months following each launch is the way that we're thinking of it now. So probably once in May and probably once potentially around Black Friday.

 

Jason: And we also are really curious of just what does it feel like to have a product that's for sale next to our larger product? And so if these kind of mini products are literally like a $150-$250 product and that's it, there's no ongoing payments, there's no nothing, it's just you're buying a one off thing, how does that supplement our overall revenue? And what does that look like in terms of our email list, which, let's just say has 12,000 people on it right now, about. Of those people, we're trying to get 120 to buy each time we do a launch of WAIM Unlimited. Well, are there another 100 people on the list for each mini launch to buy a smaller product? And that's a hypothesis we just want to test because we want to see if there are people who are like, yeah, I can't really commit to paying for WAIM. I love what you all do, which this is things we hear via email, so I'm not just saying it. And they want, like, the Notion Starter Pack, like you said. And are there 100 people for those mini launches that we do twice a year to do that? So that's an experiment we're going to find out, and we'll keep you posted on it here on the podcast. And it's just one of those other ways that we're trying to add revenue to our overall revenue goal that we haven't done before. All right.

 

Caroline: So again, just to recap here, our particular process is reevaluate your enough number so you know what you're aiming for, see what that would be across an entire year. Also, one part we didn't mention here that we got part of how we got to that 534 number was basically saying, how much money are we making per month now? How much money are we aiming for with our enough number? And let's pretend that we got to that enough number by the end of the year, like end of the year reaching our enough number. Take the average of where we are now to where we want to be. Multiply that across twelve months, that gets you the 534.

 

Jason: Exactly.

 

Caroline: So in doing that math, what we're accounting for is like, basically from where we are now to where we want to be, if we got there in exactly a linear growth, how much money would we need to make across the whole year? None of this is going to play out the way that you project, but it helps you set some type of...

 

Jason: Yeah, I think for us it just helped us know, here are the amount of customers we need every launch. Here are the amount of customers we need in the mini launches. We're not going to reach that number just by putting that number out into the world. You have to go, these are the amount of customers that we would need to get at this price point to meet.

 

Caroline: And if you do this exercise and you go, Oh, I need 1000 customers to reach my enough number, I would need 1000 customers at my current price of my offer.

 

Jason: And last year you got 30 customers.

 

Caroline: Last year you got 30. You might go, okay, maybe instead of my model being where I am now to getting to my enough number at the end of this year, maybe you go, give me two years and you go, Okay, let me half my enough number. Let me say I get from here to half my enough number by the end of this year. What does that look like? And you kind of run the numbers that way until you land on something that feels aspirational something to aspire to, but feels realistic.

 

Jason: Yeah. So the next thing to do in this process is it's great to have an enough number, it's great to have customer goals, but how the hell are you going to do it, right? And I think that that's where the real secret sauce lies in running an online business is not just setting goals and then crossing your fingers and hoping that everything you've done in the past helps you reach those goals. Especially when your goals are increasing, you have to do things that change to meet those goals. So for us, we basically took a look at kind of the weakest point in the Wandering Aimfully marketing bridge as we call it, and we have a full episode about marketing bridges if you want to go back and listen. But essentially for us, the weakest point is traffic. So our traffic of the wanderingaimfully.com website has been going down every year by like 40%, which is not a great trend, but I will say our revenue has been going up every year. So we are attracting a better audience. We are getting rid of, I think, an audience of people that have been coming for other reasons or other posts that are kind of falling off. Namely, really the biggest of all of them is my social media detox journal that I wrote in 2014, which was on the homepage in the number one spot for that phrase for years. And now it's slowly dropping down, which is totally fine because that's not our ideal audience for Wandering Aimfully purchasers. So we know that we need to increase our traffic. So our email conversion is fairly good for people who are coming to our site to signing up to our email list. But we know that because the traffic is declining that we want to attract an even better audience to Wandering Aimfully to then sign up for our email list who are going to be better suited to...

 

Caroline: Yeah. It's also one of those things where you have to make these decisions in your business, where you go, Okay, focusing on traffic might not be like the sexiest, most quick turnaround in terms of results right now, but I know that every moment in the future we are going to wish that we had done this sooner.

 

Jason: Exactly.

 

Caroline: And so there are times where you have to, and we'll talk about invest later on, but there are times when you have to make a decision to reinvest in your business even though you know that something isn't going to pay off right away. I think that's what invest really denotes for me is like, I'm putting an effort now to see the fruits of it later.

 

Jason: And that's kind of the focus of our eight-week email series that we mentioned earlier.

 

Caroline: Exactly.

 

Jason: We're doing the work now so that it hopefully pays off. So talking about our Q1 project. So we have not planned out our Q2, Q3, Q4 projects because we want to see how the first one goes. But the first one, what we're doing, is called Narticles.

 

Caroline: Yeah. So in order to boost this traffic, basically, we're just going to start with creating like 15 to 20 better, more targeted articles on our website. And so these are new articles. Narticles is what we have affectionately named this project. And so really, that's just about writing high quality articles that are better suited for our ideal audience, which we have continued to hone over the years, but we haven't really created a lot of new content. And the second part of that is realizing that people's consumption habits are changing and so placing more of an emphasis on these more condensed, shorter, scannable, kind of bite-sized articles that are still extremely high value.

 

Jason: Yeah.

 

Caroline: But like, I do think kind of gone are the days of like the extremely long...

 

Jason: Yeah, it's just, it's so hard to keep up with the trends of, like, what is Google rewarding? What's ending up on the front page? What are people clicking through? And we have so many long form articles and it's like, does someone actually read through all of that and then sign up for our email list? It's almost impossible to know. And so I think, again, we just love experiments. We love doing hypotheses and proving out to see how they go. So with the Narticles thing, what we want to do is create shorter articles that are like 1000 words at max. They answer very specific questions for our ideal audience. And this is what we would tell people. And we have a whole episode on the content strategy, content salad strategy here on the podcast. But it's what we would tell people, which is like, identify your ideal customer, identify their ideal problems, then create a list of articles you can write to solve those problems and then show those in a way that someone can find them. And so, right now, the show-those-in-a-way is really kind of a broken thing on the Wandering Aimfully site because we have 120 plus articles that range so many topics that are just not really helpful in a conducive manner. Whereas with Narticles, we want to create kind of a new articles page that's like, here are 15 articles dedicated to you, a person who runs a client based business and wants to transition to digital products. That's it. There's no Jason's Fitness Journey from 2012.

 

Caroline: Carol's philosophical concept about authenticity.

 

Jason: Exactly. All of that will still exist. You can find it'll be buried. But our articles page will be 15 articles for our specific ideal audience, because this is the exact thing we would tell someone else in this position of, you've got to get this foundation right. Now, the other thing I'll say that it's a big experiment as well, is, Okay, it's great to write these articles, but who's going to see them?

 

Caroline: Who's going to see them? How are they going to see them?

 

Jason: We're going to dive into the world of Pinterest.

 

Caroline: We have for years been like, we want to get... I used Pinterest quite a bit when I had my own Made Vibrant blog with my hand lettering. It was just very well suited for that. But we know that if we're going to invest this time, we do want some type of amplification. So you're going to be able to come along with us on that journey. Is it going to fail miserably? Maybe.

 

Jason: Yeah.

 

Caroline: But that's okay.

 

Jason: Are we going to do it ourselves? Are we going to hire someone? The jury is still kind of out on that decision. We haven't really got into that yet. First thing we need to do, again, and this is like, we would tell anybody in a project like this, this Narticle thing as a project.

 

Caroline: Get the articles written.

 

Jason: Yeah, get the articles written. Like, have the thing that you want to then promote promotable, but don't go down the rabbit hole like, Well, now I need to learn Pinterest. It's like, No, not yet. You need to have the thing built so that you can promote it. So that's our Q1 project. We are under no illusions that that project alone is going to fully increase our traffic, fully grow our email list to the numbers that we think we're going to need to get all the customers. But that's what we're doing the first quarter. And so at the end of the first quarter, maybe halfway through, we'll have another meeting and we'll go, Okay, what do we want to do in Q2? What's our next experiment? And so for us, the focus this year is every quarter to have a project that is going to increase Wandering Aimfully's traffic or email subscriber list growth and just try and really focus on identifying those client based business owners who want to transition to digital products. How do we find more of those people? How do we help them in some way so they trust us and see Wandering Aimfully Unlimited as a program that they want to join because they know they'll get value from it? How'd I do?

 

Caroline: That was a great summary.

 

Jason: Nice. I feel like I put a little bit of lube on my legs because we're all chafing here.

 

Caroline: Yeah, I feel less chafing, honestly. I'm all lubed up. The second project. So that was kind of our growth project.

 

Jason: Yes.

 

Caroline: There's a second project, which is more of reinvesting in our own offer. And this is a project that we've had on our wish list for so long.

 

Jason: For five years, since the day that it launched.

 

Caroline: And that is to redesign the Wandering Aimfully dashboard. And so this is the internal experience of how someone accesses the myriad of coaching sessions, courses, workshops. I honestly couldn't even tell you how many resources we have inside WAIM Unlimited.

 

Jason: Hundreds.

 

Caroline: Well, if you include articles, but like, if you include just like courses and resources, like probably 100.

 

Jason: I think it's yeah, just under 100.

 

Caroline: Which is wild. Right? But obviously if our selling proposition for WAIM Limited is to help you focus in your business on one thing at a time and to eliminate overwhelm and the experience of trying to go through everything in WAIM, we have certain things like search and tags and all of that, but it's not a great experience. To deliver on that promise and this is also what's gotten cluttered the more things that we create, because that's the thing is we're always going to be creating things.

 

Jason: Exactly.

 

Caroline: So we are going to invest in creating a better experience.

 

Jason: Yeah. And what that process is going to look like is we're trying to create a limited amount of time that you have to redesign and rethink the experience of the dashboard, which you've already been playing around in it. How many hours do you think you've worked on it?

 

Caroline: Oh, like probably six.

 

Jason: Okay, so I was going to say ten. So even in 10 hours, you've already thought through so many fun new things that we can reimagine in the way that the experience goes. And I just think that it's going to make us so much more excited when the core inner product of Wandering Aimfully that people get into because they purchase the program from us, we are excited about it because it's new and it's awesome and it functions better and you can get access to things better. And really the core way that it works, especially for any WAIMers who are listening, that's not going to change. Like the saving of things, the adding of notes of things, being able to search and sort through our stuff. It's just going to be a better overall experience. It's going to be a more modernized design. It's going to be a more easily readable and scannable design. And so I'm just really excited because whenever you can take the time to reinvest in your core product and make it better, it gets you excited about marketing and promoting it.

 

Caroline: Exactly.

 

Jason: The key is though, we're doing this five years after, so where we see so many people go wrong is you make your online course and then six months from after making it, maybe you don't get a bunch of sales and you go, Oh, it's because I didn't like design it this way. And then you go and you redesign the whole thing and you just haven't done any marketing or promotion. We've done plenty of marketing or promotion and now we feel like we just want our core product to be better, more modern, more usable, and so very excited for that. And hopefully we can kind of curb our wish list of wanting to do all of the things.

 

Caroline: Yeah, that's going to be our big challenge is sort of knowing that it can be so much better, but also balancing that with what can we accomplish in the time frame and the budget.

 

Jason: Yeah, because we do have to pay a developer to take your designs and turn them into a functional thing. Thankfully, we do have a very good developer, but he does cost money and we don't want to spend too much money because again, our savings goals and we're trying not to up our spending this year. So we just have to be very careful with how we do that and we're just going to try and be creative in how that gets executed.

 

Caroline: Yeah, so those are the two projects. And so for you, again, recapping, if you come up with that goal, you go, This is how many sales that I would need to reach that goal of my offer. And then ask yourself, Okay, and maybe to follow our formula, it would help you to go, what's one marketing project and then what's one sort of core offer project? Right, so how can I make my core offer better? And then how can I make my marketing better? And maybe that's a good place to start for Q1 for you of going, Okay, these are going to be my two focus things.

 

Jason: We don't have it listed here. Can we quickly to go over the rest of WAIM's marketing plan? Which I think is very simple and easy to go over.

 

Caroline: Just so people know how we sell WAIM?

 

Jason: No, just in general, like how WAIM is marketing and our content plan for the year. So Instagram. We're not going back on Instagram. YouTube. We did our travel videos, I think 18 total videos last year. We're going to dabble in recording two videos alongside the Narticles and see how they go. If that goes well, then we might do some YouTube stuff. But we're putting that as like a very big maybe. This podcast will continue to do as we've done before and our email newsletter is a non-negotiable. Every Monday, we send out a helpful jam-packed, value-packed email.

 

Caroline: For the first year ever, we have all of our series mapped out for the year.

 

Jason: Yeah, so I just wanted to give the overall picture. We're not getting on TikTok. Again, we're not spending time on Instagram. We are focusing on articles and then again trying to use Pinterest to build up some traffic from that. And thankfully, we do have an existing email list. We have existing traffic that we're using.

 

Caroline: Great. That's one of our businesses. Let's talk about the other business.

 

Jason: Yes. So Teachery has an exciting birthday this year. It is celebrating its 10th year of inception. So this 2023 will be the year that we hit the anniversary of when I opened up Photoshop, which I believe was Photoshop. I want to say, like...

 

Caroline: You can't.

 

Jason: 5.0? I don't know.

 

Caroline: You're making that up.

 

Jason: Yeah, but 2013 me created a Photoshop file of a course design that I just wanted because there wasn't a great course design. Gave it to a WordPress developer. I had this WordPress site that people could buy a course from me and like, go through the content that then got turned into the first iteration of Teachery in 2014. And here we are nine years later, thinking about doing our very first bit of marketing for Teachery.

 

Caroline: It has been completely word of mouth.

 

Jason: Yes.

 

Caroline: Up until this point. And so now, and we say this every year, we're like, this is going to be the year where we really crank it up on Teachery. But we...

 

Jason: Any crank at all is up.

 

Caroline: Any crank at all is up.

 

Jason: Just a tiny just a little nodule turn is a big crank.

 

Caroline: But we really just needed to get WAIM to a place where it was so much more consistent in order to be able to shift. And we're at that place now.

 

Jason: By the way, Teachery is an online course software, if you don't know if you've never heard of it before.

 

Caroline: Oh, what's Teachery?

 

Jason: Yeah, exactly.

 

Caroline: Yeah. It's a software platform where you can make online courses with an emphasis on complete control over customization and making them creative looking, which is kind of what differentiates it from a lot of course platforms out there. It's an emphasis on your creativity and you can make it look exactly how you want it.

 

Jason: And also we've tried to make you did a full redesign in 2020 that we had a team help us kind of put into the application that it just becomes much more fun to use.

 

Caroline: It's fun to use.

 

Jason: So the first thing we're going to do, and this is a very silly thing that we should have done many years ago, but we just didn't have the time. Teachery actually has a pretty good amount of traffic coming to it every single day. And that's ten years of people talking about it, people sharing it.

 

Caroline: Links to it.

 

Jason: People having courses that talk about that they like Teachery. So the first thing we're going to do is see if we can convert that traffic into our trials that converts into paying customers by doing something.

 

Caroline: Yeah. And so, again, this goes back to what we did with WAIM, which was establish our goals and then look at our marketing bridge and go, Where are the holes? For us, instead of traffic being the main...

 

Jason: Which we have plenty of with Teachery.

 

Caroline: It's converting to trials. And so instead, we had all these ideas about like, is it finally doing content on YouTube? Is it doing direct sales with all these ideas. We have a list full of ideas, but the advice we would give anyone is, before you go and create something new, look at your existing bridge and go, How can I make this better? How can I make the foundation better? In the metaphor, it's like, where can I repair the bridge so that before I go sending more people over it it's like structurally sound. And so for us, that is looking at this traffic that we already have coming and going, how can we convert more people to free trials? So we have a couple of experiments we're going to run on that.

 

Jason: Oh, I mean, we might just do a lead magnet.

 

Caroline: Yeah. Any type of incentive whatsoever.

 

Jason: Actually, as we started to get into this, and I think maybe some of you can relate to this, when you really take a moment to look at your business and look at the opportunities that lie in front of you, you kind of laugh because you're like, I haven't even done the simple things. I haven't even done just put like a big email sign up thing on my website. And so for us, the big thing that we're going to do is just basically try and create a lead magnet or try and create some incentive for people to join a trial and just see if we can convert a bunch of the traffic that we already have into trials. Because right now, nothing is incentivizing them other than a button that says, "Start for free."

 

Caroline: Yup.

 

Jason: So our goals right now, Teachery has 250 active paying customers. And again, that has been no marketing, that has been all word of mouth over the course of ten years. We want to grow of those 250 I don't know the exact number off the top of my head, but of those 250, we have monthly and we have annual customers. We want to grow our monthly customers just monthly from 160. That's the number. Sorry, I should have read it. We have 160 monthly customers. We want to grow that to 300 this year. So basically doubling our monthly customers and we're actually not even factoring in the annual customer growth.

 

Caroline: Exactly.

 

Jason: Honestly, just because it's too difficult to do the math, because it's once a year payments and blah, blah, blah. So we're just focusing on monthly customers. We're not changing the pricing or anything on Teachery. And then our high goal, as we mentioned, we like doing a low and a high goal, is to grow from 160 monthly customers to 700 customers. Now, most of that big number is just playing with conversion percentages on our traffic to our free trial. So if you're wondering, like, Whoa, that's a huge jump. It's literally because it's like a percentage point or half a percentage point up in their conversion. So the good thing is, with that, we feel like doing anything marketing-wise might help us grow our monthly customers.

 

Caroline: And it's important to say something different that we're going to be doing this year that we haven't been doing in the past years is devoting Fridays to basically being Teachery days. And so this is advice we give people all the time. If you're trying to make any sort of transition, if you're that person who has a client based business and you're trying to move to digital products, but you're finding yourself, we call them straddling strategist. You're finding yourself straddling these two worlds, serving two audiences or serving two businesses or serving two anything, and you feel torn in two directions and you just are having a hard time carving out the time, devoting one day and kind of creating a hard boundary around it and saying, This is going to be my digital product day, or, this is going to be my teacher day, or this is going to be my I work on my business instead of in my business day. That is one strategy that we recommend just that can help you check in more often, which is going to help you take action more often, which is going to help you get results more often.

 

Jason: Yeah. And one exciting thing for me personally with Teachery is if we do hit that low goal at any point this year of 300 monthly customers, that is going to be the moment that we bring on a customer support team member for Teachery because for the entirety of Teachery existing, I have answered every single support email.

 

Caroline: The entire t?

 

Jason: The entirety of it existing.

 

Caroline: Entirety. I'm like the entire t?

 

Jason: The entire t. The entirety of it existing.

 

Caroline: You are going to like it.

 

Jason: And you are going to like it. I have answered I mean, I don't even know what the number... Actually, you know what's funny? I do know the number because I saw it accidentally the other day.

 

Caroline: And it made you throw up?

 

Jason: I have answered 9000.

 

Caroline: No.

 

Jason: Support requests over the course of nine years. So it breaks down to like a thousand...

 

Caroline: Couldn't make the 10,000, huh?

 

Jason: Support requests. It's basically like three a day, every single day of the year, which is kind of interesting. Yeah, I saw the number. I was like, Wow, that's good. But we also didn't have Intercom at the very beginning. I don't know. Anyway, it doesn't matter. If we hit 300, we get to hire a customer support person, and I get to stop doing something that I have done every single day of my life for the past ten years.

 

Caroline: Every day, even throughout travel. I don't know how you did that.

 

Jason: And I just want to say, for anybody listening to this, there is unsexy work you have to do in your business.

 

Caroline: Totally.

 

Jason: And I think there's a difference between do I hate doing this unsexy work, or I just dislike it? And so for me, from the beginning of doing customer support with Teachery, I loved it because it was a new thing. I was excited. I wanted to help people. But by year seven or eight, I'm not really loving the people who email in from @ Hotmail email that are like, How do I change my course name? And I'm like, Come on, you got to click around. You can find it. I promise you, if you just click twice, you'll find it. And again, it's not to say that our customer support is something I hate doing. It's just I would prefer not to answer those questions as one of the two founders of Teachery anymore. And I do like helping the more complex questions, because that's actually fun for me to figure out that problem. So having a customer support person that can come on, that can help all of our dear @ Hotmail users answer those questions, that's a good goal for me. And I'm something I'm very excited about. So it's motivating for me to work on Teachery, invest in it, set up a lead magnet, and get some more people signing up for trials.

 

Caroline: Which I think, by the way, is also a fun thing to think about for you listening is what goals do you have that aren't necessarily financial but are goals about how you work in your business? So is it a goal that, Oh, I take Fridays off, or is it a goal that I don't do X, Y, and Z anymore? Or is it a goal that I only work with this type of client? Those kind of non financial goals about how you engage with your business are just as important, I think.

 

Jason: And it might take you ten years to get to those, just so you're aware of how long it's taken me to get to that goal. All right, so those are our business things. Those are what we're focusing on. That's our enough number. That's our revenue goals, how we're getting there. We will keep you up to date throughout the year. Now let's switch over to some quick life goals and then our words for the year to wrap this sucker up.

 

Caroline: Great.

 

Jason: What are your life goals?

 

Caroline: Okay, so my bigger life goals for 2023, I kind of set three main life areas that I want to focus on this year. And so my top one, my number one.

 

Jason: Top top.

 

Caroline: Life area that I want to focus on this year is our relationship.

 

Jason: That'd be nice. I would appreciate it.

 

Caroline: It's kind of sad to think, like, we've been together for almost 13 years, and this is the first year where I'm, like, very intentionally putting our relationship as the very top intention that I'm setting. And that made me sad when I realized that because I thought to myself, Well, you're the person that I spend all my time with. To me, the life that I've built now as a person is so much revolved around our relationship and we're a team. To me, I'm not just one person. We are a team for our whole lives. And so the reason I want to set that as my top intention is because I just think in the life cycle of a relationship, there comes a point where it's no longer going to just work without any effort. I think it's okay to normalize putting effort into a relationship, you know what I mean? And so after travel, we had the most amazing year. We spent so many memories together, we had the highest highs, but it was also hard on our relationship and it took a toll because it was challenging for us both individually in unique ways. And so when you're both being individually challenged constantly, that's only going to make the way that you collaborate more difficult.

 

Jason: And when you're exhausted.

 

Caroline: When you're exhausted. It taught me so much, but it's also like, okay, I want to take all those lessons and I now want to focus on coming back together, feeling closer to you, prioritizing our relationship, being a better partner. Like, there are ways that I know that I could be a more supportive partner to you after you supported me so much this past year and really the years prior to that, because that was kind of like my hardest years.

 

Jason: Do you think it's three hour earlobe massages?

 

Caroline: Is that what you want?

 

Jason: Sounds great.

 

Caroline: We can talk about that after the show.

 

Jason: Yeah.

 

Caroline: But so I'm really excited about that. So what's that... what... Oh, go ahead.

 

Jason: I was just going to say also, just from the other person's perspective, I don't feel like you've neglected our relationship over the course of the past 13 years. And I feel like, if anything, I think it's a testament to the fact that we've had such a strong relationship to make it all the way this way without even having to think about it.

 

Caroline: Exactly.

 

Jason: It's been something that has just come naturally to us and we worked on it.

 

Caroline: Exactly. It's like, it's not like yeah, that's a very good point. It was sort of to me, it was like in maintenance.

 

Jason: Yeah.

 

Caroline: Phase where it was like, oh, everything coming naturally. But to me, 2023 is about doing the things that don't come naturally. So that's a good distinction. It's like all the things I do naturally are like, speak to you kindly and think about you and love on you.

 

Jason: Nothing with earlobes, though.

 

Caroline: Definitely no earlobe play.

 

Jason: I'm not asking for play. I'm asking for massages.

 

Caroline: Like, serious.

 

Jason: I have some cramps in my earlobes.

 

Caroline: You got to this little tight area. You're like, that's the cartilage of my ear. Let me just work it. No, that's not how that works. But yeah. So to make the distinction now, to me, prioritizing our relationship is about doing the things that don't come naturally. It's like going above and beyond and what could that do? So that's exciting, and maybe I'll give updates about that throughout the year. But yeah, so that's number one. Number two is all the business stuff we said about focusing on it being like a growth year for business. And also I have all this unspent creative energy that I built up over the past year because I didn't create basically anything new.

 

Jason: Anythin'.

 

Caroline: Anythin'. The only new thing I created was our Teachery Theme Pack that I did at the end of the year, and that was when we were in Portugal.

 

Jason: Right.

 

Caroline: So I'm excited to pour more creative energy, learn new creative skills, all of that. So that's my second intention.

 

Jason: A lot of AI bots out there.

 

Caroline: A lot of AI bots I got to fight. And then my third life area intention is just my health and personal care and getting myself back to not that I was unhealthy last year, but obviously, like, you're traveling.

 

Jason: Yeah, it's very difficult to have normal exercise, yeah.

 

Caroline: It was hard on your body. We worked out probably a third of the time. So in 2021, I did a little challenge of ten minutes of exercise a day for the whole year, and I'm going to continue that this year. So ten minutes of exercise a day, whether that's resting in terms of doing light stretching for ten minutes or like, a really hard workout for 45 minutes. But I'm really excited about that. And of course, there's so many more areas of my life that I'm going to have to juggle, but I find that establishing the three most important ones that I want to invest in is that's the way that I like to do it.

 

Jason: Nice. I'm going to give my goals with my word because it makes the most sense, because it's helpful.

 

Caroline: Then we'll ease right into that.

 

Jason: My word for 2023 is invest. And that is not about buying low and selling high.

 

Caroline: That's not about crypto?

 

Jason: It's not about crypto at all. Are we even talking about crypto anymore? It is about a couple of different categories. The first thing for me is my health. So not a spring chicken anymore. For those of you who don't know, I turned 40 large.

 

Caroline: You're a wise man.

 

Jason: I like to think of it as 40 years young. I don't think of it as 40 years old.

 

Caroline: Absolutely.

 

Jason: But I also know that it's never going to get easier than it is right now to exercise, to invest in my health, to... I still want to eat my cinnamon rolls. I still want to eat my gluten-free cookies. I'm going to do those things. So I need to make sure that exercise is always a priority. I think one big advantage is where we live. The walk down to the beach is a 30-minute walk back and forth. There's a giant hill that we have to climb.

 

Caroline: Giant. Like 160 beats per minute heart rate on the way up.

 

Jason: It's a workout. It is a workout. So it's like if we do that walk two to three times a week plus working out every single day and spending 20 to 40 minutes in our little gym, that's going to feel really good to me. And I have not done that consistent of exercise since 2012. No joke. So I'm very excited to invest in that. In 2012, I turned 30. So that's like why it matters to me this year. It actually doesn't really matter because I'll turn 41 this year anyway. The math doesn't need to work out. Who cares? I'm investing in my health. The second thing is I want to invest in the Portuguese culture and kind of the European lifestyle. So I want to learn Portuguese.

 

Caroline: That was on my list too.

 

Jason: I'm under no illusions I'm going to be fluent this year. I'm also not going to force myself to like every day I have to work 30 to 60 minutes on learning Portuguese. I want to feel it out some days when I'm like, Oh, I want to spend like 2 hours messing around and learning stuff. Or we're going to hire a tutor to help us for a certain amount of time. I want to get excited about that, but I don't want to feel like it's like this pressure thing.

 

Caroline: Yeah, I think that's also knowing yourself. When you feel pressure, you rebel against it.

 

Jason: Totally.

 

Caroline: So you have to know that about yourself so that you can almost game your brain into doing it in a way that works for you.

 

Jason: And I also do not like homework, so I'm not about that life.

 

Caroline: We found this really cool mobile game.

 

Jason: Yeah.

 

Caroline: And I found it for myself because I really like the learning apps. I use an app called Memorize for my Portuguese, which I really like, but it's more like learning based. And so on days when I didn't want to feel so learn-ey, I was looking up games because I love games. And I found this game called Lingo Legend and it's literally like a combination between Pokemon... the card element is like a Pokemon game or Magic the Gathering is probably a better example meets language learning meets like a quest type of framework. And so it's really cute. My favorite thing is when I'm at a different part of the house and I hear Jason practicing and I'm like always playing Lingo Legend and it's my favorite thing.

 

Jason: Yeah, it's just like trying to get it right by listening to anything. Some of the words are really going to get me in portugal. So that's my second one. And then my third one is also our relationship. So that is children are on the horizon. And I know that that's going to bring a whole set of challenges that no one can be prepared for, no matter how much you read, watch, listen, and talk to other people. And so I want our relationship to be at the best that it's ever been, the strongest it's ever been.

 

Caroline: I didn't mention that, but that's also a big part of...

 

Jason: Yeah. And so for me, I just think we're in a new place, a country that's foreign to us, a language that's foreign to us. Things are difficult. They're not as difficult, I think, as you think they are. The longer we're here, the more that we realize, like, first of all, so many people speak English. That makes it so much easier. Like, even buying a burner phone. Person spoke English. We're like, For drugs? She was like, For drugs. And so, yeah, those are my three things. Invest is my word. And that's what I'm focusing on this year.

 

Caroline: Love that, babe. Invest. And then to wrap mine up, my word for 2023 is capable, which usually I choose these words that are so loosey goosey and more metaphorical. And for me, this year, capable feels, like, very specific. But the reasoning is that I definitely feel like I'm in this transition phase between, okay, we did our single years of enjoying our relationship, and I know that the next big chapter is having kids. And I feel like since my big 2019, kind of lowest I'd ever been in my life, anxiety year, it's been a slow process to build myself back up after that. And one of the beautiful things about being at the lowest is that you learn so much about yourself. And especially for me, like these emotional limiting stories and these trauma responses and all these things. And one of my biggest stories that was holding me back, that I discovered throughout that process was this, and I think it's the source of a lot of my anxiety is this deep fear that I'm not capable. And so literally, in all of my therapy sessions, it would always come back to like, what is the belief that is at the root of this story that makes you feel so anxious? And it was always like, I'm not capable. And so slowly but surely, like 2021 with my exercising and proving to myself that I could do hard things and I could keep promises to myself and I could invest in myself and I could work through challenges. And then really, this past year of 2022, showing myself again and again and again with the 20 flights that we did, even through the fact that I have flight anxiety with...

 

Jason: 50 different beds.

 

Caroline: 50 different beds even though I'm like, oh, this is going to be hard on my body. Or getting out of my comfort zone and speaking a language that I don't speak. All these things. And arriving at the... driving, driving in countries where literally I thought we might die. And arriving at the end of the year and going, Wow. My baseline anxiety has never been lower. I did all of that, and I have never felt more capable in my life. And so what I want this year to be about is really sort of putting that to the test in every aspect. I just want to always come back to this idea of bringing my attention to evidence that I am capable because I think that I'm going to be the best parent possible, bringing children into this world knowing that I'm capable. And I think that that is my way of kind of being in the best mindset in order to do that in a way that is mentally healthy for me.

 

Jason: And I benefit from this one, too, so it's great.

 

Caroline: You benefit.

 

Jason: Works for me.

 

Caroline: Quite a bit.

 

Jason: You're like, froufrou ones the past couple of years? Like, zero benefit.

 

Caroline: Yeah. You're like, Oh, light? Light is your word? Cool.

 

Jason: We're going to have warmer lights in our home? Cool.

 

Caroline: So capable. And it's been fun. Even the first two weeks of the year. Jason is very well aware of it, so I'll even say it out loud. Like something will happen and I'll feel really capable, and I'll be like, Capable, and he's like, So capable. And then I have a little tracker that I just call capability points. And anytime that I do something that makes me feel capable, I write it down there.

 

Jason: Nice.

 

Caroline: So that at the end of the year, I'll be able to look back and go, I have all this evidence that shows me that my intention this year was sort of, like proven out in my actions. So whatever your year is or whatever, maybe you have an invest point database or list.

 

Jason: At the end of the year, do you get to trade your capability points in for like, a slinky or like, a teddy bear?

 

Caroline: A fingertrap.

 

Jason: A fingertrap.

 

Caroline: Or an over the door basketball hoop if you have a lot of capability points.

 

Jason: I don't see it happening for you. I don't. I love you, but I don't.

 

Caroline: Are you kidding me?

 

Jason: Wait, our relationship? Yeah. You're going to be so great, babe. You're the best.

 

Caroline: You're the best.

 

Jason: All right, that's it for our first episode back here in 2023. We know we went quite long.

 

Caroline: It wasn't a big episode. Am I right?

 

Jason: Okay. Get in with one of those, huh? Thank you so much for listening. Also, for those of you listening all the way to the end, I'm going to leave a link in the show notes to our 2022 review, which has some guiding questions for you. If you like writing review or maybe you've never done it before, to look back on the last year so that you can look forward on the next year and you can do your own version of this for yourself, whether it's public or private to help you plan out 2023 and get excited about things.

 

Caroline: And as a final reminder, if you like this type of content and you want to go on our eight-week journey of kind of breaking each one of these things down even way further and then giving you action steps to do it in your own business, you can sign up for our Invest series that we're doing to kick off the year at our Monday newsletter by going to wanderingaimfully.com/newsletter.

 

Jason: Right because it's not a question.

 

Caroline: It's not a question. It is, in fact, a URL.

 

Jason: Okay, goodbye.

 

Caroline: Okay, thanks for listening. Goodbye.