191 - *NEW NAME!* ..... Growing Steady

[00:00:00] Jason: Surprise.

[00:00:01] Caroline: What is this podcast art that you clicked on? You're, like, confused, aren't you?

[00:00:05] Jason: We have a new name. We have new art. We have a new intro. And change is scary.

[00:00:12] Caroline: It's so scary, but it's still us. We promise. And we're gonna talk about the same things.

[00:00:16] Jason: Yeah.

[00:00:16] Caroline: And everything's gonna be okay. But we just wanted to give you a little heads up. There is a new intro with new music about to come into your earballs.

[00:00:22] Jason: Here it comes. Ready? And go.

[00:00:26] Caroline: Welcome to Growing Steady, the show where we help online creators like you build a calm business, one that's predictable, profitable, and peaceful. We're your hosts, Jason and Caroline Zook, and we run Wandering Aimfully, an unboring business coaching program and Teachery, an online course platform for designers. Join us each week as we help you reach your business goals without sacrificing your well being in the process. Slow and steady is the way we do things around here, baby.

[00:00:55] Jason: All right, cinnamon rollers, that's you. Let's get into the show.

[00:01:03] Caroline: That was the new intro. Did you like it?

[00:01:05] Jason: Wow. Wow.

[00:01:06] Caroline: I know change is hard. It's going to take a little getting used to, but it's a new era. Growing Steady. We're in this together. Let's do it.

[00:01:13] Jason: All right. So along with this new name, intro, everything is so new.

[00:01:18] Caroline: So new.

[00:01:18] Jason: We have another new thing, which is we now have the ability for you to send in voice memos.

[00:01:23] Caroline: What?

[00:01:24] Jason: If you want to ask us questions, if you have thoughts, if we're ever telling you to share something with us, we now have a place that's easy to do that. So in the description of every episode moving forward, there will be a link to this podcast page specifically, and in the bottom right when you're viewing that page, there's a little microphone you can click. And we would love for you to do that on this very first new era episode here of Growing Steady and submit a question to us around the topic of the next episode we are going to record. Maybe it's two episodes from now, but it's around lifetime pricing. So the question is, what do you want to know about how we've made $1.5 million using a lifetime pricing model for our group coaching program.

[00:02:05] Caroline: If you have questions about lifetime pricing, or you're like, what even is lifetime pricing? Or you've seen it, and maybe you want to know what our thoughts are about, whether it be right for your business, again, head to the link in the description of this episode, click the microphone in the bottom right hand corner and leave us a little voice memo.

[00:02:20] Jason: Can't wait to hear your amazing, juicy, illustrious, wonderful voice. That's how they would describe their voice, right?

[00:02:28] Caroline: Absolutely.

[00:02:28] Jason: Okay, great. Let's get into the actual episode.

[00:02:30] Caroline: All right, so we wanted to dedicate an entire podcast episode, walking you through what prompted us to make this big change to the podcast, the name and everything. A lot of you, I know from writing in, kind of enjoy the behind the business episodes, where we walk you through some of our decision making. So we thought this would be a fun one.

[00:02:48] Jason: As the resident nerd of analytics and all things historical data on this show in our business.

[00:02:54] Caroline: As the Wandering Aimfully historian.

[00:02:56] Jason: I am the WAIM historian. Hello. Welcome. How are you? Let's go over some show history here of this podcast. So, it started in September of 2018, was our very first podcast published.

[00:03:08] Caroline: We have been podcasting together, though, for like...

[00:03:10] Jason: Longer than that, yeah.

[00:03:11] Caroline: Years and years and years and years. But for this show.

[00:03:13] Jason: Excuse me, this is my show. Please calm down.

[00:03:16] Caroline: I'm just saying.

[00:03:17] Jason: And step aside.

[00:03:17] Caroline: If you're a historian.

[00:03:19] Jason: Step off the pedestal and step onto my level.

[00:03:22] Caroline: Take it away. Take it away.

[00:03:23] Jason: All right. So 26 episodes were recorded as Wandering Aimfully The Show. So over the course of six months, that was the first iteration of our show. That version of our show felt two years long to us.

[00:03:35] Caroline: When we both saw that it was six months of episodes, we were like, wait, what? Which just is a testament to the fact that when you're starting something, everything feels longer, everything feels harder. Everything, like time moves more slowly just because you're working out all the kinks.

[00:03:50] Jason: Yeah. So six months, 26 episodes, the majority of those were all video as well.

[00:03:55] Caroline: On our YouTube channel. So if you want to find that.

[00:03:57] Jason: We were...

[00:03:57] Caroline: In the catacombs.

[00:03:58] Jason: Pretty early on the video podcast train. Rich Roll was already doing it. But, like, come on. A ton of people doing it. After that, we transitioned to What Is It All For?

[00:04:06] Caroline: Yes.

[00:04:06] Jason: We took a one month break to gather our podcast horses, corral them together, and that show went on for 58 months, basically five years, 165 episodes. And honestly, if you would have asked me, I would have said three years, maybe four years. I did not think it was a full, basically, five years of that show.

[00:04:28] Caroline: Wild.

[00:04:28] Jason: Which is just kind of crazy. Overall, as the WAIM historian sharing more fun facts, 178,000 total downloads across the entire library of our podcast or all time.

[00:04:40] Caroline: Which, you know, downloads, though.

[00:04:42] Jason: Yeah. You never really know how many unique listeners that is. Podcast metrics are just terrible. So that's an average of 931 listens per episode or downloads per episode. So we do probably have more than 30 listeners. Just so you're all aware. Yeah. Just to kind of lay out the truth, we have accrued more than 30 listeners in six years.

[00:05:02] Caroline: But downloads aren't everything. So maybe we have 900 downloads per episode and 40 listeners. Do you think?

[00:05:09] Jason: Honestly, this is going to sound absolutely wild to people.

[00:05:12] Caroline: What?

[00:05:14] Jason: I think we have over 50.

[00:05:15] Caroline: Oh, my God.

[00:05:16] Jason: I think it's 51.

[00:05:17] Caroline: We have 51 listeners.

[00:05:18] Jason: Yeah. This is pretty crazy.

[00:05:20] Caroline: The growth, steady growth.

[00:05:22] Jason: Nice. But for those of you who are just listening to some of those numbers, and you're hearing whether that's impressive to you, not impressive to you, doesn't mean anything to you at all. I think the thing to always remind is that podcasts are just really not discovery channels when it comes to marketing.

[00:05:37] Caroline: I wrote down here, I am elated with those numbers, considering the fact that we don't promote the podcast anywhere. So the only place that you can find out about new episodes of our podcast is on our newsletter, which is a closed ecosystem to our existing kind of marketing audience. So the only growth of the podcast comes from when you all share the episodes.

[00:05:57] Jason: Pretty great.

[00:05:57] Caroline: Whether you share on social or you tell friends about it, or you post in groups that you're a part of, and we're very grateful for that. But again, we view this channel as an opportunity to form a relationship with you who are listening and to provide value and to share our thoughts and our ethos about the business world. We don't view it right now as a major growth channel, so that's just not the purpose of it.

[00:06:21] Jason: Yeah. And I think if you were asking us what would you do if you wanted to grow the podcast? The quick answer would be go back to YouTube videos and do the show as a YouTube show as well.

[00:06:31] Caroline: Probably pay someone to clip them into shorts.

[00:06:33] Jason: Exactly. And that would definitely add some discoverability, but that juice is not worth that squeeze. So we don't do it. So we're just going to continue on.

[00:06:41] Caroline: Not at this moment.

[00:06:42] Jason: The fun thing that we're going to do is have a new intro, have new art, have some new music.

[00:06:45] Caroline: Yes. Okay, so thank you to our historian. Thank you so much.

[00:06:48] Jason: Great day, cinnamon rollers.

[00:06:48] Caroline: All right.

[00:06:48] Jason: He knows what's up.

[00:06:55] Caroline: Yeah. Father time there is just bringing us the history. But you might be wondering. Okay, so what prompted this change? Where did it all begin? Why now? And it really started with a decision that we made to rebrand our newsletter. That's where this all began. And so let me walk you through that decision really fast. So we both had conversations at the end of last year, realizing that our newsletter is the number one marketing vehicle for our business. It is how we form relationships. It's how we build trust, and then people join our program. And that's literally the revenue generating machine for the business. And so we thought to ourselves, this is the thing we pour the most effort in, aside from the podcast, is the newsletter. And we've sent a weekly newsletter for God knows how many years now. And so we thought, what are we doing already that we could just be getting more out of? And part of that was realizing, first of all, advice we always give to people inside our program is to really brand your newsletter. It makes it easier to talk about. It makes it feel like more of a thing when people are compelled to join it. But the funny part is that we had taken that advice, our own advice, and branded our newsletter. But we had just branded it as Wandering Weekly. The same name, literally, from the day we launched Wandering Aimfully.

[00:08:14] Jason: That did not change, yeah.

[00:08:15] Caroline: Back in 2018. It hadn't changed. We just thought, okay, let's call it Wandering Weekly. We didn't put a lot of thought into it.

[00:08:21] Jason: Honestly, at that point, we were probably just so tired.

[00:08:24] Caroline: We were.

[00:08:24] Jason: From building Wandering Aimfully.

[00:08:25] Caroline: There were so many moving parts at the time. And so we just thought, let's give it a name and we'll come back to it. And we just never came back to it. Well, we're coming back to it.

[00:08:31] Jason: Here we are.

[00:08:32] Caroline: And so we really thought to ourselves, we want a name that is a lot more encompassing of the benefit that you get by following our content, the benefit that you get from subscribing to the newsletter. And so that was the journey that we went on to rebrand the newsletter and almost think of it like a paid offer. If someone was going to pay for this, what would we name it? What would the value proposition be for it? And I will share with you in a little bit how we came to the name of Growing Steady for that. But eventually, we were like, okay, now that we know we're going to rebrand the newsletter to Growing Steady, we were like, does it make sense to change the podcast as well? We briefly considered leaving the podcast name, kind of treating them separately. So that was a thought we had. We thought about changing What Is It All For? I should also say we weren't thrilled with the name What Is It All For? because we felt like we were outgrowing it in the sense that we didn't feel like it was super shareable. We didn't feel... It was like a little bit of a mouthful. It was great from the perspective of it encapsulated something that's very important to us and a differentiator that we feel like we occupy in the business space, which is not just growing for growth's sake, but asking yourself, What Is It All For? Why are you in this business in the first place? And that part we really liked about it. But certainly when you tell somebody, hey, do you subscribe to What Is It All For?, that doesn't come across right away.

[00:09:58] Jason: It's just not as simple, it's not as easy to understand. It is a question that we do obviously come back to all the time. And I think you all have heard us say that so many times in so many episodes, and we will continue to do that. But I think shifting the podcast to kind of the core focus of what we're trying to do, especially this year and the next couple of years, is to grow Teachery, our side project, steadily, but same with Wandering Aimfully, is to continue to grow that steadily. And so that really makes sense from our goal. And then it's also just to reinforce that goal for you all listening to say, well, we want you to do the same thing. And so I think it makes a lot of sense to have it actually be more of like a goal. Like the show name is a goal of a thing you're doing.

[00:10:37] Caroline: Right.

[00:10:37] Jason: As opposed to a reflective question that you're always asking, which is totally fine as well.

[00:10:41] Caroline: Yeah. And the cool part is that I do feel like the Growing Steady name, it encompasses both. Right. So just to. I'm going to skip down here in the notes, just letting my co host know that, so that he doesn't get confused.

[00:10:51] Jason: Okay, well, he can't see where you're typing or what you're doing, so it doesn't really matter. Just go ahead and I think I'll be okay.

[00:10:58] Caroline: So I did want to say part of this is being okay with the fact that messaging is an ever evolving process. Right? So there was a part of me that was like, oh, it's been five years, and we've changed the name three times. And we always talk about consistency. And you do want to have a branding through line in everything that you do. But here's part of the trick. The funny thing is it goes back to the idea of Wandering Aimfully. You have to be doing things and you have to be actively exploring things to then be able to refine them. Right? And so over the course of five years, we have only been able to hone our messaging and what benefit and value Wandering Aimfully brings to people by doing things. And so I'll kind of walk you through that process. So when we launched Wandering Aimfully and we came up with that name, which the podcast name was the same, it was this idea of experimentation plus intention. That was how we approached business, was always trying to experiment things, trying to explore, but then always doing it with an intention and, like a hypothesis in mind. And so that was sort of this ethos, right, but it wasn't really a benefit. Like, you tell someone that and they're like, that's cool, that that's your approach to business, but what do I get out of that? And so it became clear that it just wasn't value driven enough for people. And so, as I mentioned, that was when we transitioned into What Is It All For? So again, that's us trying to hone our messaging. What makes us different from other business podcasts? Okay, we want to talk about intention. We want to talk about living a good life. We want to talk about enough and all of these topics, which I think is why those of you listening listen to the show. But as I mentioned, it's just not shareable and it's a little bit nebulous. Right. And so over the past year or so, you might have noticed that our messaging has moved a lot to this idea of a calm business. And that was sort of our way of encompassing this idea of, yes, we want to grow, we still want to have goals, we still want to have financial goals. However, we want to do it in a way that also balances living a good life. We don't want it to feel chaotic. We don't want it to feel like hypergrowth. And so that was this idea of running a calm business. And so, frankly, we even thought about naming the podcast like the calm business podcast or something like that. But that just didn't do it for us. So you have to balance what is it you're trying to say? And is that clear? With also, what are you excited about? What gets you going? And that's what we were in search of with the new name for both the newsletter and the podcast.

[00:13:22] Jason: Fantastic. All right, so that's how we kind of decided that we were going to change the name. So where do you want to go from here on the next step of making that change?

[00:13:32] Caroline: Well, maybe it's a natural... in case people are interested in how we arrived at the name. I think people are typically, like WAIMers especially, are always interested in how we land on these names or what's a process that you go through in order to brainstorm.

[00:13:47] Jason: Go ahead.

[00:13:48] Caroline: So I wanted to walk people through that process in case they're interested. And if not, you can skip through this process.

[00:13:55] Jason: Hey, I am turning off the skip ahead button there. Boom. Turn it off.

[00:14:00] Caroline: Disabled.

[00:14:00] Jason: Can't do it in the podcast app. Honestly, I can't do that. Just don't skip. Listen.

[00:14:05] Caroline: Okay. So what I did was I went back and looked at my journal of when, as Jason can attest, at the beginning of this year. I was just walking around our house blurting out names for about three weeks.

[00:14:14] Jason: One of my favorite things. You'd be like, what about...?

[00:14:17] Caroline: Calm business?

[00:14:18] Jason: Business goes west? And I'd be like, no.

[00:14:22] Caroline: Don't love it.

[00:14:23] Jason: I had nothing to offer.

[00:14:24] Caroline: I'm not even kidding. That was just three weeks. So what I first did was I started with this question, what are we trying to say? What are we trying to say? What is the message that we would like to get across to the business world? And I established that there was, like, three different routes that we could go down. There was either we could go down the route of business as a tool to live a good life, which is something we talk about a lot. And this is this concept of working to live, not living to work that we talk about often in our stuff. So it's kind of like that path. The second path was running a calm business, like, how do you balance your growth goals while also not burning out? And then the third path was this, like, unboring, own your weird, do it differently, have fun type of thing.

[00:15:04] Jason: Really just names of my second book in different iterations.

[00:15:07] Caroline: Correct.

[00:15:07] Jason: Exactly.

[00:15:08] Caroline: And so I felt like those were all in the similar universe. But really, if there was one that I had to pick, that I wanted us to be known for, I think that's another question. What do you want to be known for? Right. And so ultimately, the one we came back to that I felt like we had the most to say was the calm business one, because I feel like the other could kind of fold into that. And I felt like that was the most value driven one of, why is someone going to listen to this? They want to know how to grow their business, but in a way that doesn't burn them out. Okay, so that is kind of clarifying piece number one. Then... but before I decided on which was the most important, I just wrote down a bunch of what I call trigger words for all of those. So it's just like, words that encompass those things, and they don't have to be clever or anything. You're just trying to give your brain, like, little nodes to attach to. Right. So I wrote down a list. I got some from my journal. It was like, balance, calm, peaceful, chill, happy, contentment, calmpreneur, space, well being, sustainable, unboring, creator. Those are just in my notebook. So I'm giving my brain stuff to chew on, and then I start making associations from there and they sort of start forming into more name driven things. Right. So I'm going to share all some bad ideas with you that I wrote down. I also love alliteration. So these were in my notebook, Creating Calm, Striving For Satisfied, Forward With Fun, Pursuing Peace, Balancing Better.

[00:16:23] Jason: These were what was getting thrown at me from across the house. She'd be like, hey. And I'd be in the middle of something like, hello. And she'd be like, Creating Calm? And then I would have to adjust my brain to be like, what's going on? Oh, this is a new name for our podcast newsletter.

[00:16:35] Caroline: How does it hit?

[00:16:36] Jason: I would turn my head, I go, Creating Calm. And I go, no, thank you. And then we would go back to...

[00:16:39] Caroline: Exactly. And so the most important thing here for you to know if you're naming anything is that bad ideas are the building blocks to good ideas.

[00:16:46] Jason: Of course.

[00:16:47] Caroline: So do not filter yourself. Get your journal out and write down everything you can think of or like in a doc or anything like that. And just the only way to get to the right idea is going through bad ideas. And so this point I was pretty much recognizing that I kept coming back to the calm business. So that's where I kind of said, okay, I'm going to choose that path. Again, now you're refining it in your brain right now. You're exploring, and then you're kind of refining. And so by this point, I've chosen calm business. And then I started kind of playing around with different formulas. So some more bad ideas I wrote down were The Long Game. It's like sustainability. Business That Breathes.

[00:17:25] Jason: I definitely remember getting that one thrown at me. And I was like, no, I don't think so.

[00:17:28] Caroline: Yeah, I went down a rabbit hole of, I really liked this idea of, like, juxtaposition or opposite. So I had Enormously Small, Ambitiously Calm.

[00:17:36] Jason: I did like Ambitiously Calm.

[00:17:37] Caroline: I liked Ambitiously Calm. And then I'm a clever girl.

[00:17:43] Jason: You are a clever gal.

[00:17:44] Caroline: I'm a clever gal. So I also was really interested in some type of, like a clever twist on a popular phrase or something. So I went down another rabbit hole of Business Unusual, Down To Business, Mind Your Business. I did like, Mind Your Business because it was like mindful business, but didn't really land. I also was looking for, I was deconstructing formulas of popular newsletters. And so one I saw was called Shelf Awareness, and it's a book newsletter. And I loved the pun.

[00:18:12] Jason: See, unfortunately, we couldn't use that for this podcast because if I was going to use that, it would be from my Ikea furniture podcast where I put together Ikea furniture. And I just described the process to you without you being able to see it. There's no video component.

[00:18:23] Caroline: It's just a different shelf awareness. But I loved the pun and I was like, oh, it would be great if we could use a pun. So then I go down a rabbit hole thing about puns and grow and go is such an easy one because that's what we talk about, right? So I'm telling you this because again, I'm trying to lead with value of like, if you're trying to name something. Here's what I Googled, popular phrases with the word go, because if I can find like an idiom or a phrase that has the word go in it, I can use it to say grow. And that's a pun. And so I found myself on rhyme zone as boy have I used a lot of rhyme zone over the years. And so a couple, it's just a whole list of things with go in it. So then I just change it and I go, Get Up And Grow.

[00:19:03] Jason: Nice.

[00:19:03] Caroline: Or Growing Rogue. I really liked Growing Rogue.

[00:19:07] Jason: Yeah.

[00:19:07] Caroline: And then I saw Going Steady and so immediately I was like, ooh, Growing Steady. I love that because the growing is the value and the benefit. The steady is the ethos that we talk about. It's the calm business, it's what we believe in, which is just like sustainability above all else. And then I also liked it because going steady is like a long term relationship. You and I have been together for so long, and we've been in a long term relationship with our business. So then I go, oh, no, I think this is it. I think I found it. But then you always have to do the double check of...

[00:19:41] Jason: Does someone already own this?

[00:19:43] Caroline: Definitely is using this for business. Turns out, no, they're not. Copyright does not exist. And there is someone who has the domain, but they're using it for a plant blog.

[00:19:51] Jason: Which has not been updated in five years.

[00:19:53] Caroline: And it hasn't been updated in five years and it's not for business. So that is the story of how Growing Steady came to be. I hope you find it at least a little bit interesting. And if you are trying to name something, I hope it gave you a couple of ideas about how to brainstorm that process.

[00:20:07] Jason: So to recap those ideas. So it's to try and find some words, some specific words.

[00:20:12] Caroline: Well, first, start with what is it that you want to be known for? What is it that you're trying to say? Find some trigger words associated with that. Let your brain chew on that. Try to deconstruct names that you like, and try to come up with formulas that you can slot in your own trigger words. Try to find words that are loosely associated with your trigger words.

[00:20:30] Jason: When do you go to rhyme zone?

[00:20:31] Caroline: And then when you're really on, like, a pun hunt and you find a word.

[00:20:36] Jason: So go to pun hunt and then go to rhyme zone. And those are the two websites spent a lot of time on.

[00:20:40] Caroline: And that is how you name something.

[00:20:42] Jason: Fantastic.

[00:20:42] Caroline: Yeah.

[00:20:43] Jason: I do think that is very fun. I think that over the years, we had talked about, I mean, probably 100 different podcast names to change the podcast to. But I think this was the first time you did all of the thinking for all the different reasons.

[00:20:57] Caroline: Right.

[00:20:57] Jason: Whereas before, it was like, well, four years ago, we were on this idea of enough. And so it was like, well, what about enough? I remember we had a note with a bunch of different podcast names with just the word enough in them. But it wasn't this explored, it wasn't this thought through. And I think that's why Growing Steady really sticks for both of us. And I think why we got such a good reception when we sent out the first newsletter a couple of weeks ago is because you can just feel that it kind of has all of the parts thought through.

[00:21:23] Caroline: Exactly. And this is what I want to say about naming, too, is like, you kind of know it when it's the right fit.

[00:21:28] Jason: Well, and I did, because when I heard this one, it was the first one that I didn't tilt my head like a dog hearing a whistle noise. And I was like, it didn't do that for me. I stopped, and I just thought for a second, I was like, ooh, I kind of like that.

[00:21:40] Caroline: And the thing I want to get across also is we have built a successful business for five years without having a right fit name. Do you know what I'm saying? Our newsletter name was not great and memorable. Our podcast name was okay, but not anything that tied everything together. And guess what? We could have spent the next ten years without Growing Steady as a name for either of those things. So that's just a reminder. It's like, yes, these things, these incremental improvements can make you feel really good from a branding perspective. But they are not necessary in order to make and to earn a good living with your business. So don't put so much pressure on yourself to come up with the right thing.

[00:22:18] Jason: Also, Google's name for their company is Google.

[00:22:19] Caroline: It's Google.

[00:22:20] Jason: It's a made up word.

[00:22:21] Caroline: It's okay.

[00:22:22] Jason: It doesn't matter. Okay. So once we had the name, then we got onto some of the more fun stuff.

[00:22:27] Caroline: Fun stuff.

[00:22:28] Jason: I think the naming part was fun, but it does go on for a little while, so you kind of lose the fun. You can only spend so much time on pun hunt and rhyme zone. So then we had the logo. So how many little logo explorations do you think you did?

[00:22:39] Caroline: You know pun hunt is a thing I made up, right?

[00:22:40] Jason: Yes, 100%.

[00:22:43] Caroline: You're repeating it like it's a thing. And again, this is when you say things so seriously that I think you think they're real.

[00:22:48] Jason: It's okay, babe. It's okay. You'll catch up here. This is our 14th year together but one of these years...

[00:22:55] Caroline: You'll catch up to punhunt.com.

[00:22:57] Jason: How many iterations of the Growing Steady logo, which everyone can see if they go to our podcast page or if you go to our newsletter page. Both linked in the description of the episode.

[00:23:08] Caroline: Yeah, I didn't spend...

[00:23:09] Jason: Or in the art. You've already seen in the art.

[00:23:09] Caroline: I didn't spend a ton of time concepting once I kind of had... that part I didn't want to spend too much time on. But, yeah, these tiny variations, there was like an entire document full of choosing the right font. We wanted it to be, like, fun and retro, but still blend in with our other stuff.

[00:23:25] Jason: And also, like, the arrow.

[00:23:27] Caroline: The arrow.

[00:23:28] Jason: Where did the arrow come from? Where did the arrow go? How far up or down did it go?

[00:23:32] Caroline: Lots of iterations on the arrow. And then Jason, I had this idea of... I kind of had the whole thing minus the turtle.

[00:23:40] Jason: Yeah.

[00:23:40] Caroline: And then I just was like, I feel like it would be cute to have this little turtle.

[00:23:45] Jason: Growing Steady.

[00:23:47] Caroline: Because this idea of, like, slow and steady. And then Jason fell in love with the turtle and I couldn't remove it. It doesn't fit right. And you're like, no, absolutely not. The turtle stays. I was like, okay.

[00:23:54] Jason: Yeah. And then the funky retro font and then really just using our brand colors that we've know the whole time, basically.

[00:24:00] Caroline: So that was really fun. And so the question is sort of what is changing and what's staying the same about the podcast?

[00:24:07] Jason: Well, hold on. We're still talking about we have the name...

[00:24:09] Caroline: Okay.

[00:24:10] Jason: So we created the art. So for the intro, music and the voiceover.

[00:24:14] Caroline: Yes.

[00:24:15] Jason: We did not hire someone on Upwork or Fiverr. We hired you and you went through and basically just picked six different songs, and then you recorded a little voiceover of just a slightly different paragraph of text, which you all heard at the beginning of this episode.

[00:24:28] Caroline: I find that it's really hard to... visualize is the wrong word because it's whatever the auditory version of visualize is. It's hard to picture what something's going to sound like with a voiceover and a song in the beginning of a podcast episode if you don't hear those two things together.

[00:24:44] Jason: Totally.

[00:24:44] Caroline: So I sort of used a video editing app called Video Leap on my phone to record my own voiceover and then dub it over some royalty free music that we got from a subscription that we have to MusicBed. I picked six songs, and then I played them for Jason, and we kind of went through what our favorite was.

[00:25:02] Jason: Yeah, this tends to be our process where it's like, you do 97% of the creative work, and then I just come in at the end, and it's literally just like how I feel adds 3%, which is not much, but it's something.

[00:25:16] Caroline: But you do need a decision maker.

[00:25:18] Jason: You do.

[00:25:18] Caroline: And sometimes when you're the creator and you're so close...

[00:25:21] Jason: You're too close to it.

[00:25:22] Caroline: You're like, I actually can't see this objectively. So you need both.

[00:25:25] Jason: Yeah. And I think that's also where it's helpful to have someone else that you're working with on this. So if you're someone listening to this and you're thinking about rebranding your podcast or starting a podcast and creating art and creating music, get a couple of iterations, send them to a couple of friends, biz buddies, whatever it is, and see which one stands out to them, because you might be too close to it and you might just pick maybe the first one that you chose. But there could be a better option if you just got a little bit of feedback.

[00:25:49] Caroline: Yeah. And again, change is hard. And I honestly, to be perfectly honest, I really liked our old music, and I would have just kept it, but I think embracing change is good. And I wanted to kind of mark the new era with a new tone, a new auditory tone.

[00:26:09] Jason: Yeah, sure. That goes well.

[00:26:11] Caroline: And so, yeah, that's part of it. It's just kind of embracing novelty.

[00:26:15] Jason: Honestly, I think that there is something to be said for, you know, we were just talking about this with friends who are thinking about, you know, making a big move. And we made the big move here to Portugal a year ago, a year plus. And I do think there's just something about, like, after a certain amount of time of doing things the same way, like, our brains just get tired of it and they get used to it and they don't get excited about it anymore. And even if it kind of feels like, oh, this feels good. We can both agree that we have such a renewed energy for writing our newsletter. For now, recording this podcast with a new name, with the new logo, with the new music, with the new intro, with the new format of the newsletter. All of it feels new and fresh and exciting. The key is, don't do that too many times in the beginning.

[00:26:54] Caroline: Exactly.

[00:26:55] Jason: You have to pick something and move forward. And it's like six months. Give yourself six months, then you can change it. Give yourself five years after that, then you can change it again. But it can't just be like every month you're changing something, or even every year you're changing all over everything because I think it just doesn't give people enough time for it to stick and to resonate with them.

[00:27:14] Caroline: Exactly.

[00:27:16] Jason: Okay, so with Growing Steady, the podcast, what is changing? What is staying the same here, Carol?

[00:27:23] Caroline: Nothing really is changing. I mean, we already told you all the stuff changing, just the name, the art, the intro. But as far as the meat of the podcast and what we're talking about, it's going to be mostly the same things that you've been hearing us talk about. It's going to be how we are growing steadily with both of our two businesses Wandering Aimfully and Teachery. And really all of it revolves around these three pillars of predictable, meaning, your processes, your planning, like making sure you're not running around feeling lost and overwhelmed all the time. So that's your first P. Predictable. Profitable, because, yes, financial freedom is something that we're all aiming for in order to live a good life. And so what are the tactics that are moving that forward for you? Sales, revenue, all of those things. And then finally, peaceful. How are you incorporating balance into how you pursue your goals and being mindful of not sacrificing your values in pursuit of growth?

[00:28:19] Jason: Yeah. And some of you heard at the end of last year, we played around with this concept called the Calm Business Confidential, where we would go through and we would find other businesses to bring to each other and to you and share their story, what they did, some nuggets we pulled out, and that was a fun experiment, but being honest, it was just too much extra work for the podcast.

[00:28:39] Caroline: We loved it, truly and honestly, I think we will revisit the idea in the future, for sure. But these are some of those hard decisions where you just have to take a hard look at the amount of input that you're putting into something and knowing that our primary goal right now is to grow Teachery. It didn't make sense for us to be spending that time on the research it required.

[00:28:58] Jason: It doesn't sound like a lot of time, but even the extra, like two to 3 hours a week of effort, it was just too much. It was like, okay, this isn't worth it because...

[00:29:05] Caroline: And you don't want to phone it in, right? You're telling someone's story, you're introducing someone to your audience. You do not want to do that in a cursory and haphazard way. And so, yeah, it's just to do it right. It just too much.

[00:29:17] Jason: And I think the other thing too, for us is the fact that we are spending so much time and energy on Teachery this year. It's our own Calm Business Confidential over the course of the entire year that we're telling. So I think it would be different if we were only focusing maybe on WAIM because that business feels a lot more dialed in and predictable. Teachery is not that. So it gives us a lot of exciting and new things to talk about, experiments that will succeed, that will fail, ideas that we will chase down, and we'll let you know how they go. So that will continue. And then the last item is that we have kind of a new home for our pod cage. Podcast?

[00:29:58] Caroline: You wanted to say podcast.

[00:29:59] Jason: And I wanted to say...

[00:30:00] Caroline: Podpage.

[00:30:01] Jason: Podpage. And I turned it into podcage.

[00:30:03] Caroline: Okay, head on over to our podcage.

[00:30:05] Jason: First go to punhunt.com. Then go over to podcage.com. And then go to wanderingaimfully.com/join and join.

[00:30:12] Caroline: Don't go to podcage. I don't know what you'll find.

[00:30:13] Jason: I don't know what you'll find there. Podpage. So shout out to Jay Clouse, who runs the podcast Creator Science. And about a year ago, I was on his podcast website reading something in the show notes, as you do, like once every 43 episodes. And I was looking for it, and I was like, oh, this looks nice. And I scrolled down to the bottom. I was like, this is built with Podpage. And it's like, oh, what is this? I remember I signed up, I plugged our show URL into it. It immediately created all the pages for our episodes, pulled in our art, and we had this nice website, and then it just kind of like sat there and we were like, well, we don't really have time to think about this or work on this, so let's not do anything with it.

[00:30:47] Caroline: Yeah. So just to close the loop there, Podpage is a tool that allows you to create basically a website for your podcast using your RSS feed.

[00:30:56] Jason: Exactly.

[00:30:57] Caroline: And so you just plug in your show, as Jason said, and it will give you episode pages, and you can customize certain things of how you want the layout, what episodes you want to be featured, et cetera. And it's just an easy way to do that. So we were doing that before manually on our side.

[00:31:14] Jason: But only for the past year.

[00:31:15] Caroline: For the past year, we had been creating individual articles for every podcast episode so that you could go read some show notes. You create a little bit of SEO for the podcast, which didn't really amount to much.

[00:31:26] Jason: No. Which was just an experiment. I think that for the first four years of this podcast, we essentially just said, like, listen, don't think a podcast is really good for SEO in any shape or form. Haven't really seen it do that for any other company, so let's not do it. And then after four years, we're like, okay, well, let's try it because it's an easy, low hanging fruit thing just to test that assumption because then we started to see some shows do have some episodes that do well and end up in search. But we tried it for a year. We spent money having the articles spun up, the transcripts done, like all those things. It just didn't do anything for us. And it was a lot of extra work for no reward whatsoever.

[00:32:02] Caroline: Yeah. And it did give us a place to put the transcripts, which we do believe that's important. So this felt like a new, easier way to have those pages exist. Also, they're searchable, so you can search our episodes and to really have that exist as a better experience than whatever podcast player you're listening to this in. And again, it comes with fun features like the voice memo kind of feature we mentioned at the top of the episode.

[00:32:28] Jason: I will also mention if you're a new podcast creator or if you're not too far in your journey and you're thinking like, do I need something like this? Maybe you use what we use to host our podcast, which is Simplecast, which we will be continuing to use because that's just the host. That's where you upload the files, and that's what goes through to Apple and to Spotify. But you may already have a built in feature. Like Simplecast has a built in website that we've been using for the past couple months just as a transition period. It's totally fine.

[00:32:55] Caroline: It honestly is very similar. The only difference is some of the customization features.

[00:33:00] Jason: Customization and then also being able to tack in an easy email subscribe box.

[00:33:05] Caroline: Right.

[00:33:05] Jason: So that your show, you can always point people to it and then you can convert show listeners to email subscribers, which again, that's probably not happening much at all. But we just figured in the grand scheme of things because we've been doing this show for now six years. Let's go ahead and go for the Podpage version version because we do want that one extra little thing. But if you're listening to this, you might not need it. It might be overkill for you, it might be too much, but also it might be a tool that you've been looking for to say, hey, this is a lot easier and let me go ahead and do this.

[00:33:31] Caroline: Great.

[00:33:32] Jason: All right.

[00:33:32] Caroline: So that basically walks you through just all the things that we've been thinking about. And a lot of this, as I said, came out of our planning discussions at the end of last year, looking at things we were already doing and go what can we optimize? Not just from a processes perspective, but also just from a messaging and a branding perspective. And as I mentioned at the beginning of the episode, it is an ever evolving process. So you may not be in the spot where you need to change anything, but I think whenever you feel like you've hit a new kind of era of your business where you feel like your message could be stronger, you have more clarity around the value you offer people. It's a good idea to just evaluate how are all of my different entities and my brand ecosystem doing at communicating that message. And I think Growing Steady is the next iteration of that. That encapsulates a lot of the things that we like to talk about and could last us for the next five years.

[00:34:25] Jason: For sure. All right, two action items here to finish out. Number one, if you like the idea of Growing Steady and you want to get it in your inbox every week, you can go to wanderingaimfully.com/newsletter and sign up for the Growing Steady newsletter that will also remind you that we have new podcast episodes. And second thing, because we're using Podpage, head over to the link in the description of this show for the little voice memo to be able to leave us a question about an upcoming episode about our lifetime pricing model. What do you want to know about how we've made $1.5 million using lifetime pricing for our group coaching program? So what question do you have? What could we answer for you in that episode? We'll pluck out a couple of fun ones that people leave as voice memos. I will edit them into the episode. It will be a wonderful experience for all of us. It will probably go perfectly with no issues whatsoever, but it'll be fun. So we'll try that out. That'll be the first episode we do that and we'll see how it goes.

[00:35:19] Caroline: That's it.

[00:35:19] Jason: Okay.

[00:35:20] Caroline: Thanks for listening and welcome to the new era.

[00:35:23] Jason: Growing Steady.

[00:35:24] Caroline: Growing Steady.

[00:35:24] Jason: Turtle up.

[00:35:25] Caroline: Turtle up.

[00:35:26] Jason: Bye.