253 - 10 most common questions we get asked

[00:00:05] 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. 

[00:00:29] Jason: All right, cinnamon rollers, that's you. Let's get into the show. And hello friends, it is just Jason behind the microphone. If you didn't listen to the episode right before this one, then we had an unfortunate death in the family on Caroline's side and she is just not feeling up to recording podcast episodes, which we can all totally understand. And I am here to just carry the podcasting torch myself and I think I'm well equipped to do it.

[00:01:02] I've... I've had multiple podcasts before this one. I don't know if you knew that. I've been podcasting since like 2013, which is kind of crazy. I'm not like, you know, as far back as like the Super OGs, but man, it's a long time to be sitting behind a mic. Most of the time, I actually was standing behind a mic because I was recording in a closet.

[00:01:17] Anyway, you don't care about those things. You clicked in here, but because maybe you're interested in WAIM Unlimited. You're on the fence. You know we have our final enrollment going on now. This episode is really going to be timely for that group of people. And if you're an existing WAIMer, maybe this is just going to be interesting because I am going to take 10 questions that come up the most often during our launches and I am going to answer those with some advice, maybe a personal story if there's something applicable, but then also a WAIM resource that you could take action on.

[00:01:48] So I think this is really good for folks who are on the fence about WAIM and they're not sure if it's going to help solve their problems to know exactly what resource they would jump into and what some quick advice would be. But then also for those of you who are existing WAIMers, if you're having this problem because there's so much goodness that you get within WAIM, you can maybe have this as a filter to go and decide what to do next, what resource to get into next, coaching session, tool, etc to look at using. 

[00:02:14] So let me not waste any time. Let me jump into these questions. And these are not in any real particular order, but I'm going to start with the first one that kind of makes the most sense to me because I think it's the one that probably comes up just the absolute most often when people are getting ready to join.

[00:02:34] So this question is, how do I get clarity on what I am building and who it is for? And I think this is one of the hardest questions to answer in business because unless you have an insanely specific niche, like let's just say that you, you know, you develop courses for yoga instructors or even be more specific, you are a yoga instructor and you create at home yoga courses.

[00:03:04] Like that's what you build. That is so specific. It is, it is really narrowed in. But then you'd go one layer deeper and you go, yeah, but you know, for who? Like, there's gotta be a common person, a common customer. Is it, is it always like stay at home moms or stay at home dads? Is it people who work nine to five jobs and they want to do yoga, but they don't have time to go to studios, so they're going to do online courses?

[00:03:27] Is it for older people, like, you target your yoga at, you know, folks who are going to be at home more often, they're not going to want to go to studios. So you can see how like, yes, the niche of what you're creating in makes sense. But then like, the clarity of who it is for is even a little bit more difficult.

[00:03:44] And I think for us, like, we, we come back to this all the time in WAIM. This is probably the biggest mistake we made in WAIM the entire time we've been running it is that it is not specific enough to who it solves a problem for that it does make our marketing, promotion, copywriting, like all of that job harder because we don't speak to a specific audience.

[00:04:07] And that's not to say that you absolutely have to, but I think if we're just giving you very straightforward advice, if you want to succeed quicker in business, you need to know exactly who you're talking to and you need a very specific audience that you're speaking to. If you can take a little bit more time and you maybe have like a longer time horizon to grow your business, which is a little bit of kind of what we did with WAIM, then it's okay, you can have a broader audience, that's totally fine.

[00:04:31] But I think this question of like getting clarity and knowing exactly who your business is for is absolutely a difficult question to answer. But we do have a couple WAIM resources that help. So I think number one, our Offers That Sell Spotlight session is really, really good at having you hone in on what your offer is, who the audience is that it's for, and then doing a little bit of what we call offer math to know if maybe you're between a couple different offers, which one is going to be the most compelling.

[00:05:00] And then I really think the other resource is our Calm Biz Kickstart roadmap. This is a six month roadmap. It doesn't have to be done over the course of six months, but we space it out that way where you can go through, I believe it's 12 WAIM coaching sessions done in sequential order that help you figure out exactly what you're building, getting that thing built, knowing who it's for, getting your content plan in place and then actually like launching it and getting it out the door.

[00:05:25] So this, how do I get clarity and what I'm building and who it's for? This is the question that we get the most often. And I think that hopefully that is some advice that helps. Okay, let's go to the second question that is coming in most often, which is how do I increase sales without feeling pushy? And I, I don't, I don't know if there is a way, if you are inherently a person when you think of selling that you get the ick from it.

[00:05:53] Like it just feels gross to you. It is, it's very hard for me to say that you are ever going to fully overcome that. I think you are always going to feel a tinge of discomfort when you are promoting whatever it is that you're selling. And I know for me the times when I have felt the most resistance to selling are the times when I've been selling things that I'm like not that super excited about.

[00:06:19] So very quick like story here to throw a couple stories in. When I was selling my how to get sponsorships course, this is, like, way back in 2014, 2015, I found it so frictionful to sell that course because I really didn't want to teach people how to get sponsorships. I just, I was so burnt out on that topic.

[00:06:40] I had been doing it for years in other business ventures and yes, I knew so much about it and I had a system that worked so well. I had gotten over like 1600 paying sponsors in a five year span. That is... There is knowledge there to be shared. But I really disliked talking about it and promoting it. And it made selling it like pulling teeth.

[00:07:02] Then transition to when I had my idea for BuyMyFuture, which was in 2015, this was kind of like the very first iteration of the selling all of our stuff in one package. I was so excited to talk to anybody who was interested about that idea. I got on, I think it was like 40 Skype calls before the idea was finished.

[00:07:23] And I just talked to people about it. I would never have done that with the sponsorships course. Never. I would. I would have been like, no, you know, sorry, my Skype doesn't work. I don't know how to install it again. It's broken. I would just not have done it. Whereas I was willing to talk to anybody about the BuyMyFuture idea because I just loved working on it.

[00:07:41] I thought it was so fun. And so I think for you, if, if A, sales feels really frictionful because it just feels frictionful for you, that's just a thing you're gonna have to get a little bit better at through reps and just doing more selling, because doing more selling makes selling easier. But then B, I think it's really about having a strong heart to heart of like, am I selling a thing that I really am excited about selling, or am I maybe just kind of like following a blueprint of somebody who sold something like this and they've done really well.

[00:08:13] And I am just jumping on this trend because it's kind of what I want to do. And I think if you're in that second camp, it's always going to be really hard. And I don't know that there's a perfect solution for you. I will tell you that a resource that can really help is we have a sales and promotion spotlight coaching session, which is really good for helping you get over that.

[00:08:34] But then even better is we have a selling mindsets coaching session, which I think is really, really helpful to get over the limiting beliefs of selling, to maybe change your way of thinking about selling and kind of creating a new story for yourself in your head. So that is, how do I increase my sales without feeling pushy?

[00:08:53] Let's get into a question that has probably been the most common recent question. And this shouldn't be surprising because it's what we shifted a lot of our content to over the past year. But that is, how do I launch something without overcomplicating the process? And I think those of you who've been listening to our podcast for a while, you will know the answer to this in a resource, which is our Calm Launch Formula program.

[00:09:15] And the 21 AI prompts that come with that that can help get your launch completely planned in a matter of like two hours or less, which is pretty wild. That's like all of your sales emails, your sales copy, your entire promotion plan, your schedule, your pre marketing, all of your positioning, just every single thing about your launch is done in two hours using AI prompts, which is crazy, but launching something without over complicating the process. The very simple answer here is, and I know this is not the answer that people want to hear, but it is, the truth is you have to start planning earlier. You just, you just do. And I know from our experience, I think we had, last I looked, 200 people who filled out the survey starting the Calm Launch Formula program and the overarching, I think it was like 70% of people say that they start planning their launch with less than one month before their launch.

[00:10:05] And that just, it just really is not enough time because there are a couple realities that, that just take place. Number one, this might not be your full time thing, so you're working on it kind of inside hours and you just don't have enough hours to do all the things. That's number one. Number two, even if this is your full time thing and you're preparing a launch, there's just a lot to do and there's a lot of things you have to get going.

[00:10:27] Plus you're also managing your full time work so you don't have a full time schedule to plan your launch. And then number three, and this is something that like literally we're dealing with at this very moment that I'm grateful that we do our launches so far in advance and plan them is stuff happens in your life, shit hits the fan, you get thrown a curve ball, you just, there's something that you cannot kind of do anything about.

[00:10:50] And if you don't have enough time built into the like before time of your launch planning phase, more than one month, you are going to get derailed and then all of a sudden your launch is going to become stressful. And we have just seen this so many times in our own launches. The, the longer we start ahead of time, the calmer the launch always is and the more time we have to do everything in the launch when it actually happens.

[00:11:13] So I would just say my biggest piece of advice for how do you launch something without over complicating the process. Start at a minimum, at a minimum two months ahead of time. If you can do three months, that is absolutely the kind of sweet spot that we have found. And then I really think that kind of the next thing would just be like, work off of someone's launch template or someone's launch formula if you've never launched before.

[00:11:36] Because if you're going to try and figure it all out yourself, that's going to be a bundle of stress that you can. You could do. Obviously, using AI nowadays, you can ask a lot of questions there. But if you're a WAIMer and you, you know, have access to our Calm Launch Formula, we do all the work for you. We have those AI prompts, and then you don't even have to use the AI prompts.

[00:11:53] You can just use all of the workbook prompts that are in there that you can just fill out yourself. And then also, as of recording this, our next coaching session coming up is managing your launch with Notion. And we're going to have a full launch template that you can duplicate every time you have a launch and use.

[00:12:08] It's the same template we have used for now 14 WAIM launches, probably not all 14, but like 10 of them, we've had the same template. So those are some resources. And that answers the question of how do I launch something without overcomplicating the process? Okay, next question that comes up quite a bit is how do I figure out which of my many ideas to focus on?

[00:12:30] And I think that this is just kind of the plight of the curious entrepreneur, if you will. This is the person, if you're like us, who you have a lot of ideas, you have a lot of things you want to do, and you're just not sure which is the right one to chase down. And this is especially difficult, I think, if you have two ideas, if you have two things that you are kind of always wrestling between.

[00:12:52] And let's just give two concrete examples. So let's say that you love Canva and you use Canva all the time, and you want to teach people how to use Canva. Like, you know all these tips and tricks and things. So you're going to make a Canva course. But let's also say that you have this Notion template that you always use to manage your assets that you create in Canva, because we all know Canva's kind of asset management is kind of a mess.

[00:13:15] So you have this template and you kind of use it for different things, like your Instagram reels, you export all of your Canva assets and you put them in there. These are two not amazing ideas, but I think it paints the picture. And you're not sure should you sell the Canva course or should you sell the Notion templates?

[00:13:30] And I think that those, those types of decisions when you're very close between two offer ideas. My personal advice, and this is advice I got so many years ago. I mean like, we're talking like 2010 advice was like, don't change, don't chase $20 offers. And I'm not saying that you can't build a great business on $20 offers, but I think the majority of people listening to this podcast, you don't have an audience of a million people.

[00:13:57] So to sell a $20 offer and have it be profitable, you need absolute scale. You need a huge audience. And the majority of you don't have that. Just like we don't have that. So it's why we don't sell and haven't sold a $20 offer in a very long time because it's just too difficult to make the money work and have a profitable business.

[00:14:16] So I would choose in that scenario the higher priced offer that people are more willing to spend money on. And I would go with that. That would be the decision making kind of rubric for me. Now, if money is maybe not the most important thing for you, then I would go with like, what's the thing you're most energized about?

[00:14:32] Like, are you really excited about having that Canva course and teaching people Canva, or are you really excited about selling those templates because you just know how much of a game changer those templates are? Then I would go that route. But I do think the revenue scalability is the more helpful deciding factor when you are between two business ideas.

[00:14:51] And I will bring up the offers that sell spotlight session. This is again the session that I would recommend for this because we have the offer math exercise in it and we also really talk about this idea of like, you know, the different ways that you make money with an offer and how many customers you need to purchase an offer to have it actually be worthwhile.

[00:15:11] So I think that's a good one. Okay, let me take a sip of water here and then we'll get to the fifth question, which means we are already at the halfway mark of these questions. When you don't have a co host and you're just going, I mean, I could edit and I could stop, but like, who wants to do that? Let's just keep going.

[00:15:26] Okay, number five here. How do I find the time to grow my business when I'm already stretched thin? And I know for a lot of you listening to this, if you're on the fence about joining WAIM, you're in a position that we see fairly often, which is you're either working for somebody else, like another kind of like solopreneur or, you know, small business, or you're working a 9 to 5 job and you want to get into working for yourself.

[00:15:49] And those, both of those two kind of groups of people fit into the bucket of you only have side hustle hours. And I think that that is just a reality that we see often. And then there's the other person who is running their full time business that they work for themselves, but they have a limited capacity, they deal with a chronic illness, they have a couple of kids running around, they just don't have the capacity to work every single day.

[00:16:13] Maybe they're managing the household as well. And so again, it's kind of the same problem, which is like, I just don't have that many hours. And I think that the, that the story here, the answer here is when we traveled full time in 2022. And I know that's an extremely privileged story to be able to share as a comparison because it's not like we were just at a 9 to 5 job we hated and only had 2 hours to work a day.

[00:16:36] We were gallivanting around Europe and we only had two hours to work a day. But it's still the same result, which is we only had two hours to work per day. The answer here that really saved us in being able to continue to run two businesses and still have a very profitable year is that we had really good systems and processes in place to get all of the things done that we needed to get done that were the most important things. And you also really start to find out like in, at the end of 2021, when we were still at our house and we were still working and we still had eight hour work days in front of us, it's easy to fill those hours.

[00:17:13] It's the Parkinson's law. It's like when you have the time to do a task, the time expands to that task. So if you have four hours blocked off on your calendar for work today, one task could likely take you four hours. But when you're traveling full time or when you're, you know, only working one hour a night, or when you're, you know, you get a one hour to go to the coffee shop and you get a break from, you know, you know, taking care of your kids, then you have one hour and you have to fit the task into that time.

[00:17:37] And so I think for us, when we were traveling full time, the thing that saved us was at the end of 2021, we really started to make better processes. And that was a lot of, like, Notion templates. That was a lot of like what you would call kind of like SOPs. And, and these are just documents that basically like walk you through your own systems and processes so that you can repeat a task very quickly.

[00:18:00] Or if you do have someone who's helping you do things, you can outsource it to them. I think just the generic advice of create better systems and processes is not fantastic. So the actual practical, actionable thing that I would tell you to do is write down what the let's call it three most impactful things you do for your business right now are.

[00:18:22] And let's identify how you can create systems and processes for that. So quick examples here. You know that your, your entire traffic source comes from recording YouTube videos and posting YouTube video every week. Let's just say that's your, like, main way of people finding you on the Internet. That's your content creation vehicle.

[00:18:40] That's your traffic generation vehicle. Okay. You know that it takes you, let's just call it five total hours to make one YouTube video per week. So that is a hard and fast, like, you really can't get that any faster. Okay, that's one thing you have to do. The second thing you have to do is you write your weekly email newsletter.

[00:18:56] Um, and you know that your newsletter drives like all the sales of whatever your product is that you sell. And so that takes you, let's call it two hours per week. And then let's say the third thing is kind of just like answering like, you know, DMs, maybe posting a little bit on Instagram or something like that.

[00:19:12] And then, you know, customer emails are just like, you know, reaching out to customers and chatting with them. So it's kind of like customer interaction, if you will. And let's say that's two hours. So in the grand scheme of things, the hard and fast, like you can't get it done any faster time is nine hours of work per week for your business.

[00:19:29] Now granted, I know that most of you listening to this are not just working nine hours per week. Just like we're not working nine hours per week. But when we were traveling in 2022, that was all we could work for many weeks. And those were basically the things that we did every single week, is we recorded a YouTube video, we sent out an email newsletter, and we interacted with our customers in some capacity.

[00:19:49] Whether it was through email or DMs or what have you. Customer support inbox for Teachery. Then what you do is you, you put non negotiable time on the calendar to do those things. So the first thing you do is you just, you carve out that time and it just has to be time that can't be replaced by anything else.

[00:20:08] And I do think this should always come after putting your life stuff on your calendar first. We talked about this a long time ago in this idea of like working to live was a phrase that we came up with in like 2016. And, and it was just the idea of like you prioritize your life first. So you put your kids appointments, you put your own needs and things going to the grocery store.

[00:20:26] Like you block all this stuff off on the calendar. So it really shows you, like, what's the actual time slots that I have left? Then you block in the hours for your YouTube video, then you block in the hours for your newsletter. And then the one step further from there, and this is what we found when we were traveling in 2022 was, oh, we actually can get a lot of these things done faster than we think.

[00:20:47] It's just we have allowed them to take a little bit longer. So like, what if we reduced a little bit of the editing, you know, that we put into a video, like just make it a little bit less edited. That 30 minutes that you save may not seem like much, but it is actually helpful in the grand scheme of every single week you're saving 30 minutes.

[00:21:03] And so every month you're saving two hours of time. That, that's helpful for those of us who are very strapped for time in certain areas of our life. So you can see how that would then repeat for the other tasks. And I think that this is just something that it's easy to think you don't have the time, but it's more important to evaluate everything that you actually need to be doing the most important things you need to do, which is generating traffic, converting that traffic to potential, like, you know, leads is the best way to describe.

[00:21:31] I don't like calling potential customers leads, but like that's the phrase everyone understands. And then how are you converting those people to customers and then interacting with them? Like those are the most important things that you need to be focusing on your business. And then if you want a resource in WAIM, if you're listening to this and you're like, hey, I would love some help with this, two resources come to mind.

[00:21:51] Number one is our productivity and processes coaching session because we break down exactly how we created some of these productivity and processes that worked for us. And then number two, we have the 90 day content plan coaching session, which basically you take anything you're working on and it breaks it down into like a 90 day plan.

[00:22:09] And then you can really see, like, how do I fit that plan into my life? So I think those are two really good resources that would help answer the question, how do I find time to grow my business when I'm already stretched thin? Okay, next question here. We have five questions left. We just got to the halfway point.

[00:22:24] I'm going to try and go maybe a little bit faster because those first five, those are like the number one questions that we get. These next ones are, maybe we still get them, but they're not as popular. How do I stop feeling so overwhelmed with everything in my business? I think, first of all, as of recording this podcast episode, everyone is feeling overwhelmed.

[00:22:42] Like, we are in such a weird moment in our own lives where a death in the family has happened. There's a potential war about to break out, another war breaking out in, like, the Europe and Middle East area. And just like our launch of our onboarding coaching program feels so unimportant in the grand scheme of what everyone's thinking about, and it just, it feels weird to keep it going.

[00:23:04] But if we let that thought continue, then what are we supposed to do? Like, when do you wait? When do you, you know, kind of pause this for? Because there's never gonna always... There's never gonna be a perfect moment. There's always gonna be something that comes up. So. And then I think the other part of this is like the overwhelm of just, there's so much to do.

[00:23:23] There are so many tasks and things, and depending on where you are in your journey, if you're at the beginning, it feels like this kind of like, mountain of sand that you have to climb. And every time you take a step up the mountain, it doesn't feel like you're making any progress. It's just kind of, you're... you're slipping back down the bottom. And I think that even if you're a little bit further along with all the change that's happening kind of in the online world where the algorithms are all changing, they're valuing different things, we're seeing our reach drop across the board on all these platforms that have provided great free reach for a long time.

[00:23:54] And we're also just seeing all the proliferate... proliferation... I knew I was going to have trouble with that... of AI and everything that we're doing, it all does feel overwhelming in that respect too. And I think part of the way that we work through it is, A, we have each other. So I think that's a huge advantage that not a lot of people have is they don't have a business partner that lives in their house with them.

[00:24:16] And if you don't have that and it is hard to find someone like that shamelessly, that is where joining a community like WAIM can be really helpful because there's a community of people who are just like you, who are trying to accomplish the same things you are, who are going through the same overwhelming feelings that you are, and you now have a place that you can relate to other people.

[00:24:35] But I think the other part of that is if you're feeling overwhelmed by everything, there, ducking your head in the sand and kind of not dealing with it is... is obviously a way that if that's how you handle it, that is the way that you handle it. And I'm not here to tell you that's a bad way but I think also just trying to make like a list of what you can, what you need to do, and then prioritizing and finding what the most important things are and breaking that down into smaller chunks, those are the practical things that you can do.

[00:25:04] But there is no right answer here. I think when you're feeling overwhelmed, there's just everyone's looking for like, okay, what's the thing that's going to solve this? There is no thing. The thing is just keep showing up and keep moving forward and keep doing your best. And that's all you can do. The WAIM resource that we made exactly for this, because we were going through a couple of periods of our own overwhelm is a coaching session called Moving Through Overwhelm. And we give some specific tactics and advice in that coaching session, especially one that's how to avoid burnout before it happens. And it's like how to see the signs of burnout before they happen. And I think too often we all run into a period of burnout after a period of overwhelm.

[00:25:40] And you kind of, you don't necessarily always equate them as together, but a lot of times they are the two things that kind of go hand in hand. Okay, four more questions here. How do I show up consistently even when motivation feels low? And I think this, actually, this question hearkens back to kind of the first question of, if you're not really excited about the thing that you create, it's always going to feel much lower on your motivation scale to work on that thing.

[00:26:09] And I know for myself, like over the years I have worked on multiple projects and multiple different little applications and businesses and things. And the ones where I really found it hard to work on them are the ones where I just didn't really enjoy working on them. And that to me is where it's the same thing in like creating content.

[00:26:30] Like, oh, I want to post more on Instagram. I know I need to post more on Instagram. The algorithm wants reels. I need to be making these reels. But you hate doing that. Your motivation is always going to be like an all time low. It's always going to be so hard to fight that. So my counter to that would be, okay, great, so you don't like making Instagram reels content.

[00:26:50] It's always frictionful. Then we have to find something else. Like there has to be another content creation vehicle where people can find you, where there is built in distribution. How can that work for you? Okay, can you film YouTube videos? All right, if that feels just as frictionful, then don't do that.

[00:27:06] Can you post daily on LinkedIn about what you're doing? That might feel cringy, but like, maybe it's a little bit less because you're still putting yourself out there and creating consistent content. Can you get on Threads or can you get on X? Probably not on X. I mean, no one wants to be there anyway. But like, what are the other ways that you can get in front of people where the organic distribution is available to you?

[00:27:28] The things I wouldn't do is just go, well, all I'm going to do now is just send out email newsletters to my list and I'm just going to, you know, record a podcast because those two things are very like insular. No distribution models built into them and it really hamstrings your ability to grow your business.

[00:27:46] So if you're really feeling like you struggle consistently to show up when your motivation feels low, try to evaluate what the different things are that you're working on. Try to evaluate where you're spending your time and what you can change about where you are evaluating that. And I think that there's a couple coaching sessions that come to mind.

[00:28:05] I don't think there's anything that's absolutely perfect for this in WAIM. Um, I think one is navigating big decisions. So I think that's a helpful one. Just because, like, we talk about a lot of frameworks and like how to think about just, like, organizing things. Um, and then I think also our... We have a yearly projection coaching session, which you can kind of do at any time to just, like, project out kind of your next year.

[00:28:30] And I know it sounds like if you're feeling really your motivation's low right now, maybe a year projection is kind of weird to think about, but it could also get you energized because you could maybe think a little bit bigger picture on, like, oh, I don't want to post this Instagram reel today, but maybe you haven't really thought about, like, the big picture of your business and realized, oh, there's actually like, a lot more here than I'm feeling unmotivated to work on.

[00:28:50] And it's because my entire bigger picture of, like, my goals and my specific offer and my audience that I'm building for, those things feel kind of out of alignment, and I need to realign them. All right, sip of water here. Three more questions. How do I grow or scale my business in a way that feels doable?

[00:29:11] I really believe that the kind of number one roadblock for people scaling their business is that they're reaching for the wrong goals. And I'm not saying that you shouldn't have big goals. I'm saying that when you're making $0 per month and your goal is, I want to make $10,000 per month in six months, that is a very, very difficult goal based on whatever your resources are.

[00:29:35] And so I think unless you have, like, a team of people at your disposal, you have a bunch of money to be able to throw at content creation and marketing and all these other things, it's not impossible by any means whatsoever. I don't want to limit your dreams and your abilities, but to go from zero to $10,000 a month in six months, super, super difficult. Now, to go from zero to $2,000 a month in six months,.

[00:30:00] Way more doable, way, way more opportunities that you can do yourself to scale your business to that amount. And then from there you go, okay, I'm at $2,000 a month, which means people, like the thing that I'm selling, people are willing to pay for the thing that I'm creating. I'm clearly attracting an audience of some kind.

[00:30:19] Now I just need to improve all those things and, like, kind of pour more gasoline on that fire, if you will. And I know for us, like, if you look at just WAIM's growth in our... this specific business, it's... it was such a slow, methodical plot of growth over the course of three years to go from $0 a month to $30,000 in recurring revenue a month.

[00:30:42] And if I asked you right now, listener, would you like to go from $0 a month to $30,000 per month in revenue, but it would take you three years, I bet you would say yes to that offer. Like, that feels good. But I think in reality, when you're six months into the business and you're only making fifteen hundred dollars a month, everyone tends to give up like we see it all the time.

[00:31:05] And it's because you've now all of a sudden gone, yes, I agreed to these terms. $30,000 a month in three years. I like that goal. But then you get to the actual, like the, the kind of slogging through the mud of what it takes to get to that goal. And now you don't want to do the work because it's, it's hard and it's difficult when you don't have quick money motivation to get you through to your goals.

[00:31:27] So I think the idea of growing and scaling your business becomes so much more doable when you adjust your goals accordingly. And you know, we've always kind of, well, we haven't done it for a while, but early on in WAIM, we really tried to have a longer term thinking on, like, we want to get to this $30,000 per month goal in our business, but we know we're not going to get there in one week, one month, probably not even close to one year.

[00:31:50] What are we going to get to in those milestones? And in one week you're probably not going to get too much. Like maybe you could get one sale the next week and like, that would feel motivating. But in one month, maybe you can go from $0 a month to $500 a month. You know, that's, that's a couple sales of something that maybe cost $150 or whatever that is doable.

[00:32:09] It does take work, though. It's not just something you can just post one Instagram reel about and set up an email newsletter and, you know, kind of like sit back and go, you know, here comes the money. It does take effort and it does take outreach, and it takes putting yourself out there and it takes communicating about your offer and all those things, but those are the steps that it takes.

[00:32:25] And so I think if you're willing to buy into doing the work to get there, you will get there. Like, we've seen so many examples of people who have grown their business fairly quickly in a fairly quick timeframe. But you have to understand what your limitations are, what your timeframe is, and what your ability is to be creating and iterating your business on a daily basis or weekly basis based on how much time you have.

[00:32:49] The two WAIM resources that I would recommend here. Number one, we have an oldie but a goodie called Future Finding. And this one really breaks down when you're at this kind of like zero to clarity phase of your business, which is mostly people who are making no money and they're trying to figure out what their idea is.

[00:33:04] Then we have the clarity to scale. So that's kind of like you're making like a thousand, $2,000 a month with your business, but it's not... It feels like you're starting over every single month. That part of Future Finding helps you kind of scale up and build some systems and processes and get some things in place.

[00:33:19] And then we have scale to optimization. And that's like... You're probably making $5,000 a month, maybe some months it feels like you're starting over. And maybe some of that month is... Some of that revenue is kind of predictable, but you're trying to get to that optimization point where you can go up from there and you can really kind of take your business to that proverbial next level.

[00:33:37] I think Future Finding is really great for that. And then we have our grow it gradually course, which is really good. It's just a lot of tips on the different levels. It's like zero to $500 a month, 500 to $1,000 a month, a thousand to 2,000. It's like all. It's like six or seven different levels with lots of tips and advice thrown in.

[00:33:55] And then one more resource is that the resource that's coming is our Calm Creator Roadmap product, which is going to help you build a specific product based on what your goal is. So if you said right now I want to make $2,000 a month, I'm currently making zero, what is the roadmap for me to get there and what is a realistic time frame?

[00:34:11] This tool that we're building will actually spit out very personalized advice for you and the steps that you should take on a timeframe based on how much time you have. So I think that one is going to be really helpful. It doesn't exist yet. We're currently in a ton of work on it and kind of figuring it out.

[00:34:28] But that one's going to be around, delivered around August 1st, which we're really excited about. Okay, two more questions to finish this out. How do I market myself without feeling awkward or salesy? And really, I think the word that came up the most was like, feeling awkward. And I think, to me, at least this comes from you're using especially content creation tactics, but also like copywriting tactics from other people, and you're just kind of copying and pasting them.

[00:34:56] And let's just throw out an example of this. It's like if you were just to create like, reels where you're dancing on camera. Dancing on camera in reels is absolutely a way of creating Instagram reel content or TikTok content that works. But if you hate doing it and it feels super awkward, don't do it.

[00:35:14] Find a different way to do it. And I think so much of the what makes people feel really uncomfortable with creating content is the type of content creation they're doing is based on someone successful that they've seen and they're trying to emulate that style of content creation. When instead you need to figure out like, okay, what's my message here?

[00:35:33] What's the, the problem that I'm trying to solve? What's the, the core thing I'm trying to get out into the world? And what are 10 different ways that I can create an Instagram reel about that that aren't cringy? And this, truthfully, this is where I think AI has really changed the game for people being able to find this information.

[00:35:52] And if you're not a big fan of AI, then, you know, you can just do this manually. You can go find, you know, 20 accounts in your niche on Instagram and you can go through and watch, you know, 10 minutes of their reels, and you can write down all the different style of reels that they created. And then you can create, you know, based on the different styles that you found your own version.

[00:36:11] But if you want to do this in like five minutes, you just tell, you know, ChatGPT or something like that, hey, I'm gonna, I want to create Instagram reels. I don't like dancing around. This is my niche. This is what I talk about. Give me 10 kind of like, formats for recording Instagram reels and like, the way that I could talk about them and it would immediately spit back, like, oh, you know, do these sitting at your desk with like a background track and it's a short looping video with text on screen.

[00:36:34] Okay, do that. Do like a jump cut style video where you're, you know, front and back in the video and you're giving advice and you're sharing from two different perspectives. That's just a random idea. But like these are things that it would spit back faster than I can come up with them, which is what makes it so powerful to come up with those ideas.

[00:36:50] So if you find content creation, copywriting, any of this stuff makes you feel really uncomfortable, look at where you're getting inspiration of what you're creating and change the format and the style of content that you're creating to be better at that. And I actually don't think we have like a great resource in WAIM for this.

[00:37:11] I think if anything this is just one of those it's like how to build confidence in your business and we have a mending your mindsets coaching session. That would probably be the one I would point people to because I think this is just mostly all mindset related. It's this, the coaching session is not going to be very tactically helpful, but it will be helpful just in the going through a bunch of kind of toxic mindsets that we all run into as business owners and how we figure out how to get over those.

[00:37:37] All right, the last question here, and I think this is a good one to end on in this episode, which is how do I overcome fear and self doubt so I can actually take action? And this to me is I remember I had another podcast with my friend Greg called Move the Needle. Shout out to those of you who listen to the very few episodes of that podcast when it existed.

[00:37:59] But Greg is a very successful business person and I have looked up to him. I consider Greg a mentor of sorts in previous years of my life. And I really always appreciated Greg's almost like lack of any fear or self doubt in growing businesses. And I remember that he told me like one of the traits that he always knew about himself where he would be successful in business that he learned very quickly was like his ability to deal with kind of the stresses and the mindset tricks that your brain plays on you when you're trying to build a business.

[00:38:34] And if you can get through those, you can then kind of like figure out all the tactical things. You can, you can figure out all the other stuff. But if you really, really, really have a hard time dealing with the stress and the pressure of running a business or the fears and the self doubts, that is, that's just, that's kind of like a DNA thing.

[00:38:53] Like it's, you either have it or you don't. And I don't know if it's, if it's that cut and dry that's just either you either have or you don't, you're going to succeed or you're going to not because I do think you can work through these things. And, and I think even like Caroline would admit, like she, she is definitely someone who of the two of us, she deals with a lot more fear and self doubts when it comes to putting herself out there, especially with business stuff than I do.

[00:39:14] And that's probably just a lot of like, you know, societal white male privilege if we're just being totally honest that I've grown up and I've been able to do a lot of these things because of what I look like and who I am. And that is... It is what it is. Right. And, and so I think if you're a person who is like Caroline, who has grown up with a lot more willingness to want to please other people and you get really kind of like stressed out and in your head very quickly.

[00:39:40] Um, I, I just think that there is no substitution for getting through that than the repetitions of doing more of those things. And this is just... I, I've seen it over the years with Caroline watching her very closely since 2010, work on various businesses, whether they've been businesses that we've run together or her own things that she ran with Made Vibrant where she would really hold herself back from doing something early on because she was just so afraid of what would happen, of what people would think, etc.

[00:40:11] And now it's like that almost doesn't exist at all. Like she's just so willing and ready to put something out into the world because she's, she knows that almost never the first time you put something out into the world is it the done version of that thing. You're going to have to iterate, you're going to have to change, you're going to have to talk to people, you're going to have to go through a whole bunch of, of different stuff.

[00:40:29] So it's like why even get worried about the first part when I know it's going to change completely anyway pretty soon after that and it's going to be different. So I think that the, the fear and the self doubt is 100% relatable, real, something we all go through in different phases and stages and different amounts for sure.

[00:40:47] The, the WAIM resource. We created a WAIM resource specifically for this and it is the entrepreneurial mindset and personal growth coaching session. And it's... You'll hear a lot of the things I just said in that session because it's exactly what Caroline and I talked about when this question would come up often and how we could help our WAIM members get through it.

[00:41:05] Okay, I think that's it. That's... Those are the 10 most common questions that we get. I hope that even if you're not going to join WAIM Unlimited, you got some value out of these and it gave you some food for thought on how you could move forward in your situation. I hope if you're an existing WAIMer and you were listening to this, you're like, whoa, the... There's a coaching session for this specific thing that I'm dealing with right now that I can go jump to in WAIM, and I'm really excited about that. And if you're someone else who's listening to this and you just enjoyed the melodic tones of my voice for 40 minutes, then I hope it was fun and I hope you enjoyed it.

[00:41:39] All right, I will be back on the mic, maybe with Caroline, for our last launch update for the final enrollment here of WAIM Unlimited as we close the doors here in just a couple days. So if you're on the fence, now's a good time to check it out, wanderingaimfully.com/join.