Minisode (Jason Only) - Does everything feel messy right now?

[00:00:00] Jason: This is just going to be a quick solo episode from one half of the Growing Steady crew. Caroline is currently out on an errand and we aren't recording this week because she's not feeling great. And we're trying to make sure that we give her as much space to recover from not feeling great and just trying to conserve her energy.

[00:00:22] As you all know, we are on the baby making journey. Well, we've made the baby, but we are on the baby growing journey. Anyway, I want to save all of the asides for, you know, another episode and we can talk about, you know, trying to balance this kind of like, new phase of our lives and how it's even going to get more difficult here as the months go on.

[00:00:41] But that's not why I wanted to record today. I wanted to record something really short because I just wanted to share from my side of things and maybe we'll do a full episode about this. Just kind of like where things are at with running Teachery as a business. And for those of you who don't know, I basically ran Teachery not by myself for 10 years, but essentially like almost by myself for 10 years.

[00:01:05] I had a co founder for the first, like six years, basically, or seven years. And you know, I would say that he definitely put in more time at the very beginning because he was building everything. And then I was just there to kind of like market and sell it. And then when we parted ways amicably, I kind of took over, worked with developers and just kind of like worked on it myself.

[00:01:25] And then Caroline would kind of bop in. In 2020, we redid the entire interface. Caroline basically taught herself how to be a UX and UI designer. And we spent $100,000 on a development firm essentially redoing how everything looked in Teachery. And, you know, a lot of mistakes were made during that time.

[00:01:42] And if I could go back, I would do that all over again differently. But it was a lesson to be learned. And then since then, we have kind of worked on it a little bit. And then last year, as you may have kind of tracked along, Caroline worked pretty much hand in hand with me in Teachery for basically like the first, let's say half of the year essentially, or first four months of the year.

[00:02:01] And it was great. You know, I think we had a very good time trying to figure things out and work together. But I think it also showed, as we've talked about in this podcast multiple times, that just building a SaaS business is not the best for Caroline, especially as it relates to one that's been around for 10 years.

[00:02:17] I have a lot of kind of like emotional baggage with it. And so, you know, anything that comes up, it's very hard for me to make decisions. But also, you know, Caroline doesn't move as quickly as I do in a lot of different ways. And I think that when you have an existing business and you want to make changes, a lot of times you're just trying to move forward because anything to get progress is good.

[00:02:38] Anyway, that's kind of all the context to share of this. The point of what I wanted to just chat about for a few minutes is this place I find myself in right now where I'm kind of in this like, new messy middle of Teachery. And I feel like a lot of people can relate to feeling like you're in the messy middle of your business.

[00:02:56] Whether you've been in business for 10 plus years or this is like you got laid off from nine to five job and you're finding yourself going, well, I don't want to get laid off again. I want to start my own business. And everything feels really messy and it just feels messy no matter where you are. And I think there are a bunch of people right now who are online trying to tell you the perfect way to do things, and they have all of the answers and like their systems are going to be the ones that get you to the perfect result.

[00:03:21] But I think if everyone's being honest, especially with how much AI is currently changing the entire landscape of the online business world, none of us have the right answers. And I know for me, when I'm looking at Teachery, I am always trying to move forward in a way that feels right to me, in a way that building an online course platform, a digital product kind of hosting platform, if you will, it feels like the thing that I want to do in a way that I want to do, if that makes sense.

[00:03:49] So obviously there are plenty of competitors that have been around for less years than Teachery, for more years than Teachery, although only a few. And I didn't pay attention to many of them for a long time. And then, you know, maybe the last year I would look into them a little bit more. And I find myself these days really trying to kind of go back to where I was in like 2015 with Teachery, which is like, what do I want it to be?

[00:04:15] Like, what, what do, what do I believe is like a great course platform? Because I know that there are plenty of other platforms that are always going to blow us away on features. There are plenty of other platforms that are going to be able to do maybe more direct support and helping you build courses and those things, but that's never going to be something that we can really do.

[00:04:34] And I think for your business, like you might be at a place where you're thinking, you know, I'm trying to figure out like, what is my way of doing this thing? Like what is my way of carving out my own path through this like well worn path of people doing all these things the same way I'm doing them. And it feels like maybe there is no answer.

[00:04:55] And I will just tell you, for me right now with Teachery, the number one thing on my hit list, if you will, is trying to have a better course editor. So for those of you who use Teachery, I think you would agree it works. It's very customizable. You can add a bunch of custom code more than you can in most other course platforms.

[00:05:12] I think all course platforms really. However, getting something to look the way that you want, it does take effort. And in a day and age when like you can type into a chat prompt and get like an amazing thing coded like using something with Lovable, it feels a little bit clunky to not be able to get what you want out of a piece of software like Teachery.

[00:05:31] And I know for me I want a better experience when we build courses. And I know that last year when we built the Calm Launch Formula program, which was a course, it felt clunky. It was the first time I had gone in and had to like, you know, add multiple lessons and add content and do these things. And for the most part my time is spent in teachery just fixing stuff.

[00:05:51] It's just helping customers and it's going through features and like adding on integrations and you know, trying to tweak old code to make it better. And it's a lot of just what running a software company is. And I'm not complaining, I'm just saying like, that's kind of the core of what I was doing.

[00:06:05] But when I got back into working on Calm Launch Formula, it just really showed me, gosh, this is like, it feels like an older piece of software. And I'm not saying that to make any of you go, uh oh, like teachery is crappy, I shouldn't use it. I'm hopefully trying to show you that like I want it to be a lot better, but in being a lot better, I'm in this position where there's so much ahead of me that I have to do to make it a lot better.

[00:06:28] Both in time and cost and decision making and kind of figuring out, like, what do you do with a platform that has, like, all of this technical debt? You just leave it behind. And I think for you listening to this, you might have not technical debt and, like, a bunch of code, but you might have, like, product debt, you might have skills debt where you have been doing, let's say, Squarespace site design for the past five, ten years, but you're finding yourself going, like, if I have to design another Squarespace site, or if I have to do this thing, or if I'm like another VA for another life coach or whatever the thing is for you, I can kind of feel it, at least in our Wandering Aimfully community that, like, everybody is just kind of in this weird, I'm feeling a little bit of messy middle time. 

[00:07:15] And I know there are a lot of exceptions to this, people who maybe just feel like things are great and that's great for them, but I think for a lot of us, like, it just feels messy right now. 

[00:07:25] And I kind of just wanted to record this to share that, because I think we definitely try to come across in our podcast and in our coaching community and in our newsletters, you know, positive and upbeat and because, again, like, we've been positioning ourselves as un-boring business coaches for a long time, you definitely don't want your business coach to come around and be like, hey, yeah, things are kind of weird right now, you know, like, let's just all chill.

[00:07:48] It doesn't really inspire you. It doesn't motivate you. But I think it's sometimes it's helpful to just be honest with how things are feeling. And I know for us, like, we're making this big pivot with Wandering Aimfully. And I don't want to talk a lot about that because I feel like that's a space where Caroline should be here to discuss that with me and with you all to hear about. And we will keep talking more about that as we continue to make a pivot in a transition. 

[00:08:10] But for Teachery specifically, like, it just feels so messy to me right now. And I'm definitely fighting a feeling every day of imposter syndrome of, like, I've been running this business for 10 years. Like, shouldn't I have this figured out?

[00:08:24] Shouldn't I be showing all of you, you know, that I know what I'm doing and we know what we're doing, and this platform can go toe to toe with the Thinkifics and the Teachables and the Kajabis and like all these other competitors that are out there. And then the other side of me is like, screw that, who cares?

[00:08:40] Like, yes, all of our customers who are potentially going to look to buy Teachery are going to compare us. But I don't need to compare myself to those companies. I just need to figure out what do I want to do. Like what makes me really happy to work on this product and to get up out of bed every day and want to sit down and talk to developers and look at tasks in Notion and work with a designer and figure out how I'm testing things that I'm really excited to have be new things within Teachery.

[00:09:07] And I think maybe for you, as you're looking at your business and maybe you're feeling like things are a bit messy right now, you're feeling like things are maybe out of your control. Like you just feel overwhelmed by the all obvious things that are going on in the economy and like the US political crap and all that.

[00:09:21] But just in general with the like shift of online business and whether you feel like you have to be creating more content, content than you ever have just to keep up to be visible and all the algorithms are changing on what seems like a daily basis and it just feels like you don't know what to do.

[00:09:37] And I think my advice as I just want to kind of like wrap up this like short message here is don't bury your head in the sand. Do something. Do something you can control. Do something that can help move your business forward in some way. Whether it's taking really good care of your customers and going above and beyond in customer support, whether it's making a decision to go, you know what, I've just been kind of copying and pasting my business from other people's businesses that I've watched or heard about on podcasts, or like read articles about or followed on social media. And it doesn't feel that different. 

[00:10:09] So I need to actually step out of that and take some time to figure out like what makes me unique and what, what can I do differently. So I just, I want this to be like a little bit of a messy message here. And I don't know if Caroline's gonna be mad at me that I shared it without even telling her, but she wasn't feeling good anyway, so I felt like I could do a 10 minute message and that would be fine.

[00:10:30] It's okay if you're in the messy middle right now and I would just offer the kind of like high five to you that that's how business goes from time to time. And I know there have been other times in the past 10 years that things have felt really messy for us. And that's just something you have to work through and you have to figure out and you have to not give up when these things happen.

[00:10:49] So that's my message to you right now. Don't give up. If you're staring a big decision in the face, try not to make a big decision without giving it time to kind of marinate and for you to think on it and to really figure out if it's what you want to do. And if you're just feeling like you're not motivated today, then put your motivation somewhere where it actually feels like it might make a difference as opposed to just skipping out on doing anything for your business and like watching more YouTube or more Netflix.

[00:11:15] Like those, those are good things to do at times. But instead of spending hours in the day not doing anything because you feel paralyzed, just do something, move something forward, change something, post some content, put yourself out there because those things do pay off and, over time, they are the little things that add up. All right, hope you enjoyed this just little off the cuff episode and we'll be back next week with a regular one.