Justin Welsh Shows You How To Start & Grow A One-Person Business

welcome back to another episode of the modern mastery podcast where we help you optimize your human experience through holistic personal development mind body spirit with business as your vessel for freedom fulfillment and the impact of your life's work today i have justin welsh who over the last decade has helped build two 50 million dollar annual recurring revenue companies teams of 150 plus people and has raised over 300 million in venture capital that was until he burned out he saw the opportunity in the attention economy he started his one person business and now he advises early

stage smb sas companies in the healthcare technology vertical he runs a private community for online creators he's built two digital products for creators and he has a one-on-one coaching business in this episode we talked about how linkedin is not a resume site it is the land of opportunity for creators the best route to take as a beginner in online business and we broke down the components of a one-person business content strategy and the trial and error in between if you are a growth-minded individual that has skills interests or passions have tried to turn them into

a source of income but struggle to make it sustainable and predictable consider joining modern mastery hq where you can copy and paste our hundreds of processes strategies and systems into your one person business while working four hours or less per day we've packaged up the information from myself a marketing consultant and joey a performance consultant into proven processes for starting and growing your business as a coach freelancer digital product creator content creator or online educator while becoming a laser focused machine we offer a seemingly outrageous fifty thousand dollar guarantee because we are that confident in

our teachings if you want to build a one person business design your perfect lifestyle and live like you are supposed to go to join dot modern mastery dot co slash podcast to get your first month for five dollars or if you want to skip all of the do-it-yourself stuff and join an intensive six-month program that guarantees business and personal success we also have the mastery program you can apply for the next cohort at join dot modern mastery dot co slash program links to both of those will be in these show notes and last but not

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further ado let's dive right into this episode of the modern mastery podcast justin welsh my man welcome to the show how are you doing today i'm doing great dan so uh it's really good to be here man glad glad that you and i are getting a chance to catch up and chat with one another yeah i'm excited you do something very unique i mean i'm a twitter guy kind of exploring instagram now and as you said before we even started this a lot of twitter people like to [ __ ] on linkedin and i was

one of those people because i used to think of it as like oh this is for recruiting for a job or trying to find jobs and other things of that nature which we will dive into but i have a question that i ask everyone that comes on this podcast it's the very first question and that question is what is your life philosophy in one sentence in one sentence um to do what i want with whom i want whenever i want that is my life philosophy you're on it that it's it goes both ways it's like

people either know or they think about it and then it comes out to something similar it's all it's all related to growth like i can kind of sense what everyone's going after now especially with the people that have seen uh some form of success or autonomy or have gained that personal sovereignty that everyone's after and that's really it so with that how how did you make that realization yeah i made that realization through um kind of going through this painful journey which was um for those of folks who aren't familiar with me my my past

life is i'm an executive operator i was chief revenue officer at a sas company uh prior to that i worked for another sas company that was a unicorn for five years i was an early employee there and after 10 years in really high growth sas companies zocdoc and patientpop i came crashing down burned out really badly especially the executive part when i took my first executive role i was 33 i was a stretch hire thought i'd get the company to a million maybe two got it to about 51 million and as it got bigger and

bigger and bigger i lost control and burnout is about loss of control it's not about working hard i can work hard all day but losing control is is what starts to really cause burnout and in late 2018 in december um i was really heavy i was drinking too much eating too much not getting enough sleep and i had a panic attack and um i literally thought i was dying like no joke my wife had to call the emts 9-1-1 they all came to the house um it was really really bad and uh after that happened

that january about maybe two weeks later i let my co-ceos know that i would be stepping down from my role and i stayed for another eight months got myself into shape uh stopped drinking so heavily slept more but but that was the sort of the thing that needed to happen in order for me to look at my life through a different lens if that makes sense wow that makes a lot of sense and i can't i can't resonate with the whole executive position but in terms of in terms of like alcohol and bad habits that

stack up over time that is one thing that i can heavily resonate with right now because i'm a i'm a young guy and i went to college i had my time partying partying and i made this realization recently where i was trying to justify my alcohol consumption and it was not a lot by any means right it was maybe once every two weeks just on the weekend and man when i say just like stopping that alone it does give you more of that sense of control because like the brain fog and other things can last

like up to a week and you're just not making the progress that you could so in terms of regaining control was did you do anything before leaving the job to start on that path yeah i i for 90 days i went alcohol free um that was that was a huge thing for me to kind of reset my balance and less less because like i like to chug alcohol right but more more more because it was a coping mechanism for the stress that i felt uh at my job and so i thought i thought all right

i've already made the decision to leave the company i had great great ceos at my last business and still still really close to them to today so i made this decision to like clear my head which then ultimately allowed me to eat better i eat better when i'm not drinking alcohol or i'd make better food choices sleep better right naturally sleep not in the beginning but it starts to come you know much better much cleaner and then one thing that i did i have two back surgeries um so i can't do a whole lot of

lifting or running those are kind of all off the table for me so my wife and i started walking 10 miles a day so we lived in la at the time and the square around our house was 1.1 miles and so we did three in the morning three after lunch and three after dinner and with no alcohol healthy food a lot of sleep and walking 10 miles a day i lost like 40 pounds and i just got clear and it was a perfect time for me to get clear because i was going out on my

own and i needed to be as clear as possible yeah i read that in one of your tweets and i was gonna save that for later because i am also a fellow walk enjoyer i go on like five six blocks a day they're not that long um but you mentioned that you like a business idea popped into your head and we don't have to dive into this business idea sure but in terms of walking would you now consider that crucial not in terms of your health but in terms of like idea generation and just being

able to perform well during your business doings 100 yeah yeah it's um it's interesting much like eating and drinking i'm a binary person so like i'm usually zero or one like and with work i'm not too much not too different so if you sit me in front of the computer i will sit in front of the computer all day and i will be on twitter be on linkedin writing blog posts fixing my website changing processes doing anything that i can do i feel like every moment of the day where i'm not working on my business

is a wasted moment which is a problem and so um walking gets me away from that and so we do phoneless walks my my wife and i are she'll take hers because she's not uh loving technology the same way that i do and to me it's just like clear time right it's clear time with my wife which is awesome um it's really good time for me to think and when i walk a lot of times i throw all the things that i'm struggling with out into the space for my wife to hear and she's like

really good at bringing a complete we're very different people bringing a very different approach uh to solving those challenges and like a lot of times when i get back home i have i have a problem solved or at least i'm moving in the right direction and therefore when i get back on the computer or start working on the business again i'm i have much more clarity on solving that problem so yeah walks to me extremely important yeah that's awesome so when you are on the walk do you have how do i put this like a

specific mindful process that you go through i'll give i'll give you an example so um like i try to be as present as possible like breathing not focusing too much on the business stuff and that can get kind of difficult right so is there like a conscious practice that you have to keep your mind off of the business stuff yeah it's that's a great question i don't know that it's a conscious practice that i have but if i think about our walks together they generally follow a pretty similar pattern to one another which is usually

it's time my wife likes to tell me a lot about her business as well and you might find this this might resonate with you or maybe it won't but when she tells me about her business challenges the the answers become really obvious to me and i'm like oh that's really simple i would fix it this way one two and three and then i realized after after going through that that her problem isn't too dissimilar from one that i'm facing but i overcomplicate my own solutions rather than being simplistic in nature like i am when thinking

through her solutions so once i've actually helped her solve a problem i'm like oh that applies to my problem as well and therefore it's like two birds one stone which has been really really helpful um so our walks kind of start off talking about her business and they generally morph into chatting about my business outside of that we talk a lot about travel right so like 30 we we walk about 90 minutes i'd say 45 minutes that walk is just like where do we want to go next why do we want to go there what

do we want to discover so it's quasi work and quasi play but but it's definitely a great opportunity for me to get my eyes off the computer right i can i resonate with that a lot and i'm going to start making that like connection myself because i don't make that connection when i'm actually talking to people or giving advice because i've read a tweet or some piece of content at some point where it's like i am great at marketing other people's business but when it comes to marketing my own business i suck because you just

overthink it too much you over complicate what's actually going into it but then if someone comes to you with advice it's like oh yeah easy this this and this and so that's it's a cool thing to make that connection but now i want to talk about how you balance that because a lot of people will hear this i'm assuming and they'll think 90 minute walks like that's a long time to be away from the computer and away from work so first let's start with what does your daily schedule overall look like yeah it's it's pretty

similar every day which like there's proponents for randomness and there's proponents for like you know structure i'm probably i lean more towards the structural side and so my days are pretty pretty simple i get up at about six o'clock and drink coffee it's my favorite time of the day with my wife is we spend an hour and 15 minutes drinking coffee talking to each other catching up we have a nice outdoor patio and screened in patio that we love to sit on um 7 15 is when i post content each morning on linkedin which is

the platform that a lot of people probably have seen me on i'm pretty new to twitter although figuring it out and enjoying it a lot but i post on linkedin at 7 15 in the morning central time and i set aside 45 minutes for engagement to chat with people answer comments so on and so forth uh at the end of that we'll do one of two things we'll we'll get ready and we'll go for a walk we do six miles here at a local park called shelby park or we go to our gym in east

nashville here and we spend usually 60 minutes on i'll do the elliptical machine because my back come home generally i will write for about an hour and a half so i try and write an hour and a half every single day have lunch and then tuesday wednesday thursday my after afternoons are reserved for my advising clients i advise early stage smb sas companies and so i usually have some meetings with with customers tuesday wednesday thursday outside of that monday and friday i'm working on business systems so i'm trying to you know eliminate automate delegate pretty

pretty simple following that that pattern trying to understand what's taking a lot of my time that i don't like doing and that doesn't give me energy trying to do more things that do give me energy that's a pretty like overarching look at my week nice i like the the last summary of that doing things that give you more energy and taking away the things that don't so because that's a that's a big thing of mine too and i'm gonna try that because recently i've noticed and i'm talking about like early in the morning where you

kind of take it easy you you have that hour where it's like you have your coffee you possibly get warmed up for the day like you get ready to go and i've been the type of guy where it's like i just have to go in the morning and and not that i want to but it's like i get up at 5 36 and it's like okay we need to get the day started right now and my mind isn't primed for that at all i've noticed that i'll sit there for an hour doing practically nothing just

scrolling social media on my computer and then it's like okay now it's time to write or post content or something when that could probably be better used just relaxing prepping my mind for the day and like warming up in a sense is that has that been a like trial and error for you yeah and and i actually it's interesting because i i chose that schedule just based on sort of just what i've done historically right like old habits are hard to break um but i chatted with my wife the other day about this and when

i'm drinking coffee in the morning i'm generally at my highest point i'm like i can think most clearly it towards 2 p.m i'm i'm almost worthless um so you're catching me two hours two hours before i'm generally worthless but um what i would like to do i think and test out and work towards is starting to flip that a little bit so getting up coffee instead of going right to the gym um writing and then coming to the gym two three in the afternoon you know when i have some i'm a little down on energy

and kind of getting ramped back up through through doing you know some workouts so i'd like to actually test that and see how the quality of my day goes the quality of my content what i write how my business reacts um that that for me is the next sort of test to see if that makes a difference yeah that's the beauty of all of this right because i've been doing the same thing it's like i've probably i've probably been self-employed i think it's like closing in very close to three years now and the entire time

it's just constant testing of like okay what's the perfect schedule for optimizing my energy throughout the day and so with that that's just a perk of self-employment and being able to create your own structure so with that you are the linkedin guy even on twitter you're the linkedin guy so let's let's start there actually let's start before that before linkedin so we're at the point where you have quit your executive position and now before linkedin was there anything you tried out was there any shiny object syndrome or testing different things before committing to linkedin yes

and no so the last part of that sentence changes it a little bit of that question so i started with linkedin that's how i started in in most people who are listening to this who are twitter fans will probably find that to be an odd choice but think back to like late 2018 as i had this sort of panic attack and i knew that i was gonna go out on my own the first thing that i thought was i needed some attention like i just knew that attention would be a good thing and so i

didn't know how to get any i'm a sales leader so i know how to sell myself really well but i don't actually know how to go out and like do distribution or back then i didn't know how so one of the guys who worked for me was named kevin dorsey and he had been writing on linkedin and he was a thought leader in the sales space and because he was doing that i was just like oh i'll do the same i'll pick the same platform twitter to me was news back then i didn't understand the

platform right and i didn't want to be on video or instagram you know so i don't have a six-pack ab so i didn't want to be you know thrown throwing pics up so i i chose linkedin and i i started to to write um but i also tried like some video video series i tried like long form blog posts i did all these interesting like mini webinars all this stuff to just try and get attention and then one day i wrote something and it went it kind of went berserk and it got like i don't

know three or four million impressions and i was like oh this is interesting because a i like this i like to write i and and b like it seems to be working and so i just from that moment on i didn't do video i don't do audio i mean except for for podcasts and things like this and i just started writing every single day and my goal was to be a better writer and it doesn't matter like linkedin is just you're just typing into a box and hitting send it doesn't matter if it's linkedin or

twitter like sure they're different platforms but the practice of writing every day and shipping and publishing um was something that allowed me to start understanding how to create as much attention for myself as possible and so that was you know what now two two and a half was three years ago and uh you know i've been writing every day since beautiful so when you first started because this is like the sticking point for everyone on linkedin is one you you wanted that attention for the sake of growth and building authority how do you get that

initial traction yeah it's a great it's a great question so first of all there's an opportunity there right so like everyone knows twitter as the platform for creators and everyone knows linkedin you and i were chatting you know before before we hit record about how it's like a resume site and you're like oh i thought it was just a site for resumes or i thought it was just a site to share job postings it is and that's why and that's why writing content that's good and compelling on a platform that's not meant to be used

that way gives you a leg up and so for me it was all about how can i show up and be radically different than everybody else on this platform and as i started to look at twitter and i started to pay attention i was like oh i see how people are using twitter i'm going to go use i'm going to go use linkedin just like people use twitter because nobody else was doing that i stood out and as i started to stand out i started to just do things that i had done my sales leadership

job analyze the data what's working what isn't working double down on what does cut what doesn't and so i started to learn about formatting right um being compelling being polarizing i read every book that i could get my hands on copywriting i read all the cash vertizing and ogilvy on advertising and i read all russell brunson's books on how to create characters and you know i just became a student of getting attention and i got really good at it and the interesting thing about getting attention online is that it's addicting and anyone who says that

it isn't is full of [ __ ] and so once you once you get it you want to get more of it and to get more of it you got to study more and so that's just sort of been the cycle that i've gone through is writing analyzing studying writing again repeat i did the same thing and i forget about this all the time cash fertilizing that brings back memories because now now people are promoting like different copywriting books but man like cash advertising is good like you'll hear people take the stance where like they

go against advertising but that that opened up so much room for other uh like research like more connections to be made and so with that one i encourage everyone to go read cash vertizing because it'll just lead down so many different avenues but also what's what's like the tangible process for getting those first impressions because on twitter it's like oh you just comment under other people's posts or you tag someone with a value post and they'll retweet it so how do you go about that so there's there's basically two really simple ways one is not

too dissimilar from twitter which is um and i kind of teach this in my course which is yeah being underneath large accounts and because linkedin is is run by microsoft and therefore antiquated and doesn't roll out very good features you can't you don't know when i post like there's no there's no notification button you can't set a bell or a ding for my posts and so um what i encourage people to do is find three to five of their favorite thought leaders and just write a message and say when do you post i don't want

to miss it and whenever they post in the morning or in the afternoon or whatever get there first but get there first with value much like twitter not two not too different than twitter add something meaningful underneath their their post you can grow from a thousand followers to ten thousand followers just doing that the second thing is to write to publish and i give a framework for for getting started on linkedin and again this translates pretty well to twitter you know i'm getting some really good traction on there after having posted now for just five

weeks um so my my framework is i start with the meat and the meat is like what do you want to teach someone what is the thing someone should learn from reading this this post on linkedin it's usually the numbers that you'll see on a twitter thread right step one step two step three it's the meat it's the information you wanna you wanna display um so i always write the meat first what's what's something i wanna teach someone today how to write well how to build a business how to build an audience whatever you want

to call it right once i've written the meet my next thing is how do i actually want to get people to stop and read this so i write the hook which is again it translates well to twitter first line is the scroll stopper for me it's how do you get people who are scrolling on their phone to stop when they read that very first line the second line is the validator like okay i'm validating reading the second line that it was a good idea for me to stop after reading the first the first line and

the third line is the hook line which is getting them to click the see more button which exists on linkedin but does not on twitter so if you want to click see more i've got you right once you click see more you're now into the meet you're now reading the information that's actually valuable and at the end of the the post i like to do a recap and a call to conversation so much like you'll see twitter threads giving you a tl dr like here's all the things you just read in a short summary i'll

do the same thing on linkedin so that way if people want to participate in the conversation they don't have to go back up and reread everything they can get the short nugget right at the bottom and it's easy for them to participate and then i'll do a call to conversation you know what would you add do you agree disagree calling them into the engagement section pretty pretty standard and so if you can follow that format even as a first-time writer which is just like hook meter information recap called a conversation you're going to grow slowly

if you continue to be con consistent so really being underneath big accounts and then having a good structured you know process for your writing i think are the two biggest things you can do early on right i like what you i like what you said there about the the notifications because now you told everyone when you when you post so expect more engagement 7 15 am central time every day nice i'll be in there as well so with with that have you changed your process over time and what i mean by that is from beginner

let's say 0 to 10k followers to 10k and beyond what's your linkedin process now yeah now it's just it's more robust and it's more systematized so for example um i used to sit at my screen and look at a blank you know white screen think what do i want to write today and that that's not that's never uh very fun over time as i started to realize that i needed ways to ideate rapidly i created my own system i called it just the content matrix for lack of a cooler or better name and what i

did was i just took all of the topics that i normally like to write about i listed them on the left hand side i took all of my favorite structures observations step-by-step guides how to's analytical ex first y pass first present whatever all these different structures listicles whatever and i kind of just put those across the top and then once a week on saturday morning over coffee when i'm feeling really energized i got tons of free time i sit down and i just pair those things up topic structure pair pair of pair the idea is

just ideate quickly quickly quickly quickly so as soon as i put these two things together an idea merges i write the headline so i'll write 10 headlines right away now i've got at least 10 starting points and then i'll use tools like um i like i think it's called type form and there's another there's hype fury and so i'll just start to plug those into those tools and use some of the inspiration and templates that they have to make sure that i'm writing in a way that's formatted correctly i'll throw it into hemingway app hemingway

will tell me if it's grade one grade two grade three my sentence structure's clear everything's easy to read and then i i load it back into hype fury and i try and create ten pieces of content sitting down for two hours and then because i've created 10 pieces of content i might as well put them everywhere that's relevant and so not only will i send them to linkedin but using hype fury i'll send them to twitter i'll create posts that will go to instagram and then i'll put them on my my website since most of

my followers are from linkedin i sort of use this suction system where what i'm doing is i'll post the blog on linkedin to 130 000 followers and 50 000 newsletter subscribers and i'll share a snippet of the article and then i'll redirect them to twitter and i'll pull my linkedin audience to twitter they'll start liking the tweet and then it gets exposed to lots of strangers on twitter who have no idea who the hell i am and so i've been using this momentum trick to kind of take my linkedin audience bring them to twitter and

use them to expose my content to people who don't know me and so that's sort of the system that i follow on a regular basis that's smart i really like just one from 4 000 to 22 000 followers in like five weeks yeah that's insane man i'm missing out on the linkedin game i knew i was gonna have to double down on it right now but uh no that's really that's sweet and you have a lot of power i've i've specifically on twitter i'm sure it's on linkedin too but you've talked about the amount of

impressions you get and this is all technically organic compared to paid ads what are your views on paid ads i i've never run a paid ad um i don't have the competency to like know how to run an advertisement so uh i'm not i don't know how to do that which may sound really silly to people listening but like i just don't care i i generally believe that i am more likely to make sales of my product by building this massive organic following by by having people know exactly what i stand for exactly what i

write about exactly my what my opinions are and exactly what my products help them do and i make most of my products priced at what i call like an impulse buy pricing i'm not out there selling 1200 master classes the amount of trust that it requires to build in order to get someone to spend 1200 bucks is pretty massive most of my stuff is what i call trust trip wires right so it's getting people in with a lower cost product that delivers incredible value and having them start to say like this is someone we can

trust when i spend money with justin i know that i'm going to get significant value from the product and so i feel like the best way to do that is to continue to go out and build an organic following could i do advertising and maybe have a three to one return on on my investment maybe i'm sure there are a million facebook ad gurus out there who would tell you that that can happen it's just not something i've done yet and i'm sure some of your listeners will be like why not and the answer is

i just haven't focused on it i wish i had a better answer no i'm this i'm the same exact way like i i tried a whole facebook ad agency a while ago and that was my only experience with ads ever and after just like seeing and as you said getting kind of addicted to the growth on either platforms it's like why do i like i don't feel like i really need this especially right now when this is working and it's not really worth splitting focus so i completely agree with you there but uh i guess

yeah paid ads they're an option they're there for certainly people like us when we decide to go after them so if i decide to build yeah if i if i decide to build a sas platform or a sas company like and the prices at the right uh you know if i can get enough people into good lifetime value then sure i'll spend spend some money and have customer acquisition costs and if i can justify that then yeah hell yeah i'll run ads but someone else will run for me because i don't know how to do

it exactly but with all of this so we talked about content how you ideate and come up with all of this content this all falls under the umbrella of a personal brand so in terms of the personal brand how first how would you define that i mean i don't really think about the i hate the word personal brand i used to use it a lot when i started like i wrote guides on how to build a personal brand so i called it um i think of myself in this i mean this in the least arrogant

way possible so i don't i don't mean this in an arrow but i think of myself as a walking business i don't think of myself as a personal brand i'm a person who happens to know how to solve a lot of people's challenges i know how to help people grow their audience on linkedin i know how to help people build their first service business i know how to help people productize service businesses that they've been successful with i know how to do those things and so it's not my personal brand it's my business and i

think that i have spent the last two years two and a half years being really really afraid or uncomfortable to call myself an entrepreneur because to me entrepreneurs are people who start sas companies that's what i think of when i think of an entrepreneur someone who raises 100 million dollars in capital and for me to call myself that was just so uncomfortable and recently i had a dinner with the former ceo of the first startup that i was at which is a unicorn and he said well tell me about what you're doing and i described

it and he said you're an entrepreneur that's a business that's a business that scales like you can scale that business year over year and i was like oh that's interesting so for the very first time two two weeks ago three weeks ago i started referring to myself as an entrepreneur rather than as a personal brand or you know a one-man business and i had all those different ways to refer to myself that way other than entrepreneur and now i feel comfortable saying that um i can relate to that a lot because it's the same like

one there's the stigma that an entrepreneur is someone who builds some form of like huge company they're very like out of touch in a sense but then there's also the stigma of like oh entrepreneur is a kind of like cheesy way to put it in some cases maybe only i've experienced that but yeah it's it's it's a weird dynamic there and i want to talk about the what is it the i lost my train of thought but we'll dive into yeah we'll dive into the promotional aspects of linkedin and personal brand and how you go

about this because in in my opinion like the one man business it's much more clearly personal it's much more authentic and with that comes different ways of selling things sometimes because as a business it's like you have to stick to the brand message you have to stick to this certain way of saying things so when it comes to promotions there how do you go about promotions on linkedin yeah i think about it i i forget i was having a conversation with a guy named eddie schleiner who runs a site called verygoodcopy.com and we were talking

about copywriting and he used this one word something about curtin language and it was like you use this language in your copy to infer that there is something magical behind the curtain and you know the audience needs to pay to pull that curtain back and see what's behind it and so i've that's always stuck with me and so when i go out and i create content the first thing that i'm doing to set up my promotion is i'm proving expertise like if you look at my linkedin profile every single thing that i've written gets a

hundred thousand impressions or more like i can prove that i know how to build an audience there the next thing that i can do is i can prove that i've turned it into making money i can share screenshots of how much money in the business makes just based on linkedin how much my products make all those different things that is all just setting the table that's all table stakes for me like being an expert having some authority showing people that you know what you're doing but then the next thing that i want to do is

i want i want to let my audience know that the way that i do those things is really complex and i can show you the complex systems that go behind doing those things but that exists inside my product so the first thing that i do when i go out to promote something is i create sort of um a takeaway of what you get with the outcome so what happens when you have 130 000 linkedin followers well you get great job opportunities you get asked to speak on podcasts like this you get asked to speak on

stage at events like saster you make money you can sell products you can be a thought leader you can win awards like all those things can happen if you build a big following so first i set the table and say like imagine being able to attain all of these things right what's the gap between not having them and having them growing an audience becoming an expert and having some authority want to do that here's a peek behind the curtain want to peek behind the curtain fully here's how much it costs right and then i throw

out an impulse buy my product is 150 not necessarily as much of an impulse buy as my first product at 50 but with a nice 25 or 30 discount it becomes something that people can easily pull the trigger on and whenever people pull the trigger on it i put them into a funnel where i ask for video testimonials two weeks later and i have 2 500 students i've got hundreds of video testimonials that are really really powerful they all get automated to my landing page so my conversion rate continues to increase over time as people

visit there and i just the cycle continues people buy people video promote i post about it people go to the site conversion increases they buy they video promote and around and around and around it goes and so that's how i think about promotion there's no more complicated system than just that specific sort of flywheel that i've created that's real that's amazing i'm going to pull i'm going to go back over this i i encourage people to rewind this and go over that because to me i've always struggled with that right it's always the give value

give value up front give value as much as you're told one both to give value up front in your free content and even on the landing page etc but the being able to not give so much away that makes people want to try to do it on their own if that makes sense because then they're just going to leave her and they may come back eventually once they don't have those complex systems here's something interesting though and that i i um i had a conversation with someone who has a really massive following on twitter and

i won't share or share who it is but uh he and i had a chance to get a coffee here in nashville and we agreed on something which is i can take everything in my product today that is in the paid product and if you look at it it has all been shared for free somewhere somewhere along the line i have shared everything that exists inside of it people don't pay me for some new secret even though they believe they are they believe they're paying for news what they're really paying for is aggregation they're paying

for everything in one spot they're paying to go from point a to point b in one hour not to have to sift through my content for the last two years and spend a month trying to put it all together and so i always give freely every system i figure out everything i described about siphoning my linkedin audience and bringing that's all free you can all read that on my on my website but when you want to go build your first linkedin audience you want to go build your first service business i've assembled all of that

information in a way that is extremely digestible and affordable and so people pull the trigger get a lot of value and continue to buy from me um one one thing dan that i didn't mention that might be helpful to some people is outside of creating that flywheel at the end there's also an invitation to join my private community and i make my private community subscriptions quarterly so they're impulse buys again so people can just join the community they come in 99 bucks for a quarter and what i'm creating is my own personal twitter my own

personal linkedin where as i grow and as i sell more and create more products now i can promote them on twitter i can promote them on linkedin through my newsletter but i can also go to 2 000 people who i have as a captive audience who enjoy my my stuff and drop a link in a slack channel that's pretty like that's that's an easy way to continue to sell future products from people who are already excited and so it's all these different sort of buckets of you know it's kind of a diversified portfolio of income

if you will in in distribution yeah i love that i love how you put that and the the one question i have from that is why why the quarterly have you tried the monthly pricing structure i haven't um i started yearly and what i found is that yearly really really screws with your optionality so like three months in if you don't like running the community you got nine more months right and so for me i brought it down to quarterly mostly because i don't want it to be a hotel like i want people who want

to come in and stay for a while and so i think if you give the community 90 days you're probably going to be really really pleased with it i think if you come in for like 14 days and you're like i don't like this in the first 14 i'm not going to spend the last 14 and then you'll probably have a higher churn rate i could test it out to see what works but quarterly gives me the right amount of sort of oomph to get the right people in but it also gives me optionality where

i'm always three months away from if i don't like it anymore closing up shop that makes a lot of sense i like that i may try that myself and so i regained my train of thought from when i lost it and my question here is i've been toying with this in my head a lot and it is like the future of business kind of as a whole but where do you since you are a one-man operation or a one-man business and and you see the value in that do you see things moving more towards that

i don't know that i see things moving more towards that i i think i see and i'll say i'll say something about a topic that i know very little about i'm not a web 3 nft crypto guy i'm just not it's just not something that i understand very well but like i do see like daos daos whatever you call them and and i don't think that's all that different than what one man or one one woman businesses will do in the future you know for example if you look across twitter i see a lot of

people building product studios so their studios that create product non-stop and they rely on people with heavy distribution to go out and deploy those products to their audience that's a product studio i want to create a distribution studio myself other people who have really large followings why can't we bundle together and say hey you want to take a sas platform to market hey you want to take an info product to market you want to take a community to market collectively we do 500 million impressions every year like what's that worth to you what what are

you willing to give away for that and i think that if one man one woman business businesses pair together to to really improve their power then they can start to own a large percentage or or even a small percentage of a lot of businesses and i think that's a really powerful thing that is i have to munch on that as well because i can't talk too much about this but like i just love uh i feel like it is a very big thing and very accomplishable for those people that are driven to do it right

to escape whatever suffering they're in in terms of a job or something else because that's that's what a lot of the people that interact with us and buy our products they want to do but then i kind of get caught up in that mindset of like oh everyone wants to do this or this is where things are going to move or there's going to be a massive push when in reality i don't really know all i can do is just keep pushing the message i'm pushing yeah and and i think what people often overlook is

so imagine me right when i when i quit patient pop built the company from a sales organization perspective to 50 million from zero right and i could have gone out and said well look at guys like mark roberts who built hubspot he built that to a hundred million from zero therefore i am not the expert because he did something twice that'd be foolish because a lot of people struggling to build something to a million bucks so the reason that i'm telling you the story is there's probably a lot of people who listen who want to

do something on their own want to leave their nine-to-five want to get started in self-employment who look at other people and say there's already a me out there but there isn't like there's a million guys talking about audience building building businesses building on link there's a million to me right but all i want is for people i'm the brand i'm the niche the niche is me and when the niche is me i don't compete with anyone else and so i'm always trying to teach people to like build a niche of one build something where people

like you because you're entertaining humorous funny polarizing be the guy or the girl that people want to follow there's as long as you're interesting there can only be one of you and if you can build that niche of one you get you know kevin kelly thousand true fans whatever it is like you got a walking business there and so i just hope people don't get discouraged by seeing that more people are dipping their toe in the water because it's just validation it's not it's not competition i completely agree it means it's working and it means

there's something there and the way that i like to put it because that's a this is a big thing i talk about a lot in terms of like you being your own niche and i am a big spiritual guy so i i try to and like philosophical so i spin it in the way of like your conditioning every single uh stimuli external stimuli you've been exposed to your personality the things that have built up over time makes it so nobody can compete with you if you learn specific skills to market and sell yourself on the

internet and understand those hard skills of content creation writing marketing sales etc so with that we talked about that one huge misconception with online business as a whole what are other common misconceptions that people have when they come to you when it's time to build something for themselves yeah that's a really great question i i think the the most common misconception is that if you have an appropriate niche and a product that solves a specific group's uh group of people's problems that you're sort of all set i think like oh i work with um high

performance female sales leaders in the healthcare technology space i help them become better at their jobs okay cool i've identified my niche and i'm really good at that i did that thing for five years and i know how to do that thing knowing the people whose problem you solve and being able to solve their problems are are only two pieces of the pie the other piece of the pie that you're forgetting is getting that attention we talked about earlier is getting those eyeballs making sure that people know who you are what you do and why

you do it and so the misconception that i see is that people don't spend enough time or don't understand the amount of time you have to spend copywriting learning how to be a great podcast host learning how to host live events on on video if that's your medium like running a successful youtube channel building an instagram following it doesn't matter if you want to solve a problem like if people don't know about you it's all a moot point and so to me one person businesses are mostly about marketing and i think that gets greatly overlooked

by a lot of people going into them that was so well put i i wish i could put it like that well now i can wow because i made that i unconsciously made that comparison because we talked about what you the things you tried and failed at before going all in on linkedin and for me it was it was so many different things and i didn't realize that the problem there was getting my offer in front of people because as a freelancer the five different things i tried freelancing with it's like okay yeah i'm gonna

send 10 20 cold emails and then get discouraged call it a day and try something else because it's not working i could have like get people the greatest results but if i can't actually get them the results that it doesn't matter so that is that is huge and a big thing like one thing i'm big on because once i started learning the marketing once i picked up cash vertizing once i let that take me down a huge rabbit hole of marketing and sales it's like everything started to click it's like yes i understand like i

can solve this problem i've acquired enough skill to do something for a specific person and now it's like okay how do i make this appealing for that person how do i actually get their attention in without knowing all of this stuff what seems like a saturated market as we talked about before that's not really the case so that's huge and listeners that is very big so pay attention to the whole marketing side of things and marketing yourself and one thing i do want to talk about as well is your your bios there is a very

minor difference in your twitter bio and your linkedin bio one says you are building a portfolio of one-person businesses to five million in revenue that's your linkedin bio your twitter bio is you're building a portfolio of no code businesses to five million what's what's the reasoning behind that yeah it's a good observation um it's the best way to put this so generally twitter tends to be really tech heavy so when i say tech heavy like linkedin has a lot of people who work in technology that is different than people who make a living creating technology

there's two that's a minor difference in their no code on linkedin is not a popular topic like people aren't talking about no code like they talk about it on twitter it's not talked about it's not there aren't as many solopreneurs on on on linkedin there are people who work for other companies so using the word no code it's meaningless or or less meaningful on a platform like linkedin one-man business that resonates it's pretty easy it's easy to understand what it is i'm a solopreneur right twitter very focused very tech heavy in the way that people

are building with technology and so when i talk about building a business i want to be very clear that i'm not an engineer i don't uh build sas products i build everything with no code and mostly service businesses that get productized eventually that's mostly what i build service business until it's good enough i understand it well enough i productize it and then i move on and build another service business i productize it that is sort of how i do do business and i want to make a clear sort of distinction on each social media platform

so that it resonates with the common user so that's why i think about that nice i like that so what's in terms of like the the similarity there would you are you making one man business and no code business kind of synonymous with each other in your eyes i don't know that i am i i think it's a good question i don't know i don't think so i think that no code businesses can have lots of employees and i think a one-man business can be you know can can be someone coding something back back you

know building piece of software um for me it's just using jargon or lingo that is synonymous with that platform and so that that's sort of how i chose that um i think if i started using the word no code on linkedin people would say what does that mean exactly and and we've been following you for three years like have you changed are you doing something different but building a business is pretty simple to understand a lot of those folks who follow me on linkedin and by the way i'm painting with a very broad brush here

this doesn't describe everyone but are our you know sales development reps account executives you know they've worked at sas companies but they don't spend time looking at no code tools they've never used zapier before they don't use notion it's a very very different audience whereas twitter like everyone talks about that at least everyone that's in my uh you know sort of feed so it becomes something where i can blend in but also distinguish myself and say i am an entrepreneur i do build businesses but these are the kind of businesses that i build and therefore

someone doesn't mistake me for you know the the next great sas builder although i may someday yeah i love it man so the let's go back into like in terms of like breaking apart the bio what you're helping people with right so the the first step for an absolute beginner what is the first thing they should do to start transitioning what's what's their what do you recommend as their first stream of income to build yeah yeah it's a good question i think there's something to think about before you build your first stream of income i

think the first thing that i recommend people think about is like who do they like to spend time with because in my opinion misery doesn't scale so if you're spending a lot of time talking to people that you hate talking to that does not scale so like who do you like to spend time with okay whatever that whoever that group of people is or are um it should be a group of of people that are behind you in their journey so if you're i'll use sales and example if you're a sales manager talking to account

executives they've never managed people before they're two years behind you in their journey and they want to look they want to learn how to become a sales manager right so that is an example of looking behind you where were you two years ago where were you three years ago that's a group of people that hopefully you enjoy talking to if you do the next thing that you should do is you should talk to them and you should understand their problems right talk to them for free ask them to jump on a call for 15 minutes

what's keeping you from moving from an account executive into a sales manager again just kind of using my past once you understand those challenges you can very easily create solutions or hypothesize solutions right i think this is the way to solve that problem or i know very specifically that this is a way to solve that problem once you do that the thing i recommend doing is creating a service business i'm a big fan of service before product and because i think you learned so much for your product by first having a service business so for

me that service business often looks like a simple coaching business okay great i'm going to go find 20 account executives who want to be sales managers i'm going to make it a no-brainer impulse buy price come spend an hour with me for 100 bucks okay cool you just made 2 000 bucks talking to 20 people and you can start to identify commonalities okay what are the most common challenges these people have yeah they all have five challenges but what's the most common one what's the biggest one what's the most painful one cool how do i

solve that very specific challenge you work through with those 20 people you're going to start to see common solutions oh each time i do this one particular thing with all of these 20 people it works right so what does that become that becomes your product so then you go build a product you know how to become a sales manager in three months at your job right go from point a to point b in 90 days put that into a product deliver that product into your audience and now you can raise your service rates so instead

of a hundred dollars for an hour now you're 2.50 an hour someone can't afford your rates you point them to the product someone doesn't want to learn the self-guided product you point them to your rates and that's just how you build your first two revenue streams then you can repeat that right you can do that with another group of people you like helping the the potential is limitless and by the time you're done you've got five products they're all impulse buys you can point people to them on your content on your email list wherever when

they reach out to you one-on-one you say go over there buy that product and you also have five different service offerings that you have at hopefully a higher ticket price so that's how i think about sort of the going from who do you want to work with to building a service business to productizing the knowledge that you learn by working with those people beautiful that's exactly what almost everyone i've talked to has done but it's never been put that simply and i've i've been growing like originally i was i went the freelancer right freelancer route

right which i still think is extremely viable but i like the consulting route much much much more like that's what i eventually transitioned into after i i started with web design realized that i was kind of a commodity had to learn more skills start with funnels make it specific to a specific business and then once i had results there i could start consulting people on it especially the people i liked being around which were creators other one-man businesses because they're they're just fun to talk to right and so when i could consult them on these

things and they like doing them things on their own that's one thing i've noticed about myself it's like i like to do things on my own rather than having someone do it for me i would rather learn from them pay them to teach me and then do it myself from a better point of view so a lot of different avenues there but i completely agree with the service business so we're closing in on time and i have one last question for you and this can be pertaining to anything business life whatever what is the most

potent piece of advice that you agree with but you feel like other people skip over wow that's a really good question um here's what i think it is so i'm a big fan of small risk and so a lot of people talk about like don't have a plan b right or or go all in on one thing and if you don't go all in on one thing you're not committed i don't know if this is exactly but i disagree with that so like my thing is i love to spread risk out this i like to

invest in my businesses in the same way that i invest my money which is diversified and therefore you know if something happens to one of them i'm not [ __ ] out of luck and i think the majority of stuff i read out there is like go hard or go home go deep no plan b if you put all your energy towards one thing you have the most chance for success i disagree with all of that for me it's like i'd rather build 10 50 000 businesses than one 500 000 business and that advice is

comes off the back of people like daniel vasalo who talk a lot about that on twitter i'm a big fan of the way that he thinks about small bets and so that is the most profound piece of advice that i've received is is basically reading some of his earlier twitter stuff as he was discovering that for himself nice i completely agree there so i do talk about like going all in but it's it's nuanced in a case where like i feel like the majority of the things you do should be diversified but then when there

is that pull to say like go monk mode on one project or something similar that's when you go all in in my opinion you need to focus in on that one thing but i love that because i've been opening up or making connections regarding those small risks a lot more and i've been writing about it a good amount which helps a lot with understanding it so justin that was an absolutely amazing podcast there were some great pieces of advice dropped there so i appreciate you for coming on the last thing where can people find you

and then where can people purchase your products yep you can find me on twitter at justin sass that's justin s-a-a-s you can find me on my website at justinwelsh.me or you can find if you're interested in learning how to grow in linkedin which i'm sure a lot of twitter folks aren't but if you are um you can go to the operatingsystem.co theoperatingsystem.co sweet and we'll have all of those in the description and i i guarantee a lot of twitter people want to grow on linkedin i feel like they're just choosing yeah they should they're they're

choosing the polarizing option where it's like [ __ ] linkedin twitter's only way so no we're all going to take over linkedin great interview yes thank you man thanks for coming on again we'll see you next time see you thank you so much for listening to that episode of the modern mastery podcast i have a few favors to ask you for a whopping zero dollars you can support this podcast by following rating and subscribing on whichever platform you are listening on for an additional zero dollars you can share this podcast and tag us at modernmastery

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