Time for a New Chapter FTH: 099

Kim Doyal 0:01

Hey, what's going on everybody? Welcome to another episode of F hustle with Kim Doyal. I, of course, I'm your host Doyal. And I'm just doing a little preview clip for today's show because I jumped right into it saying, We haven't you know, we haven't done anything in a long time. And it was specifically referring to today's episode, which was a conversation plan conversation between myself and Joe Hirsch, my co founder of the content creators plan. So I thought I would just do a little preview clip here. So it makes a little bit more sense. When you listen to this. We did record this on video, which will be up on YouTube. And we'll be sharing in the content creators, Facebook group, and anywhere else, that seems like a great place to share it. So that being said, kind of big announcement to make. So enjoy the episode. Welcome to F the hustle. I'm your host, Kim Doyal. You want a life that is meaningful and exciting. In this podcast, we're going to talk about launching and growing an online business that meets your lifestyle. F the hustle is all about doing good work, building real relationships, and most importantly, creating a business that supports how you want to live your life. You don't have to sacrifice the quality of your life today to create something that sets your soul on fire. And yes, that includes making a lot of money. So we'll be talking about selling, charging, what you're worth, and help earning more means helping more people. My goal is to help you find freedom and create a business on your terms. Hey, what's going on? Everybody? Long time, no talk? No, see, we haven't done anything in video in a long time. So we've got a big announcement today. Of course, we are the founders of the content creators planner. I'm Kim Doyal. And of course, my cohort is God earth. Well played not passed off very well. But we're, we're excited we do have a big announcement. And I'm going to kind of pass this over to Jodi to start with the announcement. And we've got a lot to share with you. So stay for the whole video. But we do have an announcement to

Jodi Hersh 2:06

make. Yeah, so the big exciting announcement is that, like all good things, CCP is coming to an end CCP being content creators planner. It's a mouthful for us. So we always call it CCP. And while we love the product, and we have loved working with everybody and helping everybody with through content creators planner, we're finding that we're both just way more focused on and excited about other things. And we're really doing a disservice to CCP, and to our audience. So we thought that we'd share a little bit with you about kind of how we got here, some of our favorite moments and highlights and things that we've learned along the way. And a little bit about what we're each going to be doing moving forward and what all of this means for you guys than our customers.

Kim Doyal 3:06

And first and foremost, of course, we want to thank you all for being on this journey with us. And just so you guys know, Jodi and I love each other life is good. This is not some weird, like, oh, you know, but we're not breaking up. We're still we're still very good friends. And, you know, confidants and counsel to each other about business. So I want to do that. But a huge thank you. It's been such a fun, amazing journey. No regrets. It's, it's been wild, you know, starting something and launching something here before the world went upside down. But let's go God has prepared some really great kind of questions and take away so we're gonna jump in and say that, but again, thank you so much for being on this journey with us. So let's, let's get into your little structured thing you got to do there. I love it.

Jodi Hersh 3:57

Well, why don't we do like a quick sort of like, timeline of what what brought us to here. So back in the summer of 2018 It's crazy. I was literally on a cruise. I've been on one cruise in my entire life. And I was on the cruise floating around somewhere in the middle of the British Isles. And Kim sent me a message. Did you send me a LinkedIn message? Or did

Kim Doyal 4:29

you know it was Facebook Messenger Facebook, okay. Yeah.

Jodi Hersh 4:34

She asked me if I if I knew InDesign, I'm like, Yeah, sure. I use it all the time. What do you need? I figured i'd make a video and show her how to do something. But she was interested in getting some help to produce this printed book that she she had thought of which

Kim Doyal 4:51

I'm gonna interject because this was the funniest answer. They literally said can I a hire you to do this? Or B Do you want to do this with me and her The answer was yes. It was like it was awesome.

Jodi Hersh 5:08

I do remember that. So the answer was, yes, I'll partner with you. And that was I got back to the state. I got back home sometime in August, I think like, mid to late August of 2018. And we started work on it immediately. And then we decided that a Kickstarter was a good idea.

Kim Doyal 5:31

At the beginning of December, no less. I don't know why I had that. I had to do that. But moving on.

Jodi Hersh 5:38

You know, the funny thing about all these missteps are you learn so much more from the mistakes than you know, from the things that actually worked? Well, maybe, maybe it's equal, maybe you learn equally from both, but the mistakes are just, there's just so funny.

Kim Doyal 5:55

They are. Right. And the nice thing is, it's like, you don't know what to mistakes that you make it right, like, stop to think about I mean, originally, we had even thought we should get imprinted overseas, all the books we had tested and stuff. And each thing led us to where we were, but it's it's, I don't know, I always say like, if you knew now what you know, if you knew then what you know, now, would you have done it? My answer is still yes. But

Jodi Hersh 6:19

yeah, definitely. No, I might have done some things differently, knowing what we're doing now.

Kim Doyal 6:23

Yeah, that's true. Yeah.

Jodi Hersh 6:26

But so we have a famously failed to Kickstarter. But fortunately, we also had Kim's email list that she had been growing for years. And we had everybody in Kickstarter. You you can't export them at a Kickstarter for you can certainly one by one, send them a message. So that's what we did. And in our case, you know, I'm a web designer. So I whipped up a WooCommerce site, basically, over New Years, and we started selling, pre selling on our own. And we were able to raise enough funds through the pre sale to be able to pay for the first batch that printed books, which I we sourced locally here in Atlanta with a company that I knew. So if anybody wants that information, is called Book logics. And they're in Alpharetta, Georgia.

Kim Doyal 7:19

And they're phenomenal, amazing service, highest quality, best price, lowest minimum. So it was like, how do you beat this? Yeah,

Jodi Hersh 7:27

yeah, it's all it's basically print on demand. So they're set up to do short run, printing. So quantity, I think our smallest quantity in bulk was is 250. But the price gets much better as quantity goes up. So we had a successful launch. We were I think we were still designing the book while we were pre selling. I don't remember the details of this. But one of my funniest memory is that Kim and I had known each other for about seven years, five months, or something like that. Yeah. Online. We had zoomed were we knew each other. Were so old. We had Skyped. Okay. We chatted a few times. And we were online friends, but we had never met in person. And we were scheduled to meet in St. Louis for a mastermind event that Kim was invited to and I was her plus one. And the books. I might be mixing up like two different stories, but I remember like the books had like, just come in, and we were like finally shipping them and I'm like racing to deliver hundreds and actually I had to pack them into the bubble mailers and carry hundreds of books to the post office. As I'm trying to fly to St. Louis. It was all like one crazy 24 hour and

Kim Doyal 8:50

you brought me a chunk of books. Remember, you also brought me a ton so you had your own stuff, plus a whole ton of books for me to take home to California.

Jodi Hersh 9:03

Oh yeah, I think they charged me extra for my luggage. But so we met for the first time in baggage claim.

Kim Doyal 9:12

Yep. We absolutely did. You know thinking to something else we did in between you remember we did for I don't know why we limited this to four days ding dongs but Black Friday, Cyber Monday before the Kickstarter, we ran a giveaway. And we got 500 subscribers, people signed up for the giveaway and it was to win like an annual subscription with four planners and a hoodie and you know all of those things, but it was fun to test that and I'm like, You should have ran that for like two weeks. I was just I don't know, you know, so hindsight like I was thinking Black Friday Cyber Monday for days, but so just so I think to share the piece that we were talking about this and marketing it constantly the second we came up with the idea, we started throwing it in the con 10th graders Facebook group. Jody, would we do a zoom call? And she showed me a design and I'd screenshot it and share it in the group. She's like, Oh, you know, it would have a read notes and stuff on it. But it was yeah, that was that was an intense five, six months in remember, you got sick at Christmas time? You were sick for a few weeks. That was not I know.

Jodi Hersh 10:24

I feel like I was patient zero. Yeah. But that was like a year in advance of the pandemic, though. Yeah. Yeah, I was sick. My boss for the holidays. That year. When I recorded the original walkthrough video, I have this really deep voice. And I had to keep pausing the recording to call for like 20 minutes, and then come back. But I don't know if that's still the audio track that's out there floating around on YouTube.

Kim Doyal 10:54

I'm sure it is.

Jodi Hersh 10:55

I'm sure it is. It's like two octaves lower than my normal speech. Yeah.

Kim Doyal 11:00

Yeah, that was wild. And when we shifted, we didn't have what we're we're using girl originally, maybe it was when we started the ads. But we didn't launch with the masterclass, but pretty close. Or we did pretty close. We wanted to make sure we had one upsell during that process, because we had the physical digital and the masterclass, right.

Jodi Hersh 11:22

The original upsell was a really annoying pop up with the digital planner.

Kim Doyal 11:29

That's right. We didn't do the math in class till we Yeah.

Jodi Hersh 11:33

And then we started running our own Facebook ads using ad espresso we started with because we didn't like the native interface. And once we had an ad that was performing well, I know it was made because I remember the name of the totally bogus still may something once we have a successful ad, and it was time to scale it up. That was when we started looking for help. And we found an agency that helped us scale up our ads. And that's when it got really interesting. I never thought I'd be the person that would say I was spending $1,000 a day on Facebook ads. But we had scaled up to where we were profitable at $1,000 a day because we were getting a return. So more we put in the more we got out. And during that time we had our one of our best highlights was our biggest month. I think our gross sales that month were like 67,000 Yeah, yep. And that may have no that was January, like January of 2020. Yeah.

Kim Doyal 12:45

Now, I just want to throw in, and not to be a Debbie Downer. But that year was a shit show to night. 2019 I lost my mom, Jodi had some health issues. I moved, and almost twice in like six, seven months. And so just for I and I want to share that only because, you know, life doesn't stop happening to us as we're as we're creating and growing and scaling or whatever we're doing.

Jodi Hersh 13:11

And we were running other businesses at the same time. Absolutely. I

Kim Doyal 13:15

mean, my life shut down for a while it was I was devastated. But it was still like, I don't know, finding that balance. Because we knew what we had created and what we believed in and we're like, well, we're gonna keep going people like these, you know? And do you remember it was so fun. Even before we turn the ads on, it was like, we would text each other's sales and updates. And you know, it was, it was really fun, then as we started scaling, to be able to kind of run with that. And it was it was wild. There was a there was a really, there was a great energy about seeing it working and scaling and working and scaling. And it was just, it was a blurry wild talk.

Jodi Hersh 13:57

Yeah, I mean, it was it was definitely fun. And it was intense. And I mean, some of the best parts were hearing from people how much they loved the planner, and you know, how they were using it. And, you know, in hindsight, I think maybe one of the, one of the many mistakes was trying to maybe do too much, which is kind of ties in with what we how we both are focused and what we're doing moving forward. It's, it's very tempting to try to do everything that I think have to do all the things. And, you know, as content creators, we, you know, we're just kind of wired to make stuff. And we definitely were doing too much. And I must say that it's challenging to create content about creating content on a continual basis, such as what we were doing. It's kind of like the snake eating its own tail. I mean, it was yeah, that was Was it was challenging and it was

Kim Doyal 15:03

challenging. excited about it. Honestly. Yeah. You know, it's like I love the planner. And I love creating content, but creating content about content. But But I think we have that conversation in terms of what we're content planners, shouldn't we create content, it felt like, oh, boy, like, it was a little tricky to feel like we didn't, we were tired of content, I think at a certain point, but we were

Jodi Hersh 15:29

and, and even with two of us switching off, I think Kim did probably create more content than I did. But

Kim Doyal 15:34

God gave me everything behind the scenes that kept the machine running. Let me just tell you that right now.

Jodi Hersh 15:42

It was still like the most amount of content that I authored myself, though, for any of my projects. And while it was really challenging, it was something good that came out of it is that it really has forced me to become a consistent content creator. And you know, as a result, I'm now publishing. A weekday, daily weekday email called Fresh squeezed, you can find that on my web or in store.com/fresh.

Kim Doyal 16:14

All the links for everything we mentioned will be below this video, by the way.

Jodi Hersh 16:19

I never in a million years thought that I would do a daily email, I would have said, You're, you're nuts. I don't have that kind of time. But they're really short. I'm saying that they're short, sweet and nutritious, fresh ways. And it's actually really fun. And I would not have come to that, if it hadn't been for content creators, planner. And yeah, the commitment that we made to each other to stick with it, because I think it is on my own, I would have petered out. About you.

Kim Doyal 16:50

Yeah, for sure. For sure. Especially because I mean, I've created content for a long time on Kim Doyal, Wordpress, check, whatever. But there is a difference when you've got an accountability to somebody better responsibility to someone else. And like creativity published was the first newsletter I had published, which got me so excited about f the hustle. But it was, it was fun to see the the responses to that it was fun to do that. But again, it was the same thing of creating content about content. You know, I enjoyed doing the newsletter, but then it just started feeling the snake eating the snake to your point, you know. And I think the other tricky thing with that is, first of all, let's not forget our six hour famous zoom call where your ears are about ready to fall off. We spent six hours together on a zoom call, really defining the brand story for content creators planner, which is why I think our ad hit right out of the gate, our site resonated with people we did that's I always call that the intangible work that people can't see. And it's really taking that time to get clear on your message, who you serve the problem you're solving. And we did that we did that really well. And so, but then we also have two very distinct voices and personalities. So it was, you know, nurturing that into the brand. But yeah, the newsletter was phenomenal, too, though. I mean, I fell in love with newsletters, before we even started it, and it got me really excited about the possibility of them.

Jodi Hersh 18:20

Yeah, I think, you know, on my side of things, too. It just all of CCP and its needs really forced me to tackle some technologies that I had dabbled with but not like really mastered. So not only do we use WooCommerce, which I was already pretty adept at but I boy I definitely know my way around WooCommerce really well. Yeah, like every add on imaginable in there to make it do everything. But I installed and set up every single LMS system.

Kim Doyal 18:59

We have because we moved off of Thinkific so a couple things everybody. I think we started with Kajabi right that was before we started

Jodi Hersh 19:07

with Kajabi and then we went to Podio odia. And then we went to think if IK and then we decided to bring it inside WordPress, it was getting really expensive on Thinkific which was driving that because it worked great. It was just getting very expensive. And we tried, you had the Thrive. What is the Thrive one called apprentice Thrive Thrive apprentice. We tried that and it was having an issue conflicting with I don't remember what one of our other plugins that that we couldn't turn off so we were having an issue with that. And then we tried. I had a copy member press so we tried member press courses and that looked fine. And we also decided to try LearnDash And when I say try, I mean like, really set them up and yeah. And LearnDash. Just, it's been great. So yeah, got that all set up. And we've not had any issues with that. But also early on, we got cart flows, and started experimenting with our funnels. And we haven't to date taken full advantage of all the latest features, which is one of the reasons why we've decided to move on, from CCP is we just, we've there's not enough time, effort, energy to put into it with our other things at this time. But I'm actually really excited about some of the new features of CART flows, which I'm going to be experimenting with very soon. Very wine thing as we wind things down, because I don't know if we should save it to the end, or to tell everybody what we're doing yet. But

Kim Doyal 20:59

let's let's do it right, now's a good time, is it?

Jodi Hersh 21:03

Okay. Um, so we...