LMScast with Chris Badgett

This episode is brought to you by Popup Maker Boost Your Website’s Leads & Sales with Popup Maker Get started for free or save 15% OFF Popup Maker Premium—the most trusted WordPress popup plugin to grow your email list and increase sales conversions. Get Popup Maker Now In this episode of LMScast, Chris Badgett talks with Nick Usborne about his initiative, Your Awesome Life Story, a website that helps people, especially those over 50, record and save their life experiences for those who come after them. Nick Usborne has decades of expertise in the field and is a prolific author, educator, and course developer. In order to preserve family history and make sure that priceless experiences, lessons, and memories are not lost over time, Nick emphasizes the need of documenting personal narratives. He talks about how many people lament that their family’s legacy is lacking since they didn’t document their parents’ or grandparents’ stories before they died away. Nick’s project provides a number of platforms for producing and disseminating life stories, such as scrapbooks, audio or video recordings, written memoirs, and even dynamic websites. Importantly, he reassures that one doesn’t need to be a professional writer to tell their story authenticity matters more than style. Your Awesome Life Story encourages people to record their life, which helps close the generational divide, strengthen family ties, and leave a rich legacy for future generations. Here’s Where To Go Next… Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website. Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS. Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014. And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide Episode Transcript Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program, I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co founder of Lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show. Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest and good friend. His name is Nick Usborne. I’ve known Nick for about six years and he is a prolific course creator. And writer, teacher he’s been in this industry for a long time. He’s got a new project called Your Awesome Life Story. We’re going to dig into that today. But first, welcome to the show, Nick.  Nick Usborne: Thank you. Pleasure to be here. Always fun to talk with you.  Chris Badgett: Tell us What your awesome life story is it’s basically and by the way, I just want to say head over to your awesome life story dot com. So you can look at what we’re talking about. And Nick, if it’s possible, maybe turn down your speaker volume a little bit. I can hear it coming through your mic just a little bit.  Nick Usborne: Oh, all right. Let me have a look. So say something to me, make sure I can still hear you.  Chris Badgett: Yourawesomelifestory. com.  Nick Usborne: And does it sound any better now?  Chris Badgett: Sounds perfect.  Nick Usborne: Okay, cool. All right. All right. So what is it? It’s basically a service, for people who, boomers or say you’re over 50 and you want to create a record of yourself, of your life. So it’s about writing your life story. It’s part of kind of the family history, scrapbooking, journaling, that whole thing where people don’t want to lose everything. Like I’ve spoken to so many people who say, Oh man, I wish I’d done that. With my dad or with my mom or with my grandma before she passed, because now I know she had so many kind of stories and lessons to share and she did such great thing, interesting things in her life and there’s no record of it. So it’s lost to us. So the idea of writing and creating and then publishing a life story is you, it’s a legacy. It’s something you can share with your kids, with your family, it can be passed down so your grandkids can find out about your life and there’s so many. I started off when I started creating this was just, Hey, wouldn’t it be fun for people to create their life story? And then the more I got into it, the kind of deeper I found the topic became I was talking to someone who does activities in a retirement home. And she was saying, Hey, that’s great. There’s so many people here who would like to report their stories, but so many other fringe benefits, like getting a group of people together to share their stories, to get to know each other better, there’s the, I don’t know it’s just such an adventure. The more I dig into it, the more I see this as a kind of life adventure of, yeah why do I want. Everything that I’ve done, everything I’ve learned to be lost. It’d be, Hey, I got some particular stories that my kids just love. They just say, Hey, tell me the story about when you, and this is usually about when I was in my teens or early twenties, when I was crazy. And they want to hear those crazy stories. If I didn’t share them, they wouldn’t know. And I’m sure my, from my parents, particularly my mom, my dad left some of his stories behind, but my mom didn’t. There’s probably so much there that I never, she was just like mom, but I didn’t know her before, she was married. I didn’t know what her aspirations and what she did when she was younger. So I think there’s a lot of, there’s a huge loss within a family and it connects family. It connects generations. A grand, a grandson can say, Hey, you know what? Grandpa’s not so different. He had these same struggles when he was young. When I think about Nick, I think about the story of you living in a cave in Turkey, I believe. It’s just, that’s such a cool story. Let’s make sure it’s not forgotten one day,  I should have used that as an example in the course. And I haven’t, that’s not lost. I’ve written that one up with texts and the store and the photographs and everything. Chris Badgett: You’re a writer, very talented writer but your awesome life story is for anybody. And how do you, what’s your approach to getting people that aren’t necessarily writers or YouTubers or content creators to capture that, which is particularly common, especially in the older generations today. Not being creators, if you will, for the modern web.  Nick Usborne: I think all of us have some capacity to write. Yeah, because even if we’re not writing for the web, we’ve written letters. If you’re old enough, you’ve written letters, you’ve written postcards. You, you know how to communicate. And one of the things I say in the course is, Hey you don’t have to have had a celebrity life to make your life story worth sharing, your kids don’t care about the celebrity stuff. They just want to learn about you. And also you don’t have to write like you’re, John  Grisham or Stephen King. You can just write in your own voice. And sometimes you’ll get a younger person helping a grandparent. With their life story and they’re likely to just record them on video or audio and say, Hey grandma, tell us about, and then that can be transcribed. If you don’t feel like, so there’s all kinds of different ways to do this.  Chris Badgett: And what are some of the formats, if it’s not a book, it could be what?  Nick Usborne: My dad wrote up just a part of his life because I was raised on a farm and my dad had that farm for 30 years. So his life story, he didn’t talk about his, when he was younger, he didn’t talk about when he was retired. He just talked about those 30 years. And he actually did it just simply as a binder, like a scrapbook. And he typed up the story. He added photographs. There was like newspaper clippings, things like that. So yeah he just, he was retired when he did it and he just sat down and he’s typewriter and then wrote it up. So that was a binder. There’s another member of my family, like a second or third cousin, he’s actually built a kind of family story as a website, which is also interesting because the thing about it, if you did on a website, it’s a living history. Is you can add to it, somebody has a grandchild or you suddenly remember something, or you find some photographs in the attic. When my, both my parents have passed and particularly when my mother passed, she was the second to go. There were so many boxes of albums and photos and things like that. And it was fun to look at but the trouble was a lot of those pictures had no context. We’d love to, I’d love to say, Hey, mom, where was this taken? And why did you keep this? What was this? We never really had, so we had bits and pieces and old letters and postcards. Old ferry tickets from vacations going, from England to France, just all kinds of stuff. So yeah, you can add all kinds of, I’ve lost track of the question now. I’m rambling. It’s  Chris Badgett: just a content. The different formats it could take. So it could be a  Nick Usborne: website, it could be a binder. Another friend I have who he was actually, he originally set out just to write like a letter to his children. So that’s a format. You sometimes see that, letter to my younger self or yet letter to my children. So he was going to do a letter to his children because his kids were leaving school, they were graduating, but that had no education in finance and money. At school. And you thought that’s not good. This friend is his, he’s, he went through all kinds of struggles and he tried different businesses and they didn’t work. Then suddenly they did. And now he’s very wealthy and very comfortable. He wanted to share that with his kids. So he started off just as a letter to my kids. And then he thought hang on, there must be other parents out there who feel the same, that their kids get no education in money matters and entrepreneurship and stuff like that. So he turned that into an actual book and it’s like a three, I got a copy here somewhere. It’s like a 300 page book he had published, by a big name publisher. So you can go that route or you can just do it yourself. You can publish it as a, just as a, an ebook, as a PDF, or you can take that PDF and publish it on the Kindle, Amazon Kindle. So there’s lots of different ways of doing it. And, or you could do it just as audio or video. It’s. I guess through the mechanism or the, how you approach helping somebody achieve this, because I know it could seem like a big project, but how do you ease into it in your course of like process? Chris Badgett: How does somebody get started and on the path and what are some of the milestones and methods in your course?  Nick Usborne: So I take them through kind of steps, because like you say, it can feel overwhelming. Like I have no idea how to do this. So I said, okay, step by step. So step one is why are you doing this? What’s your why? I want to hand this down to my kids or the why could be, it could be a journal of rediscovery for yourself. It could almost be therapy for yourself is Hey, there’s all kinds of stuff I went through and I just want to review that and get back through that. And so it can be therapeutic too. And also the why is. Yeah. Like, why do you want to do it? Then there’s the who, but who are you doing this for? Is this just for immediate family? Is it really an intimate thing just for immediate family? Or is it for like extended family and friends? Or is it for everyone? Like my friend who published it, as a big name publisher. Is it this for everyone? That matters too. And then I say, okay, let’s now gather together all your stuff, boxes of stuff. These are the building blocks, the kind of bricks of your story. And then we get into, okay, how do we structure this? Like, how do we find the beginning of the middle of the end? And where do we begin? So I have a big beard on. So basically what I’m doing is I’m, I don’t throw anyone at the deep into the deep end with the course. I say, okay. Why are you doing this? Who are you doing it for? Where’s your stuff? Let’s put that into a structure. And then in the next session, we look at, okay, we’ve got a structure, but let’s do a bit of storytelling here. Let’s apply some of the kind of theory of story to this and make it maybe a little bit more exciting to read, interesting to read. Rather than just dull pros, as it were and then there’s all kinds of tools that I talk about. And one of the things I do right at the end is a section that’s almost, I don’t think I titled it this, but it’s close to saying, Hey, I’m not dead yet. It’s my story so far, but maybe my story so far can inspire me to do other stuff in my life. So I might, as I’m writing my story, I think. You know what? That was such a period of my life. You mentioned like I lived in Turkey for a while. I can say, you know what? I should go back there. I’m going to put that in the bucket list. I’m going to go back to Turkey and revisit that place and see if any of the people I knew back then are still there. So that goes in my bucket list, or it could be something I haven’t done. I’ve never, Hey, I’ve never been further east. I’ve never been to the far east. I quite like to go to the far east. So I’ll put that on my bucket list. So when you do your life story it’s a voyage of rediscovery for yourself and for your family. But. Can also be an inspiration for, Hey, here’s some of the things I want to do with the rest of my life. I’m not done yet. It could be volume two, somewhere down the road, or if it’s a website, then you just keep adding to the website. Okay. Here’s the journal of our finally my trip out to the far East. Here’s the journal. And I put it on the website. Funny question  Chris Badgett: for you. What if you’re feeling a little overwhelmed? Oh my gosh, there’s so many stories, so many different parts of life. How do you choose what to not focus on  part of it? Nick Usborne: Again, I did, I go through this in the course is there are some things that you don’t want to, my brother was writing a book like a memoir and he was chatting to me and he was asking me about stuff. And there was a particular episode that he said, oh, I want to put this in. And he mentioned that and I was like, no way, because that particular episode was very personal, very painful for me. Back in, in our early childhood, and I said, no, please do not, I do not want that shit. So there’s some things that you may not want to share. And definitely in terms of privacy, if it involves someone else, you should ask them before you decide to share that, or it could be, Hey, maybe I’ve had struggles. Maybe I’ve had addiction. Maybe I had problems with her in any relationship. Is it good for me to go back through that? It might be. Do I want to share that with everyone? Maybe I do. If this is a story and part of redemption, maybe I don’t. So you’re going to go through stuff and it’s like any kind of editing of any kind of story or anything like that is, is the stuff you want to put in and the stuff you don’t want to put in. And part of it, I talk about a push pin structure. Think of highlights, again, you talk about the trip to Turkey. Okay. That’s the kind of push pin thing. I’ll put that up on the wall. That’s interesting. It was interesting when I moved from England to Canada. That was a big deal. I’m going to put that in it, where, so there, there’s, you can do almost like a highlights reel. You don’t have to cover everything. No one wants to know everything, but it’s, think about what’s interesting to you, but also think about what would be interesting to your kids, to your grandkids, what would they like to know about you? And also like one of the things that I’ve done and I talk about in the course is because the world changes so quickly I’ve got a. Even in the closer picture of a slide rule. So slide rule is what we used to use at school before there were calculators. But my kids and their kids, they wouldn’t, if I showed them a picture, a slide rule, they’d have no idea what it is. So I put that in there because it’s interesting. Wow, think of all the changes that have taken place just over a relatively short period. So it’s fun and it’s. I hope at no point did I say, Oh, this is hard work. I really don’t want this to be hard work. This is fun. This is exploration. And this is going back through. This is like ringing up old friends, someone you haven’t spoken to for 20 years and say, Hey, I’m doing this thing. And I suddenly thought, do you remember that trip we took? Do you remember that concert we went to? Do you remember that time we misbehaved, whatever it is. And it’s you can reconnect with people. I’ve done that. I went back to England and I reconnected with one of my very first bosses after I left school like I worked in a quarry and they, he was a master Mason and he was a fantastic guy who had a huge influence on my life, I, when I went back to see him, I hadn’t seen him for over 20 years. So that was again, part of rediscovering, rediscovering important times in my life, important people in my life. And I think we get, we’re always rushing forward. We’re so obsessed with the present and the future. And the past is gone and I think that’s a shame. I think it can be my process of creating the course. I’ve necessarily gone through the process myself of creating this life story for myself. And. It’s really interesting and it is healing in a way. And it’s so interesting to look at those big forks in the road. Like when I came to Canada from England, what if I hadn’t? What if what stimulated me to come to Canada? I wouldn’t be talking, I probably wouldn’t be having this conversation with you now. We wouldn’t have met the way we did all those years ago. So there’s these forks in the road, which are fascinating when you look at them. Wow. And I’ve spoken to that, about that with my kids of Hey, just imagine if, because I, my, my kids, I bumped into their mother. Oh, I guess it’s always the case. It’s like almost by, I wasn’t looking for her. Yeah. I just bumped into her and all of a sudden we, we’re married and having children and stuff. What if I hadn’t, she was in fact the person who sold me my first. Flat, my first apartment in London. What if I’d gone to another realtor? What if I hadn’t seen that ad, whatever it was, everything changes. So it’s fun. It’s really interesting. And I’ve involved my kids a bit in it. Because again, part of my story is my life with my children, raising my children. So I said, Hey, do you remember that time? And sometimes we have very different memories. Of what, they’ll say, do you remember? And I’m like, no, what was that? And then they remind me and I think, oh, true. That was great. Anyway,  Chris Badgett: let’s talk more about that therapeutic aspect. What are particularly, I think when you’re getting older. There’s some pain of loneliness, boredom maybe looking for meaning and significance and you’re talking about how good it can be. But what’s some of the kind of the negative side of like where people are at later in life? That this could really help with I  Nick Usborne: think  Chris Badgett: it’s  Nick Usborne: part of it and I talk about this in the course is, and this is when I was talking about retirement homes, the lady there who’s in charge of activities that say one of the biggest. Issues there is that people become less social, that fewer social connections as you get older, you tend to have fewer people around. So she was saying that what she loved about the idea is that it gathers all the people together in a group and all of a sudden they’re talking with each other. And somebody says something and someone else just burst into laughter and said, Oh, that was me too. I did that. Or I, I saw that band. Oh my goodness, we were at the same event and we never even knew. And it just brings people to life a bit, I think. And it’s and even if it’s not old people, it could be, I don’t, maybe I’m old, I don’t feel that way. But just like I said, get reconnecting with that boss of mine, having conversations with I, I got back in touch with the headmaster of my high school. We had a conversation, so again it’s reconnecting with people. Again, for sure I’ve thought about and revisited moments in my life that were not wonderful. And again, that can be really helpful to revisit those moments where things were not great. So I just think it’s ever since as I’ve created lots of courses and they’re generally for the, in the marketing space, this is a new departure for me to do something outside of the digital marketing space. This is just for anyone and everyone. It just started off as just this little tiny spark of an idea. And what generally happens with me is a spark of an idea either kind of flickers and goes out or it just starts this yeah. And it’s been like that for me with this is I find it so interesting. I find it so fascinating. And I love like stories man, people, everyone loves stories, right? And stories are great connectors between generations, between cultures from across the world. I can sit down and laugh about something silly that has a thanks, it’s a story about Thanksgiving dinner. Hey, you could go to Japan, go to China. They may not have Thanksgiving, but they’ll have those holidays and they’ll have the same experience and have the same funny stories, different language, different culture, different place. But stories bind us as humans and their stories endure. But Bible stories, pre Bible stories, ancient Greek stories, ancient Rome story, these stories are still alive. They connect us with the past, they connect us with the present. Stories like, Hey, I remember reading my little kid, my kids stories of bedtime, they’re such a central part of who we are. And how we connect with others, whether it’s different cultures, different age groups, different, anything, everything like that kind of glue that hold us together. So when I talk about your awesome life story, it, when I say awesome, whatever you may think, oh yeah, my life wasn’t that interesting. I bet it was, I bet you have some good stories to share. You don’t have to be a celebrity. You don’t have to be a superstar to have it. The story worth sharing. So yeah, for me, this has just turned into this big roaring project. I, and like I say, everywhere, every time I turn everything I look at this, I just think, Oh man, that’s interesting. That’s interesting. That’s interesting. So it’s growing like nuts now. Like for instance, that thing of the retirement homes never occurred to me when I started the project that, that people in homes might be interested in me helping a group of seniors sit around and tell their life stories. And it was only when I started talking to the kind of administrators and activities people there that I said, Oh, my goodness, this would be wonderful because it addresses so many issues of community of socializing. Of memory, it stimulates memory in older people. It’s really good for older people and their kind of brain health, as it were to, to remember stuff. It’s really helpful for them. So it never occurred to me that when I started the course but like I say, the deeper I go, the more the applications I find and the more interested I become. And that’s important because as like starting and publishing and selling a course is not always easy. There are bumps along the road. It never, I always think it’s going to take off, go viral. A gazillion people will buy it on day one. It didn’t happen. So you, there’s a grind. You have to keep on grinding, working at it. And if you don’t love it, it’s really hard that grind. But if you do love it, then it becomes easier.  Chris Badgett: So I watched the movie last night the new remake of Moby Dick. And the author had to work hard to get one of the survivors, as an old man who was a kid during the incident, to tell his story. So if you’re a kid, or a partner, spouse, or friend, and you’re trying to encourage The person you care about to that you think this might be really good for them, or you’re just genuinely curious and you want to get those stories captured. Chris Badgett: This episode of LMScast is brought to you by Popup Maker, the most powerful, trusted pop up solution for WordPress. Whether you’re selling online courses or memberships, Popup Maker helps you grow your email list, boost sales conversions, and engage your visitors with highly customizable pop ups. Imagine creating custom opt ins, announcements, and promotions that actually convert. I personally use Popup Maker on my Lifter LMS websites for lead magnet opt ins, card abandonment, upsells, downsells, And guiding users to helpful content. PubMaker is an essential tool for growing my email list and making more money online through my website. Ready to take your website to the next level? Head on over to wppopupmaker. com forward slash lmscast and save 15 percent on your order. Discount automatically applies when you visit through that link. Popup Maker also has an awesome free version so you can just use that as well. Go to wppopupmaker. com forward slash lmscast and save 15 percent off your order or get started with the free version now. Get more leads and sales on your website with Popup Maker today. Now back to the episode. Chris Badgett: How, what would you say to somebody like that? Or it could be like the retirement home activity coordinator. To encourage somebody to buy into the idea of doing this.  Nick Usborne: You can’t force it. There’ll be people who are very private and don’t want to. But I would say generally more often than not, we like it when people express interest in us, in our lives. It’s Oh, you’re interested in me. You’re interested in my life. That’s cool. Let me tell you stuff. And I think particularly if there’s a strong bond there, like if, Hey, I’m just thinking if one of my grandkids asked me something like that, I’d just melt because my grandkids. So I’d say, sure, of course, go sit here. I’ll tell you some, I’ll tell you some stories. And your dad can tell me to shut up when I tell stories that aren’t appropriate. But it’s I think most of us we like the idea of being asked cause it makes us feel not important, but it makes us it’s like our life matters. It’s like an endorsement of likes it is. It’s like the subtext is grandpa, your life matters to me. And that, like I said, that makes me melt inside. Yeah, but like I say you can’t force it. Some people are very private and they won’t want to. They won’t want to talk about stuff like that or they’ll have had, a lot of almost insurmountable difficulties in their life. And they just don’t want to revisit that. You got to respect that say, okay, that’s okay. And if you’re in a group, if you’re in a group setting, like in a retirement home, maybe out of a group of six or seven people, maybe there’ll be one or two who just like to sit there and listen. And that’s okay. Chris Badgett: What what’s like a realistic timeline for somebody to go through this process, just in general, I know different strokes for different folks, but it’s somebody pulled us off in a couple months, three months.  Nick Usborne: Yeah, I think you can, I think that’s about right. You can do this in two or three months. One of the things I say in, I interrupt one of the sessions in my course. I say, okay, hang on. And that’s where I’m talking about the discovery process of finding all this stuff and maybe interviewing some old friends or school teachers or old bosses, or maybe finding, maybe your local paper’s still there and they have archives and you can go back to when you were a teenager or you played on a sports team and you think it might’ve been in the newspaper. All this kind of discovery stuff. I say don’t rush this. The process of putting together the raw materials for your story, the journey is half the value. Yes, it’ll be great when you’re done and you can share this, but like the real value here is this journey of putting it together. Yeah, so don’t rush it. Like you want to, and it’s tricky cause I also say don’t slow to a crawl and lose momentum, but don’t feel this like a deadline and enjoy and be present for those times when you’re discovering stuff or you’re interviewing someone, or you’re going out for a beer with someone that you haven’t talked to for 15 years or 20 years. Don’t rush that stuff. Because even if at the end. You never put this down on paper, which I hope everyone does or on, whatever medium, even if, just the process, just going through the process up to that point has huge value, I think, of exploring, re exploring your life through the stories of your life. Chris Badgett: It’s almost like a working vacation. It’s fun. But there’s some work aspect to it, but yeah it’s enjoyable.  Nick Usborne: Yeah. And there’s no deadline. There’s no failing. There’s no, it’s just a, it’s just a journey. And I think like I say, it was, keep trying to think of what was the original spark? And I can’t remember. I think it was, I think there was just like a page in a book that I read. Months of my life in the middle of last year that I just think it just, that was just the spark and I can’t remember the book and I but I’m pretty sure I was reading a book and I don’t think I finished the book. I think when I had that spark, I stopped on that page and I thought that, and it wasn’t about life stories. It was about life, but I can’t remember why it sparked the idea. But yeah, sometimes you just never know where it’s going to come from, the idea.  Chris Badgett: What’s your approach to teaching in the course? Is it like videos, text assignments? How do you do  Nick Usborne: it? Yeah, I do kind of video. First of all, I build PowerPoint because I want to show things. I want to illustrate things. And then I go through them. It’s as if I’m doing it. I record it. The course as it stands at the moment is pre recorded. So there’s nine different videos, nine, nine sessions. And basically it’s me, my voiceover on PowerPoint slides, but at the end of each session, there is a worksheet. So this is part of the kind of teaching process that I go through. And I said, look, listen to his session one. Here’s the worksheet and this stuff for you to do. There’s an assignment that there’s lines where you write stuff down. So I encourage people to go through, listen to the session, complete the workbook, the worksheet, before they go to the next session. So they’re internalizing and they’re participating because the, this, like with courses, sometimes we get into courses and we just we’re half present, half not, and we’re listening to it. And then maybe we see something out the window and then maybe we’re halfway through and we don’t even go back for the rest of the course. And that happens a lot. So I don’t want that to happen. That’s why I have these worksheets in between sessions. to get people to actually participate and to internalize what they’ve learned and to build up, in the end, they’re going to have these nine different worksheets as a pile, as a little binder, as it were. I also have some kind of bonus materials. There’s one of them is a prompting guide, where if you are sitting with your grandmother, How do you prompt her to remember? Hey grandma, like if, when you walked out your door, when you were 10 years old, what did you see when you went to the shops, what shops did you go into? And what did they have? When you left school, grandpa what was your dream? What did you want to do? And then what happened? And so it’s one of the, one of the downloads, one of the kind of bonus downloads is 52 different prompts to, to actually, and that is those 52 prompts are really interesting. Cause you can do it to yourself. You can go through them and get and do it yourself. And it’s really interesting to unearth stuff that you haven’t thought about forever. I did it. I said a while back, my wife said, Oh, do you remember that time we went to Pittsburgh? And I said, I’ve never been to Pittsburgh in my life. She said, sure you do. We went together. I said, we did not. And she had to really prompt me and remind me of the specifics of that trip. And I said, Oh, wow, you’re of course you’re right. She could remember I didn’t. But then I did and it’s like we forget so much and it’s not like part of the prompting and part of this whole process is we, our memories, this back shelf, there’s the back room storage of our memories and there’s front, the front window of our memories. And we often get lived through life just looking in the front, the store window, the front, the big memories that we hold in the front. But man, we got so many memories stored back there in the shed behind during the, on shelves back there. And that is where some of the amazing stuff is in those memories and stories that we haven’t thought about for a decade or decades. And that’s what the prompts are for. Is it helps you unearth those and you go, ah, and you go back into the storage room and you pull out the, and it’s Oh man, I haven’t thought about that for so long. I should give that guy a call. So again, it’s enriching. It’s reminding you of the kind of tapestry of your life and the weave of your life. Chris Badgett: Tell us about the free guide on your site. So if somebody wants to check things out, you have sign up with an email address and they get your life story discovery guide. Yeah. What’s in there?  Nick Usborne: It’s basically, it covers a fair bit of what we talked about today. It’s basically a lot of it is the why. So the course is the practical hands on step by step that, that free it’s, Hey, it’s 47 pages. It’s not nothing. It’s not like one of those three page freebies the substance there, but what it takes you through a lot of the, why the emotional journey of why this is important, how it can be good for you, how it can strengthen your family. How it can. Bridge gaps in the family it can bring people together. So a lot of the reasons why in the discovery guide is to discover why you want to do this. And then at the end, if you think, you know what? Yeah, I do want to do this. I’ve discovered the one, then you go into the course and that’s the practical step by step. Okay. Here’s how we’re going to do it.  Chris Badgett: So if somebody out there is listening to this and what their curiosity is peaked, or they know someone like, let’s say they have an older parent and they see this opportunity, what would you say to them to encourage them to follow this thread? Get the, get,  Nick Usborne: Get the guide. The, anything you’ll pay for the, any payment for that is I’ll send you a series of three or four emails in the days to come. But even the emails are informative rather than pitching. Yeah, take the guide and talk about it. Talk about it with people in the family. Talk about it with, say it could be an elder relative. Sometimes, I guess I mainly. Speaking to if I’m buying Facebook advertising for this, which I do to get people to see this, I’m targeting the 50 plus 55 plus. But like you say you could be 25 and you’re thinking of your grandma or your parents or that old friend who’s lived next door forever and used to babysit you when you were a kid. And that seems to be, I’ve mentioned before, I think it seems to be a real motivator for some people. This is almost I’m not ready yet, but I’d love to help. I wish I’d spoken to, I’ve got a friend whose mother. And she had Alzheimer’s it’s not a lot of fun. And she was saying, ah, I wish I’d thought about this for my mom before that, that took hold that I’d captured her story in time. Because again, like when someone’s diagnosed with Alzheimer’s or dementia or whatever, it is that fear, the horror of everything is lost. Everything in my mind, every memory, everything is gone. So it can be very powerful for them to invite them to let’s capture that. Let’s capture your life story. So yeah, I’d get the discovery guide. That’s the starting point that, that explores the reasons why. And then you can get the course for yourself if you want to do it for yourself, or you can get it to help, to go through it with an older relative or friend.  Chris Badgett: And I’ll just say, we don’t have to mention the price because Nick may change it at some point, but it’s very affordable and approachable. So if you’re intrigued, I’d encourage you to check out yourawesomelifestory. com. Any final words for the people, Nick? Nick Usborne: If you’re course creators, or you want to create courses do what I did, which is follow the spark, follow the flame. There’s lots of, there’s lots of people who will say, Hey, here are the hot topics. Here’s where you need to be. Here’s where you want to be. That’s okay. But I, but but I think your greatest work will come and your most successful courses will come out of where it lights a fire inside you. It’s like I say, this is I’m ridiculous. I published a number of courses and I always think on day one, Oh my goodness, this is awesome. A hundred people are going to buy it in the first five minutes and they don’t, but it’s what kind of drives me. Like I say, if you’re not in love with your topic, it’s really hard to keep going because it is a grind. You have to keep working it. It’s a business. You have to keep working it. So find something you love. You want to share that is important to you that has meaning for you and that you think has deep meaning for other people. And yeah, now when you invest the time it’s important. It’s rewarding. So yeah, Jeff is something you love with a spark.  Chris Badgett: I just thought of it as you were talking were to use a course as like the finished product, you could, for example, like I’m thinking about this, if if I went through a prompt hey, what lessons do I wish my kids knew When they’re my age or before they get here. So they have an easier time or better time or whatever. Why would I teach them? And then is there a story that goes with that? And you can literally like use a core structure, which are literally called life lessons or lessons. They could be life lessons and do that. And then even one, there could be a whole course about finances and money as an example and then another course about love and another course about travel, another course. Nick Usborne: To the point about the story thing, it’s say, if I say to one of my kids or grandkids, listen to me, I have years of experience. Let me give you some advice. Generally doesn’t work like, Hey, old person, just shush. But if I say, let me tell you a story and the lesson is embedded in the story. Then that’s something that people want to hear about and that stories are teaching tools, the fair, don’t go into the woods. Cause the big bad wolf, we tell stories to keep our kids safe, don’t, don’t go out after dark into the woods. It’s a scary place. The wolves will get you. So yeah, stories are fun. Sorry. Rambling.  Chris Badgett: No, it’s good. It’s good. Yeah. Story is part of teaching. That’s Nick Usborne, yourawesomelifestory. com. Check it out. Get the guide. Thanks for coming back on the show, Nick. It’s always a pleasure to have you. I can’t wait to see where this goes as time goes on. And it’s really providing a valuable service to the world and humanity and people’s. Hearts, minds, and memories. It’s very cool. Like you said, it’s a spark. And the more I look at this project, the bigger that flame keeps getting. It’s a good idea.  Nick Usborne: Okay. Hey, and we should mention this is built. I’d love my, the whole thing is built on Lifter LMS. Come on, man. You gotta, we gotta do a bit of promotion.  Chris Badgett: And Nick is a serial creator. He has many core sites built on lifter help mess. So it’s always fun to see what you do. And I love seeing it when it’s something like this that can really put out a ripple of positive impact in the world. One of the other things is there’s a lot of kind of negative ripples in the world right now, or all around the world. I love the idea of putting something positive out there as a bit of a counterbalance modest, but just a little thing. Going back, like you said, we’re really focused on the present and the future, and we have our recent window of memory, but there’s a lot of gems back there to go find. Nick Usborne: Absolutely.  Chris Badgett: Thanks for coming back on the show, Nick. We really appreciate it. You’re  Nick Usborne: welcome. Thank you for inviting me. Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMSCast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at lifterlms. com forward slash gift. Go to lifterlms. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post Capturing Your Awesome Life Story appeared first on LMScast.

This episode is brought to you by Popup Maker Boost Your Website’s Leads & Sales with Popup Maker Get started for free or save 15% OFF Popup Maker Premium—the most trusted WordPress popup plugin to grow your email list and increase sales conversions. Get Popup Maker Now In this LMScast episode, James LePage from Automatic and Chris Badgett explore how AI is changing WordPress, online education, and coaching. James LePage, who has experience in web development, entrepreneurship, and artificial intelligence, is a prominent figure in the AI and WordPress fields. From creating websites for neighbors to managing a prosperous organization that specialized in WooCommerce and online learning systems, he began working with WordPress as a youngster. From creating websites for neighbors to managing a prosperous organization that specialized in WooCommerce and online learning systems, he began working with WordPress as a youngster. In this episode, James talks about how he went from working as a freelance WordPress developer as a teenager to managing an agency. Exploring AI, and ultimately selling his firm, WPAI, to Automattic. He emphasizes how AI is revolutionizing automation, website building, and course production, simplifying difficult processes for non-developers. The topic of formal education’s applicability in the IT industry is also covered in the conversation, with James highlighting the importance of experiential learning and incubator settings. Here’s Where To Go Next… Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website. Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS. Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014. And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide Episode Transcript Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program, I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co founder of Lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show. Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMSCast. We’re joined by a special guest. His name is James LePage. You can find him on Twitter or X at James W. LePage. James is a leader in the AI space, particularly in WordPress. And we’re going to dive deep on artificial intelligence, WordPress, and specifically around courses and coaching and teaching and things like that. But first, welcome to the show, James. Thank you very much for having me. I’m excited to be here. Awesome, man. I can’t wait for this conversation. We met briefly at an event, but it’s going to be really cool to dive deep and get into what you’ve been up to. Tell us about just your journey with WordPress and artificial intelligence, just to lay the groundwork for, where you are, what you’re doing and your area of focus. James LePage: Yeah, I have been involved in WordPress basically since I’ve grown up. So I’ve grown up in this industry and I got started when I was a pretty young teen and working in a kitchen and realized I didn’t like working in a kitchen. There was a chef who was mean to me, threw knives at me. I was like, I don’t like this. I need to go do something else. And that’s something else ended up being tinkering with WordPress and eventually realizing, hey. This is a really easy thing to break into and get started in. So started building WordPress sites for myself and the neighbors and. Started off on page builders, but grew into learning the basics of HTML and then CSS and then JavaScript and PHP. And I think that type of story is something that I’ve seen a lot of stories similar in the WordPress industry. So I started and grew into a developer. Was freelancing for a little bit, ended up making an agency. That agency I ran for a few years. It went from just me as a credit credibility device to getting a first developer and then a designer and growing into eight people doing some pretty big DTC projects, specifically. On WooCommerce, but also some course websites, which I had mentioned to you. So we have some of that course experience in the background of my mind ran the agency for a bit and ended up selling the portfolio in college. In college, I also was studying AI when a lot of AI research was coming out around transformers and gen AI and things like that. And then left WordPress for a bit, did a venture backed startup. I was the technical co founder. It was called chair club based in New York city. And. That was a big idea that didn’t work out. So after it didn’t work out, trying to figure out what I wanted to do. And it was like do I go back to the agency world? Do I go try to break into Fang and the more traditional software development, or do I do what I love doing and found something again? And I ended up taking option three and option three was really clear to me because. AI was becoming really powerful at that point, GPT two, and then GPT three were coming out and it was really clear to me that, Hey, I had a lot of problems in my agency building things. And I think AI could be really beneficial on the code side to start. So launched the first product in what grew into WPAI, which was another venture backed startup. Specifically, as the super creative name suggests for WordPress and AI and launched the first product called CodeWP, which was a very creative name again, a code generator for WordPress ran that for a bit and then also started down the path of creating an AI agent for WordPress that did things for you before it was cool and Yeah, built that and then very recently in December ended up getting acquired by Automatic and still breaking into the role at Automatic. But we’re thinking about big picture AI specifically in the context of WordPress and the open web and publishing and what that looks like in the short, mid and long term future. So that’s a long introduction, but that is my entire background in WordPress. Chris Badgett: That’s a very well stated introduction is quite the journey you’ve been on. I have to ask just because education is important to those who watch this. It’s interesting. You studied AI in college. What did you get out of that? And would you recommend that to somebody entering college years these years in 2025? How important is it? James LePage: It’s an interesting question. So my approach to college was very anti college and it was difficult for me to actually go to college because I was running a very successful agency in high school that was, it was doing very well. And we had really big projects and I was apprehensive of doing that and school at the same time, ended up going to school. I went to Syracuse university and they had a really great entrepreneurship track. So I actually, Ended up taking the major in entrepreneurship. And as a part of that major, it was college and you still did your classes, but it was entrepreneurship. So you had your opportunity to work on your business and you were essentially mandated to study topics. And I was in school at the time that the AI was having a lot of research. Published about it transformers and then also the application of transformers around gpt2 and that grew into gpt3 and chat gpt in the systems that we see today that was happening. So for me, it was logical. All right, I’m forced to study like I have to learn. Oh, no. So I ended up studying AI and that provided an incredible base and foundation. For me to be able to understand how these systems actually work. And I think that’s one of my superpowers where I can look at these systems and be like, Oh, this is how it works. So it makes the actual thought of how you implement it. For example, with code WP, the idea of, all right, I can really easily. use one of these models fine tune an understanding of WooCommerce code into it, provide relevant code samples and get a really crazy system that takes my request and spits out a WooCommerce code snippet, which was the actual original idea behind CodeWP. So the education was really important. And I don’t know, I don’t know the place of college in software. I think that I actually do know a lot of software developers who didn’t go to school and think differently. And they’re really effective because of that. I know many who have comp sci degrees and are really effective because of that as well. So it’s an interesting question. My education is legitimate, but it’s a bit different than the path that a lot of other people took. Chris Badgett: That’s really cool to combine your entrepreneurship, the business you’re actually building and working in with school at the same time. And that’s it just creates some synergy there or whatever. That’s a pretty cool way to think about it. Like you’re not just, getting ideas and studying. You’re like working on your business and learning technology. James LePage: It was almost more of an ideas incubator. And the most impactful part of Syracuse specifically was they had an incredible incubator and they had. A lot of people, there were a lot of people in AI who actually run pretty successful AI startups at this point. There are a lot of people out of AI and everybody just talking and sharing ideas paired with the mandate to actually learn paired with the fact that a lot of my buddies in this incubator, we’re also running either services, businesses, or trying to raise for a startup, or in some cases, actually running a startup and that ecosystem and environment was really helpful. So I actually would hope that. Education goes that way in the future, especially as we see more impact with AI. And there’s a whole nother podcast to do on AI and education, but I think that moving towards that collaborative environment is really helpful. And I actually see a lot of parallels with the course industry. So I’m sure we can touch back on that in, in the future. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Take us into the future a little bit. The whole world is a gush with AI, my old parents are using chat GPT but like particularly around WordPress and publishing and building websites. What do you see the future? That’s how the masses aren’t really seeing yet as a deep practitioner of AI, like the opportunity, like what is it? James LePage: I think there’s a really big. And there are a million different answers. So I’ll try my best to do some of the answers. The first answer is us as people who build WordPress and the creators and WordPress and those in agency, those trying to do their own site, those freelancing and building for others. I think that. There are a massive amount of AI tools coming out that are here to stay, and those who adopt these AI tools become super, super powered in terms of being able to code, being able to ideate on content, being able to ideate on images and designs and things like that. So I think the immediate opportunity for everybody is to really embrace these tools and look at how you can use them in your day to day lives and be a more effective creator. And those who adopt that, I think, are really well positioned for whatever the future of AI holds. You’ll notice that I didn’t say write an entire WordPress site, or click one button and create a WordPress site, or paint a painting by clicking one button and creating an image. And I really think that In the grand scheme of things, human creativity is really important, and it’s going to become more and more important in the future, as we’ve already seen, I think, with these AI generated articles, and they all sound the same, and it’s all it’s content, but how beneficial really is it to us? I’m already seeing people who are not liking this and like against the AI side of things. So I think that aspect of how do I augment myself? How do I improve my workflows, not replace them with AI becomes important right now, but also how am I creating and maintaining that human element of what I do in that near future. So that’s the near future question. I think you can become really powerful. Especially in WordPress. So that’s why in WPAI, we built CodeWP and we built AgentWP. It was like, how do we provide these tools to the people who build to just be quicker? And I hated writing code snippets that were 80 percent the same for WooCommerce. So we built the tool to fix that. I think that was like the real mentality behind those products. That’s also what we’re thinking about at Automatic. And I think the whole industry is thinking about this. Like, how do we build tools to be more effective on the web? So that’s the short answer. I can also do a long answer, but I’ll break if there are any questions in between. Chris Badgett: I just, I’d say, I think GitHub Copilot has a really good name because the Copilot, the AI is there to sit beside you, not replace you or take your job. If you get really good at leveraging your Copilot. You’re going to be like 10 times more productive and save time and have more room for the creativity. And a quick clarifying question for the technical folks out there. How does chat GPT as an example? Differ or get hub copilot differ from James LePage: code WP started as this single turn prompt tool that you could say I want this functionality for my site and it would do its best to generate a single code snippet that you would install into functions PHP or like a plug in like code snippets to extend this little functionality. So a good example is that in WooCommerce You have a WooCommerce subscriptions plugin and you want to add this like additional subscription term. I think it comes with 12 or 24 months and I want 36 months. And if I wanted to code that, I could go on stack overflow. I could go on the WooCommerce docs. I can look through like the actual setup for this, but it’s simple enough and we can put it into this AI system and have this system output a really good. Piece of code for that specific functionality. And that was the origin of code WP. And it went through a few iterations. We ended up selling as we were working on the third iteration, but it really started growing more and more into an IDE. Where you would be conversationally working with this development environment and creating multiple files. It wasn’t just a PHP code snippet, now it could create a PHP primary file for a plugin and then generate the JavaScript and the CSS and enqueue those and create like a little functionality plugin. And that’s what it was really good at. It wasn’t anything to go and create the next lifter LMS with one button or gravity forms or whatever it was. And I don’t think we’ll ever have systems that really do that, but it was one of those things where it’s okay, I need this functionality for a client and I know what I need to do. I just don’t know how to do it. Exactly. So I’m going to have this tool do it for me. And we saw a lot of people love it. It was awesome to ride that wave of growth and appreciation as everything else was happening. So that product was launched a week before chat TBT. So we just rode the wave on the WordPress side of things, which was awesome. And that also allowed us to do a lot of real discovery of what people wanted. In terms of AI for WordPress where people were asking like, Hey, code WP, can you go and help me do a performance scan or a security scanner? Tell me why this page is blank and white. I have no idea. And that led to the second product agent WP, which was this thing in WordPress. And it was like, okay if we have this agent in WordPress and we can give it access to the file system in a safe way, and the ability to run and execute code in a safe way. Then at some point, this thing can read your error logs and tell you why this page is white and sit beside you as that copilot and do things for you, but also use what WordPress has to offer, which is this framework for data and functionality, basically and help you do really anything. So that was actually the motto is do anything WordPress and got pretty far along on that and then ended up at automatic and we’re keeping that mentality of. What can we do with AI and WordPress in a way that makes sense for the users of our awesome CMS? So that’s what we’re thinking about now Chris Badgett: How do you think about that across different types of users, like the developers, the power users, the first time user, it seems challenging to make everybody happy, but maybe I’m not thinking about it the same way, or maybe somebody, one segment, you got to focus on first or whatever. James LePage: It’s interesting because there are a lot of approaches that you have when it comes to AI and WordPress, because you have so many of these little user groups, and one approach is, AI is fairly robust and you can build a pretty robust system that. You can scale it up and down in terms of complexity and what it can do and what it has access to. So for the really basic first time user who just needs to know how to change their homepage to home from the blogs page, it can just say, Hey, go click this link and it will bring you to the relevance settings page. And it will say, here’s the settings page. And when you do this will happen. But for the developer, it can identify, Oh. This is a question that is not as simple as moving to a new page. This is a question that requires code. So I’m going to go and use that functionality that’s been built into the system to go and generate relevant code. So that’s one approach where you have a super generic system that adapts to the user base. Another approach is. Using user interface to silo different products. So for example, code WP it’s actually, it’s up and there’s always going to be a reference of what the code WP product was because I’m really proud of what we had built. Same with agent WP code WP. Was million buttons, a million options, a code editor front and center, like really built for a developer built for somebody who is ready to develop. And it was an AI product and it was still a conversational AI product, but that was built in a way where you had this tool bench to go and work on. And the agent. Was built with a single text input and it handled everything under the surface. And it was all using similar, actually it was using a lot of the same shared models and data infrastructure between our two products, but it was packaged in a way where it made it a lot easier for one group who was. Less technical in one group. We were super technical to go and make it happen. Those two approaches, I think each have their merits and I don’t really have a clear answer because we have done both at this point. So it’s a, it’s an interesting thing to think about. Chris Badgett: We paused after talking about the near term. What do you see further out with AI and WordPress? James LePage: I think it makes WordPress really important. So I think WordPress ends up becoming this. I mentioned this before, so there’s a mantra in automatic and throughout WordPress is the operating system for the open web. And I always looked at that and I was like, I don’t know, like I build websites with this. But I think that becomes much more true as these AI systems and AI content and AI, everything starts taking hold. And I think. The place WordPress has in this is a way that you can build sites in the near term But in the long term this is a way that you manage all of your personal content all of your writing all of your videos all of your images and it can surface as a website, but it can also surface as A source for maybe a voice assistant coming from some speaker somewhere, some AR VR experience or whatever else AI pushes the interaction model towards. So the WordPress product becomes super important because you need a way to manage all your stuff. You also, in the midterm, still need a way to manage your functionality, and maybe you still want a website. I’m not saying websites are going anywhere. I love websites. You still need that underlying system to make it all happen. There aren’t too many underlying systems that are open source, that power 42 percent of the internet already, and are built for headless with a great API. With extensibility like wordpress. So I think it has a really big places that operating system such framework for the web as The internet does change because I think it will. I think what will remain constant, which is what we started on is the human element. There’s always going to be the need for human created thoughts, human created ideas, images. It’s actually probably going to be way more important. And I’m hoping that at some point there’s going to be a standard, maybe. at the browser level or the OS level to verify this image was taken with an iPhone. This content was written by James himself. There’s the stamp. So we know, and you can repurpose the content however you want. You can present it as a website, you can present it as an AI bot, whatever, but the actual content and the way you manage it and the way you handle it will be really important. And I think The human bit will be the most important. I Chris Badgett: like that. It’s a it’s like a much bigger vision of what a content management system means. Like that content is not just images and texts on a screen on a webpage, right? It could go a lot of places for the human. They need a central place to manage their human created content and maybe some AI generated content as well. That’s really cool. Let’s turn the focus to the somebody who’s trying to teach online. Let’s say they, they want to make an online course and make money selling that through the internet all over the world. Maybe they have a coaching aspect where they do zoom calls or maybe that’s an upsell or whatever. How can course creators leverage AI these days? And where do you see the industry going for the e learning website powered by WordPress? James LePage: Yeah, I think probably the most important first thing is that I probably wouldn’t try to make a course with AI. I would lean on the human element. The reason why you’re making a course because you’re the expert in your domain and you want to Provide that knowledge to other people, be it for free or for profit or whatever it is. So focusing on that aspect of the human bit is the first step. I’d say it’s probably really, I haven’t created a course. I actually always thought about creating courses, but never ended up doing it. And I’d probably be pretty tempted to. Use a lot of AI to make my stuff. I think that the general trend of where everything’s going is people are picking up on AI created content and when they do, they really don’t like it. So in, in a specific scenario, so one of those scenarios would probably be education for those who are creating the courses and putting together this experience. that surfaces in a website or is an app or whatever it is. I think that AI is going to really help those individual creators who need to navigate WordPress and need to navigate complex data models and user interfaces that surface as really well built products like lifter. And they can use these tools to be. Much quicker with what would ones take maybe like a day or a week. Now you can focus all on the content and you’ll probably see really smart implementations of AI on a plugin level, on the WordPress level, on a browser and a device level as well, to really assist you in the process of actually how do I put together this page? How do I actually like. Assign this video content to this specific lesson. And how does this lesson play into a more general course structure? I think that type of usage of AI integrated, but also in systems like chat, dbt, where you’re trying to plan out I know how lifter works. I know how WordPress works. Let me like think through maybe my structure of the course before I start or how I’m putting the actual content together in a logical presentation for the user. I think those are immediate things that we can do. And in the near future, there’s going to be a lot of tools around, let’s make it easier for you to create this website and create this experience and get this content out to people. And then I think in the longer term, AI is going to modify and merge and you can probably use a I in the context of education where you have all this knowledge and you want to make it really easy for somebody to access that knowledge and There’s always the place for this structured style of education, but sitting next to that structured style of written content or videos, there could be an assistant, and it could be answering questions in real time, maybe anchored to the video providing that perplexity style search where you’re looking through things, and it’s like, Oh, James wrote about this in a community aspect of his course, or James had a lesson about this, and here’s what he had to say. So I think that type of generative aspect of AI is going to be Pretty helpful in the mid future. And then again, like as the interaction model with technology and it’s whole starts to change the human aspect, especially like the video stuff, like I’m just speaking to you person to person. Here’s what I know. Here’s what you want to know. I think that’s going to be really important as well. The concept of education online and the course online honestly, probably won’t be that disrupted by AI and I’m going to, like I said I’m going to be looking for people created content and hopefully there’s like actual verification. James actually made this to be able to have that experience. Chris Badgett: Can you talk us technically through this concept of an AI assistant for the student or an AI tutor? A course should work for everybody, but it should also work in challenging circumstances. And as we all know, in a classroom some people are doing better, some people are doing average, some people are really getting stuck. How would an AI tutor work? It’s essentially trained on All the content and the student could be like, Hey, I’m stuck on this part of what James said over here tell us about how, an AI tutoring system would work James LePage: technically. I think that there’s a lot to think about first the system itself. So of course, you could look at a course, like just a repository of data. This is a lot of information. Yes. Like I put together all of these lessons and they’re the written lessons, plans, and maybe like quizzes and courses or quizzes and videos, and all of this results in the user purchasing this to fulfill their goal of learning this specific topic. And. When you think about it, like a whole bunch of data, structured data, then you can think about, okay what does AI need to be really good? What does it need to answer the right questions? And if you go and ask chat, GBT, and it’s gotten way better over the years, but if you go and ask this thing, a super complex question with no access to the web, no access to anything, maybe it will answer it. on a surface level. It’s not going to answer it in a super detailed level. It’s not going to answer it in a super personalized level. Worst case, it’s actually going to answer it and it’s going to be wrong. And it’s going to hallucinate this response. Now me as the student is going to be like, Oh, I know this crazy formula and it’s completely wrong. And I think where you can implement this AI tutor in the context of a course is this tutor can draw on the information that the course has to offer. And instead of you can use it as this like artificial intelligence, or you can use it as a really powerful search tool that can present information in a personalized way to the user. So I’m on a video and I’m learning about this specific topic. And I paused the video at X timestamp. And I’m like, wow, I really did not understand anything that was just said here and I can rewind it. I watched it like 500 times. I still can’t figure it out. At that point what does the student do? If education, like being able to contact the instructors included, I’d probably call up the instructor and I’d be like, Hey, can you explain this in a different way? And that instructor would use the same information that was probably presented, but presented in a different way. That’s unique to my request, my, my request to understand. And this assistant can do the same thing. It can pull in all of the information from the course. It can pull in information from that specific lesson. And I can ask about. Hey, can you dive a little bit deeper onto this specific point that maybe the video glossed over, but maybe the information is available in the course or something like it, and it can surface this in a really unique way, and it can actually cite the lessons, too. So I see the interfaces like, let’s have this thing like a copilot sit beside you and be available to answer these questions, be available to repurpose the human content. And cite the sources. So we know that this is a relevant and accurate answer, but it’s an answer structured in a way that best matches your question. And I think that’s a really powerful education device because you basically have that on demand answering aspect of the instructor. And the instructor always has the position in the education of, Hey, like I need to really understand what this user is. I’m the subject matter expert. I’m going to answer in this way. I don’t think the copilot could ever really do that, but I think it can surface those immediately. Relevant questions, and that excites me a lot. And I actually already do this with ChatGBT, and I’ll take AI papers, and I’ll put it into ChatGBT, and I’ll read the paper, and I’ll bump into a problem, and I’ll be like, Oh, let’s talk a little bit deeper about that, and let’s reframe how this paper presents things, maybe in a simpler way, or in a different way. And that style of education, paired with AIs, is really helpful to me. Chris Badgett: Based on what you’re saying, it gives me even more excitement about WordPress in terms of being a educational content management system. So if a teacher is old school and has like folders of paper, lesson plans or whatever, their content is not digitized. But the more people have their content digitized in videos. In courses or whatever, it could be often Google Docs and other tools outside of WordPress, but it’s making sure that as a teacher of the future that your content is managed and accessible by AI is really important and WordPress is going to play a significant role in that, I think. James LePage: Absolutely. And that’s a lot of what I’m thinking about and focused on at Automatic, but also as a community member and somebody who’s been. With WordPress and AI since the start of all this generative stuff. It’s like, how do we make WordPress an easier way to take what you have and then surface it in a website? Like, how do we make building websites easier? Because that’s the purpose of a website. How do I present myself digitally? But then in the mid future, like how do we. Get the right content for the right context and then present it to a user in a unique way and circling back to what you said about the education and maybe these professors or teachers have all of these like written documents and these crazy things. I think that WordPress. Paired with AI can help the digitization process and help classify and tag and categorize this information and make it more accessible to users. So you don’t really have to take the super long process of Oh, I have all these paper notes. I have to go through them and type them out. I don’t want to do that. So that’s a really interesting thought about how you make information more accessible. Then also another interesting thought is say you have this. educational system and you have 50 students and they all read and look through your course and There are a lot of questions that arise from it. And how do you make this Educational system better for users in the future and for students in the future? You can have an FAQ or they append information on to Maybe has a new video like, Hey, here’s some common questions that popped up from the first cohort in this style of system. The teacher can go and answer these questions. And now these questions are relevant and available to an AI assistant or however else you’re choosing to present information. They can also like scribble notes like if you have WordPress as this content management system and you have it integrated with AI, maybe I draw a diagram to better show the user that student. A specific concept. And now that diagram is always available to the user and can be used as the A. I. To refer to or maybe make a diagram of its own to try and answer the question. So you have this ever growing collection of knowledge, and that becomes really powerful. And it’s a different way of presenting education, but it all comes back to you need the expert behind all of this stuff. And it’s just how are you presenting content that comes from the expert? To the actual end user. Chris Badgett: Speaking of subject matter experts, some folks don’t really understand AI agents yet. So how would like a course creator first, what is an AI agent? Second, like how would a course creator leverage an AI agent either for education or just for their business? Like the thing that pops in my mind is if I build. A course that targets a very specific type of person. I would love to set an AI agent loose to go find all of my ideal students and send them this personalized email and invite them to my free training and see if they’ll be a fit for the paid course or whatever. But tell us, riff a little bit on AI agents.  This episode of LMScast is brought to you by Popup Maker, the most powerful, trusted pop up solution for WordPress. 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Now back to the episode. James LePage: I, so I started smiling when you asked for the definition because we started building this agent a year and a half ago and agents really picked up maybe like in the past three months and have really become a topic of discussion, but they’ve come from marketing. So there was never really a clear definition of what this agent is. It’s this crazy AI thing that does things and it’s going to change the entire world, but it was always like if I can say that as a company, I can go raise. 50 million and try to figure out what an AI agent actually is. And that’s been the case for a while. And for us, when we started working on our agent, our definition was, all right, we want this thing to live in WordPress and do tasks for users and start in a synchronous manner. I ask it to go and. Update a setting and maybe I don’t know where the setting is. So it goes to the settings page and it updates it and says, here’s what I did. And in the far future, the goal with that agent was, all right, let’s have this proactively just exist in WordPress and help do the plugin updates and help do the performance and security scans and the stuff that I don’t want to do. I just want to push it off to this expert assistant. So that was our agent. And I think recently the industry has converged on the same definition of it’s an AI system that does things for users. And it can do things in front of you. It can do things behind you, upside down, whatever it is. It’s a system that does something, an AI system that does something. And the reason we’ve come to these. Pretty clear definitions at this point is because now there are systems that can actually do things for you in specific applications and industries. So like in WordPress, but also opening eyes, pushing systems like operator, they just announced this thing that can see a computer screen and click around. And there’ve been systems like that in the past. This is probably the biggest marketed one. So we’re getting to systems like this. I think the way. People online should think about these systems is as right now, really powerful automation tools. Instead of building a Zapier flow or a Zapier flow, I’m going to go and think about, and then prompt this assistant to do something similar. And maybe it’s going to work. Maybe it’s not. The thing with the operator product is the web is a wild place that is made of many different frameworks and. Sometimes accessible, sometimes not. So computers have problems with the web as people do. So it’s not the most stable right now, but at some point you’re going to have these things that do things for you. You can automate away a lot of the busy work you can in the context of education, maybe I’m trying to do research for a new lesson that I want to push out. I can have this go and probably pull in maybe a hundred relevant articles and. Maybe pre scan them and say here’s why I think that this paper is relevant to your AI course. And obviously not have the thing, read the paper for me. I don’t think it’s going to be good at that, but classifying and categorizing and then helping me go and say, all right, I should read this paper to make this lesson. That’s probably the way. That style of like general agent is going to be really impactful. I think in the context of WordPress, I know in the context of WordPress, we’re working on things that can make the annoying parts of WordPress easier. So the maintenance, the updates, the security actually using WordPress, like how do you make that experience better so people can focus on what they’re good at? Like course creation or website creation or selling physical products or running my bakery, which I need my WordPress site to go and link off to. So that’s probably high level how I look at agents. It’s really fluid. It’s something that there’s a lot of like grandiose ideas. If we’re going to have like swarms of agents talking to agents and the agents will do agent things, and then eventually it’ll tell the human that it just bought a car for a super great, like maybe we’ll have that. Maybe we won’t. My main thought about agents is there are probably some immediate automation benefits. There are probably some really fun industry specific applications. And it’s probably something that in the concept of an AI that does stuff for you, you should probably watch. But I don’t know if we’re going to have like swarms of agents buying cars and piloting Tesla robots anytime soon. Who knows? We’ll see. Chris Badgett: What do you think about like a website builder who’s not a developer and they start getting, more ability to create custom code using AI tools or doing it in future WordPress tools. How do you, like the human is also still needed for example, you could build a whole app without being a developer. And now you have an app, but what if it breaks? What if there’s security problems? Like how should people think about using AI to code without having a human coder around? James LePage: There are two sides to the question. The first side is the tools that companies make. So the tools that we made at WPAI, and now that we’re working on at Automatic, it’s up to. Us, the creators, to make these tools in a way that are safe and accurate and as good as we possibly can make them. So when it came to CodeWP in the beginning, there was like no thought towards security, no thought towards accessibility. And as the product grew, we got much more focused on, okay we need a system that makes sure there’s a bulletproof sanitization of anything going in or out of these code snippets and these plugins eventually. So that was our responsibility. And we had to build the tools to use the models to apply them to our specific products and use cases in a safe, accurate manner that was intended for our industry. So that’s one side of it. And the other side of it is. Just going and creating systems that actually offer value and tying that back into the responsibility of the builder. I don’t think the responsibility really ever falls into the user’s lap, unless you’re using general tools and generalist tools. And eventually I think these systems will be so good that. We can move a lot of the crazy stuff towards the AI. So the user themselves is acting as the expert in their business and in what they do. And they’re piloting this system, knowing that it’s outputting good stuff. Or it’s saying, no, I can’t do that. I don’t know how to do that. And that’s a really important system that we were working on with our agent. AI always says yes. So you have to create systems for it to say no, to not do something. As opposed to doing something and blowing up your site or doing something and it not being what you want it to do. So it comes back to build really good systems. And then follow and subscribe to the mindset of the do it with me user. So I’m an expert. I’m, I like using the bakery example, because one day I’m going to open a bakery. So it’s I run my bakery. I know the customers that come in, I know my location. And I know why people come to my bakery. I know we cook our bread in this awesome, incredible, specific way. I don’t want to build a website really, but I want to present on a website. So I want to have this AI do it with me. I want to walk it through, like here are my needs and my requirements. And I want it to either build the site or tell me, no, I can’t build the site. Go hire a real professional. I’m just a little AI agent. So when you build good AI systems that know their limits and are really accurate and you have the do it with me style user, I think that opens up the accessibility to. A lot of people that would never create websites or pay people to create websites anyway. And that means more usage of WordPress. That means my bakery becomes more impressive. So at some point I need to hire a full marketing agency to create the brand, to create a better website. And it’s just, I think it’s beneficial for everybody. Chris Badgett: Last question for you, James. One of the things that excites me about WordPress and AI is the open source. Nature of WordPress so that, the code is easily accessible to the entire world for like free open source software. Whereas like a closed environment, SAS application, it’s like a walled garden and things can’t, AI can’t necessarily train on it unless it’s internal inside that company or whatever. What are the benefits of, Like open source software in the world of AI. James LePage: It’s the most, it’s the most beneficial selling point that you could possibly have because specific to WordPress, it’s been open source for over 20 years at this point, I think. So the models themselves already know how WordPress works and that’s great in, in isolation, but for us who build systems that make WordPress more accessible to applied systems, that means that we already have. A starting point that is miles ahead of things like Webflow the models already know. So when we build pipelines. When we fine tune these things, when we create these systems. They can be awesome. And they can be really impactful. I think you’ll see really helpful, impactful systems coming out of us and other people in the future because of it. Then also like open source the mentality of open source. The ability to self host, the ability to own your own data, the ability to look through a code base, the ability to have say in where a project goes, so not making this API change that maybe a closed source company would just hit a button and now it’s version three, putting thought into how does this play into my needs? That’s what WordPress is all about, and I think that idea going into AI and how AI impacts the open web and WordPress running 42 percent plus of the open web that’s the most impactful, most powerful thing ever. I could be building AI at any company doing anything, and I think that WordPress is really powerful, and that’s why I choose to build in WordPress. That’s why I started the AI startup in WordPress. That’s why I’m at Automatic now. I think that’s everything. So I think that’s a good closer because I love WordPress. I think it being open source is incredibly beneficial in the AI sense. And there’s a lot of opportunity in terms of the human element of content creation, putting it into this open source CMS, adapting with the changes that AI will bring and moving into a glass half full and an exciting future as opposed to something Chris Badgett: else. That’s James LePage. You can find him on Twitter and X over at James W. LePage. Look for him there. Give him a follow. Thanks for coming on the show. This has been a really fun conversation about AI. I know you out there watching and listening have learned a few things and hopefully you’re excited as I am about the future. Thanks so much, James. I really appreciate it. I can’t wait to do this again in two years and see where we’re at. James LePage: It’s fun to be on an exponential curve. Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. And with that Twitter address, my DMS are always open. So if anybody has questions and wants to bounce ideas around and try to see where we’re going with AI we’re all in this together and I love answering these questions. So feel free to get me on X James W the page. Thanks James. Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMSCast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at lifterlms. com forward slash gift. Go to lifterlms. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post AI For WordPress Learning Management System Websites With James LePage appeared first on LMScast.

This episode is brought to you by Popup Maker Boost Your Website’s Leads & Sales with Popup Maker Get started for free or save 15% OFF Popup Maker Premium—the most trusted WordPress popup plugin to grow your email list and increase sales conversions. Get Popup Maker Now Chris Badgett and Jim Hankins discuss how Jim and his wife, Doreen, developed a flourishing e-learning firm in the firearm safety teaching area. Training was an important part of the company when they first opened as a gun store. They eventually discovered their love for teaching and switched to weapon safety instruction. Doreen swiftly rose to prominence as one of the best educators in the field. Using her knowledge to expand their company. To assist other instructors and other companies increase their web presence. She even penned a book called “The Firearms Marketing Toolkit“. Realizing the potential of online education, they started providing weapon safety instruction renewal courses in Michigan. Opening up the procedure to a larger audience. Additionally, they created a real estate agent safety course that was authorized for continuing education credits, thereby broadening their scope. Their ability to strategically seek out to and cultivate relationships with regulatory bodies is a key component of their success. They sought to have their courses approved by regulatory bodies so that they could become the preferred supplier of weapon safety instruction, as handgun training frequently entails both legal compliance and required knowledge. Here’s Where To Go Next… Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website. Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS. Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014. And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide Episode Transcript Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program, I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co founder of Lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show. Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS cast. I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Jim Hankins. He’s from cribops. com. Jim is a shining example of what I call an education entrepreneur who has found a niche successfully deployed e learning and repeated ways in the firearm safety niche. And he’s done this business with his wife and there’s so much to unpack here, but first welcome to the show, Jim. Thanks Chris. It’s great to be here. So tell us about when I saw you, when you reached out or we connected and I saw you had so many sites. I was like, this is awesome. It’s hard enough for some people to get one site off the ground. Tell us about the genesis of firearm safety training and how you were able to. Figure go into this niche, but also do it in a repeated manner in different contexts. Jim Hankins: Sure. So my wife and I started this business firearms training business actually starting as a gun store, as a retail outlet with training as a. Big part of the business, but yeah, so it’s, yeah, 17 years ago. Then we just over time decided that we actually really liked the training aspect of it and gave up the, the retail side of it and just went a hundred percent for training. Doreen is a marketing genius when it comes to just relationship building and local local marketing, cause that’s a very local business, and so she just became pretty successful over time. And in the firearms training business, there’s, certifying bodies that create the content that the States we’ll say, yes, this meets our criteria and and they oftentimes have other services that they provide that they sell to customers and Doreen became one of the top instructors in that space. So yeah, long story short, she then wrote a book. There’s a book an Amazon called the firearms marketing toolkit, if I remember correctly. That’s focused on helping firearms instructors really, it applies to any local business on how to, how to be found on the internet. And we started. Providing services, coaching services and hosting services for CRM, marketing, automation, those kind of things, anything to help them make the most of the time because they’re usually solopreneurs, right? Or there might maybe a husband and wife, team they oftentimes have a, main job and this is a side hustle they do on the weekends, right? So anything they could do to help automate that process of, user sign up and those kind of things. We started recording content for them that they could in turn sell or give away to their customers to get them moving in the direction of using e learning as another aspect of their business. Dream was getting pretty successful with that concept in the state of Michigan, she created a renewal class that could be taken online. So now that could be purchased anywhere in the state. She created a real estate agent safety. Class that actually she went through the process of getting it approved for continuing education. And so now you get to see credits for that. She just started pushing that type of content out to other instructors. And then that became, a whole another business of hosting, web hosting and CRM hosting for the class. For the instructors. Yeah. Yeah that’s how we got into the, learning management as a service and providing it to other customers. Chris Badgett: Yeah, you guys create the content or you’re using licensed content or a little bit of both. Jim Hankins: We’re creating all of our own content. Then just literally providing that over to them as a white label and they can, sell or. Or give away as a lead magnet. In some cases, it’s really short just for the purpose of lead magnets. It could be content that helps the students become acclimated to the vernacular before the class. They have a little, 30 minute class that they can take at their option. Before they join if they’re new to that world. And yeah, so that’s what we do. Chris Badgett: What, like I see a lot of people who are in the mandatory education space. It could be for a job like to keep a license or get credits or it could be like I’ve seen stuff in the court systems. But I think one of the biggest things you have to figure out and one of those is if there is a governing body, how to work with them or find them or help get them to promote you once you’re approved and just build that relationship. What kind of general advice do you have about? Being seen and working with a, like a governing regulatory body. Yeah. So it’s Jim Hankins: all about income producing activities is what I’ve heard others say. Yeah. So you have to look at what can you do on a daily basis to reach out and expand your business to be found, it’s hard to. For people to find you if you’re not doing anything to to make that happen. I’ll give you a simple example, as you mentioned, the court systems. There are people that uh, do things they shouldn’t have and get in trouble with the law. As it relates to firearms training, one of the simple things that Doreen did was she. That can in fact, she just did this last night dropping off a bunch of mailers to the the bail bondsman’s and the, various court related folks to tell them about our court ordered firearms safety training as an option. And so the, and then she does that, right. Those are typically live, but that’s an example of, just reaching out into your community and figuring out, what can you offer at, one to many. That that enables you to, satisfy a need and create a niche all by yourself. I’m pretty confident there’s probably nobody else doing that because they just haven’t thought of it and she’s able to, yeah. Do those classes all throughout the week. And it makes it easy for the court system, right? Cause they’ve already had these court ordered, firearm safety training, but then the people go to the trainers looking for the offering and they’ll say, yeah, we don’t have that. Yeah. So she doesn’t remote. And there’s no, no, obviously no firearms involved because these people are, have been now precluded from having, a firearm, but they still need to have the aim to understand what they did wrong. As it relates to the law. Yeah. Chris Badgett: It sounds so simple, but find a need and fill it, do outbound sales and find the people that are talking to the people that need what you have and just develop that relationship and scale that. It sounds so simple, but yes. It’s not like locals, local people. Jim Hankins: All the things that used to work still work in local, like the tear offs printed on, cork boards and outside of grocery stores and things like that. Business cards at the local diner. She still does all those things. And, when we go and frequent those diners, as we do. We look and there’s one tag left on the tear off up time to, put the new one, out there. So yeah, it’s just yeah, basic blocking and tackling on the local side. Chris Badgett: Tell us about, you have a lot of websites in the firearm safety. Like why are there so many sites? I know you have ranges, you have. Trainers, individual trainers. Like how do you, how did you scale this thing and why are there different sites and all that? Jim Hankins: Yeah. Chris Badgett: There, Jim Hankins: like I said there’s two kind of large training organizations that create the content that instructors then use. And, they’re certified to be an instructor by those those organizations, and then they just, put the we’re open sign out front of their business and off they go. There’s about a, it’s hard to say that how many are active. There’s probably about 145, 000 instructors in the U S that do this and maybe, maybe half of that number are active. I don’t, I don’t know. And, and so there, yeah, there’s no regional requirements. In fact, we had a, in our brick and mortar classroom, we had another instructor open up three doors down in a, like a strip mall area. So it’s a very competitive market, but there’s just, it’s predominantly the people states where there’s a requirement for for training to get a license. Yeah that’s the bread and butter. Then there are organizations that just do training, just safety training in general. Families will bring their kids in and those kinds of things businesses will bring their employees and depending on the type of business, like if it’s a security business or really anything. And yeah, the instructors are there to, to fill that need. And we’re essentially helping them with the marketing. Tool set the learning content and even the concept that they could have make their own content or use something other than what they’d been teaching. That’s for whatever, it’s funny. The light go light bulb goes off in their mind. They’re like, Oh, you mean I could create my own content? I was like yes, you can. You don’t just have to focus on the state. The state license based content, you can do all these other things, like as the example, one of the courses we provide is that real estate agent safety class that they can use. They don’t have to go off and get it certified in their state for CE credits but they could, if they wanted to but yeah, anything like that. Chris Badgett: Yeah, I think it’s interesting how my, my, I got started in all this actually in a niche gardening niche. It made me realize, and this was like almost 15 years ago, I think. We may be super technical people here on this call, but there’s a lot of industries that are still digitizing, still, figuring out scaling systems and automation and things like this. Can you give us a sense, maybe some figures of how big the niche is? Cause when I think of safety niche I’ve seen a lot of like martial arts, personal safety training on LFTR LMS and stuff like that. Self defense, like safety is a huge niche and firearm safety is like a sub niche within that. But like, how big is this thing? Cause I, the human mind just can’t comprehend the scale of certain niches, Jim Hankins: yeah. I don’t have those figures off the top of my head. But it is quite large. And then you can extend out to facilities, security, and all those kinds of things. It just balloons just there, there’s so many different, yeah, sub niches of the of safety in general. So I, I came from. A fair amount of focus. I mentioned that I left my wife to run the firearms training business while I had one of my apps acquired and it was safety based. So in fact, it was called safety grid. So it was a panic button that was I joined a company that did satellite emergency notification coordination. You pressed a button, a panic button on a satellite device, and it would, they coordinate the the response, right? Pull you outside the mountain, out in the middle of the ocean, wherever you happen to be, right? And so I, I. They took the kind of intellectual property that I had for a group based alerting system that I called group safety. The reason why they brought me in was it was, this was post Sandy hook. And so I was listening to the 911 recordings and trying to figure out what kind of technical. Solutions could have been brought to bear to increase the response time and to better coordinate the information because there was a lot of confusion as you might imagine in that event. And so when I and the company that I joined. At the time was my service provider to do the monitor alert. I would send the alert to them. They would, do the the event coordination. And I called them and I said, Hey, I’d really like it. If you’d be able to facilitate me sending you a group based alerting so that I could tell which building somebody was in and coordinate that. And then I had. Communication between all the parties that they could communicate themselves silent observation. Of what was happening those kinds of things. And they’re like, yeah, this is really interesting. Can you join us? Uh, we’re going to have a meeting here and we’d like to get more information. I was like, Oh, I guess I could. And it ended up being in Morocco where they had their the meeting, the gentleman, one of the gentlemen lived there. And then, yeah, the rest was history. They asked me to join and, I, build a product in that space. So yeah, so I’ve been in the safety space on the technical side, building, life and limb services. So I built their cloud infrastructure for that. And then Garmin bought them, bought the assets of that business back about three years ago, I had my exit. Now here I am one trick pony again building other messaging services. Chris Badgett: Nice. And am I correct? All the, or most of all this, these businesses and projects have been just you and your wife one of the things I’ve noticed in some successful e learning businesses are that there’s often like a technical person and then like the marketing sales and expertise and stuff. It’s just interesting. Tell us about the dynamic in that partnership on the business side, like how it how you guys complement each other, Jim Hankins: right? Yeah, and you’re right. So there’s that whole, creative and marketing, brain side, which is not me. I’m more of the technical guy. And yeah, we just we leverage each other’s strengths and it’s tough as a a husband and wife to, kind of balance that okay. Now works off. Sometimes that’s really hard to turn the work off. It never really is totally off, but yeah, we just, wake up and what are we going to do today? And, you’re going to do this and I’m going to do this. And occasionally we meet in the middle and then get things done. Yeah. Chris Badgett: As a technical person, I’m super curious, like how did you get into WordPress? For example, you could have built like a custom LMS solution or whatever. Yeah. How did you get to WordPress? Jim Hankins: Yeah. So I did have a period of my life where I worked at an ISP and then I owned my own ISP. I did have some on the hosting side I had, hosting WordPress, as they say, I think it’s, I think you could say that. Yeah, I was providing services that included. Hosting WordPress. So I had that some kind of familiarity with it as a kind of back end job or C developer, WordPress wouldn’t normally be my first thing I would reach for a solution, but in the context of the, like the firearms trainers, they already have a a WordPress site. Many times, or they’re on Wix or something else. I’ll usually pull them into WordPress from that. It’s sometimes better to just. You know, accept the world that you live in and figure out ways that you can optimize it. With a very small amount of coding on my side, I can drop in something that connects their WordPress site to something else. And make it happen. It’s great that Lifter because it’s of its existence. It makes it super easy for us to incorporate that e learning content, which is part of our offer. With, super, super easy, stamping those those solutions out and hosting them and centrally managing that stuff. So you have a great product as it relates to, all the features and the API, which we leverage to to make it easier as we start to stamp more and more of these sites. Out there and each of them, have their own little niches in the. In and of themselves. If it’s a range, then they’re going to have a completely different, requirements than just a regular instructor. Chris Badgett: Do you know can you think back to how you chose lifter LMS? And decided I think this is the option for us. Jim Hankins: Yeah. So very specifically the, one of the requirements we had was we got approached by one of the national training organizations that had an underwritten product that they. I wanted to start enabling ranges and some instructors to resell. And they asked us if we could do that, that the integration with them and enable it, be an enablement partner for them in that space. And so the product needed to be at that point WordPress based because we’d already cross that line. But it also needed to have a concept of membership. And I preferred not to have, to, to play with multiple products if I didn’t have to as for my, enterprise, days of knowing that, you know, having. One source as close as possible to have, the solution is, the cost of delivery is going to be less. And yeah, you have that membership feature, the group feature, which was super interesting. And we just integrated with the the events that come from enrollment. To build a custom offer that did the integration to allow them to resell the membership. So we WordPress becomes a single point of truth for this national organization with hundreds of thousands of members today to enable their, many thousands of instructors to resell their product offer. Chris Badgett: Tell us more about the unique way you’re using memberships. Jim Hankins: Yeah so in, in the case of the the ranges. Many of them already have a concept of a membership and the national. To use their the range, get a discount, guarantee they’re going to have a slot or what have you. So the national training organization obviously is looking. Helping them have more door swings, increasing their membership. And in most cases, the the ranges didn’t have an automated. Way of selling this membership. You came in, you had to go into the store and, they’d probably write you down on a, a three ring, VIP piece of paper, sticky note, the side of the cash register, who knows, they’re usually one or two person, shops, so they’re not, huge conglomerates. So we come in and provide an ability for them to sell those memberships online, which, they haven’t done yet. But then also have those memberships have more stickiness because of that that membership offers like an underwritten product that You know that the members would like, right? And then their website becomes the single point of truth to come in and update their payment information, add more members to their memberships, et cetera. So we had that piece then. And then the next thing that, of course, that came, which we Surprisingly, I didn’t think of right off the gate because this move so fast was you have the people at the point of sale that need to be able to look up those memberships. And yeah, we’re working on making that a little more less of a need to log in directly into the WordPress back end to. Just have that, checkout experience. So yeah, so it’s just central to the to the part of them being able to sell memberships both on premise at the cash register, point of sale. One of the ways we did that was with a foo point of sale and using the WooCommerce integration and Lifter LMS, so that kind of, that, that kind of. Another example of trying to find something off the shelf that we could quickly get together and connect the dots. And so that it would check the box of, point of sale slash selling the service online. So yeah, that’s a, Chris Badgett: another. Such a small world. I was I literally had a meal. Both in Taiwan and in Portland, Oregon at a WordPress event with the founder of Foo. Okay, great. It’s neat to see people using the tools together. You mentioned memberships, groups. I know you’re using courses. Are there any other key features of lifter? For example, are you using the certification, like certificates or anything, or Jim Hankins: some instructors ask for those things, usually the, these certificates in their case are like really state governed. So they’re usually, their paper ink signed. Chris Badgett: This episode of LMScast is brought to you by Popup Maker, the most powerful, trusted pop up solution for WordPress. Whether you’re selling online courses or memberships, Popup Maker helps you grow your email list. conversions and engage your visitors with highly customizable pop ups. Imagine creating custom opt ins, announcements and promotions that actually convert. I personally use Popup Maker on my Lifter LMS websites for lead magnet opt ins, card abandonment, upsells, downsells, and guiding users to helpful content. Popup Maker is an essential tool for growing my email list and making more money online through my website. Ready to take your website to the next level? Head on over to WPpopupmaker. com forward slash LMS cast and save 15 percent on your order. Discount automatically applies when you visit through that link. Popup maker also has an awesome free version so you can just use that as well. Go to WPpopupmaker. com forward slash LMS cast and save 15 percent off your order. Or get started with the free version. Now, get more leads and sales on your website with pop up maker today. Now back to the episode. Jim Hankins: And they haven’t started asking for that too much. We’re not using those features. It’s mostly around the the ability to event on when they’ve signed up so that you know, like for example, if they sign up for an in person class, we might use foo events for listing that event and then use that to trigger the. The pre training that they’ll get, so we’ll auto enroll them based upon that to give them access to training, and then we’ll link those events to the CRM to do the suggestive sale after the fact for nurturing to, suggest either other in person training or, e learning training. Yeah. Chris Badgett: So as a prolific LMS website creator, what are some besides Lyft or LMS, what are some essential like plugins theme? What hosting do you like to use? What are like the key tool sets that you really love working with? Jim Hankins: So we do our own hosting and we host on Amazon. I’ve spent, many years working on Amazon. That’s what I built that emergency response system on. Yeah, so we’re huge fans of that mostly so that we have, more control. And if a customer raises a problem, we’re able to get right to, the root of the problem because we own the infrastructure in that case, or the, infrastructure is code, a thing. Our, we’re huge fans of Jack’s WP fusion. So we use that quite a bit to integrate with our, with CRM and what do you Chris Badgett: like for CRM? Jim Hankins: So we’re actually, we resell GHL currently but we are also taking a, we have the Fluent CRM offer, and we’re looking to try to pull that in to make it a little simpler, so people aren’t bouncing back and forth between user interfaces the Fluent Community is super interesting as well, so we’re we’re taking a look at that and then, the kind of, Impetus of launching the new offering for crib ops for webhook processing. We use that as part of our our tool set as well. We, used it ourselves internally, and now we’ve brought that out to the public for for sale as a software, as a service to so many, WordPress sites use webhooks, in inbound and outbound for various things. And crib ops basically gives gives you the ability to have kind of a production ready. Place to send a webhook so that you don’t lose messages that are important to your business or to your customer order fulfillment, et cetera, right? So we take we give the ability for the message to be in queued when it’s sent. So in the event that the actual service that’s supposed to be receiving the webhook is down or is overwhelmed because you got lucky and you’ve got this viral sale going on, right? We’re Production ready buffer in between where you’re sitting the webhook and where you’re you’re processing it. And that also we call it crib ops tongue in cheek because it is, it also enables you to run those webhook processing things, automations AI enrichment, whatever it is you’re doing on premise you don’t need a you don’t need to open up your. Firewall and expose your network to the world. It’s a, our software talks to that place where the messages are queued. And it pulls it in and then you send it wherever you need to send it. It could be N8N or things like that, that allow you to not only process, zillions of messages, but do so at, near, near zero costs because you’re just paying for whatever the wattage is of the compute stuff that you have, which could be old servers or PCs, et cetera, that are, laying around gathering dust, wake them up, blow them off put a fresh operating system on and make them. Put them to work saving you money and providing value to the customer. So Chris Badgett: for the non technical listener, could you just describe like a web hook and a simple example of how an LMS site might use one? Yeah. Jim Hankins: So LFTR has actually inbuilt the ability to send a web hooks which are nothing more than you can think of them as notifications. That’s of interest. And you basically you can go right into LFTR and and tell it, Hey, at the point of enrollment, I would like you to send me that notification because I’m going to go off and do other things in, in, in advance of them, attending or. Because of them attending an enrollment, right? And that could be like in the firearms training world, that could be, they need to sign waivers or, those kinds of things in advance of, attending a course. And it’s important that the. that the message be delivered at the right time, right? So right within Lifter LMS in the settings there you can, set that up and then in there, it asks for a URL and that URL is the web hook endpoint, what we provide is a way where we give you the option to generate your own web hook endpoint, and then you’ll then be responsible for. Taking the message in and doing whatever it is. The lots of people use services like Zapier that’s or make Linode those kinds of services that are public automation tool sets, but you’re going to pay. For the number of tasks that you run through, and they generally start with about like 10, 000, or so workflows a month. But if you’re using the service for things like maybe a reactivation campaign, so you have many tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or a million. Customer contacts that you’re reaching out to on a regular basis that becomes a cost prohibitive to run it through a service like that, or as you could run a service, on premise doing all the same things, enriching it with AI or whatever it is you’d like to do using. Local GPU resources versus paying for it in the cloud to process millions of messages. And yeah, we just sit in front of that to allow you to do that at scale and without losing messages Due to like momentary outages of your internet connection or, your computer tipping over cat takes out the network cable or whatever it is you have going on. Yeah. So we’ll hold onto that message long enough for you to recover from that, let you know if there is a problem. And then once you get started back up, the message is there to process and do whatever it is it needs to do. Awesome. Chris Badgett: Yeah. Go check out crib ops. com. A few more just final questions for you, Jim. Can you help describe like the kind of impact you’ve been able to have with your LMS projects? Like something like Number of students, number of courses, like lives touched, anything like that? Just, I just want to inspire people from somebody who’s done lifter at scale, what they’re doing. Jim Hankins: Yeah. So like in the space with the the instructor field that is a, a passion project for many. And the, it’s the difference between them still being able to do it and not by giving them the opportunity to make additional income, additional revenue sources they hadn’t even dreamed of by taking what’s in their mind and putting it putting it in, into LFTR LMS and providing to the world and. If you are, out there listening and you’re familiar with LFTR LMS and maybe you’re only doing your site maybe step back for a minute and consider, could you help others do what you’re doing in your niche and provide that as a as a coaching or hosting services to others to make a difference in whatever niche you’re in. Chris Badgett: How has this impacted like this e learning at scale impacted just your quality of life. I’m assuming you have some like location freedom, like you just tell us about the impact of figuring this whole thing out with your wife. Jim Hankins: Yeah. So. Obviously the one to many is amazing with e learning, and the re return on the investment of time is just silly. Because you spend more time avoiding creating the content than actually creating the content, you’ll vacillate over, does this just make my, hair look, look okay. Or my lack of hair. So this is my audio. Okay. Should I put RGB lighting in the background? All these things that people vacillate over, I would suggest just create the content, right? In fact, most of the content she creates there she isn’t even on camera. She’s just doing a presentation recording and audio. So good audio get the content out there and. And get going, right? You know that, I see that a lot of it on the lifter calls as well, where people are really struggling, with, kind of analysis paralysis of getting the the content out. And I would just suggest you just get the content out there, get get, fail fast, right? If somebody doesn’t like your content, you’ll know, because they won’t watch it. After sign up, you’ll see how much they they watch. You’ll figure out where they’ve stopped and you can analyze it and iterate and improve. And the knowledge you have in your head is worth something to someone who hasn’t walked in the same exact path as you have, and you can help them and whatever it is you’re out there. Chris Badgett: And my last question for you, Jim like what motivates you? It seems like you’re having fun and you’ve been doing this a while, like what’s the, there’s lots of different kinds of motivation, but what keeps you going and excited about the future? Jim Hankins: I think it’s just one I’m blessed to have my family to, to work with me, so it’s super. Amazing to be able to get up every day and, what are we going to do today? Who, yeah, what’s on our list and the kind of the collaboration that happens I really enjoy that. I like bringing technology to life and training to life and the magic of being able to press a button. And all of a sudden an audience of, the size of the world can consume it. And I don’t know it’s an addiction. Chris Badgett: It’s a healthy addiction. Yeah. That’s Jim Hankins. Go check out cribops. com. Thank you for coming on the show and sharing your journey with us today. I’m really proud, honored, and inspired at what you’ve been able to accomplish. It’s that’s what motivates me to. Like our mission is to accelerate yours and your mission is to accelerate other people and it just keeps going. It’s like a ripple that goes out. And it’s a lot of, Jim Hankins: it really is. And yeah, thank you so much. One for having us on and to your team for doing a wonderful job in answering questions. About LifterLMS and the business in general of e learning. They’re super Professional. And I’ve had the opportunity to be a part of calls, watching them, just do an awesome job of helping people through the process as they come in. So Chris Badgett: thank you. Thank you so much, Jim. We really appreciate it. And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMSCast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at lifterlms. com forward slash gift. Go to lifterlms. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post Using LifterLMS To Create Repeatable eLearning Income Streams in a Huge Niche with Jim Hankins appeared first on LMScast.

This episode is brought to you by Popup Maker Boost Your Website’s Leads & Sales with Popup Maker Get started for free or save 15% OFF Popup Maker Premium—the most trusted WordPress popup plugin to grow your email list and increase sales conversions. Get Popup Maker Now For education entrepreneurs, Chris and Jason stress the value of community building as a long-term commitment and a development strategy. A free community may be a very effective marketing strategy by fostering trust and authority. A community must, however, be focused on the areas where the target audience currently interacts, whether in person or online, if it is to succeed. They emphasize that social media calls for real interaction and active dialogue in addition to content posting. A community may feel transactional rather than communal if material is delivered without interaction. Particularly in the beginning, when daily interaction and replying to each message promote involvement, consistency is essential. Support from teammates can help keep the momentum going over time. Engagement should also extend beyond self-promotion; adding value, responding to inquiries. And taking part in conversations all contribute to the development of credibility and trust. Entrepreneurs may build a vibrant, active community that supports their educational company by striking a balance between content, interaction, and consistency. Here’s Where To Go Next… Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website. Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS. Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014. And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide Episode Transcript Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program, I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co founder of Lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show. Welcome back to the education entrepreneur mentor series. This is a five part series that goes over the five critical hats. That you need to wear or have included in your team’s skillset to be successful as an education entrepreneur. Teaching online, building an education based company. Those five critical hats are becoming the expert, the entrepreneur, the teacher, The technologists and the community builder. This is the fifth and final part of the series where we go over becoming the community builder. Enjoy this session and be sure to check out all five parts of the series. In this session, let’s talk about community building, and this is really. I think the least understood, hat, if you will. And a space of courses, coaching, and community. Community, I think, is the least understood, has the highest failure rate yet. In fact, it’s one of the things that’s as old as humanity, this idea of community. But I think we’ve had trouble translating community to the online world in many ways. It’s pretty new to online in terms of building education and really thinking about intentionally and design it. Let’s start before the product. Let’s think about building free communities is a form of marketing community based marketing. In my opinion, is actually one of the strongest forms of marketing. If you can, in fact use your free community. Or somebody else’s free community to get traction for your ideas, build authority. But first let’s imagine planting a community, like your own community. You’re committing to this strategy, I want to build a community that I can leverage for marketing. But a community always has more than just being an ends, a means to an ends. It’s something you really have to commit to. And in terms of planting your community. I think the most important thing is to plant the community where your avatar is, predominantly. And sometimes if you’re an advanced subject matter expert, you may have, quote, graduated to some other kind of community where the professionals hang out. But it’s important to not lose sight of where You know your learners are. I noticed this in the early days of Lifter LMS and building community. A lot of the WordPress people and the course creators were really strongly in Facebook and in technology. We ended up in like these slack communities and these more geeky, techie communities like Discord and and so on. And just remember where your people are. It’s part of your avatar research. Where do they hang out? Both online communities and person communities. What conferences do they go to? Where are they socially gathering in the real world and on the internet? When I’m helping people with community design. I often have to go back to first principles and explain what social media is from my perspective. I think a lot of people get this wrong. So I like to describe social media as really being two words, like there’s social and there’s media. Media, when it comes to building a social media community, a lot of subject matter experts are. Like I’m going to post content like every Monday in my group, I’m going to post this type of content. I’m going to post links to My new course launch or do other kinds of marketing content. I wrote a new post, I published a new video, but that’s just media. So that’s not an online or that’s not a social media community. Just have a community that you post media to. And then there’s the social part. Which I think a lot of people get wrong where you actually have to be social and. Your community members need to be social for it to not be a dead community or feel like. a pitch fest. So I think of social as conversation. So it could be commenting on somebody else’s post. It could be posing a question and not just like, all right, cool. I posed a question as my post for the day and walk away. If people start commenting, you want to engage and not just be like broadcasting. This is a conversation. This is social. Building a community is a really big commitment and it’s important to, especially as the leader to not just do media and not just do social and just like react and stuff, but not post your leadership content, if you will, consistency is the name of the game. With community. I think the best communities, especially in the beginning, it’s really a daily commitment. So if you actually get somebody who’s excited about joining this group. It’s probably best that they hear from you that day from their first post or when they join, you can send them a private message, welcoming them. And then do that every day. In my experience I built a 10, 000 person Facebook group of. Course creators and web professionals who serve this market. And that was over the course of 10 years, but in the beginning, I was in there every single day. I had a rule that I would have nobody leave a post and not have a comment no matter what for me or the community. So I was really committed to every single conversation and being consistent posting. And conversating on a daily basis. And as time goes on, I could scale back a little bit. I had team members get in and help facilitate in the conversations and the content. So I don’t, I’m not in there every single day like. I once was in my free community, but it was a huge commitment that I didn’t take lightly. Jason Coleman: Yeah, I think some of that I can relate to is. The idea of not just posting in these communities, but also engaging in the social and having replies and. I forget what ratios are good. And I know Gary Vaynerchuk has a formula folks should look up. I think it’s called 8 cents or 10 cents. Like you spend, you think of it like you’re spending pennies or maybe it’s 80 cents or something like that. He’s got some kind of math of but the basic idea is don’t just post your own stuff. If you’re on Facebook or Reddit or Twitter, when the social media is like engaged with the community, answer questions. It’s important to not just answer questions about your own product or stuff you can sell. But like just be helpful in other ways to build trust and karma and affinity and stuff like that. And I like your point about. Looking for your community where they already are, rather than trying to build something and bring them in. And I’m I think folks often either want to look for or build like the social network for blank. There are some, there are a few of those that are out there, but for almost every blank, Facebook is the social network for blank. So you’re like, what’s the social network for car enthusiasts? Facebook, or Instagram owned by Facebook, something like that. It’s if they’re already on Facebook, meet them where they’re at is really useful. So I think when you’re building your own community when I’ve been building communities in the past, this has been the case. And I think it’s true in some that I’ve, I’ve seen through our customers and stuff. We see that everything is support. People are going to use every communication channel for support, including your community that you built for them to talk to each other. They’re also going to ask support, like questions of you through that channel. I think we mentioned this in an earlier discussion too. That’s like any way they can get ahold of you through a blog comment or a Twitter DM. Or they find your phone number and call you at two in the morning. Like they’re going to try to get ahold of you. And so that’s true in these communities as well. And I know that we, so we. We struggle with that to just have our community and discussion forum devolve into another support forum. And what we do to combat that is we engage and redirect. So we don’t try to stop it. It’s going to happen, like it’s very natural and. It’s not every once in a while someone’s I don’t want to go through the official. I think I know better and not get faster support here. But usually people are just, I’m here now. I have a question. I ask it. So allow people to ask questions and non support channels. Don’t try to like police that aspect of your community too much. And I think another tip there is to give the, once you’ve hit like a certain mass folks in the community. Give them a chance to talk about it amongst themselves before you come in as, the kind of know it all and say, here’s what I think. And sometimes you’re surprised, like they’ll answer the question better than you would have. You’ll learn new things, like you don’t shut down the community to just make it like a really quick answer. And they feel good communicating amongst themselves. But sometimes it is like a kind of support question that only you can answer or you happen to be the only one watching in that case, like if you can give a short answer, like just a link, just one word answer, just one sentence answer, give it and move on. Oh, I had a question. Here’s the answer. Cool. If it’s a more technical issue that like you would want to get on a call and coach them through. Or you need to follow up through some other. It means that you’ve set up for a support, just kindly remind people that like what the proper channel is for that. And we get that, you use these phrases, like the best way to get help with that kind of thing is through this official channel. The fastest way is here. And and you can use this too. If you aren’t using that community for a kind of support. But people are still asking questions on Facebook or other social media, sprinkle in links. Back to your own community or the official community. Thank you. If you’re in like a Facebook group that’s branded and has other goals, don’t, you gotta be careful about that. But if, push people back to your own community that you own. And then a side note here is to have a code of conduct. This is like a big topic that we could talk about forever too. But it feels related to this is like having a code of conduct. About how folks should use your community, what they should and shouldn’t talk about. What kind of behavior will get you kicked out and enforce it. It can be tempting to try to have a very lousy fair attitude about things and it’s good to not crush the conversation and let it go. But if you let certain bad behaviors into your community. Like it’s going to be problematic and that’s another one where maybe we can share some examples of our codes of conduct that we use for our communities. As a personal story the reason I’m thinking about this what happens, your discussion form becomes a support form is we went through that paid memberships pro support was originally like a, through a BB press online forum. Then we had the idea, let’s start a community forum for the folks to talk about like business issues and other things amongst themselves. We’ll try to start a discussion. And we tried to. Participate every day. We weren’t going where people were like, so we weren’t on Facebook where there already was. We struggled to get the conversation going. And we were working on it, but even when it was going well, like eight out of 10 posts were just. They clicked the wrong button and posted support in the wrong channel. Like it was very clear, like the support channel is right here and this is for non support things. We tried to enforce it no move here, go here. It was just confusing people. So we were like, we ended up shutting down the discussion community and we waited way too long to start it up again. We have a version now that’s on Slack and going well. And we were motivated because we found like an unofficial forum on Facebook that we weren’t even part of that had hundreds of people and we’re like, someone else is running community. We should run one too. And now, so we, open that discussion forum and we’re doing a lot of the stuff you were talking about, the building community and being in there and spending the time for the whole team and just tackling the support issues because that’s a very common thing that’s happening with people who are trying to, build businesses and use tools. Chris Badgett: Yeah, I think having the code of conduct. I just want to mention there’s this idea of having a safe space. So the main thing you want to do is protect your people. As a leader of the community, if somebody is, being insensitive or rude. Or any outside of your company values and a really negative way. You can pick them out of the community, particularly. Any community, but the free community, there’s just no room for it. I see some folks get a little overly restrictive. When you join some Facebook groups, as an example, they’re often like, you can’t promote your own thing. No external links and it’s a, it gets a little restrictive. So I try to find the middle path of if someone like is helping somebody and says by the way. I actually have a business that does this cool, no big deal. If somebody’s trying to answer somebody’s question and they drop a link to a resource that’s not ours, that’s. I’m not policing that. They’re not picking that out. It’s definitely a balance and something you have to learn by feel and a healthy community is like a, it’s a give and take. So you know, you’re figured this out well, when a solid community member will actually give more than they take. Kind of like how we talk about email marketing, like value piece, and then maybe you pitch a product. So there’s like this overweight to being giving and helpful some to think about. And just one more pro tip is that. If you have an all star community member who’s doing really well in your community, doesn’t work at your company. You can deputize them and make them a moderator or ask them to do more. Potentially give them free access to your course, your membership, your software, whatever. Because some people just really shine in communities, both online and offline. And that’s a, it can be a real asset to your company. Jason Coleman: It’s a good place to recruit from, even for more formal roles. And I think something I’ll say about that code of conduct that you touched on was. Making sure you preserve that open space for people to, so they can have discussions. And I think you might feel like if you’re writing code of conduct, don’t think of it as like we’re policing certain kinds of conversations just for the sake of it or because we don’t like it. If you think there should be a goal for the forum. Have the water cooler random channel where you’re talking about, Netflix shows and stuff. Cool. But in the general section, it’s Hey, we’re all trying to build businesses here. Hey, we’re all trying to launch, courses here. Hey, we’re all trying to talk about football here. There’s a goal for the community is if you keep that in mind. And then the second one is you want to encourage as much as possible discussion around that goal. That’ll guide you over the types of behaviors that draw away from if certain kinds of. Yeah. Overly aggressive and, political or, different things that get posted, they discourage people from coming and participating. And that can guide you as you’re not picking I like these people, no, I don’t these people, I like this way of talking, I don’t this way of talking. It’s I have a goal for the community, and if your discussion is pushing the goal forward, that’s good. And certain types of discussion that, like You know steal the air from the room and cause other people to be quiet. It’s you know, you want to handle that? Chris Badgett: Let’s talk about paid communities as like part of the product. Like it’s in the pricing, it’s a line item on your features that community is included in your purchase. The big idea here is a concept I call finding the others. So if you’ve ever, and I guarantee that anytime anybody has had the experience of Oh I found my people, for me, I’ve run in like entrepreneur circles, climbing circles. Dog sledding circles. I like find the others like, Oh, there’s these people that have the same interests and idiosyncrasies as me. That can be like a huge benefit and it happens for free in life, but it can also happen by design as part of a course. And often when you find a really good, kind of customer avatar, there’s actually like some negative emotion there, like loneliness or nobody understands me. Or, I’m happy in my family or my friend group, but I have this like weird little obsession or hobby or interest or whatever, and then you find those other people that are like really into drones or starting companies or a certain type of fitness workout or yoga or whatever it is, and there’s this like excitement and energy giving experience of finding the others. There’s a saying in our industry when. You build a great community and it becomes like this real viable business and it’s growing over time. People will often say the subject matter expert will say they came for the content, the courses, the coaching, but they stay for the community. We’ve talked about recurring revenue in another session and having a functioning community can be a big part of that. Like, how do you do that and create that finding the other’s experience? You can actually look to the offline world in the communities you participate in, whether it’s spiritual or sports or some kind of fitness thing or some kind of food thing. There’s often this concept of rituals. A group will have their rituals, like at a sporting event, there’s a series of events. If you do religious things, there’s like these series of events that happens. So like creating rituals in your community can be very helpful. I was in a community once where, I think it was once a month there was a post in a group about what are your top three wins? And the community members, the most engaged members would be like, I accomplished one, two, three, then the other people would do it and then they would comment on everybody else’s thing. And it was a big celebratory thing. That was a really strong ritual. The other thing you can do is in terms of finding the others, there’s going to be like, you’re the leader of your program or whatever, but these other leaders are going to emerge in the community, maybe with like sub subject matter expertise, like some kind of specialty, or they’re particularly good. And they’ve become so obsessed with your content that they know what you would say. And they’ll answer on behalf of you or Oh, check out. His training on this, or, Jason has a concept around not using exclamation points here. Here’s why you should not use exclamation points too much in your copywriting and stuff like that. And then you can like, as the like community leader if that, if there’s an untapped resource in your community, a helper, and somebody asks a question and you can be like humble, this is where you’re the guide and not the guru. Which we talked about in another session, is you can be like, Hey, here’s a couple thoughts on that question you just asked, but we actually have this community member, Sally, over here, who really knows this aspect really well, and you tag her, and she comes in and helps, so you’re conducting your community like an orchestra. And then the other thing that happens when you build a strong community, it’s working, and that’s great, but one of the challenges that presents As part of your, the community aspect of your product is particularly if you have some long time members, they become power users. And they’ve been through all your material. They love it. They’re here. They’re maybe at the next level of your training or whatever. So you get the graduate students mixed in with the freshman class. And sometimes the new people feel a little overwhelmed and it actually makes their imposter syndrome worse. So they’re like, Oh my God, all these folks in here are already so advanced in mind the right place. I don’t want to look immature or I don’t know what I’m doing and stuff like that. So design around that, have a process for. Welcoming new members, making sure they feel welcome and seen, and set the expectation, particularly with your advanced users in the community that like, Hey, there’s an expectation to help the new people coming up. Kind of like that little brother, little sister kind of thing. And I just want to mention that Jason and I are here as business partners because we met at some. Paid and free communities, events, pop up events, and things that happened over the years. We got to know each other by investing in paid and free communities. It’s amazing. What happens is when you have a strong paid community. I’ve seen it in my free and paid communities where members become like. They do business together, potentially all the way up to business partnerships, so communities can be really powerful and focus on this concept of helping people find the others. And I just want to spotlight a great book on this topic called The Business of Belonging. I forget the author’s name, but it’s something to check out to, dig deeper into this concept of intentionally designing community. Jason Coleman: David Spinks. Yeah. So the author of that business of belonging, how to make community your competitive advantage by David Spinks. So that was the book you were thinking about. I’d like to put a pin in a couple of things. One, like you talked to, we met at an in person event and we do so much work online. The majority of what we’re doing and we’re talking about is online communities. And we even stressed how that’s amazing. Cause there’s, thousands of people for every niche. Around the world, but if you can get in person, there’s something about even if it’s just with some of those like key people who come up out of your community on a small scale, or you tag along to another conference, let’s all meet up at this other thing. Like we did through WordPress events. Meeting in person is just obviously like another level and another level of attachment and friendship and, honestly, that, that happens with folks in your community. And then another part of the we talked to how like the free community, you can think of it as marketing. It can be used as marketing for products. And then you specify like the paid community as a product. I found that’s important. And as we’re building up this community that we have now, which is free, but eventually have a pay component, I think about it like we have a bigger team. So there’s literally like a marketing team and a product team. And because the marketing folks have communication jobs and. Online communities where you’re talking feels like a communication activity, the same people who do like marketing and sales are like leading the community. They have this like skill set that transfers, but we have to be careful about that. It’s actually like a different, when the community itself is the product it’s a different skill set. And you’re like, you don’t have to sell anymore. I’m already here. You have to deliver. We, we potentially should have the same way in our, when we develop other products and, sprints or quarters or. Sessions that we plan, what are we going to do, how are we going to improve it? We’re going to add features. So having that same mindset of we’re building the product itself and it will help you I think, really engage in a community in a constructive way to make it better. What is the goal of the community? How do we make it better? What do we, we changed? And not that, marketing people are great and obviously like they communicate well, but you’re not just, you’re not marketing to them. They’re already there. Another issue that comes up with these paid communities is I don’t know, you call it like the chicken and egg situation. So there’s a few tactics to, to help with that. And what’s, I guess a, another big idea to think about the spotlight’s a reason why these paid communities are useful, so that we, you can build content that’s one to one. That’s like coaching, like we’re talking together. Or one to many, that’s like maybe like a paid course and video that they watch and you distribute or through a newsletter. Or you can have this kind of many to many integration, interaction with your users where they’re talking amongst themselves. And that’s also value that they get. So that’s the main value. That’s one of the values that folks can get out of the community. Maybe it is the main value, like that the people are talking amongst themselves. And, but that needs a critical mass of people in there talking to make it, but then, and it’s the what is, it’s someone’s number, someone’s law for as the community gets bigger, it gets more valuable. But how do you do that in the beginning when you don’t really have anyone in there if you’re trying to build something new? So a couple of tactics I’ve seen work are free trials for paid communities. And so either start up and say, everyone’s welcome to come. And at some point you say, Hey, we’re going to be free for the next three months and then we’re going paid. Probably better if you can do it up front as much as possible. So people know, and it’s like a trial. So perhaps they purchase your course. They do the course, they get dumped into the community in some sense. And you’re like, Hey, you can hang out here for three months and then it’s X dollars per month. And that gives them time and give them some tasks and motivations to participate in the community, send them on a quest rituals. I love you talked about rituals earlier. It’s so such a powerful psychological thing for humans. And so then they get addicted to the community and it’s not a lot of money or it feels like a good value for them and they stick around. Another thing I’ve seen that’s pretty cool as a way to get people into a pay community is that you can pay to get in or there’s some way to get in for free, either because you’re like a VIP or you seed it with certain people or like the first 200 are free and then you cut off. One of the more clever things I’ve seen is Ian Castle, who has a community that talks about small cap stock investing. It’s called Micro Cap Club, and I’m not sure if he still does this, but he has like a, it’s quite, it’s investing at a high level. It’s a pretty expensive community to get into. But folks can get in for free if they provide research. So I, I don’t know if he does it anymore, but it’s very clever. It was like either pay a thousand dollars or whatever the price was. Or if you give us five pages of research on a stock of your choice and we like it, we’ll let you in for free. So it’s Oh, like either you’re paying to get in or you’re volunteering to get in. You could think of clever variations on that. And I’ll just finish these are some ways to build a paid community from scratch. And like a warning is that I’ve always seen this a couple of times and we have, we should get this guy on the talk about it because it’s wow, you made this work, but I’ve rarely seen at work where someone built a paid community for someone else’s community. Like they have to be part of that community and also like in a pretty deep way, like already connected. So they know everyone or they’re like the ideal avatar. So they just build it for themselves and then make sense. Usually it’s a very extroverted person who can make all the connections and encourage people to join. Sometimes you’ll see a community and you’re like, that’s a cool community and they have money and I can build this for them, or it’s adjacent to mine. I’ll build it and try to get people to come and there’s something about that. Like it, it’s just, it’s harder if you’re not building it for yourself. Chris Badgett: And I know we’ve been talking a lot about consistency and showing up, but you can test this idea by doing a pop up community. Just have a one time event as like a market test. It could be an in person conference. It could be. Like a special workshop that involves working together. I remember Jason and I were at an event together called Cabo Press that our friend Chris Lemma put on. And I think I went the second year it happened, and then I went, I believe, five more years after that. I enjoyed it so much. It was once a year pop up mastermind retreat in Cabo, Mexico. With a really interesting format. Like the sessions were in pools, half the day was scheduled. Half wasn’t some like lunch group seating assignments or whatever were assigned, other things were free form. It was a really well done community, but it wasn’t like something that recurred every day or anything like that, it was like an annual event pop up event for a certain type of customer avatar. And that was just a great experience. And I remember when Chris said that. The first time he ran it, he didn’t know if anybody would come and 10 people came and then I went on year two and 20 people came and then on year three there were like 60 people and now he has a, like a application. He’s always done it by application because he really wanted to protect like the want to make sure the right people were coming. It wasn’t just something that like anybody can come if you pay me, this is for this specific type of person. So he had his screening mechanism. At LFTR LMS one time I brought in a subject matter expert in instructional design and like creating MVPs, minimum viable products, where we they did the workshop. I just held the space and we were using a software tool called Miro for groups to collaborate together. And we had a couple of people we built, platforms for and help them flesh out their idea as a group over the course of three days. That’s called a bootcamp. And it was a great experience, but it wasn’t like we were committing to doing that every month. And it was, you’re getting on this treadmill of commitment. So think about you can test community in the same ways as you can pre sell and test other things without the recurring commitment. And let’s talk about community design and management. Jason Coleman: Yeah. Chris Badgett: There’s a saying. I like to say about community, which is if you build it, they will not come. It’s not about getting a community software. Like I signed up for a Facebook group or I use, I have installed the Lifter LMS social learning plugin. I now have a community. It’s true. You do, but you built the house or you’ve scheduled the thing, but are people going to show up or are they going to keep showing up? I think of it as like holding space, like you really have to, this becomes a part of your life. You have to lead it. And you got to make the space for it. You got to protect it. And in terms of leadership, what I mean by that is you this is one of those lead by example things. And you got to post useful content. You have to like actually be social. You have to like help and highlight the people that are really outstanding in your community. If, like a spammer comes in or somebody’s behaving inappropriately, you have to kick them out. You have to protect the community. And I think it’s also cool to be human in community. Like it may be like a professional business related community or athletic advice or health related advice community. Let a little bit of the humanity and sometimes you’ll see community members support each other, if something bad happens or helps, they might celebrate a birthday, even though they’re not, they’ve never met in person or anything like that. And in terms of community design and management. I’ll talk about Dan Martell’s SaaS Academy community, which was really well done. He had a Facebook group. This was a two year program I was in for software founders. And there was courses and content and stuff, but there were also, the Facebook group was very active. And like you said, Jason, Dan was very involved. He was in there, he was posting content, he was answering people’s questions. He was being that, doing that humble thing where you know what? We have this community member who’s really the best at subject matter X tag, that person, I think he called that signposting and it was a great experience. And then the the in person events he ran big cities around the United States and Canada three times a year. We would fly out to that, stay in a hotel together the actual conference room had round tables, not just like chairs in a, auditorium style. And he would intentionally design, or he and his team design who sat with who for all three days. So he’s trying to help develop relationships this person needs to meet this person, this person is at a similar revenue stage. This person is really good at marketing. This person’s really good at product. This person’s, really good at sales or whatever. And his group, his table groups were like, awesome. I just remember being like, wow, I had that experience of finding the others. He had scaled his company, beyond his size. And he had a great team that was very much involved, like doing these duties of community design and management. Ultimately he brought in. It wasn’t just him talking from the stage, he had a top expert about pricing who we’ve both studied, Marcos Rivera. That’s how I met Marcos. And he’s one of the top software pricing experts in the world. So Dan guided us to Marcos and held the space for that, knowledge transfer to happen. Jason Coleman: Some of the key themes are like. Being intentional about it, being committed continuously working on it. I like how you pointed out being human in the community and especially for those like online, versions of community where it’s hard to remember that or you feel like you’re interacting or in a certain way. But just remembering there’s a human on the other side of the screen will give you like the grace to work in moments, allow them to have mistakes and get closer. I mentioned outside these people, if you interact with them enough, they become your friends. Like we live like quite a bit of our life online. And I don’t know, probably a few people like that. They’re just like, Oh, you’re friends with them. Yeah. Hey, when was the last time you saw him? I’ve never seen this person in my whole life. Like they have a frog avatar and I don’t even know what they look like or whatever. But yeah I’m, that’s a fan, that’s a core value of ours about being human that helps guide things. Yeah, and maybe so something I’d like to talk about around designing your community because I’ve seen folks struggle with it is to make sure that you have a concentration of your discussion or put another way, don’t dilute the discussion. And what I mean by that is minimize the different channels or categories or forums. Like until absolutely necessary. So if you’re familiar with a forum that can have multiple sub forums or Slack has multiple channels. Or you’re, if you’re using a posting mechanism and you have different categories what I would recommend is start with one channel or as few as possible. And it’s okay if it’s noisy, you you want it to feel like there’s a lot of people here, it’s bumping, there’s a lot going on. If you spread that out across a bunch of categories too early, it becomes like the wild west and like I see like little dust balls flying by the, it’s like where are we? And you also, if you have too many categories spread out too thin, too, it confuses people about where to post. They’re like, I have an idea, but I don’t know if that should be in general discussion or special discussion or, news. Is that news or is it discussion? I’m not sure. So let the new channels and forms or categories come up organically. You’ll, if it’s noisy in that channel and there’s one channel where everyone’s talking, you’ll start, oh, this is a common thing, oh, every day. Or these people like to talk about this. We need a special, place just for this kind of conversation because you want to avoid what’s called like the paralysis of choice when you’re posting. I mentioned there’s too many options. You don’t know where to put something. Another part of like channel category design that can throw people off as if you use. Like jokey, clever names. And we used to call this like a web design if your menu was like mystery meat. You remember that term? You, everyone wanted to say what is this called? It’s called like Jason’s Garden. And you’re like, it’s your about page. People know these things are called about pages. Just say about, and that’s what the title of the link should be. It’s the same thing when you’re, labeling your categories and channels. You want to use descriptive names that explain, what kind of conversation goes there and have a sticky post or some kind of note that’s this is what talks here and lightly police it, if you have a support channel or like a development channel and people start talking about development and you just quietly nudge them Hey, you should talk over here. Yeah. Minimize the in jokes. You talked about how there’s like these like PhD level, after a while experts who are in your forum, they’ve been there and they start building like a cabal, like this, like force of nature. There are different, those folks who’ve been on your forum for a while are like, they’re, they work in the forums in different way. And they have these like in jokes that develop. That can be a source of community, but you want to be conscious of like when new folks get onboarded that they don’t just get hurled into this maybe even just have a one pager, here’s all the jokes and terms, but avoid naming your categories after those things. I guess like a personal story to like nail that home is I’m part of a, like a small investing group on a slack. And I think there’s six folks in there right now, but there’s 12 different channels. So it’s only six people talking, but 12 channels and and a lot of them do have this kind of like mystery meat name. There’s stuff like the CFO’s office, rat race or big picture. And I’m often like sharing news about something and I’m like, is this big picture news? Or it’s about my job cause I found it while I was working or I take the CFO role in my business. So maybe it’s CFOs, like it’s confusing where they go and it’s confusing then even just literally the user experience of using the Slack app. I get a notification, I’m like, that looks interesting. And if I click on it and Slack kind of breaks, it doesn’t take me to it. Then I go into the root of the form and I’m like, wait, I don’t know which channel that would have been in. And yet, so like you want to minimize that kind of like hunting and pecking and and this is like a small group of people who know each other, mostly offline anyway, and we’re willing to put in the work to talk to each other. But if you’re trying to build a community in charge for access and grow it like this kind of friction is, it’s going to be counterproductive. Chris Badgett: Yeah. And just another pro tip. If you just do have one channel, like in Facebook, as an example. You can use, you still have, just have one channel, but you can add a hashtag and you can train members like, Oh, if this is like your wins post, put hashtag wins on it. Or when you start the thread, put the wins thread on it. So you can create some filtering with hashtags. And another cool thing is some communities are more serious or focused than others. And one cool one that we do is called the water cooler. So for example, in Slack. Whenever you start a Slack instance, it comes with a general channel and a random channel. So Slack knows this, that like these two will happen no matter what, likely. So Jason Coleman: When I said one channel, I was thinking the one channel and the water cooler general random channel. Yeah. Yeah. It’s important. Chris Badgett: This episode of LMScast is brought to you by Popup Maker, the most powerful, trusted pop up solution for WordPress. 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Now back to the episode. If you’re like if it’s really serious, you want like the subject matter to really stay focused in the general channel, you can use that random channel or that water cooler is the, not junk drawer, but like everything else over here, personal life over here. If you’re like really on mission and you want to keep your main channel or main key channels really focused. Let’s talk about online versus offline communities, in my opinion, and experience as both a user or a member of communities and also a creator of communities, I think hybrid is the best where you have some offline and some online, now it’s really hard if you. Sell training courses and coaching all over the world to create an in person event. But if you can, or at least do it in your home country, or if you’re big enough in your own city or geographic region I highly recommend it. You can all, one thing you can do to add an offline community, if you’re like small and you’re not sure if you can pull it off is you can actually tag on to an existing offline community that. Your people are already likely going to. There could be like a professional conference that happens for the industry that your people are in, or maybe it’s a sporting event or something, so you can just like, either right before, during, or after, it could be as small as like a two hour let’s meet up at this location. Grab some drinks or some food and, just get together and chat and meet each other in person. It can be that simple. So there’s ways to hack your way into the momentum of where these people are already hanging out. And that’s why it’s good to be clear on who your customer avatar is. And you can. You can also test communities. So similar to marketing and doing pre selling and things like that. It’s good to run some tests. So you may think that your main community is in a Facebook group, like that’s pretty good guess. But there may be this other opportunity that you don’t know about crypto people are on discord a lot. Techie people typically are working in Slack for their company, so you could have just like another Slack group. They’re already in Slack, so you’re right there. There’s all kinds of different ways to think about it. I do like the idea of staying focused, but it’s good to test. And one way you can do it is just test yourself as an individual. Join somebody else’s community that has the same avatar, see how active it is. over there. And sometimes you will find oh wait, I could have two communities, or maybe my community’s migrating over here to this platform. I might want to try that. I might want to try having it on my website and see if I can make it work. So it’s okay to do some tests, but I definitely recommend not. Just finding as many community platforms as you can and starting them all at once is too much to manage. It’s also not the end of the world to shut down one with heads up like, Hey, we’re, this community is moving here. You mentioned earlier you were on a forum and you, I think shut that down and moved over here. We actually started at Lister LMS with a BB press forum as well, decided that it was better. Through a support ticket system and our live calls and things like that, our office hours. But I want to tell a story about the Lifter LMS community. Like our main original, customer avatar is a DIY course creator, coach, subject matter expert. That’s where trying to wear all these five hats we’re talking about in this training. But what I noticed is no matter what I did. This other avatar was always here, which is, I build websites for clients, the, the WordPress professional, the agency, and then within that avatar is also on Facebook. But within that, the people that were more engineering developer focused, they did not like Facebook. They weren’t that engaged with it. So what we ended up doing was testing out Slack channel, a developer community on Slack for Lifter LMS, and then that became like the developer spot and like the conversations are so different. What’s happening over in the developers versus in the Facebook community. And to your point earlier about, marketing isn’t always the best to facilitate the product side of community, what is happening is like the marketing folks are better with the Facebook side, but the actual Lifter LMS engineers, the developers are engaging more in the developer community. So it’s interesting how you get, you can try to control community, but it’s also just going to happen. Like you mentioned, there was a. Community about your product, a Facebook group that you or none of your team were even in and you found it and then you joined the community about your product. It’s funny. Jason Coleman: We’re like, Chris Badgett: this is cool. Can we join? Jason Coleman: Yeah, that was pretty awesome to discover. It made me feel good. It was like, wow, there’s like hundreds of people working on this thing. I don’t, I still don’t know what the status is though. We’re competing with them, but they’re on Facebook. We’re on Slack. One thing I liked about your like the Lifter LMS developers community is it had a test or like a form you had to fill out to get in. Chris Badgett: Yeah. Jason Coleman: And Discord does this really well. They have these tools to build these like checkbox mazes. You have to go through to make sure you get it. And Facebook groups will have questionnaires. You have to fill out an application process. I know I’m paid memberships, pros directory, or we have an approvals. Plug in and there’s ways to do that. That’s that’s an interesting tool and especially for these like online offline community hybrids where and we’ve seen some crazy ones like you have to live in one of these like 12 houses to be in the community. So you had to prove you live there. We were like talking with someone. Over like the technical challenges of that. But yeah, it’s I find like the honor system goes a long way of just ask, you can ask people, we have an alumni association, Facebook group, and one of the questions is what year did you graduate? And people like don’t answer or they don’t, it’s like they could, it’s very easy to make something up, just pick a random year. But people don’t do it. And then you’re like, you can filter on that. Like they definitely aren’t alumni if they don’t remember what year they graduated from or chose not to fill it out. It was like an automatic spammer or something. Yeah. and that’s good enough. And then you police it retroactively if people come in and they’re not actually like for these I’ve seen lots of these communities that are focused on like a physical space or like the, mountain association or homeowners association or something like that. And you want to make sure, or even on professional associations have applications are you actually a nurse? Are you actually a police officer? Another thing that comes up in my communication with these kinds of offline communities that are coming online for the first time. And I thought we could chat about it a bit is I remember having customer interviews with a bunch of these and the same conversation kept coming up where they would say, what I really want is a place for my members to be able to collaborate. And I’d be like, Oh, cool. Like collaborate on what? And they often like, couldn’t really answer to Oh no, just like collaborate. I was like what does that mean? And I think a lot of times I. Back then I have a guess, but I was like, I really don’t know, they, a lot of people talk about collaboration, and it depends on the context of the organization, but I’m like, I think I I don’t know what it means, or is it like this weird buzzword that people feel like they have to have? But one thing I do realize is it’s a kind of, a lot of them are part of an association where there’s one person who does all the work there, it’s a, it’s like a nature preserve and there’s people have membership and some people donate and some people are members because they bought a brick on the path or something. But there’s really one person who organizes and maintains it all and does all the work and maybe what they mean by collaborate is get more people to help out here. And I was like, and I don’t actually have the answer for that. I was like, I don’t know how to have technology force people to participate more. That’s a really tough question. I don’t know if you have no tools about that. And the other thing I could come up with then briefly is like in like a board situation, that same kind of thing that comes up sometimes one person is handling the technology and like they want to talk with each other about things. And that’s almost Oh, I want to train them on how to use Google meet to or like a kind of web conferencing software to talk online and how to use Google docs or some other system to keep track of notes. So these are maybe like ideas for how to productize that, like within our scope for some of our customers when they, but I was curious, like if that came up with you, like what do folks mean by collaborate? It seems like this fuzzy term people use. And these challenges of like offline communities, like trying to get more participation and like collaborate through online communication. Chris Badgett: It can be unhealthy when the idea of collaboration is I want more people to work for free for me. Yeah. And I think this comes to that holding space and leading the community, setting expectations around. All right, I want you to, you’re here, you can ask for help, but, for every ask try to help three people or just try to help one on one, like even the balance in the universe. Yeah. So it doesn’t become like platform. For where everybody’s just trying to take, cause then it’s not a healthy community. Yeah. Do you remember like early Jason Coleman: MIR, IRC forums and you would like share files. It was like you were a leech and you had to upload so many files before you could take. I’ve seen that and I’ve definitely seen in codes of conduct for communities. They talk specifically about like how to give back and give them back in certain ways or helping out. If you’ve been here a while, help out the new folks. Make sure you do that. Like they encourage it. Chris Badgett: Yeah. And it’s sound like a Reddit, I believe you can’t do a post until you’ve commented a bunch of times. So they’re like getting you to, help or contribute. Before, posting your own thing, let’s talk about other people’s communities. If you’re a subject matter expert, yeah, you’re trying to build a thing, but you’re likely not in a vacuum. There’s existing other communities around your idea, either very closely or tangentially related by communities of where people are before they’re ready for your community or where they might go after. So there’s this idea like in marketing is an example where. You can leverage other people’s audiences. And so that means even if you have zero email lists, as an example, you can go to somebody who does have a big email list, create like a training or a free resource. And you take their stage and contribute to their community and maybe get Some people over to your community or your offer. The way I think about this is just the general idea of being a helper give before you get, so for example, even in the Lifter LMS space, I’d be in like a general, let’s say WordPress community. And someone’s literally having trouble with one of my competitor’s softwares. And the question they’re asking is not like exactly about their software, but I’m like, okay, this is a website that a competitor has, but I actually know the answer to what this person is asking. Like, where should I host my videos or whatever? I’m still going to help them. So giving with no expectation of return is super powerful. Joint venture partnerships are a really interesting one. And I’ll tell a story about that in a second, but what a joint venture partnership is in a perfect world is you have an audience or community. This other person have an audience and community. They may be exactly the same or similar overlapping. And it’s like an exchange, okay, I’ll do a webinar for your community, you do a webinar for my community, we’ll both email our lists we’ll invite the people in, and there can be an offer at the end of the webinar to get the free thing or sign up for the paid thing. And those can work really well. So an example that I do at Lifter LMS there’s two, the two audiences of the course creator and like kind of the website building professional. There’s some people that I do joint venture partnerships with that have like really just the course creator. They’re not like techies at all. And I have a bunch of techies that you know, but also course creators. So we’re not, our products are not in competition. This person is selling. Coaching and courses and stuff. I’m more in the software side, but we have a lot of overlap in your audience. So once a year, we basically do an email exchange and email to whatever the the main offer is and some, something like that. And we’ve, this person I’ve met with, I’ve been, I’ve gone offline and I’ve been to their house and your home. I’ve been to mastermind events that they’ve put on it. And we just developed. Partnership, we’ve become friends, we ask each other for just business help from time to time. And we have this kind of business relationship where we just do this exchange once a year and it’s, I’ve probably done that for six or seven years at this point. So that’s a joint venture partnership. Then there’s affiliate partnerships, which are a little more straightforward in the sense that you can set up an affiliate program where. If somebody promotes your course or your membership they get a unique link that’s trackable and there’s automated systems for handling this. So they can promote your program to their community the affiliates, the affiliate system man measures and tracks that link click. And if ultimately within 30 days or whatever, that person ends up buying something. That person earns an affiliate commission, which in the core space is typically anywhere from 15 to 50 percent of the transaction amount. So that’s a way to introduce an affiliate program to your online education platform. It’s a way for other people to essentially sell for you to their audience. Collaboration point. Story with LFTR LMS but around the same time as we introduced our Facebook group, there was another popular software called WP Fusion, which connects your website with LFTR on it and other popular software to CRM companies like Salesforce, HubSpot, ActiveCampaign, ConvertKit, and so on. And we’ve integrated our softwares together. They work really well together. I help out in the WP fusion Facebook group. Jack, the founder of WP fusion, whenever somebody has like a marketing automation question or whatever, he comes over to our Facebook group, he helps out. So it’s just like this partnership where we’re leveraging each other’s community, but it’s a triple win. It’s good for, me, it’s good for Jack and most importantly, it’s good for the user. They’re getting the help from that, that outside expert and the outside expert is also now getting exposure, potentially new customers. We recommend each other’s software. We both use each other’s software. It’s just a strong partnership where two communities are working for the benefit of all. Jason Coleman: So many good options there for how to think about these other communities. And you talked about adjacent communities that come before, after in the journey. And I think that like a phrase is like, what’s next is. Is this one that can be used in a sense of if someone takes a course and at the end of it, they’re finished and you don’t have a community, if you don’t have your own, what’s next, it’s what’s next, maybe you pass it off to another community that, and you become an affiliate of theirs. Or you give someone sales leads for an even bigger course, or you could be on the other end of it where you reach out to some of these other products and communities. That have that kind of what’s next moment, like they finish this thing, they graduate from that, but that person doesn’t serve that user anymore or have an upsell. And but you do, so it’s a good way to through these affiliate relationships. Cross pollinate between products and communities. Yeah, I’m, I’m thinking about interacting with community communities like Reddit in the subreddits in social media and places, or if you’re in someone else’s Facebook group and you, he gave some of the polite ideas around how you should interact there, like you should be helpful, you shouldn’t, always be promoting, you help people, even if they’re your competitors. Another one. Like a way to think about it when you’re interacting in these communities online is to be yourself and very clearly make it clear, like who you are. I think there can be a temptation, for example, when you’re on a subreddit and someone says, what’s the best LMS to almost and you’re like, I have one to just like almost pretend you’re someone else or just answer and not be clear that you’re the owner of the product that you just linked to. Because it, that feels more potentially more authentic to the moment or it’s like awkward to out yourself, but I think that’s troublesome if you don’t declare your biases and aren’t clear about who you are, these like internet sleuths will go through your history and be like, wait a second, this is Chris Badgett, you like, and they’ll think you’re up to shady stuff, even if you just felt a little awkward, you don’t want to make it awkward. You just had a good answer for someone. So it’s almost yeah. Be a little obnoxious about it. I have a bias cause I’m Jason Coleman, the owner of this thing, but we have a really good product that answers that are really good blog posts that answers this question. Even on, on some sites, if they allow it in a signature or some point, put it in the footer, use your clear, your real name, stuff like that. Declare that you’re biased about what you’re, how you’re responding. And I think people appreciate like on something on like Reddit where you can upvote and downvote. I’m always worried when I do this, it’s like, all right, I’m biased because I own this thing, but we have a really good solution. Here’s how it works. And that, I think I’m worried people would downvote it. Cause yeah, you can’t trust that. There’s this, like in some of these forms, like Reddit knows the bias is there and they’re sensitive to it and they don’t want to talk to you. They want to talk to other people. But if you’re there and you’re like, Hey, I’m biased, but here’s, and you’re just useful. I’m surprised you don’t get as many downvotes and people who know about your product might upvote it. And so people respect the honesty. So like another case of this is paid memberships pro, we have a bunch of free open source plugins and a lot of them are hosted on wordpress. org and wordpress. org had their own support forum system and we had ours. And this has always been a little bit of a challenge because you. If you don’t support people in wordpress. org, it actually affects like your ranking, your search ranking, and there’s no way to disable it or just say, we don’t support it here. We support it over here. They’re like, Hey, if you host on wordpress. org, you have to support on our system too. So actually there’s a support for them and I would pay people to monitor that and answer questions. But it’s still from time to time, as this happened, at least a couple of times, someone would give us a negative review either on wordpress. org itself, or even on a third party type review site. And they’d be like, Paid memberships pro charges for support and they wouldn’t answer my question, but I went to WordPress and WordPress answered my question and I’m like, Oh, like WordPress didn’t answer your question. Like I paid someone to answer your question. Like that person works for me, that person is part of, as part of paid memberships pro and it just wasn’t clear because it’s called wordpress. org. The website is a big WordPress logo everywhere and folks who, beginners mindset, they’re interacting with it. They’re confused about how they’re getting support. So they just, all they saw was. When you go to slash supported payment, just pro we offer paid support. And now we, that forced us that feedback to we should more prominently focus on our free support. And especially now that we’ve moved outside the. org repo, we have to make our free support more prominent. So we don’t lose people who just think you have to pay. But yeah, but what we did, so that’s one thing we did was like, Hey, made our phone free support through our our email and contact forms more clear. But we also on wordpress. org would put in our signature every time we help someone, Jason Coleman, owner of Paid Memberships Pro or your title at Paid Memberships Pro to try to make it a little more clear Hey, this is a Paid Memberships Pro person interacting with you. There’s so many benefits to just like. Actually being yourself and being clear about who you are and being one human being per account rather than playing games and trying to, be a character or pretend you’re someone you’re not. Chris Badgett: And that completes our session on community. And if you enjoyed this, I just want to say I’ve really enjoyed this conversation, Jason, and this has been a great conversation around community. I’d encourage anybody who listens to this to think about. All the five hats in addition to the community hat, the expert, the entrepreneur, the technologist, the teacher, and the community builder. And if you’re really into this stuff, you’re not alone. So in many ways, Jason and I are really into this stuff. We’ve been in it for over a decade. And finding the others, like we found each other through the internet. So if this is your niche and you’re feeling the vibe from, of this community you’re not alone. I just want anybody who hears this conversation to really think about that. And Jason, I appreciate the great discussion we’ve had. Yeah, thanks. Jason Coleman: Awesome. Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMSCast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at lifterlms. com forward slash gift. Go to lifterlms. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post Part 5- Becoming the Community Builder, Education Entrepreneur Mentor Series appeared first on LMScast.

Jason Coleman, a tech and online business expert, joins Chris Badgett to discuss the evolution of LMS technology. They outline how LifterLMS streamlines course creation by integrating with content management systems, emphasizing the balance between an all-in-one platform and user flexibility. The duo explores simplicity in launching online courses and the importance of video production and branding for education entrepreneurs. They also delve into leveraging AI for productivity, highlighting strategies that enhance user engagement in online learning.

This episode is brought to you by Popup Maker Boost Your Website’s Leads & Sales with Popup Maker Get started for free or save 15% OFF Popup Maker Premium—the most trusted WordPress popup plugin to grow your email list and increase sales conversions. Get Popup Maker Now In this LMScast episode, Jason Coleman and Chris Badgett discuss teaching tactics for online courses, with an emphasis on how to interact with novices. They discuss the value of comprehending the “beginner’s mindset” and the difficulties associated with being an expert. One important issue they raise is that it might be challenging for specialists to relate to novice students, which can result in too complex course content. They suggest simplifying the material and employing “spiral learning,” in which students gradually go over subjects in more detail. They also discuss the need to streamline your courses to concentrate on the most important 5% of the required information. As well as the benefits of iterating and improving course material based on student comments and experiences. This method facilitates pupils’ comprehension and retention of material. The episode emphasizes how important it is for instructors to assume their students’ roles to ensure that the material is understandable. Accessible, and pertinent to their requirements. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide Here’s Where To Go Next… Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website. Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS. Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014. And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week. Episode Transcript Chris Badgett: Welcome back to the education entrepreneur mentor series. This is a five part series where we go over the five critical hats. that you need to wear or have the skills contained within your team to find success as an education entrepreneur. Somebody who’s teaching online, building an online education company, coaching, or building an education based business. Those five hats that need to be worn to cover the bases are becoming the expert. the entrepreneur, the teacher, the technologist, and the community builder. This is part three. We’re going to be getting into becoming the teacher. Enjoy this session with my business partner at Lifter LMS, Jason Coleman, and make sure you check out all five parts of this series. Enjoy. In this session, we’re going to talk about becoming the teacher or instructional designer, as it’s known in the e learning space. It’s one thing to be an expert in some kind of subject matter, but the ability to teach, to coach, to design curriculum is an important part of being an education entrepreneur. Let’s start our conversation around Beginner’s Mind, which is a concept that comes from Zen Buddhism. And digging into that, I just want to touch on the idea that it’s easy to lose touch with the learner, particularly if you’ve been in your subject matter expertise for a really long time. We’ve all talked to somebody who’s an expert in something. And it’s just going in one ear and out the other, it’s just too advanced. One of the strategies I learned around how to work with this, I learned from an instructional designer named Julie Dirksen. She has this concept called shelf space. So as we learn and master our subject matter, our shelf space and our ability to hold concepts, frameworks, you know, strategies, tactics, it just gets bigger. Where as a beginner has a really small amount of shelf space because they’re new to the subject matter and when, if you don’t accommodate for that, the, the learner just kind of gets overwhelmed or there’s too much jargon in. So some of the ways to kind of get past that, and it’s also by the way called the expert’s curse. So the expert just can’t get out of their own head and they’ve got their library of Alexandria with lots of shelf space. But one way to think about it is imagine talking to a previous version of yourself. What would that look like? Like you’re really advanced in investing, but if you were talking to you know, the investor that you were 15 years ago, you probably would kind of streamline it down a little bit. And this is where this concept of minimum effective dose comes in. So it’s not about like. Let me pack my library of Alexandria of knowledge into this content. Just kind of give them everything. It’s more like, what’s the least amount that I could teach, explain, concepts. Potentially assignments, activities, and things to get them moving. In the direction of expanding their shelf space. Julie also taught me the concept of spiral learning. Which is the idea that you don’t have to teach everything. You know, about a piece of a subject matter in one go. It’s actually a lot better to let’s say there’s like 10 key areas of a subject matter to do kind of a spiral across those 10 key areas on like fundamental ideas. And then when you get back to, you know, that first area, then you can expand on that a little bit. So instead of trying to go deep on like one aspect and take them from, you know, elementary school to PhD, let’s go elementary all the way around and start building and it’s kind of how the traditional grade system works. So at Lifter LMS as an example, one of our top performing lead generation tools, and also new customer or user onboarding tools is our quick start course, which has somewhere around 30, 000 people in it. And the concept behind that course is the idea that if I can only show people 5 percent of the most important aspects of the software, how to use it, how to set up the website, how to collect payments, create content and all that, what would I teach in that 5%? So the course content is in total probably about 30 minutes. Even though if I were to teach everything that left your LMS does. I might need like five hours to kind of go over everything. But that would be completely overwhelming. Yeah, Jason Coleman: I feel that. I think about that with my children too. And I always had trouble with that. I have these very lofty ideas that I want to instill in them. But there’s like a framework, like that shelf that’s needed. He can’t talk about this complicated subject until you build the. You know, you have to meet the person where they’re at. When you’re teaching them. I think a tactic I’ve. I’ve tried in some of the investing material. I’ve done is like I want to be able to have someone watch me as I’m researching a stock and I’m taking all the notes and writing all the very complicated things I’m doing. And and actually benefit from that, like go along on that journey with me. But there’s like a list of like 20 things they have to know. So I actually like started with the end point and said, I want my students to be here. Like they understand they can watch this whole video and they know everything that’s going on. And I can’t share that video with them yet. But that gives me like the syllabus for you know, all the aspects. I love the spiral thing. I think there’s other versions of that too, where you, you learn something and then. You, learn more and more and then. It’s like good to relearn that thing. It was like a different context. Like that was the easy version. There’s all these videos on YouTube. Does Fox media do them or something? And there it’s whatever. It’s like a symphony and five levels of difficulty or like. You know that series is really good at like hammering that point of like, Here’s one way to understand it, and then there’s another level of understanding it, another level of understanding, the same thing. That idea of like, going back to the basics. It’s good to, to realize that like your students aren’t as bored with like the basic information as, as you are. Like I was talking about the, you know, the stock research, like that’s what I do actually. And it’s easy for me. I’m like, I do it anyway. I could just put the camera on and then share it. And it feels fun and I would love to talk to people and engage on that level. But if I was really trying to enter educate folks. That’s not gonna work. Like they need to know the basics. So it’s good to keep teaching the basics and getting better at it. And some of the best teachers that we know I think like Seth Godin, I think of Gary Vaynerchuk and Warren Buffett’s kind of like his, his annual letters, like would often hammer home the same points. And if you follow these folks for a long time. You almost get bored of it too. You’re like, this guy has like three, you know, tricks or three things that he teaches. It was, is that like what do you call that? Like the mid twit mind. So it’s like, this guy only has three things he teaches or, and it’s like, that’s so exciting. Then in the middle, it’s like. I have three things he teaches. Like, that’s nothing. Then the expert is like, actually only have like one or three things that you teach. And so, yeah, I, I think if you really dig into that, trying to educate folks, like. Educate the basics. Like give the same talk over and over. I used to do more conferences and talks and I would feel almost like a comedian. Like I did my set. It’s recorded. Peace out. Now I’m working on my next one. Like, and there’s some part of me that felt bad if I gave the same talk more than once. But it doesn’t really make sense because if you’re in a different conference, 10 percent is like folks who’ve seen it before. But also if you give the same talk over and over again, you can make it better and better and get good at delivering it. And so I’ve seen that also like on the conference circuit, like folks give the same talk. And then I think another tactic is to take intro courses for things, things that you think you know, really well already. So I think folks are surprised if I think I understand investing really well, and I’d be, you know, if I. I bought a course because I thought it was interesting. I would want to skip to like the later sections where the meat is and it’s like, nah, slow down and just see how they explain the basics. And every once in a while you see something, you’re like, Oh, I didn’t actually realize that. I didn’t know that the origin of that was here. Or I didn’t know that was pulled from this. You know, where that came from. And I guess a personal story, you know, that helped me understand some of these concepts of like focusing on the basics and going back to the basics. I was at a conference and actually it was interesting. I was going to do a 40 minute talk and about a week before they said, can you instead do like a four hour workshop? And I was like, I guess let’s go, you know? So I took my talk and I turned it into a workshop and I had an early slide. It was a business one on one workshop. So it was like folks starting out building a business from scratch. And I talked about some of the stuff that we talked like in the operation section. And I had a slide early on that was like, Hey, let’s review the stuff you guys already know, like in business, you want to make money. What is that? That’s revenue minus expenses equals profit. Everyone’s on board. Cool. Next slide. And when I said next slide, like half the audience was like, wait, wait, wait, what, what go back? Can I write that down? And I was like, Whoa, like these folks, like they’re, they were good photographers. They were good at selling the things they sold. They were good at tinting windshields. Like the result, it was like a really interesting Collect a group of people with like small businesses as, but they had never really thought of this stuff and it, it actually, you know they didn’t consciously think about even something as, it seems as basic to me as like profit and revenue and expenses. And so I was like, slow down and I went back and, you know, spent some time on that slide. Chris Badgett: I remember there’s this football coach. I can’t remember which one, like some of the great coaches, but he had this thing where the very first day of the very first practice, his very first kind of teaching to the football team was this is how you tie your shoes. Jason Coleman: Like Chris Badgett: going literally to the very first step. And if you look at the offline world, like a great teacher, let’s say in a university, a professor. They may get like a new class of freshmen every year. So they’re like kind of physically forced to be reminded, okay, these are freshmen. They’re just getting started and then they can perfect it over time. And also just want to note that the beginner’s market is often the biggest market. So if you look at YouTube videos and You know, or if you look at like course sales on Udemy and stuff, like the, whatever subject matter 101, like these courses often have the best sales. So if you need motivation to like keep it simple, just remember there’s often a lot of revenue potential by not forgetting about the beginners. Let’s talk about instructional design. What is it? Why is it important? Cause sometimes like a beginner might think, Oh, I just need to get on camera, talk about my subject matter expertise. But what you’re designing is not just content, you’re designing a learning journey. It’s, it’s not a content dump. We’re not putting the library of Alexandria like in video format and crossing our fingers and hope they figure it out. So it’s, it’s all about designing a transformational path. So the main ones we see in online education in terms of transformational paths are like, you know, incremental improvements or. Like big result, big transformation, and some of the top, you know, highest value courses and memberships and communities actually help somebody create a new identity. So, think about that. What is the end result? Design for the end result. Do the chunking and work backwards from that end result and create the milestones like we talked about in a previous session. But also, think about Getting your learners taking action to make the progress, because people need more than just content to learn and make a change. And some of the ways to think about that are, yes, they need some content, they need some core ideas, concepts, strategies. But this is why I’m a big fan of assignments, particularly if you’re helping somebody go from A to B. Giving them like, okay, we’ve learned this concepts, now do X. And also maintain beginner’s mind and remember this may be the first time they’re doing that. So get them taking action. Potentially, we’ll talk about community later, but perhaps, you know, getting involved in like a social learning aspect like learning together can add more richness to the experience. And then as a side note, it is good. They’ll also be entertaining. So like a boring teacher, that’s just blah, blah, blah. Here’s the, here’s your homework. Make it fun and entertaining. If you look at some of the top performing YouTube channels, they’re entertaining as well. It’s, there’s a term for that. It’s called edutainment. We recently about a year or two ago at Lifter LMS designed. We wanted to focus on a problem of, okay, sometimes people are buying our softwares, but they’re not ready. They don’t have their course idea. They’re kind of doing things out of order, which is a challenge. Like maybe they’re buying software, maybe they’re studying ads or. Trying to build an affiliate program, but they don’t actually have their course figured out yet. Like, what’s it called? Who’s it for? What’s the syllabus? Maybe start creating that content. So we designed a free mini course called the Course Plan Challenge to help people figure out, A, what topic that they sh would be best for them to focus on. How to really define their avatar, which we’ve talked about in a previous session. How to start doing the curriculum design. And so we’re Kind of getting people ready for the software through training and really just mastering that beginner’s mind. So if you think about, this is why fourth dimensional thinking is really important. You’re not just providing content in an isolated bubble of time. These people are on a journey, you’re hooking into a pain point or an opportunity for a particular person, all the way to them being successful with your program and what do they need throughout that, like content, ideas, worksheets, you know, there’s a lot of multimedia, which we’ll talk about a little bit that you can do to kind of make your experience even richer, but yeah, plant, think through time, not just like it’s an isolated, isolated package that they need to know about. Jason Coleman: That course plan challenge course is awesome. Like, so here’s a plug for that. I, I think I definitely have like, I, I Helped implement it on the website in certain ways. So I had to like, look at it too. That was my first exposure to it was kind of not taking the course, but just like doing stuff. But then afterwards I referred back to it when I was planning a course on myself, my own. And I bet you probably do too. You almost like go back to your own course. Chris Badgett: That’s the same planning. Jason Coleman: Yeah. Yeah. So it’s awesome when you have like a piece of content like that. Yeah. Yeah. A few posts and things that I reference the, you know, in the, the book I wrote about WordPress is one of those two where it’s like, Oh, I don’t remember this, but I wrote about it in the book. It’s funny. Yeah. So yeah, plug for the course plan challenge. That’s awesome content. I yeah, you talked about like being entertaining and turning it on that’s tough for me. I remember, I think of like the teacher’s voice, like my kids in elementary school, all the good teachers, like they, you know, you’re talking to them, like they have a normal voice and then when they’re talking to students, man, I would like mimic it now, you know, but it’s like higher pitch and you’re like, Oh yeah. And like, you know, energetic and you get it, making it sound exciting. You’re talking about the boring stammer, but it’s like, this is awesome. It’s funny you said that. Then it like triggers in my head now, like I should turn that on for this. And I, I don’t practice it enough. I think to have it natural. And I remember thinking about that when I was homeschooling my kids for about a year in COVID, I was like, I think the content is good. But like, I really think like, the teacher. I don’t have like, the energy they need right now, and I like that they’ve taken action too and I thought I could ask you, cause I, I feel like I struggle with this when I’m consuming content, I like, I like to read books, and sometimes reading books at like, 11 at night, before you, before you go to bed, or like, early in the morning, no one’s around, and and it’s a business book and I’m like, that’s really good ideas. And it’s like, okay, now take action and do these things before you read the next chapter. And I’m like yeah, no, no, actually later. So I don’t know if you have tips for like encouraging that or making folks more likely to take those action and those next steps. Chris Badgett: I think just to answer that real quick, that’s one of the cool things about learning management system is you can use things like required assignments. Prerequisites, like you can’t move on to the next section to fill or drip content. You can’t, the next one isn’t coming for another week. So to create the space. So I Jason Coleman: think like the course plan challenge has like a very clear, there was like six part layout of start to finish some of the stuff we’re talking about, you know, how to develop the outline and plan for your course. Another method I’ve seen work with folks is to design a course through like content accumulation and then later strategically curate it. So, you know, the idea here is to produce content, useful content, continuously. And I talked before about like eBomb as a method of that, whenever you answer a question for someone. As an expert, other people have that question, write it down, share it somehow, put it somewhere. It’s good to publish it if possible, but if, even if not, just kind of write, write down all this content. And force yourself to do that, and get good, and then at the end, you, you can or, organize it into, you know, a structured learning path. You could build it into a course, some other versions of this Are like, so you have, say like blog posts once a week for a year, you got 52 blog posts. Then you can build these hubs around common concepts or use cases. Or it’s often called pillar content from like a marketing perspective. So like, cool, you talked about you know, once we’ve done in the past, so I’m thinking we have membership software. And so we’re answering all these questions about the different problems of setting up a membership site and running a site and thinking about pricing and things like that, and then. We build content hubs around common use cases. So we have a hub for course people who are building like a course, like memberships and people who are building associations and people who are building video sites and we aggregate all the content into those hubs. And then what’s good when you’re building those hubs is you’ll realize there’s gaps in the content. So when you do that practice of curating the content into a course or a hub or a pillar. You’re like, Oh, you know what we don’t have is, you know, we’re trying to All the content from A to B on this topic, we’re actually missing some of the key questions we don’t answer, or we link out to someone else’s website for that, or we often refer some other tool, and it’s like, oh, that’s a missing piece that we should write ourselves. So yeah, we did that for Penguin Research Pro with the use cases. It was awesome because we’ve been writing content for years and years and years. When we put together the hubs, we kind of did almost for ourselves as like a practice to help us focus on the use cases. It was something that we could deliver to folks when they sign up, Hey, what use case are you? And then we give them the hub. It’s like, here’s a better way to like browse through our content. And when, when we put it together, we were like, we were given that as like a freebie add on to the full membership. And we’re like, this is valuable in itself. This feels like. More valuable than the software, like the ideas that we’ve been talking about. So you might find content you’re building for some other reason when you package it together, it becomes valuable and you can put a price tag on it. Chris Badgett: Yeah. I think one of the things is like this presentation, these sessions are all about really identifies an aspect of this, where when you put your customer at the center of your business and not your product. Like you mentioned, Oh, this, this other thing may be more valuable than the software. What that, in my view, what that comes from is, okay, this, this particular type of customer in this case, they need technology, which we’re going to talk about in another session. And that’s what we do. That’s what our business is. And we incorporate a lot of the other things we’re talking about here, but they need help with all these other things like becoming a teacher you know, being a subject matter expert, building community and so on. So you can expand outside of the scope of your core business and just provide more resources to help people even further. And that’s just a helpful way to think about it. And like you said, you can sometimes signpost other resources like, Oh, well, they really need to figure out this other thing. There’s this other expert over here and just introduce them to another body of work. There’s a saying, just because you’re on the train, it doesn’t mean you have to carry the luggage. So sometimes you can use. Your depth of knowledge and connections to point people in other areas that are going to support them. That ultimately supports your core business as well. Let’s talk about lesson design. People are not robots and there’s variation in personality types, culture you know, predispositions and learning, it often comes up and there’s like multiple learning styles. So how do you design for that? And there’s also consumption styles. Like how do people like to consume content or engage in community or get support? Kind of the classic learning style thing is, well, there’s visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. Visual people are they like watching videos. They like seeing, like, pictures and graphics. Auditory people like to listen. If you listen to podcasts, and like a lot, like me, you’re probably an auditory person. There, there’s a few you know, really nerd out on YouTube. You’re probably a visual person. There’s also the, the readers, like people who like to read, you know, I know lots of people who they really dislike video and they, they prefer to read. Kinesthetic people they don’t like reading, watching videos or listening. They just, they’re actually really into like the assignment, the get moving, like get action. I just want to start like playing with this software or this movement technique or these art implements and just start, I, I learn by doing is what kinesthetic is. And then there’s the it’s not really a tension span, but it’s the idea that some people like rip through content and they’re just like scanning and then other people are deep divers like they read every word, they watch the video really slowly, they’ll like email you and be like, Hey, you have a typo here on line 736 about whatever, like they’re very detailed. So when I’m creating content either for marketing or as part of training, I think about that sort of a classic example of that. If I’m doing a video lesson and there’s like a big idea and concept and thing, I’ll kind of spotlight at the beginning for the scanner people who are going to move really fast and maybe not watch the whole thing just to kind of give them their, their quick hit. But then of course I’ll go into detail and do the whole deep dive for the deep divers. And then the quizzing and assignments aspect. This really helps the, particularly the assignments help the kinesthetic learners. So like, cool, we’re actually, we have a project here. We’re going to do something. So not just creating content for consumption, but think about action. And I, I really learned about this different learning style, content consumption style, making sure we’re taking action and not just consuming information. At Lifter LMS as an example with our support, I lean more, and many of us, by the way, are we do all these things like we scan, we deep dive, we watch, we read but you’re often stronger in one area. Like, I think you’re more of a reader, I’m more of a, you know, video audio guy, but I also know you like video and I also read, but you probably have a primary, it’s kind of like a personality type, but when doing support for software like Lifter LMS. I realize the biggest mistake we can make is to assume the world is as we are, particularly in a teaching role. If you happen to love videos and all you do is make videos and have a YouTube channel and have video lessons, you’re kind of ignoring a large percentage of the population. So we’ve made a commitment to make technical documentation with a lot of words, a lot of screenshots. And we do YouTube tutorials for the video learning folks. We do courses that have more assignments and just mix all the multimedia styles. We do live calls. Some people, like, really like to learn in community. You get into that and, like, people have different types of conversation preferences. Like, oh, I just want to send an email. I want to jump on Zoom. I want to watch your live stream and not have the pressure of being live on a call with you, but I’ll be in the comments and you’ll notice people cluster, you’ll start seeing the same names in different places. So thinking about that is, is, is one way to do that. And, and like even something like a refund policy for a course or membership. That’s really for the kinesthetic people. Like I don’t want to read your sales page. I’m just going to buy the thing. And then if I don’t like it, I’m going to ask for a refund. We also do trials as a conversion tool. So that’s for the. I don’t want to read your sales page. Let me test it out before I buy it. And and even in the software itself, like there’s places as an example that like, oh, here’s a video tutorial, here’s a link to technical documentation. The way the course builder works, it, it kind of encourages people to create different. You know, types of learning content and resources. So it’s a, it’s like personalities, you know, so many personalities in the world at the same thing applies to what the different types of learners, and they may, they may be exactly your same avatar, but they’re going to have all that variation and personality. Jason Coleman: With the different learning styles and the kind of content types, modalities of making content. I know it puts pressure on folks that they feel like, Oh, I have to be a good writer and a good video person and make podcasts. And I have to build, you know, visual displays of this information. But what’s good is there’s lots of tooling and help you can get with those stages. So I, I always recommend like starting with the modality that you’re most comfortable with. And then using that to build things. So an example for myself, like, I think I I’m a reader, I’m a writer. So when I was doing video and trying to do it off the cuff, it’s not coming across as well. And it got easier for me when I scripted it, basically like wrote a blog post and then like, you know, kind of sort of read it as I was doing the video. But that helped me like organize my thoughts and figure out what was important to talk about. And, and some people go in the, and actually I’ve gone in the opposite direction. Sometimes there’s like a very complicated topic and I don’t actually understand it. I started recording and I ramble with someone on my marketing team and they just ask me questions and they dig deep. Then they get a bunch of content and they’re like, okay, I’m going to turn this into a blog post, a written blog post. There’s tooling, like if you made the video, you made a bunch of videos and now you want to make blog posts, you can get the transcripts. And run it through something like ChatGPT and say, here’s my transcript, write me like a blog post, and it you don’t want to paste, you know, post that directly, but it gives you like a really good first draft if you’re good at making video and not so good at making, you know, writing stuff from scratch. And, and I yeah, just, so. Yeah, just, it is so important. I know like on my team, we’ve had a lot of written content over the years and we try to do more video and you the best version of a YouTube video is like thinking specifically about the YouTube market and how they consume content and how long it is, and it should be visual and not just words, not just a talking head, like the ideal, most Produce videos on YouTube. The ones that do really well are very well thought out. There’s kind of an 80, 20 there where they’re like, I have the blog post. If I film myself talking head, reading the blog post, that’s better than no video at all. And so, and it’s a good starting point. And then you can see if you gain traction, you know, like, Oh, there’s a little bit of traction in this video. We should probably make a better one. So that’s encouraged folks start with the modality that, that you’re best with use that to kind of go into the other media realm. And then, you know, allow yourself to 80, 20, like just put something out there. It’s not perfect. People still appreciate it because they want to listen to it while they’re washing their dishes. They can’t, you know, read it on the laptop, whatever. So another thing that, you know, when I think about building courses and educational material it’s important to focus on a single path learning journey. So you’re going from A to B, but there’s a bunch of options in the middle. There’s a, he said. You know, use different tools and, and so it’s, it helps, especially with the first version of things to simplify by addressing like one clear path from start to finish. And so an example of that that, you know, notoriously it was hard for me was I’ve tried, I don’t think we even have something on our website called the membership handbook. But with our membership site handbook, we’ve been doing this for like over 15 years. And it’s like, day one, I was like, we should have a quote unquote handbook for how to set up a membership site. We have these content hubs and other things, but there’s probably seven drafts of the membership site handbook. The thing that killed it every time early on was that there’s so many options for like, where do you host your website? You know, which tool do you use? Our tool, of course. Okay, cool. That’s an easy decision. But then it’s like, which email tool do you use? Which You know, how do you build your course if you’re building it? And, and I found the membership handbook that’s gone on. I’m never going to make it, but I’ve made similar content. It helps to simplify. It’s one path. It’s like, so I, I note the choices, but then make one choice for them. That’s the default choice. And it helps to remember your customer avatar when you’re doing that. Cause you’re like, Oh, who am I talking to? I’m Oh, Chris Badgett. You know, as my avatar, you have like this very specific person you’re talking to, you can kind of guess which tool they already have or that they’re going to know about and just pick that one, pick the obvious one or the default one or the one that you have a partnership with. And yeah, like the, the path that the folks are learning is like membership site handbook. Another problem with that is it’s like a vague concept. It’s not like, you know launch your membership site or get your first membership sale or find your first member. Or it’s even, we have six different use cases. So a handbook for each use case would probably be good. It’s too vague. It’s good to, Hey, you’re taking Crispadget, your avatar from A to B to a very specific outcome, like we talked about and yeah, eliminating those what ifs. That’s the other thing too. So there’s options of tooling and ways you could go about things, but there’s also like almost FAQ style, like, what do you do if this happens? What do you do if this happens? What if. You, you know, your customer you’re selling to doesn’t have a lot of money, so you probably, what if this, what if that and take note of those, maybe you even have FAQ sections, but don’t let it derail you when you’re writing the first draft from A to B, just, you know, log those what ifs for later, and assume it, you know, the ideal situation. Chris Badgett: Yeah, I think one way you can kind of litmus test yourself. If you’re at the handbook idea, it’s getting a little out of hand, getting hard to like figure out what to do next, how to structure. I call this problem in the course industry, creating a giant course. So if you find yourself like, Oh, this is expanding. This is like 50 or a hundred lessons. It’s probably getting a little long in the tooth and it can be really liberating to think about many courses. So. Like with Paid Memberships Pro as an example, like, a handbook for associations sounds easier to create as a separate thing from like a handbook for course creators a handbook for communities, and so you, you kind of Can separate those out. And if the same trainings are relevant to your avatar, just not all jumbled together, then a membership or course bundle can be used to offer access to that. So you allow a bit of it, a little bit of that choose your own adventure while also like kind of simplifying the learning experience in each of the many courses. Let’s talk about user experience design. We’ve talked about learning journeys, but It’s, it’s really important to think about designing that as like a total user experience and how people learn through time. So, you know, traditional school system starts elementary all the way up to higher education, and that’s a process that can take you know, years, decades. But so like you kind of get the macro view, but if you really zoom in on the micro view, like just take it one step at a time and when you kind of chunk things down to lessons it’s good to come up with your, your own instructional design framework. So here as an example, we’re talking through like topic area. Like a big idea slash strategy. Then we get into some tactics and then we’re using story as a way to do like case study, learning with examples through story. And then we’re also adding in a little conversation, which people learn from. I found it really interesting. The Google’s notebook, LLM, I think it’s called like, you can give it a resource. And the way you learn is you have this option to turn it into a car, an AI generated conversation, people learn by that. And that’s what we’re doing here. We’re having a conversation react and so on. But one of the easiest ways like to come up with your instructional design framework is to think of concepts. So like, what are the big ideas? What are the strategies? What are the tactics? And then give people specific actions to take to move forward. And we have a lot more options besides quizzing. Like I’m just going to check, some people call that a knowledge check to make sure like you got, you got the core ideas. But getting people involved in projects, there’s things, there’s a type of learning called project based learning. It’s not just about theory. This goes back to that idea of different learning styles. Some people do really good with theory and they can kind of extrapolate and figure out how to put it into practice. Other people do better with like, let’s get moving in a project and kind of back in and back and reinforce like what the core concepts are. The other thing is designing for what happens when people get stuck when they fall down. This is the same thing that happens in traditional education where, you know, you have your all stars. You have your people that are kind of getting left behind and you have like the average performance. So design through time what kind of resources and support you want to have. That could be like office hours. It could be a contact form, like right next to syllabus. So a student could like privately reach out to the instructor. It could be some community aspect. Which we’ll talk about in a little bit. I heard this phrase once, like surround yourself with help. That’s what you want your people to feel like. There’s a whole, And there’s this great training, but there’s also like all these resources and there’s like a menu of them that can appeal to different personality types and consumption styles. And I was in a training or a coaching program called SAS Academy, and I, I thought it was a really cool implementation. There was probably 300 courses in there. There was live. Coaching, training, and coaching calls. There were in person events in big cities around the U S three times a year. There’s a Facebook group. There was you could just like email the company and get help. So like, it was just like a full featured robust user experience that had like tons of resources and people could really choose their own adventure through it. All while driving to the same outcome. Jason Coleman: When I think about. Resources and support and like additional help around like a core, you know, course or learning experience. Sometimes there’s a lot of different options and you can kind of copy what you’ve seen elsewhere or kind of what’s been recommended or some things might seem obvious. But a lot of times it’s good to, you know, get the core material out there. And as long as you have a way for your, you know, your users to get back to you through like a, you know, send them an email, ask for feedback. Have a contact form have, you know, if there’s a support or you dump them into a community where people can chat, like, it’s, it’s important to get that feedback and that feedback is kind of, they’re going to tell you what they needed. There’s this kind of trick where you could almost do this too. I actually, I thought of this, I do this with my kids. I’ve never done it with in the context of business, but someone’s birthday is coming up and you don’t know what to get them. You can pretend like I just got you like the best thing for your birthday and you’ll never guess what it is. And you’re like, actually, try it. Like, do you think you know what it is? And they’ll guess and if you keep track of the guesses, you’re like, all right, well, here’s three things that Chris wants for his birthday. So it feels like that kind of thing where if you kind of it’d be interesting to like do that in advance. Working on bonuses, like you’ll never guess what they are. Actually try to guess. And then what people say is like that they’re telling you what they want. And you’re like, okay, cool. That’s they, you know. This person used a core resource, but they need, you know, extra documentation support or video, or they want something else and you can figure it out. And so, yeah, it’s interesting. Like, I think you, you mentioned designing like the total user experience and there’s different modalities and having these extra things you know, tagged onto your content and that really helps reinforce and, and get the outcomes that you want and it’s really important. I feel like a lot of times I’m, I’m like the keep it simple guy or, or I see the importance of that. And I also remember all the conversations I’ve had with folks who feel slowed down by that or paralyzed by that, or like, I’m never going to be able to do all that. So I talked about like, Hey, there’s different media and modalities that you can produce your content as like, pick the one you do the best and focus on that and make that the core of what you’re doing and make sure you ship that at least. So if you write well, right. And if you’re good on camera, do videos. And as always, like, I think it’s good to start small and try to, you know, we’ve talked in different ways of trying to not make it too complicated, bite off, you know, something you can chew, work on that, do it really well publishing early is important when I talked about earlier in sessions, how there’s a difference between like putting the content together and just having it ready for publish and actually publishing it and putting it out there. You get feedback. There’s folks who I forget the fellow has a writing course and he loves Twitter. He’s like, I tweet a bunch of random stuff and whenever tweets get engagement, that’s the core idea. I should make sure when I write my book, I actually focus on that. So he wants to write books and share books, but you know, he tweets because he gets a sense of like, which of the ideas are kind of, are hitting his audience the best. So that’s a form of publishing and, you know, early, like small forms, teasers you wrote the first lesson, push that out there, see if you can get attention. There’s lots of ways to do that. And also not just publish early, but get paid early. If you’re trying to make money on these things, there is always a difference of the audience who’s willing to consume this, but not pay for it. Or the person who’s paying for it is a different type of customer or user reader learner. And so getting money involved in the system, like makes it real for, for yourself and also for the person learning. And you said to one thing at a time, like step by step. So focus. I think, like, I think about paid memberships pro and off the lift our own messes this way too, where there’s so many features in the core product, there’s so many add ons, there’s so many other plugins, third party plugins, you can tie in other services. And a lot of people come to the software and they see it on, they get excited and it’s like funner for them to like. Add a form, add a community, add an email list, it should be drip feed, right? I guess everyone’s doing that and they, they get overwhelmed and it’s kind of like, well, like remember you’re trying to help your learner get from point A to point B, focus on the core, you know, experience and educational content you’re producing, make sure you nail that, and then these things are accessories, they’re helpers, they’re additional, and definitely it is better to have them, but it’s also good to do one at a time so that folks don’t feel overwhelmed. Dispersed. It’s kind of like if you start at the same time, like a slack, a Facebook group and an online community, like they don’t know where to go. You know, it’s like only one of those at a time. Chris Badgett: Yeah. Even like what we’re, what we’re doing here is we’re kind of expanding the shelf space to be like, Hey, there’s all these personality types. There’s all these different content types. There’s all these consumption styles. And so you still, like as an expert can, you know, kind of research and we’re, we’re expanding your mind here you don’t have to implement everything right away, but the first step is just like kind of awareness that. Oh, wow. This, this is more rich and nuanced and detailed and there’s all these options, but then like you said, shrink it back one step at a time and don’t forget beginner’s mind. And some of the most successful people I see with softwares like ours are, you know, they take consistent and perfect action, but they also continuously improve. So this is why, you know, doing a signature course, like one main thing might be a good idea. Cause it’s like. When you podcast or you become a YouTuber, there’s a saying that your first video is your worst video. So if you’re continuously improving, I’m like, all right, it’s been a year or whatever. I’m gonna remake that course or I found that I could better train my learners using this method of like concept, activity, community conversation, whatever it is. I need to retool or supplement that old lesson. So It’s not about just moving on or doing too many things at once. I wanted to double click on support systems. Cause I think this is how it holds a lot of potential and it’s poorly understood. And I like to tell a story with this. There’s a popular online education platform called masterclass. I think it’s about. 19 a month or something like that. And they did, they build a great product there. You can learn from the best in the world and like what amounts to about of hour of training per course. And you can learn how to tell jokes from Steve Martin. You can learn a business from Sarah Blakely and how to be an entrepreneur and stuff like that. But if you get stuck and you fall down. Or you have questions, they’re not there to interact with you. There’s literally zero support and that’s why it’s 19 a month. But if you want, there may be somebody who’s not as far along as as Steve Martin is a comedian, but there may be this other person who. Teaches stand up comedy who you can talk to one on one who will review your bits or your jokes and like give you feedback So like you may be able to charge that that comedy educator may be able to charge 2000 for the course, for the signature course called zero to like, you know, improv comedy success or whatever, because they’re like really supporting you and support systems similar to consumption styles and learning styles. There’s two layers to this. One layer is what do you like to do? This is your world. This is your creation. Do you like doing one on one coaching? Do you like moderating and holding space for a community? You like doing office hours, like, there’s all these different ways. Do you like email? Do you like text message? Like, some people do support, like, hey, unlimited instant message. And there’s, there’s two vectors of this. And this is actually really detailed out in detail in the course plan challenge to help you think through this. But there’s two kinds of support. There’s synchronous and asynchronous. So synchronous means I’m helping you in real time together. So that could be a one on one call could be instant messenger. It could be like a group training that you do live. It could be a in person event and then asynchronous. Some people prefer like, Hey, I need time freedom. I don’t want my calendar filled up when I’m doing things kind of in my own speed. Email support may be better for that. And you have to set expectations. So people are like, Hey, I haven’t heard from you in five minutes. Like you need to set like what your expectations are. Then the other vector is private versus group. So if you do offer one on one like synchronous private coaching support. Or you offer one on one email support. That takes more time, but it’s more valuable. So you can charge a lot more. And you can even have plans on your course or your membership where like, you know, it’s like course only, 200 bucks. Course plus group coaching, 1, 000. Course plus private coaching, 5, 000. So it, it affects like the value and just anchoring that to this idea of like masterclass where it’s 20 bucks a month or it’s here and I have your back and we’re going to be working together privately. It’s 2, 000 a month. So figure out both what you want as an individual, cause this is your creation and two, what would be most helpful for your customer avatar? Cause. You know, for example, if I was helping somebody or an avatar that had a certain health concern or, or medical challenge, they may not want any kind of group, anything, it’s a private thing and they just, so my, it would not be appropriate to even explore the group options, but maybe it is, it just depends on your avatar and my pro tip for you is the easiest way to add this to do it and support your people better, but also to make more money is to offer what I call a group. Ask me anything, office hours. So this is a group coaching call. You could do it on you know, like a webinar platform. And you could do it on a YouTube live stream with comments. You could even do it not by face, like, Hey, there’s a time of day. I’ll be in this Slack channel. You see people do this on Twitter sometimes like, Hey, I’m waiting at the airport, like ask me anything for the next hour, but the cool thing about the office hours is it’s time boxed. Like, let’s say it’s an hour every week or every two weeks or once a month, so you’re only committing as a creator to, you know, that time box. It’s also scalable. You could have two people show up. You could have 201st come, first serve, or you take the questions in advance and kind of choreo graph it a little bit. But that’s the quickest way to go from the $20 a month. Do DIY self-study training to actually having some high fidelity support system that doesn’t eat your lunch for time. Provides a lot of value. Also actually creates a little bit of community aspect. ’cause people will be at the office hours and I’m like, oh, that’s a great question, even though they didn’t come up with it. And then they’re, they’re learning. So and that, that’s what we did at Lifter LMS too. I realized. You know, selling software, there’s a lot of this like automate everything, have a passive, you know, business, but like there was so much demand, you know, you see it in emails and stuff, can I just get on a call with you? I’m like, well, we don’t charge like an arm and a leg for the software. In fact, a lot of it’s free. How can I, but how can I meet this need? Oh, so we introduced the office hours, which happens once a week and it continues to, we’ve been running it for about five years. Jason Coleman: We used to have consultation calls, so it’s like for 300, you could talk to us for an hour about anything. And then some folks are like, I can’t afford 300. Then I tried a couple times to be like, all right. I’ll help you out, just let me record it, and I can use it for content. They’re like, that’s weird, what is the way I want to do it? But then you’re like, that’s exactly what the open office hours are, like they ask me anything, and it’s just a reframing of that you know, it’s such a multiplier on, force multiplier on your time. So we have a version of that now too, it’s, it’s great. And it’s also a good source of, you know, for content. I think I love it. Like all the different, you know, ways you can support someone. And I think something that’s important to remember when you’re kind of presenting these options and kind of writing sales pages for them and things like that is to. Explain like what, what the common experience is like when, when you submit a ticket, this is what’s going to happen when you get on the call. This is exactly what’s going to happen. And even better yet, like testimonials that are like, I had this issue. I talked to Chris for 30 minutes and totally solved my issue. So that, that can be like, it’s easy to forget that you kind of like, Hey, we do this, this and this. And people have like an expectation or some kind of pretense or like, like you said You’re in a marketplace of other people solving the same solution, and you’re trying to stand out by like delivering a superior support experience. You’re like, you got to tell people up front that it’s superior and kind of own it. So we had an exercise too, where we revamped our support page, where it’s like, we’re actually better than everyone, but we’re not telling them. So like, let’s tell them tell the person, you know, about to enter our funnel. There’s different ways to deliver support. And what you’ll find, even if your intention is not to have a channel, a new channel for support, everything is support. Any way that someone can talk to you, they will. Use it for support. I mean, we turned off blog comments on our blog posts a while ago because 90 percent of them were random support. So it’s like, here’s a blog post about how to do this thing. And it’s like, my comment’s not about what you wrote about, but I was wondering how to do this. And I was like, did you not see the like click for support link in the upper right of the page? So yeah, yeah, every method is going to be support. You should decide up front the best way that you support your, your users and your learners and how you, your preferred methods of communication and then stick to it. So, but it is good still to like allow the support to originate from anywhere organically, cause you, you kind of can’t fight it. But funnel it proactively into the channels. So some, for example. Like another funny example, like to support comes out, I would do these customer conference surveys, so I am going to call you and I’ll ask you some questions for my benefit to learn more about my customer. And when I coach my team, he’s doing this too, is like at least half of them. They’re only taking the call cause they, that’s the way they know to talk to you on the phone and they have a support question they’re going to ask you. So it’s like, try to answer the support thing and then be like, Hey, I helped you. Can you help me answer these questions now? But we also you know. When folks are DMing you on Twitter or contacting you you know, if it’s a quick answer, answer it, but always, even if you answer it quickly, say the best way to get help is to go through the proper channel. The fastest way to get help is to go through the proper channel. Something I use now, because I have a team, is like, I’m not actually the best person to answer this question. I know I seem like it is because I’m kind of the face of the company, but the team is experts, or experts, and they know this better than I do. So, every time you redirect support, kind of include that. And yeah, the other thing, you know, about this when, you know, doing support is that exceptions become the expectations. So an example of that is we do technical support through our ticketing system on the website, and we don’t do support on the weekends because our teams working Monday through Friday. And sometimes the team is like. I’m not doing anything. I really care about this person’s project. I’m going to go above and beyond and help them on the weekends, like, cause they just can’t help it. They’re like, Oh, it’s a problem in my head. And and so they give the feedback on the weekend and that’s okay to do in extreme cases or sometimes every time you do that, that person just learned, Oh, actually they do do support on the weekends. Or they do do support through Twitter. I mean, this is like a cliche Twitter is like, you call the phone system. How do I, can you help me with my purchase? I want a refund. No, you can’t do a blah, blah, blah. And then you just yell on Twitter and then they DM you and say, how can I help you? And then all of a sudden you’re magically like talking to the C suite and they’re going to reverse everything for you. So yeah, if you make these exceptions, like people learn about them. Chris Badgett: 90 or like, let’s say 80, 20, 80%. Like, yes, you do need to reinforce boundaries. And actually, but on the other side, sometimes if they do get through, or you make an exception, I learned this concept from you. I was already kind of doing it, but I didn’t have a name for it. You call it a make my day? So every now and then, someone will reach out to you through the wrong channel, or even you might see them struggling. Like in a social community or wherever and you’re like, man, I can really help this person. They’re being so nice you know, they’ve already like sent in a testimonial or whatever and Either you you help them off channel like and just over deliver and then or like you actually seek them out and you’re like Hey, I saw in this group is happening, you know, we don’t normally do this But you know I really appreciate what you’ve done in our community and we really want to help you and then you you call it a make my day So that’s something you find you can do as a creator. And the crazy thing with that kind of thing is sometimes then that person, you know, will upgrade to your bigger offer or if they haven’t read a testimonial, they will, you know, they tell your friends, they become an affiliate or whatever. So it’s this weird. Dichotomy of like maintain boundaries, but also like, break the rules. Yeah, yeah. And over deliver. And Jason Coleman: the important part of that is to do it consciously instead of reactively. And forget where I got that from is ’cause it’s funny. Maybe it wasn’t that good for, but I think the company went outta business. It was like a department story. Either like Neiman Marcus or of those types, you know, like a, a big department store. And they used to give their sales team a budget of like a thousand dollars a month. To like make the day so you’d be in the buy shoes and it’s an expensive high value department store, but you buy like 200 worth of shoes. And if you said you were hungry, the person could like tap into their budget and like go buy you food so you could eat the food while you’re trying on shoes or something like crazy. That doesn’t usually happen in an apartment store and sometimes you would get they would spend more like taking care of you than they would. And that was part of like their core values and how they did some, but it also was probably like a marketing budget item. Like that money didn’t come out of the support budget. It came out like this is marketing and we hope that person goes on to say things. And I feel like like Scrooge McDuck or like the Scrooge over here, like bah humbug don’t help people. But in reality, if you you know, you scale a product, you have hundreds of folks, you can’t give this level of care to every customer. So it’s good to do it selectively and when we do that, kind of make, make your day. We have time. It’s a customer that’s interesting or like matches our values or we have some idea that they’re a sneezer who’s going to talk about it or, or, or be nice. It can be a good story and that kind of thing. Or, or sometimes it’s a technical challenge. Like we actually have this challenge where I’m curious to figure out like, cool. I’ve never used that email marketing tool. Let’s figure it out for them. Yeah, so that’s great. Yeah. When to bend the rules. Chris Badgett: And the last thing I’ll say on this support thing is you may be. You may just have a pricing problem. It’s notorious in our industry that people under price, you know, this is part of the expert’s curse. You’re so close to it. You know, all the stuff you’ve kind of undervalued what you do, or maybe you have some imposter syndrome going. So if you’re kind of like, well, I don’t want to do. You know, unlimited email support, cause my courses is 200. It’s really well done. They should just follow the steps and do the exercises. Yeah. But if you, if it was 1, 000, would you answer an email from them twice a week and give them that access? And there will be some people that like, quote, abuse that you’re getting like five emails a day. But there’ll also be like tons of people who are like, I don’t really need help. It’s included as a benefit of the bundle. And then there’ll be kind of like the average, which is how I kind of get to like that two emails a week. Is that worth an extra 800 a month to you? So always think about pricing when it comes to support and it might change your mind on what type of support you want to do and how much and Jason Coleman: all that. Yeah, it’s going to be flexible cause like, like, Hey, this is how we do things. People keep trying to do support on Facebook or whatever. Every time that happens, that’s an indication that people really want to communicate that way and you should consider, or they want a phone call and every time they ask and you say, we don’t do phone calls. It’s like a mental note. Maybe we should figure out how we can do phone calls. We can make money off this. Chris Badgett: Yeah. And you don’t have to necessarily change your pricing. You could just add one more plan that has that level that where the cost benefit analysis makes sense. Jason Coleman: So many options. Just carry it. Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode. Here’s Where To Go Next… Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website. Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS. Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014. And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week. The post Part 3/5: Becoming the Teacher, Education Entrepreneur Mentor Series appeared first on LMScast.

In this LMScast episode, Chris Badgett and Jason Coleman explore the various responsibilities that successful education entrepreneurs must juggle in this discussion. They emphasize sales and marketing in particular, as well as the role of the entrepreneur. Chris explains a straightforward technique for figuring out what the pain points of customers are. Entrepreneurs may leverage these pain areas to produce useful content, deals. Also marketing materials by breaking them down into smaller problems. Finding client problems, for instance, might serve as inspiration for blog entries, emails. Or social media postings, which facilitates audience connection and trust-building. Jason continues, “It’s important to address pain points directly. And clearly because people are more likely to act when they feel that their particular issues are understood.” Chris and Jason together highlight how crucial it is to be genuine and unambiguous. Education entrepreneurs may create enduring firms by comprehending the demands of their customers and coming up with answers. Here’s Where To Go Next… Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website. Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS. Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014. And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide Episode Transcript Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co founder of Lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show. Welcome back to the education entrepreneur series. This is a five part series where we go over the five critical hats. That you need to wear as an education entrepreneur. Or within the skill set of your team based on what we’ve seen with success. With education, entrepreneurship, teaching online, coaching, building education based businesses. Those five hats are being the expert, the entrepreneur, the teacher, the technologist, and the community builder. Today, my business partner, Jason Coleman and I are going to be talking about becoming the entrepreneur. Enjoy this session. All right, let’s talk about becoming the entrepreneur. This is a topic we could go for weeks or years on. But we’ve, you know, kind of thought about some of the most important things. Let’s start with sales and marketing. You know, there’s a saying in business that nothing ever happens until a sale is made. Just kind of going into sales and marketing. The big idea here to make this process easier. is to map the pain. Which we’ve talked about in our expert series, and then how to think about actually making the sale. And there’s a concept I have called conversion tools. That helps make selling both easier from a process standpoint and as something you can scale. So for me, My strength in marketing is content and then my strength in sales is creating conversion tools. So to get into what that means at a tactical level. Content marketing is really built around this idea of pain. If you look at your target audience or your customer avatar. What are their like chief top five pain point areas? And when you identify those, you can then find sub pain points underneath that kind of pillar. Category cluster of pain and those become like individual pieces of content. So if you’ve forced yourself to come up with what are the five primary pain points. Then maybe 10 to 12 like sub more specific nuances or variations of that pain point. That is 50 pieces of content. It’s like a year’s worth of content ideas. And you can create blog posts, you can create YouTube videos, you can create podcasts. You can create a social media strategy, you can do email marketing and ideally your product, your course, your membership. Whatever it is really helps with all of that. That’s kind of the content marketing, you know, sort of top of the funnel that flows into your business offer. And I’ll give you an example of that in a little bit. But then once you have these like content ideas that basically stem from the five primary pain points. You can come up with a content framework. We’re actually using a content framework in this conversation we’re having right now. So that, okay, well there’s this, I’m an expert. I, I have all these ideas. How do I like, kind of consistently deliver value in a way that’s not overwhelming in. In the form of content. So like a content framework like we’re using here is we have like a topic area like sales and marketing. We have like a big idea. A strategy, like I’m talking about content and conversion tools. Right now I’m giving you three or so tactics. Then I’m going to tell a story about, you know, what’s going on there. So that’s a content framework and that’s a way of teaching like strategy tactics, story. Also known as like a case study in a way. And then we’re also having a conversation, which is also a form of education. So the content framework is awesome. I just wrote a book. I’m in the editing process with that. Every chapter similar to this has like. A set series of things like tactics and strategies and stories to create a content framework. That actually made writing a book as a subject matter expert in this topic easier for me. Because then it was like, okay, well, what’s a, what’s, what’s a story related to this and so on. So it makes content creation easier. Now conversion tools there’s a lot of different ways to think about that. I think there’s a lot of misunderstanding around sales and marketing and how they’re different. But sales is actually, let’s say somebody enjoyed your content and then they find out about your offer. The process of actually creating the sale or the quote conversion event. How do you do that? In the offline world, people do that with a conversation. Like if I walk onto a car lot and I meet the salesperson. You know, I get in a conversation and I get the sales pitch, they handle my objections and then. I take it for a test drive and then I buy the car or I don’t buy the car. I try a different car. That’s kind of the sales choreography or sales motion as it’s called. But when you look at information products and online products, digital products. Courses, coaching, membership communities, there’s sort of four main ways to create a conversion tool. One is a trial that can be a free trial. Like, Hey, first month’s free. It could be a paid trial. Like it’s a dollar for a month or a week. The other way to do it is to do a demo. So you could have like, Hey, here’s a sample. You know, training or come to this one for free and let me like demo you. Or let me take you on a tour of like what’s inside the program. I’m going to kind of demo how people use it and so on. And then there’s a webinar, which is like a sales presentation at scale. Where you kind of make the pitch to like a group. You can even automate that and create like an automated webinar that just runs. And then you can also do old school traditional sales, which is one on one conversations, book a call. Here’s a Calendly link schedule a meeting. You can call it a strategy call and not a sales call to take. You know, take some of the resistance down. But once you figure out, you know, sort of your, your marketing mix. And there’s other types besides content. There’s also outbound marketing. There’s you know, paid ads. There’s a lot of different ways to do marketing, but for me, content is the primary. And just to show you an example of mapping the five pain points. Which really ties into our avatar training we did earlier, which is what we’re doing here after over a decade in this industry. I noticed in. The users of LifterLMS and broadly in this category of treating, of serving course creators, coaches, experts, community builders. And so on, that the ones that were successful had within themselves. They had to wear these five, having an, being an entrepreneur is hard. They, we all talk about wearing multiple hats.ut in online education, there’s these five hats that I can see in every single program that is successful, that. The founder is either like a unicorn and can do all five of these hats successfully at a satisfactory level, or they build a team to fill in the gaps. So, and if somebody’s failing, that’s the first thing I do is I diagnose like across these five hats. And this is part of this whole training. We’re doing the series, you know, the five hats are being the expert, being the entrepreneur, being the teacher, instructional designer. Being a technologist and then the fifth hat is being a community builder. So we’re literally using that, you know, these are the five pain points and. There’s a lot of challenges within those that. You know, becomes a foundation for this content and why if you’re somebody who’s watching this. They’re thinking if this is. All of this is really resonating, you know, they’re in the target market, they’re an education entrepreneur and we’re just here trying to help people. So that’s how I kind of think about if I could give you one idea. About improving or starting your sales and marketing program, map the pain. Create that, that map to make content out of, and then choreograph your sales process and try to package that in a conversion tool. And the best place to start is just book a call and do one on one sales. And then once you see something that’s repeatable. Then you can start doing some of these other scalable, even automated models. Jason Coleman: Yeah. I think something that’s amazing about. Like the current day and online sales and marketing is that that pain point is so immediate. So and I think it’s helpful to think of it in a very literal way when you’re writing sales copy or developing these conversion tools that like literally this person is feeling this pain right now because a lot of times it is so immediate you’re like God damn. And I wish there was a way to, and you’re like literally Googling exactly the pain point. And you’re hoping like, you know. If you’re doing marketing through, you know, search engines, you’re trying to like have up a, have a result there. So that’s what’s amazing. And even if it’s not immediate. Like some of the skill and copywriting then is like, you know you know, press on the pain point a little like, Hey, remember that? Don’t you, you hate this. But. moment. Yeah. It’s like that. That’s so immediate for folks. I also like, yeah, that we talked about frameworks making things easier. That’s so good. Cause I think in sales and marketing, a lot of, Times early on before you, you, you catch like a groove and, and how to do things. You feel like you’re just trying to get things to stick thrown out the wall. And I’ve had this with sales and marketing people that we like train up. Like for example, we write like a weekly email to our, you know, our customers, people on the mailing list, the customers. And I think for some folks when you give them that task, it feels like. like term paper. It’s like, I’m writing a book every week and it has to be like different and awesome and clever and everyone has to be amazing and over the top and perfect. And it’s, you know, that, you know, it’s what I developed as a framework. It’s like, no, like, Hey, just answer these questions in this order and that’s the first draft and then make it good and ship. And it’s like, it doesn’t have to be creative. And there is room for like that super over the top iterated, perfect email that you send everyone in your funnel. But that’s not what that exercise of like writing a weekly newsletter was in the moment. So yeah, recognizing where like the frameworks can be used. Like when you feel A little lost about what am I supposed to be doing here? I kind of don’t know what I’m doing. Try to find a framework. And there’s so many for so many sales and merchants things, and they share a lot. And it’s almost like, just pick one, right. And maybe pick a different one if you feel like you’re getting tired of one. And over time you’ll kind of like start to understand, understand the underlying psychology of how they work. So I think along that vein, like, Okay. there’s lots of different frameworks and methods of doing sales and marketing. Something that I find really useful is to keep it simple. And just so I think of marketing in this way is like, I’m just finding the people who need my thing and I’m telling them about my thing. And it’s, so it’s like, if you’re looking at, you know, a sales funnel or the forget the funnel, it’s a milestone map. It’s a journey. It’s a customer journey. You can get overwhelmed a little bit. And if you’re overwhelmed by the marketing strategies, like just think in that framework of like simpler terms that Like you make something that people need. You need to find the people who need that thing. So finding where they are as part of marketing, and then you need to tell them about your thing and there’s different, you know, is it a story, is there a framework for the stories? It’s like, just make sure you’re telling them about your thing and you’re not tricking them into buying. You know, I, ideally, if you chose to write customer avatar, like we talked about last time you know, it should be an easy sell. It should write it if you really, and that’s what I said before I was talking about customer avatars. If you know exactly who you’re talking to, it’s just a conversation. Like it’s not too clever. And this has happened before you know, in our marketing team, where They’re trying to figure out how to write sales copy and stuff and and I often try to simplify it I’m like, hey, like we have a thing they they want our thing. We’re not fooling them We have a really good thing and they want it. We just have to tell them about it and it simplifies things It makes it less high You know It’s like it’s not So contentious and it’s not the it’s not the most critical thing that does email be absolutely perfect. It’s like now you just tell them Chris Badgett: In terms of keeping it simple I love this quote. I heard that you get tired of your marketing before your market ever does. So as you become more of an advanced marketer and salesperson, it’s like, okay, now I got to do a B testing and I’m going to do paid ads. I’m going to do them over here too. And. And there’s sort of like one main channel, like when people drive onto the car lot or then you put up a billboard, like you kind of figure out the main channel and it’s easy to think you always got to do something new, but actually just keep it simple. Just stay focused on the avatar, what they need, how they usually come in, how they like to be sold to and how to over deliver on the value. It’s not complicated. Jason Coleman: Yeah, yeah, and I think that’s useful to even if you’re like outsourcing marketing or if you’re hiring someone to bring them on You There might be a mismatch of like their career path and their goals to like try something new or force like a channel or strategy and, and your need to like just find the people and tell them about the thing. So early on there is like, you do want to experiment and iterate and try a bunch of things to figure out like which of these channels is working. But once one works, like just dig into it and then it gets boring and you might find like the marketer that you hired. Is very bored or like the marketing company you hired is very bored. And that’s something to like, look out for. And are they pushing you into another channel a little too early before you really optimize the first one? So Chris Badgett: I think it is good to move to also once you master a channel to move on. But. And like, all right, let’s see if we can get ads working or whatever, but don’t just forget and stop doing that other thing and come back to it and keep, keep doing that thing that was working and improve on that. I like this idea when you’re thinking about improving your sales and marketing to, if you’re going to do something new, like in a quarter, say, do two more things that you’re already doing better, like take them to the next level. So it’s, it doesn’t become this new to new to new to new thing and your, your focus just gets totally scattered. Jason Coleman: Yeah, I’m sure there’s a clever name for it, where there’s like a bias towards like different and new when like sometimes the thing you have to do is refresh your old content, refresh your old funnels and conversion tools and update them. And that’s more high value for you than, you know, trying something different. Chris Badgett: I think that is a cognitive bias. It’s, I think it’s called novelty bias. Okay, novelty bias, good name. Being an entrepreneur is actually creating a company and forming a business. And a lot of people get stuck here. I’ve been stuck here. And you overthink it. So like the classic thing at the beginning, at least in the United States, that people get stuck on is, well, should I form an LLC or an S corp? And then they’re like, do I need to pay thousands of dollars to a lawyer? And so on. I think it’s, it’s really all about just getting started and, and like, just do a if you’re having trouble, like, I don’t know what I’m gonna name my company. I don’t want to name my product. Just pick something and start and see if you can make a sale. And it’s not fun to rebrand later, but like when I first started my web design agency, I’m like, I don’t know what to call it. I’m just going to call it Badget Media. That’s my last name. And if I do products later. it’ll just be sold through badger media. And I didn’t have to like, think about it a lot. And the way to think about just actually putting the infrastructure you need in place is like, you need the ability to accept money over the internet, sell a product and not go to jail and do your taxes. Right. So what, what’s, what’s involved in that is it’s just, I think about it like, okay, pick a name. Once you have a name You can buy a domain name. Once you have a domain name, you can have a website. You can create an email address. Once you have a separate email address and a business name, you know, register, go to your town office and register the, the business name. Once you have that, then you can open a bank account. Once you have a bank account, you can open a PayPal account or Stripe account to accept money through the internet. Now you have a website. Now you can put an offer up. Now you’re good to go. And at tax time, you know, you’re, you’ve kind of got all those fundamentals in place. And if you’re just doing a personal brand, I do recommend like keeping the funds separate and like your business kind of becomes its own identity, different email, different bank accounts. And there’s just, it’s just the basics, but some people get all caught up in the details of that, of like, what do I name it? And how do I figure out e commerce? But it’s really not that complicated. Jason Coleman: I feel like. We should probably try to write up a framework of all these things and share it as a handout for this of like. These are the steps, like it’s a, they’re pretty simple, but like each one feels super critical and irreversible. And while it is like a pain in the butt to change your logo or your brand or some of these things later on it’s not too hard. It’s like, it’s not, yeah. Like if it’s, if it’s necessary, it’s, it’s kind of better to get in the habit and, Get it running and actually make something and sell it and make some money and put it in a business bank account. It’s kind of like, Oh, cool. Now you like completed the loop. Now pick a part to make better. And maybe you realize early on, like branding will be important and you narrow in, but. It’s just like Chris Badgett: with paid memberships pro, like it’s actually stranger studios, which is an agency. Yeah. There was Lifter LMS was Badget Media and then code box. And now there’s this brand. It’s fine. Jason Coleman: That name stranger studios. Like I thought I would make video games and that sounds like a really good video game. And then when I started doing I built websites for school, I had a job. And then when I started getting con, you know contracts on the side, I already had this website, stranger studios, and this name. So I started using it. I didn’t even have the business at the time. Like you can go pretty far just on like filing personal returns. But then it stuck. And then I come up with the reason it was like, Oh, we’re strangers. Like everyone’s strangers on the internet, but like, let’s not be strangers. I forget like what our pitch was back when we did consulting. Yeah. It was good to just get into it. And our thing comes up a lot of times, it’s like forming a business is partnerships. Like either you know, you, you have a partner. Like I build my business with my wife. I’m very lucky that like you could just be lucky like me and have a life partner that you marry into. They have all the skills you don’t have and help you in every way to run a business. And being married, like we run it 50, 50 and it works out. And I think because We’re married. We’re forced to get through it. Like, like we but in general, that 50, 50 percentage doesn’t often work. I’ve seen it cases where it doesn’t work. And, and even in my, my own history where it didn’t work, I can get to. So it’s like But before you figure out the details of how to split up the partnership, like that’s confusing too. It’s like, I think it is good to try to find a partner and you can’t go really far alone. There’s, there’s, you know, lots of tools and AI will help you. And. I think it’s good to get started and probably in the space of content marketing you know, like learning educational content, there’s probably a higher percentage of solo preneurs than partners. But if you, so get started, but when you start building something like, it’s so good to have a partner they help out in so many ways. And it’s, it’s kind of like, and there are risks, but it’s kind of like love in that, you know there’s There’s a lot of potential pain if it doesn’t work out for unraveling a business relationship, but it’s, it’s worth it for like the rewards of like going through this together because when there’s hard times and when you run into issues and when you’re learning things, there’s, it’s great to have someone to like be excited with and help you out and talk through and second guess everything you’re doing. So there’s different forms, but so if you’re literally going to have like a partner. Like share a business and you’re incorporating. I think what I, what I found that work out is if you can find one of the partners to have more than 50%, like 60, 40 split instead of 50, 50, cause that deadlock, if you have two partners or like in our case with investor geeks, we had a business and it wasn’t even incorporated, but we like on paper agreed like, Hey, this is all third. We were making ad revenue and we would split it. What happened was like it was only one we only got one third of the output from the business And so we had other things going on. We weren’t motivated to work on that We this other thing we had a hundred percent of we got and then also there wasn’t any one person who had more than the others That was motivated to make it work. You know, like, Hey, like if it’s more than 50%, if you own more than 50%, like there’s one person who’s ultimately going to be responsible for the business. And sometimes the business needs that. Cause if you run into you bump heads, you’re like, I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do. Dissolve. Whereas like if it’s 60, 40, one of you is like, it’s your job to know what to do. You’re like ultimately responsible for his business. And so. If you can get into that relation, that kind of situation, I’ve, I’ve seen it work out better and to have a tiebreaker for those kinds of things works out. And even if you don’t like Kim and I are 50, 50, we it was like a tactic to, if you have like a business with your, your spouse or even just a, like one other partner. We would in the consulting days, we always had a tiebreaker. So in the consulting days, whoever found the project was like the head. So when they decision on the project or like what to do about it, or if we’re firing that client or, or who’s in charge, who makes the decisions as it goes, whoever found the client, you know, was the one who like broke the ties on that. And so that helps where we were 50, 50, but for every project someone was in charge. And so we weren’t getting stuck. And later on when we went to products, we had an agreement where like, I was like, Hey, we’re 50, 50, but I’m the CEO. So like the tiebreakers I’ll, I’ll make the tiebreakers and it Chris Badgett: helps. I think partnerships are great because entrepreneurship’s lonely. It’s like, it can be super lonely, especially online. If you’re not interacting with people in person is as much as a quote, normal person. So having partners is, is great just from a loneliness perspective, but also coming back to like this idea of having to wear multiple hats. I mentioned like you kind of need a base level of efficiency across being an expert, being an entrepreneur, being a teacher, being a technologist. And being a community builder, it’s really nice to share those hats with a partner. And some of the most successful Lifter LMS sites I see as an example, there’s like this partnership between a techie and a talent. So like the face of the business and everything, and then there’s somebody else who like does the website, does marketing and other things. So it’s, it’s, it’s much easier to do it together than. A solo act though, you can definitely do it. Yeah. Jason Coleman: And sometimes there’s like support groups or masterminds or communities that you can take part in that help fill that gap. If you, if you’re kind of feel all alone, Chris Badgett: let’s talk about product. Like we said earlier, a sales, nothing ever happens till something is sold, but you have to have something to sell. So I’m a big fan of product. And a product really should be like. the solution to a problem as efficiently as possible. And I learned this framework from a guy named Dane Maxwell. He said, the Holy grail of business is just three things, a customer, a result, and a mechanism. And a lot of us get really focused on the mechanism, like how we solve it, what’s in the course, the VIT, making the videos. And even when we’re selling, we keep talking about the mechanism. But like really good sales is like, Oh, I will help you achieve X result in Y number of days through Z mechanism. And what, what’s primary there is the result. It’s the improvement offer or the transformation. And so really design your product around solving a problem, not your body of knowledge. This goes back to like the library of Alexandria thing we talked about in terms of what people actually want to buy. And you know, once you have that result, that solution to a problem to create a mechanism or a transformation there’s this concept in instructional design called chunking. So like, if I’m going to, you know, help somebody find the love of their life, if I was a dating coach, you know, the end result is finding your love of the love of your life. Right. So that’s like a huge result. But like you can do it. It’s probably easiest to like reverse engineer instead of being like starting at zero and be like, all right, I have somebody who’s frustrated. They haven’t found a partner. What do they do first? You can often work back from the end and be like, what happens right before they found the love of life? Well, there’s this kind of this milestone where these people decide that they’re going to go from short term to long term relationship. So how could I coach somebody or create training around that concept? And if you go back from this there’s sort of like a dating process and then you go back from that. There’s a first date. And then, before that, there’s like learning how to approach and be comfortable, comfortable around the type of person you’re going after. And before that, there’s kind of this phase where you really need to kind of become the best version of yourself or do some of your inner work and like kind of get ready to like go out into the world and do this thing. I’m not even a dating coach, but like, I’m kind of like finding these milestones or these chunks that need to happen to get this result. And by doing that, you’re actually creating. your unique mechanism of how you help people. So that’s, that’s kind of the customer result mechanism. And then the other thing is as if we use our dating coach example your program should work for your avatar in challenging circumstances. So if they have setbacks or maybe it’s not like your actual avatar and this there’s a lot of this other type of person in your program, which is also fine. But like, maybe they have this other challenge that not everybody has, like, how can I improve my training or my coaching so that it still works, let’s say, even if the per, they’re trying to date and they’re, they speak a different language, as an example, I’m just thinking of something like, how would this program still work if there was a language barrier or a culture barrier or a geographic barrier? Like they met online and they really think that like, there’s all these like challenging circumstances. So. Don’t just think like in a perfect world, this is how it would work. It still should work under pressure in the same way, like a good vehicle can like drive in the snow or in the rain, it’ll still get you from a to B. One of the biggest parts about product is pricing. And this is something you know, we’re both fans of a guy named Patrick Campbell and his, one of his hooks, he’s all about pricing, particularly in subscription businesses. He ended up selling his company for a couple of hundred million dollars, but hit one of his hooks about pricing is face it. You just guessed. And when he says that, like his avatar, like people like us with subscription software business are like, yeah, you’re right. You know, like they all, so he like understands the avatar or whatever. But pricing is key. We could do a whole thing on pricing, but just to throw some quick ideas out there there’s different there’s like value based pricing or like if you were going to do this like one on one with somebody, how much would that cost? How valuable is the result that you’re promising? So if you can, if you truly are a matchmaker and help people find the love of their life, what’s that worth to a person? It’s priceless. And so if you really want to go for something that’s really lucrative, find priceless things I’m sure there’s all kinds of like, if you’re a health coach and you specialize in some challenge that you can help people overcome this, it’s kind of priceless where somebody goes from a permanent chronic condition to like exactly where they want. Whereas like if you’re like, like if I was doing business coaching, I might, I could be like, I’ll help you grow by 10 percent every year, whatever. Like that’s an incremental improvement. That’s still valuable, but that’s not as valuable as like, I’m going to help you scale from like small business to mid market. And I think about it in terms of return on investment. I could talk about pricing forever, but I’ll leave it with this one thing, which is Whatever you do, price it, try to price it at 10 to a hundred X ROI for your end customer return on investment. So. If I think helping somebody find the love of their life and in their mind, they think like I would pay 20, 000 to find the love of my life, maybe charge two grand for that. Or if you want to go broader, Jason Coleman: it should feel like 10 times as much value for what they paid. Chris Badgett: Yeah. That’s like, yeah. Cause they should not feel like price gouge. If you’re going to help a business grow. And they invest like 10 grand in you, your training should deliver at least a hundred grand worth of value for them. And then they’ll keep coming back. They’ll tell their friends that’s good pricing. Jason Coleman: That makes the math easy. You’re kind of like, if I do this thing that sometimes people coach businesses to make more money. So it’s like literally money. So it’s like, at the end of this, you will make an extra a hundred thousand dollars a year, would you be willing to pay? 20, 000 for that. It’s like a no brainer. Right. And if it feels like it feels like a good investment when it has that kind of ROI, Chris Badgett: I think business is actually the easiest because you can use money. So when you have your, your chief problem or these five pain points, there’s often metrics like business metrics. It’s easy. I think it’s a little harder. Like what’s the value of finding the love of your life? It’s a little different. And just a quick story about Lifter LMS. We decided we started out as paid. We wanted to make sure people would buy it. It was 150. We sold 42 copies in the first week of the launch. We said we were going to shut down the business if we didn’t sell more than a hundred. We were bullheaded and decided to keep going anyways. But then later We made the decision to make the core product free and have add ons and bundles and stuff Which is how we made made the money, but so like you can test your pricing So even if you think just test it, like pre sell it or work with an early group of people and just get going. Jason Coleman: The market is more flexible and like you can change your prices and people don’t really notice. And, and often, especially in the beginning, it’s like, don’t feel. Attached to the 50 people who just bought at a certain price. It is like, if they notice you make it free or raise your price, they may get upset in some direction, but you’re like, think about the 50, 000 people you’re eventually going to serve. So it’s like, that sometimes helps. It’s like, it’s, it’s difficult to make those changes, but you can, yeah. Change your pricing. If it didn’t work out, you can launch something again. If the launch didn’t go well, like apparently no one noticed, they won’t notice the second time either, but you’re trying to do it better. Yeah. There’s so much to like to dig into here. The, as another resource for folks, when you were talking about results and chunking, that sounded a lot like there’s this book called badass by making users awesome by Kathy Sierra. And I I think it’s a book about product and touches marketing, but but it’s like a, the, the analogy they use in that book over and over is you’re not telling someone how to use a camera. You’re telling them how to become a photographer. That’s like the result, you know? And so it’s like the documentation, you know, isn’t just how to do it. It’s kind of like how to get to the result. And the, and you’re going to be more successful if you build your products that way. And I think Yeah, we, on pricing really quick, it’s like, yeah, the guest is good. I think like trust your guests too. People downplay the guests and their systems. I have a couple of things like about pricing that. Or maybe newish to like everything that’s out there you could find. One is like do all the methods that everyone, all the methods are really good. So do all of them and then kind of like take the average or what your gut is telling you after you do the exercise. Like you kind of learn the exercise of like time and materials plus a margin, like make sure you’re making money. That’s really important in doing that exercise. Is like, can I price this product in a way that I’ll still make money? That’s really important to like go through the exercise and the number you get out is, is an indicator of what might be the price. And then if you trust your gut, what’s everyone else charging? That’s another method. But I forget the, like the, you, you, you threw out a couple other methods for figuring out pricing. And so it’s like, do all that. And then kind of like, you know, the process of going through that a number of different ways, then you’d be like, Oh, actually it feels like the price should be about this. And the other thing on pricing I think about is like the timing of the pricing. So we think about that too. I think we talked earlier about we, like you had a paid, you went paid and then free or like you could charge monthly or annually. And it, the, When you ask for money should match like when you’re delivering the value. So an example to drill at home is there was a course I saw where it was, you know, quit drinking in a month and It was amazing. I think it was priced at like a hundred bucks and this person was making money selling that course, it was transforming people’s lives. And he was building like a little free community. And he’s like, how can I make recurring revenue off the community? Like how can I deliver more value to them and keep making money? And it’s like, this problem is tough. Cause if. Your product does what it really says. Everyone loses 20 pounds. They save a bunch of money than I spending on alcohol. They repair the relationship with their mother and their spouse and their kids, like their whole life changes in month one. And you already anchored that price of a hundred dollars. So like I’ll change your life for a hundred bucks. And then it’s like, I’m going to sell you a gym membership for 200. Like it doesn’t work. Like so in reality, what I think that person had to do in that case is like, if you have a product that delivers a ton of value upfront, like charge upfront And then, you know, you deliver ongoing value, charge a smaller amount ongoing. But I think that exercise, it’s not talked about too much of thinking about the timing of the product, of the pricing. We can also get into like, we were talking about product. Now we were talking about marketing earlier, kind of an old school marketing idea that I think sometimes gets lost when your head’s deep. And what you’re doing is that product is marketing. And so what you want to do is use customer insights to guide your product development. And your positioning of your product. And so it’s, you’re not, not just like how to sell to them. Like, so as you’re talking with customers and you should always be talking with customers, it’s like either do consulting. So you’re doing your type with them or take calls or find a way to like, always be talking with your customers. Cause you’re going to learn from them. And as you learn from them, you might think I’m learning how to like market to them better. We talked about that. That is true. But. The real market is like, maybe the product should kind of sell itself. And if you improve the product using what you’ve learned from the marketing, you know, all that stuff will flow more easily. There’s like a positioning is this term to figure out early, like, which is really important and we could dive into, but it’s basically. There’s other products that solve the thing my course or my product also solves How is mine positioned verse those and I think you talked to some points Of like is it? You know, what’s the mechanism is it or I think we’re talking about like speed insight Yeah. And certainty. So it’s kind of like, which, which of those am I like levering, leveraging most first, like the other solutions out there you know, like a gym is like, you come here three times a week and then you get healthy, or if it’s kind of like a diet has a different pace but it’s kind of solving the same. Problem. So figuring out, you know, your, your course, how do you position it? And I think positioning like pay memberships pro also made the decision to be a freemium product. And part of that was positioning of like, let’s be the best free membership plugin. So there’s like a paid one and let’s be the free one that has the widest distribution. Let’s be the biggest free one was, you know, and that, that’s how we would differentiate between with the others. And there’s another term here is like called product market fit, which is you know, when you are developing a product early on, you’re building a course, you’re, you know, you coach someone through something and then you tried to build a course around your coaching, but it didn’t hit for the masses like it did for that one person. And you’re like, why, what’s wrong? And you go back and reiterate. And it’s crucial that you, One of the reasons to be a hundred percent focused is it takes a certain amount of grit when you try something like that and it doesn’t work to not give up and be like, ah, the product doesn’t make any sense. No one will ever get it. And like actually dig in and be like, I have to make this work. What could I do to make it work? And that iterative process is like product market fit. So I so an example of this and What we’ve done, we have a membership platform. We built this tool to run Black Friday sales called Sitewide Sales, and we used it ourself, we dog fooded, and then we used it for a subset of our customers. And I think we had like a few hundred, maybe like a thousand people using this on a membership platform to run Black Friday sales. And then we’re like, everyone should use this to run every Black Friday sale. So we tried to build like a general purpose version. And it was like how to run a sitewide sale on like any e commerce site was the goal. And it wasn’t getting traction. People weren’t, it wasn’t obvious to people what the need was. And we built like a really good tool that works. But then when we were talking to folks, There was a couple insights that did stick. Like, so I’m like getting market feedback here. And one of them was like, Oh, like one of the killer features to be going to have is that they could schedule a sale. So a pain point was like, Hey, do you ever run a sale? And you have to like wake up at midnight to like. Put the banner on your website and update the coupon code and set it live. You’re like, that’s so annoying. I hate that. And you’re like, yeah. So like, what if you could set it up in advance? And like, okay, that’s a feature. And that was a feature we had, but it was like buried in the settings. It needed to be like the feature. And. And I was talking to you earlier, you’re like, it also had to like change the name. It’s not site wide sales. It’s like timed sales, scheduled sales. It’s like, that’s like the core thing that people get excited about. That needs to be like the name of the product, the focus of the product. And, and technically if you do that in this case, like there’s like a, Obscure technical reason why that’s hard, like to run multiple sales at the same time and have them all scheduled at an advance and overlap and automate. There’s like a hard, it’s a hard technical challenge based on how we already built the product to do that after the fact. So what happened actually is like, we got that key insight and we’re like, shit, we should have from the beginning built it like this with, this is the focus with this technical architecture. And then it would. So serve the killer app that like, it seems to be clicking with people when we’re trying to sell it. And that’s like, it, it needed another iteration. We didn’t give it cause it was a side project. And maybe that’s another story, like, you know, how to handle side projects. But yeah, I remember like product is like, yeah, product market fit, iterate through it, figuring out your positioning, always talking to customers. Chris Badgett: Yeah. Product is marketing. I love it. And sometimes if you’re thinking. Well, I don’t know what to do in my marketing. Just move the free line and give away a little bit of your product or use it. And two examples, like at Lifter LMS, our top performing lead generation the way we get email addresses and, and it kind of also works as a conversion tool is we use our software to make a free course about how to use our software that we give away for free. And so like the product is literally marketing itself. And I think as of now, we’ve probably had somewhere around 35, 000 people come into that and it just works. But just to give a different example, like with the dating coach example, we kind of talked about the end result, you know, they’re getting married or whatever. But that first step was about working on yourself and getting ready to like go out into the market and approach people or whatever. So maybe make step one free, just move it over the free line and give that away for free. That’s your, your main marketing tool. And at the end of it, there’s just a call to action to be, by the way, this is step one in a six step process about how to find the love of your life. And now you have this like really strong marketing, which is actually a piece of your product. In terms of the mechanism of delivery, here’s step one. You can have that for free. So, so you, you don’t have to like overcomplicate it. And in terms of, um, marketing and just a pro tip out there, if you’re ever thinking about just, you’re already got this working, let’s say as a dating coach, like, well, just go out past your end result of you know, finding the love of your life, maybe the next thing is something about. A parenting thing or something like what’s going to happen next. So always think about people. If you put people at the center of your business, not your product, decisions get much easier. You’re like, Hey, I’m trying to expand my company. Well, like what do they need after they find a love of your life? And just stay with that same avatar and, and go with them. Jason Coleman: That’s awesome. Sometimes like successful pivots are. I had the right audience, but they weren’t willing to pay for this thing, but they are willing to pay for this other thing and this other format or this other version and keeping your eye open, eyes open for that kind of thing. Chris Badgett: Yeah. Being flexible is so key. Let’s talk about operations and you know, part of, even if you’re a solopreneur, there’s all this, these functions that are going on inside the business. And if you’re doing everything, you still kind of have to do everything if you’re doing it by yourself. So it comes from corporate culture, but having an organizational chart, even if it’s just you, I recommend making the organization organizational chart, like you’re the CEO of the business name Jason Coleman: over and over and every column Chris Badgett: who’s doing operations, who’s doing sales, who’s doing marketing, who’s doing product, who’s doing support, who’s doing design. You can slice and dice the org, however you want. But like map it out and that’ll also, you’re, you’re, you’re going to be stronger somewhere. Like a lot of people really love product and like the coaching or the courses and the, all that, but they hate marketing. Well, somebody has got to do marketing and somebody needs to sell people. So map it out and. One of the ways I like to think about that is you put your name everywhere and when you’re like, oh, maybe this is working, what’s the first thing I would do? If I could hire somebody, where do I want to delegate? Typically the first answer particularly if you don’t have a partner and you’re not already like dividing and conquering is perhaps getting a virtual assistant to help you in some of these processes or even take over something like customer success and Or even marketing if you really don’t like marketing, but your assistant is really good at writing and could take your ideas for from a content Spreadsheet or calendar that you make and help execute that that’s fantastic Partnering Is good like for your business, but you can also partner with outsource agencies to help Fill in the org chart. So for example, if you want, if you don’t want to learn to run paid ads yourself, you can partner with an ad agency to do it. You could potentially even negotiate instead of, you know, just paying whatever the rate is, like giving them a percentage of sales that are tracked through their generation. So like being creative about partnerships is helpful because it is overwhelming to wear all these hats. And particularly if you’re early on. And can’t if you can’t afford to like go big, you could get creative in the partnerships. Like one of my first courses where I brought in other expert instructors in the platform, I didn’t pay them anything until their stuff started selling. So they got a percentage of sales. I was able to partner to help create product within the org that wasn’t all on me and that business was with my wife as well. So yeah, typically a virtual assistant is a good first hire just to try to unload and delegate some of the things you’re either not good at or just can’t find time for that you can build a process around. And then also there’s this idea when you do start to get a team to have like a singly responsible individual on each part of the business. And that’s all, that’s you everywhere when you’re a solopreneur, but. It’s really nice. What, what happens is sometimes entrepreneurs can be a little bit of control freaks and not, not like fully delegate. It doesn’t mean you’re not involved. You’re not, you’re still need to manage and coach and stuff like that. But having different singly responsible individuals and like empowering them, like from a management philosophy, the way I look at that is particularly at a high level position in the org chart is. If you’re the CEO, like you’re still like setting the goal and the vision and stuff, but give them freedom on how to get there. Cause they’re a different person. Hopefully they’re better at you at the thing. And just, but think about the org chart. Like when I see an entrepreneur who’s just stressed out, like there’s so much going on, you kind of got to slow down and like, what is, how is this ecosystem working? And, and you know, it’s something that’s never perfect. Like you kind of have to refine it over time. So yeah. Jason Coleman: It’s a good activity. It’s like business plans. It’s like, you know, you make the business plan and that’s not worth so much cause things change so rapidly that it, but the planning process of writing the business plan helps you figure things out. I feel that way about org charts. Like very quickly after we settle an org chart in a business, it goes out of date and you’re like, Oh, we just hired some. So they’re not an org chart. And you’re like, yeah, okay, we’ll get to it. And I could totally relate to that. The first time I put that together yeah. I think I got, you know, maybe it was like, that also has talked about an e myth revisited of doing an org chart, even if you’re a small team and you put your name on every spot and maybe like a tactic if you’re in that phase where you’re doing everything. Is to pick days of the week and like Friday is the day when I’m CEO and I do CEO stuff and like Wednesday is the day I do marketing and I do marketing stuff and to kind of make sure that you don’t, you don’t forget to work on critical areas of the business when you’re at, you know, until you figure out a way to either automate some of those aspects, outsource some of them or hire people to work on them. But it’s good to be, if you’re thinking about what you’re doing as a business, you’re going to write down all these roles. And then yes, I think I said like the E Myth Revisited, that, that was like a transformational book for me thinking about business. And you know, it made me think of business as building systems and there’s other folks who talk about stuff like that, but in like maybe like the main. you know take away from that book is like, right. Standard operating procedures for everything. And like that, that is building the business. And it’s an interesting book if I reread it and the, it’s like half story, like a fictional story. He’s talking to a woman about her business and half kind of prescriptive, like here’s what you got to do. And I remember like I devoured that book the first time I read it and that the story really helped hammer at home. But then as, I had already been in business for a while rereading it. I was skipping over the fiction and like, just tell me what to do, man. I’m trying to remember like exactly how to do this thing. But yeah, so. you have org chart, these are the roles. And then the different roles, like they, they do things. I call them standard operating procedures. There’s different names for these things, but it’s basically like write down instructions for everything you do or record yourself as you’re doing something. That’s all, you know, you can hand off a recording of yourself doing it, but also write down what you’re doing and why and how you’re thinking about it. And. Especially when you’re hiring folks, but you can do it for yourself when you’re not. Cause it’s just, I still run the SOPs in my own business. Cause it reminds you what to do. I’m doing all kinds of stuff. And I’m like, how do you do this again? And make sure you don’t miss steps and the goal for a good SOP. And don’t tell this to the people that you hire, but you want the most mediocre workers to be able to run, execute the SOPs. And I forget, I think that’s, It’s kind of the phrasing that Michael Gerber uses in the e myth book. So it’s like right up to SOP for the lowest. You shouldn’t have to like, like early on in a business, you’re, you’re, you’re an exceptional person and you’re the one who makes everything work and you’re like a great, you know, sales person or a great developer or a great content writer, and eventually then you hire out those roles. And like, maybe you’re lucky and you hire someone who’s even better than you are, but probably they’re expensive and you’re not actually hiring at that. So you don’t want your business to only work because awesome people are running it. You know, there’s definitely parts of your business where it’s like, write the SOP for the lowest common denominator, mediocre person who could execute that task. And if you, you keep that in mind, you make them as simple as possible. And then another kind of tip related tip to that, when you, you start thinking in terms of systems in your business is that you can fudge it early on and automate things later. So you know, in the short term, you can use human power and time to do things and kind of make a mental note. I’m either going to ditch this cause I can’t scale it or when I scale it, we’re going to have to automate this. So like a real good example is if you’re, you’re selling a course. And it leads to, there’s a kind of like coaching or consultation aspect. It’s like do it yourself and you’re, you do it really well. But your time as the CEO of this business is really valuable, but like be willing to do it early on yourself. And it just takes time. And then in the future, you can automate aspects of that or subcontract it to someone else. Or even sometimes it’s like, even as simple as like, we need to send an email this many days after they do, and I don’t know how to like actually program the thing to send the email. It’s like, just take notes. Like you’re, especially in the early days, you’re watching every single cell anyway, like send the email yourself, do it manually. So don’t be scared to do things manually or things that take time. And if it works out, you can automate it later. Chris Badgett: Yeah. For standard operating procedures or SOPs, I think one just a pro tip out there is at the top of it you kind of got to sell the idea to the team member a little bit. Like, why is this important? Instead of them opening, I’d be like, like, let’s say we’re a coach or a course creator and we have somebody helping us with new onboarding, new clients. If we want them to. The new client to receive like a personalized email and maybe some branded swag in the mail or something like that. Before step one, like open your email, step two, use this templated message. Like before getting into all that, you know, saying something like we want all our customers to feel special, valued and welcome to this community. It’s part of our brand because of X, Y, and Z. You’re kind of like providing context and like company culture and Jason Coleman: the values. Chris Badgett: Yeah. So there’s something to do. Let’s talk about team and leadership. One idea I want to dig into here is sometimes leadership and management kind of get lumped into the same thing. Just like sales and marketing where they’re, they’re actually different, but there is overlap and the same thing like leadership and management are not the same, but there is overlap. So I wanted to talk about more of the leadership side. Like the management side is sort of like in the operations of like, okay, we have these standard operating procedures. This is the process. This is how we do things, you know, quality control and, you know, performance and things like that. Leadership is more higher level And, and I find that people tend to gravitate towards like, there’s like layers of leadership, like the top being like a transformational, super inspiring leader at the bottom of the leadership hierarchy is like, I have to listen to this person cause they send me a paycheck or whatever. And we all want to like move up and become higher levels of leaders. And the crazy thing within leadership is that when you have a team, Not everybody will see you as the same. Like some may see you as like transfer, transformational, inspirational, and others may see you as like, I’m just working here cause I need the money. I need the paycheck. And it’s not bad or good. But like it’s good to kind of move up and tactically one of the ways to kind of get clearer on your leadership is to actually get clear on your, your vision, your mission, your values, your strategies, your tactics, and actual projects. So whenever somebody’s like feeling like crazy busy, they’re often like in the weeds of projects, which you should be, or tactically executing some kind of campaign. But particularly at the top of that figuring out your vision and mission to use our dating coach example, like, why do I care about helping people find the love of their life? Maybe it has something to do with a lot of like loneliness or depression in society. Maybe you have a personal story from a friend or family member that, you know, inspired you to start this thing. Like what’s the story, what’s your vision? What wrong do you want to write in the world? Mission’s a little more goal oriented. Like I want to help a hundred people find the love of their life in 2026. So they’re like, And then you put this stuff on your website, like on your about page of what you’re, what you’re doing. It’s easy just to be get really busy in the projects. Like I’m creating content, I’m, I’m doing marketing, I’m building this site. I’m figuring all this stuff out, but whenever you get stuck or you’re not sure what to do or not sure what to prioritize by going back to that leadership, you did leadership work you did earlier on what’s your vision and mission. It can often settle things down, help you prioritize. I’m also a big fan of leading by example. If you have a team so, you know, demonstrate the work ethic. You want to see others do in our example of like helping new customers on board and you like have as a part of your company culture that you actually do really care about your customers. You’re not just trying to separate. money from their wallet. You got to show that like it’s good for your team to see you like over deliver to somebody or if a customer was getting challenged, like even breaking process and being like, this has happened to me in a coaching program where like it didn’t include private coaching, but the coach, like I just emailed him, I’m like, I’m this challenge. He’s like, let’s jump on a call. I’ll be glad to talk through that with you for like 30 minutes. And that like demonstrate his team sees that. Yeah. And that like demonstrates that Hey, this is how we treat our customers here. It sets company culture. Then the other thing about leadership that’s really important, I think, is to take good care of the people, not just below you, but above and beside you as well. I, there’s a framework for this. I’d give credit if I could remember the person’s name, but it’s called plus minus equal. So when you really want to grow and you really want to develop your leadership. You want to lead your team, you know, they’re kind of below you. Or your customers the equals you want to like connect with other leaders in your industry and just try to help each other. Some people call that masterminding. You and I both do that as well. Then look up above you, like reach out for mentoring, get help, treat those people well try to add value and give back to them and stuff like that. And it just kind of develops this leadership momentum. And just as a personal story, I always think about this. I had a boss once tell me a long time ago that. He promoted me up to being a manager of the company and this was in Alaska and there’s a lot of like dying crazy stuff that happened, whether in situations and all kinds of stuff. He’s like, man, you’re so calm under pressure and level. And when I remember him saying that, I’m like, I’m not, I just must not show it.  I am like common or pressure. So whenever something kicks off you know, I try to just be calm and be like stable because it helps your team is sort of, you’re kind of like a lightning rod and your team will feed off that energy. And I think being on time is an important one too. Like, If you’re a leader and you’re like cracking down on people for being late or not keeping commitments, but you’re also like never on time, it’s a little contradictory. So if you want to have a culture of like timeliness and respecting other people’s calendars and schedules and stuff like that, it’s really important to like practice what you preach and have congruency there. And I’ve always appreciated that. And of course things come up and like, Hey, I’m late. Sorry, I’m late. This thing happened or whatever. But that’s how I, Those are some tips on leadership. Jason Coleman: All that resonates with me around like leading from the inside and by example, and try to do that as much as possible of getting side by side with them. I feel like sometimes when I’m training managers early on, they think When you’re managing someone, they do stuff for the manager. Like all the work trickles up and it’s like, I don’t know exactly what the percentage breakdowns you were kind of referring to some of the things related, but it’s about like third. So like a third of your time as a manager is like, you’re doing your own stuff. A third of the time your employees are like helping you do that thing. And then a third of the time you’re helping them do their thing too. Like, don’t forget that last one. Like you should be like And I think that helps. Yeah. Like the glue that holds everything together and like keeps the respect of everyone. But then there are those times when, you know, you’re in the trench with folks. But then as the leader of the business, you, you know, you are doing these high level CEO things and you are. You’re there’s a, like solving the big business decisions. That’s why they’re an employee. They just want a job, you know, and like, you. Handling the risk and some of the pressures and I think of it like an umbrella. I’m like Preserving these folks from thinking about these things that are just gonna that don’t concern them. I’m like a micromanager way of like trying to hide the information. It’s really just kind of if this thing is just worrisome for people you know, let’s Let’s insulate them from that. I, we I, I start to like really micromanage the, like you’re in a Slack with me. I think when we started working together, a lot of my first kind of feedback of like. How I do business for how you do business was around like the communication. And Slack and kind of like the management channel. Like the channel is marketing, but some of the discussion goes in the management channel. Cause you don’t want the marketers to see you fighting, you know, it’s like fight over here amongst, and then. You know, show yourself as a solid front. Like, you know, we’re all doing this together. And then it like, Oh, they’re really smart. They know exactly what we’re doing. Like they gave us like the one directive. They didn’t see the indecision. We’re like, I don’t know if we should be doing this. They’re like, I’m thinking of one of three things. I don’t know. Let’s do the first thing. Cool. And I, I think that’s not like, I don’t think of it from, I hope, like from like a micromanaged, like control everyone’s, and I make fun of it all the time. I’m like, the idea of police, like Jason is like trying to police everyone’s ideas. I’m not coming from that standpoint. I’m coming from kind of like a caring standpoint of like nurturing and trying to give people the space to do their job outside of the distractions and, and really just kind of managing the flow down. And, and I think. If you do that, like there’s a lot of respect that like it makes folks jobs more enjoyable. I think a lot of the stuff that people hate about jobs is like the bureaucracy and the politics and the confusion and, and that, and you kind of insulate that. So we’re talking about team and leadership and you were just talking about having a vision, building a mission and setting your core values. You know, as a business and using those to guide you. And in particular, I think. That’s useful in all kinds of contexts, but in particular in hiring, it’s been super useful for us. And so the suggestion here is to like define your core values early and use them to hire folks. And I think where I’ve seen this idea written most clearly is in a book called traction by Gina Wickman. And that’s like the entrepreneurial operating system EOS. There’s like a whole, like, you know, group and a lot of kind of midsize businesses use this framework for everything, but it has a really good chapter about defining core values. And what I loved about it was it wasn’t like an abstract exercise. And you could do it at any time. Like it really was. So if you, at this point I already had some employees and it’s kind of like, think about your ideal employees, the ones you like, what do you like about them? You know, and like takes you through the steps. You write down all these things. All right, which of your employees are problematic? What don’t you like about them? Kind of figure out and, and, you know, you can go through process and we have core values, both our businesses and they overlap, you know, kind of well. And so once you have these, you’re like, Oh, like everyone who works here and is great is like a hundred a plus on all these core values and people who have problems are failing at one or more of the values. And so you can start reviewing people internally about that. But then when you’re hiring, was the kind of the big ah ha for me, was I used to hire, say I was hiring someone in marketing, I would ask them questions about how they’ve marketed before and try to judge if they have the skill set to do the job they’re gonna do. And instead now when I’m hiring people, every question I’m trying to drill into, do they have the values of everyone else who works here. Cause that’s, Turns out more important than the skill set because if we work together for six months and you have all the skills But you don’t have the values. I found it’s almost impossible to kind of for some of these values or so And maybe to make it more clear like There’s one value in particular we have at stranger studios, which is you know, taking responsibility for your own work. And we’ve found that that’s probably the most important of all the values we have, because it’s the one that you use to fix things when they’re broken. So if I sit down with someone and we have another value, which is like you know heifers or you know, have a commitment to open source and transparency. And maybe something’s out of line there if they don’t take responsibility for, you know, why they’re not meeting that value. Like there’s not even like a tool to lever to make it better. And I mean, I could go on advice like that, taking responsibility, like an example of that is when, when there’s problems and why it’s so important, like when, you know, Something’s not getting done. Like an employee you have messed up. They sent out like a blog post and it was poorly worded. It was undrafted. It looks like they might’ve plagiarized like the worst thing you could imagine. And then you’re like, Hey, that’s a problem. You definitely need to talk to that employee. They’re probably breaking some core values while they did the sloppy work. So having those core values to talk it through. But As a manager, having responsibility for this work means that I have to take responsibility. Like, how did this happen on my watch? What did I do wrong? Why didn’t I explain to this person that this, why did they think this work would fly? What, you know, why did they think they could get away with this? Why didn’t they know how to do this? And so we’re always doing that. So it’s like at every level, it’s kind of like, you know, taking responsibility for what you did for the work that you do. So I’m diving into like one specific value. We have, you know, five of them, but it’s once we know these things and it’s like, man, these things really, we developed them based on the people that we worked with and we wanted to work with and what we liked about them. And these were the traits. Then we you know, definitely tested the people who, you know, thought about these with the people who are working at the business and whenever we hire, we test on those first. And then definitely the skills are important too. I’ve, I’ve realized. You know, basically we have to trial everyone like it’s when we hire someone to do a job It’s nearly impossible to know if they can actually do that job well until you actually work together Even if you see stuff in their portfolio There’s sometimes there’s cases like oh, they were working with someone else and the person who really can do it is that other person you didn’t hire or but It’s it’s hard to to judge people. Some people really get it interviewing and not just get it doing the job and but you can train people on skills and and Things but it’s hard to train them on values. So looking out for that early is key. Chris Badgett: I Think one thing when creating your values is they don’t have to be cheesy You So like you might think like trust, integrity, work hard, but you can actually have fun with it and they can be kind of creative. And like the first things you think of of like, of course you want to work at a company that has integrity. Like that should be every company. It’s not really that unique. So like spend some time on it, like at least a week, like thinking about it, talking to team about it, just introspection. I just also just want to iterate that like terminating or firing people is one of the hardest things you do as an entrepreneur. And when it’s about the values, it becomes easier because it’s not about, Oh, I feel this way or you made me feel this way. It’s more about, this is the culture. These are like kind of the rules here of how we operate. And oftentimes, you know, this person has been given, like clearly communicated that like, Like, for example, at LFTR LMS, one of our company values is clear communication. So if I were ever to let somebody go for communication, I would have tried to coach them, help them level up, get on the same page, understand expectations with communications more, and then, you know, give them a path to improve and look out for it and revisit. So then when it does come time to a termination conversation, if that’s going to happen, It’s not about how I feel. It’s just protecting the values of the company and we’re not seeing change and it becomes easier to do. Jason Coleman: And that’s key. You said like protecting the values of the company. Cause it’s, it’s like, if you let folks in who don’t have those same values, it kind of poisons the well and you know, people, if work ethic is important and that’s built into the values, people come in without it, then other people are like, Oh, he’s not working hard. Why do I have to work hard? Or you know, they’re not communicating well. Why do I have to communicate well? So yeah, Chris Badgett: and one more thing just to add on that is To make your life easier if your personal values and your business values overlap pretty good or even are the same It’s so easy just to show up because this is like, this is who I am at work. This is who I am at home. And it’s just like the same, you’re not like a different person at work. And when we talked about the customer avatar before, if the person you’re targeting is also in this values group, there’s just so much congruency. That it’s not hard or forced or like that’s where I’m talking about one day Like you don’t want to necessarily serve everybody because this other group that doesn’t have these values at all Probably aren’t going to be that fun to work with or support or whatever So it’s it sounds quick like oh write down the six most important values But like really think about it and think about it and who you hire and who you want to work with as customers and so on Let’s talk about thinking in spreadsheets and building models. The thing I love about spreadsheets is I’m kind of on the, I’m like, if there’s like the right brain, who’s like artists left brain hardcore analytical spreadsheets, more on the analytical side. I’m probably Right of center in terms of my creative, like way of abstract thinking. But I love working in spreadsheets because it removes abstraction. Like I do a lot of mind maps. I mean, looking at one of my notes right here, like here’s a mind map of things I want to talk about values. But if I was actually going to like codify my values and like get more specific and make sure they fit, I’d move off the mind map and move into a spreadsheet. Because this cell needs to have a data point in it. And then once I have that data, or that word, or those numbers, I can build formulas and do stuff. So I just love the idea of removing abstraction and forcing yourself to work in spreadsheets. Like, even as like a course creator, if you’re gonna create like a resource to go with a training, like a worksheet, this is how I create worksheets. I would be like, well, how do I support this person? I start mind mapping on my paper, but then ultimately I’m going to build that spreadsheet and put boxes on there and give this box a name and that’s going to become PDF worksheet. So I moved from abstract, you know, brainstorming into concrete, valuable resource. You can do that for course outlining too. So like, okay, I’m a, to use our dating coach example, I was just brainstorming when I came up with those like milestones of like what needs to happen on the way to finding the love of your life. So that’s kind of a brainstorm, but eventually we want to put that in a spreadsheet and start thinking about you know, the order of things, what’s missing. Is there anything that goes between this and so on? Marketing content is the same. Where if we find our five pain points and then we got our mind map going and then we can create like a spreadsheet that gives us like categories and filters and columns for like, Oh, for this pain point, here’s the 12 topics. And then, you know, it could just keep expanding because there’s only so much we can carry in our working memory. So moving off of like journals and scribbles to like spreadsheets and tabs is really powerful. And then on the more business side, like business planning, using our dating coach example again, like if I was going to get into adding a line of business for like, okay, they found their soul mate. Now we’re going to do like how to do the family thing or whatever. Be like, well, how many customers do I have? Like what percentage of people like want to have kids? And I could start forecasting numbers and stuff, which is something you’re really good at. Your forecasts are awesome of like kind of validating ideas. And what if that grows at 10 percent every year? And now we have these two products, the love of your life and then awesome family product. And what’s it, what does that look like in 10 years? There’s only so much of that you can calculate in your brain. So that’s, that’s really helpful. And just a personal story, like you’ve done that. Like when you look at things like growth, like at Lifter LMS, like, okay, if we set these goals and this is where we want to be in five years, you said something to me the other day, like, Oh, if you grow, if you want to double the business, if you grow 15 percent every year, in three years, you’ve doubled the business. I don’t know if it’s 25%, but yeah, but that’s like, Instead of being like. I want to grow, like, let’s double the business. That’s like the abstract thought and let’s do it next year. It’s like, well, but if we do it this way and this compounds and let’s model that out in math, it really starts making sense. And you get it a more concrete plan. Jason Coleman: Yeah. Yeah. I call that like another aspect of that, doing that spreadsheet, I call it like positive visualization through spreadsheets. It’s like you, you kind of model your business and how it works and you’re like, what if I grow 25 percent per year? Click and drag, you know, it doesn’t like 25 percent is pretty big. Like we don’t like the power of compounding. You drag out 10, 20 years. You’re like, Oh my God, this is huge. And there’s something about like putting that number in there 25 percent and like committing to it to like, you find a way to do it. And if you have a good spreadsheet model, it’s like, you’ll have cells like a really simple model. I’m selling courses to people at a certain price. And it’s like how many How many people times what price is how much I make and if you want to make more money You either have more courses more people or higher price. There’s like no other way to make more money Like so which of those dials needs to turn so if you’re like, I’m gonna go 25% Am I trying to get 25 percent more users? Am I raising my prices 25 percent and hoping that people will buy it? Am I, you know, going to expand. You know, horizontally through new courses and sell them to the same people where other products and things. Yeah. So, I mean, I love it. It’s funny. I’m like on the left side of the right brain, left brain thing. And so I do love these spreadsheets, especially like early on to model the business. It feels almost irresponsible to like start. spending money on a business before you realize like how that spending that money turns into the money you’re going to make back, like to have a rough idea. This is how we make money. And I, so it’s good to get out of your, so for folks who are maybe right brained, I see folks like we’re, we’re gushing over spreadsheets and I see some folks are just like, I don’t like numbers. I don’t, I don’t get it. I don’t know how they work. And so they avoid that completely. And I, I think it’s like good to try to get out of your comfort zone and, and, and dig into that. Then more specifically, like when you’re doing these kind of like modeling forecast type sheets. You know, that could be as simple as I said, how many customers times what price it’s like the numbers are going to be imprecise and to be okay with having the spreadsheet isn’t, and I think that’s another hangup some folks have is they’re like, Why do that? I’m like, just drag 25%. Doesn’t mean you grow 25%. You’re like, yes, but the product, like, okay, now dig into it. You have to figure out how to grow 25 percent or like, it has to make sense. There’s a, you know, don’t be scared of the spread, spreadsheets or the fact that you, you can’t really know. That’s it. Yeah. So yeah, in investing sometimes. And you see if it makes sense. Like you know, you have to tell a story then to justify those numbers. This happens in like stock investing too, where you’re like, they’re growing at 30 percent per year. And then you’re kind of like, it’s a, they’re a company that sells cars for example. And you’re like, you drag that out five, 10 years and you’re like, that’s more cars than there are in the whole entire world. So you’re like, they have to do something other than sell cars if they’re going to keep growing at 30 percent and like that. So that’s like the numbers in the spreadsheet lead to the story that you have to tell to figure out like the next move you got to make in your business. Yeah. And so, yeah, like, don’t be scared of spreadsheets. Use rough estimates to get an idea and you can always update your sheet as you, you learn more. So if you realize you know, the, the assumptions you made about pricing, about how many people would stick around if you raise prices, assumptions about, you know, like you blow up and you’re on Oprah and now like that users goes off the chain. It’s like, okay, now you need to, that’s a good thing. You got to adjust your spreadsheet to account for that. Yeah. And I think. I’ve seen, I see this a lot on, I do I’m treasurer on a, like a private school board. And I, part of that, I build a forecast just like we do for lifter. And like, it’s kind of, we don’t set a budget per se, but we do a forecast that is like a rep, like stay within these numbers. But not like every domain has a budget, but that’s how we figure out, you know, is, is the school making money or losing money? And I, other people on the board just have, I see like that just maybe they’re You know, they have, they struggle with either like the spreadsheets scare them or they’re like, it’s not exact. And it’s like, it’s just a forecast and you do your best and you adjust. If I’m wrong, then we adjust. And actually, you know, oh my God, we overshot. The school lost money. That is bad to lose money. But hopefully mid year you can check in and be like, shoot, we’re going to end up, you know, and kind of adjust if you can. Or if you have like a cushion of money, like, okay, last year we lost money cause we didn’t have a good forecast. Why? Okay. It changed these adjustments. Next year’s forecast is going to be better. Chris Badgett: Yeah. One of my favorite business spreadsheets, and this was a trick I learned from Dan Martell. It’s called a precision scorecard. And this is something I recommend everybody do who has a business, which is Create a spreadsheet that has like the main functions. So like for a course creator business as an example, you’ve got sales, you have marketing, you have like customer satisfaction or just customer results metrics, and maybe you have some operation stuff just for the actual running of the business. And then pick three metrics. so that you can be more scientific about it and you can see things and you report it every week. So three metrics per department. So to give an example, like marketing as an example, if you have an online business, you’re going to want, you might want to look at traffic, like how many in your Google analytics, how many, how many people visited the website this week, you know, and sales, you might have whatever your conversion tool, if it’s a one on one call, you might have like meetings booked. Meetings, show up rate, sales conversion rate, so that would be like three there. And then you just, you fill it out every week. I actually like actually going and tracking down the numbers myself. I often think like, oh, that’s something an assistant can do. But the very act of me like digging in, getting the data, putting in the sheet, looking at it, looking at it last week, looking at it the same week a year ago. I start like seeing patterns and I get ideas and, and, and it’s great to celebrate where you’re winning. Like, Oh my gosh, our traffic doubled this week. It tells you like, Oh, that marketing thing we did worked or, or you’ll find a problem. Like if you do ongoing monthly coaching and you have like a really high churn rate of people not renewing or canceling, there’s something to dig in there. So it’s sort of like a, when you go to the doctor. And they run labs and they’re looking at all these markers that helps like figure out what to do, Jason Coleman: diagnose the health of the business. Chris Badgett: Let’s look at kind of being an entrepreneur and like, it’s sort of this thing I’ve heard. Um, I’m trying to remember the guy’s name. I heard this from, but like, there’s this one quality of entrepreneurs that they can’t turn it off. It’s like a thing. So they’re like always kind of in business, you know, They’re always looking at through the lens of business or entrepreneurship wherever they go like If you’re picking up your kids at school and like man, this pickup process is really inefficient like at my kids school I had to like You had to like go against traffic make a u turn in the back of the parking lot to get in line It was just it was always like chaos but you can learn from any domain. And the big idea is really just pattern recognition. So if you can’t turn it off, if you’re always just grinding on like seeing systems and wanting to optimize and fix everything and start new companies, cause you see like something new working, you can, you start identifying patterns. So pattern recognition is. a big part of being an entrepreneur. And when you study either different types of businesses or even different disciplines entirely, you can see patterns that you could apply over to your company. And then when you see pattern, then you can start, okay, I see a pattern here that’s sort of like, For me, it’s kind of like right brain and then it’s like, let’s push it over to the left brain and start building it. Like what is the actual mechanism and system here? How does this work? And then you can, can I apply that system in my business? And for marketing specifically, like everything is marketing. As of recording this, we just watched a presidential election process. It played out over years and months and it’s a giant marketing campaign. So when I’m looking at that, I’m like, okay, this is the this text message I’m getting on my phone. Let’s look at the candidates websites. You know, what is like, what’s happening on social media? Like it’s all marketing is everywhere. Communication’s everywhere. So you might learn something that you see in like a presidential campaign or let’s say a Black Friday retail ad for like clothing, but you sell courses and coaching, but like, was there something in that brand of clothing the way they did it? They were like, I think I can try that over in mine, but kind of format it differently for what I offer. And we mentioned earlier about Robert Cialdini’s book Influence. The people that read that book are kind of business and marketing nerds like myself and Jason. Yeah. But what he did is he actually studied like cults, which is more of like a social science, social thing. He was like, how do these cult leaders like develop all this influence? So he took something from sort of a social science world and brought it over to business and marketing. And so there’s all these Chowdhury nerds in business. So that’s just a great example of taking it from over here and applying it to a completely different industry. Jason Coleman: This reminds me of a tactic I heard from Alex Ormazi, who’s on YouTube about exposing yourself to these other things. He recommends like not turning off ads or paying to get rid of ads on YouTube. Like if you’re ever going to make a YouTube ad, you want to expose yourself to all these ads and kind of see what seems to be working. Or when something grabs your attention, you’re like, wait, why did that grab my attention? Why did I react to that text message or that email or that phone call or, you know and take mental notes and be like, Oh, we could, we could do it that way. That’s awesome. And I think, you know, I, I definitely have this in my life where I’m, I’m always thinking about business. We’re here in this space. I think we’ve both been done and we’re like, what’s it cost to lease this? How much did these lights cost? And it’s like, you just can’t turn it off. You can’t do it. Whenever I’m at a restaurant and it’s kind of like, how many tables? Am I like, how did the turnover? You know, Kim and I, Kim, Kim started making dog treats for our dogs. And we’re immediately like, how could you scale this up and make that? She’s like, no, dude, you just, you have a hobby, keep it as a hobby sometimes. But I’m always thinking about that. And I guess one thing that’s useful about that is that you know, you can pull things from our industries, apply it to your business. You can also use that same mindset to analyze your own business. So if you can tap into that and find that kind of beginner’s mindset of you know. Trying to experience. What do I offer? What do I give away? What do I sell? If I, you know, how would I think about that? And and you can kind of consider other You know big changes like we get caught in our ways like it’s a free man product. This is how we sell it We sell this thing. Let’s not, you know, tweak the business model But I have that thing. I mean, that’s always analyzing, come up with business models on the fly. Like turn that on my own business. Don’t be afraid to like entertain big changes. And there’s a really good blog post by Jason Cohen of a smart bear and WP engine where I forget what is this? It’s some crazy numbers, like 20 or more like thought experiments to like push you outside your comfort zone and consider different business models. Like if you sell something for 500, what if you sold it for 50, 000, what would you have to do in your business? To like justify a 50, 000 price point. And what’s really amazing is if you go through that exercise, maybe you’ll be like, I should be in the business of selling 50, 000 things. That could be cool. But you might realize like, wait, I have this thing to justify a 50, 000 price point. And it doesn’t actually cost me any money. I can record it once and give it away for free, basically. And deliver more value to my people who are paying 500. So you like, you push yourself. And if you’re, you constantly have that. So. Don’t be stuck in, in a way about you know, your, your business model and consider things. And even if you’re not gonna, we’ve changed slightly our business model over time, but we’ve done things, you know you know, like is offering lifetime deals or not. And we have like a mutual friend in the same space who I think is more defensive on this. Like he, he has, I think he’s struggling to grow. He runs a very similar business and he wants to push the same levers he’s been pushing. But it’s kind of not going to work. Like I, I think of this analogy, which is silly. Cause I don’t go to the gym that often, but like when I used to work out when I was younger, you’re like, you do a bench press and you’re like, cool. I go from like 150 to like 200 pounds bench press and you hit a wall. And at that point, like just doing the bench press over and over again, it’s not going to push you. You need to exercise other muscles that contribute. And, you know, shake it up a little bit and try something different. And so I think this mutual friend, like, I think is hitting a wall and trying to do the same exercises. And it’s like, consider this thing that you give away for free. You could charge for it. And you’re like, how do you do that? Like you really could like nothing sacred. And that’s part of it too. If you’re like, nothing’s really sacred, we’re just thinking, we’re just exploring opportunities. Go with me here. Like, you’re like, come along on this journey and see what it feels like. If you made this big change in your business, you don’t have to do it. We’re just talking. But sometimes you get insights that way. Chris Badgett: I think one of the coolest ways to always be businessing that can be a lot of fun is to flip the script. Like, In sales and marketing it used to be called like the mark or the prospect, like who’s the target, right? In sales, direct sales. So I actually really enjoy when it’s flipped. Like if I’m going to buy a car, I’m the mark, like I’m semi, but I am fully aware I’m like looking at everything and I actually enjoy it because I know what’s going on. I know what good sales looks like. I know what not great sales looks like. And it’s fun just to be on the other side. So if you want to create a course, flip it, take somebody’s course. That’s something you’re interested in. If you want to become a coach, like get coached, see what they’re doing in their business. If you want to run a services agency, hire a services agency. And if you do those things that are in alignment with your business, there’s a lot of synergy. So. You know, for example, I hired a coach for I mentioned the Dan Martell several times and he has a program called SAS Academy for SAS founders. While it’s extra time, I also wanted to go in there and see what it was like to be on the other side and be the client and how does this coach do his thing? And it’s really informed things like that. And if you’re starting to delegate in your org chart And you’re, you’re, you’re have a service offering or an agency. Like you can hire an agency to run ads for you and see how it goes. What can you learn from their process? And so I’m not just get the service and the result. Jason Coleman: When you’re building a product or pricing something, you’re like, you’re, you know, you’re pricing a course. You’re like, what courses have you taken recently? What did you like about them? What were they priced? What things have you spent money on personally? Why, how? Never stop learning. Yeah, it’s always on. Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post Part 2: Becoming the Entrepreneur, Education Entrepreneur Mentor Series appeared first on LMScast.

In this LMScast episode, Chris Badgett and Jason Coleman explore the importance of developing subject matter expertise as an education entrepreneur, highlighting important tactics and procedures. By comparing this path to handicrafts, they highlight how mastery necessitates a strong, lifetime dedication to education and ongoing development. This dedication goes beyond first-time interest and necessitates constant interaction with business advancements, continuous learning, and an openness to change and try new things. Chris Badgett has spent more than 15 years working in the online education and course development sector, constantly changing jobs as a software entrepreneur, agency owner, and course producer. A key component of developing competence is creating a deliberate “media diet.” This is consciously consuming materials that are in line with particular objectives, whether they are books, blogs, YouTube channels, podcasts, or newsletters. Jason Coleman emphasizes how crucial it is to modify this diet in accordance with present goals, such as emphasizing business-related items when an entrepreneur is starting out. In order to establish a learning and collaboration ecosystem, tools such as YouTube’s “Watch Later” feature, carefully chosen subreddits, and resource sharing via Slack are essential. Writing becomes a fundamental component of the professional journey, acting as a means of elucidating and expanding comprehension. Drawing from the Feynman Technique, Chris and Jason stress that true comprehension comes from the ability to explain complex concepts simply. Here’s Where To Go Next… Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website. Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS. Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014. And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide Episode Transcript Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co founder of Lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show. Hello and welcome to the education entrepreneur mentor series where we unpack the five critical hats that you as an education entrepreneur yourself or with a team need to wear to be successful teaching online, potentially building a business around your knowledge, skills, and experience. Those five hats are being an expert, being an entrepreneur, being a teacher, being a technologist, and being a community builder. Today, Jason and I are going to be talking about becoming the expert. So we’re going to be talking about the expert hat. Enjoy this session. All right, today we’re talking about becoming the expert, and the first idea we want to dig into is developing subject matter expertise. And I have this idea around craftsmanship and what does it mean to be a craftsperson or a craftsman. And really I think the main strategy here is it’s all about lifelong learning. It’s a huge commitment. And once you commit, you really have to commit. ’cause you can do a project in school and learn in shop class, how to build a wooden toolbox. But if you really wanna become like a finished carpenter, you’re gonna need to spend years in that industry. And so there’s a big commitment, but it takes continuous improvement and lifelong learning. And some of the ways I do that is once you commit, like I committed to online courses as an example. First it was just a fascination, but I really committed about 15 years ago. I just fell in love with the industry. And once I decided to do business in this area, both as a course creator and later with an agency and later with software. It’s just a commitment that I’ve kept up with and once you commit as a crafts person It’s really important to keep up with your industry and not rest on your laurels And one of the ways I keep up with the industry of online education, influencer marketing, online coaching industry, course creator into industry is through YouTube podcasts, newsletters, books, and blogs. Like it’s almost like entertainment for me to spend a big chunk of time on that. And the other part of lifelong learning is just not stopping and asking for help. Whether that’s coaches, mentors, community, peer masterminds, that’s part of being a craftsperson is that continuous learning. So for example, a couple of years ago, I joined Dan Martell’s SAS Academy, which is designed for software founders. I spent two years in the program. It was a coaching program community that are like 300 training courses in there. I looked at that like my nontraditional master’s degree. When I signed up, I committed for two years and the other piece, which is really fun is making time for experimentation. We’ve been doing that lately in our businesses with AI tools. I was recently trying to create a course with all AI and I’m making a course about that from our community, but it’s not just about studying. It’s also about experimentation and. For me, I’m just constantly experimenting, constantly studying my industry and my fascination, looking at competitors. Seeing what influencers are coming up in the space, what’s new with the tech. And I’ve just, I feel like I have my pulse on it, like an obsession. Jason Coleman: Something that stands out to me is that I think we both do is curate this media diet consciously. And I go through phases in my life where something is different, isn’t focused. Am I like being a developer? Or like a father or like working on the business and when I’m working on the business, I’ll update my YouTube subscriptions and put different things on my watch later, like on Reddit. If you’re on Reddit as a site and you just look at what they show you, it’s all like dogs doing backflips and people breaking their legs and like whatever hilarious things. But if you actually subscribe to the subreddits that are related to business and your topic, you start getting that as like a newsfeed. So like I hide all the like poker. Parenting, politics, unsubscribe from all that stuff, subscribe to all the business stuff and immerse myself. I’m reading books. So it’s Oh, like the book I’m reading, fiction start, I have these business books I want to read. I’m in a business mindset. I’ll start reading the business books while I’m, so I changed my media diet. across all the different forms. And that helps me like stay in the zone. So even when I’m relaxing and going for a walk and listen to a podcast, it could be, if I’m working on the business, it’s like a business podcast instead of a comedy podcast or whatever might, also be in there. Chris Badgett: Yeah. And I just to piggyback on that, I like to, when I am walking, it’s learning time for me or when I’m exercising. If I hear something like I need to implement that, I like literally email myself on out just like a note to jog my memory. And also I appreciate, like I, you mentioned watch later on YouTube. I also like Slack myself all the time using our instant messenger and also have trusted. People like if Jason sends me a slack message with Hey, check out this video. Like I, I highly value it. It’s like the human feed of like curators that, that have similar interests. Jason Coleman: Some, I want to talk about like, how do you develop subject matter expertise and really dive in and learn something like one of the big ideas I have is around writing to learn. And it’s not my idea. I think there’s a name like called the Feynman technique Richard Feynman, the physicist. So the basic idea is you don’t really understand something until you can explain it well in the simplest terms and forcing yourself to write about it forces you to do that. And so more recently, like folks like David Perel, James Clear and Anne Lamott, like all talk about this, like power of writing to help you organize your thoughts. I think writing is unique. Some folks aren’t good writers. So maybe it’s, making videos forces you, or like doing audio if there’s some other medium that kind of works for you, drawing diagrams, but I think writing in particular is special about organizing your thoughts. And tactically, I would, recommend blogging like you’re trying to learn about something you feel like you have what I don’t know anything yet. What do I have to write about it? It’s write about your experience learning about this thing. A tactic for that, if you feel like. Jason says, write something, but I don’t know what to write about is this concept called an e bomb, which I take from the 30 by 500 course by Alex Hillman and Amy Hoy. And that’s basically like when someone asks you a question or sends the E stands for email, when someone sends you an email and you answer it, that’s content. It’s oh, other people have that same question. Put it on your blog. And answer it, maybe a little bit better, a little bit longer, long form, go into it more deeply. And so that’s that’s where you can find these content. Or if you have a question and you answer it, and then the other one is publishing it so don’t just write it down and put it away in your journal. There’s something about putting it online and other people can read it that like forces you to really nail it. So often I have an idea and it’s in my notes. Then when I’m like, I’m going to write this and publish it, I’m like, I don’t actually understand that as well as. Or I thought I knew the history, but I don’t, let me read and get it more clear. I always thought like in, in college, like everyone struggles to write and you’re like, I’m trying to get like a hundred percent. That means I like followed, like the best practices of writing. It’s so artificial. I didn’t really learn to write well until I started publishing for other people to read. And it’s there’s an audience and you have to explain something to them and transfer knowledge. It forces you to really do that well. And so like in our, my career, like where this came up was the investor geeks blog, which was like my first kind of WordPress project online. Me and two other friends had just come out of college and we had decent jobs and we had four or one case for the first time. And that literally was probably like one of the first blog posts is like, What is a 401k? And as we learned about it, we wrote about it like, Oh, this is what it is. There’s different kinds and here’s how you should think about it. So every time we learn something about investing, we would blog about it there. And it really forced us to understand what we were talking about. And we had an audience and, we built an audience from that, but also probably the biggest value we got from that was just learning all those things and how to manage money. So now later in life. Yeah. When business is going well I know all these things. Chris Badgett: I think writing is critical and it’s almost like it’s going out of fashion. Like what a kids want to be when they grow up, they want to be a YouTuber. It’s about video, visual, the rise of Instagram and everything. But writing it literally, it’s not just blogging, like social media is writing a script for a video is writing emails, writing, writing a business plan is writing, communicating to your team or your friends is writing text messaging. It’s all writing. So it’s like the super skill. And you mentioned blogging. I think. There’s a misconception that like, Oh, is blogging dead? Everything’s on social media. Now that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t blog. And, really owning your library of content, especially while building in public and what you’re learning, it just sharpens you so much. And it’s all about putting in the reps. Yeah, nobody’s a great writer at the beginning or, graphic designer or teacher, but just putting in the reps as a subject matter expert, all of a sudden it’s that whole thing about you overestimate what you can do in a day, but underestimate what you can do in a year. Jason Coleman: Yeah. And I think on that point of, Is blogging out of fashion. There probably was a moment where on the internet content wise, you could learn something, become an expert, write a blog and kind of become famous as a blogger. And now it feels like you said, YouTube, social media, it’s different. It’s all, it’s like in the moment it’s shorter attention. It’s, it has to be outraged, not just look how smart I am. And that’s like chat GPT knows everything anyway. Like I don’t have to like search for a blog on what a 401k is. Like Google just tells me when I. Search it. It’s still a good method to organize your thoughts. And then once you have that content, you can repurpose it and you like, okay, I wrote the blog post now, you want to, record yourself talking about it and share that on social media 10 times. So if as part of a bigger marketing strategy, like you said, it’s you still write a script often before you video record, you write a draft before you talk to your team, sending emails and stuff. So it’s still a good skill as a baseline for, even if the As a marketing engine, it’s not as strong as it used to be. Chris Badgett: I think just one more point on that, that I call it a news item. So if you’re going to do a marketing campaign about a new product launch or a sale or something important, the first thing I do is write a blog post about it or a page of content on the site. And that becomes the hub of all that other stuff, like social media, building a course about it, sending emails, all this other types of writing, but that blog. Post the news item is the core of everything. We’re talking about Jason Coleman: educational content. If you have ideas for courses and lessons and things like writing a blog post about one core aspect of it and sharing it around and trying to see how it sticks, see what’s interesting to people, that’s really useful for helping you in the early stages of, figuring out the content. Chris Badgett: Yeah. Let’s talk about inner game. As a subject matter expert looking to teach online or just being an entrepreneur, there’s a lot of inner work that has to happen. The biggest thing I see is imposter syndrome, like who am I to do X or I’m not ready, perfectionism creeps in. And what I’ve learned over probably 15 plus years being an entrepreneur is that Entrepreneurship is personal development. It’s like the, in my opinion, one of the highest and most useful ways to improve yourself. And, but these things creep up like imposter syndrome and self belief issues. We hear about things like fear of failure, but actually fear of success is a bigger problem. Like not what if I fail, but what if it works? And now my high school friends are going to see me and I have this like new identity and Oh, I remember when that guy was doing XYZ and now he’s like teaching business or doing whatever. Like it, you get all this, get in your head and creates this imposter syndrome thing. Everybody deals with this. Yeah. I would say even like presidential candidates as an example, like deal with that. Like in the highest job positions. If you don’t have imposter syndrome. You might be a psychopath, but one of the ways that I work on that, that I’ve learned over the years is shifting the focus. Don’t make it about you and the perception of you just focus on helping people. Cause as soon as you transition the focus from I need to be perfect to how can I best help these people? Some of the weight of imposter syndrome just melts away. And the other thing is, I’ve noticed this at Lifter LMS as an example. It’s been going for over 10 years, and I’ve, pattern recognition is something that entrepreneurs do, which we’ll talk about later. But one of the things I’ve noticed with the projects that are successful, the people that, make the million dollars, or get 300 enrollments on their first sale or the first time they offer their course or their membership or whatever, Is that people have, these people all have this mode of consistent, imperfect action. So they’re okay with like little micro failures along the way, or, I’m like 80 percent happy with this course. Let’s just ship it. Like they, they overcome. Is that the Jason Coleman: same as I’ve heard of like a bias towards action as like a skill? Yeah. Chris Badgett: Yeah. And it’s, and I add the word imperfect, a bias towards imperfect action, but it’s forward. Yeah. Yeah. And the other thing that really helps, and I think this is like writing you have to put in the reps, is just developing a thick skin because when you go on the internet as a public expert or entrepreneur, there are quote haters or you get judged. You’re on stage. And the reality is there’s a lot of mental illness in society, a lot of negative energy you get. Online is really more of a reflection of the person who’s given that out. And of course, nobody’s perfect. If you can admit mistakes, if you do make a mistake and you get some negative blowback, but just having a thick skin, it just comes with time. I think we’ve both seen that in our companies at lifter LMS and paid memberships pro that like when you’re doing customer support and working with people. Sometimes people are like frustrated, they’re angry, maybe the tone’s not great. But after you do it for a decade, you’re just trying to help these people. You understand their project’s really important to them, understand there’s all these cultural differences and people are in different emotional states. It’s not that you get immune, but your skin thickens. Yeah, you take Jason Coleman: it a little less personally. It’s like you said, it’s not about you. It’s about them. Exactly. It’s like the mental switch. Chris Badgett: Exactly. And if we’re all coming from a frame of we’re just trying to help. Yeah. Yeah. The whole business is just a business of helping. And if you’re coming to us for support or coaching or content, it’s just a frame of helping. One of the things I wanted to talk about in terms of a story related to this an imposter syndrome. One of my first course projects I did with my wife, and we did it in the organic gardening and permaculture niche. And I wanted to get other course creators, like more famous people. So like here’s imposter syndrome, like who are the best organic gardening and permaculture experts in the world? And there’s a guy who had the bestselling book on Amazon and the topic of permaculture named Toby Hemingway. He was, I was living in Montana at the time he was doing a talk over in Idaho or Washington state. And I was just dreaming a little bit with my wife. We could just go over to that talk, film it, talk to him about it, get him to become an expert on our platform. All he has to do is say, yes we’ll just make the pitch. I was like, to my wife, Sam, that’s her name. And I said, just send him an email, tell him all that stuff I just said, and just ask him. I was joking when I said this, but she didn’t really see it as a joke. She emailed him. I just said, finish the email with just saying, where do you want us to send the check? Jason Coleman: And Chris Badgett: she literally wrote him that. And he said, yes. And a week later we filmed it and then he put it on his website and then we got a bunch of traffic. We did more stuff with him. But that’s, sometimes you just got to be a little bold to get past the imposter syndrome. And there’s just P people are just people. Yeah. And yeah, we made a good offer. He said yes. And we did a partnership. Jason Coleman: And imposter syndrome is everywhere. And like you said, if you don’t have it, that’s almost something that’s wrong. And the people who don’t have it to me, anyway, they’re annoying. The opposite is what, a know it all. Yeah. And those folks, I guess have a different path where they can fake it to you and make it. But I think. I start to see in others if you dive deep and build relationships with folks, you see how other people are imperfect and you’re like, Oh I’m as smart as them. I should be able to do this too. And I guess it’s just something you build up over time. The other thing you talked about was like dealing with the haters, the hate you get. That’s the negativity from stuff. If you’re putting content out online, building courses and putting it, making yourself a public figure, exposing yourself to that. You just open up to it on a scale and we know as humans I forget what it is like I think it’s humans process negative things like four times as much as positive. So that it’s like a, an investing, there’s I forget what they call it, like negativity bias. So if someone says something bad about you, like that hits you like four times as hard as if someone says, Hey, your hair looks nice. You’re gonna be like, sure, that’s good. And I have a post about this, tons of things to deal with that. But I think, One thing that’s important early on that helps is to seek out that positive and ask for it and be open about it. So sometimes like example that we got negative reviews that were hitting us on like the paid memberships pro product. And we had an emailing list and it was like, let’s just email them and say Hey, could you say something nice about us and give us a review? We really appreciate it. Boom. And then a bunch of customers came back and gave us some reviews and then we could dive into that. And yeah, it’s good to process that stuff too. Cause there is. underlying the whatever the negativity that’s in there. It’s there’s a point. So you’re like, Hey, is there a point to this? Is there a way that I can learn from this? Cool. Take that out and then, try to deal with it. So another thing about intergame related to that maybe is I see a lot of folks who who give up too early sometimes and they have big dreams They want to make a million dollars and then they only make a little bit of money and it feels like insurmountable and so a concept that helps there is to think about getting just one percent better every day And this is a concept that’s james out to share talks about in his book choose yourself And there’s other flavors of this but it’s like a focus on incremental growth. And so it’s You know, when you’re shooting for some big goal, this many members, this many subscribers, this much money. You could get upset on the, on that path when you handle setbacks and you talked about having thick skin helps with that. Another thing that helps with that is starting small. So there’s this tactic. So it’s Hey, I want to make a million dollars a year. I wish I could credit this. We’ll find it. Who talks about this, but it’s a, okay, you want to make a million dollars a year and that seems hard. What would make that easy? And you’re like, if I had this, it’d be real easy to make a million dollars. So oh, if I had a million email subscribers, I just need a dollar for my rhythm and I could do that. Oh, cool. Okay. How do you make a million email subscribers? Okay. I don’t know. What would make it easy to have a million email subscribers? It’s I don’t know if some other guy with a mailing list with 10 million promoted my email list. And I’m making something up, but it’s, that’s that kind of thing. You can scale back from your big goal. And come up with the small goal. That’s this is the next step. What’s the next good step for this. So I think thinking about that and focusing on those small steps and also like always be learning. So this is like a trick is like of handling setbacks. If you set out to make a course and sell it, it’s the first time you’ve ever done it and you like to be successful. I want people to learn from this and make money off it. That could happen, but it might not. But one thing you can control is you can learn from the process. At the end of it, you’ll know how to create a course and promote it and sell it and put it out there. And so some, I always try to have that with every new project. It feels like a little risky or brand new is like, how can I always be learning? How can I like, even if I fail, still pull something from this, like a version of all these things I’m thinking about. That come, this comes up often in like the, maybe like the indie hacker space or people who are trying to build a business on the side. They set a goal I need $10,000 a month, and that will replace my like, nice cushy job, and then I can do this full time. And they build up a system, they get attention, they start selling stuff. They create a way to sell money or sell money, had to get to sell things to make money. And like after six months or a year of work, they’re making like a thousand dollars a month. And they’re like, I failed. I’m only making a thousand dollars a month. I need 10, 000 a month. And they feel like they’re 10 percent of the way there. But in reality, like an experience of watching people do this and our own experience going through it is they’re really halfway to 10, 000. Like that first step is so hard. Just getting any money is like a big deal. And of course there could be like problems with the market or the product that you’re building that kind of limit its potential. To that it might not grow to 10,000, but the effort part of it is you’ve done half the effort to get, if you’re at a thousand dollars a month, you’ve done half the effort to get to $10,000 a month. And I think people don’t think of things that way. So it’s that message sometimes helps people like keep pushing when they’re ready to give up. Chris Badgett: Yeah. Failure is feedback. That’s how I think about it. And that’s, it’s like a reframe. Like I heard a really cool reframe that stuck with me as soon as I heard it. This is like inner game stuff. You know how a lot of people say, man, I’m crazy busy. I heard this guy on a podcast being interviewed and he never said that. He said, I’m active. It’s I’m not busy. I’m active. Like he would reframe what the interviewer was saying to put a positive spin on it or a productive spin on it. Yeah. And in terms of 1 percent better every day. I don’t know the math behind that you, you might know, but if you do get 1 percent better every day, you’re like a thousand percent better at the end of a year or something like that. It compounds. It’s crazy. Yeah. And then one way I noticed that which kind of ties into the imposter syndrome thing is I went. The first time I started getting out from behind my computer and going to industry events and things, nobody knew who I was or is not very well known. And only a couple of years later, I’d show up at similar events and like a lot of people knew who I was, but I was writing, I was publishing and put myself out there as being authentic. And then, but it didn’t feel like it at the time, but every day I was just shipping a little bit, shipping a little bit, trying to help people, making imperfect content, and that just compound to becoming a micro celebrity in a niche. Jason Coleman: Yeah. It’s nice to have a buddy in that process that can help. For me, I need a buddy to do this. I don’t know. Maybe some people just on their own to like really when those moments come up. Celebrate them as wins. I’m always like moving on to the next thing, but it’s nice when someone’s Oh my God, that’s crazy. Everyone knows you here. That’s a big deal. You’re like, Oh, okay. Felt normal or like a thousand dollars a month on the side. That’s crazy. That’s awesome. Chris Badgett: Yeah. And getting off zero, like you were saying Oh, you’ve made a thousand dollars. It’s a failure. Like I see it all the time. I’ll talk to a course creator who is man, I only got three sales. I’m like, yeah, but that’s not zero sales. Yeah. It’s like a big deal. And I can. Be very different in a couple of years. Let’s talk about creating influence. Yeah. And I’ve actually never been comfortable or a fan of the phrase like influencer is probably my own limiting beliefs or imposter syndrome or whatever. What came before influencer? Was it guru or. They all have their challenges, right? Even what we’re talking about today, being an expert. Okay, subject matter expert. And it’s a little counterintuitive, is sometimes I’m a really strong introvert, so it was hard for me to take the stage and just put myself out there on the internet, but eventually I just said, okay, I guess I’m doing this, and over time I got comfortable with it. The other thing I found with that when you do take the stage, that’s the big idea is like at some point you got to get out of your head and onto the web and, be public. And I think it’s a lot of work to try to manufacture a persona or a brand. So just being yourself authentically and you can be like the professional version of yourself. So for example, if you have a bad day or something bad’s going on in your life, it’s going to the doctor. The doctor still shows up for work, puts on the white coat and gets the job done, but they might be having a bad day. There’s some little bit of professionalism that you just show up, but you got to take the stage. And I see a lot of, I’ve heard this in another community. They have a name for this person. They call it good idea, Glenn, like a person with a lot of ideas that like nothing ever happens or there’s never visible work. And if you don’t do it, you’re never going to create. influence. And one of the things, if you are going to create influence, I’m a big fan of this idea that your vibe attracts your tribe. So the more you act like yourself when you take the stage and the vibe you put out there, you’re going to attract people like that. I noticed that for example, in Dan Martell’s SAS Academy that I joined, like Dan’s like a smart entrepreneur dude. And he had a bunch of software companies, but he’s also like into fitness and like lifestyle and make sure relationships are good and stuff. So I think of him as like full stack. So when I get in there, I’m like, Oh, there’s other people in there that, yes, they care about business and growing software companies. But they’re also like, care about lifestyle and a lot of bootstrappers in there and stuff. And I was like, cool. Yeah. Like the vibe he was putting out there attracted a great community and a couple of tactical things about creating influence. The first one is if you haven’t done it yet, you need to read Robert Cialdini’s book called influence. And he even has a second book called. Pre fluence, I believe that’s what it is about what to do before you try to influence. But Cialdini goes over the seven things, which are reciprocity, social proof, authority, liking, and I think there’s one more I’m missing. And once you really get all that stuff, It helps give you a roadmap of what to do. I think reciprocity is one of the easiest ones to understand, which is if you want to create influence, give something away for free. So tying into what we were talking about earlier, like when you write a useful, valuable blog posts that somebody finds value in, that’s like a form of influence. You’re giving away something for free. If you like stay committed as a craftsperson to a subject matter. Like I’m a total online course nerd. That’s like consistency. That’s another part of influences is that and then just being authentic as you do that, it’s, it works. And the crazy thing about Cialdini is. A lot of his research was around cults, like how to cults create influence like cult leaders. So when you’re reading the book, you’re like, man, this is a little gross. Like I’m not trying to become a guru or manipulate people. I think the difference between positive influence and manipulation is intent. Are you just trying to help these people and influence them in a positive way? Or are you trying to take their money, get them in a cold and pull them away from their family or whatever your, that is. And then I think it’s really important. I think a lot of people miss this step. If you are going to create influence is to choose your audience wisely. So sometimes when you create a business, you think that, Oh, it’s for everybody. Is it really though? Does it, do you want to work with every type of person out there? And so make a choice about a lot of, it’s just, and we’ll talk about this more later about. Your customer avatar and niching and things like that. But I had an aha moment, of course, as a human and a idealist, I do want to help everybody. I want to save the world. But I think you do your best job as a expert really picking a tribe or community to help. And that whole community thing, the tribal thing is real. From my story, I’ve moved through several tribes. Like I was anthropology guy in college. I was after that climber Mountaineer guy, then I was a dog musher guy in Alaska. Now I’m a software guy, a tech entrepreneur guy. And I move in these tribes and I think there’s a lot of loneliness out there. And if you’ve, if you’re vibe attracts your tribe and you want to help these people, you like these people, that creates a lot of sustainability in your project. Jason Coleman: Chad Dini’s book is awesome. It feels influence, feels like this magical thing that just happens. And then he just lays it out and very clear left brain. This is the reality of it. And you’re like, oh, it’s the playbook. And there is that risk, like when there’s other things like this. When you know the playbook, it feels like manipulation, and you’re like, it might be inauthentic. It’s really hard to find that line. But I think like in marketing in particular, it can feel like sleazy at times you’re using these tactics and you remind yourself we actually make this thing that they want we’re actually helping them if they actually complete my course, it’s good for them. And so if you believe that in the core, then it can help you use some of these tactics and under understanding that you pick up from like a book like that. You were talking about choosing your audience wisely. And I, yeah, I guess like the customer avatars about that. I’m reminded of the who’s the guy with the pumping patch video. Chris Badgett: Oh, I know what you’re talking about. It’s a personal finance thing Jason Coleman: or Chris Badgett: it’s about finance. Jason Coleman: I think it’s on business, but that he’s every so often you take a list of all your customers and you think of which customers do I hate and they cause the most stress, and it’s okay, how can I, and which customers do I like and they’re the most awesome and I love working with them. And it’s of course, after that, then you should like, okay how can I rearrange my business? So then I’m serving these people I like and not serving these people I don’t like, and it could be as simple as like on your copy, be like, this isn’t the product for these whiny assholes that end up in my Chris Badgett: customer chain. I recommend that by the way, for when you’re writing a sales page and having a section who it’s for three bullet points who it’s not for three bullet points. Yeah. Yeah. It’s like good exercise. Yeah. Jason Coleman: Every bad customer to bounces off your sales page is a good outcome as well, including this is really for you. Come on in. But if you’re the kinds of folks who get into this business, like we solve pro we’re good at solving problems. We like helping people and you just do it reflexively when you’re in the weeds. And then you find out you’re like, it’s, you got to take a step back and be like, what are we doing? Am I doing, am I actually doing the thing I really want to do and helping the people I really want to help? Am I in, in the tribe I want to be in. I think you touched on this too, of, building influence through trust. You said about like giving stuff away for free. And that’s almost like a core value that we have. We build this free software, just solving problems for people, delivering value that You’ll naturally build up a reputation for being someone who gets something done and delivers And I think a lot of folks maybe if you in the content space you’re building like a course or education I think very rarely do you have that top secret? These are the five ingredients that make the thing and I have to hold, you know Don’t share that unless people give me the money a lot of people feel that way but more often You probably should switch your mindset and it’s give away your best stuff for free And it’s like just put it out there for free on your blog send it to them If all you want to do is hook them to sell a thing like what’s gonna do it best But the big idea the nugget the most useful tactic the you know The clearest description of like how you go from you know Where you are, to where you want to be and get your outcome. So like the clearest way you can do that, the best content you have is always good to put out for free. And then people will pay for access to you for having it in a clear, organized way. A tactic like that, that I often recommend for people want to build courses is like, so I talked about blogging as a way to learn. You blog, just blog, keep blogging, write the thing, give it away for free. And when you’re done, like if you did that once a week for a year and I have 52 decent articles and you’re like, all right, cool. Take that content and now build it into a different format that you can sell. And you’d be surprised, you feel like, Oh, they can just get my stuff for free. So why would they pay for it? But the real interaction, typical interaction on this website is someone searches for something. They see your one good article and then your post like promotes, here’s the book that explains everything. And you’re like, Oh, I, you got me. Let me get the book that explains everything. There’s also a speak with your actions instead of your words. And so it’s like actually do it, talk about yourself. And your journey, instead of theorizing I felt that way when I was like writing notes for this, sometimes it’s I so that pumpkin patch, I wish I could remember that guy’s name. That’s a story I heard that’s useful and I could share useful stories. Like we’re in the space, we have lots of useful stories, but that’s actually when I did and worked. So I actually went through that process a couple of times and I try to go back to it every time. So I’m, I can give, I’m really talking about something that is authentic to like. I operate. And maybe it’s just another rephrasing of this. Gary Vaynerchuk has a book called jab, right hook. And he’s thinking about if you have emails, if you have a four email series, don’t always be selling. I think that’s like always be selling is probably something someone says, but actually. I think you might have a better outcome if you’re like give, and then you deliver value and now they’re on your side. And then you’re like, Hey, by the way, I sell this thing and it could help you too. And that’s like a mode that I use both. So it’s it’s funny, I’m talking about like selling, but it’s like this, these concepts build influence towards the sale. So it’s these If you think about it in that way, a story also related to Gary Vaynerchuk. That’s like the antithesis of this. I have a lot of, some of the stories I have in here are like you said, like learning from your failures early on. I had this website, wine log. net. It was like a social site for wine and you could keep track of the wine you’re drinking. And there was a couple of other websites in the space. Cellar tracker is the one that was like the old school one. That’s still around. So they, they won. So shout out to sell a tracker. I keep track of your wine with cell tracker. It’s a really good app. But at the time they were like this old windows 95 slow, not really web to a website. We built like the modern version of it. There’s another site called court. And there’s all these wine websites were coming up and Gary had a wine podcast and he was advertising on all our websites. I remember he, Hbought an ad on our site and I had twelve hundred dollars for an ad placement for a month or something and he’s like you should give it to me for I forget how you tried to talk me down to 600 bucks or something like that and I stuck to 1200 and he was like, alright Jason He’s like I’m gonna give you 1200 bucks, but like you should know like you Probably should have took the 600 deal and just had me had the goodwill towards you. It was great. He gave me like this little business nugget. And at the time I was like I was like, I don’t know. I didn’t want to give up the money, I was like, that’s what I think it’s worth. It should be worth it. I don’t care who you are. It was my attitude at the time. And fast forward for a bunch of other reasons, like Gary Vaynerchuk bought that website corked and built it into his brand. And it became part like, and we were friends, but you’re like we interacted before, but yeah, Our wine website didn’t tie onto Gary Vaynerchuk and made some of the biggest wine websites in the world. So it’s like I, for 600 bucks, I lost a little bit of influence with Gary Vaynerchuk, which would have been useful. And I wasn’t thinking at the time. And I do feel it’s funny. It’s like when you put a price tag on something, that’s your price and you should stick to it. And I’m not like a big biz dev guy. But I think in that moment, if I really was thinking about what was best for that website, if I was like, how do I build influence so that I can turn this into a bigger thing? It was like, Oh, cool. You got the attention of The biggest, like social, early social media guys talking about wine right now, like building influence with him and his connections was way more important than money at the time. And it’s instead that conversation of cool, I’ll do an ad for your paying. And what more can I do for you to help you? That would have paid back in spades. If I had been helping Gary and said the other way around what would have, how would that relationship developed? Chris Badgett: Giving away your best stuff for free. Like in that case maybe not give Gary the free ad, but reduce the price, give him the hookup. And one way I think about that is this concept from I think I first heard it from Eben Pagan is moving the free line, like not necessarily all the way to free. But information wants to be free. So like you should be giving away uncomfortably free amounts of stuff or valuable stuff. And like you said but if it’s also like available on the internet and other places, what you’re actually selling is your way of supporting it, your unique style that just resonates with people or whatever. But, and we, but like with Lifter LMS and paper shows pro we give away so much for free with our core softwares that are in many ways more powerful than really expensive paid solutions and it works. So moving the free line and then show, don’t tell. I like that a lot. It’s easy to like, talk about things theoretically. And some of the way I built influence in WordPress is I didn’t just say you should use WordPress, build a blog, sign up for a hosting account here and install the software. One of the first courses I made was how to build a WordPress website in a weekend. I showed people how to do it. I just sat down and turned on ScreenFlow and recorded it. Turned it into a six module course. Put it on Udemy, put it on YouTube as a video playlist. And then what happened is, so what I’m, my idea here of creating influence is give away your secret sauce, tell people your process, particularly if you have an agency or whatever. Because at that time people were watching my videos on Udemy or on YouTube and they’re like, you know what? This stuff is actually complicated. Can I just hire you? Jason Coleman: Yeah. Chris Badgett: So by moving the free line, then the clients came in. Not just from my local community, but from all over the world. And that was uncomfortable to be like shouldn’t I just build websites for people? I’m just going to teach everybody how to do it themselves and show them, not just tell them about it. Let’s look at the difference between being a guide versus a guru. I really love this framing. And a guru, like it’s like a religious figure who. Preaches and speaks truth. And this is the way but a guide, and I actually come from a background of guiding wilderness guiding. So I understand guiding at a deep level. It’s a guru would just be like climb this mountain and a guide is going to be up there adapting working with people, dealing with setbacks, dealing with weather changes, and I think also being a guide. Takes a lot of pressure off like you don’t need to be the guru Giving a sermon. You just need to help people get results. And the big idea here is Instead of just having quote the best information as a subject matter expert Be like a results getter for people like the guy doesn’t climb the mountain for you like they help you get that outcome of Climbing the mountain successfully you Or whatever your niche is, starting a business, getting in shape, finding the love of your life. People want results. They don’t necessarily want you to be, give them like the golden book. They really, there’s a underlying motivation and result or transformation that people want. And I think it’s really important when you do become a guide to marry a problem. So don’t necessarily think about who’s my target market. You should think about that, but what problem do you want to solve in the world? What what wrong do you want to write in the world and just obsess about it? And I can’t really explain how I got obsessed about it, but I love this idea of people being able to post, basically create information products and create this digital content. Anybody, anywhere in the world could pull it up on a web browser, put their credit card or their PayPal account in and build this online business around. I just fell in love with this problem and tying it to the problem of education because education has a lot of potential to make societies better, improve people’s lives. And all and help people economically and so on. I just fell in love with the problem. And one of the ways to, get good at this and being a results getter, a helper, a guide is to build the name for it as a customer advisory board. So like regularly I meet with some of our users, our customers, I’m hearing what their challenges are, what their wins are. It totally informs how I think about. What product do we make? Or you hear about how are we different from the competition? What’s our positioning? And then when I think about problems and marrying a problem I heard this from a guy named Dev Basu, I believe that people only buy three things, which is speed, certainty, or insight. And there’s a fourth one, which is to stay out of jail, but that one’s more this is why we hire accountants at tax time and so on to stay out of jail. But, and usually the speed, certainty, and insight, sometimes it’s a combination of those, but there’s usually one primary. If I’m, if I was going to do like a health course it, you could take different approaches, like speed, you’re going to get this health outcome really fast, or if I’m going to do certainty, it’s going to be like, okay, this is actually going to work this time. If it’s going to be insight, it’s going to be. Yeah, the industry is completely wrong and I’m going to give you like new ways to think about health and whatever the specific result I’m trying to get is. So I often think about speed, certainty and insight, not just in marketing and selling, but also our approach to this problem and how we solve it because the speed, certainty and insight people don’t, aren’t necessarily buying you as an influencer. They’re buying the result. But even under the result is that quality of speed, certainty or insight. Jason Coleman: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Chris Badgett: And then the last thing is, this is a classic mistake that experts make. I call it like the library of Alexandria problem where people don’t necessarily want, especially these days with information overload and internet everywhere, infinite scrolling. It’s not about giving people like so much stuff and like a hundred hours of training and 50 bonuses and all these modules and stuff. What’s the minimum effect? A guide, once you get, wants to get you to the top of the mountain as efficiently as possible while staying safe. And that is They’re not trying to teach you everything they know about mountaineering or climbing or whatever. It’s just we’re going to help you get this result as efficiently as possible. I think it came from Tim Ferriss, the minimum effective dose, like productivity folks are all about this idea of what’s the minimum I can do to get the maximum output? What’s the 80, 20. So instead of giving your customer as an expert Hey, here, check out my awesome library of knowledge. It’s I can get you this result quickly. So in terms of guiding, I feel like we’ve been guiding people at Lifter LMS for over a decade now. And we’re not just selling them a product. We’re not just giving them software. We’re not just providing technical documentation. I talked to users, customers, people who are just in the industry, people using competitor products. We get on live calls and we do all this like personalized guiding. And one of the, one of the last kind of ideas around that is when you’re helping your market they really want you to still be able to help them even in challenging circumstances. And this is why how guiding is different from being a guru. A guru would say this is the way a guide will be like, Oh, I see you’re having this challenge adapt this way. And you’ll still get the outcome person be different challenge. Okay. Let me help you adapt. And over time you can bake that wisdom into your. actual process. So maybe it’s more automated or whatever, but humans are not robots. So eventually you do end up with some personalization there and that’s why they like you. Jason Coleman: I’m hearing there in this guide, the difference between a guide and a guru is instead of here’s my knowledge, take it or leave it. You’re taking responsibility for the outcome. I think that’s a challenge in that you’re trying to teach someone something and you feel like I’m giving them all the information. But they’re not getting it, is that their problem, but really you could be a better teacher by meeting them where they’re at. Maybe you said how to get from a to C, but they’re actually at B, they need a different path guide, guide to get there. So I like that it’s, and yeah, taking responsibility for the outcomes that you’re given instead of just like being an info dump on people. I hope it’s useful. I think it’d be more effective. Chris Badgett: And on that note, just like a pro tip, I think the sh it is shared. Like some people would just be like, Oh, I have churned. My people didn’t renew their monthly membership or the annual thing because they just didn’t do the work. So I, but there is a piece that is shared. Like the people do have to do the work. Oh yeah. There is some failure that’s outside of your control, but there’s a lot we can do as. As the expert to help when there are setbacks. Jason Coleman: Yeah. Yeah. We all know those folks who, it goes both ways. Like we know those folks who are like the idea people. Who’d never actually get over the hump of shipping and getting something done. And if they’re also selling to an audience of people who sometimes like, I would like to lose weight, but I’m not actually going to do anything to, to make a difference, the folks who are super successful, they find like a different way to talk to a different subset of that group, and maybe some of these folks aren’t hopeless, trying to get results and dealing with it on that level at the same time, I think. You don’t have to know everything. So you don’t, maybe that’s related. We talked about a few different ways of focusing on helping people and being resourceful instead of omniscient. Like you said, like the library of Alexandria, right? So it’s Oh, it’s not just dumping everything there is to know about this. If one tactic of how to get the A to B, that will help people. Congrats, something that you can turn into content that you can, give away and sell to, to help people. It’s like a mindset shift of being the kind of person who can find the answers instead of having them. Like we said, don’t be the no at all. You’ll figure it out. And when you figure it out, then you can share that experience with folks. I’m building a network of experts to consult with. You don’t have to be the only one who knows there’s other folks. Don’t be scared that like they’re your competitors. They’re also like potential partners that, you know, Oh, this, software’s better for this use case. You should use that software. It’s good for that. Or my content focuses on helping this target audience, but you’re, you fall outside of it. It’s good to know. It’s important to like. Communicate confidently that you’ll be able to find the answer to them. You want to be known as someone who’s able to find the answers and follow up and come back. It’s it’s crazy. I think it’s crazy impressive sometimes. Through customer support channels or interactions with folks online and checking, they throw a zinger and you’re like, I have no idea. I never heard of that one. And then if you come back the next day and you’re like, I couldn’t sleep. I was thinking about this and here’s everything I learned about it and how it fits into the stuff I do know. They’re like, wow, that feels like a guide, not a guru. And they’re like, Oh, this is someone who’s really helping me with my specific issues. Get to where I need to go. This kind of mindset is something I had when out of college, I worked for two years as a consultant at Accenture. It’s like one of the, what do they call it? The big five consulting companies. And that experience is crazy. Cause as a really young person who didn’t know much, I’m thrown like into these businesses. And people are paying a lot of money for this guy who’s supposed to have the answers. And I don’t know anything yet. This is my first job out of college and I’ve only been here a couple of months. So they really bill you and charge for you as if you have the answers. And I think it’s clear. to most of the, the people on the the business side that are working with you, they’re like, this guy, kid doesn’t know it, but super quickly and they train you on this at Accenture. They do a good job of like, when they ask you a question, you don’t know the answer. You tell them like, don’t worry, you hired Accenture at a whole team. There’s a team of experts and I’m going to talk to them and they’re going to give me an answer and I’m going to tell you, and I’ll facilitate this. And You do that a couple of times and they don’t sweat the fact that you’re like, you’re this fresh young kid who doesn’t know anything cause you’ve proven that you’re helping them anyway. There’s this other aspect of that, that you’re still useful to them at finding the answers, even if you don’t have them. And over time, that’s how you become the kind of person after, you do that for 10 years and a lot of the questions are, I’ve seen this a bunch of times before. Here’s like the three things that help people, you become the person who knows it all. Chris Badgett: Being the person that can find the answers is, can also help you actually just launch. So I see it all the time where let’s say you’re doing a membership site and you have like individual trainings or mini courses and maybe you think you have to build like a hundred of those before it’s ready to launch. But if you just have a few ready, And you offer actual one on one or group support, the customers, your early customers will literally pull the product out of you and be like, Oh, okay. They need help with this now. So now you don’t have to just assume, exactly what this person who has come to you made a purchase, ask for your help needs, there’s like a real feedback loop and you can just create in front of them. I don’t have that for you yet. And then by the time we meet next week or next month. We’ll have a new training on exactly that problem. So I think that’s really cool. It allows you to just launch and pre sell and just help people more in real time, giving them exactly what they need. Once you, your community gets bigger, you’ll start seeing patterns of that. And you’ll intuitively know Oh, this other thing, they really, I’ve had seven people who really need help with this thing, but that’s where. So your like quarterly plan or your annual plan just gets mapped out in front of you and you’re not guessing because there you have paying customers asking for your help with X. Yeah. And that’s the benefit of lifelong learning when you make the commitment to that is. You’re also learning how to learn. It makes you more resourceful because you’re kind of Matt, you’re focusing on craftsmanship and mastery. So you’re getting better at metal learning or the act of actually learning, which is part of being resourceful. Let’s talk about the customer avatar. Jason Coleman: All right. Chris Badgett: So this goes by a lot of different names. Some people call it your audience, your niche. Your ICP, which stands for your ideal customer profile. And these things all are like a little different, but I think the customer avatar is really the main, the avatars, the way to think about it. So who is the ideal person? That’s a perfect fit for your course or your coaching program or your online community your reader, your audience, and. How do you figure that out? And the key to that, in my opinion, is to actually obsess about it forever. It’s a forever commitment. One of the easiest ways to do it is to actually, if you’re like not sure what to choose, and you’re like one of these people who’s like interested in a lot of different things, I don’t know what to make my course about or my coaching program or my online business, just do a previous version of yourself. Cause you, you remember yourself. So like when Chris or Jason was just starting an agency. And what did they need help with? It’s easy cause you know who it is. If you’re already moving and let’s say you have a services business and you’re trying to productize, you already have these people that are paying you money. You can think about productizing what you know, and you’re learning about their challenges and you’ve already got the this kind of avatar forming like who’s my favorite customer. Like we were talking about earlier Who do I not want to work with that develops like your anti customer avatar. But once you have this person nailed down, it could be an it could be a previous version of yourself It could be like your favorite client. That also happens to pay you the most money and be the easiest to work with or whatever So Some people also invent like a fictional version, which is fine too, where you just Oh, it’s a woman who’s just had a baby. She’s in this income range. She’s just left corporate, whatever. And you’re like figuring out this avatar based on Demographic stuff like we’re talking about there, but also psychographic stuff like, Oh, but they’re depressed because of this. Or, they’re really emotional about this topic and so on. So you just map out this avatar of like you’re the FBI or whatever, and you’re profiling like some suspect you’re looking for is one way to think about it. And one of the things I like to do when I get into the customer avatar, is do a pain and opportunity map. So what is the, what are the most painful things in this person’s life? What are their, when on the opposite side of pain. What are their goals? And what opportunity are they seeking. Would they pay money to get closer to? Cause it’s either away from pain or towards pleasure. And if you can find the top six pain points in the top six what do they want to move towards? And then which one of those is like primary or which, what’s another theme that like governs all of that? Is there an identity transformation? There’s this idea that you can have your avatar, you give them incremental improvements, but if you can actually like change their identity, That’s the most powerful product you can sell. You can charge the most for it. So an example of that would be like in the business niche if my program is going to help you quit your day job and become an online entrepreneur, six figure entrepreneur, this is like the classic example. That’s like an identity transformation. Somebody who’s stuck in corporate hates their job to entrepreneur with a working business. He’s happy and has. impact and lifestyle freedom. So that’s like a transformation. So think about that. It is okay to help people with incremental improvements, but those big flips of identity transformation, like I’ve seen one that’s a little more counterintuitive is I’ve seen a user help people move to Australia and become doctors in Australia. So it’s it’s that’s like a major change. And that’s what his program was. all about. And the other thing that happens, this is just more of a nuance with the avatar. I’ve often, when I started with Lifter LMS, I had the subject matter expert person that we’ve been talking about here is the avatar, the aspiring course creator, the monetized knowledge person, somebody who has a lot of passion. They want to create impact income and freedom by helping others through teaching and charging for that with the information product. That there’s a lot more that goes to that avatar. I won’t go into the two pages of it, like who they are, but what ended up happening is I was moving forward with this. I started noticing all these agencies. And, WordPress professionals and stuff showing up like, Oh, the people that build sites for clients in this niche for courses or membership sites, Or e commerce stores and they want to diversify into digital products, but they have this like agency person that’s helping them. And I started looking at who’s following me on social media. It’s Oh, the people that actually interact with my tweets and stuff is like these agency and WordPress and technology people. So I ended up like having to split there’s two avatars and no matter what I do okay, we’re just going to focus on this one. This other one’s always here. And so that sometimes happens. But I think it’s a really valuable exercise to figure out the avatar, obsess about it. And just be open to, it’s not something you set in like year one and you’re good, like it evolves and it changes and you end up in weird situations like I’m talking about where I have two. Jason Coleman: A common template for that shows up in like business to business space is there’s the person who uses your training and then the person who pays for it. Chris Badgett: Yeah. Jason Coleman: And they have different needs and avatars. And if you want to reach that audience and sell to them, you have to map both people, the person who’s paying for it and the person who’s that you’re actually, delivering the content for man, a couple mistakes. I see folks run into. When they’re working on their customer avatars. And I say that because I’ve run into these mistakes several times over and over, like I’m actually talking about myself, my friend who’s had these issues. But I do see it a lot. Cause we help a lot of, similar businesses and people too is one is like resisting, like not going niche enough, not making it specific enough and resisting that. Under the pretense of I’m trying to make a big thing that helps everybody. And I’ve done that. Like it’s a membership platform for all kinds of things. The problem with that is that that I, this customer avatar is very useful tool when you’re writing sales copy. When you’re figuring out how to build the product and when you’re figuring out. The content or the, learning, if you, it’s almost like you want to go through the exercise of really having a very specific customer avatar. And feel what it feels like to write like you write sales copying it so hard and you’re like you’re not talking to me You’re talking to chris badgett He’s this old, he’s right in front of you. He looks like this is what he loves. This was, and you’re like, Oh, you’re just talking to Chris Badgett. It flows. You’re just like, this is what he needs to know. And what I would tell him, some people resist that they want to niche down. And I think also if you do, it doesn’t mean you can’t help everybody. It’s just a bullseye. It’s just the center of the target. And you’ll still help a bunch of people that, you know, but there’s someone in the middle that you’re writing towards. Chris Badgett: It’s just a quick example of that, like Apple computer. Like when they did the whole, the crazy ones, the artists, the misfits, all this, a lot of other people still have Apple products besides the, the artistic, innovators type people. Yeah, but the avatar and maybe it still is like that. Yeah, it’s but it doesn’t mean you can’t sell to and help other people Jason Coleman: Related to that when you’re building your customer avatar. I think a mistake I made early on was thinking about like demographic Information like man or woman or they like, You know, expensive things are cheap things or how they dress or you almost think of building a Facebook ad and you can choose to demographic traits. And I find that stuff is not as important when you’re building your customer avatar as the things you talked about, which were like, what are their pain points? What are their common challenges? And in like we were figuring out use cases for paid memberships pro. And if there, or there’s a bunch of people who build courses and the thing that’s common among them is not if you think of a yoga course and like a, health food course and a get fit course, the thing that’s not common is that like they’re women and they, I don’t know, demographic information about those folks. It’s was not as useful as they wanted to build a website. To sell their course. That’s what’s common among them. The, and specific chat. So that’s the top. And then specifically, like what was challenging about it? Was it that they, had struggled to make the content. It was that they struggled with the tooling?nd then you’re like helping them with their specific problems and challenges instead of, I think sometimes people get caught up in the fluff of I’m trying to speak to women, so it needs to look and smell this way, right? And you’re like no focus on the challenges. Another thing to focus on is, the people who want to pay you, it’s assuming you’re doing this, you don’t have some outside funding source and you’re just spreading the word. You’re trying to turn this into a business. I find like a very specific version of this. And when it comes up is you’re you’re selling something and there’s a cancel, people can cancel and they churn. And I think early on, there’s almost a lot of. recommendations to, hold on to those people. So you only have three customers and one of them left. And you’re like, I guess like a third get them back. I need that a hundred dollars a month or whatever they’re charging. And you struggle and. I don’t think you should totally ignore that person. You should get the feedback, but very specifically, like they came into your orbit and they left, like that’s a very clear signal that they don’t want to pay you for the thing you have currently. So maybe take some feedback and you can use that to figure out like, am I creating the right thing? But that customer that left is like not your customer avatar. are, is that the person you’re serving or not? If they are and they left, that’s like a different story now. Okay. I, Don’t want that person to go. So then think about how you could keep them. But a lot of the people who will bounce out and cancel out and churn. are like, that’s a good turn. They actually don’t need the thing. And you don’t want to strive too hard to focus on those folks. And I think we also talked about like various forms of consulting and customer interaction as a way to get this feedback. So I guess I’m thinking, how do you find out? It, I’m assuming the situation where you have a little bit of traction, you’re selling something and you want to g. So you want to find out more about your current customers so you can figure out how to find them and make more of them. It’s like focusing on the ones who pay you. And I think you can have these like consultation calls with them. Sometimes if you’re selling like an info product, it’s Hey, for an hourly rate. You can still talk to me or I mean in the early days, like put an hour, actually probably put an hourly rate and then say, but actually it’s free for the first whatever, or I’m giving, everyone who signs up gets, instead of 300 an hour, they got to talk to me for an hour for free. But talk to your customers and do like you said that there’s so many reasons why Products of all kinds folks who build them start out as consultants because they were very close with a customer and trying to solve specific Problems and then they realize other people have this problem So if you skipped over that part and you have a little bit of success people are buying your stuff It’s like maybe back take a step back and consult some of them and work really closely with them to figure out who they are and what problems they have. And so some tools you could do. So like that consultation calls put an hourly rate for people to just talk to you if your time is busy. And then we did a paid memberships pro, and I’ve seen other folks do this, like what we call do it for me setups. So it’s and then like the educational space, I think it’s pretty common of I have a course, but if you want mentorship and like a more, high touch help through this. You can pay me more and then I’ll do that. And you can price those lower. It’s a, they make, it’s a way to make money. So it’s like another way to make money off your audience and stuff. But I think always think about it as Oh, this is me like learning about a very, not just a customer, but a customer is willing to pay more than what the average customer pays me. Like it’s a super valuable customer to dig into and try to figure out. And I guess quickly, like when paid nurses pro did the, to do it for me, like how it worked, we were selling for at that time. I think I don’t know, various times, like 100 a year, you gain access to the software and support, but for 500, we’ll spend five hours, like helping you to set it up. And it was a way to talk to a lot of customers. And again, that thing of figuring out who you like to work with and who you don’t. I remember the stats when we did the, do it for me Like 50 percent of them were perfect. It was like, this is our ideal customer and they just need a little bit of help. And we help them exactly how we can. We get a little bit like, Oh, we build a tool that we can give to other people where we fixed a bug or we learned something was like perfect. And then after. The five hours was up, like they went on their way and they didn’t need us anymore. Another 25 percent in that cohort were, they needed more. So it went really well. And then they’re like, you’re the smartest WordPress person I know. Can you do all this other stuff for me? And we’re like, we’re not consultants. We don’t do online. We’re building a product. So it didn’t they like, which is, it’s a good problem to have. And you got to build partners of people that you can push that work off to, but it’s I, you helped me with this. Can you help me with my whole life? And you’re like, we don’t actually do that. But then 25% We’re just crazy bad failures because we were taking the money up front and then saying, Hey, we’ll solve your problem in five hours. And just the expectations were off. And they were quote unquote bad customers, but that experience of digging it wait, why was it bad? Why did they think they would get this when they were only going to get this and using that information of how to change the copy and the documentation and the product itself. So that when those people come, they deflect before they pay you. Chris Badgett: One more pro tip with the figuring out your avatar and who’s going to pay you is to just pre sell them. Don’t even create anything yet except for the sales page. So I want, I think I want to sell to this person. This is the problem I want to solve. This is my mechanism of how I’m going to solve it. And you can set it up. You can use our softwares to take the money. You can be totally transparent and give them like, Hey, it starts like a month from now and even say if I don’t get this many orders, I’m going to refund your money and so on. Pre selling helps. I love the idea of if you’re not already a consultant and like really understand the avatar and the The solution in the problem space do coaching first before you try to do a course and do private coaching work with them one on one, even if you’re losing some money, based on your hourly rate or whatever, it’s very validating to make sure like this avatar is right. I can help them. I’ll over deliver through private coaching or even done for you services. And there is a framework I learned, which is really simple. They can help with this, like structuring these things, which is DIY, do it yourself, DWI, which is done with you. And then DFY, which is done for you. and the passive online course with no support is do it yourself, good luck. The done with you is like we’ve got courses, we also have like weekly office hours and so on. And then done for you is more like a agency, like you’re hiring us and we’re going to get you the result. We’ll get it done for you. So using that, those frameworks help and yeah, it takes time to adjust and get that avatar offer clarity. So you got to experiment. It’s part of the learning process. Let’s talk about practicing with intention. I’m pretty convinced you, the reason why a lot of folks fail or lose momentum is that they, not only did they not commit to a problem for an extended period of time, but they didn’t It wasn’t the right problem for them and they didn’t really go all in on a single problem. They got shiny object syndrome. For me, if you’re going to spend all this time creating courses, coaching community, maybe writing a book, maybe doing public speaking, Becoming the person for this, category of problem. It’s a huge commitment. So in my view, if you’re not willing to focus on this avatar and this problem or problem set for more than a decade or at least a decade, it’s probably not worth doing. Maybe you don’t love the space enough or. You’re not just, you just don’t have the passion to keep going. So it’s just to make a decade commitment when you choose your problem, particularly if you’re one of those people that has multiple interests, maybe like fitness, maybe like investing. Maybe you like cooking and you’re like, I want to get into this space. I’m not sure which one to focus on. There’s this test you can do called the onstage test, which is like if five years from now, if you’re on a stage giving a talk about this topic. and your mother or your family or whoever is in the audience watching you like, are we good here? Are you still doing this in five years? It’s called the stage test and really putting in those 10, 000 hours. So your products and programs will get better with 10, 000 hours. And if you’ve already spent 10, 000 hours in this space and that decade commitment it’s going to work, but it’s a huge commitment. So don’t take it lightly. I think this idea of get rich quick overnight success, it’s just not helpful because it’s not the way it works. And when you do marry these problems and stuff, you can revise as you learn. There’s sort of two ways I think about it is, or patterns I’ve seen in the space when you become a subject matter expert. There’s whatever your niche is, you can either be like, I’m the person for X and I have this signature program that delivers this result for this person. It’s called this name. And then every year you rebuild it, you deliver it. Again and again through cohorts Maybe you just redo all the content every now and again and you have a signature program Then there’s more of like the serial entrepreneur who’s okay. I’m really committed to this avatar And i’m just gonna I am going to build the library But it’s I’m taking micro problems and I’m like building a thing here. And I just keep going until I’ve essentially surrounded this person with help. And it’s not really a signature program. It’s more of a doctor patient thing, like where the coach is like prescribing Oh, you need help with this problem. Take this training in my program, come to office hours on the weekend. It’s more. It’s less of this signature structure thing and more of a prescriptive. Hey, you’re in the club and then I’m here to help you and prescribe training and content as needed. And the other thing that’s okay to do is to admit mistakes. If you, maybe your signature program has a major problem in it and Hey, I think I need to take this part out. It’s not helpful. Or maybe I structured my offer so that it’s actually not starting early enough in their journey. Or maybe I’m not staying with them after they get to this point and they really need me for another part or this middle part is not working. If I’m helping people build an agency and I show them how to do that, but they’re ha my clients are having trouble getting clients. Like I think what I’m teaching, maybe it’s not working. I got to readjust. And I got to learn. I got to be resourceful. And then in terms of practicing with intention, I take this seriously. So like when I make a commitment, like when I got into sled dogs or I got into the LMS space or I became a podcaster or started a YouTube channel I knew I would be doing it 10 years later. And that decade commitment is just it’s both sounds like a lot of work, but it’s also freeing you know what, I could see myself in 10 years. And it helps rule out things that maybe you shouldn’t focus on. Whatever’s hot of the day, you might see an opportunity, but do you see yourself doing that in 10 years? Jason Coleman: That’s great stuff. I it’s funny, it’s like you brought up 10, 000 hours and I know what it means and you know what it means. There’s like a famous essay about 10, 000 hours and that’s like the average time it takes for someone to be labeled as an expert for something or mastery. Yeah. They love all mastery. And yeah. That’s the thing is we’re talking about becoming an expert at something. And one way definitely is to do it over and over again, like 10, 000 hours. And you like through osmosis, you’ll accidentally become good at it. Like almost anything, if you just do it that often. But I think when practicing with intention will get you there faster and better. I think like anything that any skill I’ve tried to learn if you trying to get better at guitar. Just learning songs and playing is pretty good. But if there’s a reason, like there’s coaches. There’s a reason that like coaches who aren’t the best can still help people. Who are the best is they’re walking them through exercises that, you know, for guitar, stretch your fingers. Learn to memorize, these chords and changes and notes and, keys and things. So setting goals for each practice session, like one small concrete thing to improve over time. And so recognizing every time you do, every time you write a blog post, I did it for this podcast, every time I’m recording something I wrote. So for this, it was, don’t cough. And I wrote the. the overarching topic of this discussion is becoming an expert. So it was like, Oh, remember to like, keep tagging that. So I put that on like on the top of my notes and over time the. These things will become more natural. And that’s really how you become better at a skill. And I think it’s also how you can learn with intention as well. So yeah, you do the same thing over and over, but better each time. And then I think another version of that is not to be scared to copy from the best. And so you might feel that you have to do it your own way or pay your dues. Which is, it’s true, but don’t, it’s, it is good to just copy. And there’s an ethical way to do it. Like whether it’s copy as practice. And even I brought up the guitar. It’s you watch like a really good guitarist and you’re like, and let me try to learn that someone else’s song, and there’s like a good course, I think it’s called copy that is like a sales copywriting course. And there’s 10 different examples of really good sales pages. It’s like literally put this on your screen and then type it up and feel what it’s like to write those words as if you wrote them. And yeah. Building websites or like building courses, like a good, if you there’s a course that you really like, it’s like just steal some aspect of it. You’re not going to copy the whole course, but it’s like copy the structure of the course, but it’s your content. It’s about a totally different subject matter, but you just steal the structure of it. And if you steal it, be like, Hey, give props to it if it makes sense. Or there’s other ways you can do that. You can take your favorite parts of some of the. other material and and apply it to your own work. And don’t be worried about doing that again. Like you don’t have to be the guru, the person who knows it all. This just comes out of, your glorious, magical brain is. Being transparent about how you figured it out and working towards this helps. Chris Badgett: I think copying, that’s in humans there’s mirror neurons in our brain. It’s how we learn language and kids copy their parents and their siblings and stuff like that. That’s just what makes us human. I’ve heard it called R and D, which stands for rob and duplicate. That’s a funny way to say it. So you want to R and D, but you want to actually give credit. Like you’ve heard us cite, like earlier, I said, moving the free line, that’s Ed and Pagan. You found the 10, 000 hours from Malcolm Gladwell and so on. So good site credit. And the other thing is to just think about remixing because a great book, like a nonfiction book, came from research where there’s a lot of different ideas. So what plagiarism is like not giving credit, copying exactly, not mixing and matching with other things. And so that’s, I think that’s an important thing for an expert, especially a lifelong learner. Just because you heard something really good from somebody else in your industry, you can use it. Just give them credit, mix it into your style and your framework and everything. And you’re good. That’s how like great books are written. Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post Part 1- Becoming the Expert, Education Entrepreneur Mentor Series appeared first on LMScast.

In this episode of LMScast, Tim McIvor, the developer of SchoolPsych.com, a website that offers professional development for school psychologists, joins Chris Badgett. He discusses how to build continuing education. Tim talks about how he went from working as a school psychologist to starting a charity organization and then starting a company to satisfy the demands of his industry for continuous education. Recorded webinars are available on SchoolPsych.com to assist school psychologists in completing the 75 hours of professional development needed to renew their licenses. Tim emphasizes how LifterLMS has been essential to his platform, allowing for features like quizzes, automatic certifications, and organized lectures that adhere to accreditation requirements. He has enabled school psychologists throughout the world to enhance their practices and have a beneficial influence on the pupils they serve by utilizing technology to make training more accessible. Here’s Where To Go Next… Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website. Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS. Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014. And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide Episode Transcript Chris Badgett:  You’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co founder of Lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show. Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMS cast. I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Tim McIvor. He’s from school psych. com, he’s a creator. He’s doing a lot of cool things in the education space. We’re going to get into his story. We’re going to learn about the impact he’s making, how he’s using LFTR LMS, but first, welcome to the show, Tim. Thanks so much for having me, Chris. I’m really excited to talk to you. I love seeing people find success and build cool platforms. Can you tell us what schoolpsych. com is all about? Tim McIvor: Absolutely. It’s a professional development platform for school psychologists to renew their license through my recorded webinars. So basically there is a national association of school psychologists and they give out a different accreditation system where you can become a provider and approved provider for this national association. And then once you get that. Like schoolsick. com currently has that once you get that, you can provide certificates that school psychologists can then use to renew their license. So it’s all built around this system of school psychologists needing these certificates in order to renew their license. Chris Badgett: Is the license something they have to renew every year or every three years? And they need Tim McIvor: 75 hours of professional development. Chris Badgett: Wow. That’s awesome. And is this I don’t know the industry really well. Is this like. All public school psychologists need this or how does that work? Tim McIvor: So pretty much all public school psychologists need this if they are considered a nationally certified school psychologist. And school psychologists are very motivated to be nationally certified school psychologists because it’s an important credential to have for getting good jobs. And then on top of that, you usually get a stipend for having that nationally certified credential. It’s not technically necessary to work in public schools. It can just there’s a lot of benefits to having it, getting better jobs, getting stipends. Chris Badgett: Very cool. And just to better understand the industry correct me if I’m wrong, but not every public school has a school psychologist, like where do they operate or do they, does every school have a school? Yeah. Tim McIvor: It’s something we get a lot because we go on behind the scenes. So although not every school has a full time five days a week school psychologist for every single public school in the United States. There is a school psychologist assigned to that school. For me personally, for the past 10 years, I’ve worked at three schools. And so it’s always been two days at one school, two days at another school and one day at the last school. So yeah, we’re behind the scenes. As students, they might not know who I am unless they work directly with me. Okay. And so they might feel like they don’t have a school psychologist or they don’t have this because we are typically assigned to multiple schools. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And just to better understand what school psychologists do, like what are some of the most common psychological issues that the industry helps with in the United States? Tim McIvor: So basically we’re not the school counselors who are doing all like the counseling and all the scheduling and all the help with the school college applications. We’re doing the special education evaluations. And we’re doing all the testing. We were writing up reports and determining if students qualify. For services. So our job is very rewarding in that sense, in that we are directly able to work with students who are referred to us, test them on these different tests that we’ve been trained on and determine whether they qualify for additional services under Different special education categories that they might qualify under such as a learning disability autism. There’s ADHD It counts under the other health impairment category and then of course we do more than this job But as far as the primary role I would say is the special education testing But of course we do a lot of consultation with teachers crisis prevention data analysis and so on and so forth Chris Badgett: Awesome tell us your story because it sounds like you were a you are were a school psychologist, but you decided to get into the the education side to meet the need of continuing education. How did you make that turn or what inspired you to, get involved in education for certification and all that? Tim McIvor: Yeah. It started in graduate school where I was asking around how do you get the best jobs in school psychology? And one of the head people of the Boston Public Schools told me that if you volunteer in a professional development association and she was referring to the Massachusetts School Psychologists Association specifically you would be able to network very well. That would be one of the best ways to be able to get a good job. And she was absolutely right. People were able to. Pull strings for me to get jobs that were in demand. But that actually ended up being only one benefit. The other benefit is I get to learn how a professional development association works in school psychology. And then when I went out to Nevada. After I got a job out there, they didn’t have one of these state associations, but because I had done all that volunteer work for MISPA sorry, for Massachusetts I helped create one with about five other very passionate school psychologists, and we created the Nevada Association of School Psychologists is a nonprofit, and we basically Helped the state run a whole bunch of professional development conferences. It’s still going strong to this day. And I was the president of it from its inception for the first two years. And that’s when I really learned how to build a professional development association from the ground up. Chris Badgett: That’s very cool. And how long ago was that, that you set out to build the association? Tim McIvor: That was 2014. And that was actually as my first year as a school psychologist. Yeah. I was doing that and so I was the president of an entire state Simultaneously while being a first year school psychologist probably i’m probably the only person to ever do something like that It was just crazy. But people had a lot of respect for me for doing it Obviously very motivated hard working and it worked out very well. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I’m guessing you were in this industry of continuing education, did you start by delivering it at in person? Why yes. Continuing at events. Tim McIvor: Yeah I did the traditional route the entire time I was president just doing these in person conferences, but I knew that, with go to training, go to webinar type platforms, you could totally do it live and it would make it so much easier than having to book a venue. Plus Nevada is such a rural. State in so many parts that for them to all have to fly to one place for professional development, didn’t seem very smart. So after those two years as president, I started looking into how we could make it more accessible for that nonprofit. And I was also taking notes for my own to create a business. And that’s exactly what I did that the year after I was president in 2017 I created a business where. I was launching live webinars on GoToWebinar, on GoToTraining. But I noticed that I, after the webinar, I wanted somewhere where we had these recordings to put it up for people who missed the training, who missed the webinar. And that’s where LifterLMS came into play. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. So what was your history with WordPress? Was this your first WordPress site or were you already using it for something else? Tim McIvor: No, I actually had built like five websites by then. I’m one of those crazy people who graphic design is just a passion of mine. And so like any chance I could get to build a website for example, during my internship year, I was like the tennis coach for the high school tennis team. And I was like, let’s build a website. Like I would find any reason under the sun to build a website. And so I just love building websites and I knew it would be good because I knew I wanted to get into the business aspect of school psychology eventually. And yeah, I did have a little bit of a background with WordPress prior to this. Chris Badgett: So tell us about the story of how you decided to use Lifter LMS. Sometimes people get a little overwhelmed with all the LMS is out there and there’s this decision fatigue and like figuring out which tools or plugins to use. Tell us about how you figured that out and ended up with Lifter. Tim McIvor: I remember watching a YouTube video in early 2017 about how to create an LMS platform. And it was literally the first YouTube video I looked up was by a guy named Adam and I’m trying to remember the name of his platform. It was like, WP something crafter, I think crafter. Thank you. WP crafter. Awesome guy created a great video. I think he, he now owns Presto. You know what I’m talking about? Yeah. Yeah. Awesome guy. Really appreciated his videos. Never talked to him or met him in person, but I could just tell he’s a very upbeat, nice guy. And He showed step by step how to use Lifter LMS and how to set it up. And I was sold. I didn’t actually have to look at any other platform. I did later just because somebody else who I collaborated with, who wasn’t good with technical skills, wanted a platform. And I helped her find Rizuku and Kajabi and things like that. But for me, I felt very strongly that right from the get go, that Lipter LMS checked all the boxes. And there were a lot of boxes to check because the National Association, in order to be an approved provider and give these certificates for school psychologists to renew their licensure, you had to have quizzes, you had to have evaluation feedback, you had to have, Generated certificates. The lessons had to be structured in such a way and everything that they required Lifter LMS had. And so I never ended up looking elsewhere. I’ve been a loyal Lifter LMS customer since 2017. Chris Badgett: Okay. Oh, awesome. You’ve been around that long. Very cool. You mentioned a lot of the things like. Quizzes and certificates. What other features do you like most about LFTR or use the most? Tim McIvor: Yeah, absolutely. I really like just starting off the bat the user friendly nature of the platform. And I love how in the dashboard, it just permanently stores your certificates. I can tell you that school psychologists, yes, they’re interested in professional development, but ultimately, They’re most interested in just making sure they get those certificates and that they can find them three years down the road when they are looking to renew their license. And so for them to see that it’s all just stored with the name of the certificate, the date, and just how easy it is to auto generate these certificates on my end so that I don’t have to email each person really gave me an edge in creating this. Platform because there are other school psychologists who tried to do this type of thing, but didn’t really know how to because they figured, they might have to email individually the certificate and oftentimes what these nonprofits do is after a live conference, they’re, printing out certificates. I’m going to write the name down. It’s very it takes a lot of time. It’s very time consuming. But the way lifter LMS just sets all this up as very auto generated help save me a bunch of time. So I could focus on. What I really care about which is just teaching school psychologists, best practices. For me, the passion is all about how can we get school psychologists, the best possible training from the best possible people to make the largest amount of impact on the students we serve. And that to me is A big passion to know that I can be part of having a major impact, not just on the three schools I work at, but also globally. There are school psychologists across the entire world who are using school psych dot com right now. Chris Badgett: Oh, so cool. How do you handle the situation where if you’re used to like a webinar or a filmed event where it’s like one presentation. It’s not necessarily a course with multiple lessons. Are you creating like a sort of a mini course that just has one lesson per course? Yeah, so one hour Tim McIvor: webinar, followed by a quiz followed by an evaluation feedback and you’ll see that all of my webinars are set up the same way. It’s three lessons and second lessons quiz third lessons evaluation feedback But yeah, it really is just that one First lesson. That’s the webinar. That’s the content. I’ve never had to use multiple lessons. There are some features on literal mess. I know that would be helpful for like university professors. But for me, it’s just simplified in that sense. Chris Badgett: Do you do all the website stuff yourself or does somebody help you with it? Tim McIvor: Yeah there were very few times where i’ve had to go on what’s that website called like code press or something like that Yeah codable where you ask the software engineer To help you fix something, but it was never related to Lyft or LMS. It was related to like security and things like that. Making sure my website is secure from hackers. I was having an issue with that for a bit. But yeah for the most part, just learning things on YouTube that the one thing that I wanted to make sure I said today was that every time I would. Reach out to your support team. Since 2017, I’ve always gotten great responses. I’ve even sometimes gotten video tutorials tailored specifically to my website on how to do something, which I’ve never seen a company do before. I’ve never seen a support team that specific in helping their customers. And so that’s why I’m a huge fan of Lyft or LMS. I think that’s where. You guys really stand out. You have a great product and then it just the best support team I’ve ever seen. Chris Badgett: I appreciate that. We we think about support, like it’s not a cost center to be minimized. It’s actually a feature of the product. So like we try to go big there. Tim McIvor: Yeah. Chris Badgett: You have you do a lot and that’s part of your story. Hey, I started my first job and built an association at the same time. But like when it comes to content creation. I guess in theory you could teach everything, but you have other people teaching and you teach some, or tell us about how you gather and source all the material. Tim McIvor: I think at first I thought that I could just do it all. I did 12. I was broke at the time. School psychologists don’t necessarily make a ton of money. So I didn’t have money to pay speakers. And so the first, 12 webinars I made were all me. And then I noticed that once I started reaching out to guest speakers there was a lot more interest in the website because, I specialized in technology and school psychology and one person I’ll never forget how they explained this to me. That’s like almost eating your vegetables. Like it’s good for you. School psychologists. should be learning about technology and school psychology, but in reality, they want like the meat and potatoes. They want the behavior interventions. They want all these topics that are highly in demand that I couldn’t necessarily be the expert and give them. So that’s why I realized in order to truly make this website great I needed to start reaching out. And after I had created those 12 webinars. I had just taken any money I had made from that and put it into guest speakers. And now we’re up to over 50 webinars on the platform. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Do Do the webinars remain current and usable over time, or do they have a shelf life? Tim McIvor: Yeah, I would say after about six, seven years, some of these webinars need to either be redone or just taken off the platform. And then for my technology webinars, because I did them, I could just go in and update them where needed, which I’ve done over the years. Chris Badgett: If somebody is thinking about recruiting other Kind of content creators. Do you now do you like pay them or do you pay them a royalty? Or are they just happy to do it to get exposure or experience? At Tim McIvor: first, I was looking mostly for people who would do it for exposure. Maybe they had a book. And then there were a few school psychologists who were pretty well known. Who I was just really good friends with and they didn’t mind doing it at a cheaper price. In fact, one of them I had quoted a pretty high price and said, Oh, you don’t have to pay me that much. I’ll do it for this. Like just very nice people in general, the field of school psychology is not your typical. Tech, this textbook business people. They’re just extremely nice people who are very passionate and have similar passions to mine. I’m just wanting to get the word out of how to best help kids. But then again, there’s also very high in demand speakers who I don’t blame them for charging very high speaker feeds because everyone is wanting them. And it It’s a big range but as my website’s grown, I’ve been able to get speakers that who are more in demand and charge a higher price. And so it, it’s grown over time what I can pay people. Chris Badgett: Is this become your full time thing or you’re also still a school psychologist? Tim McIvor: As of this as of this year, I actually stopped my full time job as a school psychologist. This along with just some part time consultation with the Boston Public Schools as well as just a few other more minor business ventures is my full time thing. So basically it was getting to the point where this was doing better. than my full time job as a school psychologist. I felt like I had more impact here globally to help Children. It just aligned with my passions. So I had been a school psychologist for five years in Nevada full time, then a school psychologist for five years in Florida full time. This is my first ever school year where I’m not actually in the schools anymore. So yeah lifter illness is, has helped me substantially. And in getting to that goal, which is just a dream of mine. Chris Badgett: Wow. Awesome. Congratulations on that. Thank you. How do I know people who do like professional development or are thinking about it? What they often ask how do you get clients or how do you get in the flow of people needing continuing education credits? Like how did you Get that going. And what do you continue to do? Tim McIvor: Yeah, that’s one of the areas where I think I thrive. The most is the marketing component because I am competing with about a thousand other professional development associations that there’s maybe not a thousand, but there are so many different providers who provide these NASA approved certificates. There are also the APA, which the American Psychological Association, which provides certificates, and our National Association counts those as well. So if you count all the providers from the A. P. A. Then it’s well over 1000 who I’m competing against. But one way I’ve found to really stand out. Is I’m extremely active on social media. I was watching a few YouTube videos. I remember back in 2020 that had said in order to stand out, you need to add humor. You can’t just constantly promote your webinars. People won’t like it. They won’t follow you. They’ll just get bored of your page. But if with a few exceptions, of course, who are super passionate about professional development. But if you can incorporate some really funny humor or really meaningful, valuable resources into your social media posts, that schools that call this can find a lot of value. And then every once in a while mentioned that you’ve got a new professional development webinar on your platform. That has been the key to my success. I’ve gotten over 10, 000 followers on both Facebook and Instagram that way. And they even. In that YouTube video had mentioned these are some of the accounts where they’re using humor and they’re getting like 100, 000 followers. And it was like this accountant, this like random accountant Twitter page that was using pretty good humor. And I just learned how they did it and then applied it to my page. Chris Badgett: Wow, that’s cool. Is there seasonality to this continuing ed or is it just always happening? People are signing up or do people tend to get their credits at a certain time of year or whatever? Tim McIvor: It’s all year round, but I noticed that June is a great Time because it’s pretty much the end of the school year. They’re wrapping up the school year. The kids are out, but sometimes the school psychologist still need to work another maybe week or so without the students. And so they’re getting around to all the things they wanted to do during the school year, but didn’t have time to. And a lot of that is professional development. Another one is August. And September at the very beginning of the school year school psychologists don’t necessarily have the busiest schedules yet because usually the teachers are still getting to know their students before referring them to the school psychologist and there’s usually a honeymoon to where the students are maybe behaving much better than they typically do throughout the school year. Chris Badgett: What’s the business model? Are you doing like just a la carte, individual core sales or how do you, what’s the, Tim McIvor: that was the main difference between when I was only making a little bit of money on this. And when I realized that certain ways to price it took it exponentially more sales. And What I realized maybe a year and a half ago is that instead of doing just individual webinars, which there’s still an option to for individual webinars at 25 a webinar, you can purchase an individual webinar or for 99. You can access. All the webinars. And I do the sale about three times a year. I noticed I get most of my revenue just from those three sales. So what I found is that how you do your pricing dramatically impacts how successful you are, because I would say the first five years, I really didn’t make a lot of money just on the individual 25 per webinar pricing setup. It wasn’t until I started doing that. All the webinars for X amount that people really started flocking to the website. Chris Badgett: Do you have a, is there an access period on that? Like you get access for a year or is it lifetime access or what? Tim McIvor: It’s a one year access to all the webinars. Chris Badgett: Can people take the same training three years later or do they have to do new stuff all the time or how does that work? Tim McIvor: Sometimes they do. And then I’ll have to go into the certificate and manually edit it. So I want to give LifterLMS some credit because I know you guys started out where the certificate page was very rigid. And by now it’s just so flexible. One of the best things you guys did was create such a versatile. Certificate set up because that actually has been extremely helpful. The certificates are probably the most important after the content of the webinar itself, the certificates are the most important component to my website. And so when people are saying, Hey I watched this webinar again, three years later, I can go in and manually edit the date to, to show that. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Tim McIvor: Yeah. Chris Badgett: Do you have any like metrics you can share, like to get a sense of impact, like how many students are over Tim McIvor: 5, 000 individual users. Over 5, 000 school psychologists and keep in mind, this is a very niche, small field. This is not like school counselors where there’s 150, 000 of them. There’s only about 30 to 40, 000 school psychologists nationwide. There’s a shortage of us. And so for me to have. 5, 000 users and there’s really only 30, 000. It’s like a six of the entire demographic, which I’m really proud of. Chris Badgett: Wow. You’ve got 15 percent of the market or whatever. That’s amazing. It’s pretty good. How do you think about you’ve scaled this thing and it’s going great. Did you start like in Nevada or wherever. And then, like, how did you think about going to multiple states? And you’ve also mentioned international expansion. Like, how do you think about that? Tim McIvor: Yeah, I just started promoting on these Facebook forums where all the school psychologists talked nationally and internationally. And I would never promote it on these Facebook forums. I would just basically like share memes to these Facebook groups, wherever all these school psychologists nationally are talking. Then they started following me on Facebook. I noticed for with Instagram, I would just do follow for follow type techniques where I’d follow school psychologists all across the country. And it really didn’t matter that I was in Nevada because this was accessible. Chris Badgett: Your ground game is strong. Like you’re doing a lot to get it out there. Tim McIvor: It was very cool to see what, when I did the Google analytics and see Oh my gosh, this isn’t just in the U S this is everywhere. I couldn’t believe that. Chris Badgett: So like you your program’s kind of designed around the U S standards, but like other countries and stuff, except for credit or Tim McIvor: no, it’s what it is. There’s like a lot of. School psychologists on like military, but US school psychologists like on military bases and they say like without this I could have never kept my kept renewing my national certification for the US. So sometimes people have plans to go back to the US after X amount of years and so they might be for whatever reason. In a different country but they still want to keep up their national certification here in the u. s And they say my website’s the best way to do that Chris Badgett: what just shifting gears back to the tech What other tech is really critical to you like software or plugins or themes or hosting that? You know a really important part of your stack Tim McIvor: Sure. I think that videos are the next biggest thing. And I really for, because there are school psychologists who are deaf and hard of hearing, and because we are so focused on helping and accommodating students with disabilities, it would be very hypocritical if I wasn’t accommodating school psychologists. With disabilities such as those who are deaf and hard of hearing. So closed captions is a must for all of my webinars and there are closed captions on there. And then on top of that features that I would love to have is, with the advanced lift or homeless videos. I’ve looked into it and I’ve actually bought it twice and then realized that there was a certain feature that is making it. Less versatile. So basically, when you’re watching the video, and then you click out of the screen to, for example, click on a different window, or maybe you’re clicking on the PowerPoint slides, the video stops. And I’ve never really wanted that to happen. I want it to flow. For some of my technology webinars. I say we’re gonna, we’re gonna learn excel in real time so that you can start to crunch the numbers. But if they’re clicking on excel and then the video immediately stops, or if they’re clicking on Google sheets or Google forms, all these different technology platforms, it defeats the purpose. So one of the things I had. Wanted to mention in the Lifter LMS advanced videos feedback is that I love a lot of the different features. I just wish there was a way to toggle off the when you click on a different screen, the video immediately stops because I think it actually. loses a little bit of user friendliness that way. I understand the purpose. We want to make sure people watch it from start to finish. But I also think that if people don’t want to watch something, they’ll find a way they’ll just be on their phones with the thing on silent. You know what I mean? Like ultimately we want to give users some flexibility. If there is a PowerPoint slides on another tab to look at it while they’re listening to the video. And so I’ve actually bought. The advanced videos and then realized it wasn’t for me because of that feature and you know how you can vote for something to be Updated I put in a vote And I don’t think it did very well But I voted to just give it a little toggle on and off that way we can choose whether we want it To be that way or not. Chris Badgett: I’ll have to look closely at that I thought we had a that was like an option to turn on or off. But if that’s not Okay, that’s good feedback. I Tim McIvor: would love, right now my users, when they go to my webinars, I have to tell them in the notes note where you left off, because they can’t remember. Where you left off and I know advanced videos plugin, it’ll remember where you left off, which is why I really want that plugin. But because of the other component of the plugin, I haven’t been able to use it. Chris Badgett: All right. Yeah. That’s really good. That’s totally sensible. That makes a lot of sense. Tim McIvor: Cool. Chris Badgett: And you asking for that live here definitely helps. Maybe Tim McIvor: other people will see this and vote for it. That would be great. But yeah, Chris Badgett: what are you using for video hosting Tim McIvor: Vimeo? Chris Badgett: Yeah, Tim McIvor: that’s Chris Badgett: the standard. That’s great. Tim McIvor: I know that Adam is big on from WP crafters, big on w bunny. net. And so I, I. I had made it on my to do list to check that out. Maybe it’s a cheaper option. Vimeo just raised their prices on us. So who knows, maybe bunny. net is the future. And so that’s one of the things on my to do list is maybe transferring it over to bunny. net. Chris Badgett: All right. Any other like essential tech, like what do you put your email list on and or any other plugins you love and stuff? So Tim McIvor: I, I do love how with the Lifter LMS reporting, I can just download everything to Excel and then upload it to Brevo a email marketing. One of the things that I also wanted to give some feedback on was like the memberships. Sometimes people don’t want the subscription of basically having to have it auto renew every time. But let’s say those same people, they. Purchase a one year subscription to all the webinars on schoolsick. com and then right before that membership is over, they repurchase a membership for another year. They renew without without it. What am I trying to say without their first membership expiring yet? It doesn’t trigger an entire new year on all the webinars. It has to say expired before that happens. And basically, that’s one of the problems that I’ve run into. And from your tech support, they said that would be a good thing to work on in the future, but it would be extremely helpful because there are people who pay for my membership and then they end up wondering what happens a few days later when all their webinars expire. Chris Badgett: Oh, that makes sense. Yeah, that is something to look at. So you’re selling the membership is all access with the annual renewal. Tim McIvor: So for me, I don’t, yeah it’s an annual renewal, but every time I do a different membership, so I have the spring break sale, that’s one membership. Then I have the fall membership. Then I have the blacks Friday membership. And then I have a new like 2025 spring break membership. So these are all different memberships. So they go from. The 2024 spring break membership and then by the 2025 spring break membership a few days before their 2024 spring break membership ends and then it doesn’t auto renew all the webinars because they’re not expired yet. Chris Badgett: I see what you’re saying Yeah, we could look at that and how to smooth that out for you Tim McIvor: Yeah, I think anytime somebody just buys something it should immediately kind of auto update the enrollment to the new okay, this is when the year starts because they just bought it Even if they bought it while they were still enrolled in it. Chris Badgett: Yeah, that’s good feedback. You say you were manually adding people to Brevo? Tim McIvor: Yeah. Yeah. You can do that. Chris Badgett: I was just wondering if have you heard of WP fusion? Tim McIvor: No, I haven’t. Chris Badgett: I’m going to check right now, but WPP fusion just, excuse me, automates. Passing contacts from LifterMS to the CRMs. Oh, cool. And I’m wondering if if Brevo is on their list. Tim McIvor: Yeah. Let me check out WPFusion. I chose Brevo just because it’s cheaper. Know it’s maybe not one of the most well known of the email marketing platforms. Chris Badgett: WPFusion integrates with 50 or so Oh yeah. I’m there. I’m done. Yeah, they do have a Brevo integration. So that’s awesome. Thank Tim McIvor: you for letting me know that makes it a lot easier. Chris Badgett: And they probably have a Black Friday sale coming up. Tim McIvor: Yeah. Yeah, that’s true. And I give you guys a lot of credit that the 60 percent off. Sometimes the crazy Black Friday sales that you guys do is just always love those. Always look forward to those. Appreciate that. Chris Badgett: And I noticed you do a Black Friday strategy as well. Tim McIvor: Yeah. That, that’s how I said I got the sales from like exponentially higher when I started saying, you can have all the webinars for XML. That was really what was my biggest breakthrough in business so far. Yeah. Chris Badgett: Yeah. There’s a saying that I always try to remember cause I’ve been doing running sales and doing marketing for a long time that you get tired of your marketing before your market ever does. So just keep doing sales hammering. Tim McIvor: Yeah. Hammer. And sometimes I’ll do the same meme from two years ago and people will forget that I even posted that meme. And so for me, it’s Oh, that’s so lame to post the same joke twice. But then it gets three times as many likes. I’m like, Oh, I guess people forgot I did it or something. I don’t know. Chris Badgett: And there’s new people that come in. Tim McIvor: Yeah. New people. Sometimes you have to be a little bit repetitive with some of your content and it saves you time that way. You’re not constantly having to look for new stuff, Chris Badgett: how just big picture question, how has the school psych. com website and online business and education platform changed your life? Tim McIvor: Yeah, that, that’s been the biggest component is that with my day job that I had for 10 years, it was just such a grind having to do basically an eight to five every Monday through Friday, and then go home and work on these passion projects at nights and weekends so to be able to have a platform that helped me very quickly get to where my goals were to the point where I’m no longer working my days, I’m able to just solely focus on my passion projects and be creative. I honestly have never felt happier in my entire life. And I never knew that this could ever happen. Like I would say five years ago, I wasn’t making that much money. So I never saw the true potential of it. Ironically, it wasn’t until COVID that people started really going from these live conferences to recorded webinars. And that’s when it started to take off. Chris Badgett: Yeah that’s fantastic. What was the timeline from let’s say when you got your WordPress site set up and you chose Lifter to that moment where you it was really working and you were able to like, how many years are we talking about there? Tim McIvor: Talking about six years where I realized, okay, I can actually quit my job because this is making more money than my regular job. And then I just to be on the safe side, did one more year in the schools. And that was my hardest year because by that point, my website truly was Extremely time consuming. There’s a lot of people messaging me wanting to, either collaborate with webinars or this or that it was growing. And so it’s to the point where I really needed to be able to work on this full time. So seven years. Chris Badgett: Nice. And you’re definitely no stranger to hard work. It sounds and is it besides like having outside content creators that are doing webinar content, is it just you or do you have any team members or, Tim McIvor: so I do have team members, but they’re not necessarily, I’m like. Pretty much the main guy who runs this thing, but I feel like it’s always important to get second opinions on things. And so I’ve set it up in a way where there are certain school psychologists who have volunteered to help me out. They’re friends of mine, and I’ll go to them for either advice or just a variety of different tasks that are very are not very time consuming, but are very helpful to me to get second opinions and I’ll make sure that they get all the webinars for free all the time for helping volunteer. Chris Badgett: And what motivates you like, to do a side project and, just keep working on it grinding for six, seven years. And I know it was like getting growing over time, but what kept you motivated at all that to do all that? Tim McIvor: A big foundation of that and that was my passion for making sure school psychologists knew the correct the correct best practices. And I’ll give you a story, which is that in the 90s, there were these reading wars, and it’s like, how do we teach kids to read? theory which focused on phonics and one theory that just basically focused on whole words and context clues. And these two groups were basically constantly fighting over school district money because one had a curriculum for whole word, one had a curriculum for phonics. And then in the nineties they did all this research saying it’s phonics. Phonics is much better than whole word reading. But in the two thousands because whole word reading had such good marketing and they had so much money behind it and it was a lot more books so they could make a lot more money. So big corporations were very interested. Whole word reading one out in the 2000s and a lot of children were taught to read using whole word reading, which was not the best way. Now there are going to be kids who basically learned it and made the best of it, which is fine. But the kids who had learning disabilities needed phonics, meaning that we weren’t getting at all students with this method. And as a result, a lot of kids had fallen behind. And so that was just one story that we learned about in graduate school of how important it is. To know the best practices in order to give the best recommendations, and by now in 2024, a lot of those companies that teach whole word reading are going broke because finally, the word is getting out that, phonics is the sole way you can’t just teach kids to read based on context clues, having them guess what it might, what the word might mean. And basically taking that one story and applying it to all different areas of school. psychology. We need to teach school psychologists to recommend great interventions to teachers great recommendations to parents of what to do at home. School psychologists are involved with so many different areas of the school that if they’re very knowledgeable, they can equip so many other educators and just have an amazing impact on the children we work with. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. That’s definitely something I’ve seen with people who stay the course and find success is, making money and is nice, but there’s got to be that passion and sense of there’s going to be a why, Tim McIvor: because the amount of weekends in my late twenties, early thirties, and the amount of nights. That I could have been out doing really fun hobbies or this or that. You have to have a why when it gets tough and I’ve always had that really strong, why Chris Badgett: Tim, I want to thank you for coming on the show and sharing your story and I’m really proud of you and it’s it’s really inspiring to see what you’ve done and the impact you’re making in the world and what it’s done for your life and stuff like that. Keep up the great work. Thanks for being a shining example. Tim McIvor: Oh, absolutely. Anytime. Bye bye. Always happy to be on this podcast. And if you want me out in a future episode, I’d be more than happy to, honestly, I was so honored to be on this. Chris Badgett: Great. We’ll have to do it again in another couple of years. Yeah. We can get an update. Tim McIvor: Where am I? Where am I in a few years? I would love that. Chris Badgett: Awesome. Thank you so much, Tim. Tim McIvor: Absolutely. Take care, Chris. Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post How to Build a Continuing Education Business With Tim McIvor appeared first on LMScast.

In the LMSCast episode, Chris Lema discusses the idea of motivation and explains that it is not an external factor that varies but rather an inherent component of an individual’s wiring. In the WordPress and technology communities, Chris Lema is well-known for his leadership, business strategy, and motivating ideas. He is the CEO of Motivation AI. He emphasizes that each person has a unique kind of drive that is ingrained in their DNA by equating motivation with fixed characteristics like height or eye color. Chris contends that people are constantly motivated when jobs or objectives fit with their innate wiring, challenging the conventional wisdom that views motivation as a resource that has to be replenished. He presents the MCode (Motivation Code), a program that examines an individual’s motivational wiring by analyzing their life tales. People can better understand why certain experiences seem rewarding while others don’t by adjusting their job and surroundings to reflect what really motivates and excites them. He also discusses his work with CaboPress and his position as CEO of Motivation AI, highlighting the significance of comprehending motivation in both personal and professional circumstances. Here’s Where To Go Next… Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website. Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS. Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014. And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide Episode Transcript Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co founder of Lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show. Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMS cast. I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Chris Lemma. I’ve known Chris for probably a decade or almost a decade. It’s been a very long time. Chris has done a lot of things. Currently he’s the CEO of motivation AI. You can find out about that at motivation code. com. We’re going to be talking a lot about that today. Chris is also the founder of Cabo press. I believe I went six times. Which is awesome. And maybe we’ll talk a little bit about that. But first, Chris, welcome to the show. It’s great to be here. Awesome, man. Just to bookmark it in for the people out there watching and listening, what is motivation? I find that an extremely interesting, just core concept. How do you think about it? Yeah, I know there’s a lot, but what is it at the highest level? Chris Lema: Yeah, I think that’s a great question. I think the easiest way to think about it is like thinking about your eye color or your hair color your height. These are things that you did not control. You were born and you did not do anything to manifest your eye color. You didn’t do anything to manifest your height. It’s just is what it is. And so I think of motivation, right? The characteristic of motivation as the way in which you’re wired and your DNA, you didn’t control your DNA and you don’t control per se, how you’re wired. Most people tend to think about motivation in a completely different way. They think about it as gas in the gas tank. So you either have a lot of motivation or you have a little motivation. They don’t think about it as eye color. Cause you’re like I. I always have blue eyes or always have brown eyes and you’re like, and you always have motivation. But what you have is a certain kind of motivation. You’re wired for a particular kind of motivation. And and often when we find that I don’t feel motivated, when we use that phrase, I don’t, what we’re really saying is the things that are in front of me are not stimulating the part of me that is wired in a certain way. So the things that are put in front of me. Are not aspirational. So therefore I’m not excited about it. And you’re like, you’re not excited about it. But if we took this and we changed it and we made it, so it was aspirational. We made it results driven, or we made it, performance and challenging base, then all of a sudden you’d be like, Ooh, I’m excited about it again. And that means, okay we’ve locked in. The thing that you’re trying to get done in line with how you’re wired. So how you’re wired is as static as your eye color and your height and what have you. It is not fuel in a tank that has to be replenished. So when you see those means that are like motivation lasts a day, discipline lasts forever. And you’re like no. Stop back up. You have motivation every day and you, we all know this is true, right? Because there have been times in every person’s life when you’re sitting at home on the couch in your pajamas or in your shorts and a t shirt or whatever. And someone comes in and goes, Hey, do you want to go out? You want to leave the house? You want to leave the apartment? And we’re like, no. I don’t feel like it. I don’t feel like moving. I don’t feel like anything. And then they say the magic word, whatever it is that you love the most. I was thinking of going for ice cream or I thought I’d go to Disneyland or whatever it is. And then all of a sudden you’re like, give me two minutes. I’ll be dressed. I’ll be ready. Like you were sitting on that couch and you were like, I have zero motivation. And then they put the right thing in front of you. And suddenly you’re Ooh, I can rally. I’m going to go in my room and I’m going to change. I’m going to be ready, I’m going to go. The real trick is how have you lived this long and not known how you’re wired? How have you gone this long and not know what stirs you up? What motivates you? What gets you super Oh, I’m changed. I’m going, I’m changing and I’m ready to go. And that’s what the M code does is it analyze your stories. It collects all this data, has you answer questions, and then it tells you, here’s how you are. Wired based on the stories you told us. So we’re not making anything up. It’s not that artificial choose between what would you do on a Friday night, go out with friends or stay at home and read a book. Like those are all they’re fictitious. They’re abstract. They’re not. Your own story. So when we ask people to do that arbitrary choice between a and B. We’re going to get an arbitrary answer in the form of a report and codes different in that it’s looking at your own stories and it pulls it together. Then it says, here’s how we think you’re wired or here’s some of the ways that we think you’re wired. Once people read it and put words to it and see it, then suddenly they’re like, Oh my gosh, that’s why I hated that job. That’s why I love that job. You’re like, yes, that’s exactly why. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I wonder if you can comment on, it seems like there’s a quote crisis of motivation in society. Like in YouTube, if I go to YouTube, sometimes I’m looking at trending videos and there’s a lot about how to get motivated and tell us about what’s going on in society or what and why is motivation important right now? Why does it appear to be failing right now more than ever or we just more aware of it? Chris Lema: So so I think it’s there’s several different streams that all come together one of which is we don’t try and connect these dots If you look at the number of creators that exist today compared to five years ago, compared to 10 years ago, and in the U S particularly, again, you don’t want to make this connection, but you can’t help, but go the cost of health insurance and being able to insure yourself independently. So there’s tons of people. 10 years ago, who didn’t do, didn’t even have, didn’t think about a side hustle and didn’t think about going independent and working on their own because they needed their health insurance. They needed it for their family. So they stayed in a job. And the one overarching dynamic in a job is that you have a boss that tells you what to do. So you don’t have to, you don’t have to figure out what your day’s about, right? There are some jobs where they put your whole schedule of what you need to do in each minute of every day on your schedule, and you just obey. And then whatever it is, several years ago, more people leaving independently today, more people than that, you have people who are figuring out on their own. But so rise a new problem. What happens when you’ve spent the last 10, 20, 30 years of your life, obeying someone else and doing what someone else tells you, and you’re doing the thing that they told you to do to be successful, whether or not it is the thing you need to do to be successful and whether or not they, at the end of the year, give you the benefit, the bonus, the whatever to say you were successful. Regardless of all that you’ve been living in one modality, and then you come out to do your own thing and you realize. You’re the boss of yourself and potentially you’re a horrible boss, right? It turns out like you have a whole lot of negative self talk. You’re dousing your brain with negative chemicals because you’re sitting here telling yourself you suck at things. You’re frustrated and you don’t really know what is the next step. So what’s the result of all that? You get to the end of day, you sit down and you go, I just don’t have the motivation. You’re like no. The issue isn’t motivation. The issue is you don’t have the skills. It turns out walking out of a job and going to build your own empire is not something you do on your own. It’s not something you do without a plan. It’s not something, and every one of us who has done something like down the outside realizes this would have been a lot easier if I had a plan or if I had a structure, if I had a accountability, if I had partners, if all these things that would help it. So I don’t think. The crisis is explicitly a motivation crisis. I think we use the term I’m not motivated as a way to reflect on the fact that I’m overwhelmed. I’m tired. And the truth is while that was happening, all the people that left the workforce left the companies in dire straits too, right? When everyone left those companies now put more work on their existing employees. And didn’t give them more pay. As a result, they’re also getting burnt out. And what do you say when you’re getting burnt out? I’m just not motivated. So we use this phrase, right? But what we’re saying is inside organizations, we’re getting overworked, underpaid, and. And frustrated by a boss that doesn’t listen to us and outside of work we’re doing our own thing and it turns out we’re not good to ourselves. There’s a lot of negative self talk. We do a lot of things that slowly create friction and stress in our lives. And as a result, we often say the same thing that people at work say, which is I’m just not motivated. The truth is a better phrase I’m burnt out and I’m lost. And you can get help with both of those, but you got to start by acknowledging what the real issue is. Chris Badgett: Awesome. Let’s talk about motivation code. Yeah. What is it? Why was it created? And how is it different from a personality test like Myers Briggs? I’m an introvert, extrovert, and so on. Chris Lema: There are a bunch of really great personality assessments out there. Myers Briggs, Enneagram, DISC, StrengthFinder the list goes on and on. Gosh, one of my favorites is the Colby Index A and there’s so many good ones. Here’s what normally happens. You take it. It says something surprising to you Ooh, it figured out this thing that I already know about myself, but now this thing knows to you, you love people, you rather be alone you are so excited and you’re an external processor and you interrupt other people when they’re talking, whatever it is, and you go, Oh my gosh. But even if a personality assessment tells you that you step on other people’s toes by jumping, like you already know what they’re going to say, and then you finish their sentence and you interrupt them and you say the next thing, even if it tells you all that. More often than not, we read it, we go, Oh that’s cool. That’s cool that you figured that out about me, but I already knew that. And then we move on. So my standard test is wait two weeks and after two weeks, find out if any of these personality assessments have changed your life and what you discover is. And the reason they don’t is because most of what they’re trying to do is solve the magic puzzle that says, we really saw you. So they give you a name, they tell you what, you’re a panda or you’re green or you’re a dinosaur or you’re a, you’re an ENFP or whatever, whatever they do, they’re going to tell you something and you go, that’s But that’s where the, that’s where the magic ends. And some of those are science backed and some of them are not science backed. And that’s just what that is. M code is sitting on top of SEMA, which is the science of motivated abilities and that science is now some 60 years old and the The assessment that we put online used to be a manual and there’s still people that do it manually, right? They handwrite stuff and and the biographers that do that kind of work have been doing that forever. I learned about SEMA and those assessments in the year 2000. And at that point they were being used by Disney and NASA and Harvard, right? They were places where they were using them to look at hiring new employees putting them in, promoting into bigger senior roles, all that kind of good stuff. And I wanted to use it myself. I couldn’t get access to it because it was only for big companies. Two and a half years ago, I bought all the SEMA related companies. So there were five companies. We bought them all. We merged them into one. That’s Motivations AI and I became the CEO of that company. And in buying all those companies and pulling them all together, right? What we were saying is, hey, the science is important, but more than just the science is making it all available online. And once you make it available online, then more people can take it. So we now make it available to lots of different people, not just big corporations. And the goal is not the magic trick. The goal is not, Oh, you finished taking the assessment. Here’s your report. Look, you’re a driver. You’re an achiever. And that’s it. The goal is all the applied science, right? How do you take that science and turn it into something that’s useful for you in your day to day two weeks from now, a month from now? Six weeks from now. For a boss, it means helping the boss figure out how to create assignments for different people. Why are differently for an individual who is trying to figure out their work, right? It’s looking at, okay, how do you reshape the work you’re doing so that it aligns with your motivation for someone in sales, it’s, how do you look at your prospect and know which of these dimensions of motivation are they, and how to best. Negotiate a deal with someone who’s a optimizer versus a driver, right? And so all of that becomes right. There is no right answer, wrong answer. There’s no good answer, bad answer. It’s just, look, there’s eight different dimensions of motivation. Let’s figure out who you are, who your employees are, who the people you interact with at work are, and let’s figure out the semantic bridge between who you are and who they are and how to get that language effective, right? How to behave in a way that allows you To switch between different kinds of people, but deliver the same value to all of them, right? We’ve all had situations at work. Where like I had when I was at liquid web, I had two people and I think, them both, Jessica Frick was one of my product managers and Christine Trinos was another one of my product managers. And both of them are amazing women. Both of them are absolutely incredible. Top notch eight plus players, but they’re also wired very differently. And so I was giving Jessica one set of jobs and I was giving Christine a different set of jobs. And one day Jessica calls me up and goes, what’s up? Hey, you gave Christina other job that you didn’t give me. Are you not giving it to me? Because you don’t think I can handle it. And I’m like, what? So I said, Jessica, do you want to do that? She’s no, I would hate that job. That’s why I didn’t give it to you. I gave Christine the stuff that she would not only love, but she would excel at, and I gave you the stuff you would love and you would excel at. Even if you have the same exact job title, I’m giving you different jobs so that you’re in your sweet spot. I’ve been doing that for decades. When we pull all this stuff together for M code, we were like, we can do this and make it available to every manager, right? We can make it so every manager knows how to do this way more effectively. And every employee and every employer and every salesperson, all these people can. Be better at what they’re doing when they realize, Oh I need to interact with different people, different ways, because they’re wired differently. And I’m wired in a particular way. Chris Badgett: So I took the M code and my strongest motivational dimensions are visionary driver and learner. And so let’s say I was working for you. What kind of work would you give me? And what kind of work would you not give me? Chris Lema: A visionary. When you think about your goal orientation, right? When you think about how you think about goals, a visionary is transformative. You want to talk about what is the transformation that’s going to happen. A learner on the other hand is all about the knowledge driven mastery oriented goals, right? And a driver is results and ambition and Solving problems. So those are three different, those are three different things. And what we got to figure out is which is your strongest, right? And which is the thing that would, if I gave you a goal, right? If you, if I wanted to give a goal to Chris, the driver, I would go, Hey, Chris, we got these issues. We got these and you’d be like issues. I love issues, I just want to stomp out these issues, right? I just want to, I want to close them out. And I want to check them off. I want to get them done. If I’m talking to Chris, the learner, I’d be like, I don’t know if you’ve heard about this new framework. You’re like new framework. Where do I get access to the new framework? How can I learn everything I can learn from this new framework? How can I put it to use? Give me a project where I can put it to use. And if I talk to visionary, I’m like, listen, here’s what I want us to, here’s what I want us to do. And if we do this, I think we can completely change the game. Oh, my God. Changing the game. I love that’s what I want. So you’re talking about, three different ways to shape the work based on those three. And so if I spent time with you, if I read through your entire M code report, I’d be like, okay, you When it comes to goal orientation, he’s more visionary than anything else. When it comes to work style prop, preference, he’s probably more learner than he is driver, right? When it comes to interpersonal though, he’s more driver than he’s learner. So let’s do this. And so you’re going to start shaping how I give you assignments, how I work with you, how I give you feedback. All of that changes based on who it is I’m talking to, and I won’t talk that way, even if I had the same bits of data to give them, I wouldn’t give it to someone who was an optimizer orchestrator. I wouldn’t give them the same thing as I would give you. And that’s what we’re, if you played basketball in the NBA and you could only dribble with your right hand, you would not play basketball in the NBA. If you could dribble with your right hand and your left hand, you could maybe get to the NBA. But if you don’t have what we call handles, if you can’t bounce the ball between your leg and around your back and actually start moving your whole body one way and then pivot all the way to the other, if you can’t pivot and turn around, if you don’t have those skills, you don’t play that game. And the reality is we have a whole bunch of managers and supervisors and bosses. Who can only dribble with the right hand. They grew up in homes where their mom told them, Hey, treat others the way you want to be treated. Since they’re right handed and they can only do the right hand, they expect the whole rest of the world to understand and interact with people that, that talk that way and work that way and do that way. And your mom was wrong. It’s not treat everyone the way you want to be treated. It’s treat everyone the way they want to be treated. And once you get that and you understand that changes the game. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Can you clarify for me? There’s the strongest motivational dimensions, but then there’s like the top five motivations for me, that’s explore, develop, realize the vision, experience the ideal and meet the challenge. So what are those motivations? Chris Lema: Those are motivations. And if you go into your stacked rank list of your 32 motivations, you’ll see 32 motivations with those five at the top, and you’ll have others are at the bottom, you’ll see that the top. Let’s say about 10 are green and then the next 10 are like yellow. And the last 10 are red. And the red doesn’t mean that you’re bad at them. It just means these aren’t the things that are going to wake you up. So these are all the very specific. So we took all your stories when you were giving them to us and we decoded your answers, mapped them, the stories, and found the elements that made it so that we could take this list of 32 motivations and put them in a stack rank and tell you, these are the things that really. Light you up. They motivate you. They move you. So of course experience the ideal or realize vision, anything that is more visionary. You’re going to be because visionary is your is one of your top dimensions. You’re going to be like, yeah, that’s my jam. I love, I can see the future. I can see what I want. And then I want to pursue it. I want everyone to pursue it, I see the vision. I want to chase it down. And so the eight dimensions are the handles that let you hold on to all those 32, if you had to memorize, the top 10 and in what order and what you’d be like, gosh that’s really hard. And the truth is. They’re in different places, so it’s easier. Yes, you should read through all those top five and all that stuff and put it into practice in order for you to talk about it, in order for you to think about and interact with other people, having a dimension gives you that kind of overlay. And so if I didn’t, if I didn’t know your scores or whatever, I’d be like I know visionary and learner. I know that because I’ve interacted with Chris and you can’t help communicate your visionariness and your learner ness. Also, I would tell you that, Hey it’s no shock. You’re in the job you’re in. And it’s no shock. You’re in the industry you’re in, but it’s also no shock that you’re in the job you’re in. And so you’re a living embodiment that. That our assessment is correct because you’re like, Hey, if someone didn’t know the details of anything of your report or your life or whatever, and they’re like, he’s the CEO of a LMS product in a space where he’s trying to teach other people who are educators to educate well and effectively to the whole rest. You’re like, sounds visionary and learner all day long. We’re not trying to play a magic game, right. And we’re, there’s no magic trick here. And we’re just trying to go, let’s give you the vocabulary and let’s give you the understanding so that you can better lean into who you are and what you’re doing, but also you realize you’ve had employees at Lyft or LMS that aren’t you. You’ve had employees that are not visionary. You’ve had employees that are not learners. So even when you go to give them a task, and you’re like, here, just, here’s this new thing, and you can learn it, and you do it, and then they’re like, my job sucks. And you’re like, how can your job sucks? I would’ve loved that. That would’ve been my favorite task. That would’ve been awesome. I would’ve loved it. And then you discover, oh, they’re not me. They’re different. And what you need to do for that different person is give them a completely different assignment that lines up with them. And it turns out that most of the things we want done can be done a lot of different ways. You, you used to work in mountains. You know that if someone says, I want to hike, pick a famous mountain, right? Kilimanjaro, whatever, right? I want it. That doesn’t say the full, that’s not the full sentence, right? That’s not the full story. Cause you’re like, wait, with Sherpas or without Sherpas, with oxygen, without oxygen on the East face, the West face, the North face, the South face, like there’s so much more than just, I want to climb that mountain. And it doesn’t mean that there’s a right answer and a wrong answer. It just means, Hey, some people are for Sherpas. Some people prefer oxygen. And some don’t, some people want to go the easiest route switchbacks up and down. Other people are like, I’m going to hike the ice cliff all the way up. And you’re like, Hey. Different people are motivational dimensions. Do that. They basically say there’s eight different ways to think about the world. And these are, you’re wired one of eight different ways. In fact, you’re likely wired one or two or three of eight different ways. And if you stay in that realm, you’re going to stay lit up, excited, happy. That doesn’t mean that you won’t ever be frustrated, depressed. Or anxious it just means you’ll be in your sweet spot more often, right? And that’s what we educate on That’s what we’re trying to do. Chris Badgett: Let’s talk about understanding. We’ve talked about understanding self and management and leadership and using these tools What about more laterally? Let’s say A business partnership or a life partner or friends. Yeah. There’s that kind of thing that happens where sometimes opposites attract, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Maybe you should have some overlap, but then have some difference. Like how do you. How do you think about that horizontal relationship with the M code? Chris Lema: I think there’s, I think there’s two or three things that you really want to get nailed. And that is you don’t want all of the same. So like on a Chris Badgett: team Chris Lema: just like on a team. So I was talking to a guy who was telling me about his onboarding sequence at his company. And I said, let me guess, did you take the MCOT? He’s I did. I’m like, let me guess you’re a driver. He goes, you’re right. I am. I’m like, yep. And let me guess the people that succeed in your onboarding. All our drivers, they’re all very similar to you. He goes, yeah. I’m like, cause you’ve built an onboarding sequence. Who would scare the living dates off of optimizers, orchestrators, relators, influencers like they would be they would get the instructions of the onboarding and they’d be like, I’m out. I’m out. And and I go, the problem when you’ve assembled a whole group of. One kind in this particular case drivers love solving problems. You know what happens when a group of drivers all finish all the problems? They make up new problems. That’s what they do. They make up problems to solve because that’s how they feel alive. So what do they do? They start going, oh, you know what, what could happen? This could happen. They start predicting what could happen, even though it hasn’t happened. Then they’re like, we got to get everybody pay attention. And then we go chasing off to chase after a fake imaginary dragon that wasn’t really there. Because that’s their language. That’s how they work is overcoming and over, and surmounting the challenges that are in front of them. The same thing happens if you’re two drivers that are married or two, two visionaries married who’s doing the checkbook, right? Who’s balancing the budget, right? They’re like, Oh, I see visions. I see visions too. And you’re like, Whoa, someone has to make sure the electricity gets paid. So I find that the, my number one rule is is make sure that you’re not all the same. You can’t try for all your partners are achievers and you’re an achiever or all your partners are orchestrators and you’re an orchestrator. Like you just don’t want, you don’t want. Too much overage, right? It’s going to, it’s going to clash in its own way. The opposite things we don’t have tons of opposites in the list, but there are some, right? Like you could see an achiever and a orchestrator go head to head sometimes. And so the ones that are more diametrically opposed, those are probably not perfect pairings for people, especially partners or in relationship, partly because you’re trying to constantly make the case for something that the other one just. It’s just not wired for. So for example, I’ve spent a lot of time in startups and it doesn’t mean I haven’t had stints in big corporate gigs but even in the corporate gig, I’m trying to carve out an entrepreneurial effort. Why? Because if someone tells me these are the three meetings a day you have to go to, and this is the process for doing X, Y, and Z, and here’s how you check the list on all these boxes. And I’m like those are my lowest motivations. So if you look at your stack rank, you might have do it right somewhere in the middle, right? My do it right is last. It doesn’t mean I want to do anything wrong. It just means the exactitude of making sure that I do it exactly per process is not ever going to motivate me. In fact, it will frustrate me. So when I worked at Liquid Web, a hosting company They had an hope, a whole process for how you book travel, a whole process. They have used this corporate card. You run it on this corporate travel system. Then it, it’s automatically covered or whatever. And it was all designed so that employees didn’t have to part with their own money at any part of the process. But it was like, you had to change your password every two weeks. The software didn’t carry all the airlines. It didn’t go to all the cities I wanted to go to. And so it was a pain in the butt. And I just was like, Nope. So what I do, I just started using my own credit card and booking my own travel. And at some point they were like, Hey, you haven’t turned in anything for this track. I’m like, Oh yeah, I have expense reports. They’re like, when are you going to turn those in? I’m like, whatever. We got to almost the end of the year. They’re like, you have to, if you want to get paid, you have to. And I’m like, I don’t really care about getting paid. I just, I don’t. Like I would gladly lose a thousand dollars of my own personal money on airline tickets, then not lose a penny, but have to use that horrible system because a horrible system was just so broken for what I was doing. Do it right is never going to be the top of my list. So if do it right, is your number one, right? If Chris Badgett is do it right. Number one, and Chris Lema is do it right. 32. Partnership is gonna be hard, right? Because you’re like, Hey, I want to do this partnership. Let’s just write out the terms of this agreement. And let’s write out the commitments we’re each gonna make. And let’s write out everything that holds us accountable. Let’s make sure we have a checklist in here and let’s have a meeting where we can back you’re doing all these. And I’m like, partnerships are all about. Let’s make it work and let’s make some money together. So why don’t we just put something in play? Let’s just run it, see how much money we make. Then we’ll go from there. You’re like no. I need to have everything right. You see how those things just don’t line up well. That’s where, whether you’re talking about spouses or business partners or anything else, in a peer network. The most important thing is not so much the pairing, it’s understanding the other person, is being able to look and see, okay. They’re an optimizer. So they are process oriented. They’re focused on efficiency. How can I help them and serve them in this relationship? Even though that’s not my first rodeo, right? It’s not my, it’s not my, it’s not my first, it’s not the thing that I would think about or pursue, right? They are detail oriented. I am high achieving. I care about getting the win and you care about getting all the I’s dotted and T’s crossed. And how do we find common ground? So that’s where M code really helps peer relationships. Chris Badgett: Good news. We can partner because do it right is third from the bottom of my list. So that helped me understand what is it on the bottom of my list is be unique. Yeah. See, what does that mean? And Chris Lema: beat and be unique is one of my top five. So look at us on this screen right now, right? We’re both sitting in nice offices. We both have nice camera gear. We’re both able to get on video and talk whenever, but only one of us is matching his shirt. To his hat. And the other one is certainly not right. You could interview a hundred guests and I’m guessing I’m the only one who’s wearing a shirt and a hat, the match. And I get up every morning and every morning, I hat and then the shirt that’s going to go with it. And then I start my day. Other people call that decision fatigue and they want to wear the same black t shirt all day, every day, because that’s what Steve Jobs did. Chris Badgett: Yeah. Chris Lema: That’s fine. And they don’t care that they’re wearing the same outfit every day, or even they don’t care if they get on a phone call like this, a video call, and let’s say there’s five people and all five are all tech bros, all wearing black t shirts and they all look identical and to them, they don’t care. They’re like, Hey, let’s get on with the topic of our conversation. And for me, I’m like, Oh my God, did I miss the memo? Like, why are you all looking the same as a be uniquer? I have owned cars and often lease cars for about two years. Then when I start seeing the car that I’m driving everywhere around, I’m like time to turn this car in because I like having a car that’s unique that says, Hey, that must be Chris summer because that’s the only Bronco that’s cut up that way in Houston, right? But if everyone had it, then I’d be like, Nah. So I was driving a Range Rover and I love my Range Rover, but then everyone was driving Range Rover. And then I was like, no, I gave it to my wife. She doesn’t have be unique. So she doesn’t care. She doesn’t care how many people have the same car she does. And I do. So be unique is about, can you stand out? Can you be recognized for the things that, that make you different? You want to be, seen as separate and there’s a whole lot of people like most of the world that is like. Why would I care about that? Like, why would I care about that at all? So for most people, be unique is towards the bottom, right? For most people, that’s just not a thing. And then for me it’s I don’t know, number two or number three. And you’re like, Whoa that’s a big deal for you. Yeah. Yep. Yeah, it is. I just, I don’t want to be the same as everybody else. Chris Badgett: That’s really cool. And that feeds into my next question, which is, how do we, I feel like I got lucky, because I, traveled, went into lots of cultures, anthropology, studies, social science. I realized at a very young age that, man, people are different. Man, people have different ways of seeing and being in the world. And that’s ultimately helped me in work and being a manager and just understanding people very different. And. Being productive. So I got lucky in that I had a background that kind of helped me undo or figure out those blind spots of how people are so different and almost all everybody is. How does one, remove those blinders and just get a, get better able to do that. As you’re telling that story right there, I’m like, Oh man. If I send Chris a gift, like maybe it needs to match like the hat and the shirt, not just the shirt. And that would say a little more I understand you. I see you. Yeah. But how do we learn to see the world like others and influence them, communicate with them and so on? Chris Lema: The first thing is. My, my rough math says about a third of the population doesn’t care. A third of the population just doesn’t care at all about seeing others, like they’re just, they’re on a, they’re on a choose your own adventure game and they’re the only one playing the game and they got the remote control and they’re choosing left left. And they just, nothing else matters. And nothing we do is going to fix that, right? You have a third of the world that just doesn’t get it. That’s not bad. It’s just an issue of exposure. If you’re living in a country where you have almost no diversity, everybody’s basically the same. You don’t even know to think in that way that, Oh, there might be somebody who thinks up is down and down is up. And you’re like, what? It just doesn’t, go to a community where they all drive cars. I grew up in Southern California. There are whole neighborhoods of people that have never walked. Three blocks in their life, right? There are communities that don’t have sidewalks. They’re like why what’s a sidewalk, right? Like their whole life is they got 16. They got keys to a car. They got in their car They drove a mile to their school, right? And you’re like, oh, it’s a mile. I can walk it and they’re like What are you talking about? There are lots of places where people have blind spots, but it’s environmental, it’s not personal. In the first case, the first third, it’s a little bit personal because what they’re really saying is I don’t need anyone else. I don’t care about anyone else. I’m just doing my own thing. In the second group. It’s. Constraints based on the environment they’re in. They didn’t even know that something, and then you have the third group, which are people who didn’t know, but once they know their eyes are open, then they’re like, Oh my God, feed it more. Give me more. I want to learn more. I want to learn how to be better here and there. My wife, you can’t go to, you can’t, and Melissa, you’ve met her. You can’t go to a dinner. With Melissa. If you’re hungry, right? Because when you sit down the table and here comes a waiter or waitress, Melissa is going to immediately be like, how do you pronounce your name? Where are you from? What’s your family history? You’re like, I’m starving. I just wanted food. And now I have to wait for 30 minutes while Melissa. The waiter have their own little back and forth. But she wants I’m starving. every person to feel seen. She wants everybody to feel like, Hey, I know how to say your name. I know where your family comes from. I know your story. She does that every meal we go to every restaurant we go to everything right. All she wants is more info. Once you start giving it to him, once you’re like. Hey, you know how this is how you do growth and development? And they go, yeah, I’m like, I do growth totally different. What do you mean? Like I’m all about skill mastery, even if I’ve never done it. If I start doing it, I want to go, Oh, how do I get to expert mode? I want to, I’m going to, I’m going to, I’m going to do all the reps. I’m going to go over and over until I get it perfectly because I’m all about mastery. And she’s I just want knowledge. I just want to, pull in more information. I want to read biographies and I’m like, what? No, I don’t care about all that. I just care about I want to be the best at doing it or the best in my peer group. And once she sees, Oh, we’re different. Then she can then start thinking about how to approach. People differently. So you got one third that doesn’t care. You got one third that doesn’t know. And you got one third that would love to know and be eager to get it. And so of course, my answer is go with the goers, go with the one third that want to learn and grow more and then expose the third that are like, I didn’t even know that was possible. Or I didn’t even know that people could be wired differently. Some of those may move into the first camp and ignore the third camp, because no matter how much you talk to them, no matter how much you do, they’re just like, Yeah, whatever. And you’re just, it’s coming in one year and go out the other. And that’s a waste of time. So you, and I’m not writing anyone off, but there’s just some people who are like, I don’t care how someone else is wired. I care about how I’m wired and what I do. And you’re like, okay. That is what that is. Chris Badgett: Let’s contextualize it for a course creator or coach. So like when it comes to content, like course content, lessons, videos, texts, PDS, whatever, there’s this learning style concept of visual auditory kinesthetic and all these things. And coaching I think of as you can just do coaching without courses, but it’s more human and dynamic and stuff like that. It’s a support mechanism. So how can course creators and coaches use something like the M code to create better content and also better help their people when they fall down or get stuck? Chris Lema: So that’s a great question. I think what you’re going to discover is for every person. So we mentioned at the top of the call, I run a conference called Cabo press. This year we just did our 10th. I had everyone take the M code, right? You do the seating arrangements by the M code. I didn’t do seating. I didn’t do some arrangements, but it definitely influenced some of my lunch groups and it influenced some of our dinners. Here’s the thing you look at 60 people and I would say 80 percent of them, maybe higher, maybe 85 percent were all achievers and drivers, or at least they were an achiever or driver in their top three spots. 85 percent at least. We had two influencers, two learners, one relator, right? Does that mean that there are no relator entrepreneurs? No. It means that all my marketing and messaging, all my recruiting, all my communication targets, achievers, and drivers who are the C who are sitting in the CEO role of their agencies, product companies, and SAS companies. That’s all it means is that the way in which I talk, the way in which I describe it, The way in which I invite the people that I’m inclined to invite are predominantly achievers and drivers. And they, and there’s a couple learners and a couple, influencers and maybe a relater, but if you look at that relater, the one relater that’s there I’ve done nothing to recruit them. They have crossed every semantic bridge. And they have crossed every Delta between where they were and where I’m, they did all the work to get to me. They did all the heavy lifting because I was. Translating my stuff to achievers and drivers. And the same is true for course creators and coaches is that you’re going to discover that you work mostly with, you connect mostly with, you shape your messaging, mostly for two to four of our eight dimensions. It doesn’t mean that for others. Are not going to come your way. It’s just, they’re going to do all the heavy lifting because you haven’t even spent time thinking about it. So when we think about resilience and adaptability, all the stuff that is like support oriented that you’re trying to get up an achiever is going to be goal focused. A driver is going to be pressure filled, right? Resilient. They’re going to be like, Hey, I can persist in the midst of hard stuff. A learner is going to be intellectually agile. I’m flexible in my brain. I can pick up new things. And you’re going to go, yeah, these are the things that I like to do. So you might think of, Hey, I’ve been doing one on one coaching, but I’m going to have this once a month group call where anybody can do whatever and support. And you go, okay, but this is for a certain group of people that want to feel connected with each other. That community part that all my stuff for achievers and drivers, there’s no community part, right? You go to my conference at common press, you get these lunch groups, you get dinner groups. I’m not doing any of those things. I’m not delivering value in those moments, but I’ve crafted those moments So that people can connect with each other because that’s so important or 7 a. m. They go out and they work out. And this time I did all three workouts, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, which was a huge deal, but it’s creating another sense of community. And there are certain people, relators and influencers who are like, I love this. I love that there’s this place where we connect. And you’re like, yes, I have to craft my offering. To deliver value to different groups, even if I specifically focus in one realm. So what I would tell a coach, I would tell a a course creator. I say, first go take the M code and you can do it for 19 bucks, right? The light version gives you enough of what you need, but you can take it for 19 bucks and you go and you learn it. And then as you’re working with your clients, your coaching clients, You there’s a gift. Once you go inside, right? There’s a gift option. You can buy it for your clients. So go buy it for your three coaching clients or your five coaching clients, Jennifer Bourne, who runs PPP, which is a whole community around running their digital agency. She signed up for a subscription. And then she gave it to all her people, right? So 20 people could take it each month or 25 people could take it each month and she had them all take it so that she could know better who they were and she could then start shaping. It’s not just the content itself, though, that the language you use is going to likely be more aligned to one or two dimensions. But then what are the other components of your offering that, Connect to something else, right? Influencers love having impact. If I give you a bunch of it’s all about me, it’s all about me, it’s all about me self discovery worksheets, eventually you’re going to be like, I’m tired of just navel gazing and looking at me all the time. I care about looking out. I want to care about, serving my community. You better give them an assignment that goes in that direction because if they do, if you do this all the time and you’re thinking, but I love to be aware of myself and my stuff. And you’re like, yes, Mr. Lerner, but Mr. Influencer wants to make an impact on the outside world. And if you don’t get him focused outside a little bit, he’s going to quit your program because he’s going to put you in a camp that says all you do is think about yourself. You don’t care about impact. So I’m going to go somewhere else. And you’re like, whoa, stop. I totally care about impact. So how do I create. A component of my offering that really lights you up. Or if influencer is one of your main players, or if relators when your main players are optimized, when your main players, how do I change the language in my lesson? To hit them more. What you’ll discover is most of us when we’re course creating and we’re recording lessons, we’re just choosing illustrations that come to mind, top of head, right? Or top of head when you were writing your script, if you write scripts all of those are just your defaults. So of course, all your stories are going to line up with things that would work for you. That doesn’t mean it worked for everyone else. So once we expose you to all eight dimensions and we teach you about it, of course, our goal is to help you be able to create content in different ways. And we’ll show you, look, just doing this can shift. A driver article to be an influencer article or a learner article or what have you, right? Or you may go, oh, lesson one is really more driver oriented, but lesson two is all going to be about influencer and impact, right? And so you can weave different lessons in the course of a project so that everybody’s feeling connected to some assign. Now I like lesson three and the other guy’s I like lesson four. And you’re like, of course you do, because you’re this and you’re that. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Tell us how what somebody should do if they want to get M code for themselves and for their team. And once they get into it, how to best get the most value out of it. Yeah. Chris Lema: Okay. So number one, you go to motivation code. com and you buy the light version. If you want to spend 79 by the premium version, it’ll give you way more in the report. But if you’re just getting started and you want to try it. Buy the 19 one. It doesn’t stop you after you’ve gotten the report on the other end and then you get more excited. It doesn’t stop you from upgrading that 19 paying the additional 60 bucks and getting the premium report accessible to you. Once you’ve done your report then you go to in the, my products, there’s a gift section and you buy. Let’s say your team is seven more people, you buy seven more lights and that’s 19 bucks a pop. You buy the seven and then you go into, you get the link right for each one of these and you send it to each person and let them take it. And when they take it right, they’re going to be like, Oh my gosh, did you know that do you know that? So it’s super awesome. Yeah. Also we have in that same catalog, right? So it’s all product led growth. It’s all inside the SAS. When you go into the, my products, just like you were able to buy the the light one or, the or the premium as a gift, you can also buy a 90 minute impact session. And If you have already bought the light and then you upgraded to the premium and you read the full premium report and you’re like, Oh my God, this is blowing my mind is amazing. I want to talk with someone about this. I want to talk to a certified coach who can help me explore this and go deeper with it. Then you have the ability to buy a 90 minute impact session. And that is awesome. You will thank me forever for that 90 minutes because it’s phenomenal, but then you go, Hey, wait, my whole team took M code. How do I get someone right? And a certified trainer, how do I get them involved in doing a team training and the team training is 3, 500 bucks, it’ll pull your whole team together. And and it will even create some dynamic slides that show you the nuances between your team, right? Which becomes really enlightening. Now, I will say this. If you go the 19 route and you buy the 9 gift for your team, and then you buy the team one, you buy a team, it’s 3, 500, whatever. If you’re thinking about buying the 79 premium version, Don’t go that route instead go straight to the team edition Because the team edition when you pay the 3500 for the team session You’ll also be able to buy the premium report for 49 So you get a discount, right? And so you’re like, yeah I’ll buy the team thing and what you get is a certified executive coach who meets with your whole team and covers not only a little bit of the inside work, but also covers the Outside and the cross connects, right? So it’ll show you, Hey, you have a team and this is what we’re seeing in your team. And also here are some blind spots or some little issues, or here’s some predictive stories that might. I have literally walked into a room and said so let me guess you have an affiliate program and it’s not working well. And the CEO is looking at his executive team going, okay, who spilled the beans? Who told him this? And I’m like no I I, no one, you can stop looking around, right? Just look at me. Nobody told me that you guys were struggling. You have an entire marketing department and they’re all this big. Motivational dimension instead of this, what I should have seen is this. And this, what I saw was this, here’s how that manifests itself. This, and this are likely problems. And they’re like. Oh my God, that’s exact. I’m like, that’s what happens when your marketers are drivers, right? Like they’re just going to go off a checklist. You haven’t had a new item added to that checklist in forever. And they’re like, yeah, you’re right. I go, because that’s not what they’re going to do. They’re not going to come up with new stuff. So you’re going to need an influencer or later. You’re going to need some of these other people to come in. And that’s how you get the most of it. It all starts at motivation code. com. It starts with a 19 assessment, but it can be, you can buy a lot more and it’s all there ready to help you make most use of all this stuff. Chris Badgett: Chris, this has been amazing. Thank you for coming on the show. This is such great work and it has such big potential for individuals and teams and really the world. It’s very cool. Thank you. Thanks for coming on the show. Chris Lema: Thank you for having me. Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post Discover the Hidden Forces That Drive Your Best Work With Chris Lema and MotivationCode appeared first on LMScast.