Setting Our Business Goals For 2023
James Sowers
00:00:0000:00:24
Um hey, John. Welcome back to another working session, man. Looking forward to catching up. I know we took last week off. We were both traveling, although in opposite directions, as it seems. But it sounds like it was a good trip for both of us. So glad to be back behind the microphone and catching up. And I know we've got a great icebreaker lined up, the same one that everybody's talking about. But before we get into that, how have you been for the last week or so since I've talked to you last?
John Doherty
00:00:2400:01:03
Yeah, what's up, man? I am doing well. Had a great trip to New York City with my wife. Got to meet up with some friends from the SEO and digital marketing industry. And, yeah, life is good. I mean, it's busy. It's super busy. I calculated yesterday that I have four nights left in my bed here in Denver through December, through January 3. So heading into a bunch of travel I don't know, six of those nights are in my bed up in the mountains. But still, I have four more days in Denver in the rest of this year and into the start of next year. So things are busy. But it's been a good year and kind of winding down a little bit and starting to really think ahead of 2023. So that period in the year yeah.
James Sowers
00:01:0300:01:23
I forget the name of the app. I'll have to put it in the show notes because I can't think of it off the top of my head. But it's a progress meter that goes in your Mac menu bar. You could set it to anything. You could have an income goal or something like that. And I just set it to the year. I used to have it, too, do my lifespan. So I took, like, the average lifespan of a male that's my size and my BMI or whatever, and I put it in there. And my wife's like, that's pretty morbid. When she learned about it, she's like, that's pretty morbid.
John Doherty
00:01:2300:01:24
It's a little dark. Yeah.
James Sowers
00:01:2500:01:26
So I was like, you know what?
John Doherty
00:01:2600:01:26
We'll change it.
James Sowers
00:01:2600:01:55
And so the year progress meter. But I will say, though, man, when you have it up there, it's just that visual reminder, and you see that every couple of weeks to go by, a few percentage points tick off. It's kind of crazy. And it does kind of feel like kids accelerate these timelines and stuff, too, whether not actual, of course, but the perceived speed at which time passes happens more when you've got kids and you're busy. So it does kind of feel like we just flipped the calendar a few weeks ago, and now we're getting ready to do it again. So yeah, I don't know, man. Time flies when you're having fun, but it keeps life interesting, too.
John Doherty
00:01:5500:02:26
I'm into Stoicism and Stoic philosophy. And there's I think it's from Marcus Aurelius. The idea of memento mori right one day you will die. And keeping that in mind, it can be morbid, but it's also just reality. One day, yes, we will die, as they say in Frozen as well. I mean, I have a daughter, right, but he just reminds us of make every day count. And it's like, you don't get health, you don't get all that stuff forever, so don't put things off until later. Like actually make them count now. So I think it's a good reminder, but I'm also ready to flip the calendar to 2023.
James Sowers
00:02:2600:04:03
Yeah, I get it. I actually have a little metal bracelet here. Don't know if you could see it on the camera, but it has memento mori on the inside, or at least it used to. It's probably rubbed raw now from all the wear and tear. But yeah, it's a pretty compelling reminder for me, just like, don't be anxious about it. But it's a fact of life, right, is that it ends at some point and you don't really know when that point is. So make the most out of the time you have, just like you said. I get it. So, look, we got a great episode lined up here. We're going to do all the normal updates, but we've got an icebreaker. And then at the very end, I think we're going to touch on some of our goals for these projects for next year. Talk about flipping the calendar over and new beginnings and all that. What are our goals? And now that we have a pretty good sense of where we're going to end up at the end of 2022, what does 2023 hold? So before we get into that, let's talk about Chat GPT. Everybody's talking about it. I feel like every time I fire up a new podcast or open my inbox, there's a new newsletter or a YouTube video or something like that, and everybody has an opinion on it, which is how these things tend to work. To your point, earlier we were talking about behind the mic, so to speak, when there's a big hype cycle and everybody seems to be going one direction, it's kind of my tendency to go the other way. And it sounds like that's the case for you, too. But really I think it's more like I like to pause and give some breathing room before I form an opinion about these things. Because it's really easy to get caught up in the hype, and if the hype is overly positive, it's easy to latch onto that. If the hype is overly negative, like some of the news about the economy right now, it's easy to latch onto that. And then you kind of get this snowball effect going. So I don't know what's been your exposure here. I'm particularly interested in your opinion because you've worked in content in the past in the SEO industry. You're working in content now through Editor Ninja, of course. So it does seem kind of directly angled at the nature of your work, so to speak. So why don't you kick things off? What are your reactions here?
John Doherty
00:04:0300:07:04
Yeah, I'm the same as you in that when something is super hyped and everyone's talking about it, I get skeptical. But the difference between a lot of that stuff and this is usually a lot of the other stuff, like crypto and whatever, it's so just like ethereal and people are just kind of being pundits and thought leaders. But to actually see what it's going to be is going to be like three to five to seven years, and you can't really play with it. Right. The thing for me was because I saw it and I was like, I went to being initially skeptical and then I'm like, wait, I should actually check this thing out. So got an OpenAI account and I logged in and I was seeing people kind of doing stuff and giving it prompts. And then I started giving it prompts and I was just like, oh, wow, this is big. This is going to change the game. When it comes to creating content not in the it's going to remove the need for a human. It's like we're getting a bunch of questions editor ninja about, can you edit content produced by AI? Yes, but we're also asking that it also be looked at by a writer, someone internally subject matter expert. We're not going to go and add in write stories. We had someone be like, can you craft a brand narrative for us around this piece written by AI? And I'm like, no, we don't know your brand. Right. But if someone takes it and they put in the statistics and they create a narrative around it and a story and that sort of stuff, yes, we can absolutely edit it. But I think some people are looking at it as like, oh, I can create all this content for free, then just pay an editor to clean it up. It's like, well, you actually need a human to look at it that knows what they're talking about. But I do think there are going to be some cool use cases. I could see it automating proofreading, for example, some sort of formatted style guide or something like that. These are all the things that we're looking for. There's a ton of voice we're looking for that gets more into, like, copy editing, but with proofreading. It's oxford. Comma. Yes. No, yes. We use oxford. Commas, all this sort of stuff, and it can probably just take care of it right. With grammarly right now, you can do it, but it requires a human to click through and to have that knowledge right about what needs to be where versus this. I think there's very good potential. I actually want to try it out. I want to take something that has been written and be like, hey, can you proofread and correct this piece for MLA? Format and see what it does. Because if it can already do that, that's really powerful. I think what this stuff is going to do is actually eliminate, I hate to put it this way, but the lower skilled work, right? Anyone with a halfway decent English education can proofread a document, right? So I think this is actually going to eliminate a lot of that. And it's going to create a place for highly skilled, like the true professionals of the space to actually do even better work, because you don't have to then go and write all the kind of filler stuff that you kind of have to have in content. AI can take care of that for you, and then you can focus on making it really good. So that's my take. I'm actually super excited about it. I think there's some use cases directly for my companies and for editor and just specifically and what it's going to enable us to do. But what's your take on it? I mean, if you're skeptical like I am, where are you sitting with it?
James Sowers
00:07:0400:09:56
I think it's pretty similar ultimately. I mean, I've played around with some of the previous AI tools before Chat GPT like Jarvis and some of that. And my takeaway from those is this is pretty good. But it seemed to be highly dependent on the quality of the input. If you don't ask the right question, you don't get the right answer. And so I walked away from that experience saying, okay, this isn't replacing jobs anytime soon because you're going to have a new job. It's going to be called AI Wrangler. And I think I might have even tweeted this out. I can't wait for AI Wrangler to join the likes of Marketing Maven and SEO Ninja. It's going to be the Silicon Valley. That's the new role that you're hiring for. So that was the case then. And now that I see Chat GPT come through, I do think it is, from what little I've played around with it, it's a better experience and it seems to do a better job of taking maybe not the greatest input and still producing a pretty decent product out the other end. I've also played around with some of the AI graphic generating tools, and if you don't write those descriptions just right, you get a really messy looking image out the back end that just doesn't make any sense and is basically unusable. So I think there are some limitations still. I think it's pretty indisputable, at least in my mind, that this is a step change as a technology. So it's kind of like the cell phone or something like that, self driving cars. I do think this is a step change and we're not going to go back to life before this, so I think that's pretty indisputable. But for the folks who are jumping to writers are going to lose their jobs. I don't think we're there yet because the fact of the matter is some of the output is pretty bland. It doesn't have much of a personality or much of a tone of voice and to some degree even an opinion, especially in knowledge where we want to take a stance. We don't want to sit on the fence, right? We're either for something or against something. Because if you just sit on the fence, you don't really identify or you don't really engage with either side of that debate. Well, these machines seem to sit on the fence in a lot of ways, and so there's a lot of content out there right now that's written by humans. It doesn't have a very strong point of view or a great voice either. So I don't think that's anything new. But I think your point about, hey, this doesn't necessarily destroy jobs, and if it does, it probably destroys jobs that maybe shouldn't have been doing anyway because they're pretty low value, and we can level those people up. We can give them additional training so they can input higher up the food chain, so to speak, and have more value and also have a better experience. Because a lot of the stuff that AI will take over, I think, is going to be that tedious first draft word vomit. Get something on the page, give me some kind of structure. The human injection comes in and says, this is great. This is conceptually or directionally correct, but what's our perspective on this? What unique data do we have to layer into us? What experiences can I share that really hammer this home? I don't think that's going away anytime soon. The same way that Tesla having self driving cars hasn't replaced the shipping and logistics industry yet, right? Like, we might get there there, but we're not there yet. So I don't know. That's kind of my take is that it's a step change technologically. It's definitely going to shake up the world. Is this the exact tool to do it? I don't know. How long is that going to take? I don't know, but I think the folks who are just kind of run around like chickens with their heads cut off saying, we're going to lose our jobs. All these people are going to be out of a job. I don't know if I would jump to that conclusion because we've had this in other areas of the world, and it hasn't manifested that way.
John Doherty
00:09:5600:11:49
Yeah, I'm with you. I think I agree with all of that. It's a lockstep change. Is it going to kill Google? No. Could certain applications of it threaten Google? Right? Or will Google buy them? That kind of thing. There are some very good ask it a question, get an answer sort of thing. Of course, there's a lot of ethical concerns and such in there which those conversations should be had. But I'm not going to jump to saying that this shouldn't have been released because the questions weren't dealt with enough, or something like that, which I'm seeing. Some of those takes I'm like, I don't agree, but we should also have a conversation about it. If I should agree. I think it's all open to conversation at this point. Will it be this specifically? I don't know. What will people build off of it? It'll be cool to see, but it's the first thing in a long time that I'm like, oh, this could be big, and it could actually change how the world works or how we do our jobs, which is great. As a writer, I do not feel threatened at all. It can produce a really shitty first draft, let's say, of something, right? If it can get all of that in there, and then if you can layer in the SEO elements as well, right, the stuff that you need to have and tell me the headings and all that, and it can spit all of that out, and then I can go in and edit it deeply for a lot of content. I'm okay with that. But you also don't have to use it for all of your content, right? I can still do all my thought leadership stuff that I write from scratch. That's totally fine. But if I'm cranking out, I have 50 blog posts to specific keywords that I need to put out for a site. If it gets there and is good enough, heck yeah, I'm going to use this to produce the first draft of that. So I'm excited about it. I don't know how I'm going to apply it right beyond what I just said, but I think there are some applications that could be done with it. There's a Zapier integration. Now, could I use it to create an outline and then Zapier pushes it into Chat Gbt and then it gets populated within WordPress for me? Whoa, that's going to save me a bunch of time.
James Sowers
00:11:5000:13:23
Yeah, I think I could summarize my opinion, at least. I'm fully bought into the what it's, the how that's a little bit more ambiguous for me, like how it's going to be used. Because to your point, if I could set up a Zap, where every time I publish a new blog post, chat GPT automatically summarize is that material into four paragraphs or less that I can use for my newsletter, that saves me a ton of time, and I think the risk associated with that is very low. Or if it automatically generates a few subject lines or some ad copy or whatever based on that raw material, I think that's fine. What concerns me a little bit is I'm hearing from a lot of folks who are like, oh, I can ten x my content marketing function here just by doing fully AI generated content, and I can do content at scale. And I'm not telling people not to do that, but what I'm saying is we don't know what the organic search impact of that might be now midterm or long term. So it feels a bit like a gold rush to me in that regard, where, yeah, there are huge advantages to being the first mover. If it shakes out like you hope, but if it doesn't shake out like you hope and you go whole hog into it, right now, you could find yourself with 300 new articles written by AI generated content machines that get penalized, right? And then you're feeling the negative impacts of that because you tried to hit the easy button. So I think that generally trying to get a shortcut usually doesn't pay out in your favor over the long term. You might get short term gains or whatever, but if something feels too good to be true, it usually is. And I'm hoping that's not the case here, but it definitely could be. So the folks who are jumping in headfirst and really starting to kind of use this broadly across their business for important things like organic search traffic and increasing, that I just worry for them, but I could totally be wrong. But that's kind of my hesitation in that how it's being used piece.
John Doherty
00:13:2300:14:03
Yeah. And especially when someone does it and they don't look at it and they don't think critically about it right. And have a human actually look at it, I think that's where people are going to get into trouble. But if you use it to kind of expedite it and take care of that initial mile of a ten K race or something, that's great. If you start at mile one on a ten K race and someone else is starting at mile zero and you're the same speed, you're going to finish eight to ten minutes faster than them. Right. I mean, literally talking about a race, but I think it's going to enable us to do more good stuff. Not just more stuff, but if you use it right, more really good, really good stuff, which could even expedite business results. So that's cool. I'm all about that.
James Sowers
00:14:0400:15:42
Yeah, that's a great point. As long as you're using it responsibly and not putting stuff on autopilot, I think you'd be fine. The last thing I'll say about this is I think it will maybe not for another three, five, maybe even ten years, but I think there will be a change in consumer preferences where when something has been guaranteed or proven to come directly from a person, it will be more valuable than something that has not been proven to come from a person. What I mean by that is we already have trouble with people just copying and pasting templates for LinkedIn posts, for tweets and stuff like that. You have these big libraries of posts that have proven to go viral in a certain format and people aren't tweaking those at all. They're literally just copy and pasting the same top ten. Excel Secret, microsoft Excel Secrets you didn't know about, but you should like, they're pasting that and people are just starting to call it out publicly and that feels bad. Right? I have had people DM me and I was like, yeah, just send me your new content. I like your content, send it to me as a DM, that's fine. And if I like it, I'll boost it. Well, then I found out that a virtual distance just doing that for them, and it's not even them. I did this because of our personal relationship and when I reply in a non standard way and I get a templated response, that doesn't feel great. So I think that will be the case in the future, is you have these influencers in whatever niche. And if they're known for how they think, I think that when they're on camera, when they're behind the microphone, when there's a higher level of confidence that that thought is coming directly from that person, I think that will be valued more in the future than something that could have potentially been generated based off of any of these AI tools. Whether it's the deep fake video ones, the voiceover ones, the chat GPT, any format, I don't know. I just think as a consumer, it's similar to how organic is preferred over non organic food. It'll be straight from the human versus potentially not straight from the human.
John Doherty
00:15:4300:15:50
Yeah, totally. No, I agree with all of that though. To some point, people aren't really going to know, right?
James Sowers
00:15:5000:15:51
Yeah, that's right.
John Doherty
00:15:5100:15:59
If it gets good enough, they're not going to know. So it could technically still be you because it learned off of you. I mean, it gets all sorts of interesting ethical questions. Right?
James Sowers
00:15:5900:16:00
Right. Yeah.
John Doherty
00:16:0000:16:01
I don't know.
James Sowers
00:16:0100:16:07
It's going to be gets a little Dystopian real quick. Right? We went from morbid to Dystopian and yeah, it's going to be a hell of an episode.
John Doherty
00:16:0800:16:12
That's right. Here we go. Buckle up, folks. Okay, cool.
James Sowers
00:16:1200:16:19
Well, let's get into the Editor Ninja updates and then maybe I'll do the castaway ones and then maybe we can get into goals for both projects going forward.
John Doherty
00:16:1900:20:55
Yeah, so, I mean, it's an interesting time of year right now because I feel like people are kind of holding off on subscribing because they're like, well, we're going on vacation for a week and a half, right? Because I think a lot of people, at least in our space, take basically Christmas through New Year's off, and agencies do especially, and those are our best customers. So stuff has been a little slower on the sales side, but I do still have a couple more sales calls through the end of this year, actually just over the next few working days because I'm taking some time off around the holidays as well. But I've made some interesting changes recently or just realized some things I'll just kind of go through in like a bullet point sort of format. First of all, I was talking to someone recently in my Mastermind through Microcomp and they're like, why don't you offer a two week free trial to someone that wants to get going, but they're holding off in till the new year? And I'm like, I get that and I think it could work in certain times for certain people. But I also don't have any prospects. Straight up told me that they're waiting until the new year. Right? I think everyone is just really busy trying to finish up the year and so they're not actually ready to sign up right now if it was January 4, right? So actually offering that wouldn't be the thing to do. So I kind of feel like I'm a little bit stuck on can I actually get anyone new subscribing before the end of the year? But there are two big things that I've learned recently, James. One is who our kind of ideal customer is, or who our ideal prospect is. And then also some pricing and packaging changes, which I know we talk about all the time. But the first one is and I think I talked about this a few months ago, but I've just become fully convinced of this because I've had some calls with people recently where they're just get to know you. Calls or people have known the industry for a long time and they're like, well, no, I'm looking at your site. I'm realizing that we actually need you because we have 30 to 40 pieces of content sitting in the backlog that this person who's the director of marketing or director of content or something doesn't have time to edit themselves. And so I'm really realizing that our ideal customer, I've very much narrowed down our persona and I did this after reading and listening to and fully taking notes on the entirety of 100 million Dollar offers by Alex Hormozi on my flight to and from New York, 52 pages of notes on this book. One thing I realized was it really got me to narrow down who our customer is or who the buyer is. And it's not like directors of marketing, it's directors of content marketing or if it's director of marketing, but content is their main thing and is that person's thing, fine. But they could also just be a director of content or operations people at agencies, not necessarily the owner of a micro agency because they don't value their time, but an operations person that they're trying to scale and they're trying to get the right people in place, right. They're not just trying to do it themselves, they're actually trying to hire for these things. And it makes more sense to hire us than to hire a full time editor or even freelancers who might ghost and be unreliable and they have to build their own systems for It and production systems and all of that. So that was an interesting learning that I'm going to be applying a lot more because right now I kind of talk about content teams, but I should probably talk about content managers or directors of content because directors of content also have the budget and they can make the choice, right? And at like a BSAs company that's investing in content, they might have a director of content with two writers, but they have budget. So that was an interesting realization. He asked his framework, who is the person? And then there's three or four questions that you ask yourself. I'm actually going to find it right now just because it was actually really enlightening for me. The way the grid works is who is the person, right? Do they have the pain? Do they feel the pain themselves? Do they have the buy in? And then are they easy to target? Can we target them? So the ones that I put, for example, are bloggers, agencies, directors of marketing, directors of content, sales teams, content managers and ESL companies that are marketing in English, but they're writing it overseas. And basically the only two that ended up having all three were like, they have the pain themselves, they feel the pain, they have the budget or have the buying power is what it is. And then the target are agencies and directors of content. Like, director of marketing might not have the pain. They might be hearing the pain from their team, but they don't have the pain themselves. So they're going to deprioritize it, right? Bloggers, for example, they don't really have the pain of scaling content because they're much more like the thought leadership and that sort of stuff. A publisher, like a smart passive income might, right? Individual bloggers don't have the buying power, right? They're cash poor, time rich, but we could target them, right? So it's one of three. So not an ideal person to kind of go after. So that was really fascinating for me to see and it just increasingly showed me who to be marketing towards in 2023, which would be cool.
James Sowers
00:20:5500:23:26
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. One thing I wanted to share is the nice thing about still having a day job is I get both sides. I get perspective from both sides of the relationship. So I have kind of that client view and I also have the service provider view. And from the client view, as somebody who was recently director of marketing and now head of the ventures but still in charge of a lot of the marketing stuff for those ventures, I can tell you end of year, just surface level. What's being asked for me is prepare your budget for next year. By the way, that needs approval. Travel across the country for this annual planning session so that we can set objectives for the company at large, right? By the way, we take an entire week off between Christmas and New Year as a company to just have a break and be with our families. And there's. Like tying up a bunch of loose ends. So those demands of time. If you asked me to be an Editor Ninja customer right now, a free trial would not entice me because all I hear is, you know, that big backlog that I already have, I have to organize that in some way and give Editor Ninja what they need pretty quickly to take advantage of that two week trial. And I just don't have time for that in this part of the calendar with everything else that's being required of me. That's deadline driven and you got the holidays looming and stuff like that. So I think that point is like hiring an agency or outsourcing to anybody really is great, but it does take more time up front in exchange for recapturing more time later. And so I think that's spot on. I don't think the trial is going to move the needle right now as an end of year thing kick off next year maybe, right? Maybe if you have a line item in your content marketing budget for editing or distribution or something along those lines, I'll give you a trial now so that you can ease into things and you don't have to pay right out of the gate. And then I thought of an interesting graphic that came to mind. So I don't know if you remember the base camp homepage where they had this person with their hair literally on fire and there was like a ringing phone and a stack of papers and all these things they were trying to juggle. And it was like before base camp and then after base camp they were in a Buddha pose or something like that. And there's just like Zen and Peace and they have like a single source of truth, right? Yeah, I thought about that for Editor Ninja. This image came to my mind of this big stack of documents that still needs review and somebody's just stressed out. Like they're looking at one and they're trying to go through it with a fine tooth comb and they're just kind of stressed out. And then on the other side, the stack of documents has move to the outbox, right? If you think about a desk, you have the inbox that's waiting for your attention. You have the outbox that's done and ready to go wherever it's going next. And they're just putting the little stamp of approval on it. It's just a quick little looks good, looks good, looks good. So I'm not saying you have to use that, but that's kind of the pain and the dream. The pain is are you staring at a big backlog of content that is just waiting on you to get it out the door? Probably doesn't feel great, right? But you know the thing that unlocks that and gets you to this future state where you're basically just the last look and pass it to somebody else to publish that's Editor Ninja and that kind of closes the gap between those two.
John Doherty
00:23:2600:26:58
Yeah, I was thinking today, actually about some of those use cases that people have. And so I could say these are the common use cases. Why we see people sign up for Editor Ninja. They have a backlog of content that they want to get to, but they don't have time to get to, and they keep telling themselves they're going to get to it and they never quite get to it. And then they realize that they're actually costing themselves a lot of money by not actually having this content published, but they don't want to publish it before it's edited. Right. Obviously that's a lot of words, but have a backlog of content that you keep telling yourself you're going to get to and you never do. Your editor leaves and you can't have content not edited going back to your customers or going live on your site, that sort of thing. Kind of outlining three or four of those. But I do like the idea of the visual of to do list, edit 40 articles, right? And it's like sitting there at the top, do two Trello boards. It's like old to do list, edit all this content, do X, Y, and Z. And new to do list is you have a third of those to do because you just outsourced everything to us. Something like that, that's kind of going to grab the audience. So, yeah, I like it. I appreciate the insight. And then I think just the final thing that I kind of the final update to give. We've been talking on Slack and whatever about pricing and packaging and that sort of stuff, but I'm not really prepared to dig into that. But that did come out of the at least like live on the pod until I know whether it worked or not. So I'll update on it as I roll it out and start testing it. But the other thing is, with 2023 planning or just looking forward to kind of where we want to go, I'm just increasingly realizing the value of a deep bench of editors. We're super fortunate in that we don't have editors wanting to work with us, if anything, if we have too many. And I'm very much trying to not let them pressure and ask for like, hey, do you have more work? We have work as we have work and we assign work as we assign work. Actually, if you go asking for more work, it's going to make me want to send you less work because I know you're just going to keep asking for more. And that's just going to be stressful to me. So kind of building the business that I want. But I had a situation recently where an editor did a great job on their test project, and then when they actually got into working on customer stuff, they just didn't do a great job. They just didn't go deep. And I was like, Are you just using grammarly for this and clicking yes on a bunch of things but not actually editing? And we gave them a bunch of feedback and did it in a very nice way and all of this and then basically, long story short, my managing editor and I had decided that we were going to basically give them one more try, right? And the next time we had to talk with them about it, the same feedback, because they hadn't taken the same feedback into account, we're basically going to have to just cut ties. And the person went ahead and resigned. And I was like, that's interesting. I mean, we gave feedback in very good ways. I think they just decided it wasn't a good fit for them anymore, which is totally fine, 100% their prerogative. But they've been working on kind of a niche project for us, a niche customer. And I was really glad that I had someone that I could basically just say, like, hey, things have moved around. Do you want to edit all of this stuff for this customer? The other person was like, yeah, absolutely. And that person's great. So just really realizing that, oh, wow. We do actually need to have a deeper bench than I've been kind of running with the pipeline that we have. If two of those customers sign up, we're like at capacity. So we actually do need to kind of staff up a bit, especially if we're going to five X in 2023. We're going to have 2025 editors at that point. So I need to start getting people lined up because expect January, February, just like you said, there's going to be pin up demand. All these people that have been putting it off because they're like, well, I'm going into vacation and I'm getting my budget approved and all this stuff. I expect a bunch of those just to sign on. And we need to be able to handle it right so I can sell them in confidently. Yeah, just the knocks we take and the lessons we learn.
James Sowers
00:26:5800:28:50
Yeah, that's interesting. I've had that happen with writers. I follow them on Twitter for a really long time, maybe work with them on a project here and there. It's all good. And then I join an agency, have a bigger budget. I can afford to hire them because they're some of the best writers that found whatever I bring them on. And the work product is just not that great. And I'm like, hey, what gives? I've worked with you in the past. Is something going on and comes out that they were subcontracting? And I'm like that's. Fine. Because I think what happens is you start writing, you get really good. You start to get those case studies and testimonials. You get better clients that pay you more. And you can do that to a certain point, but then there's kind of a ceiling on how much people are willing to pay for an article for the most part. So if you want to keep making money beyond that, you either need to work more hours or sell products or something like that or start turning into kind of a micro agency and subcontract your work to other writers. The problem is when you don't protect time to oversee that and maintain the quality assurance. And that's where I've had things fall apart. So I've definitely had those misaligned expectations. Everything was great for a long time and then for whatever reason, whether it's automation, trying to use a tool like grammarly or subcontracting and not quality assuring the end product there just kind of falls out. That's unfortunate. I mean, I think for Castaway what I'm trying to do is a little bit of both. It's like, hey, can I keep this bench of freelancers on call for kind of like to flex up and down based on demand? But then there is some kind of triggering point where it's like, okay, we're going to switch off this freelancer and we're going to hire basically a close to full time person, 30 hours a week or whatever, a dedicated editor for this client because whatever it is, they've been here for six months. We think they're going to stick around or we reach some kind of workload capacity type of thing for the internal team, whatever. But I'm trying to do a little bit of both. So the freelancers help us kind of ebb and flow with demand and then once we hit some kind of volume increase that feels like it's going to be sticky and not necessarily drop off, that's when we hire against it. So I'm trying to balance it that way, but that doesn't make it the right answer for everybody.
John Doherty
00:28:5000:29:13
Yeah, I think just kind of the virtue of the project sizes and that kind of thing kind of necessitates sometimes different approaches, but it's a good approach, good approach to hear just multiple ways to do it right. Yeah, that's what's going on with me. Let's get into your update and then let's reserve a little time for 2023 stuff. Just at least manifest state what we're looking to do in the next year.
James Sowers
00:29:1300:34:46
Yeah, for sure. So the Castaway update is pretty straightforward. Similar to you, things are kind of in maintenance mode for the rest of the year. Leads are kind of slowing down and I'm not really mad about it. To your point. You've got travel going, I've got family stuff starting to really ramp up here at the end of the year. Just like visiting all the cousins and everything like that. And everybody wants to have their own hosted party and whatever. So I think it's good. I think it's a healthy forcing function to just slow down a little bit and appreciate the year that was and then kind of cleanse the palette as you head into the new year. So that's going on and then I did kind of pick up this personal brand offering. Again, I forget what the triggering event was there, but I think it might have been tied to Chat GPT even, is like, yeah, if you haven't been publishing consistently, it's never been easier. Just throw something into Chat GPT and say, write me a LinkedIn post about productized services and then copy what gets put out and post it on the LinkedIn and see what happens. And I think I was just, yeah, sure, that might work. But that's not your voice, you know what I mean? That's any more than just copying something out of a magazine or from somebody else's newsletter is your voice. So I think that set me off and I just wanted to kind of cast a line out there, so to speak, into the market and see if people are still interested in this. And I got three or four folks come back to me and they said, let me see a sales page. And in true James fashion, move fast and break things. Like, I didn't have a sales page. I had a Google Doc, though, which is one of my favorite things to do is just sell off of a Google Doc because if you could sell out of that, you could sell out anything. So positive initial feedback on that, but hopefully they'll get back to me with something more definitive. But I think it's one of those things. Let me just sit with this for the next week or two, maybe even through the end of the year, and then I'll pick it back up with you next year. So hoping that that will formalize itself kind of in the first quarter. So my day job takes a full week off between Christmas and New Year, and I've decided I'm going to leverage that time to get the whole ala carte or self service angle of creating podcast assets with castaway. I'm just going to flip the switch on that. So I'm going to set up all the wiring so that people can buy. Just convert this podcast to a blog post, just convert this podcast to video clips, just convert this podcast to a Twitter thread, whatever. I'm going to set all that up and make it self service over that week long break so that when January comes, that's turned on and any traffic that's hitting the site or I'm directing at the site has that as a purchasing option because I think it could be a big revenue stream for us. Yeah, cool. So let's see that's the castaway stuff and then productize. I wanted to do a quick retro on the Black Friday offer. I think I teased it last time that we had done something like $5,000 in revenue. We were halfway through or something like that. So just a real quick retro in case it's interesting to anybody because I got a little creative with this one. I was just feeling froggy and I didn't want to do just a straight discount on the course. So I tried something a little different just to see what work. That's the beauty of working for yourself is you can do this kind of stuff because there's no approval chain, right? So it's like, yeah, let's try it out. So I did do a 40% discount on the productized course, which is the flagship offering that brought it from about $500 down to 300. That's what has historically been done year in and year out. I also layered on two coaching packages. So you could do asynchronous coaching with zip message, or you could do real time calls through Zoom or something like that. I did a discount on those and then I did a website audit, a conversion focus website audit, and then finally I did a lifetime membership. So that was $800 for the course, the community coaching, an audit and free or early access to exclusive material. So if that sounds like a lot, that's because it is. But what I did was I kind of segmented the emails. So if in the first email where I presented everything, you showed interest by clicking on a link in any one of those, you've got kind of a follow up sequence relevant to that service, so you got some social proof relevant to that service or story or something like that. So, yeah, that was kind of the offer. What ended up happening, we did just shy of $11,000 in revenue, which exceeded my most optimistic forecast. I think they did 6000 last year. I thought if I got two or three this year, that would be kind of a gift considering that audience has been largely neglected for the better part of a year. So I'll call that a big win. It's about 90% course sales and 10% coaching sales. Nobody bought an audit and nobody bought the lifetime membership. So what we learned here, I think the offer matters, right? We know that 100 million dollar offers exist for a reason. The offer makes a big deal. But what I learned there more tactically is you can get creative but don't overcomplicate it. Right? I think the multiple offerings definitely overwhelm people. Pretty much everybody bought the course anyway, so it's simple scales, fancy fails. It's another hormonesm. I think that was a lesson learned. A lot of people like to say more email equals more revenue, but I don't think that's true. I'm actually against that. I think that does more to harm your reputation than it's worth in terms of revenue gained. But I think if you have more targeted email, more relevant email segmented based on interests, that can equal more revenue because there's more relevance there and people are more likely to take action because you're speaking directly to them instead of just broadcasting it to everyone. And then I had responsiveness as a superpower, so my differentiator compared to other influencers is it's just me and I can be hyper responsive and available during these things. Whereas like maybe a Pat Flynn or Justin Welsh or somebody with audience of hundreds of thousands of people can't reply to every single email they get with questions about the course or is this the right fit for me, that kind of thing. I just tried to stay on top of my inbox that whole time and I know that that directly resulted in at least a handful of sales because I was right there to address objections or answer questions or whatever. And then finally, stories are the best salespeople. So the best performing email I sent out in terms of driving not just traffic to the site but actual purchases as far as I can tell, was my productized success story. So I actually took the course a few years ago, used what I learned there to launch Castaway and to work on some of the stuff that I'm doing at the Good. So it basically landed me a job and helped me create a side business. I just told that story in a very transparent and honest way and that email performed better than any of the other ones. So yeah, stories are the best salespeople. I kind of knew that, but this really hammered it home.
John Doherty
00:34:4600:35:49
And next year you get stories from other people that have done it, right? And then you use those stories in every email that you send and you make even more money. Yeah, that's awesome man, that's awesome. That's a big win. Even a little bit of a cold audience to a point, right? Like new business and I mean A, it shows that you know what you're doing, but also that's a big win. Plus also you increased how much was sold by 40%, plus you could look at it as a fail that no audits were sold, but you learned a lot and so maybe you don't need to offer audits, right? And also you don't have to do any audits now, right? I mean this is the thing about a course, but you could also upsell off the back of the course, like into coaching, that sort of stuff, monthly zoom calls, accountability stuff, whatever, group accountability, that kind of thing. You're stuck like hop on the next call on Tuesday at 03:00 P.m. Eastern time or whatever, where then you can dig in and basically do an audit. But you're just showing up for everybody that's paying to be there. So I think that's a big win man. Congratulations. That's awesome.
James Sowers
00:35:5000:36:10
Thanks. Yeah, I'm counting it that way. Like I said, it exceeded my most optimistic expectations about what could happen. So I'm very pleased with the way that shook out and I'm calling it a little bit of seed capital, right? So anything else I want to do with productized for the next year, I can kind of just reallocate those funds into ads or whatever, freelancers to help me move faster. That kind of thing. So that's a big win. Big win in my world.
John Doherty
00:36:1000:36:11
I love it. Cool.
James Sowers
00:36:1100:36:28
So I think at this point we're ready to shift to next year, right? So that was kind of the last update for 2022. Where do you see things going for Editor Ninja in 2023? I think if I remember correctly, last week you said you're going to hit the six figure goal, right, for revenue, and you hit your million words plus. So two big wins for the Editor Ninja world.
John Doherty
00:36:2800:38:58
I hit the million words and we're at the 100K arr mark. We did not collect 100K in revenue. Things would be about 60, which is great. Big win for the first year. So I'm considering 2022 a win that is for sure next year. What am I going to do? What are my goals next year? I want to collect 250K in cash, but I want to be on a basically 750K arr run rate. So like 60K plus a month by this point next year. So that's like, six X growth. Six ish X Growth and then five X Growth in cash collected. Because obviously this stuff just kind of scales over time. So those are kind of my goals for the business next year. And then basically I want to go to Sponsor speak at least three big content conferences, content Marketing, World Traffic and Conversion, and maybe one other, and just get out there and maybe have a booth and really take that approach because I just need to get in front of a lot of content marketers at this point. And with that, I'm also kind of trying to punch up the level of podcasts and sites and that sort of stuff that I'm on. Just start accessing the bigger audiences because I've got the pedigree, I've got the experience and all of that. And now it's just a matter of actually getting onto those bigger platforms, right? Other people's platforms. And then the third one I want to do is I don't have a specific thing, write a book or something like that, but I want to launch some big marketing initiatives just to really make a splash in the space. Something like Credo's Digital Marketing Pricing Survey, which I first launched in 2016 or 1716, the initial one. And then 17 did in 19, did in 21. We're going to do it again next year. I want to do something like that for Editor Ninja, but maybe even bigger and possibly even something just like video or audio or something like that. I'm pretty tired of the bigger content pieces. They work. And maybe I do need to be doing those because we're a text content editing service and do like really high level stuff. And if it's that, like, have it super well designed and just the best piece of content, I'm talking like backlink levels of content. Invest 1015K into it just to make it incredible. So those are kind of my three goals for next year. I think we'll end up around 20 to 25 editors if we can hit that revenue goal. And my Sandbag goal is 5 million words edited, I think we can do 10 million next year. So that would be a ten X volume growth, which would be incredible.
James Sowers
00:38:5800:39:08
Wow. Yeah, that is pretty incredible. So five X cash collected, ten X volume throughput basically of the kind of the operable service. Wow, man. Big goals.
John Doherty
00:39:0800:39:13
If we ten X edited volume, it will like seven and a half X revenue.
James Sowers
00:39:1400:39:14
I see.
John Doherty
00:39:1500:39:17
Those are the goals. Big goals, man. But we're running at it.
James Sowers
00:39:1800:39:23
Yeah. You might as well aim high, right? Even if they come up short, you're still be in a really good place. That's kind of the way I look at it.
John Doherty
00:39:2300:39:26
You got it? Yeah. What about for you? What about castaway and productize?
James Sowers
00:39:2700:42:23
Yeah. So for castaway, I'm aiming at 150K top line. I just kind of call that cash collected. So I think where we're going to land this year, unless somebody pays for their January kickstart in December, and I just have to recognize that revenue now, then we're going to be at 53 to 55,000. So kind of in the same ballpark that you landed. So I guess that's about three X growth in cash collected next year. And I'd like to keep the margin at 30% or more. And I call that out specifically because I'm still not going to be in a place, or at least I don't plan to be in a place where I'm working in the business full time. So I'm going to have to have some support beyond just delivering the work. I'm forecasting like a virtual assistant, a project manager, something like that, some kind of operations person in there. So I'm kind of accounting for that as well. But I would like to stay profitable because if it's 10% margin, it's probably not worth the headache and I should just mow lawns or something, you know what I mean? Like, at that point, it's like, yeah, I don't know. I'd like to launch at least one new product or service line. It could be that personal branding line and collect the first dollar through that. So that'd be a good way to expand revenue. And then the last point is spending less than half my time that I work on castaway, on logistics or delivery and focusing purely on kind of sales, marketing and where I excel, so getting more help there so that I can do more of the fill the funnel kind of stuff. Then on product ties, we did about 11,000 in revenue just from the Black Friday promotion. So I just kind of thought, I don't have a lot of historical data to go off of. For product ties, I'm like, yeah, what if we just double that next year? So what if we do 25K top line revenue through productize next year? I'm going to do an update to the flagship course because all the videos are still Brian Castle, the founder, and I don't think they have been updated since 2019. So it is overdue and there's just the basic I want to have my face on there now that I'm the new owner. So I'm going to do that and launch an update there. I'd like to also produce one additional course by the end of the year and promote that because I think you can only sell so many unless your audience grows significantly, you can only sell so many copies of product ties to the same audience. So having an additional course on maybe sales fundamentals or negotiations or something like that I think would be helpful. And then, yeah, I just want to get a consistent publishing cadence going here, some kind of content flywheel going, whether that's start with a podcast episode and convert it into a blog post in an email newsletter or the other way around. But I just want to show up consistently and start building the audience and forming those relationships. So that'd be good. And then the last one I had on here was write a book. And that feels like a really big goal compared to the rest of them. But what I'm really trying to communicate there is there are 100 episodes of the productized podcast already in the can. I can take a member of the Castaway team, bundle that together and publish a book of the collective learnings from all those interviews. Right? So there's probably some kind of a physical book, and maybe it's a small one, maybe it's more of a handbook. But through all those conversations, there is enough material in there that I don't have to produce from scratch that I can just repurpose into a physical book and use that as lead generation or sell it as a product, a standalone product, use as a bonus for an offer or something. But I have all that raw material, so it feels reasonable to invest in making that something tangible.
John Doherty
00:42:2300:42:36
I think that's very smart. I had not even considered that. Now that's brilliant. Use what you already have, use those stories, write the book, use it for marketing. And then I bet you could also then find people that are like, wait, can you do this for me? Right.
James Sowers
00:42:3600:42:37
Yeah.
John Doherty
00:42:3700:43:15
I've interviewed 500 people about this thing. Can you take this and turn it into a book? For me, it's just another level, another type of repurposing, which is exactly what Castaway does. So it could be good marketing for product eyes, but productized services are still so niche, I think. But there may be agencies that buy it, right, that are looking to productize more. Right. I'm thinking like the alt agency crowd. But it could be great marketing for Castaway as well, right? If you use Castaway to do it. Right. And the start of the book is this book was put. Together by taking 100 podcast episodes and whatever, repurposing them into this book sort of thing. That's awesome.
James Sowers
00:43:1600:43:29
Yeah. And to bring the conversation full circle, maybe I'll just create transcripts, drop them all in the chat GPT, and say, write me a 10,000 word book based on these interview transcripts about productized services. We'll see what comes out the other end. You never know we're talking.
John Doherty
00:43:3100:43:33
That's right. I love it, man.
James Sowers
00:43:3300:44:00
Cool, man. Well, lofty goals for both of us, I think, and it's good to stretch. So I think maybe the message I'm taking away from this is let's unplug. Let's truly enjoy the last couple of weeks of the year here, year, and focus on things maybe outside of these projects, and then hit the ground running, man. Because if you're going to aim high, you got to get started quickly, right. You can't wait until mid January to kick things off. So at least that's what I'm taking away, is like, I'm going to unplug, I'm going to enjoy it, I'm going to recharge the batteries, and then in January, I'm ready to rock and roll.
John Doherty
00:44:0100:44:17
Yes. Same. I am not good at having downtime, so I think I will probably get started on some of it before the beginning of the year, let's be honest. But 2023 is going to be good. So that's a wrap on 2022, I guess, for working sessions. We'll be back at it next year.
James Sowers
00:44:1700:44:25
Yeah, that's a wrapping. Check us out of working sessions, FM. The first episode of 2023 will drop over there, and we look forward to talking to you then.
