How I Built an $8M Business with 0 Employees | Justin Welsh (Solopreneur)

there's the path of like being very specific and being very viral and generic I am really specific on solo preneurship like we talk about the same stuff every single day all the time right so as you grow your audience the audience that you're growing is specific my first product was $50 if they spend $50 can you deliver $50,000 of value and like set the stage for a deep future relationship for the next decade right you have that option a few years later you could do a core product as your audience grows and maintains specificity right then if you keep growing like me get you know million followers million and a half across a few platforms you can drop your high ticket offer like I did with the Creator MBA because I've been feating the same drum for so long the reverse of that is when you don't have a specific audience when your audience is relatively generic when you're talking about things like just general productivity for example right productivity in and of itself is a thing but there are so many different types of productivity it's it can get so much more Niche than that and so what happens is you might have a harder time as your audience grows we don't think about that and we're creating our content when we're building our Brands we're trying to be entertaining and get the most likes it's like no be that guy be the guy who solves a very specific problem that's painful for a very specific company or person all right well my guest today is the one and only Justin Welsh Justin Ley startup executive role in 2019 after suffering from burnout since then he's made8 billion by help helping creators and entrepreneurs become successful solar preneurs and I've taken his course creator MBA and honestly it's one of the highest Insight per minute courses that I've ever taken so welcome Jon thanks man Peter I appreciate you having me and thanks for the kind words and thanks for being a customer all right so let's go back to

um I think 2018 2019 you know you were the VP of sales at a fast growing startup you had 150 reports or something like that so for by all means it's kind of like society's traditional definition of success right but like when did you realize that you actually needed a change from that career path yeah you know becoming like a VP of sales was sort of the upper echelon of what I wanted to reach in my career and when I was a salesperson and then a manager and then a director like that was the thing that's what I wanted to be and when I got there I loved it and you know grew the team from just one sales guy to 150 salespeople I had maybe six to eight direct reports but the team was big and the targets were big and back in 2015 to 2019 when that was my life it was the growth at all costs phase and startups and so you know every Target got bigger faster you know the stakes got higher and it got more nerve-wracking right like I hit I think 16 quarters in a row of my target even though they were massively big and people think the burnout comes from working really hard or working too long and I don't actually think that's why burnout happens I can work hard for a long period of time as can a lot of people I think burnout starts to happen when you lose control and so I often kind of bring up this example where if you've played Tetris before you know as the levels get harder and harder the pieces start falling faster and you have to make moves much faster and when you mess up a move it compounds very quickly because the pieces just start stacking on top of one another really fast and that is what it's like when you start to feel out of control at a company or in your role when like you make a mistake and one mistake becomes two becomes four becomes 16 becomes 19 like it just multiplies right and it multiplies fast and so I knew that I needed a break because I coped with burnout in the same way that a lot of people do which is I ate too much I drank too much I didn't exercise very much I didn't get much sleep I wasn't a great husband I wasn't paying attention to my family and that all sort of culminated in this panic attack that I had in December of 2018 which was like if you've never had one it sounds silly like a panic attack but it was like pretty a pretty meaningful day of my life where I didn't really know what was happening and I thought I was dying and that was the day that I knew that I needed to make a change and I had a conversation with my bosses the following Monday and they were super receptive and understanding and I ended up staying for another eight months and getting myself back into mental and physical shape got it and it's kind of like a big leap to make right because you've kind of made it as VP sales and for you to tell your boss that actually you know I don't want to become SVP or coo I just want to make a change that but I guess when you actually you know go to the hospital or something it's kind of like a life it's kind of like a wake up call yeah it was interesting like I had aspirations of becoming a cheap Revenue officer it actually happened I went back to the company a year later I was rehired to be the chief Revenue officer so I was able to sort of check that box in my career which is really nice and I helped them navigate growing the company through covid but I got lucky in a weird way and the way that I got lucky was I was forced like a lot of people sit around and they think about like should I you know grow my side hustle should I become an entrepreneur should I leave my job like I didn't have a choice I back myself into a corner physically and mentally and the only choice I had was to take a break and in a weird way that was like a very lucky thing to happen to me because it's like that was the only option I had so I had to take it and it made it a lot easier got it so I think you know tech industry goes through these ups and downs and I think many tech people are feeling burn out right now either they're like they lost their job already or you know how this stuff goes like you could be doing well at your company and then they want to do cost cutting and then you get La laid off but you know I think a lot of people still have mortgages to pay they live in a Bay Area what what's your advice for folks who are thinking about doing this or trying to Take Back Control a little

bit yeah it's a phase approach right I think there's a lot of like I think people talk about media propaganda I think everything is propaganda so like if you go out and you read you know internet gurus propaganda it's all about like working four hours a day on the beach or like whatever it might be right and like sure can you eventually reach that if you put in the many years maybe but like the truth in the reality in the authentic way to sort of make it and to gradually gain back some control is just what I said it's fragile and so the first thing that you can do is figure out just like how might you get a little bit of attention online maybe it's not even online right maybe it's local maybe it's online is not the only game it's the biggest game so like how might you get a little bit of attention and if you can find 15 extra minutes every day to think about attention and to put yourself out there and to share the knowledge and the skills that you've accumulated over the course of your career or your hobbies or things that you like doing in your free time that's a great start right figure out like what does it mean to Market oneself because so many people are smart they have awesome business ideas they've got great products they've got great services but they can't communicate and in the end communicating your value is the thing that matters the most so I would practice that for a long time until you get really good at it and once you get good at communicating your value and sharing your expertise and your knowledge that is when you can start you know making a little bit of extra money doing a little coaching maybe building a product maybe you have a micras Consulting business and as you get traction you're going to start growing over time and once you have reached a certain threshold maybe your 60 to 70% of your take-home earnings getting 40 hours a week back you're likely to continue to grow and so think of it as a phase gradual approach over many years and just because you see someone who did it faster doesn't mean that's the right way to do it yeah in some ways is always good to you know do a couple years while having your main job because you know if you just quit without having to income you're going to put a ton of pressure on yourself and it's going to be pretty stressful right so that's right people see that I went on social media about eight months before I quit right I had this panic attack and then I started writing online because I was like okay if I'm G to quit my job I have to like gotta do something and I didn't know what else to do other than like maybe I would go talk about my expertise but like I had timing on my side I did it in 2018 back before the platform that I chose LinkedIn was even a popular place to write right so I got luck timing like don't follow my path and hope that you have the same luck and timing that I do follow a more gradual phased approach and don't attempt to be an outlier like try and be the person that thinks in the long game and takes their time and has patience another thing that I think

you're really good at is you created systems and stuff and one of your systems is how to use your time more effectively which is I think very relevant for people want to start S hustles right so can you talk about the steps that you go through think about where you're spend your time yeah I mean it's not too comp complicated effectively the way that I think about spending time is you should probably like anything around the Pito principle is you should probably be spending your time doing the 20% of things that maximize 80% of your intended outcome and that outcome may not be making money it might be growing a social media audience it might be you know something else you know spending more time on your hobbies but what I generally do is I start by picking like an intended outcome right so you might say my intended outcome is to grow my business Revenue right and so once you know that you want to grow your business Revenue all you do is you take a look at your week like and this is what I do something I do generally quarterly is I'll just like lay out my week and I'll say all right inside of any given week what is what are every task that I do during a week right so like if I think about tasks that I do there's like I write my newsletter I think of ideas I create content I create my templates I edit the newsletter I send it I do podcasts I help people do login issues I set up tracking on my Social Media stuff I book sponsors I find Affiliates like there's a million little tasks right that fall you know to me to accomplish or at least they used to and so once you have all those tasks out you just look and say all right like how much time do I spend on these tests right do I spend an hour two hours 30 minutes so on and so forth and then you basically say all right on a scale of whatever one to five 1 to 10 you pick the scale like how do these tasks align with the intended impact that I'm trying to have like I might say like scheduling a podcast interview back and forth on email if you tie that to generating revenue for my business it's a one out of 10 right sending my news making sure that my newsletter high quality is probably nine out of 10 so like you just kind of assign value to each of these tasks and what you're left with is you're left with an assigned value from 1 to 10 or one to five or however you want to rank it and then you've got an hourly amount of time that you spend each week and then you have ratios you simply divide those into one another and each thing gets a number right and what you're trying to do is say all right I got 60 tasks if I've have 60 tasks I'm going to do the top 20% are the top 12 right so list those out in order from 1 to 60 so what are the top 12 that's probably where you should spend your time or if you want to say it's 50 the top 10 right that's where you should spend your time everything else should have one of three sort of things Tethered to it should either be simplified or eliminated first go through and eliminate the bottom stuff right like what's the stuff that is not important at all eliminate it get rid of it after that it's like okay what are some things that are really complex that could be simplified and if you can simplify those will they take up significantly less time and therefore have a better ratio number next up can you automate something with a tool AI automated tools zappier or whatever it might be and then can you delegate things and so I do this quarterly and I'm left with the things that I should do can automate delegate elimin eliminate and simplify and that keeps me on target for the things I should be working yeah that's awesome I think like additional wrinkle is like some of these things could be like very high value for generating Revenue but like you just hate doing it like J like I don't know like trying to find sponsors or like you know teach a bunch of live courses on the weekends so then totally you might want to try to dedicate or automate some of that still right it's like certainly and like when I go through the process it's like like any process there's Nuance to the process so like if you look at your top 10 you're like man I hate doing one of these things cool it's not a steadfast rule right you don't have to be like oh unfortunately I have to do these 10 things like okay you hate it you're going to do nine out of the top 10 things and you're going to Outsource that one thing or you're going to automate God forbid you're GNA eliminate it so it's not steadfast but it helps you get a sense of where you should be sending your got it okay so now let's talk about finding

your Niche and like crafting your unique value prop by the way that that's like probably my favorite part of your course I think it's probably the most important part so people keep talking about you got find Niche how can people figure out you know what problem other people are going to pay them for like how do you start thinking about this yeah I mean there's a lot of ways right so like I don't I'm certainly not the authority on telling people how to find their Niche although I think I'm pretty good at it so I'm I'll share four ways that you can think through it and again it's not an exhaustive list I'm sure someone listening will say oh I have a fifth or a sixth way and that's awesome again I'm not the authority but you know one way is just pretty simple it's your practical experience and it's your credibility so what have you done at work right like for example I was a sales VP of sales and a sales leader for I think 15 years 16 years right so that was pretty easy so the first thing that like I did when I quit my job was I didn't become the Creator that I am today I built a Consulting business helping Healthcare startups grow because that's what i' done for 16 years so it's like easy transition right so one way is practical experience and credibility another one is just what I might call like a learned Obsession it's that thing that you don't do for a living but you're completely obsessed with so I pivoted over time I went from helping Healthcare startups grow to becoming a Creator and maybe what you might call like digital marketing for lack of a better description in Solo preneurship and things like that I was obsessed with that I never did it as a career up until me doing it now but like I was reading every book I was reading I was listening to every podcast I was reading every blog post I could find I was tinkering with tools I was doing marketing on the side creating content read magnets webinars everything right because I was super obsessed with that was an obsession that I just learned and since I learned it over time I became an expert without having you know traditional experience or having it in my title at work or anything like that so that's another thing that you can do and a lot of times people are obsessed with something that's completely unrelated to their job the third thing that you can look at is just what do people come to you for advice for like we all have family and friends that come and they say oh Peter's really good at X or man Justin I was thinking about you because I have this one problem and I know like you're the guy who can solve this thing and maybe you're good at three things right but it's like keep your eyes and ears open for those things we're in such a fast-paced world we're moving so quickly we're not paying attention to Ms we're consuming and creating we often don't stop and like pause and be cognizant of the things that people are coming to us for help for and those can be really awesome things to build a small side hustle on and last is just problems you've solved for yourself so like right now I have a problem in my business and I'm actively solving it and as I solve that problem I'm like this is a cool product service like if I'm having this problem how many other creators are having this problem and would pay a lot of money to solve it and so I'm thinking about that as a product and service because I'm fixing a problem that I have myself so those are like four ways I might approach solving the problem got it and how do you because like it's just kind of like building a product and bring it to the market right

like how do you validate this with real customers as soon as possible as opposed to try to build something and then realize people don't want this I guess it's kind of obvious answer but like how you go about it's obvious to me or and maybe you but that doesn't mean it's obvious to everyone five years ago I would have said I have no idea right but to me my inclination is to actually help them on your own oneon-one right so it's like identify five to 10 people who have those problems have those aspirations and want to work with you right and are they willing to put some skin in the game and the amount doesn't matter it's just are they willing to spend money and time to solve the problem that you solve them to reach the aspirational stage that they want to reach and if you can do that what you do is you validate that a spend the money B they'll spend the time C they'll show up and they'll do the work and then D you'll help them Reach the intended outcome that you told them that you would help them Reach if you can do those four things then you have at least a viable framework of a business right if nobody's willing to spend money and time then you have an idea but you don't have a business right and so once you do that what I would do is I would try and wrap that into a process because I would imagine that if you have five G guys and gal there are going to be commonalities amongst all of them and as you help them work through this problem or process you will see all those commonalities become a framework right so that as you bring more people in you're like I know the five things we got to nail in order to let them reach their outcome to overcome their pain points and then you turn that into a process as a service business where you can continue to work one-on-one with people once you've validated that there is more interest in the market and that your solution actually works productize it raise your rates on your service Side Lower the rates on the product side for those people who don't want to spend a lot of money to do work one-on-one with you let them work through a self-paced product those people who want handholding and want to spend time with you one-on-one they've got the service business this is exactly how I started my business yeah it does seem like a pretty Shire path it's just like you know when I think service is business is like a lot of a lot more meat a lot more meetings on one-on ones but I you just have to do it like doing a prod you just got to talk to customers one-onone and figure out what they want yeah it's like saying I really want to build a product but talking with customers sounds like a lot of time like it is but it's important right so like you know I think you hear a lot about these startup Founders who want to build something I'm just going to make up an example right like they want to build something in like supply chain right and they go and they spend like a hundred hours on the Amazon distribution centers or in the supply chain place where they're doing like you know manual labor to try and understand the pain like you got to live it before you can solve it yeah I think there was a step in your process that you skipped I just

want to bring it back which is create a movement and find a almost like find an enemy or someone to fight maybe you can give some examples of that from you or from other your friends like Dan or folks yeah totally so that's more on the marketing side right so like I don't think you need that to validate a business necessarily but if you want to go out and you want to grow that business you have to Market and so marketing is a lot like politics and so I'll give you kind of an example if you look at American politics and I'm not going to go down a political Rabbit Hole or either party I don't care about any of that stuff like just pick either party right very rarely do they tell you all the good things that they do instead most of the focus is on the bad things that the other party or candidate or person does right it's they're creating an enemy and if you think about some marketing talk like there's a famous quote and I'll probably mess it up which is like you want to give people you want to help people throw rocks at their enemies I think it was Blair Warren who said that and he's like kind of an old school marketer and throwing rocks at your enemies is like you want to pick a Target it doesn't have to be a person it could be a mantra movement it could be an ideology that you are 100% against right and so for example in your example like you're against the idea of the traditional career path like to become a better engineer you do not need to lead people grow teams you want to be a better engineer build better products right build a career building the best product possible so the reverse of that is your enemy right and once you have an enemy you can build a movement because movements are built by defeating another enemy so for example I'll give you an example for my business I talk about solo preneur right is solo preneurship right for everybody it isn't I'm very candid about that very clear about that but I also won't tell someone they shouldn't try I'm not a babysitter right I think adults should do whatever they want to do my enemy is the traditional career and life path where you work for a company until they don't need you anymore and you get fired and you do that for 60 years hoping you can save enough for retirement and we know from the average American they can't that sounds like a shitty life to me right so like that's the enemy and I throw rocks at that enemy all the time and by throwing rocks at that enemy I am building a movement and the movement is that over here we've got a group of solar preneurs who are taking control of their life time and taking control of their freedom right a guy like Dan go a buddy of mine The Stereotype and that stereotype is getting broken much faster by a lot more people of like as an entrepreneur you shouldn't be so busy that you're out of shape right you should be in the best shape of your life like the way that you treat your body should translate into how you treat your business and your family and the type of person that you are whether that's true or not right that is the movement that guys like Dan go body and mind is building and by the way I don't want to speak for Dan that might not be exactly his movement but that's sort of how I see it and his enemy is you know the entrepreneur who's letting themselves go who's not keeping themselves in shape who you know says they'll do anything for their family but they're not getting in shape for their family that's his enemy right and so I think by having these two sort of jux opposing things the enemy and the movement you could to Market a lot more effectively that's part of what marketing is yeah it does uh I'm not going to talk about either party but with the politics stuff like one my big frustration is like they just keep talking about each other they don't actually talk about what they're gonna do for the country if they get elected like tell me what you'll do for me that's right tell me what you do for me that doesn't sell man unfortunately by the way yeah I wish it did that's crazy okay so after you've crafted a really good unique value proposition and you when talk bunch of customers you validate it people maybe pay you some money for it you have this really simple funnel to actually get

attention and to you know get people to actually like build relationships and actually spend on your product may we can talk about it just at a really high level first yeah sure I keep it simple because I think most marketing is over complicated not all marketing by the way I'm not trying to paint with a broad brush there are certainly you know times and situations that call for complex marketing but for the most part there's the old school marketing fun right I think it's awareness idea I can't even remember awareness something decision action right because I don't really follow that one I follow my own so mine's a little bit different right it's get discovered build trust deepen relationships and monetize very simple so I'll kind of talk about it from a high L right so the top of the funnel is just called getting discovered and so getting discovered simply means getting your name your face your brand what you do who you help your knowledge in front of as many people as possible right because you want people to resonate with your message you want them to have an opportunity to hook on to your movement to join you in throwing rocks at the enemy to share it with their friends who say hey Jim this sounds a lot like what you were telling me about man you should follow this guy right getting discovered is huge and that is all organic soci so organic social to me is all about getting discovered and so that's why I'm very active on platforms like LinkedIn like X like Instagram like threads I just try and get top of funnel Discovery all the time you know my goal was like hundreds of millions of Impressions every single year getting discovered in and of itself is not enough right you have to it's the eyeing Aid is interest right but to me that's about interest it's more about trust so after getting discovered I want to build trust and I don't mean trust like you know you leave me at home to babysit your kids or watch your house or anything like that that's not the kind of trust that I'm talking about is like I trust this person is really good at what they do I trust this person is not just lip service that they're actually an expert in the things they say they're an expert in and the easiest way in my opinion today to show trust or to build trust is long form content and so long form content can be written content a newsletter a Blog a lengthy article it can be video right a robust YouTube video that takes someone from point A to point B and 25 30 minutes like these are a podcast right uh where you're breaking down complex topics and making them really simple these are all opportunities to build trust if you can get discovered and build trust you're in a pretty good position to take the people who want the thing that you have trust you're the right person and make some money at a business right if you sell something very expensive there's probably another step The Next Step would be deepening the relationship and that's why I think a lot of like Enterprise level companies a lot of high ticket sellers with really expensive stuff benefit greatly from events communities things where like people are getting access to them in real time and they're deepening that tie they're strengthening that Bond they're really going deep on this relationship because we buy from people we know and like so if you sell something that's a th bucks you got to deepen that relationship and by the way a th is an arbitrary number that might be inexpensive to company and expensive to an individual person but hopefully you get the point right whereas if you sell something low ticket $50 you might not need to deep in that relationship after building trust you might be ready to present your offer you might say Hey you read all my stuff on LinkedIn you've consumed all my newsletters and articles you've checked out all my long form videos are you ready to work with someone to solve your problem this thing's 50 or $99 like they might be ready to pull the trigger right then so it's Discovery trust Rel relationship monetization got it and what are some

ways that you've kind of optimized this funnel that had kind of like a step function change your business or is it just a matter of showing up every day and like doing it work yeah it's mostly the latter right but there are certainly some ways that i' I've gotten better at it so I'll give you an example of how I sort of fine-tuned it for a lack of a better description so let's start with the top getting discovered well getting discovered is a function of the value and quality of piece of content that you create so I've

created probably 5,000 pieces of unique content over the last five years and there's new AI tools out there so what's the first thing that I want to do I want AI to analyze the thousands of things that I've created and tell me what is it about the top 50 that are similar right what should I be trying to do to maximize getting discovered so often what I think is if you want to improve Impressions it's the open the hook right the opening and the hook kind of Drive Impressions if you want to drive engagement it's the body it's the call to conversation those things Drive comments reshares like the information how good is it right outside of the hook like after the hook did you deliver right that stuff drives the engagement drives the comments drives the retweets and the reshares so like I'll look for commonalities amongst those things and what I'm trying to craft feeder is like the perfect post what does the perfect post look like that drives both Impressions and engagement right and then I'll look at a ratio of Impressions to clicks to my website so like what percentage of people that saw this thing clicked through and went to the article that I recommended and when I get these ratios I can see okay just because something had a million hits and drove a thousand people to my website that's good but what about something that only had a 100,000 hits that drove a thousand people to my website that's a better call to action I got a larger percentage of people to my site and so I like I'll look at the comment alties and those things I'll have ai break those down and say what was it about this call to action that you think drove a bunch of people to my website again I'm trying to have the perfect post so once you've got the perfect post down it's like okay I know the Hook's good I know the body's good I know call to conversation's good I know the link to my website's going to work cool we're getting them to the point where I'm starting to build trust so I'm sending them to some article on my website certain articles work better than others so the same ratio how many people read an article versus make a purchase if someone reads an article and 10% of them make a purchase on this article or they read this other article and 2% of people make the purchase the first article is five times more valuable right so how do I create more articles like that so now I've got the perfect post hook body call to conversation link to my website the right article this is a well optimized funnel where I know when I Stitch these things together and I hit post it's going to lead to a lot of Revenue those are the small and nuanced things that I do to make sure that the business is grow and you have to be like somewhat analytical with this stuff right so like how do you like one struggle I have is like you know my newslet is on one platform social stuff is on like these social platforms like I have to freaking like make a manual spreadsh with this funnel and try to figure out myself yeah do you have any like tools or something they use or just you yeah I mean for the most part man like you know I've got I use publishing tools like most people I use tap Leo I use tweet Hunter and they have built-in analytics right so I can export that stuff very quickly I've got website analytics from fathom analytics like that stuff again exported very quickly so generally what I'd be and I've got you know purchase history from kajabi so like I export those three things I put them into one spreadsheet I up I upload them to something like Claude or chat GPT and I'm like give me a breakdown help me understand like what are the posts what are the Articles like what is it that work that used to be all manual but today there's no need with all the new tools yeah the AI is really good at doing this stuff like summarizing a bunch of information like getting you to take away St that's probably what it's best at so yeah so many people are like leveraging AI to like write comments and like write posts and write newsletters and like there's so much there's such a better way to use it right now it's like keep your creativity let it manage the data yeah exactly well this has being awesome so far I just have let's talk about one more topic mind yeah sure so I think this is kind of eye opener for me you know like you have this

thing about creating stacked offers and there kind of two paths that you talk about one is like just like growing your audience as big as possible and another path is much more specific and much more strategic and you know as someone who has like posted these memes have got like million plus views but like so nothing like I'm very cognizant of this so maybe talk about these two paths and like why you recommend this other path yeah there's the path of like being very specific and being very viral and generic and so by the way no path is wrong it's just how can harness the power of each path so I'll give you an example and by the way just because I say this person is in this path like doesn't necessarily mean that they are I am really specific on solo preneurship Dan go is really specific on helping Founders get their time back and build their best bodies like we talk about the same stuff every single day all the time right so as you grow your audience the audience that you're growing is specific right and so as you grow a specific audience your options are more plentiful right so you can do things like create a micro offer as you get a little bit bigger you're testing the waters will your audience spend money with you if they do let's say they spend my first product was $50 if they spend $50 can you deliver $50,000 of value and like set the stage for a deep future relationship the next decade right you have that option a few years later you could do a core product as your audience grows and maintains specificity right then if you keep growing like me get you know million followers million and a half across a few platforms you can drop your high ticket offer like I did with the Creator MBA because I've been on the same beating the same drum for so long and then eventually could probably do something even higher ticket the reverse of that is when you don't have a specific audience when your audience is relatively generic when you're talking about things like just general productivity for example right productivity in and of itself is a thing but there are so many different types of productivity it's it can get so much more nich on that and so what happens is you might have a harder time as your audience grows establishing that exactly what should that micro offer be when you're just systems productivity like what is the micro offer how do you build that how do you say I'm the exact right person to solve this very specific problem for you when what you've been talking about is Broad right it becomes much more difficult so I think those people have a longer path to monetization but when they get to the end of that path they might be able to have a bigger payback so let's take someone like James clear for example James Clear made some money on his way to becoming an author but Atomic habits was his money maker right yeah it took him a decade of building a massive audience around habits which is a pretty broad topic and then he dropped a five times New York Times bestseller right but it probably took him a really long time to get there whereas other people along the way might be more gradual in creating those business now caveat to all this there are a course outliers in both camps those who have been specific and never been able to build offers the way up and those who have been Broad and have built you know plenty of offers on the way up it's not a steadfast rule it's not black and white it is more likely to follow one of those two paths it does take discipline to follow the more Narrow Path because yeah you mostly talking about s preneurship and I tend to like just see random like it's entertaining to use to head right so like totally I need to yeah maybe talk to my family more or something instead of like talking to random all people yeah I think like in the end of the day like there's an example in my course where I remember I'm actually G to pull it up because it's a really good example so just give me a split second because I want to read to you this thing that I went through back in the day with my company so as myself and the CEOs were building our company we at some point wanted to in SEO for the business because we had built a really big sales team we were getting a ton of lead but it was time for us to actually go out and like invest in proper SEO so we went out and we interviewed a bunch of people and this is basically what we heard right we interviewed one young lady and she said like oh I do SEO for companies and you're like okay next person was like I help companies do better SEO you're like all right sounds about the same I've been working in SEO for companies like yours for a decade all like super generic I do SEO I help companies with SEO I've been working in SEO for a decade then we had this guy come along right and this Dy basically said something like this we're a Healthcare Company old school SEO tactics don't work in the crowd in healthcare space especially for early stage companies without a lot of traction over the last five years I've built a new approach for healthcare SEO that lets upand cominging companies compete with the entrenched Healthcare businesses at a fraction of the price now new companies in the space can compete more quickly and with a smaller budget is that worth a conversation like of course right how much more aligned and relevant can that pitch be than I do SEO for companies like yours and so the reason that I share this is because you can hear the relevance specificity and a 100% of people would choose to work with that person or bring that person into interview for the job and we don't think about that when we're creating our content when we're building our Brands we're trying to be entertaining and get the most lik it's like no be that guy be the guy who solves a very specific problem that's painful for a very specific company or person yeah it's just a matter it's also just a matter of putting a little bit more effort into your Outreach right it's like he actually did some research on what you guys did you provide some value upfront totally but also when people on social media go to read your tweets and your profile like they can't just find funny memes they better find stuff that's aligned with what you just pitched right yes that's why creating content that's specific is important all right I'll try to make my memes more specific that's what I'll try nice um cool I have two more questions I no there a lot of tech people when they try to transition to the solar preneurship path they teach these like high ticket core courses right like there live core courses that charge $ thousand dollars but like you're like one of the few careers that actually made a like these low ticket courses or like 150 or now $500 and actually kind of scaled there's this concept of like selling stuff why you sleep but yeah I'm not sure if that's true or like he chose this path because it's like more scalable or you know what are your thoughts on that yeah I mean couple different reasons yeah I think I chose this path first off because like cohort-based courses were not really a thing when I started like no one had built Maven like it just wasn't popular the way that it was it's popular now or at least you know more popular so I didn't think of it as an option number one number two when I built my first kind of little bit of my brand I really wanted to decouple time from earnings I had made money as a consultant for a year I was working 40h hour weeks and 50 hour weeks of like meetings right just like tons and tons of meetings like the idea of going on and doing these presentations I didn't love that so I thought to myself like can I automate this like if I make this more affordable is this a win for both me and the customer and I want to test a hypothesis that like I can make it cheap valuable and the word of mouth alone would spread a lot about what I was doing and I Pro that hypothesis to be right at least for me again that may not be right for everybody but I didn't want to spend the time I just wanted to decouple time from revenue makes a lot of sense all right man last question so let's go back to

our Tech professional Pro profile you know a lot of people are sitting uh you saying this pretty comfortable jobs right they're making like half a million dollars or something and like they have big mortgages and maybe they send their kid to private school and what do you have to like do you have any closing words of advice for these folks in terms of either solopreneurship or just like your previous Life as a tech executive yeah me yeah I do my goal is not to convert people I'm not interested in making solo printers out of people who aren't interested in doing it or don't feel comfortable with it that that's never been my intention my intent is simply to educate them that there's an option to show them to lay the options at their feet and say there are other ways to make a living so what I would do is I would encourage them to think deeply about what gets them motivated as a person is it working with teams solving big complex challenges like if that gets them out of bed in the morning then awesome stay at the company that's great like be aware of how companies work right you should be cognizant enough to know that in most people's career at some point in time they find themselves on the wrong end of the layoff all you have to do is be aware of that right so if you're the kind of person who likes working with big teams who likes having built-in vacation who enjoys having health insurance who you know likes the Comfort feeling the comfortable feeling of a nine-to-five job whether it's comfortable or not like we could argue that back and forth like if you like that feeling have a job at the same time be smart enough to educate yourself about how the world is changing how layoffs are happening and invest a little bit of time in at least getting a megaphone every once in a while and letting people know you exist right like yeah build out your profiles share your knowledge because if you do get laid off and you've built a sizable Network and people know you for something it's just so much easier to become reemployed right it's when people are like I got laid off and now I want to take LinkedIn seriously or I want to start writing Twitter that's the worst time you're already under a lot of pressure right so like if you've already done that before then you're in Muk fet situation if you crave Freedom if you crave autonomy if you like making decisions on your own and executing on the decisions that you've made if your goal was eventually to be the owner of your time for you know of course you have customers and things like that but if all those things sound like what you want and you're okay with the risk of not helping health insurance or having expensive health insurance not having a steady income every single day week or month or quarter right if those things don't scare you and you like the upside more than the downside then it might make sense to at least start dabbling in that world get out the same thing as the person St the job get out there make yourself known share your knowledge share your skills your expertise all the unique things that you've learned at some point in time especially if you get specific start to experiment can you monetize a bit and if you can monetize a bit then you can monetize more and if you can monetize for a long period of time so like those are the ways that I would approach it but there's no right answer for everyone it doesn't have to be like a burn the boast decision right you can just like correct get yourself out there and then you can decide what you want to do eventually yeah burning the boats is the worst decision that you can make in my opinion so I would encourage them not to do that okay uh well I think everyone already knows this but where can people find you online they can find me at Justin w. me that's j s n w ls. me and they can subscribe to my newsletter the Saturday soul preneur I send out one tip you can read in less than four minutes every Saturday morning all right Justin thanks so much man I learned so much from this conversation cool man great question I appreciate you having me all right