Transcript

00:00 I never made more than like 40 50k a year out of college and that's pre-tax. So I was broke so I packed up. My car drove like 1200 miles away. That's where I kind of learned how to like talk to people Network do customer service write blogs all right so today we're meeting up with Scott. He makes 50 000 a month making videos and he's going to show us exactly how he does it so yeah tell me tell me about what you do. What do you want yeah so we run uh.Basically. It's a productized service for B2B SAS companies so think about like an agency service except you're able to buy it kind of like an e-commerce product. So it's it's short animated videos for B2B SAS companies to run as paid ads and and get customers in the door. What's a typical client for who we work with we work with software companies that are primarily B2B so they have platforms like you think of stripe like a payment processor or something like that and they're typically also funded so an important part about selling something like a productized service is making sure that the people have the money to actually buy what you're selling. So we found that companies that are VC backed or have gone through like um seed and series a funding. They typically have the money to to purchase what we're selling so. That's what works best for us and companies want this because it helps sell more of their product or helps their brand Market better. The main goal with the videos is not necessarily to directly get our clients more customers it's more so to get the potential customers to like stop scrolling or to maybe go book a demo or something. Like that right. It's more of like the scroll stopper. Some people call it where it's super attention grabbing but it doesn't give you enough information to actually like go buy the service or product tell me a little bit more about your background. You were doing actual video agency work yeah.

01:56 So I've done I've done everything I've done like music videos event. Recaps you know me and a friend used to shoot weddings and just like basically everything. I've also been a designer. Built websites all this stuff and for me videos what really stuck and then it was hard for me to scale and it was it was hard to get work. I didn't really know what I was doing so I ended up stumbling onto Twitter and meeting you know a lot of the people what they call Like Money Twitter right and that's really all about how can you take what you already know how to do which for me was the video production stuff and monetize it at a higher level and then that's when I kind of got into all the technical technical business stuff. You go to college or anything like that uh I went for two months and dropped out. I think why did you drop that what happened yeah. So I ended up meeting this guy and he's like hey.I'm I'm starting this business in Colorado. You know we're going to try to like help people manage vacation rental properties like I think you'd be a good fit for it. So I packed up my car drove like 1200 miles away. I hadn't had any actual business experience prior to that. But that's where I kind of learned how to like talk to people. Network do customer service write blogs stuff like that that was in 2019. I think so I was 19. Yeah when I did that so now you're only like what 24 23 yeah I didn't really make any money until the last like year. Even though I tried all this stuff after college. I mean it was all just learning you know I never made more than like 40 50k a year out of college. So I mean and that's pre-tax. So I was broke yeah.You know the three and a half years after I left. But I was able to leverage my skills and this is something for like a lot of people too that they can they can use is like if you have a specific skill if you can find ways not just to make money with it but like for me for example because of the video stuff. I've gotten to like go shoot at NASCAR in the pit and just a bunch of cool stuff. Even though I wasn't getting paid very well for that it was stuff that I was able to add to my resume of just things that you're able to do has video always been your passion. I've been doing videos since 2016 and it it started off actually as I opened up Adobe Illustrator Junior High School to make like these presentations for some business class I was in and then that evolved into me getting a camera and trying out photography and then photography got boring. So I tried out video um and then now it's kind of an intersection of of all of them with what I'm doing because it's like design. But it's moving and all that stuff but really personally like I enjoy anything creative. So I've I've painted.

04:38 I've you know I used to like play. Some instruments just really any anything like that so your business took off and you said you're making fifty thousand dollars. A month now is that right yeah on average. It bounces around a little bit with any business right like it could be like 35. Then it could be like 55 right yeah. Just depends on your lead. Insurance you know before that you were making maybe 50 000 a year and you grew to pretty much 10x. That was there any mindset shift or was there anything that really set this business apart from others. If if I was going to choose one thing it would be switching from a scarcity mindset to an abundance mindset and it sounds really I guess like cheesy or like or whatever if you make the shift to taking those same resources again whether it's money the knowledge. Network you have right in just full-on like utilizing them to try to produce more of what you have and grow that I think the whole game changes. Before this business you had kind of a lot of creative type jobs. You were doing video. How could someone who is is also creative an artist a videographer anyone in doing production. How can they turn that into a business and be able to work for themselves speaking from what worked for me.I think that the biggest thing one get on social media right and I'll use Twitter as an example because that's again what worked for me so what I would do is be posting every day sit down for an hour schedule. It out be consistent and write things or make reels or whatever you're going to do about things specific to what you're doing are so if it's video make educational content for Brands about how they can get more customers in the door with video right. That's kind of what I did and then once you have that down once you're consistently posting you get a feel for it and you're learning about the specific platform that you're posting to then. That's when you can start actually selling a service. What works best for that is the productized model we talked about so again if you're doing something like video right. There's a ton of different things you could do you could design thumbnails for YouTube you could do an on-demand video editing service.You could do a color grading service right and come up with like a specific offer and packages to sell or some kind of offer structure where let's say your. Main package is three thousand dollars a month. Then you can have a down sell or an upsell or whatever right and so what that might look like is. Certain deliverables inside of a package and a deliverable would be like we'll color grade. This many videos in this specific way for this amount of money if you can have a service that people need is recurring and you can find the people who have the money to buy it. Then.

07:24 There's there's really no stopping you yeah and you think that's more effective than just I guess selling your time to do some some video work for you know a few hours 100 packaging your your skill set is much more effective because you're in control of what you're charging you're being paid for your expertise. Not your actual time. So if you had an a person and a b person and they both had 10 years of experience. Maybe you say a person is getting paid hourly even if it's 500 an hour right like they're a lawyer or something and then B person is selling a a productized service. They're still going to make 10 times more because they could sell what person a is doing for 500 an hour maybe. It takes them 10 hours and then person B can then charge. Five thousand dollars give them the same result and so technically person a and person B are being compensated the same the person B can go and then hire people to help them fulfill that right and so it's just this whole. This whole scaling thing is is where you make the real money do you have any employees or is it just you yeah. So I started off by myself and now we have a team of about four. So I don't have any full-time employees. But I have like a couple full-time contractors and then some like a closer in fractional roles that help me do certain things operationally.Yeah and my team is is also International as well. How's that work. It's great because I mean for a lot of reasons. But they get paid you know more than they would make where they are and my team's pretty young too like younger than me. So it's cool to be able to give people you know like when I back when I was 18. Like I would have loved to be doing what they're doing now yeah and so it's it's cool to bring that full circle and be able to pay someone what they're worth more than they would make where they live you know they can work remote. They're not my employees so they take trips and stuff and take work off so. That's that's been enjoyable too and how do you find really good talent. There's a lot of ways. But when you start building an audience people will naturally want to work for you because they believe in what you're doing and they think that what you're doing is cool. So all the people that are working for me right now reached out to me and the reason I hired them is because I know if they're reaching out to me that they're really dedicated and motivated to get done what they want to do.

09:39 And it's turned out to be true so far so how much does it cost to run your business like generally speaking monthly. So we have a tech stack that is and then there's also Payment. Processing fees and stuff like that um in terms of like labor. It's hard to put a put a put a pin on that because it's completely dependent on how many videos we're doing are gross. Profit margins um are about 65 and then net is probably between 40 and 50 just depending on a couple things but in terms of our. The tech stack is really the only one thing that we consistently spend money on yeah on a monthly basis. What do you mean by Tech stack so okay. So we have the cold email sending software. The software that we run the list through I have to pay for slack you know we use stripe which is free. But we paid the fee on that. Tech stack specifically is probably like twelve hundred dollars a month and that's so that's just what we use to be able to actually execute the services that we sell right.I notice you mentioned building an audience what does that look like for you just posting consistently um and finding a niche too when you think of a niche like it has to be really specific like super specific. So at first it was just videos for me and then it became short videos like no longer than 60 seconds right and then it became short videos for online. Brands and then it went to short videos for online brands that are B2B SAS companies did you see the business grow when you kept niching down like that yes because it made it very obvious like who our product was for it's counterintuitive too because like when you the more people you say like no you're not a fit. Then the faster you'll find people that will actually buy from you have you been able to raise your prices because of this niching down that you've done yeah. We've we the first video we sold was five hundred dollars and we've basically Timex our prices so now our average order. Value is like 3K but we sell we just introduced. Some new packages that have been selling really well from anywhere from six to twelve what advice would you have just for anyone that wants to get started with an online business. What's the first step do things like go on YouTube and do research on what you actually want to do. And then I would spend as much money as you can afford on coaching and programs that are fit on what direction you wanna. You wanna go from people that are reputable not not lamb burgers. This is where I get a lot of my work done.We got the the nice aperture light set up here and trust the old 16-inch MacBook Pro. So we actually coincidentally just closed the deal right as we started filming this so nope. It's got a 400 sale we've got starter stories a good luck charm. So we're gonna send this contract out and then talk a little bit about how we got here in the first place. You said you'd grown it from zero to fifty thousand pretty much in a year what did that look like did you start with just like 5 000 a month. How did that grow we kind of started how we are still now. But we sophisticated our offer so before it was you'll buy one video. It'll basically be whatever length and it's a flat fee essentially what we did now is we created a package so you're not only buying.You can still buy one video. But we use this as a down sell. Now. If someone doesn't want to buy the package with the packages. It's a set of videos and then we reformat that set of videos so that people can run it on all the platforms and things like that and then we also will set up retargeting ads for them. We won't run them but we'll do a bunch of setup and stuff like that so that it's an offer that's more inclusive of what the end goal is rather than just here as a video. It actually sets them up for Success yeah so when you started repackaging your offering. Like that is that when you started to see the growth in terms of I guess like financially yeah because in terms of monthly like Revenue it was like 7K then 5K then 9k and then we went to like 12 23 33 and I would say what we introduced that offer when we were struggling to get above like 12km Yeah because it just wasn't. The one videos were sophisticated enough and the ticket price wasn't high enough to bring us past that right. How did you find your first customer. What's been your main channel for growth yeah.

14:18 So there's been a couple different ones some work better than others but primarily we've done Twitter we've done cold email we've done like direct dming so like on sales navigator on LinkedIn or through Twitter and really I mean keeping it simple like it's just really cold Outreach and then the organic content reaching out to people for the viewers who don't know a lot about cold Outreach what does that typically look like like how many uh cold emails are you sending and what what's like your lead response rate that sort of stuff you got to send a lot and for our ICP which is stands for ideal customer profile specifically the open rate or reply rate for software is only about. They're two different things. The reply rate is really only like four four percent typically on average so you know you're talking about reaching out to thousands of people and then when you get those people to reply now all of them will book a call with you either right um. So it's kind of you just have to do the math depending on what your numbers look like um and in terms of you know what a cold email looks like. It's basically it's really simple. It's basically two sentences. It's like hey you know we noticed on your site that you don't have a video like above the fold on your landing page. That's something we do like have you ever looked into that and that's it you know a lot of people will write like a huge paragraph and like no one has a title right.So how does the sales process work for anyone. That's running kind of a productized service. What would you recommend doing or yeah so to break it down. Really simply you'll basically have like top of funnel. You have like the middle of the funnel and then you have bottle funnel so top of funnel for us is organic social posting the DMS in cold email and then the ads right so like those three things. What happens is a certain amount of people convert from top of funnel to the middle of the funnel. So someone will open the email. Someone will see a post of ours or even both sometimes people will open an email and then go check out my LinkedIn profile right and then they'll book a call either directly to our socials or on the website and that's kind of the middle funnel and the bottom of the funnel is like getting on a sales call with my closer then either buy or not buy essentially yeah. So.

16:26 It's yeah. It's basically those three main parts where did you learn this B2B and um so the coaching and then just trying it out yourself yeah. So the coaching is good for like at least for me like I felt like pretty directionless. I was like oh you know I know I want to have an online business. But I don't know where to start. I don't know like what kind of stuff to watch but you're dedicated and you know you want to do it. So I spent the money in the coaching. The coaching gave me an hour line and Direction and then I took that direction and I tried it myself. So for example the cold email stuff I knew enough to actually just try it. I didn't know enough to do it and then you start doing it more and through repetition. You get you get better at it yeah so same thing with the sales calls like I'm not a salesperson like I don't like doing it and but I've probably taken like 150 sales calls and then once I took enough sales calls to have a structure to it. I gave that to someone to do for them. What's your schedule. What's a typical day for you like wake up at 7 30 start working by like eight or eight thirty drink a ton of coffee and in terms of actually working. I probably sit at my desk.You know eight hours a day pretty normal working amount and then you know an hour or two is also just spent like thinking like walking and stuff like that when I'm actually sitting at my desk what I'm doing is project management so I'm in slack channels you know communicating with clients implementing feedback delivering products to them things like that a certain top portion of my time is spent doing organic content so writing I'm going to be recording more videos um planning stuff out for that and then um also consuming a certain amount of content. You know obviously try not to consume too much yeah but maybe threads about building your business and stuff like that so like a certain amount is fulfillment. Some of it is sales and overseeing some of the people that work with me and then just trying to get better every day. Yeah do you work on the weekends yeah um so the thing about weekends for me personally is if I if I don't. I don't work like eight hours on Sunday and eight hours on Saturday. But I find that if I don't work at all on the weekends I lose some sort of like momentum or I feel like I'm coming back into my business and I've been gone for a week exactly so on that same.Note vacation you take time off or do you take time to recharge or anything like that yeah. So I actually recently took off that's the other cool thing about having a business. Though is like you don't have like PTO necessarily you can kind of do it when you want as long as you have some sort of system in place um but yeah. I recently I recently went out to California for like a week and then another cool thing is because it's fully remote like I could go on like a working trip and still work but have a refreshed. You know environment to work in yeah foreign. If there's one last thing something.I hear really often is like you know follow your passion. It's kind of like follow instead of following your passion like save your passion for what you want to do outside of work. What you should really be doing at least in. My experience is following what you're good at and you like doing because if you find something you're good at and you enjoy doing you're ahead of 99 of people already yeah and then you can just save your passion for because you don't want to make your passion yeah yeah so and if you're good at something it's a lot easier to just kind of do it every day even when you're not making any money. It's like if you're good at something. It feels good to do it therefore and yeah and so for me that was video.

20:17 I used to do them for free. You know like way back when I was like 16. I used to do them for free and my mom was like you need to start charging money. For these. I was like oh really like and now we're here so yeah. Yeah.