Teaching Freelancers to Grow their Business with Troy Dean

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Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of How I Built It, the podcast that asks “How did you build that?” Today, I am honored to have Troy Dean of WP Elevation with me. Troy, how are you doing today?

Troy Dean: I’m Very well, man. Thank you so much for having me on the show. I really appreciate it.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, thanks for joining me.  So you’re a man of many hats. You have lots of things going on, but today we’re going to focus on WP Elevation. So maybe we could start things off by telling the listeners a little bit about who you are, what you do, and what WP Elevation is. 

Troy Dean: Sure. So, yeah, my name is Troy Dean. I’m from Melbourne, Australia. I started out as a WordPress developer back in 2007. We built a little plugin back in 2000 and late 2007 called Video User Manuals, which puts a bunch of video tutorials in your client’s dashboard. And then, as a result of building that audience, in 2013, we launched WP Elevation which is a business coaching program for WordPress freelancers. It has since then evolved into a business course for WordPress consultants, WordPress freelancers. And,  currently, we have over 600 active members in the program. We’ve had about 1200 people go through the course over the last three years, but now we have over 600 active members in that program. Our WordPress consultants and running businesses like you and I are building websites for clients.

Joe Casabona: Awesome. That’s fantastic. So I’m really excited to pick your brain because I also develop online courses and I know you’re one of the best. So maybe we can kind of talk about, you know, I think there are a few things we could talk about,  cause you have a membership site. 

Troy Dean: Yeah.

Joe Casabona: But you know, you also develop courses, so you’re building a lot of different things here. You have a lot of balls in the air. So let’s start off with this WP Elevation kind of evolved Into a business course, right?

Troy Dean: Yeah.

Joe Casabona: So maybe we can talk about the research or maybe the user activity that led you to the decision of evolving WP Elevation from just a membership site to a business course.

Troy Dean: Yeah. So just to clarify, it started out as a member’s website in 2013. It just started out as a membership website because like everyone else on the internet figured that, you know, there was gold in membership websites, right? And then, so two and a half, so two years later at the end of 2015, we actually shut down our membership website and we repackaged it up into a six-week course. And we now have, whereas the membership website was Evergreen. You could basically join whenever you wanted. 

The course now has three enrollment periods a year and we opened the doors to our program. Usually, for six or seven days at a time, we have an enrollment period and then we shot. We get that cohort, that class through the course, and we get them settled into the community and into the membership program once they’ve finished the course. And then we reopened the doors again for a new class, and we can talk more about why we made that decision. 

But how we got here in the first place was I remember very clearly coming out of WordCamp, Melbourne 2013. And having the same conversation with the same group of people at dinner that night after a few drinks, everyone saying, you know, where’s the business track at WordCamp. We just want more business training at WordCamp. And the whole entrepreneurial startup space was really just going nuts. Like there were podcasts, there were, you know, the whole lean startup thing movement was taking off. And all of the people that I was talking to wanted to know how to apply, you know, startup methodologies and philosophies to their WordPress consulting business and how they could actually, you know, how they could make their business really solid. They didn’t need more training on WordPress development or plugins or themes or, you know, filters and hooks or actions or, you know, BuddyPress, because there was tons of that around. They wanted training on how to run their business.

So I made a decision out of pure frustration that I was going to become the guy that dinner and I’m like, “Well, no one’s really doing this.” At the time Chris Lema was offering some coaching, some sort of one-on-one coaching staff. Matt Medeiros started the Matt report and I was like, “You know what, I’m going to build a member’s website” for that was my idea for WordPress freelancers. So what I did was, the research I did was straight out of the lean startup methodology. We hired Ash Maurya who wrote Running Lean, and we hired him to give us some coaching and he basically taught us this methodology.

And so what we did is we, the first thing we did was put up a sales page for a webinar and we emailed our entire list and said, ”Hey, we know that you guys want business training. Here’s a webinar we’re going to run in a few weeks and it’s $197, but we’ll give away the first 50 tickets, half price.” So like an early bird special. Now we hadn’t planned the webinar, we hadn’t opened the keynote. We hadn’t built one slide. We just plugged our sales page into Eventbrite to sell the tickets. And then we plugged that into go to a webinar to actually get them registered on the webinar. And my theory was if we sell 10 tickets, that will be embarrassing, but I’ll run it, anyway. If we sell anything less than 10, I’ll just refund them and pretend it never happened. And if we sell, my secret hope was that we’d sell 30 tickets at 97 bucks. That way we make three grand. And for me, that’s enough, the needle moves enough for me to go. Sweet. I reckon we’re onto something here. Well, we did. We sold out the 97 tickets in like 24 hours. We then released round two tickets for $127. We sold them out and then we released a round three tickets at $197. I think we sold a handful of those. So we ended up doing 11 and a half grand in 48 hours. And I was, and we sold 84 tickets and I was like, “Right, we’ve got something here.” There’s, you know, the needle moved. And so then I had to go build a webinar, right?

So then I went and built a webinar. I basically taught whatever I knew about running a WordPress consulting business and gave away a bunch of templates on the call. And then I’ve just pulled everyone afterward via survey monkey and said, “Hey, that was awesome. I had a lot of fun. Do you want to do it again?” And we had 55 people respond to that survey and say, “Yes, we want to do it again. We want a membership website. We want a members’ forum. We want monthly webinars and coaching calls and we want to pay for it.” We want this to be a paid thing because we want to value it. And we want to have skin in the game, you know? And I said, great. So I got half a dozen of them on Skype and we had a conversation. Tell me what it is. You helped me build it. You tell me what it looks like. Tell me what it includes. And most importantly, tell me what it’s priced at. And they all said, look if it’s a price between 12 and 1500 bucks a year, I’d buy it right now. And I said, “Sweet, I’m going to go build this. I’m going to come back in two weeks and I’m going to take your order.” And two weeks later, we opened the doors for four days and we enrolled 55 students into WP Elevation at a hundred dollars a month on a subscription. And that was the very first iteration of WP Elevation. And so we just added almost five grand to our bottom line every month. The cost of duplication and replication, as you know, with digital products is almost zero, it’s just time, really. 

And so over the last three years, my focus has become 100% on making WP Elevation the best it can possibly be. And, yeah, so that was, that’s the exact formula that we adopted for researching and proving that this was viable before we built anything. This was before we built, we didn’t even know what domain name we were going to host on them. We had wpelevation.com registered, but we didn’t have a member’s website set up. We had none of that setup. All we did was put up a sales page for the webinar. That was the proof of concept. 

Joe Casabona: Wow! So that’s a big, not a long journey, but it sounds like you did it over the course of a few weeks, but a lot of work went into that, right?

Troy Dean: Yeah.

Joe Casabona: So you got all of your feedback directly from your customers, and that’s really great to hear. So let’s actually touch on, you did mention that you had three open enrollment periods, right?

Troy Dean: Yep. Yep.

Joe Casabona: And I remember seeing you speak at WordCamp US and I remember you giving a very specific reason for that. So maybe we can kind of touch on that.

Troy Dean: Yeah. So we were Evergreen, as I said, for a couple of years, from June 2013, through July 2015, you could basically enroll whenever you wanted. And what happened, a couple of things happened. We kind of capped out at about 215 members. We’ve for some reason, we just couldn’t break them, that number, right? And so if you do the math, it was pretty good. It was like 20 grand a month in revenue. But I knew that the market was bigger than that, and I just couldn’t work out what triggers. We tried everything and I just couldn’t work out what levers to pull to get you a bigger membership base. We tried $1 trials, we tried partnerships. Nothing seemed to really get us through that barrier. 

And the other thing was I was logging in because I was still doing consulting as of end of 2015, right up into the end of 2015, I was still doing consulting. So I was logging into our own member’s website to find templates and things that I needed for my business. And the whole thing became like a vending machine. And you know, the problem with the vending machines Joe is, I’m hungry, but I go to the vending machine and there are so many choices that I get paralyzed, right? I’m like, ah, I wish there was just one muesli bar in the vending machine [Inaudible 10:40.95] that’s all I can have. You know, so I said, “Okay, here’s a problem. I’d always wanted to do a launch. I’d seen these big launches happening online and I’d always wanted to practice. I always want to try and do a launch.” And I said to my business partner, “We’re going to roll the dice here, man.” I said everyone is saying that launches are the way to scale your business because it builds scarcity into your business model, right? I said, there are two reasons I want to do this,  I want to shut the doors, I want to roll this out as a six-week, drip fed course. Two reasons: I want the scarcity to motivate people to enroll because when it’s shut, it’s shut. And also I want to give them some structure so that they go through module one in the first week and then module two in the second week. And they can’t skip ahead. They can’t binge. They have to go through it. Drip fed one module per week, right?

So we rolled the dice. We shut the doors in July 2015. We basically turned off, you know, all our existing members were still grandfathered in, but we weren’t accepting any new members, which was a pretty scary proposition. And then we launched in September 2015, we launched at a price point of $497. So it’s here. Here’s what was happening: There was $97 a month. Our average lifetime value was about 550 bucks. So what would happen is people would join for five or six months and then bangs out. And so I said, well, let’s get them to basically pay that up front, right? to go through the course and give them six months access to the membership program. And then it ended that six months, they’ll renew at $97 a month. 

So that’s what we did in September 2015. We enrolled 202 students at $497 each. So straight away, our membership doubled. At that point, we’d actually dropped from 215 down. We had 175 members when we launched in September 2015. So we had 202 new people in the program. It was like, whoa, you know, “Where did you people come from?” And what I realized is, it was because the door was closing on that date, the door, they had seven days to join and the door was closing and that’s the biggest motivator for people to take action. Since then the prices have gone up,  it’s now $1,497, the course we’re about to open again in February. So that’ll be our fifth launch. But what’s happened is people email me and say, “You know, the structure in this course is worth the price of admission itself because it forces me to focus on one part of my business at a time.” And I’m not overwhelmed. You’re actually holding my hand like a tutor would hold your hand through a university course, one, you know, every step of the way. So that’s been a game-changer for us. Absolute game-changer.

Joe Casabona: Man, so that’s incredible. So you’ve seen crazy growth just from developing scarcity, right? But you make good on that because you know, there are websites that have things that are always on sale and that doesn’t necessarily work either because people eventually get wise to that, right?

Troy Dean: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It’s gotta be authentic. I mean, usually, we close at midnight on a Sunday night and we’re done. And then what happens is we get the Europeans to wake up and they’re like, “Oh man, I can’t believe I missed because I was asleep.” So what we generally do is we generally leave the door open for three or four hours just for Europeans, just for our European and UK customers. And so we get them enrolled in, but so by midnight, Sunday night we’re closed off. And then by midday, Monday, the Europeans have enrolled and then we’re done. And then that door’s actually shut. 

And then what happens is for three days after that, we get inundated with emails from people saying, “Oh man, I missed the deadline. Can I still join it?” I’m like, “You’re kidding me. I’ve sent you 8,000 emails in the last week telling you that we’re about to close with these countdown timers in the emails.” You know, they look really spammy, but we do it because they work and I’m like, “How did you miss this?” like I have to drive around to your house and tell you that we’re about to close. You know what I mean? So it’s amazing. Scarcity people do miss the deadline and then I’m like, “I’m sorry, you gotta join the waiting list.” And so every time we open the doors, we have three or 400 people on the waiting list and they don’t all join of course, but they are the ones that generally get notified first.

Joe Casabona: Gotcha. Man, that’s awesome. So, you mentioned that you have a business partner. And part of the reason that I started this podcast is because I was talking, getting really good advice from people and I thought those conversations should be made public, you know, for the greater good. And I’m also part of a mastermind group. So is there a group of people or a few people that you talk to about business advice, bounce, business ideas off of things like that?

Troy Dean: Yeah, a hundred percent. I mean, my business partner, I’m really lucky, you know, we’re both Virgos, which sometimes doesn’t work but in our case it does. He’s extremely analytical. I’m very analytical, but I’m also the touchy-feely one in the business. Like I just want to go and hug our customers all the time and he’s, you know, very much about the numbers. And he’s a great product guy so he’s really great with user experience and I’m really good with marketing and biz-dev. And so we balance each other out really well. We’ve got a great relationship. We learn from each other and, you know, we learn a lot together. But I’ve also got a core group of people who I connect with outside of my business who are in the online space. They’ve either got software apps or they’ve got consulting businesses in either SEO or social. And another buddy of mine who’s an accountant and who’s just a really successful business guy. Usually, try and spend a day with him for a month. I just pick his brain and he picks my brain about technology. I pick his brain about running a business and we’ve filmed those. We’ve just started filming those conversations and we’re actually publishing those conversations over on the Rockstar Empires blog, which is a new company that we’ve spun up.

And for that reason again, because every time I hang out with Mike and we have those conversations, I’m like, “Man, so many people would benefit from these conversations.” So Gin comes down with the cameras and the microphones and we shoot them and they look really amazing. And we get tons of footage down there and we’re just starting to publish them now, in the hope that it’ll help other people sort of think through the challenges in their business as well. So I think it’s really important to get advice and feedback from people who are outside your industry.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, definitely. I mean, it’s teaching WordPress, you know, everybody within the WordPress base thinks WordPress’s really easy to use.

Troy Dean: Yeah.

Joe Casabona: But talk to somebody outside that space and they’re like, I don’t know…

Troy Dean: Exactly. Yeah.

Joe Casabona: So awesome. So let’s get to the title question ‘because I have lots of stuff or, I mean, you have lots of stuff that you could share with us that I want to ask about. So you built a membership site, so I’d love to hear the kind of tools that you use for that, but also how do you go about developing a course? I remember at WordCamp, US that you said that you take a zero-to-win approach and I’d love for you to explain that to our listeners. 

Troy Dean: Sure. So, let me, you just touch on the tech first, because it’s actually quite simple. We started off the membership website. We started off using Optimize Press because, you know, that was kind of the easiest thing or the quickest thing to kind of get up and about. After a couple of, after about six months, we refactored that and we started, we were using WishList Member for about a year and a half. And then when we shut and it’s good. I mean, you know, the code’s of this [Inaudible 17:29.59] which is a pain in the ass, but it’s kind of what the WishList Member does. And it does it pretty well.  It’s not perfect, but nothing is. So then when we shut it down and we turned it into a course, we found we were kind of about to custom-build something. And we just, before we pulled the trigger on that, we found this solution called Social Learner for Learndash. And it’s by some guys out of Chicago called Buddy Boss. They basically make premium themes for BuddyPress. And social learner for LearnDash is a great solution, which is a series of themes and plugins that integrates BuddyPress with LearnDash.

And so essentially your online course becomes a classroom because there’s all this social sharing stuff that goes on when you unlock badges. And when you unlock certificates, there’s like a Facebook-style wall in the dashboard, so we found that. And we’re like “This is amazing. This is exactly the platform we want to use.”

So that’s our choice. We’ve customized it quite a bit. We’ve built some onboarding wizards. We built some leaderboards. We built a member’s map and somehow a whole bunch of other things that we’ve customized, but that’s the core of our course websites. Now at WP Elevation and Rockstar empires, everything we do now is built on these Social learners for LearnDash solutions. They’re definitely, definitely worth checking out. 

My advice to someone who’s starting out and doesn’t know tech is actually not a WordPress solution. If they want to get a course up and running and you don’t want to have any problems with the tech, my advice is to go use teachable.com because those guys are doing an amazing job over there. But if you know WordPress and you want full extensibility and you wanna be able to customize it, then social a fill-in dash is all open source GPL built on WordPress and it’s awesome. So that’s the tech side of it.

The strategic side of it is the way that we build courses. And this is really in a nutshell if I’ve got information in my head that I know can help you, Joe, I say to myself, “All right.” The biggest challenge people have got is how do I get information out of my head, into a format that I can teach? And the way I approach it is this. I treat every one of our students as starting from scratch. So I want to build a course that, you know, if we’re gonna build a podcasting course, for example, I want to build a course in a way that if you’ve never even plugged a USB microphone into a computer, I want to be able to help you go from zero to win. And win for in this case would be you’ve launched a podcast and you’ve got people listening to it on iTunes. That’s a win, right? 

So what do I need to do to get you from zero to win? Now, what happens is some people come in and they’re a little more advanced. And so I just say, look, if you already know this stuff, that’s called, you can just skip through the lesson, answer the quiz and you’re up and about. But I want to make sure that you’ve got the fundamentals. So from zero to when I say, okay, what are the 6 Big milestones that you need to achieve to go from zero to having a successful podcast or launching a podcast? And the reason I say six is because we break our courses up into six weeks. At a six-week trip fed courses because six weeks feel valuable without being overwhelming, right? And also from a marketing point of view, we offer 30-day refunds on all of our courses. And so if you want a refund, I’m not going to give you the full six weeks. If you want a refund, then you bounce out of four weeks and you lose the last two modules. So, four weeks is plenty of time to take us for a spin and, you know, know whether or not it’s valuable. By the way, our refund rates are less than 1% so we don’t really have much of our refunds yet.

So zero to win is like, these are the six big milestones you need to achieve in order to go from zero to win. Now, within each of those milestones, there are generally, I like to think of it as there are going to be six action steps you need to take to reach that milestone. So let’s say, for example, in podcasting, let’s say that, and I wouldn’t do this, but let’s say that module one is the tech. Let’s say that module one is getting your studio set up, right? Again, I wouldn’t do that, but let’s say that, that would be module one. For me, that would be a lot of module five, but in this case, let’s pretend it’s module one. So we’d be like, well, you need to get a microphone setup. You know, you need to get some headphones, you need to get some software. You need to practice. You need to learn how to kind of edit, and you need to maybe learn how to normalize your levels, and then upload to Google Drive, for example, right? So there are the six steps you’ve got to take in order to get your studio set up. So the studio setup is the milestone and then the six action steps are the lessons, right? So the studio is the module and then the action steps are the lessons within each module. 

So I reckon we can take just about anyone who’s got an idea in their head for a course, and very quickly they can map out a course, which is six weeks long and has six lessons within each week. So six modules, six lessons within each week, and a 36 lessons course as I said, it feels valuable enough to be worth charging some money for without it being overwhelming that it’s just going to be too hard.

Joe Casabona: Gotcha. That’s fantastic. And you mentioned that you have quizzes, how important are quizzes to the success of the course?

Troy Dean: Quizzes are crucial, man. And so he’s the other metric that we judge everything on our student completion rates. And this is where I think we differ. And I don’t mean to sound too arrogant, but I think this is where we differ from a lot of people selling courses. See, a lot of people that sell courses on the internet think it’s great. You’ve spent 500 bucks on my course, now I can go to the beach and sip daiquiris by the pool. Well, I know that when you enroll in my course, that’s when our work starts, right? because I have a responsibility to make you finish the course. Otherwise, I feel like I’m ripping you off. And maybe that’s just because, you know, that’s maybe just because I feel like I’ve enrolled in so many courses over the years that I haven’t completed that I don’t want our students to have that experience. So we have at the moment, the cohort of students who enrolled in WP Elevation in October last year, right? Now, as of today, 70% of those students have completed the course and printed their certificates.

Now those completion rates are unheard of in the online course space. Most courses struggled to get a 10 to 15% completion rate. So quizzes are a huge part of this, right? Quizzes, badges, certificates, are a huge part of dangling the carrot and we take a more carrot, less stick approach. Dangling the carrot to get people to complete the course and quizzes is just a really simple way of saying, “Hey, have you paid attention? Can you basically repeat this back to me?” you know, and so most of our quizzes are multiple-choice. There’s one answer, which is obviously the correct one and the other ones are pretty silly. So they’re fun. You know, we try to make them fun and entertaining, but it actually forces the student to pay attention and say, “Yep, I’ve been paying attention and I can repeat this back to you.” And so they learn it, they learn it more. It sinks in. 

Joe Casabona: Nice. So when I was teaching in a classroom in front of students, I would always kind of downplay my quizzes and tests ‘cause you know, like you said, one was the right answer and then there were a few silly ones. And one day my students were like, “That was way harder than you made it seem.” So I thought, you know, maybe it’s not as silly as I thought. It’s funny that you mentioned that, but that’s awesome.

Troy Dean: And I think the other thing with quizzes, I think the other thing that’s really important with online courses is they need to be entertaining, right? When you’re in a classroom, you know, you’ve taught in classrooms. When you are in a classroom, you can see when students are getting bored or disengaged or they’re, you know, falling asleep or they’re on their phone or they’re looking sideways at their mates. When you’re at home on the internet, there are distractions everywhere, right? The kettle’s boiling, there’s a game show on the television, there’s a picture of a cat on Facebook, there’s a picture of a stoned cat snowboarding on YouTube, there’s like so many distractions, right? So how do you keep them engaged in your course? I believe you have a responsibility to your students to not make your course boring because if it’s boring, they’re just going to disengage. So part of our philosophy is that the courses need to be entertaining. They need to be engaging and the student needs to learn as well. 

Joe Casabona: Awesome. And to that point, one of the things that’s a lot different from in-person versus online teaching is that in person I knew when a student wasn’t getting it, cause you know, I could see it all over their face.

Troy Dean: Yeah.

Joe Casabona: So, what do you kind of do to combat, or help a student when they’re not getting it?

Troy Dean: So that’s a great question. There’s a couple of things we do. We try to weave into the script of each of our lessons. So there are two things that really actually, there are three kinds of psychological hooks that we try and plant in each lesson.

The first one is why is this important now? So we basically just state the case as to why this information is important in this lesson right now. So for example, if you were teaching WordPress security, it would be, well, this is important right now because WordPress is powering almost 30% of the internet and it’s growing really fast and it makes it vulnerable to hackers because it’s so popular. So it’s really important that you pay attention to security. Then you would go and you would teach a lesson.

And then there’s a couple of things at the end of the lesson. One is, you need to deal with, you need to know what your students’ objections are during the lesson. So every time you learn something, in your brain, you’re kind of going, yeah, but what if this and yeah, but what if that, and that might not apply in my case, right? you need to know what those beliefs are and you need to answer those questions so they might say, “Yeah, but my host does all my backups. So why do I need to back up?” And you go, cool. So you might be thinking your host does all your backups for you, but it’s really important to have a third-party backup, stored somewhere like Amazon or Dropbox just in case blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So that kind of deals with their objections. And then they’re like, okay, that makes sense.

And then, of course, the biggest competition we have is the fact that they’re probably going to do nothing. Inaction is the biggest hurdle we have. So what we do is we always say, you know, you don’t have to do this, but if you don’t, these are the consequences. So that’s kind of how we deal with that side of it. And then we have in terms of, if someone’s just not getting it and they need more support, we have a very active Facebook, a private Facebook study group for all of our courses. And we have, so in WP Elevation, for example, there are over 600 members in that Facebook group and we have four coaches plus six mentors plus a community manager. So we have like 12 staff who were in that Facebook group, answering questions, guiding people, pointing people in the right direction.

Joe Casabona: Man, that’s fantastic. So you tell them why it’s important. You kind of inoculate them against their objections, right?

Troy Dean: Yeah.

Joe Casabona: And then you tell them why it has to happen or what’s going to happen if they do it. That’s excellent. I’m definitely gonna remember that. So, we’re coming up on time. We’ve talked a bit about the transformation, right? We’ve got the history. What are your plans for the future?

Troy Dean: Great question. Now, I’m very pleased to announce that we recently managed to sign a deal with Zac Gordon, who, as we know, is the WordPress teacher, a Treehouse. And Zac and I have been trying to make this happen for, you know, almost a year now. And we finally made it happen. Zac is joining the team at WP Elevation to teach WordPress development which is something that we’ve never taught because we used to refer everyone over to Treehouse. I was like, well, why would we do it? But you know, they’re doing it really well. Well, I stopped doing it. So now we’re going to do it. So Zac’s joining us to teach WordPress development, which is fantastic.

Our goal at WP Elevation is to become, I mean, we already, I don’t sound like this to be arrogant again, but one of our missions here is to become the biggest business community for WordPress consultants on the planet. And we already are that anyway, but we want to really become the go-to community for a WordPress consultant to come and learn whatever they need to make their WordPress consulting business awesome and profitable and sustainable, and really support their lifestyle. And I will be the first to admit that we have some holes in what it is we teach. There are some things that we haven’t covered yet. I mean, there is so much that we could teach. So our foot is firmly on the pedal. As I said, we have five coaches now, including Zac and we are going to be rolling out new courses and new training as our customers ask for them. So as we learn what our customers need, we build those courses and we want to also, we’re going to be raising the production values of our course and hopefully, be able to shoot courses more in line with the production quality of something like a Treehouse or a creative live whereas up until recently, a lot of it has been asked in front of our USB cameras and using our slides on the computer. We want to start increasing the production values of our courses as well. And that just means that you know, more resources and we can do that now because the company is at a certain size that we have the resources to do that.

Joe Casabona: That’s great. And Zac is definitely the guy to do that too. So if you are interested in Zac Gordon, dear listeners, he was on episode nine. I believe I’ll link it in the show notes. And he talks all about his methodology for developing courses and increasing production value. So well, Troy, we’re almost done. I really appreciate your time today. And I want to ask you my favorite question, which is, do you have any trade secrets for us?

Troy Dean: It’s a really good question, man. Do I have any trade secrets? Well, you know, this is a little bit woo woo and a little bit new for me. But I’ve just started meditating again after a few years of not meditating and like about eight years of not meditating.

And I have to say getting up early in the morning and spending 20 minutes on the lounge room floor with my legs crossed in half Lotus meditating. Just being with myself actually gives me the resilience and the confidence to get through the day and no matter what happens. So whatever you can do to keep your mind positive and energized and focused. Because I actually think the biggest secret to success is focus. And so meditation for me really is just all about helping me stay focused. So whatever you can do, cause it all, for me, it all starts in the mind. I mean, I know everyone wants to know what kind of tool we’re using or what kind of, you know, shiny widget we’re using or what theme framework or what favorite plugin. But for me, it’s all about mindset. If your head’s in a good place, everything else falls into place and takes care of itself. So the Headspace app is what I’m using to meditate right now. headspace.com. It comes out of the UK, a guy by the name of Andy runs it. And yeah, headspace.com is my trade secret at the moment.

Joe Casabona: Awesome. That’s great. And I love that. I need to be better at that because you know, the first thing I do when I wake up is to check my email and that’s just not the right thing to do. 

Troy Dean: No, Joe!!! {laughing background]

Joe Casabona: I know it’s, it’s terrible. So I’ll definitely take that to heart.

Troy Dean: Cool, man.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. So, and you know, like you said, it’s all about focus or you can give a guy a hammer, but you can’t make them build their house. So, Troy, thank you so much for joining me today,

Troy Dean: Dude, this has been fun. You’re really good at this man. You should definitely keep doing this cause it’s awesome. I’ve had a lot of fun.

Joe Casabona: Hey everybody. I want to tell you about a new book I wrote with my good friend, Matt Medeiros of Matt Report, called the Podcast Starter Kit. It’s a QA-style book that tells you exactly what you need to get up and running with your own podcast. 

I’ve had lots of fun over the last several months with How I Built It and I want to share what I’ve learned with anybody looking to start their own podcast.

In the book, Matt and I try our hand at answering 23 questions that you need to ask yourself before you get up and running. We also include several resources, our favorite equipment, and a checklist at the end. Head over to the podcastbook.com to check it out. It’s only $24 and it’ll save you hours of time researching the right tools, where to upload your podcast, how to run a good interview and a lot more. That’s the podcastbook.com.

Thanks so much for listening, and thanks to our great guests and fantastic sponsors. If you liked the show, please rate it and subscribe on iTunes in Google Play or whatever your podcast app choices. If you have any questions, be sure to reach out at streamlined.fm.

And finally, until next week, get out there and build something.