Andrew: Hey there, freedom fighters. You know me. My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy.com. The reason I say you know me is I’ve been doing this for years, since about 2008.
One of the first interviews that I did was with a guy that I met at a live Mixergy event. The guy comes up to me and says, “Andrew, I’ve been listening to you for a long time. My dad and I are starting a business together and we listen to Mixergy so that I can learn about how to build a business.” I was so excited. I think he and I went out to brunch if not that day, we went out the next day. I just got to know him better.
The guy was François Arbour and he told me about how he and his father were building PremiumBeat, which is like audio that you can buy and put in your videos or put in your podcast or put on your website. The business was just growing and growing for him. I said come on and let’s do an interview.
So, François did an interview and he and I stayed in touch and then I kind of lost touch with him and I’ve been wondering what happened to him and then out of the blue, I get an email from another Mixergy fan, a guy you’re about to meet today. His name is Joey Korenman. He says, “Andrew, there’s this guy who you interviewed about four or five years ago who’s really helped me with my business.”
And he started telling me about how his business used to do–well, I’ll let him tell you the numbers. And it just took off after he got some outside help. And as I got to know Joey, I said, “Joey, you’ve got to come on here and do an interview.” And he agreed to do it and that’s what we’re here to do today, to talk about how Joey went from pretty much nothing–and you’ll get the exact numbers. You’ll get the numbers of where he is today.
The way he did it is by creating the School of Motion. School of Motion is dedicated to premium motion design training. We’ll talk about what motion means. We’ll also talk about his upcoming book, which still does not have a name but will by the time this interview is up.
We’ll do it all thanks to two sponsors who are paying for this interview. The first is a company that will help you find your brand. I mean complete with a .com, so all you have to do is start focusing on your business. They’re called BrandBucket. You can get your brand from them at BrandBucket.com. The second company will basically let you copy everything that Joey has done shamelessly. It’s called HostGator. I’ll tell you more about them later.
But first, I’ve got to welcome Joey. Good to have you here.
Joey: Thanks so much, Andrew. This is an honor.
Andrew: You heard François’ interview here, huh?
Joey: I did. Well, what happened was he reached out to me at some point. I got connected with PremiumBeat. He reached out. He wanted to chat with me and find out more about School of Motion. This was back before there was really any revenue and I didn’t really see myself as a business person.
So, I said, “Well, if I’m going to talk to the CEO of a real company, I should do some research.” So I Googled his name and the Mixergy interview was the first name I saw. I said, “He was on Mixergy? He must be super-legit.” So, I listened and that’s where I found out about him.
Andrew: Let’s talk about where your business was and where it is now. You gave me a before and after in one of our emails for revenue. Where was it?
Joey: When it started, after a few months I was selling a software product. I was tinkering with different business models. I think before I really hooked up with François and started really treating the business seriously and getting good advice from good people, the most we did was probably $5,000 in a year.
Andrew: $5,000 a year–you can’t live on that.
Joey: No. I had a day job.
Andrew: Okay.
Joey: For sure.
Andrew: And let’s talk about 2015. Where were you?
Joey: Sure. So, last year was the first year that I was literally full time on School of Motion for the entire year living off of the income and we did about $500,000 last year.
Andrew: $500,000, incredible. When you say about, let’s get specific. Are we talking $400,000-something, $500,000-something?
Joey: It’s funny. This is kind of my Achilles’ heal. There’s something scary to me about looking too closely at the numbers. It’s something I’m working on, Andrew. It depends on how you calculate it. The training programs that we sell, they cost $800 and we offer payment plans. So, sometimes people buy a course. They’re on the hook for $800, but we don’t get it all at once. I’m sure there’s like a fancy accounting term for that.
So, at the end of last year, we had collected a little over $480,000, but we had receivables for another $40,000. I’d like to say $500,000. I guess what we collected was under that, but what we had on the books was a little more. And then just to give you an idea, I just checked today because I wanted to have my numbers for you. This year so far we’ve booked in $50,000 in revenue.
Andrew: We’re two and a half months into the year after recording this.
Joey: And we have two launches, one tomorrow and one in two weeks. I’m expecting probably $100,000 to $120,000 from those. So, the growth has been really fast.
Andrew: Out of this world.
Joey: Since I started doing the right stuff.
Andrew: What were you doing before? Here’s what I see in my notes. You were working for Ringling College. Is that part of Ringling Brothers Circus?
Joey: So, I live near Sarasota, Florida, which is where the Ringling Brothers Circus would come summer. So, everything here is named after Ringling.
Andrew: Really, just because they came there in the summer?
Joey: Well, he was like this wealthy circus baron who would come in and throw his money around and he was a philanthropist. He built an art school called the Ringling College of Art & Design in Sarasota. It’s a really well-known art school and has a great motion design program. So, I did that for one year, but I had a previous life before that where I was actually doing motion design. I ran a company in Boston that did motion design. I was the creative director before that. I was freelance for years. So, I was a motion designer and then I moved in to teaching motion design.
Andrew: Got it. Okay. And then on the side you decided you were going to do this.
Joey: Correct. Here’s the timeline–I was in Boston and I was the creative director of a company that’s still there. They’re called Toil. It’s a really awesome group of people that make animation for mainly advertising clients. You can go to ToilBoston.com. You can see the work. A lot of the work that I did at the time is still up on their website, sort of high end graphics for clients like Saucony and Subway and McDonalds and Progressive Insurance.
Andrew: This is all motion graphics that you were doing?
Joey: Yes, motion graphics.
Andrew: What does motion mean? Let’s explain that now. That’s what you’re teaching. That’s what this whole business is based on.
Joey: Sure. It’s kind of difficult to explain. Even my parents I’m not sure really know what it is I do. Btu the way I explain it is this. Motion design is what you get when you combine a graphic designer and an animator. You mush them together and what you get is animation and most of it is done on a computer these days.
But it’s not animation like Disney or Pixar. It’s not what you think of what I say animation. It’s everything else. It’s logos. It’s abstract stuff. It’s very popular right now are these videos called explainer videos. Every time a new startup gets funded, they have to have one of these things. It’s like, “Meet Andrew. He’s an interviewer and he had this problem. So, a lot of that is motion design.
Andrew: If my logo just goes up on the screen and it breaks up into little bits and it’s replaced by my face or something like that, that’s motion.
Joey: Exactly. Yeah. When you watch the beginning of “Jessica Jones” and you see that really cool animated intro, that’s motion design.
Andrew: So, if you, Joey, are doing it for yourself and you’re an instructor for Ringling College of Art & Design, why bother with this side gig. What were you looking to get?
Joey: So, I started School of Motion when I was–this was before I was at Ringling. I’m trying to think of the exact year. It was probably around 2011, 2012. I was a creative director in Boston. I had just gotten married and had my first kid. I had been working for over a decade doing this work for clients, for advertising agencies and product companies, things like this.
It can be a really soul-sucking career sometimes, you know? Like anything else, I would feel really fortunate some days I get to do something cool and fun and make a good living at it. But at the same time, anyone who’s ever worked in advertising is nodding their head right now. The clients do not care about work/life balance. They don’t care that you have a one-year old you want to get home and see. They don’t care that Massachusetts is very expensive. I’m sure you have no sympathy there living where you do. But it’s expensive.
So, I would have a one-hour train ride home every day. I had a commute. But 5:59, changes would come in and I’d have to do it. I started to just get disillusioned with the whole idea of trading my time for money. That’s about the time I discovered Tim Ferriss and Pat Flynn and kind of got sucked in to this whole world of what the internet and can do in terms of letting you scale. I had a great conversation with your producer about this. I’m sort of the poster child for the 4-Hour Workweek and Smart Passive Income and Mixergy.
Andrew: Yeah, you really did make this transition beautifully.
Joey: There’s another way.
Andrew: So, you were thinking, “There’s some business in me teaching motion to other people. Am I right?”
Joey: Yeah. The way that came about was I found that while I liked doing the work and interacting with the clients less and less, what I really enjoyed was building–I had like a very small staff working under me. I was the lead animator and I was sort of the client lead and I was teaching people. They would come to me and they’d say, “You told me you want me to animate this thing a certain way. I don’t know how to do that. Can you teach me?” And I’d sit down with them for an hour and I’d show them. I really loved that.
That would make my whole day if I could sit down with someone and show them something cool and see that light go on. And then we started getting interns. I would do the same thing for them. I found myself spending more and more of my day doing that because I enjoyed it so much. At the same time, I was discovery Pat Flynn and I was like, “That’s kind of what he’s doing. He’s teaching people how to do business and there are other people like him.” I said, “Maybe I could do this for motion design.” There were already people doing this. They just weren’t really charging for it. I thought maybe I could do it and charge for it and that would be kind of the Holy Grail.
Andrew: Okay. So, you then teamed up with two other people. Why do you need two partners for something like this?
Joey: For School of Motion?
Andrew: Yeah.
Joey: Right now, I currently have two full-time employees. I don’t have partners for School of Motion. I had partners for my motion design business in Boston.
Andrew: Oh, I see. You did a motion design business too. I don’t see that on your LinkedIn profile.
Joey: That was called Toil and it should be on there somewhere. Yeah. You see that.
Andrew: So, you didn’t found Toil, you just worked there but you had those two partners while you were there.
Joey: I was a cofounder. There were three of us that founded it, but I was the creative director. My two partners, they were running an editing shop. They wanted to expand into motion design. We sort of partnered up and kind of spun off Toil from their existing business. But I wasn’t–
Andrew: I didn’t realize you were a founder of Toil.
Joey: I wasn’t an owner. So, when I left, it was a little bit of a cleaner break and they just hired someone to replace me. But I couldn’t have done that business by myself.
Andrew: I see. So then you start putting up videos on your own. You built the website using nothing but a WordPress installation and a theme you paid for. I’m looking at what the early version of the website looks like. I can see that little icon in your menu bar. You’re using ScreenFlow to record your screen and just talking into your computer about how to make a ball move.
Joey: That’s it. There it is. That’s my business. So, there were other sites out there doing similar things. There’s Lynda.com. It already had thousands of videos about motion design and Digital-Tutors was doing it and there were a couple other sites that were a little more niche. So, I just tried to figure out how to teach it in a better way or a different way, ways that haven’t been taught.
Andrew: What does that mean? What do you differently or what did you do at the time differently from all these other people who are doing it?
Joey: I’m not sure how successful I was initially, but what I was trying to do was to teach things that people need to know, not what they want to know.
Andrew: For example?
Joey: So, an example of that would be–so, the software that everyone is uses if Adobe After Effects. It’s an enormous piece of software that can do a million different things. It can be very complex. It’s difficult to learn. So, typically the types of videos that get a lot of views that people are interested in are ones where it shows you how to make something really cool really quick. There are large sites filled with content that is just that. It’s, “Here’s how to quickly make a lightsaber,” or something like that, which is cool and fun and there’s nothing wrong with that.
But if you want to be the professional motion designer, you need to know the basics. You need to know the twelve principles of animation. You need to have some design background. You need to know about some of the more obscure features of After Effects that give you control that are not as fun to learn, but are really necessary to be a professional. So, that was kind of the angle I came at it from. I just tried to find ways to teach that stuff but kind of make it interesting still.
Andrew: How many months did you go before you started charging for anything?
Joey: I think it was probably four or five months before I had anything for sale on the site.
Andrew: Before we get into what you were selling, to get traffic to the site, you used Reddit?
Joey: Yeah. I would put the videos on Vimeo–I had no idea what I was doing–I would put the videos on Vimeo.
Andrew: You still use Vimeo, don’t you?
Joey: Yeah, I do. I still Vimeo.
Andrew: Why do you use Vimeo as opposed to YouTube or Wistia?
Joey: It’s really just because Vimeo is where motion designers hang out. I’m not sure historically why that is. But real professional motion designers have always hosted their work on Vimeo. I think it might have been because back when YouTube was a little newer, the video quality wasn’t as good as Vimeo and now they’re the same. But Vimeo has hung on to that legacy where motion designers have all of their work there. So, I figured that’s where I should put the tutorial videos that I was creating.
We are using Wistia now for our paid content, for the content that lives in the courses. I would totally move over. I love Wistia and I would love everything there. It would just be really expensive to do that. So, for the free stuff we’re still on Vimeo. For the paid stuff, it’s Wistia.
Andrew: And the reason you’re probably with Wistia for the paid stuff is because it’s easier to block content. Wistia is about un-viral videos, even though there are some that have gone viral.
Joey: Exactly. It’s easier to control that. It’s easier to control the way it looks. Frankly, I think it’s a better user experience. The videos load instantly. The playback is better. They just added a new feature where you can control the playback speed. So, if you have long videos, which some of our videos are long, you can play them at twice the speed. So, it’s just a more customizable thing. That’s what we need.
Andrew: I didn’t know they added that. We built one of those ourselves for our Wistia videos because we know people wanted to play the interviews at twice speed or three times, so we coded something up for ourselves. It’s cool to see that they have it for everyone.
Joey: Yeah.
Andrew: So, you have it up on Wistia. Am I right about Reddit being your first source of traffic?
Joey: Yeah. That’s correct.
Andrew: What did you do on Reddit that worked?
Joey: So, there’s a motion design subreddit and then there are other subreddits for different software, for After Effects, for Cinema 4D, which is another software everyone uses. I would just get on there and I would say, “Hey, everybody, I made a free video. Go check it out.” I guess I was lucky that I was exposed to some of the ideas of internet marketing, like a lead magnet and a mailing list. So, I had that stuff setup already.
So, when people went there, there was stuff they could download, which was kind of unique at the time. Not everyone was doing that. So, people started talking about it. I’d look at my numbers and I’d be like, “Oh my gosh, 100 people watched the video yesterday.” I just kept making more.
Andrew: Wow. The motion design subreddit has–in order to get to the top, it looks like you just need ten people to upvote you. We’re talking about a pretty small subreddit, but it’s really well-targeted.
Joey: I’ll tell you, I think what probably drove traffic a lot was Vimeo has this feature where you can follow someone. It’s like following someone on YouTube. I didn’t even know that feature existed. I didn’t know how to check it at all. At some point, my numbers just kept growing and I couldn’t figure out how either and I finally discovered, “Oh, I have all these followers.”
To this day, that number of Vimeo followers goes up every single day without me doing anything. So, every time I was posting a new video, new people who were following me saw it and then anyone that was following them saw it. So, Vimeo kind of had that built in viral mechanism already.
Andrew: I see. I’m looking at your early newsletter. It just said, “School of Motion–subscribe to our newsletter. Enter your name and email address.”
Joey: Yeah, that was it.
Andrew: And it was MailChimp. That’s what you started growing your mailing list with, huh?
Joey: That was it. I think when I started it, I had no lead magnet at all. After a month or two, I added a lead magnet, like a video you could only get to when you joined the mailing list and something you could download. It was very rudimentary.
Andrew: Today, you’re really intense about it. I have a note to talk to you about marketing automation because you’ve really dialed it in. We’ll talk about that in a moment.
But first, I have to tell people that if you’re starting your own business or starting a new product that’s part of your business and you want to get a brand for it, I know how hard it can be. You spend hours, days, maybe even months looking for the right .com. you spend a long time making sure that you find the right domain, the right name, the right logo, all of that stuff. Then if you pick the wrong one, you might have to start right over again. I’ve interviewed some people that have had to do that.
It can be a real pain and distraction at the time when you really should be focused on how to create the product, how to get your customers, how to sell your customers on this new product. It doesn’t have to be that way. You really can make it easy and many people have already done that, including some who I’ve interviewed here on Mixergy. The company that will do it for you is called BrandBucket. They’ve got a bucket full of brands. I guess that’s where they got their name from, right? That’s the visual I have in my life.
The idea there is you go to BrandBucket and you can just kind of scroll through, the way you might if you were looking for the right t-shirt or the right pair of shoes, and just spend some time looking for the right brand for your company.
When you find it, what you’ll see is they give you the .com, a .com that’s already been vetted to make sure that it’s a good name, that it’s available, that it’s there for you. They’ll actually sell it to you if you want it as part of the package. You’re going to get the logo. You’re going to get a feel for how your company would present itself with this logo, with this domain, with this company name.
If you want to just scroll through, al you have to do is go to BrandBucket.com/Mixergy. The reason I recommend you go to that, BrandBucket.com/Mixergy, is because they will give you $75 of Envato credit when you buy a brand using that URL.
Envato, by the way, is a company that gives you all kinds of code, all kinds of themes which will make your site look great. You probably are going to want to check them out after you get your site. And Envato is a past Mixergy interviewee whose company name, whose brand was bought on BrandBucket. So, if you go to BrandBucket.com/Mixergy, they’ll give you $75 credit so you can get that design for your site.
More importantly, you can start scrolling through names, start scrolling through logos. If one of them strikes your fancy and you decide you want to use it–I’m looking at a bunch here that are pretty cool–you can just go in and buy it, get the logo, get the domain, etc. If not, if you even have no interest in buying it, I would still scroll through it just to start to be inspired by different ideas for how to come up with the name for your site, how to come up with the logo for your business, how to come up with the URL that maybe is a little different from your current thinking.
Wow. I see Continue.com is on there. Jiimmy with two I’s, I don’t love that one so much. There are a bunch. I see that right now they have 26,323 names. You’re going to find one that excites you and you’re definitely going to find hundreds that will inspire you. So, go check out BrandBucket.com/Mixergy, my sponsor, a really good company.
You get your site up. You just do a whole ScreenFlow thing. You start getting traffic in. You said a lead magnet helped you. What was your first lead magnet?
Joey: So, I had a lead magnet that was basically a link to a page that was password protected and on that page you could download a very advanced kind of fancy After Effects project and then there was a video kind of explaining it. I think I had one other thing, like some other little tool I had made for motion design or something like that.
Andrew: That’s really cool.
Joey: People would show up and they’d watch a video about something completely unrelated. That was the lead magnet. I knew that it wasn’t quite right, but it still worked.
Andrew: It wasn’t quite right because it wasn’t directly related to what they’d watched, right?
Joey: Exactly. Motion design is a very broad niche. It may seem like a small group of people doing it, but there are so many different topics to cover. That was a big challenge in the beginning.
Andrew: What I like about it is even though it’s not great, you’re not just giving them another video after having gotten them on the site, you’re not just giving them another video after having gotten them on the site with the video, you’re giving them a tool. You’re giving them a project that’s related to the site. What do you do today as your lead magnet?
Joey: I’m not completely happy with this either but it works way better. The lead magnet is you sign up for the mailing list, you get a username and a password to our site. Once you have that, you can login and we allow you to download files, almost every lesson we have on there. If you watch one and you want to download the project files from that and sometimes we include extra things, extra pieces of footage you can play with and stuff like that, your name and password lets you download it.
So, it’s one lead magnet, but you can now pick and choose the content you want to actually grab. We have so much on there that I think it’s kind of appealing. It’s an interesting lead magnet. It’s been working okay.
Andrew: Just okay, huh?
Joey: Still optimizing.
Andrew: All right.
Joey: I still feel like it’s too many steps involved. I’d like it to be simpler.
Andrew: You give me your email address and I give you the tools that go along with this one program.
Joey: What’s that?
Andrew: As opposed to saying, “Give me your email address and I’ll send you the tools that go along with this program.”
Joey: Right, or as opposed to saying, “Give me your email address right now,” and then when you go to the next page, you don’t have to enter your email address again, you can have that too.
Andrew: Yeah, I get that.
Joey: If anyone out there knows of this tool.
Andrew: Can’t you just change that through messaging? You don’t have to tell me that I’m going to get an account and all that. You can just say, “Give me your email address and I’ll send you this thing.”
Joey: I’m sure there’s a way to do it. That’s one of the things I’m good at procrastinating, looking or new tools to find new and improved ways. It’s great that the sponsor was BrandBucket because it sounds like exactly the type of thing a business owner should not spend so much time doing.
Andrew: Right, you can’t get sucked into that.
Joey: I’m trying to take that advice.
Andrew: Okay. So, the first thing that you created and sold you put up on E-junkie. What was it?
Joey: So, there’s a piece of software called Cinema 4D. It’s basically like the most widely used 3D software for motion designers. You can make really elaborate little user-created tools for it. So, a buddy of mine made a tool that kind of it takes a task that normally takes 20 steps and is kind of finicky and it turns it into one click and you can control all these options and that was it. So, we made that tool and we sold it for $50.
Andrew: All right. How’d that go for you?
Joey: At the time, it’s hard to say if the failure of it was not understanding how to market it, not having a big enough email list. We didn’t spend any money on advertising, really, or it just wasn’t a good tool. It just didn’t catch on. I think when it launched, we sold 100 of them, not all at once, maybe over a few months, we sold 100 of them.
I thought that was great, $5,000? The thing is done. It’s just passive income now. It was fantastic, if a little small. Then the software, Cinema 4D got a big update and my tool didn’t work anymore. So, then I had to spend a month fixing it to work with the new version. That’s when I realized I don’t want to be in the software business.
Andrew: Instead you want to teach, go back to what you started this whole thing with.
Joey: Yeah. That’s what I always wanted to do. Honestly, the reason I didn’t start off selling training was I was afraid because there was so much free stuff out there. It’s interesting because it was about the time I started exploring the idea of selling training that I met and talked with François, who kind of talked me off the ledge a little bit and made me realize there is room for paid training and free training to coexist.
So, I decided to give it a shot at that point. We don’t sell that software product anymore. I quietly kind of took it down. If someone would email me, “Hey, where’d that thing go?” I’d just give it to them for free. After six months, no one asked about it anymore. So, it clearly wasn’t that popular.
Andrew: So then how do you separate it? Considering that you’re giving stuff away for free, that YouTube is full of free stuff, Vimeo is full of free stuff, I could Google a bunch of free stuff. What did you decide would be the thing that people would be willing to pay for?
Joey: So, there are kind of two lessons I learned. One is if people like you–I sort of have a unique delivery and my videos have a goofy quality to them. So, people like that. So, they would rather learn from me than from someone on YouTube who didn’t take the time to buy a nice microphone and buy ScreenFlow and edit their videos and things like that.
So, one aspect was just kind of being okay with the idea that maybe it was enough that I was teaching it. The big thing I did was I tried to figure out what I could do that people on YouTube weren’t doing. So, when I built my first course, it was not just a bunch of videos you downloaded.
From the beginning, I knew I wanted to have the students do exercises and then share them and get critique on them and get feedback. I wanted to include interviews with really brilliant animators and kind of sprinkle those out throughout the course in the right place. In my head I had this idea of creating an online summer camp for motion designers.
So, that’s what I set out to build. It’s much harder to do that than to just make a ten-video series, but that’s what worked. That’s what separated us. I guess it worked because it’s very popular now.
Andrew: How did you know what topics to cover?
Joey: The first course that I did, it’s kind of what I said earlier. There are the things that everyone says they want to learn how to do, right? I want to learn how to do what I saw on TV on that commercial, a specific thing and there was a lot of that out there. So, what I wanted to do was create something broad that would be universally and instantly useful to anyone who learned it.
So, I just thought about what I would have killed to have been told when I was like in my early 20s because I didn’t actually go to school for this. Like a lot of people in motion design, they picked it up on the job. They fell into it. So, they never learned the basics. So, I wanted to create a course that was the basics. So, I focused on animation. I came up with all of the topics I wanted to cover. I was very fortunate that at the time I was thinking about this, I was teaching at Ringling, teaching this exact thing to a group of live students, so I could kind of practice it and see what worked and what didn’t.
Andrew: Talk to me about that. First of all, that’s clever that you said you didn’t have a big enough audience. You didn’t have the time or the resources to do deep market–actually, I think you might have been able to do some market research to figure out what the topic was. You said, “I want to solve the pain that I had when I was getting started. I want to go back and almost undo some of the mistakes I made or do things right for myself. Since I can’t go back in time, I’ll do it for my students.” I get that and I think that’s really clever.
I want to understand more about how you tested it in front of an audience of students at school. Do you remember one thing that you taught that when you saw their eyes either light up or you saw them get confused that you changed because of their feedback?
Joey: Actually, I do. So, when you’re learning animation, one of the first things you typically learn to do is you learn to make a ball bounce. Anyone who’s studied animation has done a ball bounce or multiple ball bounces. In making a ball bounce, in making it feel right and realistic, there are so many principles at play, right? So, that’s usually what you start with. The problem is it’s very difficult. It’s actually a very difficult exercise. But it’s just by default because that’s the way it’s been taught for years because that’s where you normally start.
So, at Ringling, that’s where I started, “Let’s make a ball bounce.” It turns out that that’s kind of scary and you’re not guaranteed that the student is going to have a quick win there. It’s very difficult. So, when I did the online course, ball bounces is in the middle actually kind of towards the end of the course, after you’ve done a whole bunch of other things that are much easier to grasp and much quicker to learn. So, that was one lesson I learned teaching at Ringling. The order you teach things in is really, really important.
Andrew: I think that’s important to emphasize that you want to give people a quick win that then gives them enough confidence to continue and almost shows that you have what it takes to teach them. They want to be proven right for taking for taking your course and also prove that they can actually learn from you.
Joey: Exactly. The first lesson that we do in that course, it’s something that I’ve never actually seen done. At Ringling, this isn’t an exercise they do, but I thought it was a very clever way of taking something that looks hard and showing you that it’s not that hard. So, all of the students, when they do it–we have a Facebook group that all of the students go into when they join a session of our course–you can see the comments like every single time, “Wow, I thought this was going to be so much harder. I’m so excited now.” Now they’re ready to tackle the next thing, which is much harder, but now they have some confidence.
So, for me, the sequencing, it’s like the little nuances of how you outline a course and sequence it and lead students on the path, that’s where the magic is and that’s what I’ve discovered over the last couple of years is that that’s the hardest thing to do. That’s what’s not happening on YouTube and some of the other sites out there that we are taking the time to try and do.
Andrew: Okay. I also like how you put your video on and then you show your screen. It feels like that’s intentional, that I get to see you, even though for the most part it’s just hearing your voice and watching your screen.
Joey: So, when I started showing up on camera–and if you watch some of the later videos, I actually invested in a nice camera and lights and a Lavalier mic. I knew that the difference in the way I’d be able to do this was if I had a competitive advantage of this is my full-time job, I can sit and do this all day long. Most people who do this do it part time. They’re not thinking about making motion design tutorials all day long because they have a day job. It was like me before I was doing this.
So, I wanted to prove right off the bat this was different. This looks professional. I have a teleprompter now. We do everything very polished. Even when we do just ScreenFlow, just sharing the screen, we will invest and have designers and illustrators created artwork fro me to animate that looks amazing. So, even if I’m showing you something simple, it’s really fun to look at it because it’s beautifully illustrated or something. So, we always go the extra distance and that was kind of another thing.
Andrew: But when you started you didn’t. Were you still showing your video on camera when you started?
Joey: It was just a webcam in the corner.
Andrew: No great lighting.
Joey: I didn’t have this cool boom arm either. It was like a microphone stand between my legs and I would push it out of the way.
Andrew: That’s important to notice. You realized one of your competitive advantages was you had time. You didn’t have money. You didn’t have the brand name. You didn’t have any of it but you had the time to just crank out a video. I think you said you wanted to do one every day.
Joey: So, after I was at Ringling for a year–during that year, School of Motion dwindled. There was not much activity happening. It was towards the end of that year that I realized School of Motion has potential and if I’m going to make a run at it I really have to do it full time. I’m not going to be able to juggle Ringling and this. That was a very hard decision because Ringling was amazing. I’m still very close with them. They sponsored a bunch of videos for school of motion. But it’s kind of that thing where once you’re an entrepreneur, you’re kind of ruined, right?
So, I quit and I had the summer off. I was still getting paid by Ringling because they pay you for 12 months even though you’re only working for 8 or 9. I had that paycheck coming in. I took the summer and said, “While I’m still getting a paycheck, I’m going to do this crazy marketing blitz where I’m going to do a video every day for 30 days.”
So, I sort of announced it to everyone. I said, “Hey, School of Motion is coming back.” I think at the time, I had 10 or 15 videos. I was like, “I need a lot more. I’m going to take six weeks and do 30 videos.” I announced it and people said, “You’re crazy. This is going to kill you.” It almost did. It was very, very difficult. I underestimated it quite a bit. At the end of it, I had tripled my email list. I had been featured on the biggest motion design blog in the world. I had made contacts with amazing companies who were reaching out to sponsor, like PremiumBeat. That’s where I met François.
Andrew: How? How could you get so much growth when you’re spending so much time creating a new tutorial every day? That sucks up your time and doesn’t give you any space to go and market. It doesn’t give you any space to go and network.
Joey: Right. So, the growth was all in terms of awareness. There was no revenue growth, nothing like that. It was just brand awareness.
Andrew: If you’re working all day, how do you have time to contact François? How does François have time to find you? What is it about working every day like this that allowed you to grow your audience?
Joey: During that time, I was working long hours. I’d have to ask my wife because I don’t even remember parts of it I was so tired sometimes.
Andrew: Were you marketing also? You were creating a video every day and marketing it?
Joey: Yes. I would create the video, edit it, upload it, write a blog post about it, write an email about it, a Facebook post and a tweet, schedule it all, move on to the next one.
Andrew: That’s it? You didn’t do any personal outreach to one of the top bloggers or potential marketers or partners, none of that.
Joey: The only people I reached out to, I still continued to hop on Reddit and post on there. Reddit sent a lot of traffic to School of Motion. So, I’m very thankful to Reddit. I didn’t reach out to sponsors or anything like that. There’s a blog called Motionographer, which is like the motion design capital of the internet. I reached out to the guy who runs it, Justin Cone. I didn’t have any relationship with him and he was notoriously hard to get a hold of. I thought, “What the heck?” He was really interested and ran an interview with me basically. That gave me a lot of traffic too. But he was really the one I reached out to.
The thing is, people who like motion design, it’s not like–we’re all really familiar with internet marketing blogs and stuff like that. People that are into that are pretty into it. But it’s not often their entire life. Motion design is not like that. Motion design is an addictive thing. If you’re into it, it’s all you think about. Watching these tutorial videos, it’s like crack. Literally there are people who watch every single day for 30 days an hour long video of me talking because they couldn’t get enough of it.
Andrew: I see. You were like a new crack dealer coming out with good stuff every day. You didn’t need to go and market it heavily. You just knew that your people would come and find you.
Joey: It was a lesson I learned from John Lee Dumas, right? His show came out. He’s a good interviewer and it’s a good show. But the reason it took off so fast was because it was every day, this cool thing, “Oh my gosh, I can’t believe he’s doing it.” So, that was part of it and I knew that would help. I underestimated how well it would work, but it worked very well.
Andrew: And then you met another person, someone who actually helped John Lee take off. She’s the one who guided him. We’re going to talk about her in a moment.
Joey: Sure.
Andrew: First I’ve got to tell people that everything you’re doing, Joey, correct me if I’m wrong, but everything that you did at least to this part of the story, everyone who’s listening to us can do just using a HostGator account. Am I right?
Joey: That’s correct.
Andrew: You just go to HostGator. You sign up. You can get your domain. You can get started for just a few bucks a month and they give you a basic package to host whatever software you want, but the one that I recommend anyone who wants to copy your process choose is just WordPress. You bought your first theme.
They could buy a theme and put it on. But frankly, WordPress comes with enough themes. There are free themes out there on the internet that you can download and install on your site and be ready to go. All you need is a topic to teach. Today, as you said, YouTube has good enough video quality that everyone can start doing tutorials with video or frankly even text and images is fine.
Is there a topic just like motion that you would recommend someone consider or you might consider if you were starting over today and motion wasn’t accessible to you. What would you teach?
Joey: I had this idea–I was talking about this with my brother in law the other day. So, I really like watching football, but I’ve never played football and I frankly don’t understand it that well and I feel like it hinders my ability to talk football with the guys. I would gladly pay for some great, well-produced course to teach me what do these words mean, secondary, stuff like that. I couldn’t find anything like that. Someone who knows football, it’s so easy to make a blog. That would be a slam dunk.
Andrew: Anyone who does that, I would pay at least $50, let’s say $100 to learn what the hell is going on in football. I don’t know what the hell is going on. I have no passion for it. I just want to be in the know. I would totally do it. Just teach me the basics of football like I’m an idiot about football, which I am. Walk me through it slowly. What the hell is a first down? What’s going on when they’re huddling? What are they talking about at that point? Couldn’t they have gotten that conversation down before we started? Is that what you’re talking about?
Joey: I know that stuff, but I don’t know why this player is better than this one. I don’t know what the defensive tackles role is. I don’t know the inside stuff.
Andrew: I see. You want like a next level up. I want like the football for your girlfriend or football for your boyfriend.
Joey: I see multiple products here, Andrew.
Andrew: You know why like that you brought that up? Here is a day to day problem. I hear people talk about freaking football all the time. I have no idea what they’re talking about. I’m not even noticing that it’s a problem for me. Meanwhile, for many people this is so basic that they could teach this in their sleep and they’d love to talk about it.
Frankly, is there a community out there that they can tap into? Probably there is. Maybe there’s a sports community where they can say, “Take this and show this to your significant other who’s not into football.” Maybe that’s what it is.
I like that idea and I like the thinking more than that. I like the thinking behind it. Take something we take for granted that’s so simple for us to understand and make it easy for people who are completely out of it to follow along and get. It doesn’t have to be that hard. Pick your topic, go to HostGator.com, get your website hosted.
When you get started, they have a simple, inexpensive plan that will get your started. Once you start to grow, you can move up to WordPress managed hosted. I know people sell WordPress managed hosting for hundreds of dollars, literally thousands of dollars at times. HostGator now said, “Why are these guys charging so much money? They have no competition. Great. We’ll do WordPress managed hosting really expensively.”
What does WordPress managed hosting mean? It means you get spam protection. You get backups. You get plugin detection to make sure you’ve got the right plugins, all that stuff. You get better uptime. HostGator has great uptime right now. You get phenomenal support with HostGator.
If you’re getting started, go to HostGator.com/Mixergy. When you do, they’re going to give you a really good discount, 30% off their usual price. That’s pretty much it. Just keep growing your business. Take whatever idea you have and put it on there and get started.
If you already have a site and you hate your hosting company, don’t wait for them to give you trouble. Don’t wait for your site to go down and for you to panic to find the phone number to call tech support. Just switch to HostGator. They have a tech support number online and they have incredible uptime, HostGator.com/Mixergy. I’m glad that they’re a sponsor.
The woman who I was talking about earlier, what’s her name?
Joey: Her name is Jaime Tardy.
Andrew: How did you hook up with Jaime Tardy?
Joey: So, I did my 30-day blitz and grew my audience and had a mailing list. I think at the time it might have been 4,500, something like that. I knew I was ready and now was the time I needed to make this course. I didn’t know how to do that. I didn’t know how to sell it. The main thing was I was afraid. That was really why I reached out. I’ve had luck in other areas of my life using coaches.
At one time, I still run a lot, but I wanted to run a marathon really fast. So, I hired a running coach. He didn’t tell me things I didn’t know. It was just things I knew said by someone else. So, I did them. I thought maybe this will work for business. So, I said I need a business coach. I don’t know any. But I listen to Eventual Millionaire. I really like Jaime. She’s got this cool style. It’s very different.
So, I reached out and she said, “Well, you are not quite ready for me to be like your coach or your mentor,” because she’s quite expensive at that level. “But I do have kind of a group program to help onboard you and get you to that level. So, let’s try that out.” So, I signed up for that. It’s called her Hustlers Program. I went through that. It was a 12-week thing. It was sort of the basics of building an internet business. A lot of it I had already done.
It wasn’t necessarily teaching me new things. I had already binged on every podcast, Mixergy and everything. I knew all this stuff. I just needed someone to tell me to do it and hold me accountable. There was one night and I remember it because it literally changed my whole life, where I had sort of written out an outline for my course. I figured this was going to take me three months to build.
We had like a weekly webinar call with Jaime where we could ask her questions. I asked her, “How do I know if I should do this? This is three months and I’m not making any money right now.” She said, “What you should do is pitch it to your audience and see if you can get people to pay for it before you build it.”
Again, that’s something I’ve heard of. I knew that was a thing, but it never occurred to me that I should do that because why the hell would it work for me? Then she was like, “If you don’t do that by the next call, if you haven’t pitched it by the next call, I’m going to ridicule you. I’m going to humiliate you.”
So, I ran a webinar. Literally I didn’t invent any of this stuff. I sent an email to my audience inviting them to a free webinar. The template for that email was based off another email I had probably gotten from Frank Kearns or something. And then on the webinar, I followed a system from one of Jaime’s guests that had been on one of her podcasts.
At the end of the webinar, there was a buy now button and it sold out in five minutes. So, I knew at that point I should build the course. Nothing I did was hard other than getting over the fear of it. That’s why Jaime–she’s one of my favorite people–changed my life totally and she’s a great coach because she figured out how to make me do it.
Andrew: Jaime is fantastic. She actually changed her name to Jaime Masters, I think, because of her divorce.
Joey: Correct.
Andrew: Which I feel awkward bringing up.
Joey: No you don’t.
Andrew: I kind of do, strangely. I feel very comfortable bringing up anything for you, but anyone else’s personal stuff I feel uncomfortable with, but I think she did a blog post about it.
Joey: Yeah. She did. It was a very honest blog post too.
Andrew: I’m just amazed at the results she’s gotten for people. What it was, was just her saying you know what you need to do. You already know pre-selling is the way to go. I’m going to embarrass you and make fun of you unless you get it done for our next call.
Joey: That was literally it.
Andrew: That’s it?
Joey: That’s the crazy thing about business. Most business is not rocket science at all. It’s go ask that guy if he likes your idea. If he says yes, ask him to pay you for it. That’s it. But it’s so hard to do that. It’s so scary. So, I think that’s why there’s so such a giant business coaching industry because people recognize that they will not do it on their own. Most people won’t. They just don’t have that in them and I didn’t. So, I’m glad that I reached out to a coach who was willing to push a little bit.
Andrew: How much did you make from that first run?
Joey: So, what happened was I originally was going to sell 20 spots to my beta. I was calling it the beta. I didn’t know what I was going to charge for it. I ended up charging $250 a person for this beta. I sold 20 spots in five minutes.
Andrew: $5,000 in five minutes.
Joey: Then what happened next was everyone who didn’t get in flooded my inbox like, “Please open more spots. This is exactly what I need.” So, I opened 20 more spots, did the webinar again a week later and that sold out in one minute. So, $10,000 in six minutes of actual selling time.
Andrew: What’s the deal with spots though? Why not say, “I’m recording these videos. I’ve got the whole thing setup? I’ll sell as many as I want.”
Joey: That’s a great question. That’s something I’ve struggled with. This whole thing started way back when I heard Pat Flynn for the first time as a lifestyle business. I thought, “This will be great. I can teach.” But then I can just go away for a month and leave everything and it will just go on its own. The way to do that is to create an evergreen course like you’re talking about. You sell it to however many people whenever they want it. So, maybe I could have done that. Maybe it would have worked great. But I didn’t.
The reason that I told myself–and I do stand by this–is the same reason I needed a coach to actually do that, I think a lot of artists who really want to get better but don’t realize how hard it is to get better and the training and the pain and the resistance you have to overcome internally, it works so much better if you have someone holding you accountable.
So, that’s why I mentioned before the idea of summer camp. If you have a bunch of other people going through this with you at the same time and you’re all sharing your work, “Whoa, that last class was hard. Whoa, yours looks great.” The incentive is greater to finish. Online courses have a terrible finishing rate. I don’t know any specific–
Andrew: What’s your finish rate?
Joey: So, out of a six-week course getting all the way to the end, in six weeks, about 40%, but then we extend the course so you can actually have an extra six weeks to finish and then it goes over 50%.
Andrew: How do you measure that? What software do you use that tells you that people actually finish?
Joey: We’re using a plugin called AccessAlly. It’s a membership program for WordPress that integrates with Infusionsoft. That’s our back end. It has this cool feature called ProgressAlly where you can track progress. There are a bunch of different ways that you can do that. You can have the students check something off when they do it. But the primary way that we measure is by looking at students turning in their homework.
So, it’s a six-week course. There are one or two homework assignments per week. What we’ll see is towards the middle of the course, people burn out and we don’t see them anymore. Their homework doesn’t get turned in. But the ones that make it all the way to the end and turn in everything, I call that a completion. At least they made it through the content and tried.
Andrew: I get it. I think there’s something to be said for someone saying, “You’re only selling this temporarily. I’ll buy it and I’ll go do it on my own time.” I know there are a lot of people who do that. The reason I know it is because I tried like nagging people to get them to finish one of courses and I found that they were starting to get burned out on it.
You don’t want someone pushing you too far when you’re not ready to get started even. I’d buy a book because someone recommends it. I don’t need the author to say, “Hey, did you read my book yet? Did you read my book yet?” So, I used to aim for 100%. Now I’m okay with a lower percent. But you’re right. We need to care about what that completion rate is. That software, I looked it up, it’s available at AmbitionAlly.com and people can get it there if they want.
Then you mentioned Pat Flynn a couple of times. You then went to–how did you get advice from Pat Flynn, who told you go bigger?
Joey: So, I’ve gotten advice from Pat in a couple of ways. One is just listening to his podcast. Really him and Tim Ferriss, if I was 14 and hung posters of men I liked in my room, those are my two guys. But through Jaime, I was invited–and this blew my mind when it happened–but I was invited to sit in on their mastermind group. She has a mastermind group with Pat. She wanted to record one of these things and I put it up as a podcast episode to show everyone what it’s like in a mastermind.
So, she invited me. On that call, they grilled me about School of Motion. Pat gave me advice. Jaime gave me advice. The other people on the call gave me advice. The takeaway from that was if I can handle 50 students–because I think at the time I only had the course setup to have 50 students go through at the time. I think it was Jaime or Pat who said, “Why not 100 students?”
Again, it’s like in my head, I had maybe asked myself that question but shot it down with, “I’d have to hire people to help me at that point. I don’t know if my website can handle that and my video bill will be too high. I’ll have to upgrade the plan.” All of those problems are solvable really easily, but without someone else saying it in my ear, I never would have done it.
So, after that I actually hired two of the best students from my beta session and I made them teaching assistants. So, then the next session of the course, I could support 100 people and have them critiquing the student work and grading the work. So, I could kind of fix things and get the systems down and move on to the next course.
Andrew: Sweet. I want to hear about your systems for onboarding people now. Let’s go into that–onboarding systems and then systems for teaching the class because I know you’re big on both of those. You started out originally with what I saw was a pretty crummy MailChimp embed form to get people to sign up, complete with a little link on the bottom that says, “From MailChimp” or whatever. Their ad was essentially embedded in your email embed form.
But you got more sophisticated. What does it look like now when someone comes to your site and gives you their email address? The first thing they get is that username and password. What happens after that that’s clever that you would have looked back on in awe back when you started?
Joey: Sure. When someone comes to school of motion now, we have a much nicer looking popup. We have this better lead magnet system where you’re basically invited to become a free VIP member of the site and download anything that you can find on our site–project files, video footage. We’ve started doing really cool partnerships and contests with companies like PremiumBeat to download a free song or Soundsnap to download free sound effects or Shutterstock to download stock footage. All of that is accessible.
Andrew: If I understand you right, you give people a free beat from PremiumBeat is that right? That’s one of the reasons why they give you their email address?
Joey: No, sorry. There are kind of separate things happening. We do give students who have purchased one of our courses a free song from PremiumBeat. But we’ve done contests, for example, with Soundsnap, a sound effects company. Part of the contest is they allowed everyone who came to my site to download, I think, 100 free sound effects, really high quality sound effects that they could use however they want. But you had to sign up and be a VIP member to grab them.
Then as part of the 30-day marketing blitz I did, I had footage provided by the Baltimore Orioles because they have spring training in Sarasota. So, we shot their mascot on a green screen. I showed in a video, “Here’s how you get rid of the green screen and put them in my backyard.” And I let you download the footage of my backyard and the footage of the Orioles. So, you could grab all that stuff too. So, it’s all about grabbing the stuff.
Andrew: These are all lead magnets.
Joey: Exactly. Yeah.
Andrew: That’s why people give you their email address. So, once they give you their email address. You already mention you use Infusionsoft. What happens after that?
Joey: So, once they do that, they go into a sequence where it’s kind of your standard–I’m not sure the term is a nurturing sequence or something like that. It’s, “Here’s some of the best content on our site. Here are some things you should check out.”
We’re still actually optimizing this, but the end game there is we want to find out if they’re interested in any of the topics that we’re teaching in our paid training courses. We currently have two paid training courses and the third one, the beta is launching in two weeks. So, we’ll soon have three. So, then we kind of segment them from there. If they’re interested–
Andrew: How can you tell? Based on what they’re clicking on?
Joey: It’s just a survey.
Andrew: You send them a survey and then based on what they respond, you tag them and then at that point, you’ve now created two different sequences, one for each of those different tags?
Joey: Exactly. So, one of the things I really like–I think you can do all this with MailChimp now–but with Infusionsoft, you can create emails that have buttons in them. You write something nice, “So, when I was young, when I was in my 20s, I didn’t have any animation training. It made life very hard for me. It would have been much easier if someone sat me down and told me what I needed to know? Does that sound like you? Yes/no?” right?
And you click yes, now they’re tagged. They are tagged as yes. They said yes to that email. What does that mean? That means that now we can probably market to them a little bit about the animation boot camp program. That’s the first one I did. And then from there, we give them to exist interest in that product and what that does is our product opens and closes.
This year, I think we’ll run it five times. Actually tomorrow, it goes on sale for the second time. So, when they are on that interest list, they get a bunch of emails around every single registration period. That drives most of our sales.
Andrew: Okay. And then what’s different about your messaging? What works about the way that you message people?
Joey: I personally think that we still don’t do a great job of messaging. I think what’s working for us is two things. One is I have always tried very hard not to give into the urge to start writing like a company. I’ve always just talked like, “Hey, it’s Joey.” It’s like what you do. Andrew is Mixergy and Mixergy is Andrew. They’re interchangeable. So, my personality, maybe it repels some people but some people like it because it’s unique. It’s a unique way of learning.
The biggest thing we have going for us is we just have the right product for the market right now. We have good product market fit. Our courses, there’s nothing else like them and they’re very effective and they get really good reviews and testimonials. People tell me they changed their lives and things. So, I think that’s why we’ve been successful. Our marketing is okay. The automation end, to me the interesting part is what happens when you’re in the course.
Andrew: Yeah. So, tell me about that.
Joey: So, this comes back to François, by the way, because one of the first things François told me was automate as much as humanly possible. A lot of the early success, I think, of PremiumBeat had to do with the fact that his overhead was very low because he spent a lot of time building these systems to automate stuff. So, he planted that bug in my head.
So, we did things like when someone signs up for a payment plan, you can use Infusionsoft and a thing called PlusThis and you can send an automatic email reminding people about their upcoming payment plans. If a payment fails, everything that happens after that is automated. They lose access to the course. It gets restored when they pay.
Andrew: Did you build all that? That’s kind of a pain in the neck to do.
Joey: It’s a huge pain in the neck.
Andrew: You did it yourself?
Joey: I built most of it myself.
Andrew: My sense is if you’re using PlusThis that you probably even used SixthDivision too as a consultant, no?
Joey: No. I have never used them. I have used an Infusionsoft consultant before when I first got on to it and I didn’t really understand some of the pieces of it. But now I think it’s helpful because what I do is already very technical and the software I’m using it super technical. I’m used to that.
So, Infusionsoft, it made sense to me. It wasn’t as confusing as it had been made out to be. Once you wrap your head around it, it’s not how Infusionsoft works that’s hard. It’s what should you do with it. It’s the same thing with animation. I can teach someone the software fairly quickly. What should you do with the software? That’s the hard part. So, it was just thinking about what emails should you send and other things. So, we also use Infusionsoft to drip feed the course to people, to send them–
Andrew: That means on the right day you send the right email saying, “Your next module is available. The next piece of content is available. Your homework is due,” that kind of thing.
Joey: Exactly. Yeah.
Andrew: What else?
Joey: At the end of the course, there are automated surveys, testimonial collection. We send completion certificates. We integrate with a tool called WebMerge which lets you send a PDF with the students name and the date they finish and it goes right to them. We also then funnel them to a sequence that sends them to PremiumBeat and they get a free song. So, there’s a lot of that.
And then on top of that, we also tag them. Right now, our biggest course has 200 students at a time going through it. So, we’ve scaled it up even bigger. But we have to separate them out. We can’t have 200 people in a Facebook group. We also do these videos during the course every single Wednesday where we take current student work and our teaching assistants like ScreenFlow and critique it.
They put that video into Wistia. It gets embedded into a playlist. So, what the student watches is like this one-hour TV show where a little five-minute segment gets updated every session. But they only see their episode. They don’t see the other students’ episodes. They just see theirs. That’s automated too through Infusionsoft.
Andrew: What is that?
Joey: It’s kind of hard to explain. But imagine if I wanted to create a one-hour video tutorial. 30 minutes of it is me explaining, “Here’s a common issue I see with this homework assignment. Here’s how I fix it.” I want to record that one time and never record it again. But before and after that what would be cool is to show some of the current student work and talk about it and say, “Hey, this is Andrew’s homework assignment. He did a good job here.”
That’s going to change every single session. Five times a year, that’s going to need to get updated. So, what we do is we built a Wistia playlist. So, that section is one video. Then the middle section is my video. That doesn’t change. This changes every single time.
Andrew: Got it. Right. So, the first thing they see is something that’s changed and then it moves on to the next video which is something that’s consistent every time. I see. What other tools do you use that are especially helpful?
Joey: We just started using ClickFunnels mainly just for our ordering process. Infusionsoft has gotten a lot better lately. They update it quite often now and it’s gotten better. But there are issues that pop up, especially when you’re running something that opens and closes and has inventory. Infusionsoft up until a month ago I don’t think let you actually sell out of a product. Actually, neither did ClickFunnels To make that happen–you’ll love this–we had to hire a developer to create an inventory management system for us that integrates with Infusionsoft.
Andrew: I had no idea that Infusionsoft did that or that they didn’t do that. I assumed you can do inventory.
Joey: Yeah. It was strange. You could track inventory but if it got to zero you could still buy it. So we worked with Toptal, actually, and had a developer create a solution for that.
Andrew: You went to Toptal to get an Infusionsoft developer?
Joey: No. We actually had them build a custom inventory tracking system on our WordPress site.
Andrew: I see.
Joey: It worked perfectly for us. So, there’s that.
Andrew: I’m amazed by the tools you discover. What else?
Joey: We use GoToWebinar to do webinars. We’ve started looking at–Webinar Jam has a product that lets you automate webinars. In the beginning when the course was new, I would do a webinar every time it was about to open. That would really goose the sales. But it got to where even doing that one webinar and dealing with registration and answering questions afterwards was too much.
So, I stopped doing it and sales kept going up anyway. So, we’re okay. But I know eventually I will need to start doing some marketing, some better marketing than we’re doing. We’re looking into that. I’m probably forgetting some. There are so many.
We just got hooked up with Zendesk for customer support, which cut our customer support time probably by two thirds in the first week of using it. We’re all about that. We’re all about staying lean.
Andrew: I never valued the importance of good customer support software. I just assumed, “We can share an email from Gmail.” But man, if you get the right customer support software, you don’t have to say the same things over and over again. You can get some passing back and forth between you and your assistant or you and your support staff. Another thing, not a tool but something else you recommend is “Invisible Selling Machine.” You told our producer that’s a book you recommend. Why?
Joey: Yeah. So, when I got Infusionsoft, they sent that book to me. It was also recommended by Joe, the Scrivener coach guy. He recommended it to me. I think he was on Mixergy too.
Andrew: Yes, he was. How were you talking to Joe the Scrivener guy?
Joey: I’m in a mastermind group with Mary Kathryn Johnson of Parent Entrepreneur Power. So, she interviewed him and said, “I think you guys would hit it off because you’re doing the same thing.” That was the book–learning Infusionsoft was not the hard part. It’s what the heck you do with it. That book does a good job of explaining that, how to think about the types of emails to send. Don’t worry about the campaign builder and how it all works. What should you do once that part is figured out? So, I did really like that book.
Andrew: What do you like about being a part of Mixergy?
Joey: It’s funny. So, being a premium member, I think I signed up for the premium membership because I’m just kind of a junkie and I wanted to access all of the material. In reality, it’s probably only been like three days since I’ve signed up where I’ve actually sat and gone through courses and stuff like that. So, to be honest, I signed up because I just felt indebted to you and I felt like I should be doing something. I’m sure that’s not the first time you’ve heard that.
But Mixergy really was kind of–I felt like I read “The 4-Hour Workweek.” I found Pat Flynn. Then I was ready for the next level. I wanted a little more advanced business knowledge. Mixergy was that. I’m still steeped in it. I was talking to Brian, your producer, and we both are kind of the same. We knew nothing about this three years ago and all of a sudden, if you find the right sources, the right well to tap into, you can grow so fast. It’s pretty crazy.
Andrew: You mentioned the Scrivener interview that I did. We actually have a collection of interviews that I’ve done around companies like yours that are selling education. We call them–if anyone calls them, they can go into Mixergy and search under category for educational company. I intentionally didn’t want to use info marketer. But I wonder if we should just call it info marketer. What do you think of that?
Joey: I don’t like the word.
Andrew: Right? But we also don’t call it educational company. What’s the right phrase for that?
Joey: I usually say online training. I feel like info kind of cheapens what it is, a little bit. Marketer has too much baggage associated with it. Even frankly for a long time, I was saying, “A new video tutorial, another tutorial,” and I don’t even like that word anymore. That kind of cheapens it too.
I think the really successful people, CreativeLive and places like that, they’re trying to bring high end experiences, the kind of you would get in a college classroom or a convention and just translate it into online. We’re doing that, but we’re also trying to use the advantages of online. Sometimes you think of teaching online as a disadvantage. In some ways it is. In some ways it’s an advantage. So, I don’t know if there’s a good word for it yet. We say online training.
Andrew: I agree. I don’t think people are searching for that. I think that’s a much better description. I’ll leave it here and maybe somebody will come up with a better word for it. Like I said, I don’t love that.
All right. We’ve talked about a lot of different things here. We talked about Jaime Tardy. What’s the name last name? I’ve got to get used to it. Jaime Masters.
Joey: Yeah.
Andrew: Her site is Eventual Millionaire. I’ve heard so much about her and I’ve been interviewed by her. So, I’ve known her for a long time, but I’m amazed by the results she’s getting for people, so we should let people know about that. We talked about your website. It’s called SchoolOfMotion.com. We talked about your book. What is it about and when is it coming out?
Joey: The book should be coming out probably the beginning of May. It’s a book tentatively titled “Six-Figure Freelancing.” Now that I’m helping motion designers learn how to animate and design and actually create the work, I also want them to be able to make a living doing it and freelancing is frankly, in my opinion, the best way to do that. There are a lot of reasons why and I don’t want to go on to much about it. If you go to SchoolOfMotion.com, if you’re on our mailing list, there will be a lot of information about that coming out.
Andrew: Cool. My two sponsors for this interview are first the company that’s going to help you get the right brand, including the .com, including–actually, not just .com, other top-level domains too, but if you want the URL, they’ll give it to you as part of the package, the logo, the name, everything to get you started right. It’s called BrandBucket. You can find them at BrandBucket.ocm/Mixergy. And if you want to copy everything that Joey has done or frankly get your website hosted by a really good hosting company, go to HostGator.com/Mixergy.
And of course, finally we talked about Mixergy Premium, which Joey is a member of even though he’s not using it enough. It’s good for me to know that, Joey. You should be. Go check out MixergyPremium.com. You’ll get access to all of the interviews and all the courses on Mixergy, all taught by real entrepreneurs, the kinds of people that build the kind of companies that you want to build and you want to grow based on how they did it–MixergyPremiun.com.
Joey, so good to have you on here.
Joey: Yeah. Thanks so much. This was great, Andrew. I appreciate it.
Andrew: You bet. Thank you all for being a part of Mixergy. Bye, everyone.
