Jason Zook: From "This Is Hell" to a Sustainable Vibe-Coded Offer

Speaker A: M. Foreign.

Speaker B: Welcome to the Get Paid Podcast. I'm Claire Pelletro and this is the show that's dedicated to giving you an honest look at the reality of running an online business. Basically, I ask people how much money they make, how much they pay themselves, and how much they have to spend to make that kind of money. We're talking real numbers here. Plus, what is the emotional cost, the mental cost to run these kinds of businesses? I've been working on online marketing behind the scenes of seven and eight figure businesses since 2013, and I kid you not when I say I have seen it all Right now, I have a lot of questions for the people who are making it work. This episode is brought to you by Get Paid Marketing, also known as gpm, which is my hybrid coaching and personalized consulting program where we help you build a custom 50k funnel for your main offer so you can then run ads to that funnel to double or even triple your sales. GPM is for you if you sell coaching, a membership, a course, any kind of scalable offer that people are obsessed with. You're amazing at helping your clients get results and they love you for it. So now you are ready to scale both your revenue and the number of people that you can help. But you can't fathom the idea of doubling the amount of work that you're doing. And that is why you're ready to automate some of your marketing using strategic ads and funnels. When you join gpm, you spend a year with us working on your ads, your funnels, your launches, the entire strategy, plus the mindset and messaging changes that are required to convert cold traffic and, uh, scale using ads. The investment to work with us is $15,000 with different payment plans available. We are opening for enrollment on Wednesday, March 18, but everyone on the waitlist gets an extra day to apply, which means you also get first dibs at my calendar if you want to sign up for a sales call to figure out whether or not this is the right investment for you. So head over to clairepels.com waitlist that's clairepels.com waitList all one word and make sure you're signed up there. And now let's get into this week's episode. Here we go. Hello, good listeners. We are back with the second half of the interview with Jason Zoom Sook. No guest has ever provoked this desire in my listeners to hear more. And it might be because we accidentally made you all wait a bit longer than normal. But thank you to everyone who reached out and was like, where Is the rest of this interview. Truth be told, we did not intend for it to be such a long time. We lost the second half of the conversation. And thank you, Jason, for taking the time to come back, especially since you were like, what were we chatting 90 minutes last time? So just want to kick us off and say thank you so much.

Speaker A: Yeah, no problem. I. If anything, it's a great example for your listeners. You just. You turn those lemons into lemonade, right? Like, it got messed up. We just. Just said, like, hey, Here's a part 1. Leave people hanging a little bit, get them excited, see if they actually want the part two. Who knows? Maybe you would have gotten no messages about it at all. And then you just would have sent me an email. Be like, hey, I. We don't really need part two. Like, no one really cares.

Speaker B: Oh, no, no, no. There was no way I was not going to get a part two out of. If I had to wait months, I would have because it is such an interesting story. So if you haven't checked out part one, it is just a couple episodes ago. So pause here, go back, listen to that and. Cause I'm going to pick up really right where we left off. You shared that you had vibe coded video reel. Was that the name of it? I want to make sure I get that right.

Speaker A: It was voice reel at the time.

Speaker B: Voice reel. Excuse me, Voice real. And at first it went really well. Like, you had even tested the idea out with your audience ahead of time. It was really smart and initially it went really well. But then week two, you were thinking of going back to selling the program. You had just taken a long time to intentionally shut down. So why. What was happening that you started to doubt yourself so much?

Speaker A: Yeah, it's really been an interesting journey in the vibe coding, like, era that we have existed in now for a total of two years. But really, what feels like about six months as like the. The crux of it, because it's when like the better models came out. But yeah, what we were talking about was we did this pre order to choose which app we would go with. And the overwhelming choice was Voice Rail. And so it was this vertical video editing, uh, app where you would just record a voice memo, it would transcribe it like Descript does, and then you could add B roll on top of your. Your voice. And so this is supposed to be really fast, really simple, really easy. And so the first week, you know, catching everybody up, like, I. I got the MVP built, it was feeling great. And then all of a sudden, the second week, I had to get to the really important feature, which was, like, exporting the video that you created so you could see the video in the app. And, like, it worked. Your B roll looked good. Everything seemed fine. You could swap B roll in and out. You could upload it, you could take it from a stock library. Like, it was just great. As soon as you hit export, nothing worked. And I really got to a place where I was hitting my head against the wall because I could not figure it out. And again, just so everyone's aware, I'm not a developer. I'm just smashing keys into the keyboard, and I am yelling at Claude at the time to just fix this, you know? And all I can say are words like, the export does not work. I don't know what's going on behind the scenes. And then, uh, and I tried to go the route of like, hey, please explain this to me. Like, maybe I know more than I actually do. And so it would be like, yeah, no worries. So what we're taking is the FFMPEG and we're going across the web codec and we're doing this thing. I'm like, hey, bud, I was completely wrong when I said, please explain this to me, because I have no idea what we're saying now. And so we need to go back to, like, talking to me like, I'm an idiot. So, yeah, it was a, uh, it was a very interesting flip from the first week with all the excitement to the second week of feeling like I had no chance of actually making Voice Real exist and work.

Speaker B: Oh, my goodness. But you had, like, actually paying customers already because of the way you had this, like, voting system right where they voted with some dollars. So how long did it take you to get something in the hands of your users?

Speaker A: Yeah, it was thankfully, uh, a buddy of mine named Cade came to the rescue. He was in our Wandering in Fleet community, and so he actually heard us kind of, like, talking about this. We were recording podcast episodes and sharing things, and we do, uh, like, a weekly call that was just for our wandering Inflate members. And I mentioned I was at this. This kind of, like, breaking point. I didn't know how to get past it. And he was like, hey, I've messed around with video stuff before. In a previous thing. He was like, if you want me to take a look, like, I'll just look. I was like, yeah, sure, let's do it. And so he actually came back to me after, like, 48 hours. And he was like, I don't think this Is like the perfect fix, but I think this will fix it. And he gave me this like long prompt to give to Claude. I gave him access to the project and I came back and I gave it to Claude. And sure enough, it didn't fix it perfectly, but it actually like cracked open the door of like how we could improve it. And so from there it was like two weeks of me going back and forth, finally figuring it out and getting it working. And then we eventually got to a place where it was working. All the people who had pre funded it could get in and start kind of playing around and giving us some more feedback. But then at that point it was like, okay, we can't just keep messing around with the MVP version. Like, and again, we only made about a thousand dollars with the, uh, pre funding sales. Like, this isn't going to be enough money to sustain us. We have to actually like launch this thing and put it in front of people as like a working product. So that actually, you know, probably two weeks after that, like breaking point, we were pretty much ready to release and launch and do kind of like a bigger marketing push.

Speaker B: Okay, cool. And then when you did go to launch, what was the response?

Speaker A: Yeah, so we were going back and forth about trying to sell it as a subscription product or sell it as just like usage based credits. So for anybody who's using AI tools you're very familiar with, like you get a bunch of credits for like 20 bucks and then you can just like keep buying credits, but you don't have to be in a monthly subscription, which feels kind of nice. And so we've never done anything like that. So I was like, well, this seems like the perfect opportunity and the perfect app to try because someone may not want to pay for a, uh, video editing app every month. They just have a couple reels they want to edit, so they want to buy credits. And so we were talking about this. We were going back and forth. I think my wife would admit. She was like, I really want to do the monthly recurring. And I was like, I really want to do the credit based. I ended up winning, I think, only because of the fact that we both love experimentation. So she was like, okay, I'll let you have this one. Because we like to play around and just try things. But the twist that we put on it because we were like, listen, as much as people like us, I don't think they're going to be lining up to spend, you know, 20, $50 for these packs of credits. What would make it interesting? And so we many Projects I've used this bump sale pricing where like the price increments up or down based on what you do. And so I was actually chatting with Claude and I was like, hey, I have a little bit of an idea, but I need your help trying to kind of like flesh this out. I want to use this bump sale mechanism that I've used, but I don't think it works with the credit packs. Like, what's a way that we could do this where there's some type of multiplier that someone could get with credits? And I, uh, kid you not within like 30 seconds, Claude was like, oh, I've got it. It's called waterfall pricing. And we're gonna start at like a 10x multiplier. So someone, you know, pays 20 for a credit pack, they basically get $200 worth of credits. And it basically said if we go down like 0.1 in the multiplier for every person that purchases, every person, you know, who buys thereafter gets a little bit lower multiplier, but they still get a great deal. And it just creates an incentive for people to buy because like, oh, well, I want to grab the multiplier. And I was like, buddy, this is a fantastic idea. But then I thought like, all ideas are fantastic until we start to actually like, can we make this work? Like, how do we actually have this happen automatically? I'm not going to go in there and like change the decimal points while this has happened. And my, my wife has been a part of many of these little kind of like bump sale pricing projects and they're very technically difficult because anytime you're working with changing the price on the fly with people sitting on a page, it is really challenging. I thought this was going to be like another week of testing and Claude did it in 15 minutes. And it was bulletproof. Like, I tried everything I could to like break it and it just worked. And I think I even remember typing to Claude. I was like, hey, I gotta say, you really impressed me. And I think it probably wrote back. It was like, you know, I don't care, I'm a robot. What do I need your thanks for it? But sometimes I just like to do that. But anyway, so yeah, we came up with this waterfall pricing mechanism. We did. I uh, think it was like a two week lead up for people letting them know about the waterfall pricing. Because whenever you do weird pricing stuff, I have learned you got to give people more time than just like a regular kind of like launch because it's going to be confusing. Like they have to Figure out like, wait, what am I getting? Like how is this? So I think that was really helpful. It got people excited and so on the launch day, you know, and again we, we have a, A uh, smaller list that is going to be interested in this and an even smaller portion of that list is going to be interested in a video editing app. And so our, our low goal I think we said for ourselves was like you know, 5,000 bucks or something like that or. No, I think it was 2,500 bucks was our logo. Because we were just like they're $20 credit packs. Like people are not going to spend that much. It's you know, good amount of uh, purchases that we need. But again this is just the initial, initial launch and I think we did the launch, we, we made it live and I think within the first like two hours we hit 2,500 bucks which was great. Like it felt really nice. Only problem was we, we left it open for two weeks and we only ended up at like $4,000 total in revenue. So it was like we came out of the gates like, oh yeah, this is going to be good. But then you just start to see like as the multiplier goes down, obviously it's less exciting for people to buy. And again it's only really 20 bucks. Like you could buy a bigger pack but most people didn't. So it was really fun for 24 hours. The next two weeks kind of just felt like, okay, uh, again Our logo was 2,500. Small list is getting this. So that's okay. But yeah, that's kind of how the launch went. Um, you know, and how we kind of uh, what then became Scene Roll? We re rebranded it. That was the launch of Scene Roll.

Speaker B: Okay, so then you got in just a few hours, 125 sales.

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker B: That's 2,500 divided by $20 a sale. I mean that's like guessing that most people took that. That is a shit ton of customers.

Speaker A: I know. And it's, it's such a, a mental gymnasticizing to do. Right. Because 100, 100 people buying something is a lot like I totally agree with you. But when it's only 20 bucks, it's when you just start to realize like, uh, I don't know if this business model is sustainable, you know, or you know, we have to go after like a much bigger pool of people. And so it was a very kind of like eye opening launch to be like this hm app is going to need 100 times the amount of customers that we got. For it to make money, that's actually like, substantial for us. And I don't know that we're going to be able to find a hundred times people in a short. You know, not like we're not trying to get it overnight, but even in like six months to a year, it felt like trying to get thousands of customers was going to be pretty, uh, insurmountable of a task. So, yeah, it was a very interesting and different launch than we've, we've kind of ever had before.

Speaker B: That's so interesting because, correct me if I'm wrong, but with the price increase, this price bump. What, sorry, what do you call it again?

Speaker A: Claude named it Waterfall pricing for this one, but my original name is just Bump Sale. That's like the price bumps every time.

Speaker B: Well, because, correct me if I'm wrong, but the previous bump sales, you made more money with each sale, not you just gave them more access or less access with each.

Speaker A: Right, yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, it was very interesting. And when Claude and I were going through the math of the waterfall pricing, I was basically trying to figure out, like, at what point do we break even? You know, because it's eventually like if someone uses all their credits, we're losing money on like, how much it costs us behind the scenes for all the things. And I think it was basically like 20 sales breaks even. So I was like, oh, okay, great. Like, that's no big deal at all. Like, if it was like 80, then I'd be like, okay, we got a problem here. But it was, it was fairly decent, you know. And even in the bump sale version, like that one, when it was like starting something at a dollar and going up by a dollar, it was the same thing, right? Like, you're giving away so much value in the beginning, only to get to a point where, like, you know, you had to get a certain amount of sales. And like, we used to do, uh, you know, these bundles of our things, you know, many years ago, and it was like we'd get probably about 125 buyers. Like, probably, like that's always been like our amount of buyers at a certain rate. But you would get people up to like $100 per sale, you know, fairly quickly in that. So, yeah, just just very different. And also, you know, I find these things just to be really informative in that I get to check a box that I've never checked before, which is like the credits pricing, the, like, kind of like waterfall mechanism, which I would love to use something like that again, like, that, to me, was really Exciting. But I don't think I would do it on like a smaller priced thing. I would definitely want to do it more in something that was like, hey, this is a monthly subscription product. But, like, everyone who buys their subscription is a little bit cheaper, you know, or whatever, and it creates a more interesting recurring revenue subscription, if you will.

Speaker B: Right. Okay. So you did talk about switching it to a. I mean, Caroline was like, let's go with the monthly recurring, the subscription model. And you were like, no. And you won on that. But you did you eventually switch it over to that?

Speaker A: We did, yeah. And, uh, funny enough, I think we've had. So we basically. Scene Roll was up for sale after the launch for about a month and with the credit packs. And so we were averaging, selling like way one, maybe two packs on a good day. So, you know, not making a ton of money, like making about a hundred bucks a week. Right. Um, and so we were like, okay, you know, at a hundred bucks a week, we're not missing out on a ton of money. Like, maybe we should go to this subscription model for this tool that actually kind of coincided when we started working on our second biocoding tool. So we had a lot less time to like, promote and market it. But we did switch it over after a month, and not a single person has purchased the monthly recurring model. And I have a suspicion why, because we still get traffic to the site every day. We still actually get people who are signing up for trials. But my suspicion is now Sceneral as a recurring subscription model fits within two products that dominate the market of video editing apps, the Descript market, which is a $35 product per month or whatever the base price is. That tool is incredible. What you can do with it is absolutely unbelievable. We will never compete on the features. So. So, like, you know, our monthly price was $19 a month. So it's like for just a little bit more. Descript is the answer. On the other side of the spectrum, you have Instagram Edits app, which I think is like pretty much the competitor, or Cap Cut, which is free. We can't compete with either of those either. So it's like we found ourselves in this weird middle ground of like, oh, well, where does Scene Rule fit in with someone's budget? Because it does make sense as just the credit pack. Cause, like, oh, I'll play around and I'll see how it goes and I'll throw 20 bucks at it, but I don't want to put my credit card down and be charged $19 a month. And it's like if I don't use this or I don't get as much out of it. So I, uh, think the, the pricing and changing the pricing to the recurring model really showed us, oh, we're actually in a really bad market for this type of product, which is why we knew this wasn't going to be our, our one and only product. It was just kind of the first one that we were going for and it just taught us a lot of lessons.

Speaker B: Okay, so tell me about the second one.

Speaker A: Yes. So our intention when we started the year, and I think I said this in the first part of the episode when we recorded, was we were going to make four to six apps because we just we a lot of ideas. We're never short on ideas. And so what we thought was, okay, this video app was probably the hardest one we were going to build because video is so hard. Let's go with something that was a little bit easier. And we were starting to look at like, the revenue of it all. I mean, okay, we've really only made like $10,000 in the first three months of the year, um, which is not nothing. And I'm not saying that that's a bad thing, but we're coming off of making $30,000 a month in our coaching business. So it's like, ugh, that's quite a shift and a huge revenue gap to make up. So we were trying to figure out, okay, what could be a bigger revenue generator, a product that people are more willing to pay for that fits better in, like the, what people are already paying for landscape, uh, of products. And what's something that's a tool that like the, the scene role, video editing thing is nice to have, but it's really not solving a problem that like, hits us every single kind of day, especially as business owners. And so we just kept talking about, kept talking about and we kept coming back to content and we kept coming back to this idea of like, when you're a coach, a solopreneur, you, you just have to make content nowadays. Like, you gotta have a newsletter, you've gotta be on social in some st standpoint or other. Uh, you got a podcast, you got a YouTube channel, like all these different things. And because you have all of those things, it's really hard to wrangle it all together in a place where you can feel like you're not just sitting at your computer every day firing up like four different apps and trying to like, connect everything to like, get your voice into all those different pieces of content. And what we had realized ourselves was we were trying to use Claude and ChatGPT to like train it on our voice. And so my wife is much more good at using these tools in the way that like people find ways that they're designed to be used. And what I mean by that is specifically, ah, with Claude using skills or specifically with ChatGPT using custom GPTs, I find these things to be so frictionful to my brain. And I don't know if it's just because I'm dumb, but I'm, I'm like smart dumb, right? It's like there's some resistance in me when I start to use those things that it does not feel the way that I should use them. And so I just, I get really stuck. So anyway, all that to say, my wife started using these skills to write like our weekly newsletter for our growing study, which is our Wandering Ainsley newsletter. She started to use these skills for like podcast episodes we would record to like create outlines. She would use them for her own short form videos she would make with Instagram. And so she created all these different skills and she actually kind of got a little bit, you know, this like burn her butt one night to like put together this like skills app thing that was like bringing all the skills together to do stuff. And she showed it to me and because I don't use these things, I had a very non positive response to it. Not like, this is terrible, but I was more just like, I don't get it, you know, like it didn't work for my brain. And I could tell she was really bummed, but I knew there was something there because like, she's the one who makes more of the content in our businesses than we do. And so I think I like slept on it. And I came back the next day and I was like, hey, I actually, I was thinking about this. It was called Skillet at the time. I was like thinking about this Skillet thing that you showed me and I think it's great, but I think there's a layer on top of it for the dummies like me that like, I just want to create content of all these different types. I want it to know my voice, but I don't have to think about skills. I don't have to manage any of this stuff. I don't want to have to think about projects. Like, I just want the tool to know all these things. And I just say, I want to write a newsletter. Here's my topic. And I think she was still a little bit flustered, but she was like, okay, let me think about that. And like, come back to you. And I. I think within 24 hours, she had, like, a working prototype of what is now called Solo Content Studio, our second app. And essentially what it was was it. It takes these skills that you kind of create behind the scenes without knowing it. And then you can apply your voice, your audience, your brand, the things you love to say, the things you don't love to say, all your little isms, your stories, all these different things. It captures them all in what we call sharpening right now. It's like this behind the scenes system that captures all this stuff from you by asking you questions. And then when you say, I want to write a newsletter, you just tell it the topic and it knows through some training what your voice should be or who your audience is, and then it spits out a newsletter that sounds like you. And of course, you can also give it examples, which came later in the build of this project. But that's where the second idea evolved from that little, you know, those little breadcrumbs of going from like, hey, we want a second app. What's the thing we need? My wife was playing around with these skills. I am too dumb to use skills. And it kind of all coalesced into the second app called Solo Content Studio.

Speaker B: I love that idea of figuring out the thing that you need yourself in your business. I remember that. That's how Meet Edgar, or Edgar, remember that tool. So I was working for Laura Roeder when she was. When they were developing that tool, and it came from this place of they. They actually let go a team member who was managing all their social. And out of, like, the necessity, she just took it on until they. I don't know if they were thinking of finding somebody else or not for that role, but she had to take it on and she really saw the need and they built it and then they sold it for a gazillion dollars and, uh, all that jazz. So it's a. Just a great for people who are thinking like, well, what kind of tool could I create or build, like, to sell? I mean, in the last half of this episode, we talked about me creating a doodle. I just did it again. I did it again for like, a while.

Speaker A: You weren't gonna do it. You said you weren't gonna do it.

Speaker B: I know. And guess what? I was yelling at Clawd again, like, anyways, I'm. I'm. I don't know why my husband has a paid doodle account. Why am I not just using it I don't, I think it's like I want, yeah, I want to say, hey, I built this, this is cool. But anyway, I think to your point

Speaker A: though, I want to share with everybody too because I know a lot of people and a lot of people in our audience kind of think the same way, which is like, well, you know, I don't know what app I would build if I was going to get into Vibe coding or whatever. And what I have always thought, even before Vibe coding was a thing just in like making your own apps, what do you use a spreadsheet for? What do you use a database for? What do you use like a notes app for? That's in a way that it's like systematized for you. It doesn't have to be like overly crazy or anything else, but it's like it's your unique way of doing those things that is an app. And if other people want to do it in the same way, that is a way that you can absolutely turn things into an app. So, you know, I think Vibe coding, what it's doing is it's allowing and I mean developers have been doing this for years. But what Vibe coding is allowing people do is take bigger complex ideas like recording a voice memo and turning it into a short form video and turning that into an app. But that's not all. They have to be like, they, they can be much simpler things that just take like a Google Sheet that like no one wants to really sit in Google Sheets except for Google Sheets people, and they can actually turn it into like a nice looking app that like does certain things that solve certain problems. And so yeah, I, I think you're right. Like you, for us, uh, especially we have tried to go down the route of like, what are big problems that other people have that we can try and like create businesses around or whatever. It never works because we don't have any attachment to it. And so every time we go to work on it, we're just like, ugh, uh, I don't know, you know, like, I want to work on this and I'd love to make money doing this, but like, it's just so soul sucking because I don't want to be looking at this thing all day, I don't care. But when we, it comes to things like trying to create content, it's like, yeah, it is frictionful to think about the newsletter, the podcast outline, the short form, video scripts, like all this other stuff that we want to make for our business that we genuinely like making. It just takes a Lot of time. And it feels like now with AI, uh, like there is a big, better, faster way that it's 90% of the way there. Even if it's 50% of the way there, it's still saving hours of time every single week.

Speaker B: That's a really, It's a great point. So tell me about how you launched that. What kind of, you know, crazy idea did you use for that?

Speaker A: We went a little bit less crazy, but still a little bit unique. So what we decided right out of the gates was, okay, let's pick a product that like, fits within people's budgets, that they're actually willing to pay for. And so when it comes to like, content creation tools, obviously people are already paying for Claude and GPT and those things, but you're not getting like the customization and kind of like organizing all of it in one place through your context or your audience, like all that stuff. And yes, you can work all those things together. But again, I think a lot more people are like me that are like my wife, where it's like, yeah, but I want it to be simple and I'll pay for simplicity and I'll pay for someone to like, think through all the tough stuff. So what we decided was, yes, this will be a content creation tool. You know, you are creating essentially drafts, but they're really high fidelity drafts of, uh, your newsletter, your podcast outlines your short form, know, scripts, et cetera. And we want to charge something that feels like actually reasonable, that we don't have to have a ton of customers for it to make sense. And so we were like, let's go with a hundred dollars a month. Because the way that we thought about it was when we were running, wandering aimfully, if someone said, hey, we have a tool that you will pay $100 a month and it'll crank out all your content you need for a week and at least get you to a draft status that's like, better than, uh, a freelancer that you hire who still can't write in your voice because they have their own voice and they can't mimic what you do. But like, this thing can do it better because that's all it does is pattern recognition. Would you pay for that? And when we were talking about this for ourselves, like, yeah, absolutely, we will pay for this. No, no, um, no way around it. And so, okay, so that starts with like, okay, the price, $100 a month, a recurring subscription product. If you're at all, you know, serious about your business, you're. You're making any amount of money over probably like $5,000 a month. It makes sense for you to just pay for things like this. So we're like, all right, well no one's going to really just want to pay out of the gate $100 a month for a thing they've never used. Even if we could show them that they used it, it might be hard for them to see the value in just creating a draft or two. So let's do the thing that we have done before, which is like, let's treat this a little bit like an info product. Like let's do it where we're going to have a kickoff call. We'll actually like take you through it and we'll kind of like train you on the thing and like teach you like why this is important. Let's have a little community area where you can actually feel like you're a part of a group who's going through this together. And let's just do it on like a, like a fixed price with like a discount built in on the recurring subscription. So the way that we did it was just basically selling a cohort, which your audience will know very well. And it was just like if you, we opened up the doors for two weeks. If you join the first week you get it for. It was basically a hundred bucks cheaper and you got like some direct access to us if you wanted it. And so that was um, 395, uh, or 295. Excuse me. So $295, just one time fee. And then the second week was $395. You know, so you miss out on the like the early bird discount. And then anybody who bought in that time, you would get 50% off the $99 price for 12 months. So you essentially get like $1,000 worth of value, if you will, you know, included in all of that with the community and everything else. And so yeah, we, we kind of did more of a standard launch. Like we did three, uh, weeks of leading up. We were showing behind the scenes of the product, you know, a couple little videos of us using it and doing it together. And, and you know, this, this also coincided with the fact of, like I said before, like, you know, when we ended up making like, I think it was like $4200 with the scene world launches just came to my mind. I was like, that's not going to cut it. You know, we don't need a, uh, we're not going to do a six figure launch of this product. There's just no way. But it's definitely needs to be better. So we did this launch and we ended up doing, I think it ended up being like $13,000 in the two weeks, which is great because it's not only $13,000. It ended up being, I think it's 42 customers. It's 42 customers who, because they gave their credit card. It's also a potential of 42 times $52,000 in recurring revenue that's sitting there waiting to be charged once their, uh, kind of subscription starts.

Speaker B: And that was my one question. Um, how long before the subscription starts like this? Uh, 295 or 795. Yeah, 295 or 395. How many months of access to the tool did they get?

Speaker A: We did two months. So. Two months. Two months of like, quote, unquote free usage. I mean, obviously they're paying for the cohort and everything else, but you don't have a subscription payment for those two months. And then the, it's actually coming up, like, as we're recording this, I think we're like 12 days away from people's subscriptions starting to be starting to pay. So, yeah, it's, it'll be interesting. We said from the beginning probably 50% of people will cancel before their subscription starts, which is totally fine. Like, it's, you know, that's what's going to happen in this. But I do think we are going to end up with at least half of those people continuing to pay because it's the only way they're going to be able to lock in this price on an app that costs 100 bucks a month and get it for 50. And I know if I was in that boat, I'd be like, yeah, I mean, I'll just pay for it because I want the deal. And I like getting the deal.

Speaker B: Got to hold on to that half off. I mean, at least for, for 12 months. Yeah.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Did you do a webinar?

Speaker A: So we, we did not. We, we used to play the webinar game a lot. And I think what happened is, because I've been a listener of your show for years, I hear you talk about this all the time. And I, I, I constantly still hear people do it. I think I still have residual burnout from, like, all the webinars that I used to do. And I don't know why I can't let go of these things. Probably just need therapy. But there is just something in me that, like, I have such resistance to it and I don't know what it is. Like, I should Just do it. Like we, I know my wife and I are, we're captivating on video. It's fun, we have a good time. The energy that we feel when we're on it is great too and we probably should have done something like that and I think we might like that's actually something that's funny. We've been talking about it since Solo Content Studio is actually like it's up now, it's, you know, for sale. It has a couple of its first customers on its own. Like without a ton of marketing. We're past that cohort, you know, group pretty much. You, uh, know, as it's just a couple of weeks, I think we will start to do some webinar based promotion and marketing because I think it really fits well to the audience. Like we've pivoted the product entirely toward coaches because that's what we were, it's what we know. It's the people that make content and like their voice is so important in their business and it's really the only thing that kind of makes you stand out from any other coach is like your voice and the things that you do. We also have some really fun quote unquote signature things that we're adding to the product soon. But yes, I'm happy for you to continue to tell me more about how you feel. The webinar would have worked. But I want you to know that I also know my own hang ups are the problem here.

Speaker B: Yes. So I can't help but ask. I'm not going to coach you on this. Uh, I, you know, I'm happy to do that on yet another call if you would like to just chat like, you know, but um, maybe I will end up coaching on that. But what do you think? The thought is why I don't want to do it. Mhm. The main thought or two, I think

Speaker A: my biggest hang up as a, as a business owner, as an entrepreneur is that I feel like everything I do has to be different or unique because what actually got me my start was being different and unique and so.

Speaker B: Not just your start, Jason, not just your start.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker B: Through the years.

Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. And so it's like these kind of like standard quote unquote, um, tactics that do work and are very much proven to work. I, I just like internally I, I rail against them because I'm just like, well that's what everybody else does, you know, like you gotta do something different. You have to do something like that's what you're known for. And, and we, we actually Pushed a lot of that aside in the wandering aimfully years because that's the only thing that really got us to the $30,000 per month business was we did a lot of the things that, you know, get people to buy. Like, you can't just always be doing different things because there are also not a million different things to do.

Speaker B: So.

Speaker A: Yes, long winded answer to your question. I think it is just this like, ingrained in me thing that I feel like I have to do something different.

Speaker B: M. So what did you do? It was just email.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: What's different about that? No offense.

Speaker A: Uh, I think nothing is different about it, but it feels, it feels like the thing that is just like. Yeah, I don't know, it just feels very like, um, normal and not. I don't even know how to describe it properly actually. Like, what makes it different? I, uh, think it's just because it works so easily, right? Like it's just typing some words into like a text editor and just be like, all right, cue these up and like, it's good to go. But a webinar feels more like you gotta like, put on the show the song and dance. You gotta get people ready for it. You gotta have like whatever the lead magnet is to get people into it. Like, it's just a lot more steps into it as opposed to an email is just like, just send the email, you know, Like I can just copy and paste and send an email.

Speaker B: Okay, so I see two conflicting thoughts there. Or two thoughts that there is. I have to do something different. But you didn't. And it's a lot more work. Which might be the dominant thought actually.

Speaker A: For sure. Yeah.

Speaker B: And.

Speaker A: And again, this is why in my long winded answer to your first question, like, I do think we are coming around to the idea that webinars would make a lot of sense. And I do think we're also coming around to the idea of like, what is going to convince someone to buy this product is not really them self. You know, jumping into a trial and like trying to click all the buttons and like make it work. Even if we have the slickest onboarding ever, which is really hard to do in a product that like, it does require you to like train it and give it information. Like, it can't just know everything about you to sound great. I think the best way to do that is through something like a webinar, right? Is to actually like show people, like, hey, you know, we have Claire's business. She gave us all this information about her business. We're going to show you, we're going to literally walk you through, like, how this starts to sound like her. And like, here's a newsletter that she wrote before this product. Drain it up. Here's a newsletter she wrote afterwards. You shouldn't really be able to tell the difference because it's going to sound the same. And I do think that lends itself directly to that. So I think we will come around to this. I think I just need to let go, uh, of this hang up that I have with being on video and talking about our product and then selling it at the end of it and just being okay with that. And I also, I think even bringing this up, like, it makes me think the last time I really did this consistently was like my first course, which was a how to get sponsorships course. And I did everything myself. Like, I did all the Facebook ads myself, I did all the lead magnet stuff myself. We wouldn't have to do it all ourselves this time. A, we have AI, which could help a ton, but also like, we do have a little bit of financial leverage that like, we could just find somebody who's good at this and just be like, hey, just help us do all this, you know, like, we don't have to do all of this because we don't have the time to think about doing all the bells and whistles of all of it.

Speaker B: Here's the one, the one piece of coaching I will give. Yes, your webinar would, you know, show them what is possible with the tool, but it would also create relief.

Speaker A: In what way?

Speaker B: It would create relief for the people attending who feel the exact same way that you do about skills, about custom GPTs, about AI in general. Like, they're interested, but they get overwhelmed by that. And so they don't use it. So they don't use AI, which means they're doing all of that manually or they're not doing it. And therefore, you know, you even pointed out in my own business, like me and my sort of inconsistency. And that's true. And so you could help people create consistency, but they have to know about that. They have to know what. Not just the cool solution, but the problem that it solves.

Speaker A: Mhm. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. And I do think that like, this is a product that really does solve a problem that only has emerged with AI existing, which is like we were all creating content as it was, but now it's a little bit of like, but how does AI help me do it? You know, it's like, I know it should, but every Time I go to tell it to write a newsletter, it sounds like garbage. You know, there's a ton of em dashes thrown in there, like, I don't need these stories, uh, and made up, like, what's going on? Like, why can't you just write a newsletter like me? You know? And that's the thing that we have solved with Solo Content Studio. Like, it doesn't do those things. And it's because we spent weeks telling it not to, and we've spent weeks honing in these systems that are behind the scenes that it knows how to kind of, like, build all that context through everything that you're. You're giving it. But I think you're right. And, uh, I do think I am coming around a lot more to this. And I'm also trying to be less. I talked to my buddy Matt d' Avella about this on a podcast that he has for a new podcast coming out, podcasting about podcasts and podcasting.

Speaker B: But he.

Speaker A: He said something that really resonated with me, and it stuck with me since then. It's like he said, I need to become the student again, because I feel like I've fallen behind. And I thought to myself, I don't need to become a student again. I was a successful business owner, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's not true. I do need to become a student again. Like, I have fallen behind in some skill sets as well. But also, running any business that's different than any other business you've run before presents a whole set of new challenges and a whole set of new obstacles and a whole set of, like, you have to figure out how to find those ideal customers. And, you know, for Solo Content Studio, it's like we ran wandering aimfully as the most generic we teach you how to do online business business. And it was pulling. It was like pulling teeth to find the right customer because we were just always so bad at, like, honing in the business on a. On a group. And for Solo Content Studio, we don't want to make that mistake. And we've just decided, like, it's for coaches. Like, we know that this is who this is going to help because it's exactly who we were, and it's. It helped us a ton. And so I'm actually really excited about that, of just, like, reframing that in my own mind. Of like, okay, I'm a student again. I need to learn these things. So I need to take that same feeling for webinars and be like, okay, I'm a student again. Like, the one thing I know I can do is I can flip on the camera, I can can read some slides, I can address the pain points, I can tell people our own story. I can show them what the tool can do, the relief that it can give, exactly as you said. And that's not the problem at all. Right. It's like all the other stuff around it that I have to kind of like figure out and get over that I think will be the turning point to kind of like make strides forward.

Speaker B: Fabulous. All right, I have two main questions for the rest of this. So first one, what's next? Do you already have number three in like cooking in the pot or is it still in your head or what?

Speaker A: What's next is we have decided we are not going to do a what's next. We are going to stick with Solo Content Studio and try to actually grow it to be the thing that actually helps us hit the vibe coding revenue goal for this year. So right now we're at like $24,000 total in revenue for this, this kind of like business with these tools. We're six months into the year, so we are falling way behind. But Solar content studio has seven or six active paying customers right now. So we're like $700 monthly recurring revenue. We have those 40 some odd customers that are waiting to pay, which should add another maybe thousand dollars recurring revenue. And then we actually have our whole wandering AIM fleet group who's getting their own little like discounted monthly recurring subscription which starts in August, that no one signed up for that yet. And that was intentional. But I know from there we might get 20, 30 customers as well. So pretty quickly we're going to be at like, I don't know, 40 or 50 paying customers at somewhere between 50 to $100 a month. Just call it 100 for nice round math. We're going to have a $5,000 monthly recurring business. And so to kind of like abandon the effort of that to now go chase another idea. We've already decided, like, hey, anybody we were coaching would be like, pump the brakes. Like, you have a business that's like starting to grow. It's people are interested in it, you have a lot of great ideas around it. Like we really love the product and it's a product that's not like scene roll where every time I want to do something oh hey buddy, FFMPEG to web codec to the thing and you fly. IO account is down. Now I'm like, I don't, how do I work on this? You know this one I'm literally just telling Claude, like, make this sound more like a human my guy, you know, like, stop messing around. Don't be a robot all the time. So, yeah, no, no new products on the horizon. We've pulled ourselves at least for what we said was the summer, but I think we're just like, kind of committed to see where Solo Content Studio goes the rest of this year. And we got the first version of the product out, and the first version of the product, I think is. Is actually pretty good. But we know there's kind of like a second version of the product that's even better. That's a lot less upfront work from the user. Because right now we. We tell you, like, you got to fill your brand profile, you got to fill your audience profile. You get. It's like 30 minutes of effort someone has to put in. And that's a lot, lot to ask for someone. Like, even for me, Like, I lo. I'm, um. Like, you lost me after like three minutes of effort, I'm out. So what we've, we've figured out is kind of a new way to onboard people where you kind of ask questions as you go, and it shows you a nice percentage thing which feels a little bit gamified, where it's like, hey, this sounds 31% like you, because you haven't trained it at all. We've only gotten like one newsletter example. If you answer three questions, it could get to 56% like you. And you're like, well, of course I want to get to 56. And so we kind of had this kind of gamification where you might put in that same 30 minutes of effort, but it'll feel a lot, lot less daunting from the start, and it'll actually feel a little bit more like a game to like, get it to grow. So really excited about that part of it. And another thing I mentioned that I, I just want to share because I think for your audience, it. Not that I want them to be customers, but I just think that it's helpful for them to hear is like, I don't think there's a lot of products out there in the content creation space that take into account the unique things that you do that are like the repeatable things you come back to. So as an example, we talked about this framework in modern nameplay all the time called Marketing Bridges. Very simple in theory, is just like people, your customers exist on the mainland just like the main world where everyone lives. Your business is an island floating out in the Ocean. There needs to be a bridge to connect the two. The bridge is marketing, it is being on Instagram, it is post, you know, creating a newsletter. It's like all these things that, like, create the little planks that like, build the bridge there. That concept of marketing bridges, it was very unique to us. Like no one else kind of like coined, you know, marketing in that way. Solo Content Studio, we can teach it that thing. And now every time we mention marketing in any type of piece of content, it can then pull from that and be like, hey, by the way, as we talk about with marketing bridges, so it's like, oh, that's a really interesting thing with coaches. They all have their own things, they all have their own points of view, they all have their own stories. So like, we could always bring up like my I wear your shirt story or like our, um, wandering fleet story or whatever. And whenever you're creating content to have these things pulled in automatically. Where all I'm writing to Solo Content Studio is, hey, my newsletter next week is about like, you know, I'm launching this new webinar for my business and I'm overcoming my fear of webinars because I'm a baby and, you know, I want you to write that newsletter. And what it would do is it would pull from all the contextual stories and be like, oh, uh, yeah, you wrote in here that you used to do webinars with your sponsorship course. I'm going to pull that in to this and I don't have to tell it to do it. Like, it just knows because I've told it those stories. So I think these are like, really cool things that we're excited about. And I think the difference with like, scene role is we didn't have a lot of those ideas to like, make us excited about working on it. With Solar Content Studio, we kind of have like a never ending amount of ideas. So we really want to slow ourselves down and just focus on that.

Speaker B: That brings me to the other question. In the first part of our interview, you kind of hinted that marketing was, uh, not your strongest suit or you had sort of let it fizzle out. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Speaker A: Yeah. I remember telling Caroline this metaphor that came to me many years ago, which is like, I feel like my knives have become dull, so. And more around like, marketing than anything else. And it's like anything else, as time goes on, you use your knives in your kitchen, they're going to get dull, right? You know, like, you go to chop a tomato and you nearly chop your thumb off because the knife is not sharp enough to get through the skin, which is like, just sharpen your knives, you'll be fine. Um, but for me, as time has gone on, it's like I kind of am resting on the laurels of like what worked 10 years ago and like, or even 15 years ago of just like the unique ideas that I would have. They were marketable enough in themselves because not so many people were having so many unique ideas or people weren't able to share their ideas as quickly through social media. And you know, as we've kind of like come out of the wandering aim flea business where things were running really smoothly, we didn't really have to think about marketing ideas too much because we had affiliates that were really doing the bulk of the work for us besides, like our organic growth with these new businesses because we don't have that built in audience that we can just like tap into. We have to find new people. Like, again, we're in the marketing bridge phase. Like, people are on the, um, mainland. Our little solo content studio business is over here on the island. And what I'm starting to realize is like, okay, my knives are dull. I don't know how to find these people, you know, and I, I've experimented personally with like, okay, maybe I'll create some reels on Instagram and I'll start talking about stuff. And like, as soon as I do that, I'm like, oh, nope, that brings up too many like, bad memories. And I don't, I don't like doing it. I don't have funny fun doing it either. Right. So it's like, even if it worked, like, I don't have fun. But Caroline really has a lot of fun with it. So she started to doing a lot more Instagram stuff. I think our Solar Content Studio Instagram account has like 700 followers. And it got started like a couple of weeks ago. And it's because she still, yeah, she's

Speaker B: so good at it.

Speaker A: And she, she is someone who like has stuck, stayed up on all the things that have gone on and like Instagram trends and things. And so it's like, okay, great, like, let's keep doing that. And our, I think our Vibe Coding 2 account is like, you know, almost 2,000 followers or something. Like, she's really good at that. Right? And so what I'm trying to figure out for myself is where do I fit in in in the business? And is the answer, like, actually maybe I shouldn't waste our time with me doing marketing stuff because Caroline clearly is doing really well with that side of it as well. Maybe what I should do is just focus my time on the product, making the product as good as we possibly can, and then just sticking to, like, taking care of our customers, running webinars. And we're gonna do webinars. Like, I'll. I'll be on those. Because Caroline doesn't like doing that stuff as much as I do, so I can do those things. But I know that, to answer your question, too, of, like, you know, uh, you know what? Why do I not feel great about marketing? It's like, anytime I sit down to think about, like, a. A UGC campaign or, like, uh, even doing, like, paid ads for Solo Content Studio. We do paid ads for Tea Tree, and I have a company that runs them, and it's great. Um, but I. I think we're at the point with Solo Content Studio where it's like, I want to figure out what works organically, then do paid ads. And I know you can kind of do paid ads to figure out, like, what works. Like, I totally get it, but there's also this, like, chip on both of our shoulders where we're like, yeah, but we also want to, like, we want to sharpen our knives again. And I think for Caroline, like, she wants to do a lot more than I do, and we want to just show ourselves that we can do this and not just like, oh, we. We had this other business that just worked because of, like, affiliates and an existing email list. Like, we can actually start over and show people that we can do this. And I don't know if that's a good thing or not. I don't know if that's a healthy way of thinking about it, but it's the way that resonates with us a little bit.

Speaker B: Hmm.

Speaker A: M. Yeah.

Speaker B: No, I mean, it sounds good to me. Like, you've figured out your strengths. You've figured out what you enjoy. Don't enjoy things like that. The other. The only other thing, Jason, I would say is you should just get. Keep getting on podcasts. You know, you're. You're good with the relationship stuff as well.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And that is a great way to build an audience.

Speaker A: Yeah. I appreciate it. And I really, honestly, I have been in, like, a. A marketing and promotion cave for years. Like, I just have been so happy to be, like, inside our business and, like, taking care of our customers and working on product and, like, it's very safe. Right. Like, you don't have to put yourself out there and nothing. Podcasting is dangerous. Like, the only thing that happens, you lose the second half of an episode. It's no big deal. But it is something where I am starting to come back around to it and to, uh, see, like, yeah, there's a lot of opportunities here, and especially now that we know, like, Solar Content Studio is focused on coaches, well, then it makes it really easy to, like, pitch us to coaching podcasts to be like, hey, this is why we want to show up for your show. This is why we want to show up for your listeners. And maybe we could even vibe code some cool little tool for, like, all those podcast audiences to be like, hey, you can try this. You can do this thing. And like, that, to me, actually sounds like a fun way to go on shows and not just to be like, hey, like, I have this app and, like, I think I should be on your show. It's like, no, there's actually some value here, some. Something interesting here. So, yeah, I think we'll definitely start doing a lot of that. And I will be emerging from this cave. I will be trying to sharpen my knives a little bit. But, like, you did say, like, we are trying to lean into our strengths a little bit too, and so not trying to kind of, like, force a square peg into a round hole just because a business does need marketing. We are two people and we can kind of divide and hunker.

Speaker B: I do understand the marketing cave. I really do. As somebody who, you know, never posts on social media, I know it's really comfy, just like, serving the clients, helping the customers. I. Yeah, I get it. I really do. And it's funny because, like, you strike me as similar to me, like, outgoing enough, but, like, not, you know, let me put my entire life on social and, you know, to create a para social relationship with strangers and things like that. But, um, all right, I. I appreciate that. And I would love to have my listeners, I mean, get paid. Get paid. Podcast listeners are buyers. So where can they go and give you money?

Speaker A: Yeah, definitely go to solo. Content Studio is the tool, the content creation tool. Know that if you do it.

Speaker B: I don't.

Speaker A: I don't know when this is coming out, but hopefully in the next couple weeks at the end of June here as we're recording, uh, uh, we're gonna have basically a full overhaul to the app. But I'm also, you know, listen. If people listen this far, I will. I will extend the deal that we did for our cohort buyers. I'll give you 50% off our monthly rate for the 12 months that we're Giving to those people. If you sign up and become a paid customer, listen, no one listens to Smarties podcast. We both know this. So like, I don't think anyone's gonna message me.

Speaker B: But wait for it. Wait, I know for it.

Speaker A: Jason, if there, if there are action takers. If you do wanna try Solo Content Studio, you wanna sign up for a trial, you wanna do a little bit of training, like see how the content comes out. And if it can make your life easier, I would love to extend that discount offer for people to get basically 50% off for a year and kind of give that to your listeners. I don't even. I literally had like no code to tell you. I just decided this while we were chatting. So this is completely genuine and not planned. So yeah, if anybody signs up, just literally reply to the email that you get, like when you join and just say like, hey, heard you on the Get Paid podcast. You know, give me my discount or else and I'll definitely do it. I won't say I forgot and I don't know what you're talking about. About.

Speaker B: Are you planning on having an affiliate program?

Speaker A: So we vicod a referral program into the app in one day because Claude could do it and we, we wanted to do a uh, credits based affiliate, like affiliate program referral program just to see how people would respond. Like, was it enough that because people use the app that they would then get credits in the app and do it? Full disclosure, I think like, you know, maybe like 10 people have actually taken us up on it and used it. Two people actually were referred from those people. So it has worked somewhat. But I know that when we uh, get this next version, I think we will do a paid affiliate program because there is margin in the a hundred dollars per month plan where we could afford to do that. And I just know that we do exist in a time where it's like someone who has a big audience that has our right customer base sitting in front of them. I would so much rather just give them the 30%, you know, per month that someone signed up and get than like give more money to meta. Right? Like I would so much rather give that to a business owner who's like done, you know, work to promote. So I uh, it is coming that we'll do a paid referral affiliate program. We do just credit space one.

Speaker B: Now you remember Fizzle? I think we actually talked about that in the last. So Fizzle had this thing where I don't even remember what it was for each thing, but I got enough people to sign up for Fizzle that my Fizzle account was free. And then I got. I scored like a one on one call with Corbett. This was like the best thing in my whole life. Free fizzle plus that one on one attention. It was fabulous.

Speaker A: It's funny you mentioned this. Caroline mentioned this when we were originally talking about this, and I think we both completely forgot about it until you brought it up. We should definitely do that. Like, we should do a version of that. I do think there is another version where if, like, if someone isn't going to use the app and they want to be an affiliate, we can figure out the monetization part of it. But yeah, if you're an existing user, I mean, it's kind of the same thing, right? Just like chip money away off of your bill. That could work. But yeah, uh, I do love. And again, doing things a little bit differently, always a little bit fun when it comes to these things.

Speaker B: So, yeah, very, very cool. Okay, so give us that URL one more time for them to go give you money.

Speaker A: SoloContent Studio. And when we get to, uh, $3,000 a month in recurring revenue, Caroline said I'm allowed to buy a domain. $2,500. That's shorter. But for right now, Solo Content Studio.

Speaker B: All right, thank you so much, Jason. Thank you for your another hour of your time. My goodness, I appreciate it so much. And next time I'm over in Europe, um, just expect the doorbell ringing, okay?

Speaker A: Absolutely. Thank you so much. And I look forward to part three for the part that we are going to cut off after this that no one's going to get later.

Speaker B: No, please don't. Don't. All right, thanks, Jason. Hey, I wanted to thank you real quick for tuning into the show and listening all the way to the end if you need them. We got all the links in this episode's show notes, which you can find over@clay clairepells.com podcast. If you really enjoyed today's conversation, make sure to subscribe to the show and get new episodes downloaded as soon as they come out. If you're an Apple fangirl like me, I'd really appreciate it if you open up the podcast app on your phone. In fact, you're probably listening from the podcast app and just leave a super quick rating or review your reviews. Tell itunes yes, this is a good podcast. Share it with others. It's worthwhile and that can help me and my guests reach even more ears. So that's it for today. I'll be back soon with a brand new episode. But until then, it's time to get back to work and get ourselves paid.