Random Business Thoughts

0:00I have a bunch of random business thoughts. I didn't think any of these deserve their own show. So I figured I'd just stick them all together and they're just random enough and they're just kind of thinking out loud about certain parts of my business and things that have come across my desk and I just just want to talk about them. All right? So I'm actually in the brewery, which I just where I always am. And I was just doing a little cleanup. And these things cross my mind. All right? So first thing is first. I had a meeting today with Kayla who does all of our customer service for some university. And a customer had emailed us and said, hey, can I be a part of your, do you even, do you have an affiliate program? I own a hot tub store and I want to be able to sell your

1:03book and get a commission on that. So I told her that this is this is sort of two things. This this particular question sparked two different talks. I said, you know, we do have an affiliate program. I originally ran it through Podia, which is where we host our courses because that's all we we were using Podia for everything our only product was really these digital courses. And since we started selling physical books, we've moved over to Shopify and now we have this Zapier integration, which fucking sucks. And I really need to get off of Podia. It's just a it's something that I need to focus on. And I don't know when I'm going to be able to do that. But we are updating the course in the new year in 2026, which is I mean, you're hearing this in 2026. So this year and

2:05probably it will happen with that. Ideally, I'd like a custom solution, but I just don't think we have the resources to do that right now. And so my even though I had talked about maybe doing that myself, there's just no fucking way. I'm not I'm not doing it. So there's a couple of ideas there. One of them is this this I looked into it briefly that I don't have much information on the website, which kind of makes me nervous, but it's called Trevello, I believe it's called. And it's basically courses in Shopify. It's digital products in Shopify. So you would use Shopify's login, which is actually pretty nice. And you could access your book, your digital book, you could access to your courses, unlock other courses. So it's basically like potia, like a really basic,

3:07stripped down version of potia in inside Shopify, which I do like, it's extremely cheap. And I should say it's much cheaper than potia with obviously less features, but we don't use any of the potia features, we only use the courses. So and it would remove Zapier, which would solve a big problem. And it's something I'm thinking about doing. It would just be a massive like migration. And I don't know how long this this particular product's been in business. I don't know, you know, what kind of support they're going to have. And if they shut down, does my courses get shut down versus using something like Thinkific, which is more course based, but doesn't use the same login, but has single sign on. Anyway, there's a bunch of, there's, it's really between these two companies, but I digress. And again, random business thought. So that's just one thing I'm thinking about. But getting back to this email, they asked about the affiliate program.

4:12And so yeah, I used to run the affiliate program through potia, but now I run it through a, there's an app called, or it's a Shopify app called up promote, I believe. I downloaded that. I installed it. I believe I have a free version of it. And I signed up for affiliates. And literally in the last year, since I've had it up, not a single referral has come through. And I looked at it and I was talking to Galen. She's just making that like gesture, like the slicing neck gesture. And I'm like, yeah, that's kind of what I'm feeling too, which is we got to gut this. It's just one. If I, like, if I'm going to do it, do it right. If you're going to, if you're going to start an affiliate program, you know, have some sort of

5:15outreach program to get people as affiliates, have an aggressive affiliate program, you know, something that's not like right now, I think I'm offering $10 for every sale. And it's just like not a good program. And I still have some, I still have like one guy selling stuff through our potia affiliate. So that I'm just going to keep up. But I tried to get him to switch over to the other one and he just never did it. So I was like, all right, he's not really doing this. The thing is, is what I realized is there are no influencers in the pool and hot tub space that I would, that I would want to be an affiliate. Like I can't even name them. And the ones that I did have, they all stopped producing content like within the last year. So I was like, all right, uh, there's just really no affiliates. Now this person owns a hot tub store. How many people

6:16do you really think are coming into his store and he's going to say, hey, you should go to this website. Here's my special link. It's like, it's, it's so not going to work. So the first business thought is kill our affiliate program. We don't need to pay for the apps. We don't need to manage it. It's done. And I think we should just kill it for everybody. There's only one person that's really making any money and maybe it's 50 bucks a month. And I'm just like, and he does, it's only through his website and he really doesn't keep up with it. He hasn't posted content in forever. So I'm like, uh, yeah, I just, it's just not worth it. It's just not worth dealing with. And I don't even think if we were to do it right, like if I were like take it seriously, that it would be worth doing truthfully. So yeah, gutting that. But I mentioned that in the case

7:24of this hot tub store, a better offer, I think would be, how about you stock the books? Why don't you put the books in stock in your store and either give them out to customers who buy a hot tub from you. Right. So every new hot tub sale, it comes with this thick manual that's all about hot tub care. And I think that that would be a great gift to include or stock the books in your store and sell them. And so I was telling Kayla like, I, there's this, we have, there's this idea that we are definitely going to do. It's just that we just don't have the infrastructure in place for it. So the idea is this, we need or we want to sell our products, all of our products

8:25to the industry doing B2B sales. And I do have an episode planned all about B2B sales, but we don't have the infrastructure in place. So let me explain what I mean. The general idea is, and this is sort of a, again, it's just a random thought, it's preliminary idea, and we tested this kind of. The idea would be, and I'm only going to talk about books, we would sell our books to pool companies and real estate agents and, you know, companies that would need a lot of books or sell a lot of books. And we would offer that at some type of wholesale discount or wholesale price. And this is a good idea. The problem, though, is right now we don't know what the pricing would be because we, so again, we, I say again,

9:34okay, let me get my thoughts straight here. So I was waiting to do this. I was waiting to start this idea when we hired this company to ship books for us. And they've been doing a great job. And they told me, hey, if a customer orders like 100 books, we'll pack 100 books, not individually, like we'll pack it in one giant box or not one giant box, but multiple boxes, and we will ship that for you. But that's completely fine. And, you know, it will cost money to ship, but it definitely won't be, you know, as expensive as, say, shipping directly from Lulu, where we buy our books from. So I was like, okay, so the company that we use to ship books will ship bulk. They won't just ship one at a time. All right, that makes sense.

10:34So I was like, all right, well, we need a lot of books in stock. And there was a company that they hooked us up with to do book printing, which I've talked about on the show before. And that company had, I went back and forth, we decided to only do the hot tub handbook with them to start, because again, we're, we've never worked with this company before. We thought, okay, the hot tub handbook is completely done. I was going to have to make some updates to it. And so I sent it to them. It took a lot of back and forth. We finally got a proof. The proof looks excellent. So we're we're excited. We placed an order for a thousand copies as our first order. And the good news is is that we normally don't order that many books. We order when we were buying through Lulu, we would order 100, 200, 400 at a time. And the reason we did that is because we got no discounts

11:37on the book, but we did save money with shipping if we ordered a ton more. If we ordered 400, it would cost us like a hundred dollars to ship it. But if we ordered like a hundred, like a 50 or a hundred, it would still cost the same amount. So anyway, but the books were still expensive per book. And no matter how many we ordered, it doesn't matter. And that's still the case right now, because we're still ordering our books from Lulu. But we have an order into this other company to get our hot-dub books printed from them. And so we ordered a thousand which the more we order from them, the cheaper it gets per book. And the shipping is cheaper because our shipping company, that ships our books, there are customers, is right near the place where they print the books. So they just have to truck it over and it's and it's in stock. And that's great. The problem is

12:37that we ordered these thousand books and their printing press broke and they had to order parts from Germany and I go, oh, so we're definitely not getting these books printed by the end of the year. So and I thought, well, we're going to have a thousand books in stock and then we can start implementing, you know, this sales pitch, this B2B sales pitch. So I'm waiting for the day in which the company says, hey, we got your thousand books printed, they're being shipped, I pay the other half of the invoice, and then I go, cool, now we have a thousand hot-dub books in stock, we need to sell these, you know, pretty fast. Maybe we, this is now, we can implement this sales system. Now, the idea, so we tested this idea, we said, okay, let's go into our email and let's pull all of the email addresses that have the word

13:46pool, spa, and hot tub in them. And I manually checked over all these emails, there was about 3,000 I think, and you know, some of them were not, like some of them were just, you know, the person's name with this plus symbol and pool at Gmail, which didn't count. So I found all of those people and I emailed them and I said, hey, here's our book, you know our books, if you want to buy more than 10 or 10 or more, will give you a 25% discount. That email resulted in two sales, but they bought exactly 10. So I was like, okay, there are companies that want to buy our books in bulk, I don't think 25% is a good offer, I also want to have different pricing structures for the amounts. So if a company, like a really big company, wants to buy 1,000 books, I want to have

14:53pricing for that. If a company wants to buy, I don't know, 10 books for their tiny little store, I want to have pricing for that too. And so I was like, do I just offer that on our sales page, like, hey, do you own a pool business? Click here for pricing or, you know, here's another page or just add those prices to that page, who knows, right? And then we could sell everything through Shopify. We don't have to create, like before I was selling 100 books at a time and a few people took me up on that offer. But I would have to invoice them through QuickBooks, they would have to pay it, and then I have to log into Lulu, create the order and send it to them. Not the biggest deal, definitely could have been systematized, but I'm like, now we can just place that order directly in Shopify, whether we do it manually or they or they do it themselves,

16:00and it's, you know, yeah, Shopify is going to take a chunk, but it's better than QuickBooks taking a chunk, I think. And then it's like in our system and it's part of our sales for that year. So I'm like, I think that's a good deal. And plus, that's what sends it to the shipping company, they'll pack the books up and ship them. In fact, that's the only way we can really do it, because we're not using Lulu in the future. So I have two ways to do this. One is that I can simply just create sort of a wholesale section, right? Like a wholesale pricing section where I have multiple tiers of different amounts of books, but I feel like that can get very confusing, very quickly. I don't mind making that, but it kind of, yeah, it just gets confusing because,

17:05you know, having, because I can't create new products in Shopify, because then that wouldn't connect with our existing system for shipping. So it would have to be the regular shipping, until it had to be a discount, and it's kind of difficult. A better solution, I think, would be to have a person dedicate it to B2B sales, and their job is to do cold outreach and make sales. And then what they do is they go into Shopify and create the order and, you know, take the payment and do all that stuff. In fact, you can even send an invoice through Shopify, which I've done several times, and that works fairly well. So that would be kind of sick, and anybody could really do that, and it would be a commission-based position, but if it's commission-based, I feel like,

18:12how do you push somebody to do that? You know, like, what if they don't get back to emails right away? Like, you kind of lose control of the sales team if they're not, if they're just commission-based, but that's something I can figure out. It's just something I'm thinking about. So in a one, and then like, one swoop, it would be, kill the affiliate program, which, again, doesn't bring in any money anyway. So it's just like one less thing to worry about, and to pay for, and then come up with a B2B process, and then get somebody in charge of that, because it's not going to be any of us in the company where none of us are salespeople. We're all either, we're just mostly, we're all content creators. So I feel like we could do it where we make it passive, where we just make it a part of our existing process, because, yeah, pull guys and pull gals and pull professionals watch our content,

19:17and so they're seeing our book, and we do get asked these questions, like people are emailing us and saying, hey, would you sell me multiple books? And it's like, yeah, we want to have that in place, but, yeah, we could have an entirely separate department called like sales at some university that's simply going out and doing that. They're actively doing that. So I think obviously you start with one, you start with the easy one, and then we can, we can eventually scale into hiring somebody. But just thinking about it. Another thing I'm, we were, again, this is all a conversation I have with Kayla. It's like, one of the issues we're running into is she's doing customer service for Zoom University. We started with just email. So just the, we have one single email address for Zoom University that all correspondence come through. It's probably not the best idea,

20:22but that's what we have. And we started with that. That's completely fine. We've had that system in place for many years. And then I was like, you know, we should do, we should be answering comments on social media. We get comments on our Facebook posts. We get comments on Instagram. We get comments on TikTok. We even get comments on, sometimes on Pinterest. And I was like, could you answer those in the same way that we kind of do? It's slightly different. But in the same way, we do customer service. Yes, but there's a problem. Customer service is easy because we use a system, we use Intercom. And everything goes through Intercom. Every email goes through Intercom. And you can interact with people. In fact, even chat support for our app is through Intercom. So I'm like, oh, so Intercom

21:26is the customer serviceable. How about we add Facebook and Instagram to that? And it's like, yeah, you can do that. But it's not very good. And then I'm like, well, what about TikTok? Because we get a ton of comments through TikTok. And obviously TikTok doesn't play nice. And I was like, wait a minute. So if Intercom doesn't do it, and it doesn't, you know, all these companies do some form of it, but not a total package. And I'm just like, why doesn't this exist? I even know Buffer, which is what we use for scheduling. Buffer does comment management, but only, but not for TikTok. And in order to get somebody to log into TikTok to answer comments, you need to have like a business that's been certified. And we don't have that. And it's like, this is like, why is this such a pain? And I mean, we're figuring it out. We're going to figure it out. But it's just like,

22:28it's like, why is there no one stop shop solution for comment managing? Because you can technically, there's a, we use a program called many chat, which is like auto DMing. They have a system for managing DMs on Facebook Instagram and TikTok, which I'm like, oh, that's great. But not comments. And I'm like, fuck, why? Why is it just DMs and not comments? And then if you go in a Buffer, it's just comments, but not DMs and not TikTok. And I'm like, it's close, but it's not perfect. You know, and then there, and you know, and look, Buffer has a lot of features. It's just they don't have TikTok. It's the one thing we need. And for my understanding, they don't do DMs. So I'm like, we kind of need both. We kind of need a system, one, a one stop shop. And ideally, it would be its own thing. Because yes, we could probably, I mean, Intercom is probably

23:33the best solution for this, but it just gets confusing, right? You have, we have email going in through Intercom. We have, you know, like chat support through Intercom. And we're going to have social media through Intercom. And it's like, yes, it would be nice if everything could live in one place, like every customer interaction could live in one place, which I believe is what Intercom attempts to do. But it's like, you can't, it's either, either it does it all or you only use it for the one thing, which we are just using it for email. And so there's no solution. And that sort of bums me out. Because I'm like, ah, that would be killer if you could manage comments and DMs on social media in the same way you would manage emails and, you know, even chat support. But that would be sick if Intercom could do all of that. And again, I know it can do Facebook

24:33and I know it can do Twitter, sorry, Instagram. But I, the last time I checked, which wasn't too long ago, TikTok wasn't an option. And I think for us, that's like a big one for us. Now, the one solution that I'm kind of leaning toward, which is not ideal. But that would be, like, so my brother has a dedicated iPhone for some university, like I bought an iPhone like a cheap one and said, hey, you know, use this to post on, you know, all these social media platforms. And right now I'm working on a, a story process, meaning, well, we're going to post stories on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok. And the only way to really do that is through

25:34the phone. Because in the same way, yes, you can use Buffer to schedule stories on, I only Facebook and Instagram. But you can't add links and you can't add music. So I'm like, well, okay, we kind of need, we definitely need the links because that's the whole point of the stories for us is that we can add links. So I was like, all right, well, that kind of, so we can't even schedule stories. So stories have to be done in real time. And really the only way to add the links. And if you wanted to add music or any other stickers, you have to do it through those platforms. And I'm like, okay, well, that's not a big deal. That's, that's doable. But I'm not going to ask an employee of mine or even a contractor to use their phone to do it. Because

26:36like they would have to log in. Like they have their own accounts. They'd have to log in to to the streaming university account. We're sharing passwords and like, oh, that's fine, I guess. It's not ideal. And what blows my mind is that this solution, like this hasn't been solved yet. Because I cannot be the only person with this problem. That's like, hey, we're a company. We do social media. How do you manage social media? How do you manage all of it? It would be sick. If you could schedule everything. You could schedule stories. You could schedule, you could schedule reels. You could schedule posts. You could answer comments, answer DMs, like all of that across to every single platform. Now, I know that there are more expensive social media platforms that are maybe more enterprise

27:39level. Like, I know Hootsuite has been around for a very long time and seems to be like the one that the big companies use. But again, I feel like, I mean, I haven't looked into it. But I doubt they do all of those things. And it's like, I doubt, and I say that because I doubt Instagram lets these companies allow you to post a story and include stickers and links and all those features with Instagram. It's like, no, Instagram wants you to do it on their platform, which makes sense. But then Instagram and Facebook and TikTok don't have team support. So like, I would be totally fine in issuing an iPhone to an employee. But they shouldn't have to log in with, you know, they should be able to log in as a team member, you know, as somebody

28:42who helps with that social media account. But I guess, you know, I don't know. It just doesn't exist. But it's something I'm thinking about. Lastly, I had a thread, actually, that got a lot of engagement, like a ton of engagement. And the thread was, I published 287 podcast episodes this year with zero growth. And that was the tweet, which is 100% true. So how do I know this to be true? Well, I know I published that many episodes. I looked it up and pizza had them all scheduled through the year. Next year, I'll have 365 episodes. So there will be even more next year. But or in 2026, I guess. And I looked at in transistor, which is the hosting company that I used,

29:46I just looked at total number of subscribers. Now that number fluctuates sometimes. But it's basically been hovering at 150 for two years. So it was at 450 when I restarted this podcast back up in January of 2024, January 1st of 2024. I was hovering around 450. And then obviously with the new format, it's not for everybody, drop down to, it dropped down to 150 quickly. And then it has been hovering at 150 for two years straight. And it has not gone up a budge and it has not gone down. It's not even dipped at all. So my theory is that I highly doubt that it's the same 150 people. I think it's just maintaining at 150. So, you know, somebody stops listening and doesn't

30:50subscribe anymore or it just could be that it is just the same 150 subscribers. It doesn't mean 150 people are listening. It's just auto downloading to their phone because they're subscribed. I don't know. But my theory is it's a coming and going. It's a cycle. It's a, because this is happened a lot with online business. It's like you kind of go through cycles where you're consuming a lot of content and then you don't. So and then there's a new batch that comes in. So it's kind of like high school classes, right? They just kind of rotate over time. It's how our customer base operates with some university because the polls don't change. The people do. The customers do. So I think that that's my theory and I and I could be wrong. But the amount of people who are like, how is that possible? How is it possible? Like this and I and this is really interesting because I'm not

31:54mad about it. It's just a true statement. And it's funny that it that it took off because it is incredibly personal, right? So I noticed that a lot of times when I share like personal stories, they tend to do better than me sharing like affirmational thoughts that I come up with. Like, you know, your customers love consistency. Like just general statements like that. It's much better from more specific. And again, it has to do with me. But this I think broke a lot of people's brains. It doesn't break my brain, but but I think it broke a lot of people's brains because the the the drum that people have been beating is consistency. I am one of those people who beats the drum of consistency, right? But it is not the only variable. It just happens to be a variable that's more often a good

32:55something good to look forward to, but you could be consistently doing something wrong. And consistency doesn't work for you. So the conclusion that these that a lot of these people were having is like, well, then you must be doing something else wrong. And but no one had an answer for that. One guy said, oh, maybe it's because you publish too often. Maybe it's because you have 287 episodes. And I said, well, then explain like all the news podcasts that do it daily. And they're like huge. It's like, it's not a it's not a it's not a quantity issue. My brain likes to believe like, oh, is it a quality issue, meaning like I need better audio, I need better structure, I need better, whatever. And it's like, yeah. And people are like, well, I don't know what niche you're in. It could be your niche. I'm like, well, I'm not doing a podcast about basket weaving something super niche. It's a pretty wide niche. So

33:59and then people are like, well, you need to start posting reels. I'm like, well, hold on. What about all the podcasts that are out there that are highly successful that don't do that? They're like, well, we need to publish on YouTube. And I'm like, okay, I mean, sure. What about all the podcasts that publish on that don't publish on YouTube and still have listeners? What's what's happening? That, you know, there's all these things that if I really want it to, I understand these are all tactics. But it's clear that just publishing episodes doesn't work. And for people to hear that and see that in like two years. And I didn't even use two years. I could have gone, I could have made that tweet. I've published, I guess like what could have

35:02been like 400 something episodes and zero growth. And people, it'll break people's brains because they're like, wait a minute. But that's what everyone's telling me to do. I have to publish content. And it's like, yeah, I mean, I heard, you know, like you go back to like Miles Beckler who was doing the 90 day YouTube challenge. He just said, I set out to do 90 days where I publish a video every single day for 90 days. And guess what? He grew. Why? If I were to do that, would I grow if I just put out a low-fi similar to this podcast on YouTube? And I think the answer is maybe because it is possible. And I've heard about people who who've done these challenges and got nowhere. I met a guy the other day and I looked at his channel and he's been publishing content on the same niche for multiple years. And the content visually is polished. Like it's a polished

36:09piece of content. The topics that he's covering are good. They're in my niche. And I'm like, these are, there's nothing wrong with these videos, right? Could they be better? Sure. I mean, any, yeah, any video could be better, right? But he has like 54 subscribers. You know, I just did not, and like you look at his videos where he's doing with like fairly bigger names. And like, like he's doing interviews with people like you would, you could, you would Google. And their names would come up. Like famous people in this particular niche. And he's getting like a dozen views, 36 views per video. And if you were to look at his stuff, you're like, yeah, there's no reason why. I don't, I don't get why. You know, you could be like, well, maybe it's thumbnail, maybe it's titling. It's like, yeah, maybe. You know, but it's still YouTube. So like

37:16people are like, it's the algorithm. I'm like, is it? I don't, I don't know about you. I don't think Apple podcasts had an algorithm. Maybe Spotify does, but I mean, most of my listeners are on Apple podcasts anyway. So I'm like, so what is it? And I think when I hear people say, or the advice to be like, you have to promote outside of podcasting. I go, yeah, I guess, but in like, what world is that also true? It's like, I thought that's what I was doing. You know, like for a lot of people like podcasting is the promotion. It's, it is that it's content. In the same way that like putting out a YouTube video, like that's how you grow, right? As you put out content, you are consistent with that. But if you don't grow, I know how to fix it on YouTube.

38:18I that that makes sense. I don't really know how to fix it for podcasts. Besides, you know, the outside promotion stuff, I just don't know. You know, it could be podcast titling. It could be artwork. It could be, you know, then again, it's like, yeah, me going on other podcasts would help, but that's outside, you know, outside your own publishing schedule. So it's like, yes, in most things, there are other ways to promote things, but it's it's it's weird that in podcasting, like you could literally just podcast to nobody. And no one will ever hear you. And it's just and even if your stuff is very good and you do it often, it's there's no guarantee. And I think that's clearly true for YouTube and everything else. So I don't know. I'm just just a thought. I don't know how to solve it or

39:22or even if I want to solve it. I don't like I started. So what's interesting is the reason I started posting on threads in Twitter and LinkedIn is because that was a way that was like, I'm like, okay, well, I could take the things that I learn from doing this podcast and share them in a text-based format on social media. I'm totally happy doing that. I know that's going to take time to build up. It's something I used to do. I actually kind of enjoy it. And so I was like, oh, well, then I got this like viral threads hit and people are asking me for my URL. So I'm like, oh, maybe maybe people will listen to the podcast. I don't know. We'll see. But maybe they'd go into the podcast page and they're like, this kind of fucking sucks. You know, I don't know. You're curious to hear your thoughts. Shoot me an email, madatmoneylab.co. I'll talk to you next time.