Uncomfortable Tasks to Grow My Business

0:00I wrote this journal entry back on March 5th, 2023, right? After talking briefly with Kevin from Epic Gardening on Twitter, I've been thinking more about my business choices. I keep breaking away from some university, even though it makes more money than everything else that I do. And because I keep doing this, the business grows slowly. I started to wonder, what if I actually just treated it like a judge? What if I did something to actually help it grow faster? And what if all we did, that's all we did, the whole team. I made a list of uncomfortable things I need to do to grow the business. I think the move is just to focus my time in a few targeted areas. So here are three things that will grow some university. One, content, two, product development, three, C-R-O, which stands for conversion rate optimization.

1:06Steph is working on the blog and the YouTube channel. But apparently, my short videos are doing well. And what would it look like to make more short-form videos more consistently? These videos would work to grow our influence and work as ads. The more complete products we add to our website, the better. We may never be in all in one place for buying pool and hot tub gear. So we have to offer unique products that people cannot get elsewhere. And they have to be branded better. I think the hot tub cleaning kit is a great start, which is this is when I was selling chemicals. But I don't think, but I don't have anything for the pool side of the business. And I think an optimization kit would be good. Like chemicals, like chemicals that save you money on chlorine and reduce the chlorine usage. If we ever sell pool supplies, they need to be top quality and have great branding tied with education.

2:07With C-R-O, conversion rate optimization, that just means constantly improving our site and landing pages. I think we're already doing this better than 99% of all websites anyway. So I don't think this will move the needle as much as I hoped. That will move the needle is more content and more pitching. The bare minimum that I can do is create short videos that double as social content and ads. So what does this look like? So that was the blog post. That was, I guess three years ago, but a lot has changed, but also a lot hasn't changed. Number one, the big change that you can hear in this post is that, at the time I was selling chemicals, I was selling hot tub chemicals, and I thought product development meant getting into pool products.

3:09And I basically admitted that C-R-O, the conversion rate optimization, the third thing in the business, is not going to move the needle. And I stand by that today. I've heard a lot of people talk about how important C-R-O is. And I think C-R-O can have big implications if you have a ridiculous amount of traffic. You have to be like a massive company, like an Airbnb type company, or a company that gets just an insane amount of traffic. I think moving little pieces, or even if you were running ads, if you were running ads, and you were getting a ton of traffic through ads, and you did a little tweak, it may have a slight improvement, but the question is, is how long does that improvement last?

4:11And it means you're just constantly doing it. And I personally think that for most lifestyle businesses, like mine, it's a fucking waste of time. And it's just one of those secretly sneaky time-wasters that feels like you're doing something worth doing, but in reality, it's not a needle mover. And it's just kind of worthless. And I've heard people, it's like, oh, you should just why not do it, because it's so easy. And I'm like, yeah, but take the focus away from it. Again, a lot of what I talk about is this idea of mental load. In terms of optimizing my business, I've been trying to reduce mental load, which means I don't want to be thinking about my business 24-7.

5:14The simpler my business is, then I'm not constantly ruminating on it, which is why I'm having a problem now in 2026, producing this show, because I've simplified it so much that I really don't know what else to talk about. It's like, it's so boring. So going back to this, I clearly, like we're not doing chemicals anymore. But I do think product development is important, and I think content is king. So let me just talk about those two things for a second, and let's just get product development out of the way. In this old case, I'm talking about creating new products, and making sure that the products that I make continue to get better. But we do not sell chemicals anymore.

6:14What we sell is we sell books, we sell courses, and we sell an app. In terms of making those products better, we are working on making the book better right now, our pool book. Our hot to book is as perfect as it gets. Our courses we had talked about previously on the show, they definitely need work, a ton of work, but it is not our focus this year, and in fact, our focus is on the app. And the app is a every single day product development. We are constantly improving the app. And we have so much more to build there, and I'm very excited about that. So I do think that that's going to have outsized returns that are going to be really hard to measure.

7:15But every week, when we improve that app, we are getting more people to use the app, and it's going to continue to grow. By us working on it. Now, the big one is content. And I talked about creating content more consistently, which we are very consistent, but how do I create more content, which is what my word of the year is. And I do have some ideas around this. Now I also mentioned in this blog post, or in this journal entry, about doing more social videos, and then using those social videos as ads. I think that when it comes to social videos, the reason I think I'm so, I double down on

8:19that as a brain, as a mental thing, right, is because they are really easy to make. And we have such a dialed in process that it kind of makes sense that why I would keep my attention there, it's very easy for my brain to rest in short form vertical videos. But I think I'm wrong, that that's where my focus should be. I think very easily, just like in CRO, I could just dramatically improve our short form videos and create more short form videos without putting that much time in. And we've been doing that a few ways, one is we started a process of collecting questions from our audience through email and through through comments as well. And then we just turn those questions into scripts, which then I can record, we can edit

9:23and we can put out hopefully between five and seven a week. But I think the real hard part, the real challenging part, and where I think the most bang for our buck lies is organic content in long form video and long form text. And this, and the reason I say that is because I know it has, I know that those two places, just from looking at our statistics, just from looking at Google Analytics, that those two places bring us the most sales, they bring us the most sales in terms of, in terms of organic content that's free and available. Now the thing that really brings us the sales is email and already we have started pitching

10:24more in email and sending more emails, that's already happening. And there is a cap on that, we can't, you know, there's only so many emails you can send a week, I think, at least for our audience. And I think over pitching can lead to a lot of fatigue, but I do think that we can just get more people on our email list through organic content. And it's the hardest one to do. It means that we have to have sort of an all hands on deck approach to long form content. In other words, it means I have to dedicate myself more to producing long form content. I've been saying on this show that, yeah, the more you put me on camera, the better,

11:26you know, like that's where my leverage point is. And I think that's still a great idea, but I need to be able to publish from that. And right now, the only time I'm in front of that camera is when there's a script ready for me to record. And I need to jump in front of that camera when there's not a script. And I think there's more content that I think that I can help make just by being me. And not only that, but I'm also helping with, I talked about before, doing, like, animations and shit for our long form content and graphics for our, you know, our blog posts and stuff. And yeah, 2026, I think I'm, I think I'm not very far off in this blog post from a few,

12:29or this journal entry from a few years ago, where I said like, yeah, I just need to make more content. I just need to do more of what already works. And it's again, why this show is getting harder to make for me because I'm like, well, what else am I, what else do you want me to talk about? That really is how simple it is. It's a bummer because, you know, I do have some people, I do have some questions that you sent in and I appreciate that, which if you want to send in questions, mat at jivinessee.com. I am trying to figure out how to make doing, you know, newsletters a little bit better, but I'm just having a hard time with it because I am just so focused on swimming diversity right now because we're heading into season that I, and I know what we have to do that I'm like, well, if I go downstairs right now and I start working on swimming diversity, when I come up for air to go record this podcast, I'm pretty sure that that what I would record,

13:34like, hey, look, look what I just did, fucking boring as hell. But the uncomfortable thing that I'm talking about here is that, is that boring part? Is the thing that like, no one wants to hear everyone, including myself, it's what I'm talking to, once the new sexy thing that we think is going to be the needle mover, but that's not the thing we should be focused on, you know, CRO, I say it in my own post, that's not it, running ads is not it, making more products truthfully is not it. Now improving the ones you have, sure. The thing that's going to move the needle for me is content, plain and simple, and more of it. And yes, we want that content to be better, not just more, but more better, yes, but how

14:41do you do that? For me, the, the, the, the bottle neck, the constraint right now is that we only have one person writing scripts and we have one person editing. So I am in this sort of content sandwich, right, where on one side, there's the actual like pre-production work of writing scripts. Then there's me recording, which there's, I'm almost endless and getting footage and all that stuff, like that's so scalable, and on the, on the back side of that is editing. And both scripting and editing are constraints, that's the bread of the sandwich. I guess I'm the meat here, I'm the filler. And the thing right now is I have the capacity to, because of what I do and how high leverage

15:43my task is, I can do so much of it. So also, I guess it means that if I have more time and I have more, and I, it means that I should also make the whole sandwich, I should also be helping with scripting, I should also be helping with editing so that we can put more out at least during the season or maybe I can shift my attention to long form written content or turning audio, maybe doing a pull podcast and turning that into content, I don't know, or written content, and even a podcast, which again, I don't think anybody wants a podcast, but it is something that's easy for me to make. And it's like an all hands on deck to making more content. And product development is something that we are also working on, but it's just not a,

16:48there's no need for it to be like crazy fast, crazy more, like it's not taking up a ton of our time, again, we know where we're headed, we just need to do it. So I don't really, again, like I'm struggling with this show because I'm losing, I'm losing the thread of like what it, what I'm supposed to talk about, and is every episode going to be about content, yeah, yeah, for the most part.