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There were four key reasons that led us to move back to ConvertKit after using Drip for the past 6 years.
🙋♀️🙋♂️ Disclosure: Throughout this article we’ll be sharing our ConvertKit affiliate link. If you switch to or sign up for ConvertKit after clicking this link, we get a small commission. We were not paid by or asked by ConvertKit to write this article, and everything we share in this article is our honest experience and authentic opinion.
Here’s a quick history of our email provider journey:
Having used a good handful of email provider platforms, we can tell you with confidence that no email provider is perfect. They all claim to be intuitive, simple, and offer great customer support. Some are better than others and instead of wasting your time going over the limitations and issues we had with other platforms, instead we’re going to share the four things that brought us back to ConvertKit.
We’ve also included a short list of things we think ConvertKit could improve upon to wrap up this article. Again, no platform is perfect 😉.
Out of all the email providers out there, ConvertKit has evolved over time and really nailed what the modern digital creator needs to run their online business with email marketing.
When we were using Drip from 2018-2024 it always felt a bit like we were the round peg in their proverbial square hole 😅. As the years went on, Drip transitioned to focus more on e-commerce features and the product didn’t feel like it matched our business needs anymore. It became harder to see simple metrics at a glance and spin up simple forms quickly.
One of the BIGGEST features that we loved about ConvertKit and were happy to get back is the Landing Page & Form Signups dashboard:
This dashboard, with the ability to hover over all the different bar chart sections, shows you at a quick glance what forms (or lead magnets) are actually converting.
You no longer need to track the conversion of your form/lead magnets, and you can also see them listed out in a grid (or list) that shows total views, subscribers converted, and conversion rate:
We don’t have the biggest email list in the world (12,000+ as of writing this article), but what we did have was years of email marketing clutter 😬.
The longer you spend with an email provider, the more your tags, segments, rules, automations, email templates, etc get jumbled up. Think of it like your closet… the longer you go between cleaning out your closet the more clothes, shoes, bags, etc pile up.
Those numbers (maybe besides the Tags 🙊) may not look too daunting, but the thought of trying to migrate and clean that stuff up was paralyzing for us.
That was until… ConvertKit’s FREE migration!
As soon as we created our ConvertKit account, we filled out the migration form. Now, as of writing this article, if you have less than 5,000 subscribers they don’t handle everything for free:
That may hold you back if you have less than 5,000 subscribers, but honestly, just taking the action to commit to migrating is like grabbing the big plastic bags and stepping into your cluttered closet.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Just because we had 5,000+ subscribers didn’t mean we weren’t going to be doing any work! We had to spend plenty of time getting all our ducks in a row and cleaning up all our forms, tags, sequences, etc — it’s not possible for someone to know the intricacies of your email marketing setup and migrate it without your input.
All-in, the process took us about three weeks to migrate everything from Drip to ConvertKit. We setup a Notion Doc to organize everything from our side and to give the migration specialist (Hi, Natalie 👋) a helpful document to work from:
Note: ConvertKit didn’t provide this Notion doc, we just created it ourselves based on all the different “features” of our email strategy and used it with Natalie. You could easily do this in Google Docs, etc.
The best part about reducing all of those things is that our email account and strategy feels way more concise and organized now. We went from an overflowing closet that was about to burst at the seams to a nice, tidy, and refreshing system.
Again, we cannot stress enough how awesome it was to have ConvertKit’s migration done for free. We spent plenty of our own hours, but it easily saved us 40+ hours of work and a ton of headaches and tasks we didn’t want to do.
For years while using Drip we were writing snippets of HTML and CSS for…. every weekly email we sent 🤣🙈. Sure, Drip had an email builder, but the experience was really lackluster and we always wanted our emails to feel custom, branded, and easy to create.
When we explored moving to ConvertKit, the first thing we did was create a new Broadcast email to see how flexible and intuitive the email builder was. And, friends? The email builder was SOLID. 👏👏
We are big Notion users, so having the “/block” shorthand in the email builder was fantastic. You can quickly add a paragraph, heading, image, etc without having to do multiple clicks.
The other things we loved immediately about the email builder:
When we sent out our first email from our shiny new ConvertKit account, many of our subscribers who knew we had moved to them asked us, “You created these emails with just the ConvertKit email builder??” So, they’re doing something right!
This is, honestly, a game-changer in the email marketing world. ConvertKit actually helps our subscriber base grow with almost ZERO effort on our part.
We can illustrate the awesomeness of having the Creator network in this 30-day subscriber chart:
We gained 263 new subscribers in a 30-day period. Nearly 50% of those subscribers came from the Creator Network and happened with very little additional effort on our part!
Previously, we were averaging ~130 new subscribers every month. If the Creator Network continues to deliver at 50% over our previous growth rate, that’s an extra 1,500+ new subscribers we’ll accrue in the next year just from the Creator Network alone. We reached out to one friend in the network and added each other as recommended creators. We plan to do more outreach to related creators in our business niche and keep experimenting with this feature.
While it IS awesome, it is also about who you can get to recommend you, so your results will vary based on who you know. However, you could easily start recommending other ConvertKit creators and building relationships with them to earn their recommendation in the future. This is a new opportunity for engagement and list growth that hasn’t previously been possible in other email platforms.
As we mentioned at the beginning of this article, no email platform is perfect and we have a few recommendations for ways ConvertKit could continue to improve the product:
These are just a few things we interact with often, so it’s what is most top of mind for us. But, overall, we’ve really enjoyed our experience using ConvertKit so we’re happy to deal with these small nitpicks.
We trust putting our email marketing efforts in the hands of ConvertKit, and if you’re a digital creator, we believe you’ll be very happy if you make the move.
We hope sharing our reasons for switching back to ConvertKit has helped you!
Hello, hello friends! As another year comes to a close, we are happy to reflect on the past year and look forward to the next one.
We’ve been writing these reviews publicly for years, and you can read the others here if you like: 2022, 2021, and 2020.
If love you photos, make sure to scroll all the way to the end of this post to see a photo dump of the year!
While 2022 was the year that probably looked the best from the outside looking in (we traveled full-time in Europe 👩🏻🦰👨🏻🦲🧳🎒✈️🌍), we both agreed that 2023 is probably the happiest year of our entire lives thus far 😱. Let’s talk about why that is…
Happiness is obviously very subjective, and it’s a bit of a moving target throughout our lives. 20 years ago me (Hi, it’s Jason 👨🏻🦲) would’ve looked at 2023 and thought, “how borrrrrring 😴.”
We really settled into our lives in Portugal (which we’ll talk more about in a moment) and have found a solid stride in our businesses. Plus, the ongoing disruption of a year of full-time travel in 2022 really showed us what makes us the most satisfied and contented on a daily basis. Combine that with a home we absolutely adore, a friendly neighborhood, and gorgeous year-round weather, and you end up with a wonderful year.
Now, did we run into challenges here and there? Of course. But, overall, 2023 was a 10/10 year and while not a ton of new adventures were had, we just felt so happy together.
One of the things we mentioned as a preview in last year’s review was acclimating to life in a new country. We feel so fortunate that we found the small coastal town of Lourinhã and that we ended up in a tight-knit community that offers us just enough social interaction.
If you’ve ever moved to a new city, state, or country, you know how hard it can be to make friends. Well, we were shocked to find that our social calendar was WAYYY more full in 2023 than it ever has been in our adult lives.
You can hear us talk more about what we loved about our first year in Portugal in our podcast episode about it (listen on Apple, Spotify, or the web).
We absolutely LOVE the predictability Wandering Aimfully has created in our lives, especially when it comes to revenue. But, we’d by lying if we said we missed the excitement of making new products, launching them, and taking our ideas from a discussion in our living room to a purchasable digital thing.
In 2023, we brought three new ideas to life and they all went well for different reasons…
While we were discussing goals for 2023 at the top of the year, we discussed the idea of adding mini-product launches in between WAIM Unlimited launches throughout the year to scratch our creative itch. Instead of diving into the deep end with a mini-product, we created a MICRO-product, something even smaller to touch our toesies into those waters.
Behind The Build LIVE was a 1-day, live-journal via a Notion page, where we shared the entire process of redesigning our website homepage and building a new lead magnet. We sold access to the Notion page via a pay-what-you-want model, but the money wasn’t the priority. While we did make a couple hundred bucks in sales, we had a lot of fun on the day of, sharing hour-by-hour updates, and feeling the momentum of a new project. We’ll talk more about why this experiment dissuaded us from doing any other mini-product launches in the “What we chose not to do” section below.
For many years, we’ve had it on our to-do list to create new content to synthesize everything we’ve taught our WAIM Unlimited Members in our monthly coaching sessions. We finally carved out the time to do this and packaged it together in an A-Z “encyclopedia” of content we named our Calm Business Encyclopedia.
Did we put a ton of work on our plate with 26 separate pieces of written and video content? Of course we did! We’re the Zooks, we always bite off more than we can chew 🤣🤣. However, we worked really well together, we created solid processes to get the work done, and knocked out the content creation without too many late nights. We’re super proud of the Calm Business Encyclopedia and know it’s a solid, helpful, and free resource that will assist many online creators.
Unless you’re a WAIM Unlimited Member, you will probably not have heard of this. To start the year I (Jason, again 👨🏻🦲) decided I wanted to stop doing the 1:1 Slack accountability system I’d offered to our WAIM Members for years and shift to a group system. It simply became too much of a mental load for me every week to do the 1:1 work at the scale I was doing it. However, we didn’t want to leave our members without some form of weekly accountability since that’s a key benefit of joining WAIM.
Through a few brainstorming sessions, we came up with a “game” in our Slack community that revolved around themed game boards, digital gem stones, and silly weekly updates to keep people engaged. All-in, 215 of our WAIM Members participated over the course of the year, and many folks said it was the best accountability system they’d ever used! We’re bringing it back for 2024 and are excited to have something so impactful for our members that’s also fun for us to host.
The success of this game was a continued testament to our core value of FUN and our attempt to craft meaningful experiences for our customers that are un-boring.
Money isn’t everything, but it is worth celebrating your wins, especially when you’ve taken a very slow and steady approach to growth:
We feel so fortunate that we’ve been able to create consistent revenue growth, while also offering a product (un-boring monthly coaching and more) that our members really enjoy and want to share with other people. Our bi-annual launches continue to work and our weekly email newsletter is the lifeblood of our business (we’ve still not used social media since the end of 2021 for WAIM).
As mentioned, we set a high goal of 300 new WAIM Members in 2023 and we surpassed that goal by hitting 310 total new members! HURRAY! 🎉🎉
We found it incredibly hard to consistently exercise while constantly packing our bags and moving to a new place every week or so in 2022.
In 2023, becoming stationary again meant that exercise and good habits came so much easier.
We both made time to exercise nearly every day of 2023 and were feeling healthy and happy to end the year (just in time for all those holiday treats 🙊).
This seemed like a fun section to add, not only to share with you, but to reflect on what we spent money on that brought the most value to our individual lives and also to our work lives.
👩🏻🦰 Caroline’s best life purchase: A <200€ stationary exercise bike
👩🏻🦰 Caroline’s best biz purchase: icons8.com subscription
👨🏻🦲 Jason’s best life purchase: Hario Switch coffee dripper (aff link)
👨🏻🦲 Jason’s best biz purchase: Screen Studio (aff link) and the Arc Browser (free so no purchase necessary, but it was worth mentioning!)
You would think that living in Europe would have us brimming with excitement to continue to explore. But… we basically hit travel burnout at the end of 2022. We intended to take a few trips throughout the year, but whenever we’d sit down to plan them, we both agreed we just didn’t want to hop on a plane or deal with all the logistics.
Our ONLY trip of the year in 2023 was going back to the U.S. for three weeks in November to visit our families in Florida and friends in Boston. That trip was (thankfully) very uneventful (as our last two trips back to the U.S. have not been great), but even just that one trip felt overwhelming and exhausting.
I’m not sure we’ll ever have a custom development project that ends up in the “what went well” category 😆. The reality of building something completely custom is that you always run into hurdles, you have to make sacrifices on your vision, and the project takes 2x the time and costs 2x the money.
We are extremely happy to have a redesigned WAIM Member Dashboard as it’s a much better experience for our members. Our first experience developing the 1.0 version of the dashboard was a bit of a nightmare back in 2018, and we can at least say this 2.0 experience wasn’t as challenging as the first. Plus, we’re incredibly proud of the final product, so I guess it was worth it.
It’s simply a constant reminder that no matter how long you’re in business, if you have to outsource work that you don’t have the skills for (or don’t have the time to do), it’s rarely going to be a perfectly smooth process.
In our 2022 year-end review, we wrote the following sentence: “We think 2023 is the year Teachery makes its biggest jump since it was created back in 2013.”
Welp… that didn’t happen… at all. In fact, Teachery’s revenue and customer numbers were on a slight decline (nothing scary or major, but we’re going in the wrong direction!).
We did ship a few solid new features for our customers including Themes, Course Hubs, and a heaping handful of small improvements. We also thwarted a few different spam attacks which revealed some important infrastructure improvements we had to spend time and effort on. We also launched a new homepage for the first time and switched our frontend website over to Webflow. That change will help us as we start to implement more marketing and promotion (read: we can now design and create landing pages without needing our developers!).
The big takeaway for Teachery in 2023: You can’t prioritize something LAST and expect for it to make strides. This WILL change in 2024! 🤞🤞
There was a 3-week stint in the summer when we got REALLY into padel 🎾. It’s like tennis, but on a smaller court with walls. We got introduced to it at a friend’s birthday party and it was a lot of fun. Right around the same time, some brand new courts were built near us and we played a handful of times.
That was until I woke up after the 3rd time playing in 3 weeks and couldn’t straighten my knee. I was experiencing some pretty bad pain. An MRI revealed that my previously torn ACL (2007) had been re-torn and there was a lot of meniscus damage. The exact words said by the orthopedic doctor upon reviewing my MRI were, “Yeah, this is not a good knee, man.” It seems all those years of playing basketball are finally catching up with me.
I’ll need to get arthroscopic surgery to clean up some “loose bodies” that are causing a good amount of daily pain in my knee. It doesn’t seem worth doing another ACL repair based on how bad the rest of my knee looks. So, my time playing padel 🎾 was pretty short-lived 😭😭.
A new section we’re adding to our year-end review is what we decided NOT to do this year. We’ll go through these things fairly quickly, but they felt worth acknowledging because sometimes it’s the stuff you choose not to do that frees up time for all the stuff you want to be doing!
As mentioned when talking about Behind the Build LIVE, that project was our testing ground to see if we wanted to put in the effort and time to do mini-product launches. What it quickly showed us was the juice would not be worth the squeeze. That micro product experiment was the perfect testing ground to show us staying focused and streamlined was the way to go. While we had earmarked $20,000 – $40,000 in additional gross revenue with two mini-products, we decided to leave that potential money on the table.
This is our enough mindset in action. Yes, that money is wonderful and many people would be so thrilled to have it as additional income, but it would have added stress and a lot more work to our plates. We’ve spent years getting our WAIM business to a predictable and CALM place, why would we add so much extra to our plates when our business is making enough money??
Namely, this is Instagram, but we also felt the pull to possibly try using TikTok. We decided not to do either, and staying off social media continues to keep our mental health in a great place without showing any signs of decline in our WAIM business.
When everyone does a Black Friday sale (we used to as well), we were going to flip that idea and do a surprise for our email list giving away one of our products for free. However, as that time crept closer, we were gearing up to travel back to the U.S. and putting more work on our plates would have left us stressed and scattered. Part of running a calm business means having the discipline to NOT pursue all of your ideas. You always have to weight the opportunity against what you’ll have to sacrifice to see it through, and adding stress on top of a pretty over-scheduled season felt like something we’d regret. So, we tabled the idea for now.
With all three of these items, you can see a recurring theme of savings ourselves stress and extra work that didn’t need to be done to reach our goals. While we set a plan at the beginning of 2023 to do all of these things, we’re happy that later-in-the-year-2023 us said NO THANK YOU and pressed pause on all of these ideas!
Say it with us, “We think 2023 2024 is the year Teachery makes its biggest jump since it was created back in 2013.” 😂🙌
There is no doubt in our minds, 2024 is the year of Teachery. We know this because we’re doing everything possible in the beginning of 2024 to put Teachery first on our work plates. Here are a few of the things we’re doing:
*For any WAIM Members reading this, it doesn’t mean we’re going to ignore our Slack channel or spend less time with you in our monthly coaching, it just means we’re using our “growth” energy early in the week towards Teachery. Thankfully WAIM is at a much more stable place and has much more momentum and well-developed processes than Teachery.
Also, when it comes to focusing on Teachery, we’re specifically talking about focusing on marketing, promotion, and revenue/customer growth. The past 10 years of Teachery being a side project have only been focused (with very little time/effort) on the product itself. We’ve never done marketing and promotion for Teachery, that is a huge change for us in 2024!
We were early adopters to ConvertKit (aff link), but made the switch to Drip when we hired a consultant to help us set up some really fancy automations and funnels in 2017.
We can’t say anything bad about Drip, but what we realized is that complicated automations and sales funnels are just not for us. The amount of headaches, technical hurdles, and overall complexity was never worth the return on our investment.
What works best for us when it comes to email marketing? Simplicity, valuable content, and consistency. We’re not opposed to email funnels and automations, we’ve just realized it’s not the right fit for us.
We’ll be switching from Drip to ConvertKit in January and are excited to use an email platform that focuses specifically on creators.
It’s no small task to switch. We have loads of email workflows, automation rules, tags, segments, etc to migrate, but we believe the effort will be worth it (read: enjoying using the email platform and having the platform itself help us grow our audience through some of ConvertKit’s built-in growth tools).
Agora falamos um pouquinho de português 🤏😅. Since February 2023, we’ve been doing a weekly Zoom lesson with an absolutely AMAZING Portuguese language teacher. We love her and she makes learning a tough language as fun as it could possibly be.
Our goal for the end of 2024 is to be able to have our weekly lesson entirely spoken in Portuguese. And, we want to continue to not overdo it on the time we spend each week learning, just continue our slow and steady 🐌 pace we’ve been on!
The jury is still out on traveling in 2024. We have our eyes on a few different trips, and we absolutely want to road trip to a few different areas of Portugal. But, we still don’t have the itch to pack our bags, hop on a plane, and yada yada.
This could change and you could see a few trips in our 2024 year-end review, but only time will tell.
Once we hit our original enough number ($33k per month) in 2021, we sat down and reviewed our financial situation. That first number was set in 2018 and as the years went by, a few things changed in our lives.
We mentioned our new enough number in last year’s review (it’s $56k per month) and that includes a focus on putting money aside for our aging parents, a down payment on a home, and savings for growing our family and not feeling a financial crunch when that does happen.
Like our first enough number, we will most likely not hit our new number in 2024. It’s likely that we won’t hit it in 2025 too, and that’s okay. Our second enough number is a lot like a “gravy number” to us. We live a wonderful life with abundance right now, and in many ways we already have more than enough. We take intentional time to acknowledge that on a regular basis, and that’s the power of knowing what your individual enough number is. The additional money we want to make is simply a focused bit of extra to help in an even more financially secure future.
If you have never sat down to define your own enough number, we highly recommend it. We also have a podcast episode all about the ethos of enough if you want to have a listen (Apple, Spotify, or the web).
One of the things we like to do each year is pick a word for the year. This word becomes a helpful bit of guidance as the days, weeks, and months fly by. We use this word as a way to come back to our “why” whenever we’re making decisions or in need of a dose of inspiration.
I want this year to be about focusing on small actions that create momentum. Rather than getting overwhelmed by the big picture, I want to break everything I do down into manageable, tiny parts and focus on accomplishing those things consistently. A weekly art habit, one painting after another. Daily exercise, one day at a time. Teachery growth, one customer at a time. This year is about consistent, small actions for me.
Yep, my word is a made up word 😂. Revenuns is a mashup for “revenue / fun,” whereby I know I want to focus on growing our revenue for Teachery in 2024 but I also want it to remain fun. I want every revenue growth decision and tactic we choose to be something enjoyable, unique, and un-boring. And, Revenuns goes the other way too: any fun idea we have in 2024 needs to be tied somehow to revenue growth.
And that’ll do it! We hope you’ve enjoyed reading our year-end review and if you write a review of your own, feel free to use this format and share it with us.
We’d love to read how your year went and what you’re looking forward to in 2024!
And now, our 2023 photo dump…
Let’s explore eight powerful reminders to help you navigate judgment and maintain your focus on your entrepreneurial journey.
Just stop worrying about it! is not helpful advice, we know. The mental roller coaster we can all ride from time to time is real, especially when feedback and criticism are being slung at us easier than ever these days.
The next time you find yourself in a spiral 🌀 worrying about what people are thinking about you, we hope these tactics can help!
When was the last time you went to a party or event, worried about what you were going to wear? Now, think back; do you remember ANYTHING any other person wore?? That’s how everyone is thinking about you too — which is to say that don’t remember because they were worried about themselves too.
Understand that everyone tends to focus on themselves more than on you. Try to visualize the quantity of attention you receive and divide it by a hundred to reduce perceived scrutiny.
Recognize that when other people judge your choices, it’s often based on their values, not yours. Don’t let their lens distort your path; stay true to your values and vision.
Realize that sometimes harsh criticism may be a reflection of the other person’s struggles. We find that when a nasty email, comment, etc comes through, it’s almost always coming from a place of hurt NOT caused by us.
Shift into empathy and avoid taking unnecessary negativity to heart. Before sending a response, imagine the person you’re replying to is having an awful day and your reply could actually help them realize their negativity had nothing to do with you!
Understand that emotional reactions to criticism might stem from your own personal wounds. Give yourself time and space to regulate your emotions and gain perspective.
Is there a loop you continuously fall into when you get criticized? Is there something from your childhood that gets triggered which blows the situation out of proportion? Inspect where your heightened feelings are coming from before any outward response.
We realize this reminder is especially difficult, but it’s also one of the most helpful when you can recognize a mental pattern of your own.
Question whether the person offering judgment or feedback has walked in your shoes. Or, more importantly, if they’re even someone who you should be taking business feedback from.
We all love our friends and family, but if they don’t have experience building and running a calm business, it’s not worth entertaining their thoughts. Thank them for caring about you, but look to get guidance from folks who are “in the arena.”
Remember that your unique self is a gift to the world! Your experiences, your stories, your outlook, your values, all of it creates a perspective that only YOU have the ability to share.
Don’t let fleeting judgment dim your authentic light; the world needs your true self.
Value being seen and loved for who you truly are. Prioritize your freedom and truth over the need for constant approval.
We love the quote by André Gide:
“It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not.”
Realize that life is limited; don’t spend it adhering to someone else’s rules.
Embrace the uniqueness of your journey and live life on your own terms.
Navigating judgment and criticism is an inherent part of entrepreneurship. By internalizing these eight reminders, you can learn to care less about what people think and stay focused on YOUR unique business path.
Remember, your journey is yours alone, and living authentically is a gift both to yourself and the world. Don’t let the opinions of others hold you back; embrace your true self and keep moving forward on your entrepreneurial adventure.
We want this article to be a reminder that you are the source of the magic in your business!
Let’s explore four important reminders to help you embrace your inner authority as you navigate your entrepreneurial journey.
One of the biggest reasons you started your own business was to take control of your life. When you work for another company, your schedule, your focus, your skill set, all of it is tied to the decisions of other people. And hey, if the 9-5 job thing can work for you, go for it!
For us, working for someone else just didn’t cut it. We knew we had gifts to give to the world and big ideas to chase down, which is why it’s always good to circle back to the best tool we have in our biz-arsenal: OURSELVES!
We cannot stress this tip enough: Don’t measure YOUR success against someone else’s goals or aspirations.
Your intuition is your best compass; trust it to guide you in the direction that aligns with your values and desires. Trust it to choose how much is enough, what things you should spend your time doing, and how to work productively that best suits your situation.
Remember that success can take many forms, from the pursuit of material wealth to seeking peace and relaxation. Only YOU know what will truly make YOU happy!
You have the ultimate authority over how you spend your time. While various strategies and tactics exist for business growth, only you can determine what truly matters to you.
Consider your priorities and values when deciding how to allocate your precious time. If you don’t want to be on social media, don’t! Just know, there are tradeoffs when not doing something or using a certain business strategy/tactic.
At the end of the day, your business is a living and breathing (kind of) entity, it will require a time investment but you get to choose where you spend that time!
Reiterating what we said above about working for yourself and not a 9-5 job, when you own your own business you make 99.9% of the rules. This is empowering and gives you a ton of flexibility and freedom.
You didn’t start your own business to be bound by all the trappings of a standard corporate job. If you don’t want pointless meetings on your calendar? Don’t have them! If you don’t like getting on the phone at all? Don’t do it! Whatever rules you want to break and yours to break with YOUR business.
Embrace your uniqueness and authenticity; don’t be afraid to be yourself. If conventional wisdom doesn’t align with your vision, forge your path based on your values and style.
Investing in your personal growth directly impacts your business success. You should always spend time improving skills, evolving beliefs, investing in your mindset, and building your habits.
Personal growth empowers you to adapt and thrive in the business world. If you are getting better by 1% every day as a person, your business will follow suit, no doubt!
While advice and guidance are valuable, always remember that YOU are the ultimate authority in your business. Trust your instincts, set your own definitions of success, and choose how you spend your time wisely.
By embracing your inner compass and investing in yourself, you’ll steer your business toward a path that aligns perfectly with YOUR vision and values.
While it’s great to have an end goal in mind with your business 🎯, the journey to get to that metaphorical finish line should be as enjoyable as possible!
Let’s dive into our E.X.C.I.T.E.D. framework to bring delight back to your work…
If you feel like you’ve fallen out of love with your business, things have gotten a bit boring, or you’re simply looking for a jolt to get you motivated again, we have seven tactics that can help you:
Investing in your knowledge is an incredibly powerful way to continue to uplevel your skills. It’s also a great way to gain inspiration and there are copious amounts of videos, articles (like this one!), courses, and conferences you can consume/attend.
There is ALWAYS something new to learn, but change can be hard. Give yourself permission to be in a season of education, but don’t rely on consuming more content as a crutch. Know when it’s time to stop filling your brain and start taking action on what you’ve learned.
Explore new skills and ideas to stimulate your mind and your business growth!
Yeah, yeah, we are obviously cheating on the “X” in EXCITED 😂😂. But, we find that leaning into experimentation and continuously trying fresh tactics and strategies can really up your enjoyment of working on your business!
As the world and the Internet continually evolve, it’s important to innovate, try new approaches, and avoid the fear of continuing to do things the same way you’ve always done them.
A couple of easy experiments to get started with:
Whatever experiments you decide to dive into, just remember that they are exactly that: EXPERIMENTS! These aren’t forever changes and shouldn’t be treated as such if they don’t work out perfectly.
It’s easy to lose the excitement you had for your business when you were first starting out. The to-do items pile up, admin tasks appear left and right, and the ebbs and flows of revenue can bog you down.
But, we believe that regularly getting in touch with your audience and customers can give you a boost of motivation. You can do this in many ways, but some of our favorites are:
Whatever way you feel comfortable connecting with your audience, carve out time to reestablish communication and get amped up about why you do what you do.
We ALL consume content all day long. However, there’s a big difference between mindless scrolling and intentionally seeking out content that inspires you!
If you’re feeling a bit stuck and blah about your business, seek out other stories, podcasts, videos, newsletters, or social accounts that you can relate to. Just remember, it’s easy to fall into comparison traps so you want to be mindful of relating your business to someone else’s (who might be much further along on their journey than you are).
💡 Pro-tip: When we go into Inspiration-mode, we create a constraint on the amount of time we can spend consuming that content. Usually, it’s 1-2 hours in a day, capped at one week. Then, we take that inspiration and invest it into our work.
Every couple of months it feels like everything is changing. That change can be scary, daunting, and completely overwhelming. But, the more you can lean into trying new technology and exploring the benefits for your business the more excited you might feel.
If new technology strikes fear in your heart, reframe your relationship with it as a tool that can enhance your work and how your product can help customers.
When your head is down and you’re working IN your business, it can be hard to zoom the lens out, look up, and see how far you’ve come!
We use weekly planning meetings, journaling, and annual reviews (like this one, or this one) to consistently review our progress. It can be hard to feel the motivation and excitement for your business when you’re trudging through the mundane of the day-to-day. By proactively taking time to see the progress you’ve made on your journey you can instantly get inspired.
When was the last time you reminded yourself of your big business goals? When did you last look off in the distance and let yourself dream about the point in the future you’re working towards?
Sure, it can be de-motivating if you haven’t made many strides toward your big goals, but we find it’s energizing when you visualize your future and how achieving your goals will impact your life.
As with the only parts of the E.X.C.I.T.E.D. framework, you want to make sure that the desintation you’re working towards is based on your enough goals and not someone else’s!
Reigniting your passion for your business is crucial for long-term success and fulfillment. By following these seven “E.X.C.I.T.E.D.” strategies, you’ll infuse novelty and enjoyment into your entrepreneurial journey.
Education, eXperimentation, Connection, Inspiration, Technology, Evaluation, and Destination—these are the keys to maintaining your enthusiasm and achieving your business goals.
So, get pumped up, stay curious, and keep rocking!
In the world of marketing, NOTHING beats the sheer power of word-of-mouth. Paid ads, content marketing, etc, are useful and have their place, but getting your customers to rave to other potential customers about what you sell is magical.
We believe when it comes to marketing, it’s not just about meeting expectations; it’s about exceeding them and creating unforgettable story moments.
The list below is (obviously) not every word-of-mouth marketing idea available, but it is a list we think is very actionable and many items on it have come from our own experiences.
There are 3 categories of word-of-mouth ideas we’re going to break things down into:
Ready to up your marketing game? Let’s goooo….
This is a tactic we LOVE, but it does take a good amount of physical effort. The idea is to go the extra mile by creating personalized thank-you packages for every customer.
The best way we’ve found to surprise people with these packages is to collect information about things they like and their shipping address in a post-purchase survey (💡 Pro-tip: Embed a survey directly on your post-purchase thank you page for highest conversion!)
Here’s a photo of the packages we used to put together for a previous product we sold:
Piggybacking off of #1, if you want a simpler version that still provides a lovely experience for your customers, a simple handwritten note can work wonders! It’s a small gesture that carries a big impact and you shouldn’t underestimate the power of a heartfelt message.
Turn your customers into superheroes with custom superhero avatars. You could do this by taking a submitted photo through a post-purchase survey or finding their photo through some Google sleuthing. Then, if you don’t have the talents to create superhero avatar images (we don’t either!) hire someone on Fiverr or Upwork. You could also try to use AI tools like Dall-E or Midjourney too!
Creating superhero avatars might be a silly idea, but it will make your customers feel like they’re part of an exclusive club (and it’s fun!)
Send your customers customized freebies or resources tailored to THEIR needs. It’s one thing to give someone an extra resource post-purchase, it’s an entire other to have it be customized to their business and their problems! Show your customers you care about their success 👍👍.
That post-purchase survey is a goldmine of content to help you wow your customers and create a word-of-mouth marketing moment! What answers did you get in the survey that you can act on in some way? And if you can’t act on the survey responses right away, just setting a follow-up reminder where you reach back out to a customer in 2-3 months to check in on them can go a long way!
What if you turned your customer’s ideal journey into a children’s book? Your customer becomes the hero of the story and you add magical and fantastical twists and turns they have to take on their path! Do they encounter a bridge-dwelling troll who wants to stop them from building an email list? Or is there a chasm that opens up in front of selling their first product? Your imagination could go wild and who doesn’t want to be the star of a children’s book??
Inject humor into your customer experience wherever possible. Right after someone makes a purchase, is there a silly or fun moment you can create with a video? Or, in your post-purchase automated email sequence that onboards your customer, can you add an email with a surprise video that creates a moment of delight?
Add hidden Easter eggs to your website or digital products! Surprise your customers with unexpected, delightful discoveries when they click on certain things or stumble upon a bit of text you added a link to that they didn’t expect.
Celebrate something fun that your customers all have in common. If you’re finding that your customers are always talking about their pets in your community, turn those conversations and photos shared into something fun, like a “Pets of [Your Brand]” yearbook for your customers’ furry friends.
This is one of the SIMPLEST word-of-mouth marketing opportunities! Call, text, DM, or email long-time customers out of the blue to thank them. Show them they’re valued and check in to see what they’re up to. Bonus points if they’ve been around long enough that you have something of value to give them to surprise and delight them.
For this one to work, you MUST not mention it anywhere! Pop open your Loom app or anything where you can record your screen and do an audit or personalized breakdown of your customer’s website, sales page, or even the product itself. Give them actionable advice (and praise!) to help them move a step forward. If you’re not excited about being on camera, you can also do a written audit or report too!
Many business owners use a charitable donation as a marketing tactic. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing, but there is another way to do this that can add a spark of excitement. We want you to think about donating a percentage of a customer’s without them knowing about it, which creates an unexpected and heartwarming moment. Bonus points if you want to ask in a post-purchase survey what causes a customer is most interested in supporting and your donation is in that specific niche.
Digital workbooks are great, but we all love receiving something in the mail. Think about sending a physical workbook or resources alongside your digital products to exceed your customers’ expectations. Even if you don’t have a printed version now, could you cobble something together that helps your customer take action while holding the item in their hands?
We all know about Willy Wonka’s Golden Ticket, but what about creating your own Golden Ticket? What’s a place within your product redemption flow where you could add your own Golden Ticket? A moment where your customers could stumble upon a secret item that they could redeem for another product, a discount, or something else from you!
This is our grand finale! Imagine you were to combine many elements from the previous 14 word-of-mouth marketing ideas and create a custom movie trailer for your customer’s business. What could be really exciting about this idea is if the movie trailer was so great that your customer wanted to use it and showcase it EVERYWHERE! That means they want to talk about YOU everywhere! It’s a wild and unexpected way to show appreciation and create shareable content.
There you have it—15 sensational word-of-mouth marketing ideas that will leave your customers talking and your business soaring.
The key to utilizing customer word-of-mouth growth is to surprise, delight, and exceed expectations. Make your customers feel special, indulge in silliness, and subvert expectations.
Don’t forget to make sharing known, easy, and rewarding. With these ideas, you’ll turn your customers into your most enthusiastic advocates, giving your business the ultimate power boost!
Fear not, for we are here to unveil the secret sauce to ensure that you never launch to crickets again! It’s all about product validation, a critical step in your entrepreneurial journey.
Let’s explore three powerful ways to validate your digital product idea!
Before we dive into the methods, let’s clarify what we mean by “product validation.” In essence, validation means confirming that real people are genuinely interested in buying what you sell. This is crucial because it minimizes the risk of investing your precious time, energy, and resources into an idea that lacks demand.
While it’s great to get followers on social media or a bunch of friendly messages encouraging you, that’s not product validation and 99.9% of the time will NOT lead to sales.
What will lead to sales when you launch your next product? Three things…
The first strategy for product validation is simple yet often overlooked—ask for feedback. Engage with your audience via emails, DMs, or social media and present your product ideas to them.
The goal in these conversations is to hear that the problem you want to solve with your offer is met with excitement. While this may seem like common sense, it’s astonishing how infrequently it’s done. Remember, you’re not looking for definitive answers here; instead, you’re gathering qualitative data.
Here are a couple of feedback tips:
When you’re in the first stage of product validation (asking for feedback), it’s a great idea to collect and keep that feedback somewhere where you can come back to it. Don’t forget, this is just the first stage of three stages of product validation!
The second stage of product validation is creating a pre-launch list, a tried-and-true method to assess interest and generate excitement. The steps to building a pre-launch list are:
Keep your pre-launch email capture page simple but compelling. Clearly communicate the value of your product and why people should join the pre-launch email list. Include visuals, even if they’re mock-ups, to make your idea more tangible!
Provide a rough timeline to set expectations, such as “Winter 2023.” This gives potential customers a sense of when they can expect your product.
Deciding whether to disclose the price of your offer on your pre-launch page has pros and cons.
Just because you create a pre-launch page DOESN’T mean people will find it randomly! Promote it to your existing audience through social media, interviews, relevant groups, other email lists, etc.
We find that setting a goal amount of email signups for your pre-launch list can help you make a decision to move forward (or not) with your product idea. Aim for an achievable list goal while also taking into account how many sales you hope to get in your first launch. Remember, keep your expectations LOW and know that your first launch is not your last launch!
The third and final stage in your product validation arsenal is the actual pre-sale. This strategy involves offering your product for purchase before it’s even developed!
You’ve built a list of potential interested customers, now it’s time to sell your product to them. You don’t want to just send one sales email and you don’t want to leave the pre-sale open-ended. We recommend a 5-day pre-sale with a discount as these are your very first customers! Send one sales email per day throughout the entire pre-sale period (yes, 5 emails in a 5-day period!)
For your pre-sales page itself, you can simply expand your pre-launch landing page. Add more details, benefits, visuals, and a clear timeline. Don’t skimp on building the pre-sale page out, but overall remember to emphasize the transformation your product/service will create for your customer.
Be sure to clearly communicate the timeline for product delivery, reinforcing the sense of trust and excitement among your customers. These folks just gave you money for something that doesn’t exist, reward that trust by delivering on your promise to them!
Product validation is the essential bridge between a great idea and a successful product launch. By following these three validation methods—asking for feedback, building a pre-launch list, and executing a pre-sale—you’ll not only gauge interest but also gather valuable insights, secure early customers, and create a sense of anticipation.
With these strategies in place, you’re well on your way to launching a product that resonates with a hungry audience, minimizing the risk of launching to silence and zero sales. So, entrepreneurs, validate, launch, and soar to new heights!
We believe a “boring-ish” business is the right mix of exciting and fun paired with repeatability and sustainability. It’s all about striking a balance between the predictably boring and the thrillingly unorthodox in your business strategy.
Let’s break it down!
🥱 When we talk about the “boring” side of business, we mean the good kind of boring. This includes factors like predictable cash flow, repeatable systems, sustainable routines, and an absence of unnecessary drama. It’s the foundation that keeps your business stable.
🦄 On the flip side, “unboring” business elements inject fun, excitement, and a dash of risk. This includes creativity, novelty, experiments, and unique approaches to common business concepts. Un-boring is the spark that keeps your business exciting!
The goal is to achieve a harmonious blend of boring and un-boring, creating what we call “boring-ish” business. Think of it like a unicorn accountant—crunching numbers but doing it on their terms, adding a touch of flair to the otherwise routine task.
Now that you understand the concept, let’s explore how to apply a boring-ish framework to your own business!
Incorporating the “boring-ish” philosophy into your business can lead to a harmonious blend of stability and excitement.
By carefully balancing predictability and novelty, you can create a unique business that stands out while maintaining a solid foundation.
Embrace the “boring-ish” mindset and take your business to new heights!
There are five popular time management strategies we’re going to cover and share our ratings of in this article.
Our goal is that you finish reading this and decide on ONE (or two) of these strategies to start using this week. Remember, there is no perfect way to manage your time, only the right way that worst best for YOU!
If you have the ability to not scroll down to the bottom of this article to find the winner, we are proud of you! 👏👏👏 We’ll count down from the fifth most effective time management tactic (for us!) and work our way to #1 on our list.
We both 👩🏻🦰👨🏻🦲 ranked each time management strategy on a scale of 1-10 and then we combined our scores to get the final ranking. Feel free to rank these time tactics for yourself OR identify five strategies you use and rank them.
The “Eat the Frog” technique advocates tackling the most challenging task early in the day to start with a sense of accomplishment. We are renaming it from “frog” to “bug” because frogs are cute and we shouldn’t eat them 🐸 and bugs are gross 🪳.
This time management strategy works well for people who have peak morning energy and self-discipline. However, it may not be effective for you if you use your morning energy for creative or enjoyable tasks.
That’s why Eat the Bug earns our lowest score of 14/20. Still effective! Just not the most effective.
From David Allen’s popular book, “Getting Things Done,” The 2-Minute Rule suggests tackling tasks that take two minutes or less immediately.
We’ve all felt the pile-up of all the tiny tasks in our days/weeks. Answering text messages, signing a PDF, taking out the trash, etc. David’s rule posits that if you just knock those small tasks out quickly they won’t take up precious mental space!
This strategy is great for staying on top of small tasks and preventing them from accumulating. However, it may disrupt deep-focus work which is why it also received a 14/20 score.
Time tracking as a tactic is pretty obvious! It involves recording and analyzing how you spend your time to improve time estimation and identify the time wasters in your day.
This strategy helps you understand how long tasks take, making future planning more accurate. However, time tracking requires extra TIME to track your time diligently so it can feel cumbersome.
We put time tracking in 3rd place (15/20 score) because it is helpful to learn how long projects will take to complete so you can work smarter and more efficiently in the future.
The Pomodoro Technique involves breaking your work into focused 25-minute sessions followed by 5-minute breaks. There are other time increments you can use, but 25/5 was the one that Italian creator Francesco Cirillo popularized this technique with!
While some find it highly effective for maintaining focus and accountability, others may find the ticking timer a source of stress (that’s me, Jason 👨🏻🦲).
Admittedly, our ranking score shouldn’t have Pomodoro Technique in second place BUT… this time management tactic is SO HELPFUL for 👩🏻🦰 that we had to put it as #2 on the list. Even if I can’t use it at all 😂😂. Ranking score 9/10 (but skewed for actual effectiveness for Caroline!)
Time blocking is the practice of allocating tasks to specific blocks on your calendar, accounting for the time you want to spend on each.
We also love time blocking because it helps in planning and visualizing your day, ensuring you allocate time for essential activities in your life BEFORE your work. This time management method is excellent for decision-making and protecting your non-negotiables.
We’ve been doing some version of time blocking for as long as we can remember and it continues to help us accomplish our goals while juggling multiple businesses and countless tasks! That is why this tactic earns a 22/10!
Just like so much of the advice in life and business, there is no one perfect time management tactic or strategy. We all work in different ways with different capacities.
Some people can work long hours, while some only have the ability to focus for short periods of time. Neither way of working is better as long as you find the right strategies to help you get the most amount done with the least amount of stress!
Find the right time management strategy that works for your brain and your circumstances. And if you aren’t sure which is best, experiment and find out 👍👍.
Many entrepreneurs share these fears when it comes to selling, but it doesn’t have to be that way! We have five tips to help you sell with confidence and authenticity.
Let’s transform selling from an icky and sleazy experience to a strategic and magnetic one.
Selling your product or service can often trigger fear and discomfort. Common fears include bothering your audience, the fear of rejection, reluctance to mention prices, and the perception that talking about money is impolite.
These fears are warranted, especially at the beginning stage of your journey, but it’s essential to overcome them to grow your business.
It’s a necessary part of business and a transfer of enthusiasm. Instead of having negative feelings about selling, we want to help you aim for a strategic, magnetic, and authentic approach to selling.
By shifting your perspective to enthusiasm for what you offer, you can build a thriving business while maintaining your integrity!
YOUR enthusiasm for your offer is contagious. When you genuinely believe in your offer, it becomes easier to communicate its benefits to your audience.
Right now, today, are you excited about the thing you are selling? If the answer is NO, then that’s okay and it just means you need to hone your offer or find a new one. If the answer is YES, then pour that passion and excitement into your sales process, sales copy, sales page, etc.
One way to sell is to make your offer so compelling and awesome that your audience tells other people about it. The other option is to proactively get your customers to talk about your offer on your behalf.
💬 Ask for testimonials: Many business owners think good testimonials (or reviews) will just fall in their lap. People are busy! In fact, when was the last time YOU went out of your way to send a testimonial or review to someone unprompted? Not often, yeah? That’s why you need to create a process for collecting testimonials and use them as social proof in your sales process.
🎁 Surprise and delight: Once a customer makes a purchase, the relationship isn’t over. In fact, immediately after a purchase happens you should plan to surprise and delight your customer in some way! In doing so, your customer will want to share that their expectations were exceeded.
🤝 Create a referral program: Whether you use a financial incentive (i.e. a 25% commission) or some sort of other reward (i.e. discounts on other products or access to other things), turning your customers into active referrers of your offer helps you sell less often!
It’s really easy to focus on the “thing” you’ve created: Buy my productivity course!
What you SHOULD focus on is the transformation your thing creates: Work fewer hours, have less stress, and have more free time by learning my XYZ productivity system.
Keep your attention on the transformation your product or service offers. Remember why you’re passionate about what you’re selling and visualize the positive change it can bring to your customers’ lives. This focus on transformation can fuel your enthusiasm and more easily drive your selling efforts.
For years we’ve watched new online business selling tactics pop up. Some of them we’ve found absolutely gross and some of them used and added to our sales-arsenal.
Take some time today to identify tactics that make you feel uncomfortable and avoid using them. Then, make a list of the sales tactics you don’t mind using and prioritize those.
Everyone has their own boundaries, so it’s crucial to choose selling strategies that align with your values. Whether it’s pricing tactics, upsells, or marketing channels, do what feels authentic and comfortable for you.
Selling is a skill that takes practice. The more you engage in selling activities, the more confident you’ll become.
We like to think about viewing each selling opportunity as a chance to earn confidence points. Every sales email, social media mention, or pitch is a step toward greater confidence in selling.
If you can gamify the process of selling and get more practice at it, your confidence WILL increase over time!
Selling doesn’t have to be a negative experience. By following these five tips, you can sell your products or services with confidence, authenticity, and integrity.
Believe in your offer, let your customers advocate for you, focus on the transformation, avoid tactics that don’t align with your values, and keep practicing. With these strategies, you’ll transform your approach to selling and build a thriving business.
And finally, remember these 3 things the next time you are selling:
