#251: Behind the Scenes: What I’m quietly working on

Jay Clouse [00:00:14]:
Hello, my friend. Welcome back to another episode of Creator Science. I've had a couple of greatest hits episodes on the feed over the last few weeks, and I had a very thoughtful, very kind listener reach out on Twitter and say, hey. I noticed you're not posting as many episodes lately. What's going on? And astute observation, you might assume that the issue is being a new dad and not having as much time. And you would be correct in that fact. But there's several other complicating factors here behind the scenes. And so I thought that would be an interesting prompt to share a little bit behind the scenes of what's going on in my world.

Jay Clouse [00:00:53]:
What am I spending time on? What's the latest? And just give you a little bit of a peek under the hood. I know I enjoy when I hear some of my favorite podcast hosts kinda give a behind the scenes, a state of the business if it were. And I thought maybe you'd like that too. So that's my intention here with this episode today is to give you a look at at what's going on in the world of creator science and the Klaus hold as a whole. I've been thinking a lot lately about a phrase that a friend of mine shared with me many years ago. He said, you can have as many cats as you want, but you have to feed all the cats. And the point of that phrase is you can do as many things as you want. Just recognize that anything that you do has a cost.

Jay Clouse [00:01:35]:
It has a new mouth to feed. And I think about that specifically whenever I think about starting a new project because projects are like cats. You can have as many as you want, but you have to feed all of them. And I find myself in a season of caring for a lot of cats. Maybe you can relate to that. I'm not sure. And so when you have too many cats, what do you do? Do you give the cats away? I won't go further into this analogy because I think it starts to get inhumane, but you get the point. I think I have a few too many cats right now, and so I'm trying to tie up some loose ends.

Jay Clouse [00:02:10]:
And I'm gonna share with you here today all of the different projects that I am working on. I will also say, at a macro level, I'm spending a lot more time working with AI, thinking with AI, and I typically tend to work most with Claude and ChatGPT. Claude is more of my, like, creative thought partner, meaning if I'm trying to think of different ways to say things or come up with certain words or if I want to get his feedback on an essay that I've written, typically, I will go to Claude with that. I have a saved project that has a voice guide. I I prompted chat GPT a long time ago after giving it a lot of my essays. I said can you come up with a voice guide for what it looks like to write an article as me as creator science and now I can use that voice guide to go to Claude and say hey here's an essay I just wrote about whatever the topic is. I just wrote an essay this weekend about Daniel Vassallo selling his membership Small Bets to Gumroad. I can go to Claude and say, I just wrote an essay breaking down the acquisition of Small Bets to Gumroad.

Jay Clouse [00:03:21]:
Please read this essay and let me know the strengths, the areas of improvement, and overall how strong you think this essay is. And it will give me a bunch of feedback. It'll say, here's what's good about it. Here's areas you can improve. Here's areas that specifically in your voice are missing. It'll often tell me that I could use more structure because my essays are typically very structured in terms of headlines or, sub headlines. It'll tell me that I need more examples, more transitions. And so I'll take some of that feedback.

Jay Clouse [00:03:49]:
I'll go. I'll write more, and then I'll come back and ask for feedback again. But the thing about AI giving you feedback is it will continue to give you feedback until you stop asking for it. Basically, there's no end to how much feedback it will give you. At some point, you just have to trust your gut and say, this feels like me. This feels good. I don't need to fix these little nitpicky things AI is still telling me I need to do. So that's how I use Claude.

Jay Clouse [00:04:12]:
I typically use ChatGPT then as more of an analytical partner. I think it does better with reasoning and data analysis coming up with graphs that same essay I just referenced. There were, points of data that Daniel Fasolo shared his PNL publicly. So I copied that into a CSV, uploaded it to chat GPT, and said, hey. Help me analyze this. I wanna create a graph of new members over time. I wanna create a graph of revenue over time. And it even lets you customize it with branding.

Jay Clouse [00:04:42]:
I'll say create a graph of revenue over time. The main bars or line on the graph should be zero zero six one f f, which is the hex code for the Creator Science Blue. It's a magical time to be working with these tools and for things that I'm not personally trying to get better at, working with AI has been very very fun. I have a few rules for how I work with it. I shared it in my newsletter this past week. I'll give you the high level here in case you didn't read that newsletter. Rule number one is that I don't outsource what I enjoy doing because if I use AI to do things that I find joy in, what is the point? Rule number two is I don't outsource what I want to improve at because the things that you don't do you get worse at. Rule Rule number three is I don't outsource what makes me unique.

Jay Clouse [00:05:26]:
I think AI is gonna take a lot of work away from people. And if you become a middleman between the client and AI, meaning you have this arbitrage of you charge the client to do this task, then you just prompt AI and it gives you the outcome. Eventually, you will not be in the middle of that transaction. So you need to bring something unique to the relationship even if it is a relationship with AI. And rule number four is I don't outsource what I claim to do personally. I think it's very disappointing when you admire somebody's work and then come to find out it wasn't their work, and that's true of AI as well. So I don't claim to do things that AI is doing on my behalf because above all, I think a lot about trust. The trust I've built with you and anyone else who follows my work is the most valuable asset I've built in this business, and I wanna use AI to only increase trust.

Jay Clouse [00:06:17]:
So I'm using a lot more in those ways, but, yeah, it's it's saved me some time. Things like data analysis and creating visuals, graphs. I could do that manually in Excel or whatever, but that would take more time because I'm not great at those things. So to save time, add high quality visuals to my writing so I can focus more time on the writing. That is just a win. Anyway, that is like the top level. I've been spending a lot more time with AI because I have all of these cats to care for. Let me give you an update on the different cats that I'm caring for right now.

Jay Clouse [00:06:50]:
And here are the categories I'm gonna share in this episode. We have the lab, my signature product offering that I'm building, audio and video, so the podcast and YouTube channel, email, which is my newsletter, a book, which is something I haven't talked a lot about publicly. I'm trying to not talk about too much publicly, and my personal life. So I'll go in order of what I just named starting with the lab. We did our town hall in the community at the January, I guess, in early February. And the point of that town hall is for me to share, you know, here's what we accomplished last year. Here's what's on my mind. I have these ideas for what I wanna do this year, and then I run an anonymous member survey for people to vote on what they think are the most important or most desired ideas that I shared.

Jay Clouse [00:07:37]:
So a few things that I'm doing in the lab to improve that product because I think the number one thing I can do for the business and for our life is to make the lab better and better and better. And that's just priority numero uno all the time. Thing number one that we're doing is we're hosting a two day event in June in Boise, Idaho ahead of Kit's Craft and Commerce Conference. And it's only for members on the standard and VIP plans. So two days before the conference, we will get together Monday and Tuesday, and we have all the meals planned, all the activities planned. And then throughout the day, we're gonna be doing small group activities that are all about connecting to other members, learning from each other, having a really high impact, high outcome two days, where basically you leave with some amazing ideas for your business, more friendships, more relationships, and a plan for taking things on. I really want it to be a super high ROI thing. We have this gorgeous space that we're spending our time in.

Jay Clouse [00:08:38]:
We have locked down incredible food, and I'm just really, really excited about it. We have, I think, 31 members, not including Mal and I already RSVP'd. I basically planned this event with the assumption of about 40 people, but 30 people on the low end. So we're already over that hump, and we have until early June to get more folks in there. I think it's gonna be wildly successful, and it's not a moneymaker. I'm planning it to be break even in terms of revenue. I think that's gonna be one of the most important additions to the membership as a whole over the coming years. Assuming this goes well, we might do another event later this year and then more in the coming years.

Jay Clouse [00:09:16]:
If you are not in the community and you want to be a part of that event, it's certainly not too late. You can join standard and VIP and then come join us in Boise. And we'd love to have you. But that's priority number one in the lab this year. Priority number two is masterminds. We've tried to do masterminds in the past. Doing masterminds in a community is a difficult thing if you don't have, like, paid facilitators to do it. Because the biggest threat is that the groups just kinda fail to coalesce and get started.

Jay Clouse [00:09:45]:
Usually, it's like a failure to launch. So I tried this, I think, two years ago is when I last tried it. And about half those groups failed to start, and then about 25% of the groups did actually continue on. But I'm trying to make it so that more groups succeed. And I think I have a new model that I'm excited about. So I had 62 members of the community say they wanted to be in a mastermind, and I matched them into groups of six to 10. And so far, all those groups are organizing, which is a really good sign. We have stated leaders in each group.

Jay Clouse [00:10:18]:
I support the leaders. I will lead a mastermind of the leaders, and I'm really, really bullish on this. I'm also giving leaders two hundred dollars towards their next year's renewal, so compensating them for the effort of leading. And, yeah, I think this might solve my mastermind problem. And assuming this goes well, I'm gonna do this at least twice a year, but maybe quarterly. Assuming these groups will probably meet for about three months at a time. Next on the docket for the lab is I wanted to increase the number of third party workshops, meaning either members who are leading their own workshops or even people coming into the community leading a workshop. So over the last couple of months, we've had members in the community run workshops for the community, and they're really high value, excellent workshops.

Jay Clouse [00:11:08]:
So we had Gannon Meyer run a workshop on Instagram automation. He is killing it on Instagram, and he gave a wonderful tactical workshop on how to use ManyChat on Instagram at a really high level. Sam Brown shared his LinkedIn content strategy. Colin Matthews is one of the highest selling authors on Maven. He shared what he's learning about running great cohort based courses. We have Taylor Cooper coming in in the coming weeks to talk about putting together a simple profitable Facebook ads funnel. So that's a priority this year as well as members in the community have a lot to share but also I have relationships now bringing people from outside the community come in and share and I love those workshops because they're valuable in the moment but also they get saved into our workshop space and increase the number of very specific tactical resources for members to access anytime. Circle just rolled out this wonderful functionality called AI agents.

Jay Clouse [00:12:07]:
And so now since the lab has more than three years of content from its existence, I am able to tell my Circle AI agent to index all that content, and members can ask it questions in chat and find either direct posts like source material, or it will summarize some of the material from that source material. So it's like a it's really powerful. And the more high quality content your membership has, the better that tool is. And so I'm glad we have three years of history, and now the search function within the lab is just so much better. Last thing in the lab that I've been working on is what I call our trusted partner directory. One of the highest requests from members is, hey, can anybody recommend somebody who blank? You know, it might be legal, accounting, finance, Facebook ads, Instagram automation. It could be any thing you do in your business. People are always looking for a recommendation, and we get really high quality recommendations on those posts.

Jay Clouse [00:13:10]:
But what I wanted to be able to do is have a dedicated area in the community that you can search by these needs using Circle's tag functionality and find folks who members of the community have hired and recommend. So we have this directory now. It's not public in the community yet. We have about 13 or 14 people listed, and I'm trying to fill a few more holes before pushing it live. But the great thing about not only having a dedicated space for this, that also will be training the AI agent. So if somebody goes into the chat with the AI agent, who I call Tubi, if they ask Tubi for recommendations for designing a brand, Tubi will be able to look through the trusted partner directory and recommend somebody that we have already pre vetted pre recommended. I think it's gonna be a wonderful addition and just another point of value here in the community. So that has been a lot of my focus over the last month plus is improving the lab in these ways.

Jay Clouse [00:14:10]:
I've also introduced this behind the scenes experience, which maybe you've heard me write about in the newsletter, but I know from lots of conversations over the last several months, I published an essay called why you need a signature product. And it's basically an argument for focusing on one product, one signature product that can kind of be the flagship for your business. And since publishing that a lot of people have asked me to help them develop their signature product, and I don't actually have much content or curriculum around that. So for one, I want to kind of put my stamp on this term, signature product. And two, I need to create actual helpful material around it. Because I am all about external accountability, what I have done is productize this experience to say, I'm going to ship an update on this product every week. I'm doing it inside the lab. So any member of the lab will get this update, whether you're on basic standard or VIP.

Jay Clouse [00:15:09]:
And I've given people the ability to purchase standalone access to this experience where you watch me work through the development of my next product. And you do that inside the lab. So you get a little bit of a taste of what the community is like just in this space. And that's been really, really great. We've had about a dozen people join that experience so far outside of folks in the lab, and I've barely talked about it. But, you know, it's put me on kind of an intense pace. Every week, I am making meaningful steps forward on the signature product offering. We've got three of them in the community now, three updates.

Jay Clouse [00:15:45]:
And it's been wonderful because not only is it helping people think through their own signature products, but I'm getting real time feedback on how I'm thinking about this. It's shaping the way I'm building it, and it's just, it's just really nice. So lots of additions into the lab over the last month or so, and I'm feeling really, really positive, really optimistic about where the community is headed. I look into our analytics, and we have more activity than ever before. So it's a good time to be in there. If you're not in the lab, if you've been thinking about it, you've been on the fence, we'd love for you to join us. We have links in the show notes to all the things that I've mentioned here. Consider joining us, even if you aren't qualified for standard and VIP, join the basic tier.

Jay Clouse [00:16:28]:
We've made that experience better and better as well. And we'd love to see you in there. Okay. So next I'm going to talk about the podcast and our YouTube channel followed by email and updates in my personal life. But first we're gonna have a quick break for our sponsors. So don't go anywhere. We'll be right back. All right.

Jay Clouse [00:16:48]:
Let's talk about the podcast and YouTube channel Last month, so in March, we were working with a new editor that we thought was going to be our full time editor. We thought we're gonna hire him full time. He was gonna handle all of our videos, soup to nuts. He's really talented, super fast, did a great job on our last video about my product launch. But kind of at the eleventh hour, he had a different opportunity he wanted to go with. And so we were left back at Square 1 needing a new editor because Connor, who you may know from some of our office hours videos, Connor has been the editor on the channel to this point. He is moving into a pure producer role so he can spend more time on ideation, working on packaging and leading the video team, which I think is a great evolution for him. I think he's gonna do a great job.

Jay Clouse [00:17:41]:
He's already doing a great job, but it creates this vacuum on the team of needing new talented editors. And so after we sort of lost this editor that we thought was gonna be our guy, we decided, okay, we have some more videos in the pipeline. Let's test several new editors at once. So we we literally started moving four different videos forward with four different editors to see how they do. So we have several episodes in the pipeline right now. We have an episode with Mark Schust coming next. Mark is a member of the lab, but he's one of the most thoughtful and forward thinking educators I know who is really embracing AI. So we're gonna talk about what we're doing to work with AI and not have it be a threat.

Jay Clouse [00:18:29]:
We have a video about the new studio that we build out to show you what we did, why we did it. We have a video with a guy named Caleb Ralston who worked with Gary Vee and then the Hormozies. He is very good at leading teams of creating high quality content at scale. And we just finished recording an episode with Colin and Sameer as well. So we have a lot of great episodes in the pipeline that are all kind of being moved forward at the same time. And the challenge has been, I am trying to get to the point where every episode in audio is also released in video. And it's had an impact on the audio show because we don't have the videos done yet. But, you know, I release an episode every Tuesday in audio.

Jay Clouse [00:19:12]:
So what do I do? And the thought was I will record more solo episodes just like this one, but that's a new muscle. It's hard. It's scary. Sometimes I sit down and have no idea what I wanna talk about. And can I talk for forty five minutes? Is that something someone really wants to listen to? It's challenging. And I also think optimally, if I am spending the time creating solo episodes like this, I should also be recording video in this new studio and maybe we turn that into a video on the channel at some point. But to turn it into a video on the channel, we need to think through the packaging of it or it's not gonna be worth the effort. You know, the literal most recent video on the channel is just like this.

Jay Clouse [00:19:50]:
I recorded an audio episode. I so happened to also record the video. We put that out to one of our test editors. She did an excellent job, but it wasn't really thought of from a packaging standpoint, and the packaging didn't do very well. So the video didn't do very well. If the video doesn't do very well, it's not worth the investment. So the point being, we need to get our video production systems up to speed, up to scale so that both audio and video are pumping out more content because right now it's a little bit slow. You shouldn't see two greatest hits episodes from me in a month, but that has been the recent reality.

Jay Clouse [00:20:34]:
And I'm gonna try to do more solo episodes like this. If you enjoy this format, I would love for you to tweet at me or tag me on Instagram at j klaus. Let me know so that I'm encouraged to keep doing solo episodes or if you're listening on Spotify, you can leave a comment right here on Spotify. I think I like doing these. The analytical feedback I receive in terms of, like, retention through these episodes tends to be higher than that of interviews. But it it feels daunting to talk about something for, you know, twenty to forty five minutes just solo. And I get out of breath. I'm a little out of breath right now.

Jay Clouse [00:21:07]:
It's it's challenging in its own way, but that's what's been slowing me down on the audio and video front is just not having the production capacity quite up to par because we're testing the team. We're putting pressure on the team and even if we have the team in place, I need to find time outside of regular work being a dad to sit down and record continuously for, again, twenty to forty five minutes, which is never been harder, but we have better equipment than ever before too. So I'm trying to push myself to do more and more of that so that we don't have these lulls on the audio feed. Alright. Let's talk about email next. I recently hired Jason Resnick. You can learn more about him at nurturekit.com. He's a member of the lab, long time member of the lab.

Jay Clouse [00:21:49]:
He is a wizard in all things email, automation, and personalization. So I believed that with 63,000 subscribers to the Creator Science newsletter, hopefully, you are one of them, That we have more potential in that list for understanding who is on it and what they need right now and delivering them a solution. But that requires some really thoughtful automation and personalization. And I can do a lot of it, but it's a time thing. I'm really pushing myself this year to solve my time problems with money. The business has accumulated some cash and I'm trying to reinvest that intelligently smartly without taking too much risk into what I believe can generate more revenue in the business. One of our first tests was I worked with a copywriter. We put together an email sequence for creator HQ to basically say people who have flagged themselves as interested in creator HQ, we should be nurturing them, letting them know how this can help them so they can make a decision if they wanna purchase it or not.

Jay Clouse [00:22:58]:
And if people are kind of on the fence, hopefully, this sequence shows them this will solve the things that you wanted to solve. You should give it a shot. We put that out into the world. It did not perform as well as we had hoped, so we're kinda back to the drawing board on that. And right now, we are working on a lot of, like, dynamic content. I know on a subscriber by subscriber basis based on their behavior, what is their current need, their biggest challenge, if they have told me? And if they have told me, how can I help move them down the path and position whatever my best offer for them, position that to them at the right time? And so Jason is helping me a lot with that. It's really great to hire competent professional people because you may not be working, but progress is being made in the business. You know, there are times when I'm hanging out with the baby, and I feel this, like, gnawing anxiety of I should be making progress and this is not productive.

Jay Clouse [00:24:01]:
And then, I'll get an email that someone on my team has done something amazing and I can see, okay, things are progressing, business is getting better and I'm not even touching it. That's a wonderful thing. And I think, we have a lot of opportunity in email. I'm always trying to get to this magical state in email where I understand the average value of a subscriber within a thirty day period. So that I can go and acquire more subscribers and prove, hopefully, that that is still a profitable investment. You know, if you know that you can acquire a subscriber for $2 and that $2 has a payback period of, you know, hopefully, like less than thirty days, then it would be worthwhile to just continue to invest in acquiring more subscribers. If the cost to acquire a subscriber is lower than the average lifetime value of a subscriber, then you should just be acquiring subscribers. You can basically grow your list at no additional cost and drive up revenue.

Jay Clouse [00:25:04]:
That is like the magical thing that I wanna get to. I think I'm probably already there. I just need to improve my own analytics because, you know, the lab has been growing. We're making it a better product. More people join. It's not the cheapest product in the world. And so I think I'm probably already at the point where it would be profitable for me to acquire subscribers. They just do a paid email acquisition strategy, but I don't have good enough data to affirm that assumption and say, yes, you are absolutely correct, and you should do that.

Jay Clouse [00:25:36]:
So that's email thing number one. Email thing number two is probably going to surprise you, and that is that I have been spending a lot more time on Substack. If you just heard, like, a record scratching sound, that is because I have been a long time Substack critic, and I'm still a little critical. Okay. So let me walk this back and explain where I'm coming from. Basically, I had started to hear some rumblings of some folks who were using Substack strictly for discovery. They were taking the writing they were already publishing on the website and ConvertKit and Beehive, whatever, and they were publishing it also on Substack, not sending an email from Substack, but publishing it on their publication on Substack and then using the notes feature on Substack to drive new discovery of them and their writing. If and when people subscribe to their Substack publication, they use some automation to pull people over to their main distribution source, which is probably ConvertKit or Beehive.

Jay Clouse [00:26:38]:
That's not an easy thing to do. Substack doesn't really want to make it easier for you to automate people coming out of Substack. Substack really wants you to make that your home and your platform, which is why I'm a little critical of Substack. It feels like you build the Substack brand as much as you build your own. But in the three weeks that I've been spending on Substack, I have published nothing to a Substack publication. There are no long form posts from me. But I've been hanging out in their notes feature, which is essentially a Twitter competitor. And the nice thing is the vibe kind of feels like old Twitter.

Jay Clouse [00:27:16]:
Like a lot of people that I followed on Twitter that I haven't really had much interaction with lately because they've left, they're active on Substack. It feels like a more intellectually rich place. I'm really enjoying the vibe there. And I do think that Substack's incentive is to encourage you and help you get paid subscribers. That is their revenue model. And so I think to succeed on Substack, you do need to have some element of a paid newsletter there. But I do think that there's just a lot of interesting discovery opportunity on Substack without having published anything. I've racked up in the last three weeks over 400 followers and about a 50 something subscribers for a publication that hasn't published anything.

Jay Clouse [00:28:03]:
You know, their followers versus subscribers differentiation is kind of interesting. Every subscriber is a follower, but not every follower is a subscriber. So your follower count will be higher than your subscriber count. But I think there's an opportunity right now because they seem to be pushing growth and a lot of older Substack publishers are a little upset about this, but Substack seems to be pushing growth and discovery. It's drawing some folks in, and I think there's a good opportunity for combining notes and long form posts. Because it seems like a lot of Substack authors don't love the notes feature, which again is kind of like a short form writing feature, kind of like x or threads or blue sky or LinkedIn. And if you're already adept at using those platforms, I think this is a real opportunity for you. And so I'm looking at it.

Jay Clouse [00:28:53]:
I'm I'm considering it. I don't think I would move creator science to Substack or do, like, the the also posting on Substack for creator science. What I'm looking at is using Substack as an experiment and a new home for some of my personal writing. I have a personal email list at j dot blog, and I haven't written to it in a few months because the cost of writing there, you know, it's a cap that I decided not to own for a little bit, but I've been really itching to write some more on that. And I think I might actually do my personal writing on Substack as an experiment to learn more about the platform and benefit the work I do on creator science. So I can I can better relate to authors on Substack and give more accurate advice and recommendations for other people who are writing on Substack? So to that end, because I'm a design nerd, I saw this as an opportunity to kind of work on the design of my personal brand. My personal publication, I should say. And I'm about to roll that out, about to deploy that.

Jay Clouse [00:29:56]:
It's exciting. I'm really pumped about it. And yeah, I think I'm going to be writing on Substack. So I'll leave a link in the show notes to me on Substack. Feel free to give me a follow and subscribe there. Again, it's not going to be my creator science writing. It's going to be more along the lines of conversation, communication, connection, community, a little bit of a broader topic, not just like online business, but communication between people. And I'd love to see you there as I play around with this.

Jay Clouse [00:30:24]:
This leads me to my next point, which I'm going to not spend too much time talking about. I have to be careful talking about any progress I'm making on a book project because sometimes it feels as good to talk about doing something as to actually do it. And so you start to incentivize yourself to simply talk about the thing rather than do the thing. But, again, because I'm a fan of external accountability, I'm gonna share a little bit about this. I was approached by a literary agent who I've actually had a conversation with in the past, and I really respect this person. I've wanted to work with this person as my agent, and they were very encouraging that they would like to represent me if I had a proposal for a book that they liked. And I shared a rough idea that I'm working on, which I'm not going to share here just yet. They really liked it.

Jay Clouse [00:31:21]:
It's in the realm of relationships and trust building. And so now I've been talking to several different developmental editors to try to find the right fit to help me craft a good proposal. I just signed a contract with a developmental editor that I think will be the person to help me. And we're gonna start working on that proposal this month. And hopefully, we'll have that proposal done in a couple months. And hopefully, the agent is still excited about the idea and wants to represent me. And at that point, we will share it with publishers, and hopefully one of them is interested in it. So a lot of, like, maybe, hopefully, TBD aspects of this, which is why I'm not gonna spend too much time talking about it.

Jay Clouse [00:32:01]:
We're still early stages. But I've always, always, always wanted to be an author. That is the lifestyle. That is the future that I see for myself. And it feels like I have a really good team in front of me and good opportunity. The challenge is I haven't wanted to write a creator book because I don't know if there's like space for a creator book. I think a creator book would be really easy to write something that is not relevant a couple of years from now. I don't wanna do like a greatest hits of my newsletter either because you've all heard that.

Jay Clouse [00:32:35]:
I want to use this project as inspiration to explore some of my larger interests to have a larger market. But but to get a good deal and have a successful book, I would also want that book to be relevant to you, the people that I've already spent time earning trust and building a relationship with. So it's kind of in this difficult puzzle that I'm not sure we've totally solved yet, where the book needs to be relevant to my current audience, but also relevant to a larger audience. And, yeah, that's part of the work of working with a developmental editor is figuring out how we position this in a way that is both relevant to the current audience and commercially viable outside of that audience. And maybe I record an episode two months from now. And I say, you know what? That was a disaster and it didn't work. And we couldn't land the plane on a concept that I thought would work. And so it's shelved.

Jay Clouse [00:33:29]:
We will see, I feel like a fair amount of fear and anxiety around this, and I'm using that as a compass to say, I think that is good. I think it's good that I'm feeling this fear and anxiety. And I think it's a sign that I should push into it, rather than shrink away from it. Because am I really going to get more conviction, more certainty by not taking action? I don't think so. So I'm I'm kind of doing, like, a burn the boats approach, setting up calls, paying a contract for a developmental editor to push me forward, to propel me forward towards a future I know that I want, even though it's scary and uncertain. So that's the book update. So as you can hear already, lots of cats here. This is part of the reason why you haven't heard from me as much on the feed here because all these things that are in the air, sometimes the easiest thing to cut out of my week if I don't have time is a new podcast episode.

Jay Clouse [00:34:26]:
Because you know what? The two episodes that I have re aired this month, Chase Jarvis and Johnny Miller, I thought they were excellent episodes. They got great feedback at the time, but I didn't think they reached everybody. And I've heard from so many listeners this week who are hearing them for the first time, and they were like, these are great episodes. So the cost of not recording a net new podcast episode, it's pretty low. In fact, you can make a pretty good argument that you shouldn't post a new episode every single week or at least a good argument for sharing more greatest hits episodes than you used to. You know, as an aside, I shared this experiment in a lab probably a year ago. But I used to when I re aired episodes, I used to put replay or re air at the front of the title in brackets. I changed that to greatest hits to say this is one of our best episodes as opposed to we're just doing a rerun this week.

Jay Clouse [00:35:18]:
And then I also moved that greatest hits label from the front of the episode title to the back. And both of those changes had big differences. So if you are a podcaster and you're re airing some of your episodes, highly recommend using the strategy of calling it a greatest hits episode literally sharing one of your best episodes calling it a greatest hits episode put it at the end of the title not the front because I think some people will be biased not to listen to an episode if they think it's not new even if it is new to them. Which is kind of interesting but it seems to be true analytically nonetheless. Okay. Last leg here a couple things in the personal life that I thought I would share not business related but also things that are going on. Maybe it's useful to you. Maybe it's not.

Jay Clouse [00:35:59]:
We've continued the process of finishing our basement here. We'll talk about this a little bit in the studio video that we're making over on YouTube. But I put together all of our costs for finishing this basement. We live in Ohio. Basements are a thing here. You may be in a place where basements are not a thing. We had an unfinished basement and this project has been a 6 figure project. Now it's cost over a hundred thousand dollars to do everything we've done in the basement so far.

Jay Clouse [00:36:22]:
A little more than 30,000 of that was the studio alone. And we have like a half bath. We have a theater room down here. We're putting in place a wet bar and like a small library nook. Very excited about the space, but it's like not a small project in cost or in scope. We've been doing this since, late November, I wanna say. And it's awesome because now we both spend a lot of time down here. You know, I'm in my studio as my working place during the day.

Jay Clouse [00:36:51]:
We spend most of our evenings in the theater room. The bar isn't completely done yet because we're waiting on countertops, but it's been a big project to have people in and out of your space every day when you work from home. It's kind of a disorienting, distracting thing. We've had that a lot here during this period of time. We are the second owners of this home. The first owner built the place, lived here for thirty something years, and when they sold it, I think they just timed the sale of it super, super well because we are constantly replacing and updating things because they're just kind of at the point where they need to be flipped. And so we just, we're just doing house projects constantly. You know, we bought for the neighborhood.

Jay Clouse [00:37:32]:
We bought for the schools. We bought for the plot of land. And we knew there would be a lot of things, but, yeah, it's a it's a lot of updates over here on the home front. And it's fun. You know, we work from home. I had this thought the other day. I was like, I'm a stay at home dad. And people hear that and they think it means that I don't also work because the, the cultural understanding of being a stay at home parent is that your partner is working and you are not, but Mal and I are both stay at home parents who also happen to work at home.

Jay Clouse [00:38:05]:
And when you live and work in the same space, there are some real positives and negatives to that, but it's nice as a hermit. You know, all the investments we're making into the space, even though they're expensive and kind of a pain in the butt, it makes our day to day existence and living space more enjoyable. And I love that the baby is now crawling. It's crazy. She is very motivated to move across the floor to see Mal and I or grab the Gatorade bottle that's in my hand. We just started her in swim lessons. I can't swim, which is sad because I grew up with a pond in my backyard. I've really only learned how to swim and tread water since we moved into this house and it has a pool.

Jay Clouse [00:38:47]:
But that will not be my daughter. My daughter will be like a fish. She's gonna get used to the water right away. She's gonna love it. She's gonna be a great swimmer And, it's fun. It's really fun to be with her in the water with the instructor teaching her how to do these things. It's just awesome. Being a dad is the best.

Jay Clouse [00:39:06]:
I've been telling a lot of my friends. It's like, you know, it's everything everybody told you it would be, but to like a more intense degree than you could ever imagine. You know, it's it's as great as people said, and you can't even understand it until you have a kid. It's as hard as people said, and you can't even understand that until you have a kid. My relationship to work is completely different because on one hand, it's less important to me now that I have a kid, like nothing is more important than my kid. So work has taken a step back in my mind, but at the same time, the stakes have never been higher to provide. And so work is more important in a way. It's just a crazy season of life, and every day is exhausting.

Jay Clouse [00:39:43]:
It seems to fly by. My experience of the passage of time is nuts. Like, she's almost nine months, and it feels like just yesterday, we were leaving the hospital. So it's absolutely insane what what being a parent is like. And I have so much respect for anybody in business doing this as a parent. It becomes so obvious so quickly People who are giving advice online and don't have kids, the models of success have changed for me. My markers of success have changed. Everything has changed, and I've never thought more about what is enough in terms of how successful the business is and how much the business is earning because the way the business is designed right now, a lot of the way to unlock more revenue comes at a cost to my time or it has historically.

Jay Clouse [00:40:35]:
So I need to be hiring more, outsourcing more, or be more okay with experiencing enough. And I'm thinking about that a lot lately. And that's the type of stuff that I'll be talking about more in, like, this new Substack publication getting outside of just this business, but sometimes it'll be overlap and I'll kind of cross post. That has been the behind the scenes of what's going on in my world. Maybe it dragged on a little bit there. I appreciate you listening to this point. If you enjoyed this, please let me know. Tag me on Instagram at jklaus or Twitter at jklaus.

Jay Clouse [00:41:04]:
If you're listening on Spotify, I love reading the comments here on Spotify. Feel free to leave one of those. A link to all the things that I mentioned is gonna be in the show notes. If you wanna check them out and join the lab or checking out this behind the scenes experience of building out my signature product course, the Substack, all that's in the show notes. We absolutely love and appreciate ratings and reviews. Haven't gotten a new rating on Apple Podcasts in a minute. If you wanna help us move that momentum forward, please leave a rating or review on a podcast or Spotify. But in any case, I appreciate you listening, and I'll talk to you next week.