#318: The $9/month membership earning more than $500k/year AND buying Smart Passive Income — Pt. 2 featuring Liz Wilcox

Liz Wilcox [00:00:00]:
I think that you're looking at the math wrong. There's 8 billion people on the planet. How easy would it be to sell 4,000 of them?

Jay Clouse [00:00:21]:
Hello, my friend. Welcome back to another episode of Creator Science. This is week 2 in our 2-episode series about the sale of smart passive income. Last week we heard from Pat Flynn and Matt Gartland about how they sold the company. This week you'll be hearing the other side of that story from the buyer, the other side of the table. My guest today is Liz Wilcox, the person who bought Smart Passive Income. If you don't know Liz yet, she's built a name for herself selling a $9 per month email marketing membership called EMM. It has been $9 since she launched it in February of 2021.

Jay Clouse [00:00:55]:
She has somewhere around 4,400 paying members and it does roughly half a million dollars in sales per year. No high-ticket upsell, no next step, just this $9 product. Before we get into the purchase of Smart Passive Income, we spend quite a bit of time talking about Liz's business. Because if you know me, you may know that I have given people the opposite advice of her business model for years. In fact, I've said over and over again that If you're gonna charge less than $10 for something, just don't charge for it at all. So I came to this conversation kind of a skeptic and I left it genuinely altered. I completely have a new lens on how I think about these membership offers. And it's really interesting.

Jay Clouse [00:01:37]:
We really get into her numbers and here's why I think this matters right now. Most of us build for the upper end of the market. Higher ticket requires fewer customers, more revenue per person. It works when it works. One of the biggest drivers of churn in my own paid membership this year has been that our members are feeling a little bit of a crunch sometimes. Their customers have less money to spend. And when your customers' customers have less money to spend, you have fewer customers. But Liz has built something that just about anyone can afford, an expense that's so low that you don't even really think about it when it hits your credit card statement.

Jay Clouse [00:02:11]:
And it's one of the most durable businesses that I've looked at in a long time. So in this episode, we get into how the $9 model actually works, the math she ran before she started, the 2-year runway she gave herself to make it happen, how she's grown it with almost no social media, why AI hasn't touched her business, and the strange way it's actually sending her new members. Then of course, we get into the purchase of SPI, what needed to be true before she'd buy an 18-year-old brand with someone else's face on it, what she licensed from Pat, and what she's planning to change. We end this conversation with an exchange that I really wasn't expecting. Toward the end, Liz admits she does not know how her $9 membership and the SPI community fit together. So we talk about it live on the mic and neither one of us fully lands the plane. It's the most honest business conversation I've had on the show in a long time. I really love this.

Jay Clouse [00:03:00]:
I hope you do too. We'll get to that full conversation with Liz right after this. I feel like I've been hearing about you and your Email membership more frequently lately than ever before. So I don't know if our circles are converging. I don't know if the legend and lore of Liz is growing, but I'm hearing a lot about this. And I do think that it's very compelling for people to hear like, okay, here's somebody who has figured out a $9 per month offer and turned that into this very large recurring amount of revenue. Can you talk about this just as kind of a way of introduction into the world of Liz Wilcox?

Liz Wilcox [00:03:48]:
Yeah, so y'all, I don't like to work that much, okay? I really love my time with my family. I'm a single parent. In the last year or so, I adopted a teenager. And I mean, I love my work, but I don't like to work, if that makes sense. And so I used to be a service provider and I, you know, sold copywriting. I'm a really good writer. And I always said, you know, like, What I provide you is great, A+. The service is meh because I'd rather be at the beach.

Liz Wilcox [00:04:20]:
I'd rather be hanging out with my kid. I'd rather be out with my friends, right? And so I came up with this idea for this $9 membership, and it's been $9 for almost 6 years at the time of this recording, because I want to be able to turn my computer off. I know what I'm providing to you is great. It's just weekly newsletter templates. That's what I'm really good at. I'm really good at quickly connecting with people. You know, getting them to reply, nurturing them, and then selling to them. My email list is over 50% customers.

Liz Wilcox [00:04:50]:
And so I knew I was really good at that. I knew it was sort of this underserved thing in the copywriting community. Everybody and their mother wants to sell you sales templates and sales emails because that's where the money is at. But I knew the majority of people needed newsletters. So I was like, well, I could be like the Walmart of email. You know, a lot of people, oh, you want to be Gucci? Well, Google it, baby. Gucci makes about 10 to 100 times less than Walmart. So I'm gonna be Walmart all day, baby.

Liz Wilcox [00:05:19]:
And so that is where I came up with that $9 offer. And like I said, I've been selling it for almost 9 years, and it just keeps building steam because it's, it's that same thing I created back in 2020, and it's just, you know, been steamrolling ever since.

Jay Clouse [00:05:37]:
So if you've been doing this for almost 9 years and it's been $9 for 6 years, what was it priced before $9?

Liz Wilcox [00:05:43]:
It's always been $9, but before that I did like workshops, service providing, things like that.

Jay Clouse [00:05:50]:
I see. Okay. This is crazy to me because I just don't hear people talking about this price point like ever. And in fact, I've given the advice. I'm like, if it's less than $10, don't even charge for it because like it's more annoying to me to pull out my wallet to pay for something less than $10 than to pay $10. But this is a really compelling counterpoint to this. I'm curious to hear if you're willing to share, what does retention on this look like? How long do people stick around on a $9 per month subscription on average?

Liz Wilcox [00:06:16]:
Yeah, my retention or churn rate is about 5%, so it's, it's pretty low.

Jay Clouse [00:06:22]:
Crazy. So that means that most people are sticking into a second year.

Liz Wilcox [00:06:27]:
Yes.

Jay Clouse [00:06:27]:
What's like the longest-term subscription you've seen from somebody?

Liz Wilcox [00:06:31]:
I— so I launched on February 16th, 2021. I misspoke earlier, excuse me. And I made 30 sales that day. The last time I checked it within the last 90 days, I still had 12 members from day one.

Jay Clouse [00:06:46]:
Crazy. Okay.

Liz Wilcox [00:06:47]:
So almost half of them are still there.

Jay Clouse [00:06:49]:
And what does this do on like a monthly basis?

Liz Wilcox [00:06:52]:
Uh, it's about $40-something thousand. It's, it's stupid. It's y'all, it's so dumb. Listen.

Jay Clouse [00:07:00]:
I don't do public math, but my math machine is telling me that that's like 4,400 subscribers.

Liz Wilcox [00:07:08]:
Yeah.

Jay Clouse [00:07:08]:
Paid subscribers.

Liz Wilcox [00:07:10]:
Mm-hmm. It's so fun.

Jay Clouse [00:07:12]:
Come on.

Liz Wilcox [00:07:14]:
It's so fun because listen, y'all, like I said, I don't like to work, but I love to serve. I love serving my people. And Jay mentioned he doesn't like pulling out his wallet for under $10, but there are billions of people that do, right?

Jay Clouse [00:07:29]:
True.

Liz Wilcox [00:07:29]:
So when I started, I had no money, I had no support. I was married at the time and he said, you know, Liz, there's no way you can make money on the internet without doing you know what, right? So I was like, Mm, I just don't believe that. I believe in creator science. I believe that it's a thing and I'm gonna go for it. And so my ideal person is that same woman, that same man that's like, maybe their family's not understanding it. Maybe they think you have to do nefarious things to make money online. Maybe they just, all they have is $9, right? And for me, I didn't have a job when I started and anything that I spent to, start my business, I had to filter through my husband. And again, he did not support this.

Liz Wilcox [00:08:17]:
And so $9 was about the max I could spend without tucking my tail between my legs and saying, hey, you know, I really want to try this or that. And so those are the people that I'm trying to serve, and what I'm giving them is perfect newsletters, right? You can't have a great launch if you're not sending weekly newsletters, right? If you're not consistently and constantly in contact with your subscribers. And so it's just been this perfect storm for me where I get to serve the people that I love. I love those newbies. Most people don't wanna serve the newbies. They're like, eh, come to me when you know something, right? I wanna say, oh, you're brand new? Come over here, let me teach you the basics.

Jay Clouse [00:08:59]:
Right.

Liz Wilcox [00:08:59]:
And then with the price point, I can turn my computer off at night. Again, single parent, right? 2 kids. I don't have a lot of family. I actually support 3 households with my business. So there's no backup plan, right? And so I want to turn my computer off. I don't want to be working late at night. I don't wanna start a mastermind. I don't wanna start a group program that takes my time.

Liz Wilcox [00:09:21]:
What I want is time. And if you give me $9, I'll give you everything you need to get going and we both can sleep at night.

Jay Clouse [00:09:29]:
Yeah, I think you're speaking to time to one degree. You're also speaking a little bit to like stakes. Maybe I'm projecting here, but like when I run a $40 or $50 workshop, there's something so comforting about knowing like, Man, I'm going to overdeliver like hell on this because even if I'm at 80% of what I could do, I can overdeliver on that price point super easily. Maybe I'm projecting, but I think that's part of what makes this really compelling is like you're not saying, hey, choose a car payment or choose my program.

Liz Wilcox [00:10:06]:
Amen. And we were talking about this before we hit record. I was telling Jay like, I don't really care. I'm not precious about what I create. I just want I wanna get it out there. And this price point allows me to do that. And y'all, it's weekly newsletter templates. So after 5 and a half years, that's a lot of practice.

Liz Wilcox [00:10:25]:
And now I feel really confident that I'm overdelivering, right? Like, these are the templates I want you to send. This is the workshop, you know, 'cause I'm doing the same workshops over and over again. You know, this is audio only right now, but you can see in the background, if you were watching, I've got a calendar and it's the same thing year after year. And I know every year that I do the workshop, I do the challenge, I do this for my members, I write the templates every week. It's just getting better and better, but I'm also getting faster and faster. So the income is becoming more and more passive. Honestly, I gotta pat myself on the back, like, wow, I really, I really did that, you know? But it was, it all comes down to, yeah, the stakes. I don't want the stakes to be high for me because I've got a nervous system to regulate for my kids, and I don't want the stakes to be high for you because I don't know what you're going through.

Liz Wilcox [00:11:17]:
I don't know if this online creator business is your forever home or not. So the stakes being low for both of us, really for me, has been where it's at.

Jay Clouse [00:11:27]:
Do you have in the current business a higher priced thing that people go to, or is it just this?

Liz Wilcox [00:11:34]:
You can opt into a year, $9 times 12. $108, and then you get all my workshops and everything else for free. Kind of like Costco, you just pay the yearly fee and you get in the store. But I do not have an upsell. You cannot get on the phone with me. I don't have a mastermind program. I've never done a group thing. It's all just the membership, and it generates about half a million dollars a year.

Liz Wilcox [00:12:01]:
And to me, wow, did I make it in life with that.

Jay Clouse [00:12:06]:
Crazy. And what is the breakdown-ish between monthly and annual?

Liz Wilcox [00:12:11]:
Uh, it's about 2/3 annual, right? It's, it's a deal of a lifetime, right? Like you get all my other products, you don't have to pay me another cent. I will not upsell you. Are you kidding? Like, who else is saying that? I'll tell you, it's, the answer's nobody.

Jay Clouse [00:12:26]:
People listening to this are probably hearing like the enthusiasm I'm coming at this with and are like, what did, how did she bribe him to be this enthusiastic? 'Cause generally I'm not like this enthusiastic, but I just think this is such a, She didn't bribe me, by the way. This is such a counter approach that I don't hear. And the reason I don't hear it most of the time is people will run the math and be like, okay, $9 per month. I have an email list of 500 people. Even if I get 10% of those people to do that, that's like $500 a month. And I don't know if that's worth my time right now. Like they think like the build towards this $40,000 number you're talking about will take forever, or maybe they won't get there, or maybe they'll churn through these people. What would you say to that person?

Liz Wilcox [00:13:06]:
I think that you're looking at the math wrong. There's 8 billion people on the planet. How easy would it be to sell 4,000 of them?

Jay Clouse [00:13:14]:
I like it.

Liz Wilcox [00:13:15]:
I mean, look at Jay. I remember, what was it, a year or two ago? It was like his YouTube countdown to 100,000 subscribers. I think I don't need 100,000. Like I just need 4,000 and I'm making half a million dollars a year. Are you kidding me? Like y'all, I was born on the wrong side of Detroit. One of the proudest moments of my life is getting my mom off 8 Mile. Shout out Marshall Mathers and the gang. Like, that's not a joke to me.

Liz Wilcox [00:13:40]:
That's where I'm coming from. So I looked at Costco, I looked at Netflix, and I did the math on theirs. Like, Costco is, you know, like a Fortune 500 company from a $60 membership fee. Are you kidding me? Like, I don't have land contracts. I don't have to pay workers' comp. I don't have servers. I don't have contractors. Like, I don't need millions of people the way Costco does.

Liz Wilcox [00:14:05]:
I was just looking for $1,000, y'all. 9 times $1,000 is $9,000 a month. I, oh my, about fell out my chair when I did that math. You know, Jay did that calculation, but you know, you're missing the time. I gave myself 2 years. If I could work for 2 years to make $9,000 a month just writing a weekly newsletter template, oh my gosh, I feel like I'm robbing people.

Jay Clouse [00:14:28]:
Intentionally provocative question.

Liz Wilcox [00:14:30]:
Yeah.

Jay Clouse [00:14:31]:
What about AI?

Liz Wilcox [00:14:32]:
What about AI?

Jay Clouse [00:14:34]:
Are you worried about it? Can I just go ask Claude to write me some newsletter templates every week?

Liz Wilcox [00:14:37]:
Yeah, sure you can, but will you see results? Absolutely not. Guess what you're paying for? My brain, my 10 years of experience. AI has not affected my membership at all. Some people will come to me, they'll say, oh, and they're in my membership, and they say, same as Jay, what about AI? And I'll say, oh, you could totally take these templates and plug them into AI for me. And guess what that has done? I didn't even realize 'cause it was doing this, but because people are putting my content into AI, who pops up when you talk about email marketing? Liz Wilcox. I get so many people saying almost every day, I found this membership through AI. Why? Because my 4,000+ users are putting it into AI and saying, Liz Wilcox wrote this, write it for me.

Jay Clouse [00:15:26]:
Ah, this is so interesting. I saw this behavior with a live course we did recently where I was like giving people homework. I was like, here's what we're trying to do, here's how to think about it, here's your homework. these questions. And they would put that and the transcript of the call into AI, and they were coming up with the best, highest quality homework of students in my programs that I've ever seen. And they were keeping up with the program itself. They were keeping on task, which was so interesting. So I think this is all just very, very interesting and compelling to me.

Jay Clouse [00:15:54]:
I do find that people in my audience are struggling with AI a bit. I have a higher priced program, And one of the highest reasons for churn recently has been that folks are having a harder time financially because I serve a prosumer. And if my customers don't have customers, I don't have customers. But my program is again, like the equivalent of a car payment or more, you know, per year. So it makes that math a lot harder. This is very interesting. I'm thinking about this, this very strongly. Why should somebody not play around in this price point?

Liz Wilcox [00:16:30]:
If you just can't get visible, if you don't have an it factor, if you're not ready to own your it factor. I know who I am and I know that I have a solid framework and I'm not afraid to get visible. I've pitched Jay for this show before and guess what? I didn't get it, right? But I pitched him again and now I do, right? So you have to be super brave. When I say, you know, I might say flippantly like there's 8 billion people, I only need 4,000. That's because I'm willing to put in the work. It's a volume game that I'm playing. Every month I get 100 to 150 new subscribers to the membership. That means I need 1,000 email subscribers, right? That means I need a lot of eyeballs, right? So if you have this fear of visibility, this might not be for you because I have to go out there.

Liz Wilcox [00:17:18]:
This is my 3rd back-to-back-to-back call where I've literally been talking for 2 and a half hours now, and I'm pretty sure Jay and I will talk for another 15 to 30 minutes, and then I have another call right after this. don't have that sort of stamina, if you are afraid to talk about yourself, if you don't have a solid framework quite yet, if you are not able to distill what you do into one sentence and then also have a 2-day workshop on it, you might not be ready for this price point.

Jay Clouse [00:17:48]:
When it comes to visibility, realistically in 2026, let's say I love this idea and I have an email list of some number of hundreds of people. But I just hate social media. I don't want to do it, but I like this model and I want to do it. Realistically, does this model work if I'm not on an algorithmic platform?

Liz Wilcox [00:18:07]:
Heck yeah. Neither am I, babe. I got all my subscribers from 2 places. Number one, getting on podcasts. I've been on almost 400 podcasts and virtual stages. And number 2, affiliates. Now you might be thinking, what affiliates? Who is selling a $9 product? You get almost nothing. My customers are selling the $9 product.

Jay Clouse [00:18:28]:
Mm-hmm.

Liz Wilcox [00:18:28]:
I tell my customers, hey, if you get 2 of your friends to join, you get this membership for free. Remember I told you my ideal customer is somebody who is looking at $9 and thinking, mm, this might be all I have to spend this month. So the idea of getting it for free is like, whoa, yes, I'm signing up for that. I give 50%, I give $4.50. So my affiliates are making more money because I'm absorbing those fees, right? So maybe I'm making like closer to $4, and $4.50. But again, getting on podcasts, so getting those warm leads. And then I have a tripwire that's like, hey, join for $1 right now, and, you know, 15 minutes only. And so I get a lot of customers from that.

Liz Wilcox [00:19:11]:
And then I got a lot from affiliates, which Jay just mentioned at the beginning. I've been hearing so much about your membership, Liz. I don't know if we're converging or what. It actually, I just had a giant affiliate push where I got 2,000 new leads to a waitlist for this product.

Jay Clouse [00:19:31]:
I've been hearing it from folks who are just like really interested in the model, 'cause I just don't think we see a lot of people at this price point with the top line numbers that you're talking about. And that's the reason why a lot of people in my world just haven't pursued it because it's like, I don't know if there's a model there. But you're on Instagram. Are you saying Instagram isn't a key part to this business?

Liz Wilcox [00:19:51]:
No, I can't remember the last time I pitched my membership on Instagram. I honestly, So, Jay and I have a mutual love. It's called Survivor. And after Survivor, I was not like one of the— I wasn't like, you know, America's sweetheart, right? And so, I actually got off Instagram for about 2 years because I was receiving so much hate. I got off social media completely. And at the time of this recording, I just got back on Instagram, and I just posted for the first time in over 2 years.

Jay Clouse [00:20:23]:
Wow.

Liz Wilcox [00:20:24]:
And so my membership, the social media model is not how I grow my membership at all.

Jay Clouse [00:20:30]:
I'm gonna resist the urge to follow the rabbit down the hole to talk about Survivor as much as I would love to do so. I wanna go back to something you said earlier, which is kind of off the plan of what I was trying to cover here, but I just haven't had a real conversation about this. Yeah. So I'm a bald white guy with a beard. There's a lot of people like me that look like me that have the same privileged position of Hey, sell the higher-priced thing because you need fewer sales and it's more meaningful more quickly. But you mentioned that you're a single mom, and I also watch— I love Queer Eye. Queer Eye is one of my favorite television shows. If I'm feeling down in the dumpies, nothing's going to make me feel better than watching an episode of Queer Eye.

Jay Clouse [00:21:09]:
On that show, we often hear from people who are like, I was raised by a single mom. And until I had our daughter, that sentence just kind of rolled off my back. And now that we have a kid, when I hear about single moms, I'm just like, how could you possibly? And also now you're running this business. So where did you, how did you, where did you fit that in?

Liz Wilcox [00:21:33]:
Yeah, I think it was the creation of this $9 offer. It was, I was doing service providing. I was no joke getting up at 4 o'clock in the morning, working for 2 hours on my clients' products and projects. waking up my daughter and putting her on the school bus. Thank, thank God she finally went to school, right? Before she went to school, I was, you know, just working when she was sleeping. I lived in an RV. I was an RV travel blogger. That's how I got my start.

Liz Wilcox [00:22:02]:
And so I was still— I didn't even have internet on my phone when I started. I had to go to libraries and Lowe's parking lots and laundromats to build my first 2 businesses. And it's, it's It's just grit, it's just tenacity, it's just resilience. It's just, you have to have that purpose. And for me, especially with this email marketing game and teaching digital marketing, again, I came from almost nothing and I support 3 households with my business today. And it's just knowing that there are more people out there like me who all they have is a hope and a dream. And they don't even have, you know, the support of their spouse or their family to say like, yeah, that's a good idea. And I'm honestly getting a rash thinking about it because I'm just so passionate.

Liz Wilcox [00:22:52]:
And I just remember that. And I will be, you know what, that starts with a D, if I ever forget where I come from. And I wanna help other, maybe you're a single parent or, you know, like whatever your circumstances, I wanna help you rise above that so, passionately that I, I figure out things in the margins of life. And I think that's why I got so good at newsletters, why I got so good at email and can boast like, oh, half of my subscribers are customers because I had to be good. I didn't have the privilege of anyone else. I had to support my mom. I had to figure it out so my sister could leave her husband, you know, and have a financial option. I had to feed my child.

Liz Wilcox [00:23:36]:
There was no other option for me. And I, Every time I sit down at this desk and I turn this computer on, I think about how many more millions and billions of people there are that are in that exact same position right now, and it helps me work more efficiently and effectively for them.

Jay Clouse [00:23:59]:
Thanks for sharing, and sorry if I'm kind of putting you back into like a hard place to think about this, but I've been thinking—

Liz Wilcox [00:24:04]:
No, it's great.

Jay Clouse [00:24:05]:
I've been thinking lately about I really feel like, I mean, anyone in our position, there is a certain degree of survivorship bias. And I think about my journey, and there was just a period of time, which probably came from a place of, like, partial overconfidence, partial delusion, partial privilege, where I just didn't consider failure to be an option. There were relative failures. There were things that, like, maybe this didn't quite work the way I wanted, but, like, at the macro level, like, am I going to go and give up on this thing, virtually never thought that was going to happen. And I think that played like a meaningful role in my story. And I was, I was trying to suss out and not lead the witness, but I heard you say it, like you said that it just wasn't an option for you.

Liz Wilcox [00:24:50]:
Yeah, I, when people say, or they would say like, oh, well, what if it doesn't work out? What, what do you mean? Like, what do you mean? Every great entrepreneur story starts very similarly. I couldn't do anything but this. There was no option. And I'm just, I've just always been like that. I saw people like Jay succeed. I saw people, you know, like Pat Flynn or Amy Porterfield, or even who inspired me for my RV travel blog, shout out heathandalyssa.com. And I was like, well, they can't be any smarter than me. I've surely, and they're here willingly sharing how to do it.

Liz Wilcox [00:25:34]:
All I've got to do is follow the directions. Yeah, I'm gonna be okay.

Jay Clouse [00:25:39]:
Do you think this is something like you can manufacture or help people tap into? There's a certain jaded part of me that has started to believe that sometimes people just don't— they're not in the headspace to make it work. I don't want to say like they don't have it, but I do want to say like in the current way they're presenting themselves and the way they're going about their business. I just don't think they're in the headspace to make it work. And I feel like the only thing I could do for that person is somehow put them in the headspace of like, there is no option of failure, but I just don't know if there's actually a way to do that. And if there's not, I don't know how to help some people who I can tell they're like, just the way you're going about your business isn't going to work.

Liz Wilcox [00:26:24]:
Yeah. So I often say to my students, A couple phrases. So, well, let me, let me preface. What Jay is saying is true, but also it's, it's not a yes and, it's a yes but. And so what you have to understand about me is my background. I have a bachelor's degree in elementary education, which means taking these really large concepts and not only making them digestible, but making them fun. And I think that really helps me take people like Jay is describing that are in the wrong mindset And getting them actually excited and getting them to take those first steps. Because there's nothing like trying to teach a 3rd grader who doesn't want to basic algebra concepts, right? Like, how do teachers do that? And then I also have a master's degree in leadership, so I'm really good.

Liz Wilcox [00:27:15]:
And I wrote a thesis on servant leadership, so I'm really good at getting behind people and pushing them in the direction of where they say they want to go.

Jay Clouse [00:27:24]:
Hmm.

Liz Wilcox [00:27:25]:
So I think it's those things, right? Just breaking things down for people into the micro of the micro steps and saying things like, these are the few phrases that I say, may I pitch you an idea? And that idea, then they consent to you telling them what you have to say. Can I invite you to challenge yourself today? Can I invite you to challenge your thinking on that? Can I share with you a story about that? And then, you know, you share a cautionary tale, right, as far as their thinking goes. And then I use this one, and my audience, my students are always like, Liz, when are you gonna have merch that says this? 'Cause I say it so much. I always say, I say this with love, I say this with love, and then I kind of hit 'em with the hard truth of that's not going to help you, or, you know, you've really got to change your mind about that, or you're, focused on the wrong thing, right? And especially I work with those early-stage entrepreneurs, those people that a lot of people, like Jay is saying, is like, I don't know if I can help them. And so when they know that you've got their back, that's when people will run through fire for you, right? That's when people will, thinking they're running right into a brick wall, they will sprint towards it. If they think you are behind them and you are doing the thing with them, and if they fall, you will catch them, right? And these are not scalable things. Saying, hey, email me anytime, I will get on a call with you. I got on a call with a guy, he's brand new, he doesn't even know where he's starting, and I thought, this guy just needs a one-on-one.

Liz Wilcox [00:29:14]:
I do not not sell one-on-ones. I already told you that, right, 20 minutes ago. But I was on a call with him. I gave him my personal cell phone. We've been texting for days. This is not scalable. And like Jay said, I don't know if he's gonna make it, but I'm going to get him to the yes or the no. I'm going to get him to realize I can do this or to realize this is not for me.

Jay Clouse [00:29:39]:
Mm-hmm.

Liz Wilcox [00:29:39]:
And to me, that's my purpose in life for sure.

Jay Clouse [00:29:43]:
When you see somebody and from your vantage point, there's a pretty big chasm between where they are and where they need to be to really give this a shot.

Liz Wilcox [00:29:55]:
Yes.

Jay Clouse [00:29:55]:
Are you trying to be real with them and compress the chasm with them? Or are you saying, I'm going to separate this diagnostic from where they're at and try to get them to take the next step forward and the next step forward and the next step forward?

Liz Wilcox [00:30:10]:
So maybe a little bit of both. I have no problem. And y'all, we're 30 minutes in, you probably understood this by now. I am incredibly direct. And people will often tell me, wow, Liz, you say things that I don't think other people can say. And people will give you a hug and thank you for saying them. It's because I think I genuinely love people. I am a people person.

Liz Wilcox [00:30:33]:
I am a true extrovert. If you've never met one, hello, my name is Liz Wilcox. I'll be here all day. And so what I do is, again, like, can I say something with love? I don't think things are gonna move for you with what you're telling me right now, but here's how they could.

Jay Clouse [00:30:53]:
Mm-hmm.

Liz Wilcox [00:30:53]:
I'm gonna give you a couple days to digest that so that they can walk away. Maybe they're not walking away with the answer they wanted, but they're walking away with something. And especially with these early stage creators, we might spend a few years just thinking about what we're doing, right?

Jay Clouse [00:31:12]:
I mean, I did.

Liz Wilcox [00:31:12]:
I think I'm on my like 7th business or something, right? Like I've done it. I've sold an RV blog. I sold a summit thing. I own an e-commerce shop for no good reason. It's called Texas Swagger. Y'all, I think I've been to Texas once, okay? Like I've just tried it all. And so I've been in their shoes of what Jay said. Yeah, me too.

Liz Wilcox [00:31:32]:
You know, it takes a couple years maybe, but that doesn't mean And I can't give you the tools right now to maybe shorten that timeframe so you can decide much quicker than a few years if this is going to be your thing.

Jay Clouse [00:31:45]:
Well, that's probably a good segue to move into talking about the next chapter with SPI. We'll get to that right after a quick break for our sponsors. I'm glad we started with like kind of the origin story and background because one, I was just intensely curious.

Liz Wilcox [00:32:06]:
Yes.

Jay Clouse [00:32:06]:
So thank you for indulging my curiosity on that. But 2, I think it sets the table for what we started to talk about last week with Matt and Pat on the show, which is this acquisition of a true legacy brand and what a lot of people are probably looking at as a very large asset, which probably means like a fair amount of risk on your behalf of purchasing it. So I would love to just kind of give you a little bit of an open floor to talk about how you arrived to this place to take this level of risk, knowing from where you came and how risky risk probably feels.

Liz Wilcox [00:32:48]:
Well, as far as the risk goes, I know, and I've proven to myself over the last 10 years being a creator, that I'm gonna make it. I have really figured it out. And when I think about anytime I take a risk in my business, like buying Smart passiveincome.com? Are you kidding me? That's the riskiest thing I've ever done. Well, maybe getting married. But you know, like, that is up there, right? As I am marrying, you know, myself, my brand to the SPI brand as well, right? And so I've just looked at the 10 years behind me and it's like, wow, you know, I've built several businesses, I've sold several businesses. The So the risk that I'm feeling is not actually as big as I think it is, right? Because even if I crash tomorrow, I have 10 years of knowledge. I have 10 years of networking and peers and colleagues. So I will never ever be starting from scratch again.

Liz Wilcox [00:33:51]:
I'm a totally different person. I have lots more experience and friends and peers to help me in the game. So I would say I'm a seasoned vet. It's not as big as it was when I was starting out with absolutely nothing and no knowledge, right? So I know I could build faster than ever.

Jay Clouse [00:34:13]:
What needed to be true for you to pull the trigger on this?

Liz Wilcox [00:34:18]:
The only thing that needed to be true was that Pat believed I was the right person for the job. Jay just said it. This is a legacy brand. 18 freaking years. Oh my gosh, I'm like breaking out knives thinking about it, you know? And the reason I bought the business was because I wanted to accelerate my progress, right? We mentioned email marketing membership, my $9 thing. You can't see it, but on in the background, I've got this road to $10K. I want 10,000 people in that membership. I've wanted that since day one.

Liz Wilcox [00:34:55]:
And so buying a giant asset like SPI, maybe that would help fast forward. But it's not gonna help fast forward if I'm not the right person to take over, if I'm not the right person to serve that audience. And so Pat and I talked so much for hours and hours every single month about who is the audience, who is listening, who cares about Pat Flynn and why, who is up late at night Googling passive income or making money on the internet, and, and why are they clicking on you, Pat Flynn, in particular? particular, right? And am I the right person to step into those shoes? And that is really the only thing that mattered to me. And I had been, you know, in, we'll say, adjacent circles to Pat for a few years. My sister actually works for Pat on his Pokémon side. And just getting to know him from my sister's perspective, I was like, oh, Pat is who I think he is. And I think we actually have a lot in common. I think our passions and how much we care about that early-stage person and getting people set up for success so we can hand them over to people like Jay Clouse, right? I think he and I are just so, so similar.

Liz Wilcox [00:36:17]:
And I cannot tell you what it means to have that seal of approval. It's actually insane. It feels like one of the greatest honors of my life. to be taking this thing over. And I just, I, I just could not be more grateful, truly, to serve this audience.

Jay Clouse [00:36:35]:
I don't know if we've ever talked about this, but I spent a year at SPI in 2021, actually like a year and a half between 2020 and the end of 2021 on the community side, helping launch SPI Pro and get their community program started. And I hadn't actually been familiar with Pat before the opportunity to collaborate as a contractor at first to launch SPI Pro came through. But I was blown away by how truly aligned his public persona is to Pat behind closed doors. And every time I get the chance to just share that, because I think it's like an uncommon thing online, I like to take a chance to say that because I was just blown away, especially someone who's been in the game as long as he has. I think it'd be really easy to also get like jaded or performative, and I just have never seen that from Pat. But because I was in the business for a year and a half, I have a sense for the audience, the community. You've described the person that you're trying to help as like getting started. And so new people coming into SPI, that probably makes sense.

Jay Clouse [00:37:34]:
But as an 18-year-old business, there's a ton of people who have been like in the SPI world for a decade or more. So how did you think about that as it comes to your core product, your core audience? Are you trying to like marry these things together or are you trying to like kind of So they will definitely be merged.

Liz Wilcox [00:37:58]:
Like Pat, and I'm sure he mentioned in last week's episode, straddling 2 ladders. You know, I've got this Pokémon thing, I got this SPI thing. Pat is a genuine person. He does love his audience. It was so hard to serve both. You know, that's a cautionary tale for me. I don't, I don't want to be that. So I will be merging my personal brand, Liz Wilcox, into SPI.

Liz Wilcox [00:38:21]:
SPI is the larger brand. It has more staff. It has more resources. More sticking power. It definitely has more SEO than I do. And so I'll be merging everything into that. What that looks like at the time of this recording, I'm still not sure, but I think the brands actually work super, super well together. And that was something Pat mentioned as he, you know, started to kind of take my pitch seriously, right? Because I asked him, he said, wow, actually, you know, we do serve these early-stage people as well.

Liz Wilcox [00:38:52]:
Or that's, that's where my heart has always been, Liz. That's where the content I've always wanted to create. You know, he's got Power Up Podcasting, YouTube From Scratch, things like that. He's always looking for that newer person. But yes, there are people that have been around for a decade, almost 2 decades, and I've, I've talked to some of those sort of legacy members of smartpassiveincome.com, but they still need what Jay and I were talking about of getting those people in the right mindset. I think the last few years, Pat's been so bogged down with straddling the two ladders, the content hasn't been as focused in on making a living, right? Everybody sees Pat nowadays as this YouTube superstar, right? This content superstar. Oh my gosh, he's had a podcast for 16 years. He's got millions of subscribers on YouTube, hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.

Liz Wilcox [00:39:53]:
And so even those legacy members have been trying to create content. And Jay, he's another master of the literal content creator mindset and framework, right? I like to take those content creators and show you how to make real money. And what I'm noticing inside what was then called SPI Pro, which is now called SPI Community, is some of those people, some of those legacy members, they're like, okay, I've built the following, now what? I'm not getting the brand deals that someone like Pat or Jay is getting. I'm not, you know, my email list, I've got one or I don't have one, but you know, it's kind of stagnant. I don't know those next steps. And so I'm gonna come in with my background and break up those concepts, create a very clear path and framework for people, 'cause that's what I've specialized in. with these beginners for the last 6 years now is, you know, getting the mindset right, getting them to the next step. And something, you know, Pat used to say, oh, we're Team Flynn, right? I wanna take that to Team WIN.

Liz Wilcox [00:41:03]:
And WIN stands for what's important now. And I think creators, sometimes we can get caught up in all the things. I just mentioned 'em, email, brand deals, content creation, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, even Jay, what I think in the last 9 months, We all at once made a video and said, we're video first now. We were doing all these things, now we're video first. That's our main focus, right? I wanna help those creators figure that out. What is important now? Is it my email list? Okay, I'm gonna go down that path.

Jay Clouse [00:41:32]:
And you're saying at the micro level to the individual?

Liz Wilcox [00:41:34]:
To the individual, yes. So we are reorganizing the community, the newsletter, the content, the podcast to really focus on helping creators figure out their next step, what's important now, these different lanes for them to go down so they can master the one thing, move to the next, move to the next, et cetera. So one day they have a beautiful online ecosystem that fully funds their lifestyle. Oh, I'm getting excited, y'all. I'm getting excited.

Jay Clouse [00:42:07]:
I feel like it'd be really tempting to purchase this asset, look at your poster that says Road to $10K and say, Got the login credentials to Kit, gonna send an email for the email marketing membership right now. But you guys have been very deliberate and stepwise and long-term in how you've approached this. I don't, I mean, I see and read most emails that come from SPI, and I don't recall you doing like an EMM campaign yet.

Liz Wilcox [00:42:39]:
I haven't.

Jay Clouse [00:42:39]:
So curious how you're thinking about like the Yeah.

Liz Wilcox [00:42:46]:
So EMM, yeah, road to 10K. Gosh, it just really chaps my you-know-what that we're not there yet. You know, we're— I feel like we're so close and so far away. Yeah, it would be so tempting to, oh, screw whatever you guys were thinking. EMM, that's a cash cow. I know it sells. Let's go, go, go, go. But I know there's a bigger picture here, right? Well, first and foremost, we don't wanna shock the audience.

Liz Wilcox [00:43:11]:
Like, who is Liz and why are we promoting all her stuff lately? I'm like, I'm a Pat fan. I'm an SPI fan. I just listen to the podcast, right? So again, Pat and I really talking about who the right person is and what those right next steps are. And so as far as the next sequence of events, because now the news is out, move over Pat Flynn, there's a new marketer in town type of thing, right? But no, actually Pat Pat isn't really going anywhere. You know, we are giving him the time and freedom to focus on his Pokémon channel because what I love about Pat so much, and I think probably why Jay and him jive so much, is Pat is a creator.

Jay Clouse [00:43:51]:
Totally.

Liz Wilcox [00:43:51]:
First and foremost.

Jay Clouse [00:43:53]:
Much more so than even I am.

Liz Wilcox [00:43:55]:
More than me. I, y'all, I, I just cosplay as a creator. Like I'm a writer and an educator first.

Jay Clouse [00:44:02]:
We talked about this. I know at the time of this recording, there's no way that you could have heard this conversation, but I like really tried to corner him in our interview. I'm like, how can you make as much as you make in terms of the amount of content? I was like, how can you be producing all of this? When do you sleep? When do you have family time? It doesn't seem like he lacks for any of it, but I'm like, when, when do you do it? And he answered and I'm like, I still don't buy it. Like, where do you get the extra 3 hours a day? I don't get it. Anyway, sorry, I interrupted your flow.

Liz Wilcox [00:44:27]:
Yeah, I don't get it either because also on his Pokémon side, he doesn't have a large team. So I don't, I have no idea. Anyway, Pat is a creator and so we're gonna be bringing him back.

Jay Clouse [00:44:39]:
Yeah.

Liz Wilcox [00:44:39]:
Once a month on the podcast for X amount of months. You know, he said, Liz, can I come back for the 1,000th episode? I said, are you kidding me? Like, you did 950 of them. Who, like, what kind of person would I be? Right? So Pat will always be a part of Smart Passive Income, but with the merging of the 2 memberships, it, and I'm, y'all, I'm stumbling because I don't know the answer. I don't know what it looks like. I just know that next step. is to announce Liz Wilcox as the new owner of SPI and grow SPI's membership. And I think what will happen, and I have mentors and peers that I'm still in conversations, it's like dear diary every night about this question, and they will help me figure out how to merge them. I don't think it makes sense, and you might hear me in 2 years and I might have 2 memberships.

Liz Wilcox [00:45:32]:
I don't think it makes sense to have 2 memberships. I really don't. And I think what Pat and I have created separately is extremely complementary. Pat has this book called Superfans. Inside the SPI community this year, we launched the Superfan System. I have a license that was part of our agreement. I can use Superfans and use the Superfan System for basically all time and eternity. Everybody, you know, you can Google it.

Liz Wilcox [00:46:01]:
It's obviously not Liz Wilcox's, right? Right? But I have the license to use it and teach the Superfan System and the Pyramid of Fandom that he created, which is extremely generous. And so coupled, when I look at the Superfan System, to me the only thing that is really missing is the email marketing, is that piece of taking people off of social media, off of YouTube, and onto an email list. And that's something, you know, especially in the last year's People have demanded from Pat that content creator type of education, but what they're forgetting is, oh, Pat has a giant email list. That's what's making this kind of churn and work really, really well. Sponsors are, you know, looking at the email list on top of the YouTube subscribers. That's why he's getting double the amount as somebody who just has a YouTube channel. And so I think merging them, marrying them together is gonna be where it's at. The price point, the timeline.

Liz Wilcox [00:47:06]:
Y'all, I don't know if you've got suggestions, you know, hit me up. I'm around town. Hit me up. I would, I would, what would you think, Jade? Let's, you know, what, what do you think I should do? Honestly.

Jay Clouse [00:47:17]:
I was just gonna say, I was gonna say, can I pitch you an idea?

Liz Wilcox [00:47:20]:
Yes. Can I say something with love? Please do.

Jay Clouse [00:47:24]:
I have all of, you know, a couple of hours of context between this conversation, conversations we've had elsewhere. So huge grain of salt. I don't think I would merge them. I'm not saying the companies. I'm saying I think I would— my current thinking is I would keep EMM a $9 per month subscription. I would have the SPI community, and I think it would be possible to have an add-on subscription or maybe a slightly high— like a second tier of that community that also gets EMM. But I don't think you would want to remove the ability for someone to purchase EMM on its own.

Liz Wilcox [00:48:01]:
See, that was my original thinking. So Jay is a genius, obviously. My trouble with it is that price point that I just bragged about for 30 minutes. I believe, and I say it with love, Pat Flynn and the gang, I believe that EMM is more valuable than SPI Community right now. now, but it's 10 times cheaper.

Jay Clouse [00:48:26]:
Mm-hmm.

Liz Wilcox [00:48:27]:
So I'm having a hard time. And y'all, you know, this is live. This is us just talking right now. And I, I love this for you listening because like, this is truly what it is to build a business. I believe that EMM is more valuable. It has 4 to 5 times more customers right now than SPI Community. And so I'm really grappling with Like, EMM is not a downsell, right?

Jay Clouse [00:48:54]:
Right.

Liz Wilcox [00:48:54]:
Uh, so I, so I'm not, I'm not sure how they live together. I'm really not.

Jay Clouse [00:48:59]:
Are you thinking about this in relative terms that you're raising the price of EMM or lowering the price of SPI Community?

Liz Wilcox [00:49:06]:
Yeah. So here's the thing. I will never raise the price of EMM. If I could tomorrow, I would turn SPI Community into a $9 membership. And if my team is probably listening to this like, what?

Jay Clouse [00:49:18]:
No.

Liz Wilcox [00:49:19]:
But y'all, I have bills to pay. I have to pay Pat and So I can't, I cannot do that. You know, unless there's, you know, shout out Justin for the one sponsor to rule them all. Unless somebody wants to sponsor us for like a quarter of a million dollars a year, you know, I don't really see it happening. So I'm really, I love this so much that I'm just being totally frank with everybody listening.

Jay Clouse [00:49:43]:
Same.

Liz Wilcox [00:49:44]:
Like, I really don't know what to do because I do know, and we spent 30 minutes, I know the $9. I know I'm working with early-stage entrepreneurs.

Jay Clouse [00:49:55]:
Yep.

Liz Wilcox [00:49:55]:
What I really want to do is just make everything $9, but from a financial standpoint right now, I cannot do that.

Jay Clouse [00:50:04]:
I see this as a not broke, don't fix it scenario, especially on EMM. I would be like, let that puppy ride. We now have an entirely new audience and form of distribution to talk about EMM.

Liz Wilcox [00:50:18]:
Mm-hmm.

Jay Clouse [00:50:19]:
The value proposition and delivery mechanisms of SPI Community and EMM are very different because EMM doesn't have like a forum function to it, right? It's just like, here's the templates.

Liz Wilcox [00:50:29]:
Right. So if you're on the annual, there's more like community events and things like that. But y'all, it's just a free Facebook group. It's not nothing really.

Jay Clouse [00:50:37]:
I don't think these things are so simpatico that I smash them together. In terms of like audience, maybe, but in terms of the way you're delivering the value, Yeah. I think you would crush yourself and your team to create a full community experience the way that the infrastructure of SPI Community is built.

Liz Wilcox [00:50:54]:
Mm-hmm.

Jay Clouse [00:50:54]:
For the number of subscribers you're trying to get to with EMM, I think it would be so challenging.

Liz Wilcox [00:51:02]:
See, but we, I mean, we do community, like, you know, we have a Facebook group, there's people in there. We do live events at least once a week. I feel like there's a community. I feel like EMM has a a better community base right now than SPI.

Jay Clouse [00:51:18]:
I would guess so. In that Facebook group, you have something like 4,000 people, right?

Liz Wilcox [00:51:23]:
There's 8,500 people.

Jay Clouse [00:51:25]:
8,500 people in the Facebook group. So people can stay in the Facebook group after they're no longer paying for you?

Liz Wilcox [00:51:29]:
Yeah, because I don't like to work, remember? So I'm not tracking that.

Jay Clouse [00:51:35]:
Totally get that. I wonder how many active members do you think are in that Facebook group of the 8,500?

Liz Wilcox [00:51:41]:
Uh, I actually just looked the other day. It's about 7,000.

Jay Clouse [00:51:46]:
Active in what way?

Liz Wilcox [00:51:47]:
They've posted or commented in the last 30 days.

Jay Clouse [00:51:50]:
That's wild.

Liz Wilcox [00:51:51]:
This is why Pat gave me SPI, y'all. Well, he didn't give it to me. I had to pay for it. But he, he told me— he came into my community one day as a guest speaker. I think there were about 200 people on the call. And we got off the call and he DM'd me. He said, I've never seen a community so active this is the right choice.

Jay Clouse [00:52:10]:
That's wild.

Liz Wilcox [00:52:11]:
I just love people, y'all. I, like I said, hey, Liz Wilcox here, first extrovert you probably ever met.

Jay Clouse [00:52:17]:
Changes my calculus a little bit, but—

Liz Wilcox [00:52:20]:
And oh, I want to say, so EMM is run by me and my sister only. That's the only people on my team running this half a million dollar business. So now I feel like I have so many resources with Pat's team. I inherited 3 people. So I'm like, wow, we have so much room for activities.

Jay Clouse [00:52:38]:
What functions?

Liz Wilcox [00:52:40]:
Uh, there's a community manager. I don't know their official titles, y'all. I just love them. So there's a guy that handles community, there's a marketing manager, and an operations manager.

Jay Clouse [00:52:50]:
Okay, okay. That's interesting. It's interesting. I mean, nobody in a community is gonna be mad about you lowering their bill 10x, right?

Liz Wilcox [00:52:59]:
Except maybe my operations manager.

Jay Clouse [00:53:01]:
Operations might get upset. I mean, it's just such an apples to oranges thing because a Facebook group is like, this is a single feed. And SPI Community, at least as I imagine it still, is like multiple spaces. It's just a different experience.

Liz Wilcox [00:53:15]:
Actually, we just moved everything into a single feed.

Jay Clouse [00:53:19]:
Oh, wow.

Liz Wilcox [00:53:20]:
That way people can see everything and they're interacting with everything. They don't have to go to specific— this is a whole nother podcast episode, I think, on how I run a community to maximize interactions with each other. Yeah, I love a single feed. I love a single feed because why do you think Facebook is so popular? Their time on site is unbelievable. Why would I do anything but what Facebook is doing?

Jay Clouse [00:53:49]:
Super interesting.

Liz Wilcox [00:53:50]:
Facebook is the master.

Jay Clouse [00:53:52]:
Super interesting. It's like, it's again very counter to a lot of my typical approach and advice, but who am I to say?

Liz Wilcox [00:54:01]:
And who am I? It all works for different people. And I always say, I like to zig when everybody else is zagging. I'm a very contrarian. You know, I did mention Survivor. There's a reason why I was cast. My brain, I think, just tends to work a little differently, but I, I'd like to think in exciting ways for my students and customers.

Jay Clouse [00:54:23]:
I love it. You've really opened up my eyes to like a wider aperture approaches and given me, like, new models to look at and be like, well, this may be an interesting way of constructing things. And I'm very excited to see how this goes for you. We'll have to bring you back in some number of months to be like, okay, what's—

Liz Wilcox [00:54:42]:
What did you do?

Jay Clouse [00:54:44]:
What did you do? What's happened? What's changed? I think that'll be super interesting, but I'm excited for you. And I think, you know, between last week's episode and this week's episode, I think And I think it just as a whole, it gets people thinking about different approaches to their business. Like, I'm sure people listening to this series of episodes are thinking to themselves, maybe there's a brand, an asset out there that I could purchase and start to build from. So I really appreciate all 3 of you, Matt, Pat, and yourself, for being really open and transparent about this whole thing because we just don't see it happen in the space.

Liz Wilcox [00:55:17]:
Yeah. I am so grateful for this opportunity to carry the baton from here. SPI, there are so many people I've met that's like, oh, that was the first podcast I listened to. It was the first this and that. And, you know, people 18 years ago to 6 months ago, and it just feels like, again, one of the greatest honors of my life. And I can't wait to have used that out-of-the-box thinking to expand, especially these newer entrepreneurs' minds on what is truly possible for them. It just, I'm so excited about it. I just feel so absolutely blessed as a creator to be the one to carry this on.

Liz Wilcox [00:56:04]:
And what makes this possible, 'cause Jay just said like, you don't see it in this space, but I think what's made this possible, 'cause I've sold a personal brand before, And now I'm buying one, right? I think the common thread here is Smart Passive Income was never about Pat Flynn, and now it's not even about Liz Wilcox. It's about you listening. It's about you figuring out what is that next important step and how can you get there. So if you're looking at people like Jay Clouse and you're saying, that's going to be me one day, how do I get there? We're going to get you there. And I'm just so excited to serve that community. I, I don't know, I keep saying it, it just feels like a literal honor to do that, and I just cannot wait to serve everyone.

Jay Clouse [00:56:57]:
If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a rating or review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and letting me know. It gives me strength, it makes me strong, it shoots me up the charts and makes the podcast grow. They go a long way to help us grow the show. If you want to learn more about Liz, visit her website at lizwilcox.com or smartpassiveincome.com. There are links to all of that in the show notes. Thank you for listening as always, and I'll talk to you next week.