#214: A transparent look at how my business performed in August 2024

Jay Clouse [00:00:14]:
Hello, my friend. Welcome back to another episode of Creator Science. This is gonna be a unique episode. You may or may not be familiar with the lab, my membership community for professional creators. Well, each month in the lab, I record a 30 to 40 minute video breaking down that previous month's performance. I get really, really transparent here. I share my profit and loss statement, including a breakdown of where that revenue and where those expenses come from. I share how I did with my goals for the month, the highlights of the month, my concerns based on what happened that month, and the changes I'm making based on those concerns.

Jay Clouse [00:00:50]:
And then I share goals for the next month. A lot of members tell me this is one of their favorite parts of being in the lab, and this episode is the audio from my latest retro looking at August of 2024. Now this isn't the complete experience of my monthly retro that you would have inside the lab because a big part of the experience inside the community is seeing my video where I screen share the information I'm sharing. I go inside various dashboards and really show all these numbers in full, but this is close. So I hope you enjoy this look behind the curtain of the creator science business. I know I love it when I get to see behind other people's businesses. And if you do enjoy this experience, consider joining us in the lab. We have some space available now.

Jay Clouse [00:01:29]:
And even if you just want to join the basic tier, you'll get access to all of my courses, workshops, these monthly retros, and more. A link with more information about the lab is in the show notes. No pressure. No expectation. We'll get to my retro right after this. Let's just dive in. Let's get right into the KPIs for the past month. So if we look at KPIs, this was my 2nd lowest month of revenue of the year.

Jay Clouse [00:01:57]:
And as I was thinking about sharing this in the podcast feed, I thought to myself, is this really putting my best foot forward to share one of my retros that's the 2nd worst month of revenue for the year? And my gut reaction was, no, I should share the more impressive months. But I thought that this is more real and more relatable. It just is. You know, the last 2 months have been months, 23 in terms of worst revenue of the year because I've been on paternity leave. So what does that say? What that says is I have not yet done enough to remove dependency on me in the business. Now these aren't, bad numbers. I would be thrilled to have these numbers a year ago. I'm still very pleased with them today.

Jay Clouse [00:02:46]:
Revenue this month was about $43,000. The problem is expenses this month almost $48,000. So I actually lost money this month for the first time since, July of 2023. And then the last time I lost money in a month before that, I don't know. Would have been 2021 at a minimum. So this is a very very rare month. Let's dig into what I'm spending money on and why revenue was down this month. Subscribers, were up about on par.

Jay Clouse [00:03:21]:
I'm picking up a little more than 1,000 subscribers per month and that is net. I am aggressively unsubscribing people who come into my email ecosystem and do not engage in the 1st 2 weeks. So the majority of unsubscribes in my ConvertKit account are actually done by me, which is an interesting thing. I'm actually working with, Jason Resnick here in the community later this month. And one of the things I'm gonna run by him is is my unsubscribe logic too aggressive? We'll find out. But I care more about people engaging and enjoying the work than just the number of subscribers because I'm doing less and less in terms of selling sponsorships based on pure metrics. And, so some of these vanity metrics just matter less to me. Good month of follower growth.

Jay Clouse [00:04:13]:
That's predominantly driven by a great month of YouTube. Podcast growth in terms of downloads is a bit static, but there's some exciting updates to share about podcast stuff here in a moment. On the digital product side, recognized revenue is about on par, but we had a great month of sales for creator HQ and if you don't know much about lemon squeezy which is the payment processor that I run creator HQ sales through they do payouts twice monthly. So the revenue that I recognized in August is reflective of a lot of the revenue earned in July. So revenue recognized is not equivalent to revenue earned And I'll show you what's happening so that we're earning more revenue on the digital product side here in a moment. The biggest reason, revenue is down was it was a down month of memberships. There were not historically a lot of memberships that were started in August. So there weren't a lot of renewals and we actually had a slightly down month in terms of new members in the community as well.

Jay Clouse [00:05:17]:
So net net that means that this was the 3rd lowest month of new membership growth in the year. Outside of that I don't think there's much here to recognize. Made some money from YouTube integrations. Most of our sponsorship revenue is on the YouTube front. A couple of sponsor integrations that paid and a good month of AdSense at about $23100 $5,000 in YouTube integrations. So where did the costs come in a couple of things that are incremental costs as, you lab mates know, most of my costs are driven by people. It's, contract labor and it's payroll for Mallory and I. Contract labor was up this month a little bit because I've been working with a, short form animation agency.

Jay Clouse [00:06:11]:
And the work product of that is okay, but I have decided not to continue that arrangement. I'll talk more about that as I get into the the good the bad and the ugly for the month. Costs otherwise were pretty consistent. I did have a higher software cost this month as well because I purchased a premium domain as I tend to do. I tend to overspend on domains, but I bought the premium domain signatureproduct.com and that was about $3,000 Let me actually confirm that. Yes. So it's $31100. So gotta have high conviction in a domain to pay $31100 for it.

Jay Clouse [00:06:55]:
It feels a little bit ridiculous, but I am such a fan of having the dotcom of something that you were trying to really own. And that is something I'm embarking on. So between that purchase, the short form agency, and then I forget what this purchase was. I don't remember what's in the other bucket here, but, expenses were up a little bit this month. Twitter growth was flat, about 500 new followers. Linkedin growth was a little bit down in the month before which was an exceptionally good month but still one of our highest months overall 3% growth there. Instagram about flat 2% growth there. Threads pretty flat down a little bit actually and then YouTube had a really good month.

Jay Clouse [00:07:56]:
We had like a 50% growth increase on YouTube this month. We had 2 great videos that did very well Resulting at about $28100 in AdSense. So views were up. AdSense was up. Subscribers were up. Everything in YouTube was good. Email was flat. And then website traffic overall was down a little bit, which was discouraging at first, but then I looked deeper into some things and I'm kind of in a meh place about that.

Jay Clouse [00:08:29]:
Podcast downloads were about flat down a little bit, but this is also something that I'm excited to share with you. So those are the pure numbers. And again, if you if you're in the lab, you're seeing the video and you're seeing those numbers, anything that was super super important I called out audibly. But let's talk about some of the goals I had for the month. I did not hit my revenue goal of $60,000. I did sign 3 new newsletter sponsors. I did make a go forward plan on the short form agency and the plan is no. I completed Project Rabbit Hole.

Jay Clouse [00:09:04]:
The page on my website atcreatorscience.com/binge that basically has a linear ordered list of my best long form work ordered by topic and also platform or revenue model. I did not hire a junior editor yet but I'm still considering that. I did create new bespoke welcome sequences which I'll show here in a moment. I defined a new workout routine. We did get Mallory sleeping more, which is good. And I did get a baby carrier that I am comfortable with. So let's look into some of the good things, and then we'll get into the concerns and the changes that I am making because of it. On the good things front, we hit a 100,000 subscribers on YouTube.

Jay Clouse [00:09:47]:
This is a big deal. My silver play button is not here yet. Should be here, on Saturday, which I'm very, very excited about. I got one for Connor. I'm getting one for my, thumbnail designer, Jonathan, as well. Trying to recognize the team has played a large role in it. It's a big deal. It felt very surreal.

Jay Clouse [00:10:07]:
I'm really glad I captured it on video. I'm trying to capture a lot more milestones in video and photos because it makes for great content down the road. Even if you think what you're doing right now is small potatoes and not worth documenting, I completely disagree. I think you should document every milestone that you can. We crossed a $100,000 in sales for creator HQ and that came with a 53% increase in sales this month alone. If we look at the chart here August was up 53 percent. We earned almost $9,000 in total revenue from Creator HQ which is up from $58100 and that was a couple of things. The podcast promo that runs on the podcast performs pretty well.

Jay Clouse [00:10:51]:
It drives consistent new attention to the product. People purchase it. I ran a promo to my email list as well. I'm using conditional logic from ConvertKit to basically say if this person does not have the tag of customer creator HQ then show this message about creator HQ. Otherwise show this other message that some benefits to them. So I'm doing these targeted sales campaigns using ConvertKit and liquid coding. And, you know, just getting more people to see the product has an improvement. Actually, what one thing I should look at, I started tracking some KPIs for my 3 biggest digital products, The Lab, Creator HQ, and Building a Beloved, Buildable of a membership.

Jay Clouse [00:11:37]:
Every month, I'm looking at visitors, views, sales, revenue, average order volume, and conversion percentage for those 3 products. So the interesting thing is this month we actually had fewer visitors and views, but doubled the conversion percentage on Creator HQ. I'm guessing it's because most of the people who came in were using some promo either from the podcast or from email. So I think more people visiting already had the decision made that they were interested in Creator HQ rather than being introduced to it for the first time plus they had some incentive to purchase So, what's interesting though is the average order volume, the price on that is not lower in August than it was in July. So it's as if the people purchasing in July were using the same promos but fewer people purchased so I guess fewer people were visiting the page with the promo. I don't know. I mean more of a concerted effort this month running the ad and the podcast and doing email stuff to get more people to the page. And it was the 2nd best month of sales we've had which includes May which was the month after the launch.

Jay Clouse [00:13:02]:
So I feel really good about that. That was a big plus for the month is that digital product sales are ticking up for creator HQ. At the same time though it was we sold about a third of build a beloved membership that we did than the month before which was down about a third from the month before that. So was not getting enough views to build a beloved membership, not talking about that product enough. And this is a challenge of having a lot of different products is how do we get consistent attention to specific products that are relevant to the person that's seeing them without doing a dedicated full blast campaign to everybody in the audience about this product because that doesn't make sense. So that's a product or that's a challenge I'm continually continually trying to solve with right message and email, and we're making some steps there. I'm really, really proud of who the creator audience creator science audience is. That's one of my biggest takeaways this month.

Jay Clouse [00:14:04]:
I don't know how closely you pay attention to YouTube, but for go to my community tab here. I ran a poll recently, which was inspired directly by a poll from Colin and Samir. They asked their audience a bunch of questions recently, but the first one they saw was, are you a creator? They had five potential responses. Yes. Full time. Yes. Part time. No.

Jay Clouse [00:14:38]:
But I'd like to be. No. But I work for 1. And no. I'm just curious about creators. And their number one response was that last one. No. I'm just curious.

Jay Clouse [00:14:48]:
48% of their audience said, no. I'm just curious about creators. 2nd behind that was no, but I'd like to be a creator. That's 25%. Then, yes, part time at 17%. Then, yes, full time at 8%. So 25% of their audience identified as a creator. Another 25% said I would like to be one day and I thought that was fascinating.

Jay Clouse [00:15:11]:
Those are much lower numbers than I would have expected. And so I ran literally the same poll in my community. Same question, same answers. And obviously, I have a smaller sample size, a smaller number of people who responded. I had 600 people respond. They had 21,000. So take this with a grain of salt. But 25% of my audience said yes full time.

Jay Clouse [00:15:34]:
51 percent said yes part time. So that's 76% of my audience identify as a creator. And then 20% said no but I'd like to be. So I'm just so proud that we are attracting the people that we're trying to attract that we are truly helping other creators. To me that's awesome. It's a it's a great audience to serve. LinkedIn Carousels are a very good thing right now. Basically, what I've been doing, I have a designer that I work with, and I send him my long form essays and then ask him to turn that into a carousel based on some of the templates he has created which were based on the brand guidelines from the brand refresh we did with Holly.

Jay Clouse [00:16:16]:
These carousels are crushing. PDF carousels on LinkedIn just continue to do very well. If we look at my document uploads here this is going to show impressions. Let's just do posts. Yesterday's upload of the creator educators PDF carousel was about 24,000 impressions. Then before that we had one with Patty Galloway that was almost 40,000 impressions. And these this Patty Galloway carousel is just quotes from our episode. And I got these quotes from Chat GPT.

Jay Clouse [00:16:57]:
I went to Chat GPT and I said, hey, if I give you my transcript, can you give me, 10 of the most compelling quotes from this conversation? They should be less than 280 characters because I was trying to make each quote the size of a tweet or less. And then it would give me some and I'd say actually can you replace numbers 234 and it give me more. And I just took like the best 9 and gave them my designer and he put them into this carousel. And this carousel performs better than almost everything I've posted to LinkedIn ever which is great because I also linked to the podcast episode in the post. And I think I was actually not expecting this to do well and I didn't put a tracking link in it, which is so frustrating now in retrospect. But when I look at my Podcast Analytics and the Patty Galloway episode it's right here in pink, it has performed really, really well. And I think a good part of that is more people tuned in than usual, which means more people can talk about it, which means more people tune in than usual. So I think that this carousel actually had a meaningful impact on that episode's performance, and this is not a difficult format to do.

Jay Clouse [00:18:13]:
You know, we started with a cover page, then I put in a slide with the guest bio, and then these quotes. And this performed really well. And at the end, you know, it says, listen to creator science in your podcast player. So PDF carousels generally on LinkedIn doing really well. This strategy, super bullish about. Gonna keep doing it because it performed so well and people really loved it. The comments were so positive. It had 10 reposts even.

Jay Clouse [00:18:38]:
So I am super surprised that that performed as well as it did. But PDF carousels right now working really well, and they're being derived from old writing. It's crazy. And because it's on LinkedIn, I'm getting some really interesting people seeing it. This creator educators post, for example, the CEO of Kajabi saw it and, like, contacted me immediately afterwards. The Creator Partnerships person at Spotter, someone at the HubSpot Podcast Network. So it's LinkedIn, when done well, gets you in front of some really interesting people. And I feel like I'm getting more industry attention from the work I'm doing in LinkedIn.

Jay Clouse [00:19:18]:
These carousels are performing really well, and it's leveraging my existing long form work. It's it's really powerful. It's really exciting. After a quick break for our sponsors, I'll talk about some of the work I'm doing behind the scenes with my email infrastructure, which I think you're really gonna like. So don't go anywhere. We'll be right back. And now back to my August retro. I did put in place new infrastructure for email journeys.

Jay Clouse [00:19:45]:
So let me show you what that looks like. I have several new sequences. There are 3 flows that people come into my ConvertKit account primarily. Anytime they go to a creatorscience.com page that has an opt in, so like direct to me, that's typically the warmest highest quality lead gen. People coming from the ConvertKit Creator Network and people coming from SparkLoop, which is like essentially the ConvertKit Creator Network, but is technically different. So I have a separate sequence for both. I created new welcome sequences for those 3 flows, which if you're watching the video from the lab, you'll see. And they're not performing as well as I had hoped.

Jay Clouse [00:20:29]:
The Creator Network open rate is lower than the previous one. The Creator Science open rate is lower than the previous one. SparkLoop open rate is a little bit higher. And the click rates are not improved either. So basically these sequences, I have like welcome. This is a little bit about me. And if you wanna learn my best stuff right now go to the rabbit hole. And I point a link to creatorscience.com/binge which again has like this linear organized look at my best long form writing.

Jay Clouse [00:21:07]:
If people click it looks like they're clicking that link let me just confirm. Yeah. Most people who click click that link and then below that I have some other like episodes, podcast episodes, essays, and videos that I recommend and my premium products. So there are a lot of links in this email and the click rate is way lower than I thought, which, you know, this is just more validation that if you want a high click rate, you actually want to reduce the number of things people can click on. So my next phase of this is picking like one thing. One thing during the entire welcome email to say, read this, do this. These sequences happen before I know anything about the subscriber from RightMessage. So I'm just trying to get them to engage with a long form piece of content.

Jay Clouse [00:21:59]:
I also put a code word at the bottom that said p s reply with the word persistent so I know you read this. And it's not a huge hit rate. So I know people aren't making it through this very long email. It needs to be shorter. It needs to be focused on like one link. The second email is basically trying to get them to fill out right message if they haven't already. And if they did fill out right message they wouldn't get this email they'd be filtered out. So this goes and says can I personalize my writing to you? If yes complete this quiz.

Jay Clouse [00:22:28]:
That's the 2 email sequence. Welcome for all 3 of those flows. Once they complete that quiz we have 1 of 5 I call nurture sequences that take what you say and contextualize my long form and products based on that. So you know when you go through the right message you tell me a current need that you have your current need and it's either create consistently grow your audience monetize earn money as quickly as possible or scale And so the open rates on these are really high 60 to 70 percent which is good and the click rates are higher and everything is written to that current need. So if you go to like the current need grow your audience sequence the first email is how to grow your audience And based on what you tell me in right message it will show you essays and podcast episodes about that. And that sequence continues and it basically says if you told me that you're building a newsletter here are my best tools or my best content on email. If you told me you wanna do a podcast, here's my best content on podcasting every for every publishing platform. Again, probably too many options.

Jay Clouse [00:23:42]:
The next email in the sequence basically says whatever you told me about what products you are or want to build here's my best content on that. So I'm trying to get people to feel like I'm really personalizing and sending my best long form content based on what you told me about where you're publishing and what your revenue model is and your current need. And ideally, these lead to sales. And I have tracking links because I have offers tied to these. And I will know if they are converting to sales and they're not converting to the degree that I would want yet. So the good news is the infrastructure is here. The bad news is the copywriting is not hitting. So I need to update the copywriting.

Jay Clouse [00:24:22]:
The creator science brand is growing. That's a good thing. I just feel that there is much more awareness and respect for the Creator Science name. We're working on some new channel graphics on YouTube which I am just like so pleased to share. I don't feel like I'm there yet so I'm not gonna share it in this retro. I'll probably share it in the next retro but it's gonna be awesome. It's hard to get right but it's going to be so fun and so awesome. We published 2 videos in a August and both of them did more than 60,000 views the first was Amy Porterfield the second was Patty Galloway the Amy Porterfield episode is really interesting because I actually originally aired an audio only version of that episode back in like September or October.

Jay Clouse [00:25:07]:
We didn't think it would be packageable for video because it wasn't about video but that audio episode did so well that I said let's try this in video and we didn't what I would call a light edit on it. We didn't do like our full typical edit we would do on a video episode and it's crushing. It's doing so well. So it tells me a couple of things. It tells me that we've broken outside of what felt like YouTube shorts jail. We did this video with Jenny Hoyos. It got 3 and a half 1000000 views. It drove about half of the subscribers to the channel.

Jay Clouse [00:25:39]:
And for a while after that, our videos didn't perform very well. And I worry is because now the majority of our audience only cared about YouTube shorts. So intentionally didn't make more videos about shorts. And now it seems like things have recalibrated, and YouTube better understands who our audience is. It's creators generally. And I think there's a lot of space for us to make more videos on the monetization side rather than just the views, new YouTube subscribers side. So that's been really, really encouraging how well that Amy Porterfield video did. Right now, I'm looking at a potential 6 figure licensing deal of my content.

Jay Clouse [00:26:23]:
And it's exciting, but it's also challenging in some ways. And, I don't feel like I can say more about that right now. But, that's a good thing to have on the table. On the life side, good things here. Having a daughter is the best. Anyone with kids knows this already, but man, so great to have a child. Like it's just it's just the best. It brings so much light and joy and meaning to our world more so than we had before.

Jay Clouse [00:26:53]:
It's awesome. I'm getting some ways to rap routine back in my life. If you watch my Instagram, you saw that I recently also fought a hornet's nest, and I would like to declare total victory from that hornet's nest. We have, in fact, defeated them. And football's back. That's very exciting. Let's get into concerns and changes. This video is already going a little bit long.

Jay Clouse [00:27:18]:
Sorry. Lots to share. So I already talked about this new email sequences are not yet performing. That's a concern, but it's a very solvable thing. I'm still like feeling a little bummed at my ability to be involved in the community over the last month and a half while I was on parental leave. But as of this recording as of posting this I am back to full time. And so you will be seeing more and more of me back in the community. Brand growth I told you that the brand of Creative Science is growing does not necessarily mean the business is growing.

Jay Clouse [00:27:51]:
I think the easiest way to leverage brand growth is often through brand deals like deals with other brands because as I'm seeing more people in the industry interested in creator science I could parlay that into more brand deals but I'm not really interested in doing that yet. I'm more interested in increasing the digital product side of things or direct to customer offers. And as you saw the last 2 months of revenue being less involved in the business has had a very linear correlated effect to the business's performance. And that's something that I now know is a bigger problem than I might have originally realized in. It's time to fix that. We had fewer applications for the lab this month than we have recently. I've started tracking this because this is a clear KPI for revenue growth on the lab and memberships and in the business in general. How many total applications did we have and how many of those were marked as a qualified application that meets the requirements to join the community.

Jay Clouse [00:28:56]:
So historically qualified applications have been like 40 to 60% since I've begun tracking it. This month only about 27% of application applications met the requirement. That was 3 qualified applications out of 11 total. The month before that we had 18 total applications and 12 qualified. The month before that we had 24 applications and 14 of them qualified. So if you're not getting enough applications total you're not going to get a lot of new members. If those applications are not qualified you're not going to get a lot of new members. So I need to do a better job of telling the story of who is here and how great this membership is.

Jay Clouse [00:29:37]:
I've really erred on the side of like being very passive and chill about this because it's done a really good job of self selecting the right type of person. And so in some ways it's it's kind of like a not broke don't fix it type of thing. But if I you know with any product you have the more you talk about it the more you will sell. And this is the best product I offer and I know I can talk about it more tastefully in a way that attracts more qualified applications. Our sales page conversion rates in general I've started tracking that and they're not great either. You know they're sub 1% or around 1% and that's not good enough. So I'm I'm thinking about moving off of Teachable And that's that's only relevant for Buildable of membership and some of my one off courses. But in general, I'm rebuilding sales pages to improve conversion, rebuilding or updating because I'm getting traffic to these pages.

Jay Clouse [00:30:42]:
If they would convert better, sales would increase. That's a clear optimization to make. If you measure the current conversion rate and then you make changes measure the conversion rate after those changes, you know, if that made it better or worse. And that's just a game you should be playing every month. Every button is usually but every month, you should be doing something to see can I increase conversion rate on the sales pages? It's probably more impactful and more important than just making another LinkedIn carousel, but here I am. Alright. The Binge page, createrscience.com/binge. It's been about a month since I put it in place.

Jay Clouse [00:31:17]:
The question is, did it have an impact? And moderately, you know, the way I can look at this is if I look at last month's traffic and then drill down to creatorscience.com and look at this Well actually what I should do is look all time and then drill down by creatorscience.com. August did have a moderate uptick from July June but it was about on par with May which was down from April. So while it was an improvement over the last couple of months, it wasn't a huge improvement. I do think it had a small impact on time on-site and bounce rate. Bounce rate declined by 1% and time on-site increased by 7 seconds on average. So people are spending more time, but how much more time? I don't know. How many more sessions not more sessions I know that having more sessions on the website leads to more sales because more people on the website means more people going through right message means more people getting offers means more people going to sales pages means more people converting Right. And so the Binge page is partially in the email sequences just trying to get more time on-site engaging with my long form work so that people start going down these different paths and getting personalized onboarding experiences for them.

Jay Clouse [00:32:42]:
So like the infrastructure is there. The strategy is sound. It's just not working quite yet. I'm behind on my video timeline. We have 6 purchased video integrations that we have not yet delivered and I was trying to get them done by the end of September at one point but it's definitely gonna be at least October. And yeah it's just we we need more capacity on the video front and hiring there is, something I'm taking very, very seriously to get someone really, really good as a junior editor to Connor. And I'm gonna redirect some of the short form budget over to that. After one last quick break for our sponsors, I will share some of the new changes that I'm making in September as well as my goals for the coming month.

Jay Clouse [00:33:28]:
So don't go anywhere. We'll be right back. And now please enjoy the rest of my August retro. Finding recording time as a dad, challenging. That's like the hardest part of parenting right now and and working like work alongside parenting is recording time is very challenging. And kids are expensive. I don't know if you know this. If you're a parent, I'm sure you know this, but all of our, personal expenses have increased having a kid now.

Jay Clouse [00:33:56]:
And that's just part of life, you know. Expenses increase. Needs on the business then increase. Create stress especially when having, this this new part of your life takes time away from work and you see, okay, that has a negative impact on revenue overall. But we need to increase revenue because life expenses have increased. That's the that's the the game. That's the thing we're trying to figure out. Okay.

Jay Clouse [00:34:21]:
Changes and decisions things that I'm focused on over the next however much time. I'm laser focused on figuring this email thing out. You know so many people spend so much money on Facebook ads to get new email subscribers to try to self liquidate those funnels and earn enough from that activity to pay for the activity and basically grow at no cost. I am getting the same quality leads for free from free recommendations from the Creator Network, and I should be looking at that as the gift that it is and say this is the same type of subscriber that would come from a paid campaign on Facebook or SparkLoop or otherwise. I'm already getting a ton of you know subscriber flow. I need to use this as a lab like a cost a cost free lab to turn this into digital product sales. And that is like my biggest focus my biggest goal right now. And to do so, I am implementing or editing 17 different email sequences, which is probably more than I need.

Jay Clouse [00:35:29]:
I can probably do this like in a much smaller test. But the the ideal end state is that these sequences exist. I'm gonna do them 1 at a time. You hear 17 and it sounds ridiculous but let me break this down. We have those 3 welcome sequences that I shared which are essentially the same email but just different inflows and I wanna measure them discreetly. Then I have these 5 current need opt in sequences that I showed you. Those already exist. I just need to play with the copywriting.

Jay Clouse [00:35:58]:
I'm introducing 3 new sequences called interests right now and for a long time. When anyone clicks a link to Creator HQ, they get tagged interest Creator HQ. Same with the lab, same with build a beloved membership. I've done nothing with that data. What I should do, if you indicate interest and you get a flag that says interest in this product, that should put you into a very soft sell sequence to tell you more about that product to try and nudge people in the direction of you're interested in this. Let me tell you how it could help you so you can decide make a better more educated decision on whether it could help you. And that should turn into more sales. And then finally 6 post purchase sequences.

Jay Clouse [00:36:40]:
I'm looking at my 6 best performing paid products. And then after somebody purchases I want to 1 try to get them a better outcome. You know, check-in on them, see how they're doing, see if they're stuck, encourage them to complete the thing. Use the thing. And for some of those things, have some sort of upsell. For example if you purchase Creator HQ and then you want to join the lab on the standard or VIP tier I will put the cost of that but the cost of Creator HQ towards your 1st year of membership. So that is not a obvious clear automated thing but I want people to know like hey if you love creator HQ and if you want to apply to the lab if you're accepted I will give you you know a coupon code to apply your purchase of creator HQ towards membership in the lab. And the same thing would be true of multiple things.

Jay Clouse [00:37:35]:
Like if you purchase Buildable of a membership, I would let you apply the cost of that towards the basic tier of the lab or standard or VIP. You know so there are upsells and cross sells that can happen in those post purchase sequences. But I think our value add and the sequences again can help people get better outcomes from the products. So I think it's a win win win all the way around. I just need to implement those things. On the podcast front I am loving this new format of recording voice memos into my phone and then publishing that as an ad free episode of the podcast the data on it is really good too. I'm using this new tool called the Bumper Dashboard, which is I know you're gonna ask if I can share this if you can have access to this. But this dashboard is only available to clients of this podcast growth agency called Bumper.

Jay Clouse [00:38:31]:
It's founded by Dan Meisner who's like a podcast industry OG. I had him on the podcast. I interviewed him. The episode is being released on the feed on Tuesday September 17th and he very graciously gave me access to it. But what Bumper does is show much more interesting statistics by pulling in data from Apple Spotify Chartable and Megaphone and also YouTube. I've had this less than 24 hours it hasn't even populated all my data but it shows me verified listeners so people who actually listened to an episode listen time how much time people listened cumulative followers and then on an episode by episode basis it'll show listen retention. So if we look at my voice memo episode the first one it is showing Spotify now. Yes love that Each episode shows listen time average by percentage.

Jay Clouse [00:39:32]:
So this first voice memo episode 80% of people on Apple Podcasts listen to or sorry. The average listen time was 80% of the episode. And on Spotify, it was 70%. This one, 86% 80%. So listen time on this is really high. If you compare that to, like, our episode of Patty Galloway which performed pretty well, we're at 60% 67%. You know? So I think these voice memos are really great for listener experience, and I can record them quickly. I enjoy doing it.

Jay Clouse [00:40:14]:
It feels very creatively inspiring to me. And this just increases the amount of time people are spending with me. And that's a huge part of any creator business. If you can increase the amount of time somebody is spending with you, you're improving that relationship. You're building trust, getting them outcomes, and ultimately driving more revenue in the business, which is super, super, super exciting. I love looking at this. If I look lifetime at this chart, you can see how verified listeners has gone over time. You can see when things picked up when they planned out.

Jay Clouse [00:40:48]:
If you look cumulatively you start to get a picture of like how much less than time people are spending. You can see this is a much more inspiring graph than downloads. My downloads have actually been decaying because of the way that downloads are defined by the IAB. But downloads don't tell the full story. Downloads only tell one story. This tells a story of how many actual people are listening and for how much time. And that is increasing month over month dramatically, which makes a lot of sense because I feel this. I feel more people talking about the podcast.

Jay Clouse [00:41:19]:
But when I was just looking at download numbers, it just doesn't look the same. It doesn't tell the same story. You know, if I look at year to date downloads, this does not look the same. I wanna look at this, like, monthly. You know, this graph this graph does not look as attractive as this graph. And this graph is who's actually listening. So I'm very excited about this data, looking at verified listeners and listen time on the podcast. That's something I'm focusing on for my KPIs and podcasting moving forward.

Jay Clouse [00:42:02]:
I'm working on 2 new products, which sounds ridiculous. The first is a remote podcast interview workshop. I need to work on the name. But people who are doing remote interview podcasts on YouTube video podcasts that are shot remotely. We want to create a workshop to show how we've gone about doing that on YouTube because I think we're doing it better than just about anybody else and seeing real results. So Connor and I are gonna run that here in a couple weeks. Members of the lab will have access to that. No additional charge.

Jay Clouse [00:42:37]:
Yeah. Excited about that new workshop. We're working on it right now in the background. I'll share more information about how to join that. He and I are recording an episode tomorrow. We'll share more information about that. And then there is the signature product mastermind that I talked about in my most recent episode with Justin Moore from VidSummit helping people develop and sell their signature product. Really really bullish on that.

Jay Clouse [00:43:04]:
That's why I paid $3,000 for the domain signatureproduct.com. That's gonna be a big big deal. And I'm gonna work with probably less than 20 people who are a little bit further along and be very personal with them. So more information about that is at signatureproduct.com if you haven't heard about it. I'm probably gonna move off of teachable to either teacher because I did get the lifetime deal. If you go to teacher.co. That's teacher with a y dot co or dot com it'll redirect. There is a lifetime deal still running on that I believe.

Jay Clouse [00:43:43]:
Well they might have. Oh yeah here it is. They have a limited offer lifetime deal I think it's like $550 to use this forever. Incredible deal. So I might move off of Teachable to Teachery or I might move to Circle. I've long had the plan of having creator school be a thing. And that being a catalog of my courses plus a very lightweight community for people who are not yet eligible for the lab. So I might do that, but I haven't made that decision.

Jay Clouse [00:44:11]:
And as I said, I'm discontinuing the video agency that I was working with. Changes on the life side of things. I'm getting back on my fitness plan. I'm getting my steps in. I'm doing strength workouts. I now have this routine that if the baby wakes up in the middle of night to eat, I help get her back to sleep. And we've now moved to that happens just about once an evening now. And if it's at 4 a.

Jay Clouse [00:44:36]:
M. Or later that I'm putting her back to bed then I just get up and start the day and I get a strength workout in that day. I go for a walk with the baby in the morning get my steps in. It's like my favorite part of the day now. And we also hired an in home cleaner to help take some stress off off of Mal during the day. And she was stressed out trying to clean the house, but having a hard time finding time. Now I have a cleaner coming. She does a great job, and it makes us feel a lot better.

Jay Clouse [00:45:03]:
Goals for the next month. I wanna get back to $60,000 in top line revenue. I want to test new ways to improve podcast listener retention. That is something we talk about in the episode with Dan Meisner. So be prepared to listen to that. I'm gonna continue daily posting on LinkedIn because it's just showing a lot of promise in a lot of really positive ways better than other platforms right now for me. I'm going to update the lab onboarding I've been talking about this for months and I just keep putting it off because it involves recording a new tour video. There's a lot that goes into it and I've just been putting it off because I'm not looking forward to it necessarily but I need to do it.

Jay Clouse [00:45:41]:
It's in all caps because it has to happen this month. I wanna get v one of those email sequences that I talked about in place because once I get the infrastructure set then I can mess with copywriting and that stuff you know is usually pretty easy for me. I'm gonna finish my merch project. That's exciting. I haven't shown you guys what that looks like yet because it's kinda crazy. But I've been working with a designer who's a clothing designer and he's been making some really cool designs for different merch that, members of the lab will get in certain ways. I'm gonna make it available for sale for some people. It's really cool and I'm excited to show you what that looks like.

Jay Clouse [00:46:18]:
And I'm trying to get back down to less than a £182. I've only gained a couple pounds during paternity leave, but I wanna lose that weight back before I start strength training again. Alright. That is the retro. Thank you for your patience like as I got this out. If you are not in the lab and you listen to this and you enjoyed it, consider joining the lab. You can get access to our retros even on the basic plan. And you can watch the video of this, all the past retros, all future retros in video.

Jay Clouse [00:46:48]:
That is something you should consider. And if you do apply for the standard of VIP membership, we have some spots available. We'd love to have you. And yeah. It's just it's just a great great place to be. And if you listen to this podcast, I'm telling you it's your type of person. You're gonna enjoy doing it. Go to creatorscience.com/lab to apply.

Jay Clouse [00:47:07]:
There's also a link in the show notes. Folks in the lab watching this, thanks for watching. If you have any questions, as always, leave comments down below, and I'm happy to expand on any of this.