 So, I'm here with Russell Nolte, an amazing author and business man who learned how to actually leverage books to have an awesome business. Now, I know a lot of you guys are interested in that kind of thing, so I thought why not talk to Russell and maybe you could learn a few things from this talk. So how are you doing, Russell? Doing very well. Very well. Thanks for having me on. Awesome. Awesome. Can I just talk a bit, just a minute or two, about yourself? Sure. So, I'm a writer, publisher, and consultant, so I run Wanna Be Press, which is a small press publisher that makes books and comics. Our tagline is we make weird books for weird people. And then I also host a podcast called The Business of Art, which shows creatives how to build their creative business, how to sell more, how to build a brand. And basically how to make their business sustainable. So, those are sort of the two pieces, and I also help people like yourself or other business people make their first book or make a book that can lead them down the sales funnel chain. Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome. What's like your worst, your best and your worst experience as you kind of started learning this shit? Probably when my fourth business failed, that's pretty bad in my 20s. So I had a bunch of, I started writing movies and television, and then we started a couple production companies, and all of them miserably, like miserable, like it's not even funny how bad they failed, like not even barely, didn't barely got off the ground. Almost like they couldn't even fail because they didn't get off the ground. And so I went back and I knew I could write, like I'm a very good writer, but I didn't know sort of what the commonality was made. Commonality was made. You fail one, that might be a fluke. You fail two, it might be market conditions. You fail four, like, and you're the common denominator of why you fail. That's not saying you're a failure, but like I certainly felt like a failure. So I went through and I said, well, what is going on? Like, what is the, what is, what am I missing here? And it turned out that I didn't know how to do sales and marketing. I like most creatives just decided that the thought, and most business people I have found, thought that you launch a thing and then people come out of the woodwork. And so they'll build it and they will come. Right. Exactly. And it's absolutely the opposite. Find people for a long time and then you can launch to them and they will buy your thing. But it's the inverse of what most people think, like find the audience and then deliver them a thing. So I learned, so this was, it was about 29. And I am a big believer that you should be able to get around as much as you want in your 20s. And like have as many crappy jobs, but you better have a backup plan by the time you're 30. So I had spent my 20s like writing things and optioning things, you know, being a flighty kind of artist. And my 30s were coming up. So I decided, well, I need to get this job. I wasn't really qualified for anything except for sales. So I wasn't really qualified for sales, but everybody's qualified for sales. Yeah. They'll take on with anybody at the beginning. So I worked and it was really hard for the first couple of years and I bumped around to a bunch of stuff, but I finally landed at sprint, which is a US based cellular retailer. I worked at one of their third party business to business stores. So we only sold the business to business. This was someone who was basically reselling spring products, job shipping them. And I was really bad at first, but they kept me on. I just making just enough like, so I justify my position. And then eventually I worked my way up to sales manager. And then I was training all of this. I ran like a store for them. As they transitioned from LA to Texas, I ran a store for them. And then I started my own Verizon dealership and left that job. And then sort of, so I learned the sales and marketing piece, but the sales and marketing piece isn't, it isn't the same industry as I'm sure you know, like it's all different. It's, if you can sell one thing, you can sell everything else, but there are different widgets and terminologies in every business. So you got to sort of, so I spent the next couple of like year trying to fit a, like fit how I was working with cellular into how to sell art and how to sell creativity and how to sell like writers and business people and entrepreneurs who don't, who don't like have a physical store and really a physical product, almost like creating a physical product for somebody that has no physical product yet. Yeah, you're also, it's a completely different need. Yeah, exactly. But the best part, so that was the worst part, the best part I'm transitioning to, I didn't forget. The best part was when it started working. So this was the, we launched our first landing in 2015. And I'm a big believer in screwing up your own stuff before you sell other people's things. So we spent sort of screwed up a lot in the, like the first round of the first slate of books we had out, we were making them for too much and selling them for too little. But so like the last year and a half sort of since June of 2015 where I left my job to do this full time, I've sort of been trying to refine how to make a creative business work and systematize it. And once it started working, once it started to be able to like process, like make a process and predict how much I was going to make based on, you know, how many people were at a show or all of these sort of hypotheses I was making actually started to come into play. And I started increasing my sales exponentially. That was the best because it's always amazing to me. It's still when I can say, this is the thing that came out of my head and have somebody buy it and say, okay, I want to take $20, which I like I spot they made some way. I don't know how they made it. And I will like buy the thing that's in your in your head. Yeah. And people do that on a mass level where like you can sell hundreds of books from people that don't know who you are, get them to convert right on the spot. That's pretty amazing. Yeah, yeah, that's that's awesome. I mean, I opened the YouTube channel again, like three months ago, because I decided to go from local to online again and work worldwide. And it's also like just an idea like, hey, I'm going to coach people and charge like 2000 a month for that. And, you know, like a week later, I think I got my first client, somebody like watched my video really liked it, contacted me. We talked for like an hour and he's like, yeah, sure, man, let's go. And I'm like, whoa, like a week ago, this was like here. So yeah, when you know the process, you can turn it into reality. It's really fun. There's this thing, which is like there's a lot of hypotheses floating around in your head at any one time, most businesses, my head at any one time that I'm testing out and then most of them fail, most of them are not correct hypotheses, which is fine. That's how science works. Like most of the hypotheses that a biologist or a chemist or a pharmacist or someone who's making like another pill, like the next like weight loss pill, they're mostly failing. But when you get that hypothesis that sticks and you're like, oh, I thought this and like that is actually the truth of it. Yeah. Pretty like it's a pretty crazy thing to imagine. It usually works. It's like, it's never like the first thing. It's like, it's so further along the way, the one that actually works, you like, you know, you just go through the thing, you know, like you try this, doesn't want this, doesn't want this, doesn't work. And then you're like, okay, now let's try this. And then you get a result. And you're like, what? Like it works. And you're like, what? Right. Almost a whole career has been about failing faster and more rapidly. So rapid prototyping, rapid iteration. Yeah. Because what I found is the people that sit on an idea for a long time, end up having a crappy idea. The ones that are out there iterating on and talking to people about it and like building up the hype for it. Those are the people that end up successful, not because their initial idea was better, but because they talked to so many people and had so many failed iterations of it. Yeah. I think, I think any idea could work, but the people, what the execution is where you have to be a master and the crappier the idea, the better the execution could be, but better ideas they don't need as good execution because it's a good idea inherently. But when you have that great idea and also has great execution, that's where you drop off. Yeah. That's like the one that gets you to millionaire status usually, or it could be the next level. Right. Exactly. I've had still a lot of our books that come out. So how our books work is we short run them first to test whether they are viable. Oh, thank you. I just was about to ask. So like when you go to a book like Ikeba back here, we get a thousand or more books. That's an offset print run. So we're spending a lot less per unit, but our overall costs are a lot more. So physical books. So I don't want to print a thousand of the Ikeba books before I know that people are going to buy them. Right. So what I do is I get short runs of these digital books, which this one's not out yet. This is just a prototype. This is my next book. And so we'll get like 50 or 100 of these short runs and see if we can sell them quickly or as quickly as we need to in order to believe that it's a viable product. And a lot of our books never get out of this stage. In fact, so far only two books that we've put out have gotten out of this short run stage and then like full and done like full on production runs. Like we've had four or five, six, and 10, 12 books of which 10, eight to 10 are still in short run status because I'm not going to spend $6,000, $10,000, $20,000 to get a bunch of books that are just going to sit in my, that are just going to sit in my garage. Another thing we use the validation. This is like standard textbook validation of a concept. Right. We also have tried a kids book division this year. We thought that somebody who likes our books also has kids or young people that they need books for and they would buy our books and then buy books for their kids. So that was our assumption. It absolutely, non-mentally failed. They've not worked, but you know, I was able to validate the concept to repay the book art, the artwork and the cost of production on a short run of books because, you know, we didn't do 2000 or 5000 at once. So it's very similar to what people do on Facebook. For example, when they do it an ad or you don't have to buy a campaign on TV, you can just, you know, spill out a bit of money, see how you can even see, you don't even need to see the sales. You can actually see like the click-through, the, you know, how much, how many people subscribed and there's a funnel going. So you can actually very quickly know if the shit is working or not. Right. And even books that go, like the Ichabad book that went to an offset run. When we, we did a short run of that and Petrina first, which are the two books that basically earned out and deserve it because we didn't justify the cost. We were able to, during that short run, tighten up all of our sales pitch for every, for that book and find out the exact reasons why people wanted it, the exact places that it would sell better. And we could do that without having to basically go to a bunch of shows with a bunch of product and then not sell out of that show. So now we have a couple of books. So now we have a couple of books that basically can, we know will earn, will like make a show justifiable. So we can justify our cost with just these two books. And hopefully we can bring in more books that then can be multiples of this instead of. Can you show the book? With this one? Which one? The Ichabad book? Both of them for like five seconds. Maybe. So Ichabad is about a, is about a psychopath that escapes a mental asylum that becomes a monster on her, but she never knows if he's killing monster humans or it's on his head the whole time. Yeah. But can you, can you describe, describe while you show the book? Like what you want to see? Sure. Yeah, show it like, like while you describe it. Yeah. So we, so for this one, we did a exclusive, this is an exclusive hardcover of the book. So we wanted to make it a prestige thing. So because the title is only on the side and the back, not on the front. Because we only can sell these or sell them on our site. We made them different than our distributor editions. So, and then. So this is our, this usually has black inside. Sorry. Like a, like a knife inside it. It doesn't, but it has a really cool ribbon. Oh, that looks so awesome. I love digital comics, digital comics like these, graphic comics. So this is about, so it's about a psychopath that escapes a mental asylum and becomes a monster on her, but she never knows if he's killing monster humans or it's on his head the whole time. So it's four issues, epilogue and back matter content, like Johnny the Homestead Maniac or traditional Japanese manga. And then we have a bunch of process stuff in the back to show you how we made the book. So, basically, basically, so that's one. And then we have a, this one doesn't have a perfect pitch yet, but you can see this cover worst thing in the universe, the back. I don't know if we can person your show, but it says God effing. God fucking hates. What? What does he hate? Albert Ross. So our goal, since we most do most of our selling at shows, we want someone to pick up the book, read the back, get a chuckle and open the first chapter of the book. I mean, any Chuck Polaniak fan would instantly pick this up. Right. So it's like Chuck Polaniak, Douglas Adams, and Kurt Vonnegut all blended together basically. It's about God, belieffully watching as karma craps on the richest guy in the universe for 300 pages. And so we kind of have our, we kind of have our niche for weird books, for weird people. And we make, like, so that's, these are weird books for awesome people, you know? Well, I, to me, weird and awesome are the same because. Oh yeah. Awesome. No, but there are genuinely weird things though. Like there are things that are genuinely weird in the bad way. Yeah, I guess. Most things that I, I find very few things that are weird in the bad way. Most of the things that I, that I find weird in the good way. And so, when we both, and then we go to shows and sell it, but you know, over the year, by doing this over and over and over again, we have a repeatable process for. So, so, so you're not this huge business. You're not this, you know, massive, famous guy. You don't have like 50 books like Brian, Brian Tracy. You're just a guy who has a business, you know, who sells books, you know, among other things, but you basically made books profitable. Right. So I found ways to make books profitable. Basically. I'll ask you, I'll ask it again just to, because I want to, you know, kind of like this. So if somebody is like really passionate about writing books, he's like, he doesn't want to be an entrepreneur, you know, in the common sense. He doesn't want to open a regular business. He doesn't want to do coaching. He just wants to write books. And he's not even thinking about making, you know, millions. He's just saying, I want to write books and make enough money to live well. You know, as a baseline, at least, you know, in the next year or so. That's possible. In the next, so maybe two years, even so I, so I will tell you that artists make the writers make their living on the back catalog, the back catalog or the books that they put out before their current book. So the more books you put out, the more successful you will become because every time a new book comes out, it will increase the sales of your previous books. So if you've only got one book and somebody likes that book, and you have nothing else, they have nothing to go back to. If you have 10 books, they will go any day like your first book, they will be more likely to go back and pick up all of your books. So I will say it depends on what, on what kind of books you make and how often you put out books and how many shows you go to to build an audience. Yeah, but as a, as a possibility, it is possible. If you have it, what's more likely is you will, you will make a living once you have about five to 10 books. As long as you're going to a ton of shows, because here's the thing, most people want to make a living selling books on Amazon as an ebook. Ebooks have a maximum profit, a maximum cost of like $9.99. And like most people won't buy it at $9.99, which means you're most, you'll maximum make $7 a book because, because Amazon takes 30% roughly. So a $10 book, you make $7. If I sell that $30 book back there, to somebody at a show, I make a $27 profit. And you can talk to him. And I can talk to them to get them to buy multiple books, but I would rather have a $27 profit than a $7 profit. And this, and having a profit margin of that, of that allows me to, you know, make more books, like this funds for more books. This fun, like that allows me to cut the cost down of people buy multiple things. When it's just like anything else, people, you know, that little thing of lipstick that you buy lipstick or chapstick that you get for a dollar costs 10 cents to manufacture. So there's a 10x profit margin in that. And there should be a 10x profit margin in books. So for the past two years, they've been studying everything about other businesses and figuring out how they're able to be successful. And one of them is the book. Book people tend to talk about a 3x profit margin, which is whatever the book costs to make, you multiply it by three. $6 book to make cost, not sell it for, sell it for $18. $10 book, sell it for $30. That is completely backwards from how every other successful business operates. Every other successful business operates on a 10x or more profit margin. And that's because they need a, they need a large profit margin so that when it gets distribution, they can still make a healthy profit margin. Once it's done, they can give discounts at stores. They can go to shows and still have a profit. Once you sell, you know, once you do a book, when we were selling, we were making a book for seven and selling it for 20. Once we got through show costs, there was nothing left. So we literally would lose money when we went to shows. So the biggest thing is you got to treat it like a business. If you treat it like a business, then yes, like this is a product, nothing, not unlike McDonald's has a Big Mac or Burger King has a Whopper or Samsung has a phone. It is the same product. It is a product and if you, if you understand that it's a product, you can sort of take a lot of the, the ways that people make money from these products and make a successful business. I would ask you, if someone opened a hamburger shop, would you think they could be successful in a year? Okay. So you're saying that first thing before anything, if you want to be a successful writer, you need to realize that this is a business. Like don't be quote unquote like a hippie. Like this is, you know, just, just me writing and you know, build it and they will come and I just ride and people will buy it. Like you have to tell people is, if they are happy with the level that they are, they're not, they're making from their writing that they should not do anything. But if they are unhappy, if they want to make more, then yes, they have to treat it like a business. What about maybe having a business partner who is like the business side? Well, you're the artistic side. Is that, could that work? Or does that make sense? I mean, it can work, but you are opening, if you don't understand the business side of it, even if you don't do it well, you're opening up to getting screwed. Yeah. Look, I believe that if you were the business side partner, you should be able to write it. If you're the, if you're the writer side partner, you should be able to do the business. But you should both specialize in the thing, because specialty is important. But one of the things that I always like, I have drawn a comic book in the past. It's called Gherkin Boy and the Dollar of Destiny. It's been a pickle that falls in the black hole. It's an adventure across the universe to get back home. It's weird. It looks terrible, but people still buy it. But I'm not going to be a professional artist. I'm going to outsource that. But I understand art. I understand page makeup and composition. I understand these pieces. So I can intelligently talk about them, but I don't, like I don't do them. I also have editors on my books, but I know how to edit. I just, that's not my core competence. And my core competence is to write, but I'm able to have to have an elevated conversation with people. And they, and understand these other things because I've studied them. So regardless, I think that if you want to be the, if you want to be in publishing as, as like a marketing director, the publisher or whatever, you need to understand how to write. You don't have to be a great writer, but you have to understand how to write and do the artistic things, whatever you're trying to sell. You know, when I was selling cell phones, I understood the components of the cell phone and how it worked. And all of that, but I couldn't go and fix it. Couldn't go and fix a tower, but I understood it enough to be able to speak about it intelligently. In the same way, if you're the writer, you need to be able to, to go and, and discuss the business stuff so that your business partner is, is, is treating you like a partner. It's a partnership. It's not a, this guy is being hired to do the business side. And I will say that years, that for years I got screwed in many, many ways because I didn't understand website design. I didn't understand the, how to try to negotiate a contract. I didn't understand these things. So when people would say things to me, it would go in one ear and out the other. When I, when I sat down and learned all of this stuff and how it function and how brands functioned in here, I'll show you a, I was able to exponentially increase the, our brand. I don't have our brand, our brand stuff here, but you can see this little B is, and this green background is the key to all of our marketing. We have the, we have green table clause. We have, we have B, we have a B on our website. We have all of our, all of our books have a little B right there on the, a little B right there on the edge. When we do our little giveaways at show, this is our current giveaway at shows. It's a little B dressed as a monster. Like we have little buttons that are green with the B on it. Like, if you understand the branding, if you understand how other successful businesses built their brand, you can then take the best pieces of it and build your own brand and make, and, and, and expect that it will work. This is the main thing that I don't understand why nobody does. I don't understand why people don't just go and steal all of the things that have been successful from all of these companies. I don't mean like actually like pirate them. I mean, there's a reason why every burger joint looks like a McDonald's. There's a reason that every coffee chain looks like a Starbucks. There's a reason every gym looks like a gold's gym. I mean, because they don't have originality is because they model the success of the people before them. Yeah. The second, I think it's called second. There's the first people that try it. They get like the big reward. And then there's people that get confidence from the people who succeeded. They get 20% of the reward and there's a lot more of them, but it's a lot better than nothing. Right. Exactly. And there are things that you can take very simple things. Like this V is incredibly cute. Why? Because MailChimp has an incredibly cute monkey. That is the core to all of their branding. So it has a little like thingy. Like a little like male hat. Yeah. And they do a different one every month. So it's okay. I can't do a different every month. Maybe I can do one every quarter. I'll print a thousand of exclusive. You know, oh, look, people need a really cool cover. Because when you look at a cover like this, it means a lot more than a cover. I don't have any crappy covers around me, but like people are immediately drawn to that. So I went to shows and I went to bookstores and I saw all the things that are successful in the exact kind of industry that I wanted to be. And then I just did that and shockingly, shockingly, it's going to shock you. I know it worked. You didn't all work. But like I kind of took what I liked about it. And I made it my own thing. And then like growth happened. It's not that like sending out a weekly email is better than sending out a monthly email because people get more accustomed to seeing you constantly. So when they see you in person, they know they more likely to remember you and you can have a real conversation with them. How about five videos a day? That's a lot. A lot of videos a day. But one a week and then sending it in your email would make sense because then you're touching the audience. It's all about I'm a firm believer that an audience will allow you to touch them as long as they give you a reason. You'll give them a reason. A new reason to be touched. Yeah, yeah. By the way, it's important to tell when I say five videos a day. I don't mean hey guys, just stupid shit. I do tons of coaching because that gives me the material to make informative videos. So I have like a very high bar of quality. Not necessarily filming, but content. Right. But there are people like John Lee Dumas that do a video a day. I watch a video, a Game of Thrones video every day. It's like a new like take on the last heartbeat. It's a new like Game of Thrones video every day and I watch them. I don't necessarily watch them every day, but it's new brand new interesting content. You welcome it. Yeah. I mean, yeah, I mean, I look forward to it because I like that content and we are nothing if not rather than is for content or rather than is for content. Now, yeah, this becomes different when like the John Lee Dumas one works or the hundred dollar MBA, the hundred dollar MBA, the guy who does webinar ninja, I believe. Forget his name, but he did like an MBA course every day and there's 10 minute thing every day. So I don't want to say discount that you can never do five times a day is way too late, but doing one really good big deal a day. I don't know, but there are also people that are very successful that do one a week or one a month. Yes. I mean, like Seth Godin does, does a lot. But there are other people that do like instead of doing one 300 every day one country word post every day, they do like one 2000 word one or one or two times a week or one or two times a month. So, you know, it's it's really important that you know you have this. This is what I do in like the actual one on one, which I don't do that often anymore is it's easy to get this sort of baseline. Most people come to me when they don't even have a baseline. That's why I stopped doing one on one because I was like, it's not even worth it for me to do a one on one with you because I'm literally going to be teaching you from kindergarten. You need to go and learn like. Yeah, I know it when you when you feel like you there's something that you taught a lot you made videos about you wrote about and you find yourself. I use the word rehashing just kind of explaining something that they should have looked up before getting on a call with you. Right. I just don't like wasting their money like if you're paying me $2,000 a month for private coaching, like I will gladly like I will take you step by step to it, but it's better if you looked at a bunch of stuff and said, OK, now I need this personalized to me, you know, instead of instead of OK, let me teach you what a sales funnel is. Let me teach you what all this let me teach you with these and this and this and this and this are. I'd rather you like I'm writing my first nonfiction book, which is basically I'm going to hand to all people and be like, hey man, read this and then. Yeah, actually get stuck somewhere. Don't just wait at the starting line for somebody to take you. I think that's one of the things that people get wrong when they do all sorts of coaching there. They come from a point of zero to come from zero place of zero and then when they don't get a lot out of the coaching. Sorry, I should say this is what people don't know. This is why I think people don't get a lot of the people that don't get out of coaching one on one coaching. This is why I think it's because they come from a place of zero and then they pay $2,000 a month and by the end of that first month, they're at one and you're like, what the hell did I just pay for? I could have looked this stuff up online and I'm like, you're right. You could have looked this up online. I don't know why you didn't because the value of me or of a coach is that we've done it before and if you've come with it, if you already know these ten concepts, I can now take it and individualize it to you. If you don't know those ten concepts, I have to explain those ten concepts to you when you could have just read it online because there are a lot of things you can read online but it ain't everything. There is a point that the internet has basically said, we're going to teach this information for free, but anything else, not all. That's where you have to be more personalized, right? Have you found that yourself? Well, what I found regarding what you said about the time thing, it's I explained to everybody that I work with. I'm going to teach you the process and if you're just, you know, we're going to customize a process for you, that's going to work. But whatever that process will be, it's not like you do it and then it immediately works. It's like the gym. You do it and then you're gradually going to see increasing results. But with the internet, you're going to see increasing results exponentially. So let's say somebody wants to also get a coach. I tell them about attention. So I explain them, okay, within two or three months, I can pretty much guarantee you're going to get your first client. But the first month or so, it's going to be pretty boring. Unless you do something really impressive, which isn't sustainable anyway because you just started. So basically it's like a rocket that's taking off. And most people don't realize that. I mean, there are two axioms which I talk about with my, you know, with anybody who I'm coaching or people who watch my videos. And the first one, which I think is the most important one, is they say, just be consistent. Like even if you're doing it wrong, just don't stop. Like just keep being consistent because time will exponentially grow everything. So you'll never see somebody who goes to the gym every day or even three, four times a week for five years and he still looks the same. You see people who just started. You see people who maybe quit. You see people who are really great at it. But where's that guy? Where's the guy who's doing it wrong for like 10 years? Where is he? He doesn't exist. Is that guy who does it wrong eventually gets it right because he's either hiring, he's like doing it himself or he's finding that things that he does really well and things that he wants to do. I think that's so important is to just start like what you said is just like do it and do it consistently. My podcast we've been doing for most of this year. We've got 140 episodes now and most of the people tell me when they come and say, oh, thank you for this thing or that it's great. It's the consistency. You just keep doing it. You didn't stop. You hit this like threshold point and you just keep going. Keep coming up with my things so I keep listening to it. But the minute that you stop that consistency the people's attention is gone. I always tell people, stop going to shows. People would forget about me in a month. I almost viewed like you lose credibility. Like there's so many people are like, hey guys I'm making a YouTube channel and I'm like, okay. Everybody is automatically like is he going to stop on the first week? Is he going to stop on the first two months? Most people don't want you to stop but it's like you just predict like when will this guy stop. And what I noticed is that at certain milestones even my haters started commenting like one of my haters. One guy was like a hater commented like comment as usual. But he started off by saying irregardless of me being a hater and I'm paraphrasing respect for the consistency because I have been doing five videos every single day for I think almost three months now. So that's literally like that's like 90 times that's like 400 videos. Right. So he's like respect, you know, you're doing it wrong you're an idiot, I hate you, but respect for being consistent. Right. So yeah, there's the milestones where you maybe start a channel, nobody notices and then after the first week or so a bit of people notice because they're like oh so he's not going away yet and then you do it for a month people are like oh so maybe he's staying a bit more and the more you do it the more you kind of gain people's confidence in you because when I look at people commenting on my channel every time somebody comments on my channel for the first time like it's still not that big that I can't remember who comments and who doesn't every time I see a new comment I'm like I'm so grateful thank you for making this comment because I know that this person probably watched like four or five, six, ten videos and only now has the confidence in me to do that because it's an investment to actually write your opinion when not everybody's doing it so like you said you're touching people so every time somebody comments somebody new comments or somebody you know just does anything related to me, talking to me I'm like okay it's somebody that I've like penetrated that threshold where he now views me as a person he sees me as somebody who's part of his life who's not going to go away so he trusts me to connect with me to communicate well I mean that's I have a very simplified sales funnel that I teach people because I think sales is way easier than most people make it out today and I think the reason that there are some way sales traders because they make it more complicated than necessary so there's three stages of to me there's three stages of of a person who is going to buy from you the bottom stage is that they consider buying from you the first is that they know you the second is that so if it's like this first thing is they know you then they have the light and they have the trust you then they will consider buying from you then they will buy from you at each level of that people fall off the ship or shredder but one of the ways that you do that is through buying triggers and one of the biggest buying triggers is commitment so what you're talking about is you're making a commitment to your brand by continuing to show videos and they're making a commitment to you to watch the videos and every time you post a video you're affirming your commitment to your brand to your audience and every time that they comment or like or do they're renewing their commitment to you yeah now I just have a simple question for you okay let's say that I manage to stay consistent with this right now we're at 2016 for five years so literally we're talking about 7000 maybe 8000 videos every day for five years I like what I think would happen I'm not sure if I said this is a question or not what I think would happen is something like watch mojo you know the YouTube channel where they basically it's like CNN they just upload shit like all day long like every three four hours upload upload upload upload is that basically every video like you said it's like it's like books it's like the more books you have the more people have to go to so I exhaust topics so quickly because of I'm making you know so many videos it's like this topic okay I killed it I can't even talk about it anymore then this one then this one then this one so it's gonna like spread out imagine like 7000 anchors on every topic known to man and I can talk about you know on an expertise level so the way I think it will happen I might be wrong but what I think will happen is like imagine like huge like the Titanic and I'm like pulling down many many anchors to try to like push it down and then eventually there's this critical mass moment where there's so much content there that the whole shit like bam like like flips off and then all hell breaks loose and then like all the 7000 videos like you see somebody like Jacksepticeye you know he's a PewDiePie fan and he's made like 200 300 videos before PewDiePie you know kind of made him famous so now you look back at his videos you know so his first video doesn't have like 20 views anymore doesn't have you know the second video doesn't have 30 views they have like you know 100,000 200,000 50,000 100,000 so like you said about the books it's retroactive people when you get famous people check out the previous content and they fill it up so you have like more cups to fill up so I might be wrong but I believe that's what will happen like suddenly bam like a flood because everybody would watch all the videos so if I had to guess if you were doing this for five years and had 7000 videos it would be way better than your 100th video or your 400th video oh yeah and you would also very the so the problem with creating 7000 videos if they're all over the spectrum is they're not necessarily made for one individual person they're not from one customer customer avatar in my case it is I talk about so if they are hang on so if they are I think you're going to get much I think it will be much better define who that avatar is in four and a half years four years and nine months also the production quality will go up significantly and just because that's what will happen with everyone even Buzzfeed the production quality will go up in five years because there will be more production stuff in five years the more you do it the better it gets so I can already tell if you go back to the first couple episodes of my podcast these new ones are way better but yes people do still go back to the beginning ones and listen to those I don't know why they do that because they're not as good the interviews are good but the rest of the content not so good they want to see your journey I know I definitely did that with a lot of people right so I went to when I used to read a lot of webcomics less now because I'm more busy but you go back to something like the beginning of any arcade or the beginning of XKCD or the beginning of a lot of other ones you'll see the you'll see the journey you'll see how bad they were compared to what they are now or how different sometimes they're not bad at the beginning but they are much cruder they're much different they definitely don't look like the same thing as they are now and that was what happens over time you get better at defining your audience you get better knowing what your audience needs too so even if somebody is so even if somebody is very honed in their customer profile you may not necessarily know what that customer wants or needs until they actually like until you get one that has like a thousand views and you're like oh I should probably replicate that and then you do it and that one gets another thousand views and all the other ones get like very little right but then like you go okay so if I do that and that and that and these if I focus on these four things I focus on interviews I focus on like short tips maybe I break my long piece up into like 10 short ones and do like 10 things if I do these four things it will increase but you don't know the things that my audience wants changes a lot over time and it takes time for me to like drop those pins and see which ones like have sold it makes 10 or 3 to 5 books a year and hopefully one of them goes gangbusters and the other ones do well enough to sustain yeah but the more the bigger your audience and the more track record you have the easier it is to make your audience will tell you what they want but your audience also gets bigger when you have that hit like when you have a shareable environment then you'll be like oh that one got a thousand I'm going to do more like that but again to me there's a book called The Pumping Plan by Michael McCallowits who talks about a lot of stuff the thing that I take away is not the thing most other people take away the thing that I take away is the pumpkin plan is about how I'm very simplifying about how big pumpkins like state champion winning pumpkins come to be and basically what happens is they plant all the pumpkin seeds and they harvest the ones that are the biggest and they those and then they harvest the ones that are the biggest from that and they just keep breeding the biggest pumpkins but they that's the thing most people get away with it what I get away with it is planting all of the seeds is the only way to know how to get the biggest pumpkins if you don't know if you don't plan all the seeds you're not doing a youtube channel and a blog all whatever the things writing books and all of those things if you're not like negotiating your own contracts and doing all these things and doing the sales and the marketing if you don't do all of it you don't know which one is going to catch on like for me we're looking to shows and going to shows doing a podcast writing books and showing other people how to make a successful business is the thing that caught on for me but for sure it's not going to be something that catches on to somebody else and so by doing 7000 videos you're definitely going to have a lot of seeds planted and by planting a lot of seeds my my thought what I think would happen is you'll see maybe 10 seeds that keep consistently growing the biggest and then you'll plant the seeds and then out of those 10 you'll see 3 that keep getting the biggest and then from those 3 1 that grows the biggest and that's the thing and that happens and then yes you'll have all of it you'll have all of the things also to go back to but you'll have the big Mamma Jamma one as well that's the the calling card like shit I need to make $5,000 right now what can I do well if I make a video about making out with each other it'll get me $5,000 I know and I just know it will I know because like I have 4 other videos of canvas making out with each other and they all need to be $5,000 so my audience wants that from there does that make sense? yeah that's why what I like about making so many videos is that it basically puts me in a situation where I have to experiment because you know everybody fluctuates during the day so I'm in different locations in different moods different topics I run out of topics so I sometimes make like a depressed video a happy video an angry video an energetic video a calm video inside you can make ones here I've seen some of them they're in different places and you might see that the ones that you're outside walking down are the ones that are the biggest yeah well I made a video today I just got this girl I basically just started walking and felt a ton of energy just started ranting not even a topic specifically just talking about goals and this girl wrote down wrote a comment like Robbie I'm so glad I found your channel it's my birthday but I'm not even going to celebrate I'm just sitting and binging on your videos because they're so valuable thank you and when I read it I was like oh my god this is what I do this for like and by the way regarding experimentation maybe you know that maybe you experienced that maybe not but I've had days again because I made so many videos every day I don't have the luxury of preparing content or getting myself pumped up for it I sometimes I just don't have what to talk about I have to like out of thin air come up with something something that will help people because again the channel is about coaching so one day I made this video in my car just literally driving in my car and just filming and I just I thought it was a really shit video I was like yeah and this I just talked about this topic for like 20 minutes and I thought it was a really bad video and a few people wrote down like in the comments like dude that's like your best video one of your best videos ever and I'm like really? and so I learned oh people like it when I'm depressed because they relate with that they like it when I'm negative they like it when I'm happy they like it when I don't have anything to talk about I'm just gonna find that over time yeah yeah by like slowly pushing the boundary on everything yeah because again the whole thing the whole reason the pumpkin thing works it's because every action naturally has a variation to it no action is the same as the previous one so if this is like the you know the scope of the things you've done then this action has a bit of variation here a bit of a variation here so so every time you expand the box a bit and you're like oh this works this works this works this works and now you're comfortable with more stuff and I also notice I expand that comfort zone on a business level like oh bigger audience you know more money per sale better ways of closing and you just grow variations on everything so every single part of the business that you do just gets better with time so one last thing is that what I tell people is to do the pumpkin thing but not just in their marketing strategy but like even I'm like I made a video yesterday I told people like look the reason you're not great the reason you're like you don't amount to anything in all your years of trying things is simply because you haven't committed to something you always like jump oh maybe this maybe this is the one maybe this is the business maybe I'll do this maybe I'll do this but you never really commit to something and just keep going when it gets boring so I mean yeah that's like the pumpkin theory in of its own anyway so if I'm somebody who wants to write books and like you said it's not really a good idea to start you know experimenting on your own without you know having somebody who knows shit how would you recommend people get help from you so my name is Russell Nolte R-U-S-S-E-L-L-N-O-H-E-L-T-Y and my website is RussellNolte.com I'll include the description in the bottom by the way awesome awesome and it has a link where you can set up a 30 minute pumpkin thing that as Roddy can tell you will probably end up being an hour also it has my blog which has my podcast the business of art as well as other musings that I have um you just want the podcast the business of art if I had to turn your art into a business you've got over 130 episodes including interviews tips tricks live shows at thebusinessofart.us it's also available on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play and everywhere else you get your podcasts and then if you want to see how we do it ourselves and if you want to be pressed.com is my publishing company join our mailing list you get some free comics and then uh those are the three main things I have a new book coming out hopefully next year about call and sell your soul how to build a creative career um and that's the the best thing to do is reach out and at least see where you stand now go to the site sign up call and then you know it's free no obligation um if you're in a place that looks good to make a book you know we can go from there if not I will be very honest and frank and tell you the sorts of things you need to do but it takes no time to just go to our site and uh look at our blog on business of art or either Russell yeah I talked again I talked personally to Russell and uh this was probably the most like brutally honest uh talk I ever had like like when he doesn't think you know something is like no like you don't know that you know you're not doing right he doesn't sugarcoat it which I really appreciate uh and just to make sure I might have missed it where can people get your books maybe on digital like uh my digital books are all on amazon uh you can just type in my name or you can go to want to be press dot com and uh the hard covers for want for the body to train are only available on our website uh but everything else is available on amazon just type in my name Russell I'll definitely be getting the comics so it's been a long time my last comics was Batman two years ago the digital's are on our site too so if you just want the digital copies because you're international not in America you can get them all on um the want to be press website perfect perfect awesome dude thank you so much thank you man have a great day you do