 Hello, everybody. Today we are here with Jack Pitman, who is a YouTuber, a PuzzleOpshipper, and a good friend of mine. He did a lot of videos with Jack in his YouTube channel. How are you, Jack? I'm awesome, man. It's the beginning of my day, and I got five calls today, which is pretty busy. Normally, I try and be very free. Cool. Can you explain a bit about these calls, how it works? Yeah, yeah. I have a Calendly link. This is just a really simple scheduling tool that allows anybody to book time with me, essentially. They just go to the link, and then they save the time of day that they want to talk and what they want to talk about. I have options because I run a YouTube channel. I like it when people talk to me, and I'll publish the videos on my YouTube channel. For me, getting that content is the payment, but I also have an option to talk privately. If somebody wants to pick my brain and not have me record it, then they can pay me 20 bucks for 30 minutes. I started this three or four weeks ago, and people have actually been using it, which is crazy to me, but it's been another income stream, which is awesome. Nice. It's about any specific subject, or you're talking about different subjects in the videos and in these calls? Any subject, technically. Like the person who schedules the call can pick. For example, if another YouTuber wants to schedule a call with me, like you with this one, then they can just go to the link and schedule it and pick the subject that we talk about. Typically, it's about dropshipping or self-employment or online income from courses, these kind of subjects. I also get calls about Nicaragua, about from tourists who want to come here and they want to ask somebody who lives there what it's been like, yada, yada, yada. But technically, somebody could just call and we could talk about, I don't know, like planting or something. Technically, there's no limitation. Nice. The people about the Nicaragua comes to you because of your video in YouTube? Yeah. Yeah. I've got like 20 videos about living in Nicaragua, so people see that I'm here and they want to ask questions. I do content about like sometimes traveling. A lot of it's about like the cost of living and comparing how different things are in Nicaragua versus a place like the US. Cool. Nice. I really like your lifestyle as you know. I believe you went just where it's good for you, where you like. I wanted to ask you today about what are you doing right now, like still dropshipping or just YouTube or what are you doing right now? Yeah. Right now, my focus is Skillshare. So I guess that's not entirely true because I also focus on YouTube, but I make content so regularly on YouTube that I don't really have to think about making it. It's just kind of how I cope with life and how I respond to the things that happen to me. So I don't think about my time on YouTube, but I do like spend a lot of time recording and reaching out to people and communicating and talking to people. But Skillshare is definitely the thing I'm trying to like make big, if that makes sense. And Skillshare is a course marketplace. And so after I actually got band dropshipping, like the end of last year, I got in over my head. I had an enterprise store with over 100,000 items and then it was super complicated. But after I got banned, I took a look at my life and realized that I had an opportunity because even though I had lost my income stream from dropshipping, I still had income from other income streams. And I had an opportunity to change everything that I'm doing with my life and make sure that every part of my day revolves around something that I love to do and that I want to do. And for me, dropshipping wasn't in that interest because my focus is on people and working with people, making content with people and educating people. So I came across Skillshare, which is a course marketplace platform where you can create courses and then you get paid as people use them and also as you refer people to the site. And the main draw for Skillshare for me is the fact that it has a monthly fee. So instead of buying each course individually, a person just pays 15 bucks a month and they get every course on the entire platform. And for me, a lot of my audience is international. So they live in countries like Nicaragua or Morocco, where the cost of living is really low, but it's also hard to find work. So these people don't have as much money and they need information. And so I'm really happy that I came across Skillshare because even if you're paying for it, 15 bucks a month for every course that you want is a really good deal. And that being said, you can get Skillshare access completely free. If you sign up through an instructor's free trial, like mine, for example, or anybody's, you get two months. And then if you make one course, 10 minute course, you get a whole year. So technically anybody in the world can access Skillshare for a whole entire year and educate themselves about something. And for me, that's really, really appealing because I don't want to just be using opportunities that are unique to Americans or unique to a small percentage of my audience. I want to be doing things and earning money in a way that I feel really passionate about. That is also things that anybody in the world, like whether they're in Morocco or Nicaragua could also do. So I feel really excited about Skillshare. Amazing. So actually, if you just doing if you just do one video of 10 minutes, you get one year for free in this Skillshare site, right? Yeah. So you have to meet the minimum requirements for the course. But Skillshare courses in general are much shorter than most other courses. Like one of my courses is 20 minutes, two of them are an hour and one is like 30 minutes. It's actually kind of hard to make a 10 minute course. So there's a couple other minor requirements, like you can't just have one video, it has to have an introduction to your course. So maybe like three or four, two or three minute videos is what you would need to actually do. And aside from that, as long as your videos and 720p, there's no glaring issues with your audio and you're not talking about any prohibited subjects, then that's all that you need to do to get the year of membership. You would actually you would also need to participate in a workshop, which is kind of like, it's a forum, and you post your progress. So you'll be like, Oh, hey, I'm going to start on this workshop challenge to get this course created in a month. And then as long as you post the course, once you finish in the workshop discussion, that's what actually gets you the year of Skillshare membership. Amazing. What can I learn though? So Skillshare, most of the topics on Skillshare are focused on like the arts, like creating and drawing and like painting these kind of things. So you're going to find that subjects, of courses of those subjects, it's super, super saturated. There are tons and tons and tons of them. Whereas on other subjects like online marketing, there's a lot of options but not as many options as they have with like watercoloring and that kind of thing. Whereas when it comes to like programming or reselling, there's not very many options available on Skillshare. So there's a couple. But because Skillshare isn't as lucrative for the instructors when it comes to having a course on the platform, Skillshare pays really well for referrals, they'll pay $10 for every free trial user you bring to the platform. And that's really good money for a referral system. However, when it comes to people actually engaging with your courses, they'll pay five cents per minute watched. And for a lot of instructors, that's just not like they could sell a course on Udemy or on Teachable and sell it for $300 a pop. And in Skillshare, you would need to get 6000 minutes to get that much money. So for a lot of instructors, especially if they already have an audience and they're established, it's not Skillshare isn't they don't they don't want their audience to know that they have courses on Skillshare because it's so much cheaper for the student to get it on Skillshare. And this also means that a lot of the like major courses that are really well known and doing well on Udemy or Teachable or other platforms, it's less likely their instructors are going to go over to Skillshare and make a course there just because it's such a cheap option for the students, which means that the instructors don't earn as much. So in a lot of subjects, there's like, there are videos, but there's not a whole lot of competition. On Skillshare, even though it's art focused, you can make any course as long as it's not about dropshipping or multi level marketing, or like a couple other banned subjects, like you can't talk about sex or relationships. And I think that's pretty much it. But they can learn the things like marketing or Instagram. Yeah, or like selling on eBay, these kind of things. Cool. So we can find our interesting things. And how is if you compare it to YouTube, because I said that Udemy is more profitable than the Skillshare, if you compare it to YouTube. So YouTube, YouTube and Skillshare is a really lucrative combination. And that's just because Skillshare's Skillshare doesn't pay well for people engaging in your course, but it does pay you really well to bring people to the Skillshare platform. So in the affiliate world, for what it's worth, just to take a step back, affiliate marketing, right, when you're being paid to offer services from somebody else, or to market somebody's product, right? It's pretty typical that you can get paid, like if you're getting paid $10 for referral, you're going to get that payment once the referral actually pays something, like not when they sign up for the free trial, but once they actually sign up for the monthly service, right? To get $10 for a free trial sign up is a really unusual and very, very incentivizing situation. Most of the time with affiliate systems, you don't get paid unless the customer pay $10 just to have the person sign up for a trial. So this is why it pairs so well with YouTube, because if you're running a YouTube channel and you're generating your own traffic, it's a really easy way to monetize that traffic, because it's not like you have to convince somebody to use some random product that they don't care about. It's really easy to be like, Hey, you can learn almost anything on this platform. Here's two months of free access. You sign up for it. I get $10. It's a super, super awesome situation because it's so beneficial for the person signing up. And it's really easy to convince people to sign up because it's honestly a good situation. And so with YouTube, what I view YouTube as is traffic generation. YouTube is how you establish yourself and you get known and you get and then you can start directing traffic from your YouTube channel to other and also people are going to benefit from the traffic on your YouTube channel. Like that's how we met, for example, like I run a YouTube channel, you videos with you about your products on my channel, so you can benefit. And YouTube is super powerful for this reason. Nice. I wanted to ask you a bit about your lifestyle now, like you travel and how do like, can you share with people what do you do now, like in life, because you moved from the United States out and how it works now for you? Yeah, absolutely. So so when that's the best thing about earning money online is that you can change your location to effectively double or triple your income overnight. Like I don't know anything else that you can do that with like you can make one little tweak and then boom, you're earning two or three times as much money. And the reason we can do this is because if we come from a country with a high cost of living, like Israel or the United States, these kind of places, then by by being able to earn enough money to get by in that country, you've already passed the point way past the point where you can earn enough money to live in a foreign country with a low cost of living, right? So in my case, I was in the United States, in order to really become self employed in the United States, you need to earn about $2,000 a month. There's some places you could get by with like a grand a month. But in general, you need about two grand a month in the US to to live. And if you're living in certain areas, that's nowhere near enough money in a lot of places in California, that's, that is not enough to survive, you won't be able to pay your basic bills and have food. So compare that to Nicaragua, where like my local friends, because I live in Nicaragua now, they went to college, got a degree, got a job, and they're earning $7,000 a year. So that's a little bit more, a little bit less actually than $4 per hour. And that's like with college education and everything. So you can live here, you only need like $500. It's a quarter of the amount of money you need in the United States. So what I found was I was in a position where I was still working a day job. I was a barista at Starbucks, and I had gotten the job at Starbucks, specifically so that I could become self employed. Starbucks has a very flexible schedule. One of their things is that they will work with you so that you can accomplish whatever you are trying to accomplish. Most of the time this is going to school, right? But for me, it was getting my own my my self employment status being able to be my own boss and earn money from my computer. That was my goal. And Starbucks was the thing that allowed me to ease into that. But what I found was that I had to work at Starbucks in order to get my bills paid. But the time that I was spending at Starbucks was getting in the way of me actually growing my business. And so I had an opportunity to move to Nicaragua and live there for a month. And I did that. And then I ended up like falling in love with a place and ended up coming back here and live here for nine months. And in that nine month period, I was able to quit my job in the US and become fully self employed. And I ended up going back to the US for nine months thinking Oh, now that I'm self employed and I'm earning money, everything's going to be great. I won't have the same problems I had before everything's going to be happy. But I actually found I was really lonely and depressed and the US is really expensive. So I actually ended up moving back to Nicaragua at the beginning of this year about four months ago. And it has been awesome. It's so much easier to save money. I don't really have any burdens about whether bills will get paid or any of that. It's a completely different mentality here because I have faith that everything will be taken care of like my rent here could triple and I would still be okay. So it just gives you so much more flexibility and and typically you would sacrifice friendships or you would sacrifice whatever connections you have where you currently are to go to another country like this. But I got really lucky and I ended up meeting a community of really awesome people and establishing a history with them in my past when I was here at first. And so essentially, I moved away from Nicaragua and I stayed in touch with all the friends I made and I actually got closer to them and ended up moving back in with them. So now I have all the benefits. I have the cheaper cost of living. I have the community, the feelings of family and everything all here. So it's been amazing and it's so easy to accomplish things just because there's there's nothing holding me back. And I can do anything I want. It's really great. That's amazing. So actually say that with $700 in Nicaragua, you can live like a great life without any problems. Yeah, like so 700 bucks wouldn't give you enough to completely fix most problems because so if you're earning $700 a month, you're earning more than most Nicaraguans who are educated and working. But that doesn't mean that you have enough money that if something really like if somebody you love dies, you can't necessarily fix the situation, you know, or if you get in some kind of legal trouble and you need to bribe somebody, maybe you don't have enough money for that. Whereas if you have like a grant a month, then you can basically do anything. Because at that point, it's hard to spend that much money unless you're really, really being frivolous. So you start saving up money without even really trying to just because everything's so cheap. Me, for example, the ways that I spend most money are like buying lots of food to cook for for a bunch of people because I love to cook. And in the states, I had to be careful about that because it's easy to drop like $800 on a meal for like five or six people. And that's just one event, right? Whereas in Nicaragua, like my splurge is at the grocery store costs like 40, 50 bucks. And that's as high as it gets. Whereas splurging in the US, I would pay like $200 or something like that. And so I don't even really have to fix things because I just splurge and buy food and cook for people. And it ends up being cheaper than it would be elsewhere. So I'm still saving money. Amazing. Is it dangerous to live there? Any problems with the security there? So it's a bit complicated because if you look online, Nicaragua, in particular, there were some events that happened in April. And essentially, what it boils down to is there is there are these protests against the government. And in these protests, sometimes they get violent, you can get shot, other people can like the police could shoot you or somebody fighting against the police could shoot you. It is possible to get hurt if you are participating in one of these protests. And also, if you do participate in the protests, you risk the government, like listing you as a member of these protests, and then you'll be targeted by the government and they'll try and like jail you and deport you and that kind of thing. So essentially, if you participate in these protests, there are big problems. You do not want to come to Nicaragua. It is really dangerous. But if you have nothing to do with these protests, it's completely fine. And so like for me, I'm not really affected by the things here because the cost of living is low. It's hard for locals to find work. But because I earn online, I don't need to worry about that. I honestly don't feel any different here than I did in the US. Granted, I didn't live in the safest places in the United States. Like I lived in Wheeling. And Wheeling had a big has a big opiate problem. So there's a lot of like homelessness and like drug problems and that increases crime rates and these kinds of things. But I don't feel like in my day to day life, I'm not stopped from doing something that I want to do out of fear or safety. If I want to do something, I'm comfortable to do it. I go to grocery stores. I go to the park to skate. I don't like walk outside alone at night. I don't go to the markets after the afternoon because they're pretty dangerous. But aside from that, honestly, I don't feel in any more danger than I did in the US. But again, it's really important to understand you cannot participate or go to the protests. If you're going to these events, you are risking your life. Oh, okay. So I think that we will end with one question. What would you recommend to someone who want to try this lifestyle like you do right now? Ah, okay. So there's there's one thing that I think distinguishes people who are able to become self employed and do what they want from people who are unable to do so. And that is one thing about the way that we think almost everybody wants to be self employed. We want to be able to like who wouldn't want all of your bills covered without having to do any work every day. Like you because you took care of all of it in the past, you know, I mean, that I think everybody would want that, right? Like everybody would want to not technically have to work to have your rent taken care of your food taken care of your entertainment, all taken care of that sounds ideal. But most people don't end up actually living that lifestyle. And that's because most of us don't believe that it's actually real. We think that people who are like that, they are just well connected or they're lucky, or they are super smart, or they have worked super, super, super hard. And that's how they got that situation. But really the only difference between people who can do it and people who can't is the way that you think. If you want to be self employed, you have to treat self employment like any other occupation. You can't you can't doubt whether doctors make money or dentists make money or plumbers or electrician or carpenters. All of these people make money. Obviously, there's no doubt about that. Yet when we talk about self employment, a lot of people are really skeptical. And they'll be like, I don't know they are they they're scamming people or not. There's so many reasons that that we can't do it. But really, in order to do it, you just have to really believe that it's possible and want it. And you pursue the information and apply it in your life. And maybe it seems scary and intense now. But three or four years, you'll have the life you want. Amazing. Actually, it's all about the mindset. I think absolutely. I think this is relevant to anything in business. Like, I think that businessmen without the right mindset, it will not work because they would always have problems and they would always have hard times. And only if you change the mindset and you understand that this what should be so everything will work in both ways. And the business and the lifestyle. Yeah, every obstacle isn't a reason to stop. It's a problem to solve. Exactly. Thank you very much, Jack. I was really, really, really happy to do this interview with you. Thank you for coming here. Yeah, this was fun. It's fun to be on the other side. Bye.