#36 - Jessica Lackey: How to (Actually) Build a Successful Online Business and Leave the Entrepreneurial Casino

Corey Wilks, Psy.D. (: 00:02

From your perspective, why are so many online businesses more of a gamble for people?

Jessica Lackey (: 00:11

you start out thinking that you're going to have the vision of success, that everyone's like, you're going to have six figure business in 60 days, right? Like they're selling you the dream. And then when you really look behind the hood, the math doesn't math, but we're sold this seductive image of you can do it. Just pull yourself up by your bootstraps. It really starts to.

compound with the American dream. You can do anything, rugged individualism concept. And people can take a total advantage of that. So it's totally a gamble.

Corey Wilks, Psy.D. (: 00:53

How do you make it not be a gamble?

Jessica Lackey (: 00:57

You have to know what you're trying to build and how it actually works. And no one actually wants to tell you how it actually works. My first experience with trying to build an online business, I was a life coach, but I didn't come into life coach thinking that I wanted to build an online business. I came into life coaching because I wanted to do something other than my terrible corporate job. And

I found Amy Porterfield's Digital Course Academy and I'm like, ⁓ of course you just need to sell a course. And then I'm like, well, who am going to sell said course to? ⁓ so there's another product for that. And I didn't stop to think, I was like, you know, I didn't stop to think about, ⁓ how many people do I need in order to, I mean, I didn't go to, I didn't really go down that road fully. think we never built a

course until I had the audience size to do it. But they made it seem so simple. They made it seem so simple. And I was like, well, I'm working a full-time job. I don't have time to do anything else. And so that's why I started going down the rabbit hole of online business. like, well, they just said you just launch a course and you can make your millions.

Corey Wilks, Psy.D. (: 02:17

I am always, I've learned to be super skeptical of not obviously like get rich quick schemes. Like those are generally easy to suss out, but I've gotten to the point where like, I'm super skeptical of anybody who ever tries to teach me how to do business ever because it's like, my first question is always like, okay, well what the fuck have you built first? What have you built outside of this thing? Right? Cause

I understand that teaching people how to do what you have done is an in demand, viable and can be very like ethical and moral way to do a business. Right. If that is your second or third business, right? Cause then you're, quote unquote selling your solidest, right? And I have done this myself, right? I have a course on how to build a coaching business that I

fought against myself to build for years because for a long time, cause I was like, I don't want to be the coach who coaches coaches on how to coach. Like I shred, I don't want to fucking be there, but I was getting so many people inbound who were like, Hey man, how did you do this? How did you build your business? How did you end up working with, you know, this person or that person? How do I, you know, or Hey, I am a coach. How do I actually scale?

my knowledge through other products and services and things. And I honestly got to the point, I was just tired of answering the same questions over and over again. So I was like, okay, fine. I will just record my answers to all this shit, everything I've learned, package it up. And then it's like, Hey, if you have questions, just buy this thing over here. But I don't want to be that guy, but there is demand for it. And I rarely ever even talk about it, promote that course.

But so many people, their first business is teaching you how to build a business. Their first business is like, I teach writers how to write. Okay, cool. What the fuck have you written? I haven't written anything. Like I have taken the writing courses like that. I have taken the YouTube courses like that and the coaching I've taken. That's why I'm so skeptical because I've taken so many of those courses and the best ones are from people who know what the fuck they're talking about.

But sadly, very few people meet that criterion because they have done. And again, like this is, there's nothing against, you know, I have nothing against Amy Porterfield or Brendan Bouchard or Stu McClaren, like all these are the people, right? ⁓ cause they are the forerunners of these things. But as far as I know, they all also did other things before that. And then this is the thing they're kind of doubling down on and known for right now, because there's so much more money.

Like at a certain point I was making more money for my course on how to coach than I was coaching, which is both stupid and inevitable. Cause it just, it scales better, right? Like it scales better, but I'm so skeptical.

Jessica Lackey (: 05:22

Right.

I think there's a difference between let me tell you how I did it and let me tell you about how business works because I'm in the place now where actually I don't like most of my clients won't do what I do to build a business and I'm not doing what they're doing to build a business because I've been moving from.

Like I've done lots of things in my career. There's the pre, which I'm sure we'll talk about, but in my solo printer shift journey, I've been a subcontract consultant. I've been working in a boutique consulting firm. I've been a fractional COO for multiple seven-figure organizations.

been a coach, I've been an advisor, I've been a teacher, I've launched a course, I have a membership. By the way, if you're listening to this, don't try to do all these things in the same time period, because it's really tough. you know, when you see how all of those different businesses work and you start to see, okay, well, the person in the consulting lane is going to tell you, here's what I did to become a consultant. And the person in the life coaching lane is, here's what I did to become a life coach. And the person that's in the creator lane,

says, here's what I did to be a creator. And you look across all of it, and you're like, this is where my, I think, special sauce comes in, is like, I'm not going to teach you what I did. I'm going to help you understand the landscape and the frameworks for how to make decisions about business, not what to do. And that's a very different skill set than, me tell you what I did. I'm like, I don't want you to do what I did. Unless you have an operational background from McKinsey and Company and

know, Nike on your resume, you probably can't do what I did. That's not my job. My job is not to teach you how to do what I did. My job is to help you understand how to make decisions and why.

Corey Wilks, Psy.D. (: 07:17

Yes. And that comes from demonstrated expertise. You've cultivated through doing the shit, right? And that's my thing of like, so there are so few people who have done the thing they're, they're trying to teach people or they're, trying to help people do it. Right. And that's what saying. Like it's just, it's so rare because it's so much easier to take a course on how to build a course. And then you build a course teaching other people how to build a course.

That is the most common thing, right? Or again, like my DMS are full of people that are like, Hey bro, I'll, I'll set like 40 to 60, you know, prospect calls for you a week. And you know, I'll help you get to 10 K a month or 30 K a month or some show. like, one, you've never done that for anybody. Why aren't you doing that for yourself? And then you wouldn't have to do this for me, but also I don't want a full-time job from you. Like four to 60 calls sounds miserable. But going back to the thing you said about

The math doesn't math related to this. One of the traps I see so many people get into early on in entrepreneurship is they say, ⁓ I will put out a course or an ebook or something. There's nothing wrong with that. They're very viable things. The issue is, and honestly, I think an ebook is probably honestly a more viable thing in that an ebook you can put up on a marketplace like Amazon for discoverability.

So many people build like a little, you know, downloadable thing or course, and they don't have an audience to support the price, right? Like if you build a one 99 course and you have 200 fucking email subscribers or some shit, even if they all bought it, unless they all buy it every month and refer a friend, it's like it literally, the math doesn't math, right? What has been your experience with, with the math, not math.

Jessica Lackey (: 09:15

that a hundred percent. There's two or three things where the math doesn't math. One is again, just straight audience size. ⁓ this is not just applies to, ⁓ to the course model and the creator model, but this applies to services. ⁓ you know, if sheer volumes of numbers, like, you know, the average is like 3 % of your audience is really willing to buy at one time. And I'm like, well, if that means you're only meeting one or two people a month, new people, then yeah, you're not going to make much money until you start really ramping the volume up.

Two, the math doesn't math related to one time purchases. Again, people haven't really thought about, what's the business model behind this? the $200, you know, that's why accounting firms, they should just be making bank, right? I'm like, all right, you need like 20 clients at like 500 bucks a month to make a pretty good living and then they stay with you forever.

because it's a repeatable, consumable type of service or business. And it's different than thinking like, OK, like the VIP day option, the VIPs were super hot in the services industry a couple of years ago. And I'm like, do you know how hard it is to get one new client every single month for the rest of your life? That's an unsustainable business model. And then the third part about what the math doesn't math is, let's say you launch a course. And you've got

a thousand people on your list for say that's like a pretty good size list and you have 60 people buy the thing and that's a 6 % conversion rate which is I think which is pretty outstanding. When you try to go sell it again if you only have 1,100 people on your list you're not going to get nearly the same kind of the response. I call that either the second launch syndrome or the second year slump. It happens to service providers. Second launch syndrome is you exhausted all the latent enand in your network.

You didn't grow your audience, right? So you sold it once. It was great. Now you have nothing, you know, the next time you go to sell it or this or cohort, no one bought it because all your super fans bought it the first time and you didn't fill your audience. Same thing for service providers. You, everyone has a pretty good first year. I mean, not everyone, but consultants come out, they go to their warm network. They go to their, you know, their former employer. They, they got professional contacts and they usually get a handful of projects in the first year and they put their head down and do the projects. And then they look up.

a year or two later and they're like, my referrals are no longer providing me referrals because they've given me everybody they know. I worked with everybody that I kind of already knew and now don't know anybody and I don't have an extended network. So these are where the math doesn't map. And this is where the dreams and the promises like you just don't know enough people. You you haven't thought about a long-term business model and you're not consistently doing the work to expand your network and expanding your audience. That's when

the cool first launch, just craters, and it's not a business. And that's where people get really stuck.

Corey Wilks, Psy.D. (: 12:15

So then what is your perspective on how to solve that?

Jessica Lackey (: 12:19

One is figure out what kind of marketing you want to do. Some people are built for traffic. Some people are built for longevity. You got to figure out your personality. ⁓ I love a retainer model. I love it. Well, for a while. if I'm with a client for more than two years, I tend to get a little antsy because I tend to want to go faster than they do. But like, I'm cool talking with the same client over and over again.

some people are like, I get bored with that. I'm like, great. Then you have to have the stomach to launch new things or continuously grow your audience. Like, I think this is, that's part of, ⁓ your business model personality. Do you get bored really easily? Do you like to launch new things? ⁓ if you want to launch shorter things with more, less responsibility to the client necessarily, you better be prepared to market the hell out of it. If you, don't want to have to market that much, don't design a business model that

has short term containers. These are the design decisions that no one thinks about when they're like, I'm gonna have a course. I'm like, all right, awesome. I didn't want a course. I didn't have that kind of marketing engine behind me. I didn't wanna do that kind of content marketing. I didn't wanna do paid. At least I didn't, four years ago when I started. So I built a business model that didn't rely on me getting new clients all the time. It was fantastic.

Corey Wilks, Psy.D. (: 13:44

So I, I'm assuming we both have, I have done most of the business models and learned the hard way, all the business models that I don't fucking want to do. Cause I think a lot of us kind of fall into this trap throughout our journey of, well, let me just try on different models because this one worked for this person, but this one worked for this other person. And it's almost like this, it's, it's overwhelming because either

you fully adopt their entire business model and that doesn't work for you either because it outright doesn't work for you or the reality doesn't meet their inter their, their version of right. Like there's a lot of behind the scenes things going on that is making their business model viable for them that you don't know about, which is why it isn't working for you. Or we try to like hodgepodge different pieces of different business models, but it's like,

that Frankenstein version often doesn't work very well again, because we don't have a lot of those behind the scenes things. ⁓ and it really, ⁓ leads a lot of people astray. like for me, you know, I've obviously, I, I still do coaching. I have a couple of self-paced courses that I don't particularly promote, but they're available on my website. I have my community, ⁓ which is, you know, much more enjoyable for me, ⁓ purely because

It simplifies my, my offer stack, right? I've like, Hey, if, if, if you want more of me, either hire me one-on-one or join the community, like that's, that's pretty simple. ⁓ it gets me away from the launch model because I have learned. I hate everything about a launch model personally. It's very fatiguing for me. ⁓ I, I like the, ability to just, I guess if I'm going to mix metaphors,

Seeing it as more of like a garden of like, this is the one thing I have that I continually tend to and grow. And with, you know, an ever evergreen offer, people can join it anytime and it's recurring. People can join any time. And then it's like, your focus can slightly shift away from acquisition to just recurrent and retention. Right. And I love focusing on retention over acquisition. is far less fatiguing and I'm never like,

Cause acquisition, like you said, at a certain point you burn through your network. So now you're getting colder and colder as far as people's awareness of you and what you have to offer, which shifts your messaging. It shifts your copy. It shifts everything because when you like, I love reading copy for a warm audience versus a cold audience, right? Because for a warm, like it's, fundamentally different, right? And that's another trap people fall into. Sometimes it's like, I am reading the warm copy.

of a creator I really admire. And if I try to copy their copy, it won't work because it's warm copy. And I'm trying to market to a cold audience. And that's a real nuanced thing. I don't think a lot of people talk like really consider enough is like how warm or cold is your copy basically. ⁓ but I can focus on that, that warmer copy. can focus on keeping people happy rather than trying to convince people. can make them happy.

Jessica Lackey (: 17:06

Yeah. And that comes with differences too, right? You will be facing the challenge in, you know, six to 12 months of what happens to the people that are more veterans. I'm facing this in my world right now at this time is like, okay, well, I'm not having to get a bunch of new people, but now you're going to have kind of two tiers of your people in your world, the people who have been with you forever, who know your frameworks, who are looking for more advanced content. You'll have some people who are newer, who

don't know you as well. And so the community infrastructure you change or you build will change, right? Like your onboarding will change and you're, you you might have to think about doing different things in your retention model for your vets versus your new people. ⁓ These are, and you as the person running this cannot get bored. Like you can't necessarily say, ⁓ I don't feel like doing this now because if you do, then you drop your main source of income, right?

There's a reason why some people really love the cohort model because they start and stop and everyone starts at the same place and ends at the same time. And they come in with all the same language at the same time. And there's a beauty to that. And then you get to take breaks. These are the parts of also, as we're talking about this, you can't mix pricing with different kinds of business models, right? You can't be like, well, I'm going to take someone's premium pricing from over here and necessarily try to apply it.

to this particular business model. Is it the right market? Is it the right promise? Is it the right transformation? The whole like shit about like W price and charger worth and stuff like that. I'm like, one of the things that has always pissed me off, someone's like, oh, well, let me tell you how I went from charging $5,000 for the brand retainer to a $40,000. And I'm like, let's just be real clear about that. You changed who you work with, full stop. Like the $5,000 brand could have been a B2B smaller organization, but the $40,000 brand intensive.

is not a small b2b organization. It is not a solopreneur. It's a widely different audience. let's not just pretend it's from expertise. Expertise is a part of it, but it's not mindset. I mean, mindset's a part of it, but it's your fucking market. Sorry, am I allowed to swear on these? I assume so. I thought so. I know. But yeah, but like that's where, ⁓ you know, like, you know, one of our colleagues, Ollie Richards ⁓ is in the

Corey Wilks, Psy.D. (: 19:20

For sure. It's my show first fucking sure.

Jessica Lackey (: 19:31

you know, business consultancy game. And he works with similar things that I do, some education businesses and things like that. But he's working with people who are close to seven figures and I am not. And therefore he can charge $2,000 a month for a group coaching program and I cannot. I mean, I could if I was being highly unethical in a market with a lot of free cash floating around, but we are not in those times right now. And I think that's what, I couldn't copy his model. Actually one of my forms, like,

kind of business coaches right now. Like I don't want the model that this person is building either because like I'm like, it doesn't work for my people. They're at a different stage. So like, he's like, you should have less calls. I'm like, if I have less calls, people don't like one, they want to leave because they're not going to get results because they're not at the stage of their business yet where they can be quite as hands off. Like that's not who I'm working with. And so it just continues to, these are all the questions about what kind of business do you really want to build that no one asks?

You build the business where if when you fell into the online, I call it the entrepreneurial casino. When you fell into the casino, which floor of the casino did you enter on? Did you enter on the Danco? I want to be a creator, you know, right in four hours a day and making us, you know, $750 million with my deep work routine. Did I come into the Instagram, you know, life coaching space where, you know, did I come into the.

B2B, let's grind it out content marketing-wise. Where did you come into the casino? That's probably the business you started first without any question about whether or not the responsibility level, the impact level, the financial level, the requirements on your time, whether any of that works for you. Now, to be fair, I don't know if there's part of the reason I wrote my book is no one actually laid out all the different kinds of business models in depth and says,

Here's kind of what's not the stage of business, the responsibility that's required, the impact, like the impact on your time and money. ⁓ Some business models are more lucrative than others at the start. No one laid it out because I don't think anyone was interested in ⁓ deconstructing how business really works for the expertise business owner because no one wants to buy that. Like, ⁓ learning about how

business models works is not a sexy promise. Let me show you how you can make your first six figures in just six months. That's super sexy. Understanding the mechanics of business foundations and business design and trade-offs, that is, ⁓ I'm quoting you, I remember this piece, was a, ⁓ my God, was like Quickie Dickie and the captain.

Corey Wilks, Psy.D. (: 22:21

Yeah, gnarled bar. Yeah. A clarion call for expertise is the article.

Jessica Lackey (: 22:25

Yes,

I remember. I remember that really clearly because everyone wants to follow like the kid who's teaching you how to do the thing versus like the, well, you could go that way, but do you really want to, you know, be that prolific and content marketing for that type of business model? You can, do you know the trade off? And like, I really, I was actually channeling that piece earlier today when I was writing something. Cause it's not about where to go. It's about where to not go in some cases.

Corey Wilks, Psy.D. (: 22:54

One like, so going back to like the recurring model, right? Recurring is the, the Holy grail, right? Because you just, money keeps coming in and it is easier to compound. It's easier to like forecast and budget and know how things are going to go. It seems like the perfect situation, right? Which is why software, one reason software, you know, companies can make so much money, right? Cause they're all recurring revenue. Most are recurring revenue models.

memberships are similar. I, at one point, um, Tim Stoddart, I don't know if you who Tim is. Um, Tim's in the entrepreneur space. Love Tim. He's, he's a phenomenal entrepreneur. Um, I won't put he bought copy blogger. I don't know if he sold it or not, but he's, he Tim's in a bunch of shit. He's like a legit entrepreneur. Um, has had, had multiple like marketing companies around, um, like directories and shit and bunch of other stuff.

And Tim and I worked together for a while, ⁓ on a paid newsletter. Basically Tim hit me up. He was like, Hey man, I love your writing. ⁓ I want to, I've been doing this paid newsletter on like bootstrapped entrepreneurship, but I just don't have the bandwidth. Are you like, would you be down to ride it? Not ghost ride it like ride it just, you know, as a partner. like, I get to get paid to write a newsletter about entrepreneurship. Fuck. Yes. And it was super fun.

⁓ and it was steadily growing. It was, it was going well. ⁓ we ended up spinning it down, but what I quickly realized was recurring revenue also means recurring responsibility. And that's, well, you talk about those trade-offs, right? Like people don't tell you that people like, especially now with Substack, right. And how Substack I'm assuming has like low key paid people to move over and they're promoting them to the algorithm and shit. ⁓ so that they bring all their followers over and shit, but people look at Substack.

And they're like, oh, pay newsletter. That'd be great. Like, I just charged $5 a month or a hundred dollars a year or $400 a year, whatever it is. And I get paid to be a writer. I can be a real writer. Okay. But you just gave yourself a job like a week or whatever your cadence is. You gave yourself a job. Nobody gives a shit. If you're sick, nobody gives a shit. If you're stressed or you can't think of what to write, it's a fucking job. Now it's a responsibility. There's nothing wrong with.

Right? Like Paulina, ⁓ Pompano with the profile, she's, she does a great job with that. Right. It's a mix of free and paid and she loves it. She comes from a journalism background. But one thing I talk a lot about is like the hidden cost of success. So like success has two costs, the cost you have to pay to achieve success, which is like grinding it out, discipline, all that shit. But the hidden cost, the second one is the price you pay after achieving success. So it's like, Hey, both this goes back to like business models and shit. I'm like, Hey, before you start,

a paid newsletter, let's assume it does go well. Are you willing to pay that cost of success to maintain it? And that to me is such a clarifying question to like help you see further down the road. Like when shit isn't, it was almost like new year's resolution shit. Like all the fanciness and shininess has worn off all the excitement, enthusiasm is gone and now it's, it's mid April and it's just like, do I still want to be doing this? Like, is this still the shit that I want to be doing?

And for most models, for most niches, for most whatever, the answer is going to be no, but you have to know that before you start. And there's a balance between knowing that and like experimenting a little bit, but thinking through that before you over invest for me has been huge for helping me avoid a ton of miserable business models. How's that landed for you?

Jessica Lackey (: 26:41

Totally. In my book, I have four lenses of responsibility. It's one of the chapters in the designing your business vision. So there's self, team, clients, and community. So there's yourself, the cohort. If you sell a course, ⁓ you have no responsibility. I mean, you do to some extent. like, you know.

If someone bought your course and they didn't finish it, there's no responsibility there. You do your best to try to make it good, and you try not to scam people out of their money. ⁓ But if they don't finish it, you do your best, that's really it. The responsibility shifts to yourself, and then marketing the damn thing with that kind of acquisition. ⁓ You have responsibility to your team. ⁓ This may be, especially in the whole one person.

I can make a million dollars a year with just by myself, even though I'm not actually doing it just by myself. I just don't have any employees. And I'm just not telling you about all the contractors and project managers I have in, know, that type of one person business. I'm like, you know, the one famous person I think we're both kind of thinking about, I'm like, I'm like, you've spent how much on this person to redesign your website and this person to set up right message for you and this person to help you with your marketing. Yeah, they're not employees, but sure.

Corey Wilks, Psy.D. (: 27:43

For sure.

Jessica Lackey (: 28:01

Let's just be real clear about it wasn't really one person business that did this redesign, but

Corey Wilks, Psy.D. (: 28:04

Or so,

you have a team of VA's, but because none of them are full-time employees, cause you're going through an agency, it doesn't count, but you sell how to be a solo per anyway, go ahead. Yes. Yes.

Jessica Lackey (: 28:10

Right.

Right. But exactly. when you have

the exactly, but when you have the team, you also have the responsibility to the team. But then also you have the responsibility to like not fuck around with your business model too much because you have a team thinking for clients. Like, you know, what's the responsibility? Are you selling an ebook? Are you selling a one-off course? Are you selling high emotional like coaching? Like when you, know, you're, you're coaching like, yes, you don't take on responsibility for client results, but

You cannot have an off day when you show up with your clients. You must meet them where they are. You must show up. If something's going on in your personal life, it doesn't come into session with you. can't. That's a ton of responsibility. Comes with a price point that you're charging for it. And then there's a responsibility to your community. As you grow, do you start outsourcing to under-qualified success coaches? Do you make sure to spotlight and signal boost?

⁓ individuals who otherwise wouldn't be, know, Wouldn't be seeing the spotlight. Do you think, how do think about pricing and how do you think about scholarships and how do you think about, you know, justice pricing? And these are all again, every business model can work, but you know, if you, if you're thinking about like, I want to have accessible pricing so that everyone can join my community. I'm like, okay, great. That means you're probably either need a ton of people in there, which jeopardizes the experience a little bit for some of your clients or

You have a ton of responsibility because you're probably not going be able to pay people super well to be able to help you moderate. Like these are all trade-offs and choices and there is no good and bad. They're simply not choosing and then exploiting one of the parts of that responsibility circle. You know, some people exploit their teams. Some people exploit their clients. Some people exploit themselves and ⁓ they don't pay themselves and they pay super high. And, know, they spend all their money on coaches and I'm like,

That should be money in your pocket. You know, or they got, I like a fire client once because like she wouldn't get, you know, I was kind of working with her, but she couldn't get things in advance well enough. wasn't, she wasn't doing the job of running a community because she was a, her business personality was a, a launch and bust kind of model. Um, but she wanted the sweet nectar of recurring revenue.

And cause she didn't want the responsibility of launching, but she also didn't want the responsibility of running the team and running the community. so ended up folding. Cause people were like, I don't feel like I'm getting what I, I don't feel like I was getting what I was promised and people would, know, and I'm like, you, you gotta pick. And I think that's where a lot of the kind like with, with strength training, there's like the newbie gains, like, yeah, you can have more money and more time and more autonomy and more freedom.

When you start, right? Like you can have most of those things, but in the messy middle, before you've scaled up some kind of business that lets people, let's really let's it run a little bit on its own. If there's a business that does that, like all these things come with trade-offs. And I think that's the, you know, the miss the under discussed concept, like, yeah, you want to have a YouTube channel that gets you monetized. I'm like, all right, that means millions of people are going to see you day in, day out. Are you comfortable with that kind of visibility?

My nervous system doesn't really want that kind of visibility, which means that's not my business model.

Corey Wilks, Psy.D. (: 31:42

Well, and this is why I'm excited. You're writing this book one, cause you were the person to write it, but also it is a, there's a high need and

I wouldn't necessarily say there's demand in that. I don't know how aware people are that they need this, but I think as soon as people hear about, they're like, fuck, that's exactly the missing piece. Right. I've been looking for and not even known. That's what I needed to be looking for. Cause like there's so much granularity of this. Right. So even let's dig a little bit more. So like even like, let's say you, you go with the community model, the recurring model. Okay. At that we can talk about pricing and pricing psychology and like all that other shit too, but even something as simple as

learning when to go against what the gurus tell you. So like most of them will say, do monthly because monthly is more accessible. I was like, okay, but is one, is this the model that I want? But also does this model, this pricing structure facilitate my goals for this community and what I want this community to be in order to be its best for everybody who joins. Cause I know like, ⁓ like Jay Klaus at one point,

He had talked about how the reason for his community, he doesn't do monthly and that, you know, that could always change in the future. Who knows? But he was like, I want it to feel like a commitment for the entire year. And I know, ⁓ other people have talked about how, you know, somebody joins for a month. may take longer than a month for them to really get the results that they're looking for. But if they only paid for a month at the end of that month, they have to ask themselves, was this worth it? And it's like, if you do monthly.

Basically what that is saying is that person has 12 check-ins throughout the year to say, was this worth it? Do I want to keep doing it versus a yearly model? It's like they ask that once every year, it is a higher barrier to entry because it's typically gonna be more money, more of a commitment, but it gives you as the, the facilitator of that community room to breathe and grow and, take them on a longer journey. It's almost like short form versus long form content.

almost right of like, if it's a short term engagement and commitment, you have to keep them hyper engaged. You have to like do all these things versus like, look, motherfucker, you're here for a year. We're going to get you where you want to go, but it's going to take a minute. Right. And it just, it, it also means that when people join, everybody there knows all this person is going to be with us for, for at least the next 12 months versus like this person could be here for three weeks and then then dip. Right. And the set level of granularity that

is very important for your business model when you're thinking about it, because entrepreneurship is overwhelming because there are a million little decisions you have to make on a regular basis. And any one of them probably won't, but has the potential to be the make or break decision you make that day.

Jessica Lackey (: 34:48

Yeah. Well, even in that, like, this is the question of, you know, like, it depends on where this community, like it's taken on this example, community fits in your offer stack. So like I have a membership that's $30 a month because I really want it to be like a no brainer price point. Right. And so I have I had I have some people who joined and it took them two to three months to like get into the community. But it was so low priced that they felt like, it's an easy opt out. I have had people.

leave and then be like, want to come, I'm coming back. Right. You know, and then it's also about what's the, like, what's the purpose of the community. So for mine, my membership is over. It has changed since I launched it, but it over indexes on the rhythms that, ⁓ keep a business healthy. we have an, ⁓ an hour once a month on metrics review because the people who track their metrics have much more success.

We have an hour once a month on what I call sacred sales hour, which is where you do outreach. And I have a framework for doing that. we have like a quarterly, we have a, know, a quarterly planning session, a monthly call, right? But, you know, I don't have a forum, so it's easy for, and I have like, I have like just enough curriculum so people understand like the monthly rhythm and cadence and how the thing works. I'm like, you know, that's really supportive, like dip in, dip out when you have time.

but you're gonna get the emails, you're gonna get the reminders, you're gonna see the calendar, you're like, shit, I should review my metrics, I should do some outreach, right? ⁓ I can come in when I want. And then if you wanna do an actual business transformation, that's really great for people who are just trying to get in the rhythm, see what I'm all about. It's also really great for my alumni who are like, I do not wanna keep paying a super high price because I need to go do stuff in my business, I like to put that money in my pocket, but I just wanna stay engaged. But if you want the full on forum,

The coaching call, the live calls, the curriculum, like, yeah, that's a minimum six month commitment for me. Um, you know, and some people are like, you know, six months, I'm changing some of the business model around cause I'm trying to make it a little more modular and then entry point. But it's like, okay, well I'm like, people are like, I'm going to put a community together. like, what's the purpose? Like, what are, um, you know, April McLean talks about like, what are the, what is the goal they're there for? What are the regular.

gathering points and how are you facilitating member to member connection? Like that's what community is all about. If it's not those things and it could be like a group coaching model that's just done in a forum, that's fine too, right? But those are the like, what is the purpose? Why do they keep coming back? Where do they, what's the job to be done? And again, that's not as sexy as just like not your group program. like, well, I don't know. Does this need to be done in a group? Does this need to be done individually? Should this be a course? Should this be a course with office hours?

Those are all very, those all do different things. But no one, again, that's much more of a nuanced question than, well, you did it. Now just launch a course or, you have a big audience. We'll launch a community. ⁓ People don't pay if there's no rationale for how they're going to get value from it. And that rationale of how they're going to get value matches what they need. Right? Like I am in the lab because I don't have a place to ask a lot of creators what they're doing. And so I'm in the lab for that.

Am I in the lab for any of Jay's courses? Love him, but not at all, right? Like that's not what I'm there for and not what I pay for. I pay for, you know, people being pretty active in the circle community. Um, I don't go to any of the live events. Like that's just not what I'm there for. So again, these are all the much more nuanced questions that, uh, no one's teaching you how to ask when you're thinking about like, well, what is this business that I'm trying to build? Again, not sexy.

Corey Wilks, Psy.D. (: 38:35

Well, then there's, there's the other part of like,

this like the field of dreams thing of like, if I build it, they will come. So many people spend months and tons of money and tons of just stress and effort building something they don't know if anybody actually wants. And I remember cause like I've wanted a community for a while, but I'll, know, I didn't want to build one until I felt I could really dedicate, ⁓ what I needed to dedicate to it.

I've done, you know, cohort based courses. I've done group coaching programs, a bunch of one-off shit, self-paced stuff. I've, like I said, I've played with a lot of the different models. Um, and I remember at one point I was considering launching, um, a community for higher, high, basically for my friends, for like higher level creators. And so I went to some of my friends, I was like, Hey, I'm not pitching you on this.

But here is my pitch. If you think about other people at your level, is this something you would want? And without exception, every single one of them said no. I was like, really? And like multiple people in very different, like creator niches, and they all said no, and they all said no for the same reason. Well, one or two reasons. One, they were like, I don't want to join another community. It's too much of a commitment. Or.

Another said, every time I joined a community, I ended up being the expert. Everybody asked me questions about, and I don't want to do that. I'm not getting paid to be here. And, but, the biggest one is like, I don't want to be in a community at my level because if I need something specific, I'd rather just hire an individual person to help me either to do it for me, which is what most of them said, or to, you know, like consulting coaching kind of deal.

I do not want to be a part of another community. And I was like, well, fuck, was thinking about something almost like Hampton, but online for creators, right? Like this premium kind of thing. But every someone was like, I do not want that at all. And that was great. Like it sucked, but like it was great because it told me that definitively people, the people I was targeting for this didn't want this. So that saved me a ton of headache. So I was like, okay, well then

who is looking for something like this that I also want to serve, right? So, okay, this isn't going to be for seven and eight figure creators. That's fine because they just purely don't have the bandwidth to be a part of another community like this most of the time. How do you think about sort of pre-selling or validating an offer or validating a business model before you over index on it?

Jessica Lackey (: 41:24

Well, I think there's two build it and they will comes. I would think there's build it and they will come, which is a problem. And then post about it and then they will come, which is also a problem. So both of those things. Like don't they, they increase the latency between you and the person. So people are like, I'm going to post about this all the time in order to find clients. like, ⁓ do you know who these are? People are, do you know how to get in front of them? Do you know what they're thinking? And.

If you don't know who they are and you don't know how to get in front of them, what makes you think your content is going to be shareable enough to get in front of them? If you don't already know how to get in front of them, like that's like, like, you know, I was given this piece of advice ⁓ by an early coach in there. If he's like, if you can't talk to 50 of your ideal clients, don't create anything and don't post a bunch of shit until you can go find 50 people. And if you are not willing to build your network far enough to go talk to 50 people,

who could potentially want to buy your product or service, you have no business being an entrepreneurship. Again, something else that no one teaches is like, they're like, oh, I'm just going to post on social media and tell if I have people. like, you have no audience. Who's going to find you? And are you going to be speaking enough to what they need to know about in order for them to like your work? Unless you got a lot of business experience or your network already is who you want to serve, that doesn't work anymore, if it ever did. And that's the same thing as build it and they will come.

Both of these things keep you at arms distance from your clients. unless you get into a market incredibly early with arbitrage, you got onto Substack before Substack was cool, you got onto LinkedIn before everyone got on LinkedIn, unless you happen to be early enough to find market arbitrage opportunity, which is tougher now, you're not going to post your way to

the market you want unless you already have that network. So go get the network, go talk to about, go get the network before you spend all your time posting. are like, I'm so busy. I'm like, do you have any clients? And they're like, no. I'm like, what the hell are you doing every day? Like literally, if you have no clients, your number one job should be not be writing. It should not be, I mean, I like to write to think, which is a different conversation. Your number one job should be talking to as many people as humanly possible to get close to your target clients. Yes, you'll want to write it down.

what you're thinking and hearing. why is your calendar not three to four hours of network building calls every single week? Yes, it's tiring as hell. But if you have no clients, what else are you spending your time doing if you're trying to build some kind of services business? And even if you're trying to build a creator business, go solve their problems first. I have some issues with sort of like the, you know, the.

You know, the ship 30 for 30 right online type of material of like, just post every day and people find your stuff. Right. But like, actually really, really appreciate what Nicholas Cole and Dickie had to say about like, just go do the work for people. Show that you can do it, earn your way into those networks and then get paid. Like go do the work. Like what else? Like you can post about it or you can just do it. And then you'll find out what really works and you actually speak from authority about it.

Corey Wilks, Psy.D. (: 44:43

that and like, ⁓

I'm Gary V. He talks about document, don't create, and just this idea of like, go live life, do the thing. And then you can share what you've been doing, or you can like share an insight you gained from doing the fucking work. But too many people like, and this is, so I use the term creator a lot. And like with the creator alchemy lab is created podcast, like also ship. And I talked about how for me, if you create, you are a creator. So that encompasses

solopreneurs, entrepreneurs, authors, you know, coaches, all these other different people, other types of entrepreneurs. I love the term creator because it encompasses all those things, but a lot of people have resistance to the term creator because like, I don't want to be an influencer. I'm like, I influencers is under that umbrella, but it isn't creator and influencer aren't synonymous for me personally. And I'm really trying to like change that, that, that rhetoric, but a lot of people

go into the quote unquote creator economy with the mindset of I need to be an influencer. So they say, okay. And, most influencers are just vapid. Like they have nothing real to say. Right. And it's like, I got a, I got a friend who just started like an influencer agency and I'm like, buddy, I love you. I can't fucking stay in the work you do. Right. Like, cause it's just like, they're in bikinis all the time or they're just by the pool. And I'm like, no,

One of these people has had a new fucking thought in 17 years. Anyway, it's a whole thing. It's my own bias, but maybe they're all members of MENSA. I don't fucking know. Um, but there's just this idea of, let me focus on finding the right hook, the right, the right template, the right format with the right image and then the right CTA. Then I'll go viral. It's like, okay, that is relevant. After a certain point, you do need to make it to where people

uh, it does catch attention, but within that, are you saying anything that needs to be said? And are you saying it to people who need to hear it? And are you posting it in a place where those fucking people are like, um, I had Amanda nativity at on her episode will come out at some point. And one thing that she and I were so, you Amanda's big on marketing and shit. And one thing that we were talking about was like, I don't know how true this is, but I've heard

that Lamborghini doesn't make commercials for the reason that people who can afford a Lamborghini aren't sitting around watching TV. I don't know how true that is, but as just as a, as a mental model, I love it. Right. Of like, are you creating con are you doing content marketing for in a place where your ideal client is? And are you saying something that they need to hear? Or are you, are you just getting too wrapped up in like the packaging of it when what is inside?

is is fucking empty. How do you think about that?

Jessica Lackey (: 47:50

Like, I, it depends on what you're trying to do and who you're trying to work with. If you're trying to work with someone who's one step, you know, one step behind you or a couple that's different. Um, like I actually, it's funny. I started a YouTube channel and I don't actually watch a lot of YouTube because I can't find things I want to watch on YouTube. don't, you know, to be fair, like my entire feed is like 75 hard videos, right? Or it's like 75 hard and all amped all. I love, mean, like I'm not.

Like Ollie, every time I'm trying to make an Ollie style video, it totally fails. I don't know how to do it. Right. Because I'm also not providing like, you know, the eight ways to be more productive. Like my, my people, my people are beyond that. They're like, they're interested in this kind of like long-form conversation. They're going to hear me rant about business models for, you know, two and a half hours, but they're not interested in like a 15 minute hooky clip about like, you know, the

three mistakes you're making with your marketing. mean, maybe they are. I'm not interested in it, which is why all the videos I make that I like that are terrible, even though they're like, have a hook and shit like that. I don't know how to do that. And that's why I don't like watching YouTube videos. Cause I'm like, where's the highly nuanced conversations about business growth? ⁓ my God, the guy, Dan Martell, he has a YouTube channel and I tried to watch it. I'm like, I can't like it's like how to 10X everything. And I'm like, ⁓

You're just telling me build my audience check. Okay. ⁓ So yeah, I think people get over indexed, particularly if they came up in the creator world. They get they over index on the hook and the packaging. And I'm like, are you of saying anything of substance? I'm I'm launching a new, you know, of course, I'm a creator, right? Even though like I'm really a teacher and I'm really a, you know, curious person. But I'll create I've already got like the next like four books planned and, you know, the next workshops and things like that. But, you know, it's really, you know,

A lot of people in my world right now are talking about like having a signature methodology and having a signature offer. And a lot of people, think, you know, there's probably courses on how to create your signature offer and shit like that. There's hundreds of them. How do you create your framework and things like that? How do you know? But that stuff is lived. That stuff emerges from the walking in the doing of it. It emerges from the patterns and the observations that shit comes last, not first. And everyone's so focused on how to make it visually appealing that it has no depth and soul to it.

might be hooky, might get you attention, but it probably won't get you revenue. And my job is not actually to make you get attention, it's to make you money. And I'd like to make you money and not like from selling your services, from selling your courses, not just getting views. And those are different things. it's a different measure of success is like happy clients, returning clients versus, you know, shares.

Corey Wilks, Psy.D. (: 50:42

why another person I've had on that, I know, know, Jay Akunzo, ⁓ again, his episode will be at some point and you know, I, I love one thing that Jan I talked about was like, you know, resonance overreach, don't market more matter more like all these other things. And cause I love that. Right. And I like you and Jay, especially because both of you are very no bullshit to the point that like, like even in the episode I did with Jay, like he pushed back on something and I called it out of like you like,

Not, not that you're an asshole, but like, you're not like, you're not a yes, man. Like you are down to respectfully push back and like have a real conversation. And that's why, you know, I wanted to have both of you on here too. Cause like you're very no bullshit. You've very much come from a place of lived experience and you've, you've gone through some of those things. You've seen all the guru stuff. You've seen what actually works, what doesn't work, how people get led astray. ⁓ and like just the, the depth and compassion you, come with from all this.

is very refreshing and honestly, one of the reasons why I wanted to start the show, but with frameworks and things.

I do agree that having your own sort of language, I think languishing is very important, especially like as, as a thought leader, right? In this space, again, this, can be a crunchy term, but as somebody who shapes the thought, the zeitgeist in a niche, right? I do think languishing is important. The issue is, like you said, most people get too wrapped up in

Creating a framework rather than filling a framework right so Because what happens most of the time when you when you hear a new framework and you can tell when like it's been Overpolished because they've already got the fucking trademark for it and she was like I've never heard this before Why do you are why do you already have a registered trademark for it? But then you you you hear it and you dig into you're like, oh, there's nothing new there not because it's timeless wisdom repackaged It's it's a cliche

Like there's nothing new here. You took a regular thing and just put a fucking package on it and made it and claimed it to be your own, right? Versus here is something that I have, uh, either something I've triangulated an insight. have earned the hard way and I have come to create a new language or a new term for this thing or for this methodology. There's so much more substance to that, but that is really hard to teach for people.

It is much easier to say, here's how to create a proprietary nomenclature system for everything you create. How do you think about that? The hard part of that, I've like,

creating a framework, iterating on it, putting it through the fire, and then seeing what survives. How do you think about that process?

Jessica Lackey (: 53:44

I the first part of that process is the process. I'm actually, that's one of my, in my workshop is going to be like how to understand that this part is a process, right? Like one of the challenges with like Jay's resonance overreach is like, I think a lot of people hear that. I love it Jay. And actually we talked earlier today, we have, we have like collaboration happening. It's going to be awesome. But like a lot of people started kind of like saying lofty things to try to be resonant. I'm like, no, that's not actually how it works. That's like,

And he's not talking to the people who don't actually have anything to say. He's talking to people that have lots of say and just are focused on like the wrong angle. But now he's, you know, when people who are earlier stage, they're like, I need to say grand things. And I'm like, no, you need to go work with a bunch of people until the languaging that you use comes out and you need to go write about it and put a framework, put, put ideas together and see, test them with people. So I think this is the, the actual process is you must talk.

You must work with people. must observe. You must be curious, right? That's actually like the part. Then you must go like write it out and test it out. Then you must go back and deliver it with people. And then you must keep honing and sharpening the edge. And I think actually letting people know that you're not going to have a polished framework, it's kind of like honing a sword. Like it takes a lot of time to forge it in the fire and letting people know one, how not to get stuck.

and the steps that they're going to go through, like giving them a map to this process, I think, is really important. So I think it's like, and giving them the accountability. Like the framework is like, yes, this will take you two to three years. We should check in. These are some of the waypoints along the way to things I may think about. So like giving people a map to do the heavy lifting versus like teaching them the end-to-end processes, like giving them navigational tools.

If you don't have this yet, it's okay. You're not supposed to. Like you will not have a signature asset and like languaging and mechanisms and all the shit that people say you need to have to be an expert. You won't have that until you've actually done it with a whole lot of people and written about it a lot of times and like said it out loud 50 to a hundred times. And then you'll be like, ⁓ people will start quoting your language back to you. And you're like, I got something like that's a sign. ⁓ you also, one of the interesting, and I want to get your take on this.

One of the things that I think is like missing from most of the creator economy is sheer curiosity. I'm like the only way in my world that you can stay with this work and have any kind of substance to it is to have an undergird of curiosity. But in most...

surface level creator businesses. They're just like, how do I ape what everybody else is doing versus like, how am I driven by an innate curiosity? I'm assuming you feel similarly in the ones, the businesses that persist and the ones that flop.

Corey Wilks, Psy.D. (: 56:46

So I really like the concept of curiosity. I personally take a slightly different approach because I'm all about like you, dimonia, fulfillment, flourishing, that kind of thing. So I think about it more so from a perspective of conviction rather than curiosity. And I think part of that is like my own wiring. So not that I get wrapped up in fucking labels and shit, but I,

both as a child was formally diagnosed with ADHD and still as an adult meet a lot of those checks. But as a psychologist, I fully officially do not give a fuck about diagnoses like that, especially for myself. But I say that to caveat, I'm a naturally hyper curious person. And that is one way that some people kind of categorize certain versions of ADHD of you're hyper curious. Like as a default, you're always thinking, you're always ideating, you're always exploring. So because that is my baseline,

I don't think about curiosity as separate from myself. And because of that, I think about it more as conviction. Okay. So that caveat. ⁓ and in like, in my community, ⁓ we had a workshop recently around like high conviction entrepreneurship because I think we kind of had this, this sort of quadrant of, ⁓ the things that, you know, how much do you care about something versus how much do other people care?

So if you build something that you care about, but other people don't, that's a hobby. It's an expensive hobby. If you build something other people care about, but you don't, that's where you get into like golden handcuffs kind of territory. And sort of like that sweet spot is what do you fundamentally deeply give a shit about and believe needs to exist in the world that other people also know they need? What is that? Like what are all the different variations of what could be in that quadrant? ⁓ there's a lot more to it than that, but I think about it more like that.

Because I think too many people focus on finding the low hanging fruit, which is also where you get people riding waves, right? Like right now we're in the AI wave. Everybody suddenly is a fucking AI expert, an AI consultant. And before that, the same people were like the web three bros. And before that they were the ghost writing bros or whatever in the fuck, right? Did a couple people do legit work as ghost writers? Sure.

and did a couple of people build really cool projects that were Web3 based? Sure. Most are just riding waves.

And I think either, I think you're fucked either way with that because either you do succeed and now you feel trapped because you fundamentally don't give a shit about it. You were only doing it for the money or for the audience growth or for prestige or some shit status, or you invest all this, you know, effort into it and it doesn't work. And now you're like, well, fuck, I just wasted six, eight, 18 months building something I didn't care about and didn't financially work out.

I really think you're fucked either way. Now, if you see AI as a means to the end, it facilitates something else cool. Then you can go all in on AI because you're not, you're not obsessing over AI itself. You're seeing AI as a tool for the, to facilitate the thing you actually care about. Okay. I think that that conviction piece helps you weather that storm because

⁓ So I mentioned the term eudaimonia before.

A lot of people are familiar with like hedonia or hedonism, like the hedonic treadmill, which is just pleasure seeking. So you do something because it feels good in the moment. Eudaimonia, at least my interpretation of it, is more so it doesn't necessarily feel good in the moment, but over the long term, it is worthwhile to do. Okay, eudaimonia is much more around fulfillment rather than just pleasure seeking. So, and it may feel good, but sometimes it isn't going to. So even like in the process of you writing your book.

My assumption is you have conviction in this book, which is why you spent so much time writing it. You spent so much time refining it through client work and your own lived experiences. And then you work to codify it into a printed format. I am sure there are plenty of times where you just wanted to fucking burn your computer or the book or just say, this is too much, right? I tell people all the time writing to me,

feels like belly crawling through broken glass every time. Whether I try to fire off a quick fucking pithy tweet or I'm writing a, you know, 5,000 word chapter for my book. It's excruciating every single time. So it doesn't always feel good, but it is worth it to me because of the impact I hope it has over the long run. So for me, it's much more around conviction. Do you deeply believe that this is worth doing or not?

Jessica Lackey (: 1:01:49

Yeah. I think it's the end. It's the end because you can have conviction about something, but if you're, I think because you and I are both naturally curious people, like the idea, like, I don't know how you could have can just have conviction about like your, know, like the reason I joined your, your creating off my lab. That was called, sorry. I'm like, I mean like 15 circle communities, but I joined yours because I'm like, you are always pushing the bounds on.

how to think about the topic, how to talk about it. I really liked your high conviction workshop. You have both conviction and curiosity because you are always thinking about what comes next, how do I explain it differently, what model do people need, because you're naturally curious. You're not like, I have conviction that this thing exists, but I lack the internal curiosity to further my own thinking and to express myself. They're just like, I think this just exists, and I'm just going to write a first draft, and there we go. And I'm just going to keep

dead. I'm going to keep just doing what I'm doing without the like, how do I get better? How do I reach more people? Not in a hacky way, but like, truly, how do I, how do I explain this in a way that meets more people? How do I refine my thinking? How do I like, have a like my signature cohort program is called define your foundations. And I'm taking that from a six month, 12 to 15 to the keep adding shit shockingly, 12 to 15 module program to a 12.

month, like six course model. Cause I'm like this, this two lessons I taught on sales, not enough. needs to be sex. Like the, the one lesson I built the two mess, the three lessons I built on clients authority and, and, ⁓ or premise and positioning. I'm like, that needs to be an entire. Like three months with like integration weeks and much. I went from like one framework that's kind of eight off other people's to like my own 15 frameworks, right? Like this is.

Cause I don't know how you can have, I think you can have conviction without curiosity, but that's a flat business model that's just like, let me just do the thing over and over and over again versus like the curiosity. That's like, how do I continue moving it forward? How do I continue meeting the market? How do I not get bored? But also how do I not stay in, how do I stay in? Like, how do I continue like thinking about how do I deepen my connection with people? A lot of people are just like, I believe the shit exists and I'm willing to like do the hard work, but I'm like,

Are you willing to do the hard work? Like, can you do it without like a fundamental or an undergird? Like, I think it's like, can't, you can't separate conviction out. But I think I see enough people who are like, I'm just gonna make all these YouTube videos. I'm like, great, you have conviction. And are you actually getting any better at it?

Corey Wilks, Psy.D. (: 1:04:35

love that. Cause like, yes, I think that curiosity is the driver that allows you to be exposed to the thing you have conviction in. Because a lot of people, it's like you have conviction in something, but you may not have come across what that thing is yet, regardless of your age, right? Cause I got plenty of people who, cause I'm 36. So I I'm officially middle aged, I guess now. So like I have plenty of middle aged people, fucking millennials in middle age now.

to it. Kevin Kelly, you know,: 1000

So for me and his friend, his friend was like, I'm 65. So let's say I die at 80. I have three units left of all the things I could do. What are the three things that I have the most conviction in that are worth my life to pour into? We think about time, money, attention, but we don't think about life invested in something. And I think that's really where conviction comes into is like asking, like, are you willing to, to spend your life?

a portion of your life units doing this thing. If the, if, if you even start to waffle about it, it's like the answer is probably fucking that. Right? It's like that Mark Manson thing. It's either like a hell yes or a fuck no kind of deal. But for so many people, when we're kids, we're curious, but that slowly gets just kind of hacked away through a lot of, I won't go into conspiracy theories and I'll say it's well-intentioned, but misguided need for structure.

throughout like education process, early adulthood, jobs, corporatism. And we just, slowly lose the, the ability to be curious. So then I think that's when you see a lot of ⁓ adults later on try to rekindle their curiosity that they've let kind of die out during adolescence and early adulthood, because it was like, I was super curious. I was learning all kinds of things. like, I didn't have cares. I could just do anything.

But now there's all this, not only have I become conditioned to not be curious, to just accept things and go, go with the flow, basically, except the status quo. But I also have all of this pressure of if I do something that I suck at, everybody's going to judge me. And in order for me to follow my curiosity, that means risking doing something that I'm going to suck at it first, cause I'm new to it.

And I can't handle that barrier to entry, that fear of judgment, right? You know, going to one of my frameworks, the four horseman fear, fear of ridicule. How will other people respond to what I do? And I think that cripples a lot of people's innate drive to be curious between being conditioned and the fear of being judged for doing something you suck at, cripples a lot of people's curiosity. But I agree.

rekindling or re-embracing your curiosity is what will allow you to find the thing you have high conviction in.

Jessica Lackey (: 1:08:06

Yeah. I started my book as a pure curiosity play. Um, I, I was in this like mastermind ethical business leadership or something like that. You know, someone who was supposedly one of the quote unquote good ones. Right. And I was looking around at what, what they were teaching and I'm like, you're a small, you're a coach with a small audience. You're a coach with a small audience. You run a music studio. You're a coach with a small audience. You're a coach with a small audience. Why the fuck are we talking about a lunch model?

Why are we talking about social media? Why are we not talking about sales and proactive? Because this person was a, you know, she had 10,000 followers. She sold to a list. And that's where I got curious and I got angry. And then I got curious. like, why are we not teaching people how this works? And then I'm like, why doesn't anyone know that this person's business model that they're teaching doesn't work for your business?

that and then I saw a bunch of like rampant exploitation. I was in another program and I'm like, this is garbage. And this one famous, famous, like, you know, really seen as like a quote unquote, you know, like paragon of like feminism and stuff like that. She was telling people at one hundred thousand dollars to like, that's when you make your first full time employee. I'm like, with what money? With what money? What the fuck are we talking about here? Like a full time employee. What are you paying them? Seven dollars an hour? This is insane. Philippines.

Corey Wilks, Psy.D. (: 1:09:29

Philippines, that's

it, yep.

Jessica Lackey (: 1:09:31

Like no

one was talking. Those are the those where I got angry and got angry and then I got curious and and like conviction really rolled in ⁓ when it was over the holidays ⁓ and I was like this book has to fucking get done. Like the curiosity wasn't there anymore. Now I'm just like I kept saying I'm gonna have a book done by the end of the year. I paid a writing coach like a lot of money to like work through the process and like there's my parents are like so how's the book coming and I'm like

I have to finish this book now. And then I over two weeks over Christmas holiday this past year, I didn't have any clients. I brought off my week and I went to the coffee shop and I looked at the first five chapters of the mid book because the last part was 90 % done. And I looked at them like there's one of my chapters had like four or five bullet points in it. And that was it. I'm like, okay, I have to do some work now. So that was that was when the conviction really I was in the coffee shop like five or six hours a day for like three weeks straight finishing.

the actual first draft of my book. And then I had to go back after I had to finish the thing. That was the hardest part. I had to finish the thing. had to, had beta readers. I had to actually finish summaries. had to put reflection questions in there. The hardest part was doing the fucking bibliography and all the stupid citations. Cause I cited, you know, I cited heavily all my influences and I had to put them in ALA format and things like that. like, that was a little, I was like, this is, this is no longer about curiosity anymore. I'm like,

Oh, I don't know when I found this like quote from Brene Brown in this particular book. I had to go literally pull all the books off my bookshelf and be like, when in the past 15 years of being a business owner, did I remember that I read that particular quote and can I find the page number where it's on there? Like that was when I was like, all right, this is no longer a curiosity problem at this point. This is like sheer force of will because I signed a contract and I want this book to be out in the world. It cannot be like a blog post to edit later. Like that was. That was the.

That was the spring and I'm like, God damn it. It has to get done. It has to get done. And I was just like, that was where I was like, this is no longer fun anymore. This is, this is, this is not fun. This is the hard part.

Corey Wilks, Psy.D. (: 1:11:41

It's not fun, but it's worthwhile. Exactly. And that's my thing. Like, cause people just, and that's my thing. I like with curiosity, curiosity is incredibly important, but I think sometimes people.

have a misunderstanding of the value of curiosity because I think some people think that curiosity means ⁓ chasing what is fun and exciting. So that, so either they keep, you know, shiny object syndrome. Sometimes they just keep chasing that because as soon as it stops being as fun or as new curiosity naturally declines because it becomes more like well, well trod, like more like a well trodden path. Right? So you're not as curious.

So it's like, well, I'm chasing my curiosity. I'm following my curiosity. It's like, okay, but the point of curiosity is to lead you somewhere. It isn't just blindly keep fucking following it off a cliff.

Jessica Lackey (: 1:12:37

It's like that Oliver Brickman. You read 4,000 Weeks, I assume, right?

Corey Wilks, Psy.D. (: 1:12:41

I'm familiar with the, haven't read the whole thing, but yeah, go ahead.

Jessica Lackey (: 1:12:44

Yeah. Well, he's like, you could, it's like dating, like you could, you could try to find your perfect partner or you can find someone and commit. the commitment is a whole, yeah, you might not have found your perfect person, right? Like could there be someone who's like younger, fitter, richer, hotter? I don't know. Probably. But like, but then you missed out on the sheer depth of building and a committed life with someone and like,

like learn and I think that's what's interesting that this is totally off topic, but I keep reading about like AI making it like people not thinking as well and things like that. And it's like, okay, well I can write the thing, but I didn't wrestle with it in my mind. didn't grapple with it in my thinking. I didn't wrestle with the ideas. And so the tree stood up and yeah, like it's the same 500 words, but it falls over real fast versus like the way you

do hard things is by doing hard things. And if we don't do hard things, we'll never learn how to do hard things and develop the resilience of doing hard things. don't write if we don't think, if we don't stick. We will never develop the fruits of that labor. We'll never develop a strong infrastructure for our life and business because we just keep flitting to the next thing versus being like, I'm gonna go through the resilience when it's hard and I can't necessarily outsource my way out of it and I can't AI my way out of it. have to...

to stick and commit. It's not to stick and commit to like, to the point of like, you know, some cost fallacy where you just keep investing in things that aren't working. like, you know, you have to, like, you have to get through the dip. You have to get through the dip. And if you give up every time you hit the dip, you will never make it to the other side of any dip. And all you're going be doing is the frustrating part of starting the dip over and over and over again. Like, you know, don't keep throwing good money after bad, but you can't.

And I think this is where like they're going back to responsibility. can't just cause it's hard. I'm like, yeah, pick your hard. Like at some point it's going to be hard. Is it hard because you have to stick with a community model that you're kind of bored with? Even though you'll want to, you have to stick with the marketing. That's hard. You have to stick with the team management. That's hard. Or you have to deal with the fact that you have to do it all yourself because you didn't want the responsibility of a team. Pick your heart. I don't really, you know, there's, think that's the, that's the underlying truth of this whole entrepreneurship thing is like, yeah, this shit is hard.

Pick how you want it to be hard and like stick with it.

Corey Wilks, Psy.D. (: 1:15:12

I think Mark Manson says something like pick your favorite flavor of shit sandwich or something. And Tom bill you, he says the struggle is guaranteed success is not. And it's just, it's that right. It's, know, it's choose your heart. And that's where I think that conviction piece comes in is like curiosity will, will help you find it, but you will inevitably hit that dip, whether you call it the dip or the valley of despair for like the Dunning Kruger thing. Like there's tons of different names for the messy metal, all that shit, but the,

The reality is if you do not believe your thing is worth continuing to persevere in order to do that is when you will quit every fucking time.

Jessica Lackey (: 1:15:53

And this is where the casino comes in to play really, because, okay, when you hit the hard part, you're like, ⁓ I don't know what to charge. My marketing isn't working. There is, you know, who should I hire? my God, I'm overwhelmed. The casino is there to give you a trophy surface level answer to make it easier for you. overwhelmed. Here's a tool, you know, ⁓ you know, you, you ran out of time. Cool. Launch a course, have a fucking this passive income business model. And they're there to give you.

the surface level antidote, just double your prices, know, shit like that. I'm like, ⁓ okay, this is not actually, like, you know, there's someone there that's like, I'm going to ease your burden for the low, price of multi-thousand dollars. And it might not be what you needed. It might not actually be in line with what you want, but it's so seductive because you're like, God damn, this is hard. Like that's what it's, that's why we gamble, you know, almost all, you know, I have a chapter on pricing, for example, you know,

particularly for women, you probably are undercharging. You probably are. You're competing against, like, why would they pay $2,000 a month with a copywriter where they can just use AI? Care tasks are undervalued in the United States, particularly in society. We pay our teachers like crap. So we assume that care tasks are just going to be done for free because of gender roles. You probably are undercharging. And I do want you to charge more money.

But listening to this simple advice versus wrestling with, well, what can I charge? What is my market? Have I had enough conversations? What is my business model? What is my audience size? We want to outsource all our thinking because we're like, this is simpler. It's easier. And I can maybe not have to do the heavy lifting to get through the dip. I can just like buy someone's thing and they're going to have me sell me the magical solution to success. The question is, how many magical solutions of success did you buy? How much did you spend on it? And ⁓ how

And this is where people tend to find me. I'm like, I wish I could get them before they spent lots and lots of money. Cause I'd like them to have a little more money to spend with me doing the right things versus throwing and getting themselves in lots of debt and trouble by spending lots of money on solutions that weren't for them in their stage of business. And, but it's because it's hard. If it wasn't hard, people would not make money on it. Like they wouldn't make money on this, selling you the solution. If there weren't real problems with you face the dip.

It is hard. That's where the casino comes in and be like, let me make it easier for you by giving you like a simple solution. Just have, just do this one tool. I'm like, it's not the tool that's going to like magically reorient your calendar. It's problem is your time to take on 15 fucking too many projects at the same time because you're distracted by shiny object syndrome. Like no tool is going to fix that.

Corey Wilks, Psy.D. (: 1:18:46

also like on the, on a meta level, you know, the person who's selling you how to build a membership community, they're not selling most of the time. They're what they're selling you is a workshop. That's the thing that works for them. It actually isn't the membership community. And it's like learning to see past that and see like, okay, this person who's selling me a business model, what is their business model? Cause that's what, and that's my thing.

you know, the whole issue with like meta creators, right? Creators who create for creators. And I have very mixed feelings about the whole, you know, talk to somebody two steps behind you. think there's a lot of good and bad in that both advice and, and practice, but

my advice to people. ⁓ so like, you know, in my community, we have a decent bit of people who are coaches in one facet or another. have other types of entrepreneurs, but, ⁓ with a handful of coaches and my advice to them is always don't follow people who are teaching you how to be a coach, follow actual fucking coaches and look at what their business model is. I'm like, look, here are my friends who have

great coaching practices, just go to their website. How did they lay out their website? How do they position themselves? What is their actual offer stack? All they do have a single course. All they did write a book about the type of coaching they do. Just do that. Don't follow the fucking guru teaching you. And I talk shit about myself. Like, look, I have a course. I understand that you don't have to take my fucking course. That's fine. Don't if you don't want to follow people actually doing the thing you want to do.

not the people who are only teaching you how to do the thing you want to do.

Jessica Lackey (: 1:20:44

Yeah, I sometimes like I struggle with this because this is a total mindfuck for me right now because like I rail against this and then yet I'm like turning into the person who but to be fair, like there's a difference I think in like I really am trying to think about how do I build a holistic business academy, right? Like I went to Harvard Business School. I will tell you that they do not teach you how to they teach you how to negotiate, which I'm terrible at negotiating. I feel it every day. They teach you how to do marketing. If you're a big

CPG brand marketer, they teach you how to do business turnarounds. I did learn how to do accounting. Not really, but enough to read P &Ls. Mostly what I learned at HBS was how to talk in front of 90 people who are judging your every word without blacking out. That was the number one thing I learned. ⁓ And how not to care about grades anymore, because it didn't matter. ⁓ But there is a...

I'm stepping into the space where like, actually genuinely want to build an education business. And I think there's a, there's a need for that. And so I do fall into the, ⁓ yes, my business sometimes works better than some of my clients do because I'm selling the shovel versus selling the gold. And I recognize this and yet I feel compelled to step into the market, but it totally, but like, that's because that's where my curiosity lives. It's where my, my, my spark type lives. Like I can't.

Like I built this not because I wanted to get in the education business, but because I couldn't not like I'm listening to all of these things. Like I mainline business podcasts at some point I will stop doing that. I was actually learning. I had to learn these things to actually help my clients when I was like fractional COO. I had to learn these things. And then I'm like, well, I'm learning these things. I'm writing about it. It evolved into that, which comes with its own set of like, Oh, now, now I'm like, now I'm, now I'm one of them. Oh my God. What have I done?

Which is why I have a business model where like, yeah, people join my community for like 30 bucks a month and they get a one-on-one call with me. And they're like, I get a welcome call with you. like, yes, I know that like with the low ticket business model, I'm not supposed to do that. It's supposed to be high touch and low touch or whatever. And I'm like, I don't want to build my business like that. like, but you have to like kind of like classical music. You have to know the progressions and the chords and how music sounds together before you can break the rules.

A lot of people just want to break the rules. And I'm like, you got to know why you're breaking the rules and how to offset that structurally in your systems. Otherwise you're just going to, you're going to flame out a burnout.

Corey Wilks, Psy.D. (: 1:23:15

And like, if you're getting people results that helps like overcome a lot of like that internal battle. Right. And like for me, what the, the, the thing that finally pushed me over the edge for me to make my, coaching course was I realized most coaching courses out there or whether they were self paced or like live programs. Cause I went through a live program that I spent almost $10,000 on and I,

I did it for my specific use case just so I would have like a certification. So that way I, there's a whole thing with like the psychology of last year ship. ⁓ cause I was leaving therapy, but you don't need a coaching certificate unless you're going to do like very specific, like executive coaching for like specific businesses or something. It's largely irrelevant. But I was like, I didn't learn fuck all in that program coming as a psychologist, but I've looked at a lot of other programs that are thousands and tens of thousands of dollars.

and most of them suck or they're by people who haven't really done the work and don't have true expertise. I was like, I have no right to complain about a problem if I am unwilling to offer a solution. So it's like, if I put this out, at least I know one course is worth it. I can't control all the other courses. And it's like, Hey, I'm very open. Like, you don't have to take this course, but at least I know one is good. And that was what pushed me over the edge.

But I think like even, you know, and people have gotten great results with them, but I think even like with you, you know, just, just admitting like, Hey, look, I understand. I'm kind of stepping into like the meta creator bit of this. However, here's all the shit I've done. Here's the results people have gotten. Here's my conviction in this. And this is why I'm doing this. Right. And I think that that's just being candid about that automatically separates you from the people who like,

Don't even acknowledge it. Cause that's where you get into like guru, guru, territory and shit. ⁓ but going back to like with, business models and, ⁓ conviction in general, and you know, you write your book and things. Another thing that has helped me kind of push through that dip is considering like, what are the consequences of this continuing to not exist?

Right? Cause lot of people only focus on like, well, how good will it be once this thing comes out? Or once I build this thing, it's like, that's great. But sometimes frustration will just get you angry enough to push through your insecurities. So it's like, this has to come out because if it, the longer it goes without existing, the longer this problem will continue to exist alongside it. And that I think helps kind of get you over that hump sometimes as well.

Jessica Lackey (: 1:26:09

Yeah, no, it's, ⁓ it's really funny. I'm, I'm so terrible. I read, there's been a fair amount of like, so solo printer ship books come out. actually, ⁓ it's funny. I was on a podcast and after the podcast was, ⁓ over there, like we're writing a book on solo printer ship. Can you be the technical editor? Because you're the only person we've ever found who can like read the whole thing and like do this. And so I did. And like, you know, their book is, it was,

It was good and also for a whole different audience than I'm building for. it's like, I'm like, I added some things and I'm like, yeah, this is, you know, it's, for your audience. This is awesome for my audience. This is not what I'm trying to build, but you know, like it's totally, this is a good book, but I've read every solo printer. I've read so many of the business books, but like a couple of them come out this year and I'm just like skimming through them, like on the Kindle and being like, ⁓ are they, are they saying anything that I'm not saying? And like,

Like this sounds so egotistical. My I've read hundreds of business books. There is no guidebook to building an expertise space. There's guidebooks to building consulting firm in the sense of like building, you know, Alan Weiss is million dollar consulting. ⁓ there's business books on business expertise. There is not a book like this. And if there had been a book, I would have found it by now and there wasn't one. So I wrote it and you know how some people, some

Blot books are like, this could have been a blog post, right? My book is this should have been 10 books because each chapter could be at each chapter is like, it's like a meta analysis of every other of the hundreds of books that I read before, because it didn't exist. had to write it. you know, you're friends of Paul Malaird, right? Yeah. I have this like dream of like, it will never be, not be picked up by Ali, even though we use the same ⁓ editor and writing coach.

But I want this to have the pathless path effect. I want people to read it and be like, oh my god, let me pass it to four of my friends that need to read this. Because like you said, it's not going to go wild. It's not going to have a big launch. But I want it to be the book people are like, I can't believe I didn't have this in my life before. It's now my manual. It's tabbed. I reference it all the time. And I'm going to pass it to four of my friends. And then four of their friends, I'm to pass it to four of their friends. That's what I want this to be. I want this to be the.

I don't know it will be there, I'm like, I want this to be like company at one. I want this to be the book that just gets passed along quietly doing its job behind the scenes. If it gets me, you know, speaking opportunities, awesome. I don't know if it will. I don't know if anyone really wants to have me being like, don't listen to the influencers when every person that's at a conference is a fucking influencer type. But I wrote it because it's like there is no book like this. Trust me, I've tried.

Corey Wilks, Psy.D. (: 1:29:04

Like, ⁓ have you read, write useful books by Rob Fitzpatrick? His is probably one of my favorites on like the craft of writing, like, and cause hit, you know, the advice is generally fairly simple of like, first off, you got to write a great fucking book, right? Like, duh. But just the ideas of ideas around word of mouth and like, how do you actually get word of mouth? Cause that's really like,

Jessica Lackey (: 1:29:07

Yep.

Corey Wilks, Psy.D. (: 1:29:30

If you can just see your first like thousand readers, if it's good enough, word of mouth will happen. And then that's how it kind of grows exponentially. ⁓

That is a very simple piece, but a very practical piece of like, is your book recommendable and what goes into making it recommendable? One thing is, do people get fucking results? Can people finish your book? ⁓ Lawrence Yo, another friend, Lawrence just, he just published his first book. This one is self published, but I think he's also got a traditional deal now that he's working on second book. ⁓ But he has actually owned Paul's Paul Miller podcast recently.

And one of things that they were talking about was, uh, Lawrence was like, yeah, it's a short book. Cause it's like, I don't know, a little over a hundred pages. Um, and Paul was like, it's a book. Like a book doesn't have to be any specific link. Like it's a book. And Paul was like, the fact that it is a shorter book increases the likely that people are going to finish it. And if people finish it, that is when they recommend it. Like people recommend books, they finish and there are

are multiple ways of getting people to like finish your book, right? ⁓ Pacing formatting, chapter size, ⁓ insights per word ratio kind of deal. And that's how I kind of think about, you my own book of like, is somebody, am I dropping bombs every so many paragraphs to keep people reading? That way it isn't like a slog or something. And I just, really liked that. Just the concept of, you the point of a book?

is to convey information across time and space. Like that's, you know, whether it is information, inspiration, emotion, like it's a conveyance of the human experience through time and space. That's really what the fuck a book is. Same thing with a song, right? And, and I don't think enough people think about that as they write something, as they write a book, right? And I saw something on Slipstack the other day, they were talking about how,

they're moving back toward having like a physical bookshelf rather than like a Kindle because, or even just like a series of like bookmarked, you know, blog posts, because those don't queue up memories. But a bookshelf is like a physical memory palace of like, I read that book. This is, this is where I was at. I read that freshman year, all this over here. Right. And that you re-experience part of that. And a book, like you said, like, you know, more books should be blog posts.

Paul says more blog posts should be books, right? I've like, if you really like nobody, nobody's like, Hey, you're my, my friend. Let me forward you this fucking blog posts. Like that doesn't happen to the degree we as blog writers want it to happen. But like, I, like I said, I'm, I'm, I can't hold a fucking URL right now to show people something, right? I love Lawrence's work, but I can just show you this book, right?

Jessica Lackey (: 1:32:23

rate.

Corey Wilks, Psy.D. (: 1:32:37

Jay Yang, another dude I've had on like, just, I, this is a fucking prop. Like I can just show this all the time. I can gift this to people. So I love that you're writing a book when you didn't have to, right? You could have just made this a course. You could have just made this some proprietary pay walled, pay gated fucking thing. So, you know, three day retreat mastermind, which you still can cause you know, there's the group component of it.

For sure, the live component, but you could have, but you chose to put it into a book and do the, you know, belly crawl through the agony of the book writing process.

Jessica Lackey (: 1:33:20

It's so much, got the first, as we're recording this, I have the first proof. It's like, I finally see it. I tried to like get it printed at Kinko's. It like, cost me $250. I'm like, because it's 300 page book full in color. Right? I'm like, oh no, we will not be, it's beautiful. Cause I had like custom illustrations done. Cause I was, I was like, oh, well I need to.

I need to see the ideas in print. need to visualize them. So I had an illustrator working with me all last year. They are on YouTube videos and things like that. The illustrations. But, ⁓ you know, like, I don't know if my book is, I don't know if my book is one of those books that's like, it's finishable, but it's something that in every chapter is bomb, bomb, bomb truth. There's actually very few stories in it. You know how most business books are like anecdote, anecdote, famous anecdote about Steve jobs.

Anecdote thing, right? know, ⁓ mine has like, mine has lots of, has a fair amount of examples, some of which are real, some of which are made up. ⁓ I'm really nosy about people's businesses. So I'm like, yeah, I can piece together how you're making, you know, your million dollars a year. I'm like, just by piecing it together by paying for paying for things you bought and telling you, like I pay attention. ⁓ but like, I really want my book to be like a guidebook that are like, okay, I don't need to hire yet. But when I do.

That's the chapter I'm going to go back to. want to be able to like send to people chapters. And I also want to be able to send people gifts. you know, it's I want it to be hard back. Yeah. The Kindle, the Amazon version will be paperback. But. You know, I want this to be like the book that, you know, just like you did with that. mean, you know, I'm like, got a book right there and I'm like, I'm like, oh, yeah, it's like tabbed and shit like that. I can pull it out on calls. I want that to be like the Jessica Bible.

you know, pick your not religious term, but the Jessica tome is right in front of you. And you're like, what does Jessica think about this? It is scary as shit though, because you know what? I cannot fix it. Like if my thinking evolves, like that's it. It's crystallized. It's an amber and I have to be good. I have to be okay with the fact that it's done now. And there might be the next book, the next book, which there will be because I've gotten the bug and now I'm like, oh, I'm to just, you know, I don't know if it'll, I don't know if I'll be able to make it a business model.

the books themselves, which would be awesome. But it's scary. I have zero idea. Well, and you know, like we talked about the fear of ridicule and things like that. ⁓ I was at Kit's Captain Commerce when Ann-Laure ⁓ La Conca talked and you know, was talking like people didn't know who she was. She went to different spaces. And then I know I have a tiny experience downstairs.

But people will see me on this YouTube channel who I don't know, then they will, trolls will come for my book. And people will come for me. And people who don't know me and I can't explain myself to them will read the book. And I'm explicitly moving myself from what I call an intimate impact model to a broad impact model. I'm doing it on purpose. I'm doing it consciously and it's scary as shit. like, it would have been so much safer to not publish this book.

Like, and I would have made probably this, I don't know if I would have made the same amount of money. Like I'm hoping this makes me more money, but it would have been a lot safer. And it is one of the more terrifying things I've done is to actually sell this thing to people who I don't know. And it's like, I started running Facebook ads to grow my list a little bit. That's scary. This is like the scariest thing I've, well, you know, getting married.

for a scary thing because you know, it's like, that's like, that's like the real now, like we're doing this thing. Um, quitting my job was scary, but not really because you know, like Liam Neeson and Taken, have a set of skills I've collected over my career. I can figure out how to make money. This is like really scary because this is like putting my identity on the line and letting people read it in a world that's not real. not always really accommodating and nice and

I'm doing it consciously because I have conviction. It is the scariest thing. It's so scary. No one talks about how scary it is.

Corey Wilks, Psy.D. (: 1:37:39

and you're a woman in business.

Jessica Lackey (: 1:37:41

yeah. I am a woman in business and I am not a thin woman in business. I think that's important to be said. Like I do not look like a beautiful creator. Like I'm pretty, but ⁓ I'd like to think so, but like, I am not like, I'm not Marie Forleo. Let's just put that out there. ⁓ for your, podcast listeners. And it's really scary to be like, yeah, as a slight, as an overweight woman, I'm putting, I'm being physically putting myself out there.

doing it anyways.

Corey Wilks, Psy.D. (: 1:38:12

which I love. I love so fucking much. And like, so in lore, she, at one point I posted, think on Instagram or something. So she recorded her audio book and she is hella French, right? ⁓ like I don't remember how old she was when she learned English, but like she wasn't raised like, you know, ⁓ bilingual like from birth. So she has an accent and I guess this one, you know,

Randy 4 20 69 or some stupid shit like was talking shit about her and her, her accent for doing like the audio book. And he was like, you know, nothing against me. It's like nothing against you, nothing personal, but your accent is fucking awful. And this book was so hard to listen to. It's like, shut the fuck. It's like my thought always said is like, all right, Randy, what the fuck have you done with your life? Have you written a book? Have you put yourself out there? No, shut the fuck up. Right. And that's

I very much have a fuck them attitude and I understand various places of privileges and like my own oppositional nature and shit. understand various factors, but that is my, my default of fuck them because I am focusing on the people who get it, not the people who don't, not everybody will get it. And honestly, it's for me. I like, I never invite controversy, but I accept it.

when the people who hate me are the people I want to hate.

Like if you're a neo-Nazi, I kind of want you to hate me. cause if you like me, that probably means I fucked up somewhere.

Jessica Lackey (: 1:39:55

Yeah. Yeah. I probably don't, I probably don't go that far, but I definitely want to, you know, like, and this is what's interesting about creating like really, this is where like the commitment and the conviction has, and then the, like my, my innate curiosity and like my, like, this is where we also get in trouble with AI as well. I going, I go back to the, that's all my heart today, but like the language that I end up using for things is really resonant and people it's like, we're creating like a shared world around this. And like, I need to be

figure out, how do I get new people in my world? So it's not like a super inshiller thing. But yeah, the shared language is like, if you don't believe this, you should go, there will be plenty of other people that will tell you it'd be easy, that will tell you you don't need to do outreach, that'll tell you that you can just post and, and, you know, write for four hours a day and, you know, make your millions of dollars. There will be people that will tell you that and they will take your money gladly. ⁓ I will not tell you that people will tell you, you don't have to be consistent. And I find that like the strict

guarantee you they started in: 2017

when it is a very different kind of environment, you know, how did, and did they have the model that they're teaching you now then? I doubt it. So I'm like, if you want to, you know, like this is where people are like, wish someone ⁓ asked me the other day, they're like, ⁓ they sent me a link of somebody who I know the backend of their business very well. ⁓ because I'm like, again, like I pay attention. I, so you know how a lot of people put their like paid paid financial numbers behind a sub stack.

And I paid for the stuff stocks. like, this is a business research. And someone sent me someone who they follow and they're like, oh my God, this person must make so much money. This must be so easy. That must be able to sell this. And I'm like, I know the back end of this person's business. They do not. You know, like there's some people like, oh, I wish I could just do what this person did. It would be so easy. I'm like, no, like it's not like that's yes, those are professional pictures and it looks pretty, but they're

Business is less successful than yours right now. ⁓ There's no easy shortcuts to any of this. I, you know, there will be people that will tell you that it's easy. And I will be the one that be like, if anyone, you know, it takes you five years to build such stability in your business. wish I, yeah, there's ways to shortcut getting revenue faster than that, which is almost always basically treating your business like a job and doing part-time work at a really, at a basically salary rate. You know, that's how most people do it.

But there will be people that will tell you that it's easy, and there will be people that you tell you don't have to do the work. Those will not be me. So if you want to go spend money with them, you should, because you and I won't be a fit anyways.

Corey Wilks, Psy.D. (: 1:43:07

When like recently I was working with a creator team and they were talking about a launch and how they had built a wait list of like 6,000. I'm like, I was like, fuck a wait list. Like your wait list is triple the size of my whole email list right now.

And they're like, yeah, it's for a thousand dollar offer. And I was like, fuck. Like if you have 6,000 on the wait list, not even including like all the blasts and shit you'll put out, you will easily hit a hundred purchases. Like 6,000 who are already hungry for it. Plus however large hundreds of thousands of actual list is, ⁓ if you get a hundred people,

That's a hundred K launch. And like, which is great. Like they've, they've put in the work. They fully deserve all of that. But it's like a smaller, you know, somebody with a smaller audience or a different business model could look at that, be like, fuck. Like they made a hundred K in, one week or like, ⁓ Nat Eliason, cause he posts about all this shit on Twitter, right? Nat fuck. He, he launched his, he pre-sold, he pre-sold a fucking.

community course thing that he didn't even, he hadn't even built yet and made like two or $300,000 in like a weekend, something absolutely off of a fucking tweet. Correct. Correct. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And like, and then, you he got a bunch of covers and like, I know Nat, I love Nat. He's fucking great, dude. Um, he's here in Austin too. And what the thing was is like, people didn't want to really acknowledge was like, and, but Nat did, he was like, look,

Jessica Lackey (: 1:44:39

Well, that was that AI course thing, like the vibe coding thing. Yeah.

Corey Wilks, Psy.D. (: 1:44:58

I've been in this space for eight, 10, 12 years. I've built up an audience around things like this. I've built crypto projects. I've done this. I've built an app, fucking like Kegel app or some shit that's, that too, but like, nah, won't put, he's got like a Kegel app that like, there's, I was like a fucking Pomodoro timer for your, for your taint or some shit. I don't know. But like he's got a Kegel app that still gets downloads and makes money.

Jessica Lackey (: 1:45:12

He wrote a book on the topic.

Corey Wilks, Psy.D. (: 1:45:27

He was like, I've done all of these things before. So then, yes, I did fire off a tweet. It was like, Hey, should I build something like this? And I got hundreds of comments and made six mid six figures in a weekend, but it was because of that eight to 12 years beforehand. It wasn't that three day period, right? And it's just like, that is so fun to see, but it's unrealistic for anybody else to think they can emulate that.

if they are not also emulating his decade plus of being in the space.

Jessica Lackey (: 1:46:02

And I think it's really important also acknowledge that he wasn't just in the space for a decade because I think a lot of people are thinking like, ⁓ I've been here for seven or eight years. I should have that kind of success. And I'm like, OK, it's not just time, but it's like weightlifting. It's like time under tension. Like how many tweets a day was Nat doing? How many? I was on his sub stack. I first found out about Nat actually through his Roam research course.

Like I don't remember. think that was like when Notion was happening and I don't remember how I found it. was in actually no, I found it. Fun fact. I was in Ann Loris Nest Labs for a period of time because Paul recommended that community because I found Paul first, then I found Nest Labs and then I found that's Rome course. And so I subscribed to that and I don't know damn thing about crypto, but I bought cryptocurrency. It was a great book. I have Husk. It's on the thing I need to read, right?

Corey Wilks, Psy.D. (: 1:46:55

Crypto

confidential. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Jessica Lackey (: 1:46:57

Crypto Confidential. Yeah, yeah. read that. It was a great book. was like a

like that actually like that intro inspired the intro to my book. ⁓ Fun fact. But ⁓ but yeah, like ⁓ but Nat and other people and Lauren, you know, Paul and you were you can't just like be in the space. You have to be actively doing the things compounding over time to.

get the results that you're looking for. And I think that's also a misnomer. People are like, oh, post once, twice a week on social media. email my list maybe once a week if I remember to do it. And then there's some weeks where I just don't write it because I get bored. like, again, they might have high conviction in their ideas, but low conviction in the habits that actually lead to what they want. They're like, oh, this is important. But they're like,

And again, you don't have to like, coley architect your life around it, but you kind of, I think you kind of have to a little bit, which is like, you have to keep showing up at the, to get those kinds of results. You have to be willing to do the, the hard work at a frequency that actually is progressive overload over time. And yeah, and that's just, again, people will be like, ⁓ you know, this is easy. I'm like, well, sure. Actually tweeting once a day on social media is kind of easy.

Corey Wilks, Psy.D. (: 1:48:09

sure and go ahead.

Jessica Lackey (: 1:48:21

the one day you do it, doing it for eight to 10 years and building relationships with people while your life is happening. That's the hard part. It's not the tweet. It's doing it for eight years.

Corey Wilks, Psy.D. (: 1:48:35

that and like, what are you doing outside of Twitter that you that you're tweeting about? Right? Like some people like, I am going to be like a Twitter influencer. I live on Twitter. It's like, okay, but what are you doing outside of? Cause if that is all you do, then the only thing you're going to be able to sell is a course on how to grow your Twitter. And that happens. But it's like, like you said, like, like and Laura Nat Paul, you know, Lawrence, like all these other people, Tiago, like everybody kind of knows everybody.

And part of the reason for that is, yes, they're all putting themselves out there and they are, I don't like the term networking, but that's the most familiar term for people. ⁓ Genuine networking, actually building relationships rather than seeing it as transactional. Yes, everybody is putting themselves out there and they're trying to meet each other. And then they're getting recommended by each other. But it's like all of those people are doing incredible things offline. Like, and lore.

finished her PhD. She is doctor and Laura LaConflict. She is a neuroscientist before that she was, you know, she worked at Google. She built Nest Labs. She wrote about the neuroscience and mindful productivity, like also the ship Paul, former McKinsey dude, you know, became a vagabond basically like travel the world. And then it was like, I'm like in tandem with my consulting business where I teach people how to be leadership consultants and ship. I am writing a memoir about the pathless path.

Right? Tiago teacher into everything Tiago does now with second brain shit, author, all that. And it's just like, and the same thing with you, like you, come from, you have a thorough pedigree of like education and, and, know, professional background. And you've also been in this space, like you said, as fractional COO, as a creator yourself, you, you write, you do the YouTube, uh, you have a podcast as well. Correct.

Jessica Lackey (: 1:50:29

I have a podcast as well.

Corey Wilks, Psy.D. (: 1:50:30

Okay. You have

a podcast as well. You do the whole like creator thing and like everything that is underneath the creator, right? Um, of course, creator consultant, this, a YouTuber, podcast writer, whatever, like you have, you also do all those things. So it's like you putting out a YouTube video isn't what makes you great or a single podcast episode or a fucking tweet. It's everything else you're doing offline that you then go online to talk about.

And that's the missing piece. I think so many people overlook is they think that, and myself included, like I struggled with this for a minute too of like, I'm going to live online commenting on LinkedIn posts is part of my job today. And it's like, no, no, it fucking isn't when I like, I will sometimes comment because I actually want to have a conversation with people, especially with friends and things, but it's like commenting on LinkedIn isn't my job doing things that are worth

posting about on LinkedIn, that is my fucking job.

Jessica Lackey (: 1:51:34

That's a sound bite if I ever heard one.

Corey Wilks, Psy.D. (: 1:51:38

But it like business models, right? Like this whole episode is around business models and like doing the hard shit and like accept and like acknowledging like there's a lot of hard shit in here and you have to have a noble attitude so that you can actually do the hard things to make this successful. So many people put social media as a core piece of their business model.

but they don't connect it to anything, right? Like JK Molina, one of the things, and JK is one of the former money Twitter guys. One thing that JK says that I like is likes ain't cash. And it's just this whole idea of like, like you've talked about, some of the people, some of the big creators are fucking broke, but nobody knows it because they have this audience of hundreds of thousands. Like, okay, but their audience doesn't buy their shit. So they have to rely on

sponsored content, for example, right? Or just growing your audience around nothing in particular, around platitudes. And then it's like, who is your audience? You don't know. Who are you talking to? You don't know. What do they want to buy? You don't fucking know. How do you pay the bills? You made social media a central part of your business model, but you didn't connect it to

any form of monetization, resonance, anything. How do you think about that?

Jessica Lackey (: 1:53:08

completely like it's like is your job to be famous or is your job to help someone achieve a goal or transformation and if your job is to be famous go be famous there's a youtuber guy I don't want to say his name but like I've watched for some I found him on one of those like you know last maybe last spring there was like a spate of like I quit YouTube videos like everyone's posting about Heather quitting and one of these guys was like I'm gonna quit and I'm like okay well I heard about him because everyone was quitting YouTube at the time and I'm like

Every one of his videos is about his like creative process. I'm like, like, okay, we're just, this is just warriorism at this point. Like what is he trying to sell me other than the drama of watching him go through trying to figure out what he wants to do on YouTube. And I'm like, you know, I think that's where it's again, like the business model is like, what's your business? Like what's your business? Are you in the business of being famous or are you in the business of helping people achieve a change or transformation?

Are you in the business of edgy, like entertaining people? And if you're in the business of entertaining people, and if you're in the business of being famous, awesome, know that, right? ⁓ you know, there's a, the guy, don't know how he makes his money, but like champagne Cruz is one of my favorite follows on him and corporate bro. Or my favorite follows on Instagram. I don't know how they make money, but they're hilarious. Right. And I think they make money for his concert content. I don't totally know how they make money. They're both like,

Anti-corporate. They're both like corporate guys and it's really funny. ⁓ But I don't know how people make money. I know how you make money. I know how I make money. And that's, think, like I make money by like helping people do a thing, not by exploiting my life or, you know, trying to make people laugh or, you know, being clickbait. It's a choice. And I think that's always like, it comes back to the very beginning is like.

How do you actually, what are you actually doing as a business? Not as a hobby, not as just a creator, but how do you intend to make money, pick the business model, pick the marketing strategy, pick the business model, understand your responsibility, understand your tolerance for marketing, understand your client base and what they're willing to pay for the transformation you provide, put it all together and then you have a business that works instead of spending god-awful amounts of time just like.

posting shit on social media that leaves you tired and burnt out.

Corey Wilks, Psy.D. (: 1:55:39

The only thing I, I talked to people about is there's a difference between thinking about yourself as a content creator versus an entrepreneur who creates content fundamentally different mindsets.

Jessica Lackey (: 1:55:52

Yeah.

And I think that's, you know, I think those are, that's a, you know, people really should think about, okay, I'm not just doing this. Like if I'm going to create content, awesome. I'm going to explore, but this is where I hate people saying I'm a freelancer. I'm like, you are a business owner. You're not like freelancers. Not a thing. If you get money for work, you there, you therefore are a business owner. You should treat it like a business. You should treat it like, you know,

You should pay taxes on it. Hopefully you should, you know, like this is not like, there are no freelancers. There are people who are self-employed and then there are people who have employment or, you know, a mix of the two. So like, you know, are you a content, are you a content creator or a business owner? think we should all be business owners first, content creator second, if at all. You can be a wildly successful business owner making zero content. Like you could, you know,

You might not be a creator, even though like a lot of people in their business create a ton of things, but they may never identify as creator. But you know, it's like, you know, are you making money being content creator? Are you making money running a business? I prefer the latter.

Corey Wilks, Psy.D. (: 1:57:08

It was like one of my friends, he goes by his name's Nick, but he goes by Chewy is a YouTube, he's a YouTuber who in the jujitsu space and you know, Chewy sells, you know, instructionals with like, know, like structured, you know, DVDs basically around like certain jujitsu techniques and things, and they're fairly low priced. Um, and then he's got a decently large YouTube channel, a couple hundred thousand. So people look at you like, Oh, he's a YouTuber. Like that's how he makes his money. He's like, no.

I co-own a gym. He was like, the reason I, cause I trained at Chewy's gym for three years. ⁓ And the reason Chewy originally started his YouTube channel years ago was to just film the techniques for the students who couldn't come to class that day. And then that like blew up. He was like, I co-own a successful gym. I also have, you know, the YouTube channel.

I have my instructionals. I even teach other gym owners how to market and grow their memberships for their own gyms. Cause like, yeah, well, not quite that. Yes. It's more one-on-one, but yeah. Cause like Chewy kind of like you, said you kind of like, you know, mainline business ship. Chewy's always learning about marketing and copyright. He's just, he loves, he obsesses over it and he's always trying to become a better storyteller. But like it's like, no, no, no. Chewy could completely stop YouTube today and it would make

Jessica Lackey (: 1:58:13

like, hormones-y?

Ha ha.

Corey Wilks, Psy.D. (: 1:58:35

the most marginal impact on his business. Cause he co-owns a fucking legit gym. And now he's doing like jujitsu tournaments. So like, that's a bunch of money too. And it's like, you have to understand like, what is the business behind the content? That's the model. Like that's what the business model is. Like the content isn't the business model. The content is part of the business model. And I think that's why, like, that's one of reasons why I'm excited for this book. So.

What is, we've been talking about this book forever. What the fuck is this book called?

Jessica Lackey (: 1:59:09

It is called leaving the casino, stop betting on tactics and start building a business that works.

Corey Wilks, Psy.D. (: 1:59:15

Cool. And then when should it be out roughly?

Jessica Lackey (: 1:59:19

September, October-ish.

Corey Wilks, Psy.D. (: 1:59:21

Cool. Okay. And then pre-orders will be around August ish, August, September ish. Okay.

Jessica Lackey (: 1:59:25

Yes. fun facts.

It's like getting all the checkout things like the sales time, like I never sold anything, any sales checks before. So we are, we are one step ahead of like all the deliverables that are required for the book to go live. You know, people are like, just put your book up on Amazon. I'm like, but I don't want to. I mean, it will go on Amazon, but I'm like, I don't want to just put it on Amazon. want to have like the bundles and special things. I was very inspired by Nats, ⁓ husk pre-order. And I'm like,

Cool, now I gotta figure out how to do all this. So yes, it'll be pre-orders sometime in the ⁓ August timeframe. People will be able to download the first sample chapter and ⁓ the book should be ⁓ available sometime in September, October, release date, TBD.

Corey Wilks, Psy.D. (: 2:00:12

Awesome. I'm super excited. ⁓ final question for today. It's a two-parter, which I try not to do, but I want to.

What do people over complicate and underestimate when it comes to building a successful business?

Jessica Lackey (: 2:00:35

They overcomplicate marketing.

And they undercomplicate they under was it undercomplicate underestimate ⁓ how long it takes to ⁓ expand your network to the right people. like when I say they overcomplicate marketing, ⁓ you know, especially if you are trying to be a services business or you are looking to lead with making money versus leading with, know, you don't need the YouTube channel. You don't need you just simply need to like go talk to people who might have your problem. Tell them that you can help and then

Corey Wilks, Psy.D. (: 2:00:44

estimate.

Jessica Lackey (: 2:01:10

offer to pay have them pay you for it. Now, you know, yes, there's lots of ways to do that. But I think people over complicate. I'm like, you don't have to have the social media. You don't have to the YouTube. You literally just need to go find your people and go talk to them. If you happen to know who they are, that's better. But, ⁓ you know, we overcomplicate it. I'm like, you don't need all the mechanisms. You don't need the funnels. You just need to put yourself in densities of the people that could want to pay you over and over and over and over again for three to five years.

and underestimating how long it takes. ⁓ Every entrepreneur I've met who it's going to take you a couple of years to really build up a sustainable book of business, particularly if you are trying not to like rely on retainer based models and things like that, recurring revenue, ⁓ go get a bridge job, go get a part-time job. Don't assume your art's going to pay the bills. Like I have an MBA from Harvard Business School and it took me

till this year, four, five, four and a half years later to make stable revenue from courses and cohort models. And I funded myself along the way with fractional COO work, high-end consulting work. I've just finally stepped down my fractional COO retainer. I did a bunch of subcontracting consulting at the beginning. Like if you need your business to pay the bills, go get a job that's part-time while you...

build up because even if you're selling like, you know, thousand dollar a month coaching packages that last forever, you know, it takes you 10 to 15 months. If you get a new client every month and they stay with you forever, it's going to take you 10 to 12 months at minimum to build a hundred thousand dollar a year business. So, and you know, unless you are like super connected, you know, like this is if you're, you know, the former CEO of kit and you want to build a coaching practice with, with creators that are seven figures, you know them all. Right.

That's easy to build. If you're trying to break into a network that you don't know or don't know very well, assume it's going to take a long time and make sure you aren't grasping at straws along the way, looking for a simpler solution when part of it is time. Part of it is just your time and network.

Corey Wilks, Psy.D. (: 2:03:29

I just love how unvarnished and no bullshit your answers are. Like.

Paul Millard is a very different kind of human being. I love Paul so much, though I will never actually become like Paul. I endeavor to become more like Paul because like sometimes I need to reach out to Paul to have him on talking to Paul for the first time is disorienting sometimes because Paul just doesn't fuck with status games. He doesn't put on a facade. He's just like,

Yeah. If you read my book, you'll probably end up making less money. Like I don't claim to make anybody rich. I brought in this much and then it all dipped. And then now I'm in Taiwan and then this over here. And like, you're like, Hey, get a fucking job. No shame in that. Like if you, if you actually want to succeed in this, you need to take some stress off. And even if you're doing this full time, one client a month, which is honestly a solid, like

amount to hit every month, that's still going to take you 10, 12 plus months of, hitting that every single month for you and everybody staying for it to really add up. Like that's just such a, like a good real answer that I think we don't ever hear.

Jessica Lackey (: 2:05:01

it's

not sexy. Do you think anyone's gonna be like, let me tell you how you can make a six figure business in three to five years. Like that doesn't sell very well, but I'm, I'm, ⁓ I'm hoping that the right people will be like, ⁓ she's serious. She's real. She's honest. Yeah. She might be selling me. She might be selling me the shovel, but she's actually pointing to where the gold is. My shovel is not going to break. And you know, it's a solid shovel.

So like, you know, there's only so much one can do.

Corey Wilks, Psy.D. (: 2:05:34

Love you so much. All right. Where can people go to learn more, to find you, et cetera.

Jessica Lackey (: 2:05:41

Yep. My website is deeperfoundations.com. You can get the book at deeperfoundations.com backslash casino. And you can find me on LinkedIn and you can go check out my YouTube library, even though I'm not sure if I'm actively posting there at the time that this goes live.

Corey Wilks, Psy.D. (: 2:05:58

And I will have links to everything as well as show notes. This was so much fun. I'm so glad we did this. Any parting words?

Jessica Lackey (: 2:06:06

⁓ we name dropped so many people in this episode. I don't, have listened to a number of years, but I'm not sure this may be one of the highest like name drops per episode because we're talking about business and we're using real examples. Make friends with people on line, make friends with people online. Don't just like consume their content, reach out, you know, when you're in Austin, invite them for coffee or breakfast, which is what Corey and I did a few months ago.

But I think like get to know the people in your world because it makes this, it makes having a high conviction business, makes leaving the casino, you have to find the others. And some of the names we dropped here are some good others to be around.