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Brian Casel: Hello, it is Open Threads. It's my podcast. I'm Brian Casel. Welcome to it. Today I'm talking to my friend, Matt Gartland. He is the CEO of Smart Passive Income with Pat Flynn. You might think of SPI and Pat Flynn, and it's all about Pat and, and his longtime podcast. Well, you know, he doesn't run it alone and he's got a large team led by Matt Gartland, who behind the scenes has been instrumental in growing the product line and the business. of SPI.

It's, it's super fascinating because it has evolved in so many ways over the last 10 plus years from affiliate products into courses and then memberships and community. And we talked all about that and the mechanics and the strategy, what it looks like [00:01:00] behind a massive online brand like SPI. So super interesting, a lot of, you know, just kind of geeking out on some business model kind of stuff. So really good one for now. Let's talk to Matt.

Matt Gartland.

Matt Gartland: How's it going, man? It's going pretty well. It's a thrill to be here. Thanks, Brian.

Brian Casel: Yeah. Thanks for joining me. So you are the CEO of SPI Smart Passive Income with Pat Flynn, right?

Matt Gartland: Yeah, probably sounds a little weird when you say that out sometimes still, but it's true. Yeah.

Brian Casel: I mean, I think you and I first met like a while ago, like almost nine or 10 years ago, which, which means you must've been working on this team for at least that long, right?

Like when did you get into that team?

Matt Gartland: That long ago, I was just starting to work with Pat and support the SPI brand. I'll be it as a. freelancer consultant. So I had my own creative [00:02:00] agency at the time. And that was kind of, yeah, like the, kind of the glory days of blogging and Chris Gillibeau's like world domination summits and all that sort of stuff.

So kind of met Pat through some mutual friends in those circles. And it was kind of an interesting starting point where he was really starting to grow and my agency was starting to grow. And essentially we were supporting what we now call creators, professional creators. So, Nonfiction authors and podcasters, different sorts of writers.

We did a lot of editorial work, but then grew into different forms of digital media, basically everything but video. Uh, so then Pat and I kind of just continued to work together and we developed a fast friendship. And along the way, I kind of started to think of myself as a little bit about like a pseudo business partner to Pat, you know, and then he sort of the other way around and my team kind of started to become like unofficially the SPI team.

Uh, just cause we kept expanding work together so much, which was great.

Brian Casel: Got it. So you're like, your agency was sort of doing like, like creative, like marketing projects and project management and, and, [00:03:00] uh,

Matt Gartland: Exactly. So everything from this pipe blog, like Pat would do some of the writing. Certainly. Uh, we did a little bit of ghostwriting at a time, honestly, but then all the editing, all the configuration, all the management, all the backend stuff in terms of the systems, uh, the integrations with WordPress, you know, we would take responsibility for.

And then also the podcast. So doing the actual audio editing for the podcast, uh, assisting with planning it out, looking into the future. What sort of guests do we want? Pat obviously brings a lot of that to the table, but then helping to kind of plot that out strategically, et cetera. Right? So that was the podcast.

Oh, go ahead. Sorry.

Brian Casel: Well, I mean, for those listening or for those who tune into these, any kind of content, if you don't have the experience in producing this stuff, I mean, it is incredible how much work and nuts and bolts and production. Really goes into it, especially once you have a large audience, like, like Pat does, but I mean, even for this little podcast, I mean, I've, I've got an editor and assistant.

We worked through a meticulous process just to get all [00:04:00] these pieces together. And then, then when you pulled in like article writing and publishing and promotion, there's so many little things beyond the creative or the, if Pat is the one on the mic or Pat is the one writing an article, there's so much more that happens between that and it getting published, right?

Matt Gartland: Exactly. Uh, honestly. I think that there's almost no depth sometimes. So like the bottom of the well, if you will, or the, uh, you know, or the iceberg, you know, kind of pick your metaphor, right? It's easy to see just that tip of it that's published and that's on the web or some podcast player or something, but what goes on behind the scenes, especially for a brand at this scale and all the different technology pieces that we have in place.

And then over courses of time, like the platform, which is like such a gargantuan thing sometimes. So with the podcast is like one example on that point, I think we've platformed the SPAG podcast three times, like to different hosts. And that opens just like can of worms of things like, yeah, careful about.

And it takes a lot of deliberateness to scope that [00:05:00] out, to plot that out, to test, make sure you don't screw something up. And that's super

Brian Casel: scary too. It, it's not just like an email tool where you can like export the list and import the list. I mean, a podcast feed, it's like, it's RSS. You got to hope the subscribers don't lose it.

And yeah, that can be tricky.

Matt Gartland: And probably the biggest thing to emphasize, I don't know if this is. We want to take the open thread, but no, when Pat and I joined forces formally at the end of 2018, a lot of that was around like, what is the vision for the company, like the brand on the business side. So I kind of think about SPI now on like generation three or four of its business model in terms of like where I'm leading it and, and Pat's of course still involved with the vision and the direction of the company, but, you know, taking responsibility for it.

So if you rewind the clock, like when Pat himself started the brand to his immense credit and really started to deliver a lot of value to folks out there, there almost wasn't a business model, right? He had other forms of income. He really got his start line building niche websites that would then generate passive [00:06:00] income through the sale of ebooks and some of those concepts way back in the day in the 2009, 2010, 2011 era, right?

The Internet's a very, very different place now, 10, 11 years later. So, you know, over time affiliate marketing became a big source of like the revenue generation for SPI and was arguably at one point in time, like the business model was almost like entirely affiliate revenue generated from convert kit, et cetera, kind of like insert your favorite piece of technology.

But then along came online courses and still a lot of popularity, a lot of potential with online courses, but we're even seeing in the macro sense of like the economy and other things like express demand for the D. I. Y. version of course is starting to experience some attrition or at least with pricing and different kind of legacy mechanics for marketing and sales.

So there's just, we're now in a new era of like, what is attractive? What is, what is serving in a different way? What's modern? That's super interesting. So yeah. Anyway, like the business has changed just so much.

Brian Casel: Yeah. I do want to ask you all about that because when I think of Pat [00:07:00] Flynn and SPI, my first thought, and it's because I've been following it since back then in the 2010, 2011 era.

So I remember it as. If I'm thinking about the business model behind it, it's, it's an affiliate marketing, so it's content, it's personal brand, but the revenue generation comes from affiliates. But, but as you say, it really has evolved and there are so many different directions that, so yeah. Like, how do you see like the balance between affiliate and courses and books and membership and anything else that's in the mix there?

Matt Gartland: Yeah. Increasingly, very predictive, you know, and trying to make it like not an accidental business model. So, you know, what do we want the business model to be? Where do we want the revenue to be coming from? And then over some period of time, call it like an annual strategic plan for the company. Like what do we want to grow into?

Because this thing or collection of things we want to prioritize for the growth because you know, it's what we care about. We feel we have a more defensible position in terms of like just trying to compete in the market and the way that we want to serve. So like that's healthy for a business. Versus where are [00:08:00] we seeing attrition or, or whatnot.

So on the attrition side, just going back to like that V1 or V2 model of SPI, again, back in its heyday or its starting point, it was so much of it was SEO based. It was organic search. It was like, okay, putting out great content, having really in depth articles, which we still put out good articles, but to play the SEO game now in 2022 is a very different thing than it was back in 2010.

So that form of like, if you want to talk like. Sort of in like MBA language, right? Like that competitive advantage is, is not as strong as it used to be because there's how many tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of new bloggers, writers, brands online. So continuing to rank in the way that you used to rank and continue to use that as your primary strategy to get traffic, to then get passive income through affiliate sales.

Like it's. There, those methods are, can still work, but is that the game we want to be playing and how effective is that going forward? Those big business questions that we've been wrestling with for a while.

Brian Casel: Totally. And it seems like it's like you say, like SEO is [00:09:00] increasingly competitive and difficult to rank because there's just so much content out there now, but I think it's also more competitive for attention.

And like attentions and like stickiness. If somebody Googles for something and they land on a website, like, yeah, they might get their answer, but there might get the answer to their question right now, but are they necessarily going to come back again and again? And I think it's interesting with podcasting.

I've always felt like podcasts are difficult to win over a first time listener, but once you've won them over. They're loyal, right? Like there must be how many hundreds of thousands or millions of listeners to Pat who tune into every episode, right? That just must be a more powerful thing over time, would you say?

Like to have that loyalty?

Matt Gartland: I think so. Now I have a strong bias towards podcasts. I love them. So just being like a consumer, that's one of my favorite mediums for sure. As I know you are too, right? It does seem to have. A better retention factor, so they even think about things like software and now community, which maybe we'll come back around to the concept of community building, but churn matters.

So you want retention. You want to keep your churn [00:10:00] as low as possible. And I do believe I don't maybe have the best data set to point to, to validate it, but. To win someone over through an audio medium podcasting, you have a much better chance to retain that person or the lifetime value, right? The LTV of that audience member listening to you through a podcast is going to be much better than just someone that like reading your blog.

It'd be an interesting, interesting debate though, that's maybe data sets. between podcasting and email next to each other. Cause I mean, that's still like the key asset that every brand and creator wants to build is like email list, you know, that's still holds water. So yeah, those two things are still like, yeah.

Brian Casel: And email seems increasingly difficult too. Right. I mean, it's still, I think the best way to like directly like send a message to your subscribers, but email deliverability must be an increasingly difficult challenge, right. Spam boxes and promotional inboxes and things like that.

Matt Gartland: Yeah. The technology is very different.

Deliverability plays into that. For sure. You hit on one of the bigger themes and it affects, I think a lot of us that are entrepreneurs and I'm guessing, you know, probably most folks listening is is that attention factor issue [00:11:00] and it plays across mediums, podcasting, email, newsletters. People just have less time.

It feels like the world is just more fragmented than ever. I'm not like the genius that had that insight. Like there's more and more conversation about that, even like in national press and really smart publications. So, and even me as a consumer also like, yeah, I love podcasting, but I don't listen to 30.

I think I actively listened to probably less than five. Yeah.

Brian Casel: Right? Yeah, exactly. That's why I think it's so difficult even for podcast junkies like, like myself too, right? Like there are only a handful of shows that I listen to like almost every episode. And when I think of like the act of tuning in versus the act of reading an article or reading an email, an article or an email or a quick Google search is quick.

I'm in the middle of the day. I'm trying to get through something. But a podcast. I'm going to put it on and go walk the dog or go for a drive. Right? Like I'm much more consumed in who I'm listening to. And then as a podcaster, I meet people all the time who've listened to my shows for years, and I'm meeting them for the first time.

And it's like, I know so much about you. Like, I know your whole story and like, I'm just meeting them for the first time. [00:12:00] And it's always an awkward, like one way thing.

Matt Gartland: Yeah. So like, it's a force function on quality, at least as I see it. So. Look, if people are more discerning about what email newsletters they're staying subscribed to, and what podcasts they're also staying subscribed to, like if you're not, if you're not innovating, if you're not keeping the quality higher, if you're not doing something different, not just for the sake of doing something different, but like genuinely trying to listen and kind of keep up with like, Hey, what's interesting in terms of format, in terms of guests, in terms of just talking points, right?

If you get complacent, or if you let your bar drop on quality or something, right, then you probably put yourself at more of a risk than ever to like get unsubscribed from. Right. Not because maybe like, right. I don't like your show or like you as a person, but like, Hey, like my time is more fleeting than ever.

And like, I might have to make some calls. Right. So yeah, like that landscape on the business side, which I guess me on my soapbox a little bit, like, I don't think. Us in this industry that kind of overlaps, like the tech scene with like the creator, entrepreneur people, we don't talk about the business side as much as we talk [00:13:00] about just the pure creation side of, Hey, how do you make a podcast?

Hey, how do you like build a brand? Which is an important thing. So the business side is not level set in mind.

Brian Casel: You know, I actually want to get back into the business side here. So thinking about products. Or maybe like info products or community membership products in general. I'm curious to know, you know, here we are in the middle, late 2022.

What does the landscape for these types of products look like today? I feel like I'm several years out from like, I'm out of the game of doing info products. I'm doing SAS now, but like I've seen really successful products. That are like one time purchase, like high ticket, like several thousand dollars to get access to some big name course thing.

And then I see other models where it's like mini courses, lower price points. And then it seems like today, correct me if I'm wrong. It seems a little bit more skewed toward membership subscriptions, get access to a community plus access to some workshops and courses. I mean, what's the landscape looking like?

Matt Gartland: That's a pretty good pulse. Most folks that [00:14:00] have some, some decent size and scale probably have. Some hybrid model where a lot of those things are in the mix to some degree, I think of like Dickey Bush over at 30 for 30 and his model is tremendously centered by his main pencil is a, I guess what is now called a cohort based course.

So a CBC, that's at least one term for it is essentially like small groups. That has a live instruction component with some asynchronous collaboration work as well. And that's really caught fire, I'd say over the last couple of years, you know, two years or so.

Brian Casel: That's literally like I'm having calls with coaches every day now because coaches like are our best customer in ZipMessage.

And so many of them are doing these courses and group cohorts matched with. Access to the coach, whether it's asynchronous or live or group. And so we're looking to really go in that direction and you're right. Like I see it with almost every single person who's doing coaching. They're matching it with some course component.

Matt Gartland: To maybe rush maybe to one of the punchlines, what seems to be true, and again, [00:15:00] not because I'm the whiz kid that like figured it out, is that a predominant kind of common denominator is solving for loneliness in your customer base, right? So solving for like, Hey, I don't want to just learn podcasting on my own in my office, right?

I'm going to buy. Power up podcasting from SPI and learn from Pat because he's the instructor, knowing that course or any other competing product that also teaches podcasting, right? And like do it on my own. Like I want to learn with someone else. I want to be a part of an experience. Certainly some of these conditions are at least lauded as exacerbated because of the pandemic.

I have a data set to prove that, but it seems, it seems like that's a logical assessment. After being cooped up for two years, we're increasingly lonely. The world is harder and there's more people entering entrepreneurship, which is actually a good thing. In my estimation, like my judgment, it's exciting to have more folks choose to bet on themselves and maybe pursue a different career.

Right. And try to get their own thing off the ground, but then by that same token, like, okay, you have more people entering the market. They need more help and they want to learn from people in different ways. So, so the whole like [00:16:00] supply demand kind of curve around like what is the prevailing demand interest in this market.

It's still learning, of course, but it's learning together more than learning alone.

Brian Casel: Learning together. I love that. And I mean, it gets to the community piece. I've always used to think about. A lot of these courses, they sort of tack on as like an afterthought, like, Oh, and you get access to our community, whether it's a Facebook group or a circle or a Slack or whatever it might be.

But it seems to me like most people are joining it for that primarily. And oh, by the way, you get some training, but it's really to meet other people who are going through the same thing or aspiring to a common goal. We want to learn together. We want to mastermind together, right? That seems like where a lot of the value actually is.

Matt Gartland: Yeah, a lot of the value, a lot of the like retention value as well. So it's something that it's not a guarantee, but can be true if you build a community well, or any of these kind of shared experiences, whether it's community, community, which we come back to in terms of like memberships and subscription products, or just like these cohort things that are sort of like, come and go, right?

Hey, [00:17:00] it's six weeks. And then like, maybe there's something after that or not. But anyway, is that The together, this factor almost like has to be there, but there's difficulty in executing it. It's a different level of difficulty in terms of like how you pull that off. Uh, but if you can people stick around for the other people, not just you, not just the creator, not like the figurehead or the token person that's maybe like the creator at the center of it.

If you do it well, which again, not a guarantee, not easy, you know, well, they're going to stick around for the other people in the group.

Brian Casel: It does seem like. A really well run community is really difficult, probably more difficult than people think it's not just putting up access to a community. And then the people will just talk to each other.

Right? It's, it's actual mock, like, uh, engaging the community, like pulling people in. Right? Like, can you talk a bit about, like, how do you guys actually manage it on your team? Right? tasked with Making sure our community is thriving and active and how do you think about KPIs? Like, what do you track in terms of like our communities working?

Like, how do you think about that?

Matt Gartland: Well, first I will say that a lot of people [00:18:00] underestimate just how difficult community is. It's become a buzzword because there is a lot of interest and a lot of demand and those are good things. But without really kind of studying what it takes to do it well and developing skills or bringing people into the mix that have those skills.

That's where anyone would just run the natural risk of, of underestimating, you know, that, and then therefore risking, okay, maybe you get a decent project off the ground, but you fade out. So there's like, even the pull from the podcasting universe is like, okay, great. You got 10 episodes up, but then like you podcast, right?

Like that idea, you know, community fading is. It's just as real, I would say even like an easier condition because the difficulty factor is harder. There's more, more moving parts in terms of how we do it. We have a full time team of three that are devoted to community, which then to bring more of like the business kind of piece of it back into the picture, like there's real costs there, right?

Like I have three full time people on salary with healthcare benefits and add other costs on top of those things. And it's like, well, this is not a small amount of money that I'm spending to deliver a phenomenal community experience. Right. So then how do you [00:19:00] make something like that profitable and scalable?

Brian Casel: I'm kind of curious, like what does their job entail or what are like the projects that they work on to keep a community going? I mean, just for example, like this is actually something we're working on at ZipMessage. I have a new marketing coordinator and one of her tasks is going to start a community or for coaches who are using zip method, right.

And we're thinking of like creative ways to make it worth. Participating things that she can be working on. So I'm curious, like, what does that team actually do? Or what has worked? What kinds of structures or routines tend to work?

Matt Gartland: Yeah, to start from maybe what doesn't work or like what maybe they shouldn't do is just more content creation.

So with community plays, these aren't just like, hey, join this and get more content, exclusive content, bonus content. Like you could see that in there a little bit, but in terms of express demand, and I do have data actually to validate this, at least on our side of the pen. When we launched the first version of our community over two years ago, we surveyed and then [00:20:00] knew it validated at least my thesis that people wanted connection, like networking and shared experiences more than like just more content.

And I have data sets that prove it. We're continuing to collect that data. Then the job description, at least, so I have a director. And then I have two community managers. That's a little three person team. And the director is someone that is developing strategy with me around like what future programming.

Can we do for our members? So programming is maybe the magic. It's almost like a teacher, like curriculum design, right? That's not content, it's like experiences. What are you trying to lead them through, right? What sort of like almost journey are you trying to construct within your safe space, that is your community, then you kind of have to stir the potter or fan the basketball spinning on your finger, kind of pick your metaphor, to keep that engagement and those cycles going.

So the director or just anyone that can do strategy is kind of working with, at least in this case, like me and certainly Pat brings some ideas to the table too, but to then really like build out a method and a roadmap of [00:21:00] like, okay, these sorts of experiences, these new experiences. We just tested a new experience using a new piece of software called butter, butter.

us. It's like Zoom, but a lot more fun. And you can do more interactive things like with folks that show up on like a live event. So we did. At least for this experience, it was our two year anniversary with our community and we had a lot of people show up live and we had different programming elements built in.

So that's just one quick example. But we bring in knowledge experts, we do challenges, we do like pitch competitions, if you will, you know, with our members in the entrepreneurial space of our community. We curate masterminds internally to our community, so we don't facilitate them, but we kind of play matchmaker.

Oh, like this person, you should know this person. So,

Brian Casel: yeah, I used to do that with my, uh, I used to do that with my product has group, which I no longer run or own, but yeah, like the mastermind matching. People love that. It actually really is difficult to join a mastermind group if you're not easily networked and you might be able to meet some people, but they're not necessarily going after the same goal as [00:22:00] you are.

But by joining a community. You all are, and then getting matched up.

Matt Gartland: Yeah. And the magic there is not just in the matching, but the right matching, right? Cause if you're going to match someone who's already making a million dollars a year with someone who's only like, not even full time, right? Like that, that's maybe not a good matching, right?

At least not necessarily. It's not always about revenue, but you're trying to find people that are sometimes either at the similar spot of their journey, or they share certain characteristics in common where like that group is going to click and it's going to work. Right. So that's kind of like the art of it.

Brian Casel: Yeah, for sure. I mean, I'm also kind of curious about how you use community or your audience in general for research and planning new product development, right? How are you generating new ideas? Because the SPI brand is not known for one product. It's many products over a long lifespan, right? So yeah.

Like, do you go straight to the community first to get, to see where interest is going or where trends are going? Or how do you think about that? Do you do like customer interviews, things like that?

Matt Gartland: It's still a [00:23:00] hodgepodge. I wish I could say that we had some like super like whistle clean methodology here.

We don't, I'll confess. So when we first conceived the community, which I initially called SPI plus, we relabeled it SPI Pro when we first launched it. But that was an idea that I had two and a half years ago, brought it to Pat. He really liked it, brought some great thoughts into the mix as well. And we started to kind of move that forward.

And that was pre pandemic. We were working on this model, even before the pandemic was a thing. It just, I guess, kind of worked out serendipitously that like we had this thing pretty far down the product development roadmap. And knew that we would be launching it in the summer of 2020. And then when the pandemic hit in March, it's like, well, like, thank God we're three months away from this thing launching.

Right. Cause we know it's going to be very valuable to people. And we had a very successful launch. So on the front end of that, I wouldn't say that we did any hardcore like VOC collection or market research. To, like, validate that I think we just kind of instinctively knew and we had anecdotal evidence from conference, like, [00:24:00] going to in person conferences again, pre pandemic people wanted more of a certain, like, hallway experience.

That was perspective path right into the mix, which was very validating as well. We knew from our student groups. With our online courses, our on demand DIY online courses. So again, like Power Up Podcasting, for example, at that time after the course, we would invite folks to join our Facebook groups back then for each of the subjects.

So podcasting, affiliate marketing, email marketing, kind of our big 10th pillar topics. And then we didn't have a lot of active community management. It was more of just like, Hey, you guys figure it out over there on Facebook. What we ended up doing was de platforming off of Facebook entirely. Those student groups brought them onto the circle platform, which is specifically focused on community building and then have more intentionally done programming post course experience into that group, but it was those student groups that we were able to harvest.

Some validating, some feedback to your question around just like trying to get some VOC. Like those student groups were very, very valuable. And then yeah, the audience at large, which I make a big distinction between audience [00:25:00] and community not being the same thing. They overlap, but audiences, Hey, I have an email list of blank.

Right. So like, cool. That's an audience. Community is different in terms of, again, the mechanics, how do you do community? Well, how you get those interactions going, et cetera. So.

Brian Casel: Yeah, totally. And that's a great distinction because it's like. An active community member is a very different person than just an audience member, even if they're an active audience member, right? Like there are people who exactly, like I might actively subscribe and listen to every single episode of a podcast.

I'm a, call me like a super fan. But I might just not be a community forum person. Like maybe I don't want to spend time asking and answering questions in a forum. Like that's just not my thing. Right. So it's like there can be like a valuable member of an audience or a community and they're two very different things.

Matt Gartland: It's interesting. Exactly. There are different points in some, again, customer journey that you could design for your brand, right? So an audience member who is listening to your podcast and loves it and has maybe joined your email newsletter also and loves that too. And maybe they are interacting with you on Twitter.

But [00:26:00] hasn't done anything else, hasn't purchased a product or hasn't yet maybe joined your community if you have one, they're just at a different point in that funnel or in that journey map. And again, depending on the way you want to think about that. So for us, again, kind of going back to the business side and you'd also ask about KPI and I can kind of weave that in also is we are a community company.

That's kind of like. What we are declaring today in terms of the generation of this company and the life cycle phase that this company is in is we're a community company, and that's a very orienting decision, right? Okay, what products are we building? What products are we trying to grow? And to some degree, intentionally saying, like, what ones are we not going to grow?

Or are we going to think about very differently in terms of how we institutionalize these other maybe legacy products into this new normal of a hey, we're a community company. So our community is our product. It was initially kind of one dimensional in that we had one membership tier that we launched with that we call it a spare chrome and still do.

And we kept that in place for two years. And then now this [00:27:00] summer we are doing two things. We're going up market and down market. So kind of even if it's all right, Brian, even a couple of thoughts. Part of the feedback and audience validation is this community is great. There's some subset of them that was like, cool.

A lot of this is kind of marketing and that more like creator energy, right? I want to talk business. I want to talk business models, business strategy, roadmapping, like strap planning, cashflow, like budgets, all of this stuff that's really important, but that's a different sort of person. So that's more like.

My skill, my energy, whatever you want to call that. So we created a new membership tier that's like upmarket in terms of its price point is a lot higher.

Brian Casel: Is that like a totally different location? Like they're different communities.

Matt Gartland: Still lives in the side of SPI pro, but it's, um, through the, like the permissions that you can do in the software, you can just lock it down.

So we have a beta group going through that now it's built around me. So like. Just to say, if I like not Pat, Pat's really like kind of like the staple of pro itself, that the original community tier on the center of what we call the MBA group. So we have [00:28:00] pro sort of in the middle, if you were to think about like your traditional SAS three column pricing screen.

So pros in the middle, we have now MBA that's in beta. We're going to go to market publicly in January. We're in Q1. We have 20 beta members there and it's going really well. And then we also launched the down market here. So We got the product market fit right now. I'm proud to say with pro in terms of pricing, there's an application that everyone gets in.

You have to apply to get in to pro. These are strategy decisions that we've made along the way, but we knew that we. Had an opportunity to serve a different sort of entrepreneur earlier in their journey. We didn't need to put an application on the front end. It could be just like on demand to get in. So we launched what we call the learner community that launched two weeks ago.

Interesting. And it's, it's lower price point, lower commitment, less programming. I mean, there's still, I still have a community manager devoted to serving of the learner community, but it's just, it's a different thing compared to pro right. In terms of its construction. Yeah. So. So now we,

Brian Casel: I love that, like that sort of like ladder between, uh, you know, learner into pro [00:29:00] and business and sort of going in different interests.

Matt Gartland: SAS entrepreneurs like you like think the same way. It's like, okay, I have, I have a product I can kind of partition off different feature sets or, or advanced analytics and integration. So I'm going to put that on my pro plan or my enterprise plan. Right. So you kind of do the same thing.

Brian Casel: Yeah, totally. Or like people who are solo or versus like people who have teams and they're inviting users, right.

Yeah. Before we wrap up here, I wanted to just, Pat Flynn and SPI have been around for so long now. Massive, massive audience. Right. I wanted to just hear, what does this look like behind the scenes? Like what are some, I don't know, like anecdotes or picture of things, if you will. Like, you know, it's from an outsider looking in.

It's almost like, I wonder like, what is the inbox of a Pat Flynn on a daily basis? Like, is it just total chaos or what? And then you must get pitched with product pitches every minute of every day. Like, what does this look like?

Matt Gartland: Sometimes it's a zoo or the classic, like duck analogy where it kind of looks like it's just gliding effortlessly across the water, but underneath those flags should just kick in [00:30:00] like crazy.

So there's some truth there. I don't know about Pat's personal inbox. I thankfully don't see that. Sure. He gets a ton. He has a personal assistant, executive assistant that just manages all of that almost separately because it's the volume is so high in terms of, yeah, just what we think about. It's a great responsibility to think about the size of the audience and how we're serving them and wanting to serve them consistently and increasingly serve them better to truly try to stay on top of the market.

And I dare say, even try to get ahead of it sometimes. Right. And that's a challenge. Like there's certainly like the pressure of like, cool, the pressure of responsibility. Like we have so many people that are, you know, gratefully learning from us and we're helping, but like, you can never be complacent. So we just always want to kind of keep pressing forward.

And at least when, when I took,

Brian Casel: and how has it evolved? Cause you've been there for so long now, right? Like you've seen the journey, are there any like turning points or milestones that you can think of in terms of like, okay, there's the initial level of audience and then things really changed once we crossed X [00:31:00] number of subscribers or, or it was a totally different picture.

Once we, you know, turn this corner, anything like that,

Matt Gartland: Once it coming to minor. For better for worse, they're all kind of revenue oriented. So like when we first got into online courses in 2016, like that was a game changer, like that was a brand new on this business model or that quickly became the tentacle of the business model.

So like that was a major decision and it did well. And that was, if I'm remembering correctly, like mid to late 2016, the first online course from SPI came out from Pat. And that was before, again, we had tied the knot formally. So we were supporting Pat on the agency side with most of that work for the course and assisting it just in the agency model.

So that was major. Pat's second podcast was also a big thing called Ask Pat. It was Pretty early on in that whole, like, ask blank, right? Sort of a model. So, and it was a daily show for the first 1000 episodes. So that was like a daily never met for [00:32:00] a thousand episodes. So that was a pretty big game changer in terms of audience growth, new angle, getting more customer voices and audience voices into the mix because.

It was all predicated off of someone leaving a voicemail, like an actual audio voicemail. That was then the basis of that individual episode that then Pat would have like a, almost like a coaching response to that question. And that was the concept. So that did really well for us. That particular show has kind of evolved into a different thing.

That's a hard thing to keep doing. But yeah, that was a big thing just on kind of the brand and the audience side. And yeah, not to, I guess, too hard, but launching community was the most consequential thing recently. So coming out with that in 2020, and then with the decisions that we've been making around strategy, around staffing, around investment, this is what we want to make the business.

We want to turn this into MRR, just to talk again, kind of at the revenue level, like an MRR machine. So we charge for those memberships. You don't have to have a charge for community. Like you can set up [00:33:00] a community app circle or any other piece of technology and have it be free, but we're saying, no, we're a community company and you know, a business needs to generate some revenue so it can support itself and reinvest that back into the product.

And community is our product.

Brian Casel: It almost seems like the move towards subscriptions also aligns with consumer. Preference, right? I mean, if I'm going through a phase in my career or my entrepreneurial career, you know, there are communities that I purchased a membership. I remained a member for about two years and then I sort of like outgrew it and moved on and it was worth the monthly or quarterly subscription, whatever it was.

It's sort of like a, and you see this with software too, like the Photoshop used to be a big one time price tag. Now it's a subscription, right? It's sort of, yeah, it's like a subscription.

Matt Gartland: It starts to then. Just more naturally online with other things that people have expressed demand for right now. So go back to newsletters.

There's obviously a lot of free newsletters out there, like the newsletter concept versus just broadly email. So being more specific to like what a good newsletter is and how it works and how to do it well. Thanks to [00:34:00] Substack, thanks to other platforms that have really goosed up the interest and the ability to have good editorial quality newsletters go out there.

I think of like James Clear, obviously very successful creator, author. He has one of the biggest newsletters I think around. So like, okay, oftentimes, not always, but oftentimes those providers and free newsletters also have a paid newsletter that is subscription based for three bucks, four bucks, five bucks a month.

Uh, there's phenomenal industry publications. Hot pod is one that I do subscribe to and that I stay subscribed to that tracks the podcast industry. Um. You know, and they have a free version and they have a paper

Brian Casel: and it's incredible. And like the new level of value that you can see from a paid newsletter.

Right. There's so many, so many interesting, uh, paid podcasts is one that I feel like it's, it's surprising how that has not took off as much as people have thought it would. I still never answered. I

Matt Gartland: feel like it's going to come to the KPIs are very going to be Brian's and are to yours increasingly.

Right. I care about MRR. Right. So are we building in? Are we building into these membership [00:35:00] subscriptions? M churn that's we're intended to be building into them. What is our LTV on our customers? What is the churn? Right? And then increasingly, a metric that I track is at a gross revenue level. What percent of our gross is MRR?

'cause I'm trying to change the composition of our revenue to be dominated by MRR versus non MRR oriented things.

Brian Casel: Yeah, it's also interesting in your case, because you have so many different product offerings and theoretically over time, you would continue to offer new products for different things. And so I guess that opens up an opportunity for like a single subscription that gets access to increasingly more value.

I mean. You know, the Amazon prime model, right? Like if I need any sort of good, I'm going to Amazon first before anywhere else because I'm a prime member. And so like, if I need anything in my entrepreneurial tool set, well, I'm a SPI subscribers. So let me check there first.

Matt Gartland: One degree further in an exciting, expansive way.

We haven't crossed this bridge, but it's a tantalizing one that we're thinking about, which is not just our own [00:36:00] products, but other products. So when you build community, if you do it well, and you you're authentic and you have all the right kind of disclaimers and everything up front. You can build into not just creating a community can become its own economy.

Like you can build a marketplace inside a community where you're elevating other people's products. And then you, Hey, if you control the market, you're building this economy, then like you can take a slice of that. Right. And that can be its own revenue generating thing. So, well, we haven't gotten into marketplace design quite yet, but it's conceivable, like it's the models are out there.

The technology is there to do it.

Brian Casel: It's just incredible when you have the audience, but more importantly, the attention and the community and the engagement, that it just opens up so many new creative opportunities for business models. Yeah.

Matt Gartland: Yeah. Yeah. Super interesting. Exactly. So it's a crazy fucking

Brian Casel: jam on this stuff like all day, but,

Matt Gartland: Oh, I know.

Yeah. And a very, again, very different one than, you know, 2010, 2011 era, Seth Godin coming out with his blog. Like it's just an [00:37:00] exciting, very different world now.

Brian Casel: Totally. And even when I look at, at SPI today, I mean, obviously hat is still there, but it does seem like it's a much more. Wide ranging, like robust, a lot of different offerings.

It just looks like a ton of value in so many different areas. So

Matt Gartland: Yeah, he's always going to remain the front man of the band, but yeah, there's just more of a course.

Brian Casel: Yeah, that's great. I mean, Matt, this is awesome. I could pick your brain forever on this stuff. Maybe I'll have to have you back at some point.

Matt Gartland: Oh, I'd be honored. Yeah. Thank you.

Brian Casel: Today's just been a blast. Yeah. Well, thanks for doing it. Yeah, absolutely. Talk soon.