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2:00

That's my full name, all one word, teachable.com/J Klaus, J A

2:02

Y C L O U S E. I

2:11

literally went on vacation to the beach and

2:13

drew this little three circle thing. I want

2:15

to do my best work of my career

2:17

with good people and get paid fair money

2:19

and that's it. There is no back end

2:21

on this thing. There is no big exit

2:23

at the end of this thing and that's

2:26

fine. But I think I would have been

2:28

so worried about the back end on the

2:30

thing if I had done it when I

2:32

was 25 or 35 or

2:34

whatever. I would have messed it up. Hello

2:50

my friend, welcome back to another episode of

2:52

Creator Science. I am so excited to share

2:55

today's episode with you because it has had

2:57

a big impact on me since we recorded.

3:00

My guest today is April Dunford.

3:02

April spent the first 25 years

3:04

of her career as a startup

3:06

executive running marketing, product and sales

3:08

teams. Now the startups that April

3:10

worked with, they were mostly all acquired for a

3:12

total of more than $2 billion.

3:15

And during that journey, April

3:17

positioned, repositioned and launched 16

3:20

different products. When

3:23

I started, I didn't want to

3:25

run a business. That was never my goal in life

3:27

was to run a business. My goal was to

3:29

be the world's greatest vice president of marketing. That's

3:31

all I wanted to do. I just wanted to

3:33

be really great VP marketing. But

3:36

ironically, today April is a business owner. She's

3:38

an independent consultant and she's worked with more

3:40

than 100 early and growth stage startups to

3:43

help them position their products. Now

3:45

if this word positioning is new to you, I

3:47

don't want you to get too hung up on

3:49

it. It's not super important for this conversation. But

3:51

positioning is basically how you talk about your product

3:53

and differentiate it from other products in the marketplace

3:55

so that people see your product as the one

3:57

they want to buy. wrote

4:00

the book on product positioning. It's called Obviously

4:02

Awesome, how to nail product positioning so customers

4:04

get it, buy it, and love it. It

4:06

was published in 2019 and provides a

4:09

methodology for positioning that any company

4:11

can follow. It's become a best

4:13

seller and among entrepreneurs, product, and marketing

4:16

folk, April is kind of a product

4:18

legend. My consulting is my main

4:20

business. You know, book revenue is just like, I

4:22

don't know, it's like free money. I can't believe

4:24

it shows up every month. And

4:28

while that may be true, April has sold

4:30

a lot of books. It's

4:32

a little bit hard to count because I've got

4:34

all these different channels and I'm selling some books

4:37

at bulk. But the first book has sold

4:39

over 60,000 copies. I

4:41

could be closer to 80,000 copies

4:43

now, but it's a lot like a lot

4:45

of books. And as you'll

4:48

hear, the success of that book has had

4:50

a huge impact on April's overall business. And

4:52

I invited April onto the show because several

4:54

of my close friends have told me that

4:56

they love April's business model. She has no

4:59

employees. She works with a small number of

5:01

clients per year at high prices and her

5:03

clients are glad to pay it because they

5:05

see an ROI. Getting

5:08

the book out was absolutely transformational

5:10

to the business. Like that's what

5:13

took me from this is a

5:15

good business that pays me more

5:17

than what my salary was in

5:19

house, you know, yay me consultant

5:21

to you. Holy man, I didn't even think

5:23

it was possible to make this kind of

5:25

money and work with this

5:27

kind of clients and do this amazing stuff. And

5:30

yeah, the book was a game changer. This

5:33

conversation is divided into two halves. In

5:35

the first half, you'll hear April and

5:37

I talk about how she built her

5:39

consulting business, how she attracts high caliber

5:41

clients, the process she uses for qualifying

5:43

them. And in the second half of

5:45

the conversation, we talk a lot about

5:47

April's experience publishing her first book, Obviously

5:49

Awesome. After exploring traditional publishing, she decided

5:51

to self publish the book and she

5:53

says it's the best decision she's made.

5:56

I talked to a very famous author

5:58

and I basically He asked him the

6:01

question, like, what does your publisher do

6:03

for you? And he

6:05

didn't know. He wouldn't

6:07

admit that, but he didn't know. And

6:10

I was like, this is kind of a scam.

6:13

I took a lot away from this episode, and

6:16

I think you will as well. I'd love to

6:18

hear what you think about this episode. So tag

6:20

me on Twitter or Instagram at JClaus. If you're

6:22

listening, let me know. I love seeing it, but

6:24

now, let's talk with April. For

6:33

a long time, my goal was be a VP

6:35

marketing at a Fortune 500 company. And

6:37

I kind of did that, and then I went back to doing

6:39

startups because I thought I was better at startup

6:41

stuff. And so I did that. But I

6:44

was VP marketing, I think, seven times

6:47

where I ran marketing teams. And after

6:49

the seventh one, I was like, really,

6:51

April? We're going to keep doing this?

6:55

Are we going to keep doing this? And I'll tell

6:57

you, the last one wasn't great. The

6:59

last one, I was like, well, that kind of sucked.

7:02

I really want to sign up for another one of those.

7:05

So I did what I think a lot of people do

7:07

is I just said, well, maybe I could just

7:09

do consulting. And let's try that out. And

7:11

I had some false starts with consulting before where I

7:13

went and did consulting, and then I fell in love

7:15

with the company, and then I joined as a full

7:17

timer. But the last one, like I said, the

7:19

last one was bad. And I was like, maybe it's time to slam

7:21

that door and just go do my own thing. And

7:24

so it took me a couple

7:26

of years to kind of figure out

7:29

what that meant. I think

7:31

at the beginning, I started the way a lot of people do.

7:33

I'll just do the job I was

7:35

doing before only fractionally. So I'll

7:38

have multiple clients, or I'll work a

7:40

short period of time, and then I'll do that. And

7:43

that didn't seem like a good model for me for

7:45

a bunch of reasons. One, marketing's so broad. There's

7:47

so many things you could do. And so you

7:50

come in and you say, are you a fractional

7:52

VP marketing? There's 1,000 things that could mean. The

7:54

other thing is I felt like the expectations were

7:57

all out of whack. Everybody wanted me to have

7:59

full time responsibility. for part-time pay. I

8:02

was like, Hey man, that's not what I signed up for. So

8:04

I didn't like that. And so what I

8:07

wanted to do was have an engagement, like something where

8:09

there was a beginning, a middle and end, I come

8:11

in, we do a thing together and then it's clear

8:13

when we're done and then I go and then I

8:15

go to the next one. So I always

8:18

knew my focus was going to be around positioning at

8:21

the end of about two years of messing around

8:23

with a bunch of different models. What I settled

8:25

on is kind of a

8:27

workshop model where I'm working with

8:30

companies on their positioning. I work with

8:32

a cross-functional team at a tech company.

8:34

I come with a methodology and I

8:36

come in more like the facilitator and

8:38

the teacher and we're working

8:41

through a thing together. You

8:43

know, that sounds very easy and obvious, but it

8:45

literally took me two years to figure that out. Yeah.

8:48

Well, what I love from what I'm hearing here

8:50

is you are so in

8:53

touch with realizing when something

8:55

isn't working the way you want it

8:57

to. And being willing to say, let's

9:00

pause that then and let's try something else

9:02

as opposed to just doing more and more

9:04

and more. I find a lot of people,

9:07

especially in the, in the realm of providing

9:09

client services, they just take on more

9:11

and more and more and it gets harder and harder

9:13

to step away from. Well, the other thing

9:15

I think people do is they blame it on the client,

9:18

right? They'll say, well, that's stuck because it was a bad

9:20

client. And you

9:22

know what? My whole thing was how do I make sure I

9:24

never have a bad client? So

9:26

maybe it's the engagement changes. Maybe I do a

9:28

better job of filtering out bad ones at the

9:30

beginning. Like you should see how I filter. It's

9:33

kind of ridiculous. Like only about one in 10

9:35

of the companies that reach out to me actually

9:37

make it through my filter where I say, yeah,

9:39

I think this is a good fit. Can you

9:41

tell me about that? Yeah. So

9:44

at the beginning, I was just kind of taking

9:46

my victim where I find them. Right. So people

9:48

knew me as a good vice president of marketing.

9:50

So what happened is customers would

9:52

call me and they'd say, hey, come and be our

9:55

vice president of marketing. And I'd say, no, I don't

9:57

do that anymore, man. I'm doing this other thing. And

9:59

they'd say, yeah. Okay, let's just sign up for the

10:01

other thing. And they didn't care what it was. Like

10:04

they were just, we just want you in here. And then

10:06

you're going to fall in love with us and be our

10:08

vice president of marketing. So for the first year, I did

10:10

a lot of that. And I should have been saying no

10:12

to those deals cause they didn't want what I was offering.

10:14

But I was saying yes, cause I was like, eh, I

10:17

just need to get some work happening here. So

10:19

then I got more into like, you

10:22

know, I'm going to qualify you. And so now

10:24

I have a whole long list of qualification things.

10:26

So first of all, it

10:28

became very clear to me, like my background is very

10:30

B2B. If a company calls

10:32

me and what they have as a consumer product,

10:34

that's not really my background. My methodology

10:37

wasn't built for those kinds of

10:39

companies. Could we do something together?

10:41

Yeah, maybe, but would it be amazing? I don't

10:43

know. I couldn't guarantee that. So I thought, you

10:45

know what? I'm just going to say no to

10:47

that business. I'm sorry. So that

10:49

was the first thing. No consumer stuff, only B2B. Second

10:52

thing is most of the companies I worked with as

10:55

a VP marketing had a sales team. And there's a

10:57

lot of things you can do when you have a

10:59

sales team that you can't do if you're selling a

11:01

completely zero-touch sales model. So

11:03

I stopped working with companies that didn't have

11:05

a sales team because I was much more

11:07

valuable to those that did have a sales

11:09

team. And then if the

11:11

company was too early stage, we didn't have

11:13

a lot to grab on to do positioning

11:15

work. So I thought, well, you

11:18

know, if they're too early stage, I should be just

11:20

telling them no and trying to instead of trying to

11:22

do something, but we don't really have the right inputs

11:24

to actually do good stuff. All of

11:27

this was really important in that what

11:29

it meant was if somebody makes it

11:31

through all my check boxes,

11:33

their tech company, their B2B, they have a sales

11:35

team, they've got a product in market with a

11:37

certain amount of traction, I can feel

11:40

very confident that we're going to do some pretty

11:42

good work together, which gives me the confidence to

11:44

charge a lot of money for that. Because if

11:46

we do smash it, that's actually really, really valuable

11:49

to the company. Before, I think I was scared

11:51

to charge a lot of money because it was

11:53

like, well, maybe this is going to work, maybe

11:55

not, we'll see how it

11:57

goes. But now it's like...

12:00

If you tick all my boxes, we're going to smash it.

12:02

It's going to be awesome when we get to the end

12:04

of it. I have that

12:06

confidence. People hire me for that confidence. The

12:09

people hire me because they know their chances

12:11

of getting a really good result is much

12:13

higher than if they go to

12:15

somebody who just minors on this work and doesn't

12:17

major on it. That's

12:19

allowed me to put the rates up,

12:21

work with a higher class of customer,

12:23

all that stuff. How do I

12:26

interact with this filter? If I'm somewhat interested in working

12:28

with you, are you talking to me and asking these

12:30

questions? There's two things. One, if you

12:32

go to my website and you go to

12:34

sign up on my website, there's an FAQ

12:36

like right there on the contact form that

12:38

basically says, if you're a consumer, don't fill

12:40

in the form, man. It

12:43

doesn't work, but it's laid out pretty

12:45

straight there on my contact me form. It's like,

12:47

this is kind of who I work with and

12:49

so who's a good fit for me. It looks

12:52

like this. There's even a

12:54

mention of pricing on there. I don't

12:56

like talking about pricing upfront, but I

12:58

think it's fair to people to let

13:01

them know what the ballpark is because

13:03

a lot of smaller companies don't have the budget. When

13:06

I was cheap, I never talked about the pricing upfront

13:08

because I figured once you talk to me, you'd know

13:10

it was worth some money. Now I

13:12

put it on the website because I think the smaller companies

13:14

who don't have the budget, let's not waste each other's time

13:16

here. If you don't have the budget to do it, then

13:19

just don't fill it the form. All

13:21

that stuff is on the website. Then

13:23

we'll do a qualifying call. There's

13:26

a handful of things I'm checking for in the

13:28

qualifying call. Are they really

13:30

big enough? Do they really have enough traction in

13:32

the market? Sometimes people call and they say, we

13:34

made all our money in this market, but we

13:37

want to be in this other market. We

13:39

haven't sold anything there, but we want to do the

13:41

positioning there. I turn those ones down because I'm like,

13:43

we don't know how to position it because you haven't

13:46

sold anything there yet. You need to go sell some

13:48

stuff and call me in six months. We're

13:50

having those conversations. The

13:52

other thing I'm looking for is sometimes

13:55

people call me and they think it's a positioning problem and I

13:57

don't think it is. They'll call me

13:59

and say. you know, once we get

14:01

a customer in the door, we smash it. Like we sell

14:03

everybody, we close everybody. It's amazing. And I'm like, maybe

14:06

your problem is awareness and lead

14:08

generation. I

14:10

sound like a existing probably. So I'll disqualify those folks.

14:13

It was a very broke. We shouldn't be trying to

14:15

fix it. So we do all that

14:17

stuff in the qualification call. And then a lot

14:19

of my clients are looking at me, but they're

14:21

talking to other people too. And so part of

14:23

the qualification call is them making sure I sound

14:26

like I know what I'm doing and they want to work with

14:28

me too. I also have a

14:30

bit of an asshole filter, frankly, in the qualification

14:32

call. Like if I don't think I want to

14:34

spend the whole week with these people, like

14:37

I've done my time 25 years in startups. Like,

14:40

you know, I don't have to spend a week

14:42

with jerks. So if they're kind of

14:44

jerky to me, I'm like, Oh geez, I think I'm all booked

14:46

up. That's the

14:48

lesson. I feel like everybody learns the hard way. Yeah.

14:50

Like, Oh, I should have, I should have a filter for that. Yeah.

14:53

You should have a filter for that. This is where I'm

14:55

at now. Like if I was just starting out,

14:58

here's the other thing to know about this. Like I

15:00

started my own thing, like at the end of

15:02

my career, I've been 25 years

15:05

as a VP marketing. So it wasn't

15:07

like I was 25 with debts and

15:09

broke. It's different when you do it

15:11

late stage, you can be a little

15:13

bit more picky and you can spend two years not

15:16

making too much money trying

15:18

to figure this stuff out. So I had the

15:20

privilege of doing that. I couldn't

15:22

have done this business when I was 30 years

15:25

old and broke and in debt

15:27

and whatever, but

15:30

I had the luxury of being really picky.

15:33

And so the great thing that

15:35

happens when you do have the

15:37

luxury of being really picky is you tend

15:39

to smash it every time you do pick

15:41

somebody, it's a really good fit and then

15:43

that generates a good word of mouth. So everybody's like,

15:45

Ooh, you know, we did this thing with April. It

15:47

was really good. And that's all goodness.

15:50

I'm going to come back to that point you made

15:52

in a minute about this wouldn't have looked the

15:54

same had I done it earlier, but

15:57

you, you mentioned this contact page on your website. So

15:59

I pulled it up. up here and I was looking at

16:01

it. And what I expected to see was a

16:04

form with a bunch of different fields, a bunch of

16:06

different check boxes. Actually what I see is a very

16:08

simple form with an FAQ below it with a lot

16:10

of the questions. So it's not saying, are you this,

16:12

are you that? You're saying, I don't work with B2B

16:15

companies. I work with growth

16:17

stage and larger organizations. You can expect

16:19

a minimum investment of $60,000. So you're qualifying

16:21

them and saying, this is just what it

16:23

is. I fill this out if this

16:25

is you, but you're not making the

16:28

form longer, which I see a lot of

16:30

service providers have a really long intake form,

16:32

which I think presents new

16:34

problems. So the person I'm

16:37

dealing with is generally the CEO of

16:39

a growth stage business. So they're a

16:41

startup CEO, companies making 30, 40, 50,

16:44

100 million revenue. Like it's amazing they fill

16:48

out a form at all. Like

16:51

if I put any friction in that.

16:54

And what they really

16:56

want to know is like most of

16:58

the time these folks come

17:00

to me really qualified already. So

17:03

they've seen me on stage somewhere.

17:05

And then they bought the book and

17:08

read the book. They might have attempted

17:10

to do the exercise themselves internally because

17:12

I encourage everybody to try and do

17:14

it themselves internally. And they've been wrestling

17:16

with this thing for like six

17:18

months. And so by the time

17:21

they hit my page, it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. I

17:23

just want to know like how much does it cost? When can

17:25

we do it? After a

17:27

quick break, April and I talk about the evolution

17:29

of her business and how her first book came

17:31

to be. So stick around. We'll be right back.

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19:53

now, back to my conversation with April Dunford.

19:55

So I was doing workshops well before the book. The first

19:58

couple years I didn't know what I was doing. I

20:00

was taking all kinds of different projects on

20:02

and things kind of sucked. I

20:05

was doing some fractional CMO

20:07

stuff and it was shit, everything

20:09

was shit. So I said, well, I actually

20:12

have to figure this out. And so the first

20:14

thing I decided was I only

20:16

want to do work where I'm right in my zone

20:18

of excellence, which for me is the positioning work. So

20:20

I want to eliminate all this other work. If it's

20:23

not positioning work, I'm not going to do it. And

20:26

then the two other factors were I just

20:28

want to work with good people. So I'm

20:30

going to hard disqualify anybody that looks like

20:32

they're problematic to work with. And

20:34

then the last thing was I needed to figure out

20:37

a way to make fair money for what

20:39

I was doing. Like one of the things

20:41

about being a VP marketing at startups is

20:43

you generally get paid under market value if

20:45

you're an earlier stage companies. And there's

20:47

always this big promise of stock options that never

20:49

actually works out. And so even if you get

20:51

acquired, which is a whole other podcast. But so

20:54

I thought, you know what, I'm not often getting

20:56

paid what I'm worth. So at this stage, you

20:58

know, if we're going to do some stuff together,

21:00

I'm going to get paid one more. So

21:02

those were the three things. One of the things

21:04

I quickly came to the conclusion on was

21:07

anything that appeared like doer

21:10

work, like I'm going to do

21:12

your positioning for you. That's

21:15

a problem because I'm always going to get compared

21:17

with, well, can't we just hire a vice president

21:19

of marketing to do this? And

21:21

so they would, you know, take whatever the salary

21:23

was for VP marketing, split that up and say,

21:25

well, you're here for two months. So we're going to pay

21:27

the equivalent of two months salary of VP marketing. And that's

21:29

just not, I just wanted to get out of that. And

21:33

so I thought, well, really what my

21:35

goal here is, is to work with

21:37

companies on their positioning, but they

21:39

know more about their product, their market, their

21:42

situation, all this stuff than I could ever

21:44

learn. Like even if I went in and

21:46

spent three months with them and interviewed all

21:48

their customers and interviewed all the executives, they're still

21:50

going to know way, way, way more about the

21:53

situation than me. So a

21:55

big unlock for me was I

21:57

started going in and working with companies.

22:00

and basically getting the gang together like

22:02

we get the executive team together and

22:04

instead of me trying to figure

22:06

out what the answers were. I

22:08

would come in with a process to pull

22:11

the answers out of everybody because

22:13

my thesis was the answers are there

22:15

it's just the different parts of the

22:17

organization don't agree. And

22:19

so that turned out to be a

22:21

really big game changer in my work

22:23

that instead of me spending months and months

22:25

trying to do all this leg work. I

22:28

would just bring the right people together in the room

22:30

and have a process for pulling stuff out of people.

22:33

So instead of being the person

22:35

doing the positioning I'm facilitating and

22:37

teaching the folks how to do

22:39

it. This makes a lot of

22:41

sense because as the third

22:43

party coming in you

22:46

are incentivized to do the best work

22:48

as efficiently as possible and

22:50

so you're saying how can I most

22:52

efficiently set myself up to do

22:54

what I need to do. And in

22:57

figuring out the answer that question you

22:59

developed a really repeatable

23:01

process and framework. That's

23:03

exactly it. So after

23:06

doing that a bunch of times I

23:09

thought okay I really got this down now so

23:11

like you know I come in here's the framework

23:13

here's the thing we do I come in as

23:15

the facilitator I'll do it. Then I

23:17

got this idea well there were

23:19

two things happening in my business one was

23:22

companies were coming to me and I

23:25

was trying to explain what we were going to

23:27

do in this workshop and it was hard to

23:29

explain. And people were kind of like

23:31

well can't you just do it for us and

23:33

I'm like no I can't and here's why you

23:35

know when I explained that and then I would

23:37

explain the process and all this stuff. And sometimes

23:39

it was hard to do in an hour like

23:41

we need a second call to talk about it

23:43

and I thought well what I should

23:45

actually have is a book. Well

23:48

at first I thought it was a blog post I

23:50

thought what I should have is this big detailed

23:52

blog post that says here's how you do it.

23:55

And then two things would happen the little guys

23:57

that were too small to work with me because

23:59

they. They're not even paying themselves,

24:01

let alone a consultant. They could just read

24:03

the post and do it themselves. And that

24:06

would save me having 9,000 coffee meetings with

24:09

CEOs of early stage companies because at that point

24:11

I was spending a lot of time having coffee

24:13

meetings with CEOs of early stage companies. And

24:16

so they could self-serve that. And then

24:18

in the coffee meeting, we'd have smarter

24:20

discussions. And then the second thing was

24:22

that the CEOs that were in

24:24

my market space could read this thing. And

24:27

this is like the description of here's exactly what

24:29

I do. And so if I go

24:31

to a conference talk or something and I'd say, hey,

24:33

you want more information on how to get this done,

24:35

here's the blog post, go read it. If

24:38

you're stuck, call me. And so

24:40

that would maybe save me this first call. But

24:42

then I got right in the blog post and I'm like, oh man, this is

24:44

more than the blog post. This is too

24:46

big. This starting to look like a book. So

24:49

then I went down the whole journey of

24:51

getting the book out. That

24:53

took me a long time, like maybe two

24:55

years. But getting the

24:57

book out was absolutely

24:59

transformational to the business.

25:02

That's what took me from this

25:04

is a good business that pays

25:06

me more than what my salary

25:08

was in-house, yay me,

25:10

consultant to, holy man, I didn't

25:12

even think it was possible to make this kind of money and

25:15

work with this kind of client and do

25:18

this amazing stuff. And yeah, the

25:20

book was a game changer for me. I'm

25:22

going to ask, this is a faux pas on podcasting,

25:24

but I'm going to do it anyway. I'm going to ask you two questions at

25:26

once. The first is,

25:29

why did the book take

25:31

two years? You made it sound like it took a long

25:33

time, longer than you expected. And two,

25:36

what would you have done differently knowing

25:38

what you know now to make that path more efficient? Oh,

25:41

well, let me tell you, I just wrote the new book

25:43

and the new book was so much easier than the first

25:45

book because the new one, I know what I'm doing. The

25:48

first one I didn't know. So the

25:50

first one I got a lot of

25:53

really well intentioned but terrible advice

25:55

about books. So I thought,

25:58

well, I'm going to write a book, so I'll go. talk

26:00

to book authors about how they did it.

26:02

The problem is, is most of the people I talked to,

26:05

you know, wrote books like 10 years ago. And

26:07

I think the book business has really,

26:10

really, really changed. The other thing

26:12

is that if you wrote a

26:14

book with a traditional publisher, all

26:16

you know is that. Like you

26:19

don't know what self-publishing looks like. So

26:21

like I talked to a very famous

26:23

author and I basically asked him the

26:26

question like, what does your publisher do

26:28

for you? And he didn't

26:30

know. And he wouldn't admit

26:32

that, but he didn't know. And

26:35

I was like, this is kind of a

26:37

scam. And so I spent a year trying

26:39

to go down traditional publishing routes and that

26:42

didn't work so good for me. One, they

26:44

didn't like the topic. They thought it was

26:46

stupid. Two, book publishers were

26:48

like, well, hasn't a book on

26:50

positioning already been written? And I'm

26:53

like, yeah, man, in 1982. But

26:55

you know, I think we need a new one every

26:57

50 years or something. Yeah.

27:01

Yeah. And they're like, I don't know.

27:03

I don't know. Sounds risky. And

27:05

then they would ask me really like these

27:07

questions that drove me crazy. They'd say, well,

27:09

how many newsletter subscribers do you have? How

27:12

many followers do you have on Twitter? And

27:14

I was like, well, like a

27:16

decent amount, frankly, but I mean,

27:18

I can have as many as you want. Like I

27:21

can go buy those. All you care about is the

27:23

number. Like these are kind of dumb questions.

27:26

So I eventually landed at the place where what

27:28

the book people do is

27:31

produce the book, but they

27:33

don't do anything to market the book or promote

27:35

the book or anything. All they do is produce

27:38

the book, get you editors and cover art and

27:40

all that stuff. And even that's

27:42

terrifying because what they're doing is buying

27:44

the book, which means technically

27:46

they own your book now. Like they own your

27:49

IP, they own all your stuff. For a consultant,

27:51

I found that kind of terrifying. Like if I

27:53

wanted to use diagrams in a book that they

27:55

had published, I would have to license them from

27:57

my publisher. Really? Yeah. That's another...

28:00

I haven't heard people talk about. I was like,

28:02

that's dumb. Well, that's why most books are so

28:04

fluffy because you don't want to put all

28:06

the good stuff in there, otherwise you've got to license it back from

28:08

your publisher. This

28:10

is the other thing I learned is that book

28:12

publishing is like a hits based business. So

28:15

what they want is a book that's like

28:17

chicken soup for the soul. You know, something

28:19

really fluffy, really broad applies to everybody and

28:22

they're hoping you get a hit. What

28:24

I wanted to write was

28:27

something really specific for practitioners

28:29

that was really narrow. And so that didn't

28:31

go so great with them. So eventually I did

28:33

get a deal with a publisher, but

28:35

we got into like basically a

28:37

disagreement. They wanted me to write

28:39

positioning for your life, you know,

28:43

and I was like, that's not the business

28:45

I'm running here, people. I work with tech

28:47

companies. That's it. Like, you know, and so

28:49

I ended up firing them and going self

28:51

publishing, which in my opinion

28:53

was the best decision I could have made for

28:55

like a thousand different reasons, but mainly because I

28:57

really knew my audience. I knew what they wanted.

29:00

I knew what I wanted to do with this

29:02

book and I needed to have the creative control

29:04

to build a product that I knew I needed

29:06

for this business. And I'm super happy that I

29:08

did that. Was it difficult for you

29:10

to fire the publisher you had an agreement with?

29:13

I was really lucky. They hadn't paid me my

29:15

advance yet. And so if they

29:17

had a paid me my advance, that would have

29:19

been bad news, but they hadn't paid me the

29:21

advance yet. So I just said, look, it's

29:25

not me. It's you. Bye. So it was bad. You

29:30

know, it's funny. They came back to me like three years later

29:33

and said, wow, like, looks like

29:35

you're selling a lot of books, April. We'd like

29:37

to buy that book off you. And I said,

29:39

really? Oh, that's cool. How much,

29:41

you know, and then we went, we got

29:43

talking about a deal and the deal was

29:45

stupid. It was like the dumbest sales pitch

29:47

I've ever heard in my life. Actually. It

29:49

was like, you give us

29:51

everything and all your pipeline, everything. We

29:54

will take all of the

29:56

royalties and you will get the privilege.

30:00

saying that you were published by XYZ with

30:02

a little sticker on the back and I'm

30:04

like, you're joking, right? Man,

30:07

man, oh man. So here's one question

30:09

I have for you with what a

30:11

publisher does potentially. Did

30:14

you care about bestseller lists at

30:16

all? Because it seems like that

30:18

carries some cache and might even

30:20

have some reporting promise as

30:22

opposed to self-publishing? Yeah. So

30:24

I decided that didn't matter. So

30:27

here's the thing. You can self-publish and

30:29

be bestseller on Amazon. Anyone could do

30:31

that. In fact, that's kind of a

30:33

meaningless thing like bestseller. Like if I just

30:35

make my, if anybody makes their book 99

30:37

cents, they'll be bestseller for a

30:40

day in some category. So that means nothing.

30:42

But if you wanted to say you were

30:44

New York Times bestseller or Wall Street Journal

30:46

bestseller, you have to

30:48

be published traditional way because those lists

30:51

don't count self-published books. So they

30:53

don't count anything that's print on demand.

30:55

They do everything through this thing called BookScan, which

30:58

is kind of a thing with the publishers. And

31:00

so if you self-publish a book, you will not

31:02

ever show up on the bestseller

31:04

list on any of those bestsellers.

31:07

And so, you know, I wondered

31:09

like, would that do something

31:11

for me? Like if I was New York

31:13

Times bestseller, would that change my life?

31:15

And so I met a guy and he

31:18

essentially bought himself a New York Times

31:20

bestseller. So what he did was he's

31:22

a very famous marketer. He's a really,

31:24

really big email list, like hundreds and hundreds

31:26

of thousands of people. He got an

31:28

agent. The agent shopped him around.

31:30

He got a book deal and he got

31:33

a spectacularly huge advance, like $100,000 advance,

31:36

which, you know, for a new author

31:38

who isn't like a famous person, that's

31:40

a big deal. And then he took

31:42

the entire $100,000 and gave

31:45

it to a company that goes

31:47

around and buys books at

31:50

the specific stores that count for your New

31:52

York Times bestseller thing and had all those

31:54

buys happen in one week so that he

31:56

popped up on the list for like one

31:58

week. And that was... was it? And

32:01

I could tell you this guy's name, I won't because I don't

32:04

have permission to talk about him. But you don't

32:06

know that he's a New York Times bestseller. Like

32:08

he didn't get anything that goes with being a

32:11

New York Times bestseller. And so

32:13

I just kind of decided, who cares?

32:15

Like for what I do, like if I

32:17

was a fiction book, like if I was

32:19

Harry Potter, that'd be different.

32:21

But I just wanted

32:24

to sell a lot of consulting and

32:26

use this book as a way to make that easier. So I

32:28

kind of didn't care. Like I mean,

32:30

it'd be good for my ego, but I think it's

32:32

kind of important to separate out your ego on that.

32:35

And you know, and I've sold a lot of books, like really

32:37

a lot of books, so I feel good about that. Yeah,

32:39

probably enough, probably enough to put you

32:41

on the list. I absolutely would have

32:44

made an all-tree journal bestseller for

32:46

sure. There's no question in my mind,

32:48

I would have made that one. I don't know if I would

32:50

have made New York Times bestseller, but who cares? Yeah,

32:53

this is the racket that

32:56

exists within the industry that I want to point

32:58

out. I'm using that word very specifically because that

33:00

word actually has meaning. But can I tell you

33:02

a little detail here? Please. When I

33:04

did the math, you know, when I was working

33:06

with the publisher, they were going to give me

33:08

a little advance, 10 grand, 20 grand, something like

33:11

that. And that's an advance on your royalties. And

33:13

so the royalties, the way they calculate it, Amazon

33:15

takes 30%, the publisher takes

33:17

another 50% or something.

33:19

So you're left with like 10% or something,

33:22

so like some little slice. So you know,

33:24

less than a buck a buck or something is

33:26

usually what happens. And so when

33:28

I did the math on that, I was like,

33:30

Oh, man, I'm not making any money on books,

33:32

you know, and everyone says that nobody makes any

33:35

money on books. Yes, yes. Okay, so then I

33:37

switched to self-publishing. The way self-publishing worked was I

33:39

hired a company, and they did everything the publisher

33:41

would do. So two rounds of edits, made my

33:43

cover look pretty, get everything interior design, get it

33:45

all set up on all the systems, you can

33:47

buy it in a book store if you want

33:49

to all that stuff, and I just paid them

33:52

up front. So for the first book, I paid

33:54

$20,000 to make that

33:56

happen. So I did all that. And then

33:58

the book came out. So now we'll go the book is selling, I

34:01

only lose the 30% that Amazon takes.

34:05

So I'm actually making a few dollars a book, but

34:07

I'm not looking at it because I'm thinking, well, that's

34:09

not money. No one makes money on books. So then

34:11

I got to the end of the year and my

34:14

accountant said, Hey, April, what's

34:16

the revenue on this book? We need to figure this out.

34:18

You know, we got to put this in on your taxes

34:20

and stuff. And I'm like, yeah, okay, let me

34:22

pull the thing out of Amazon. So I'm selling

34:24

maybe 95% of my books

34:27

are on Amazon. So I go on Amazon. I

34:29

download the report and it pulled this thing

34:31

to look at how much did I make

34:33

in royalties for the year? And it wasn't

34:35

even a full year because the book didn't

34:37

come until May. And I had

34:39

made $70,000. Wow.

34:43

Almost that large advance you were just

34:45

talking about that some people. Like people

34:47

that's not nothing. Yeah,

34:50

totally. So I was like,

34:53

Oh my God. It was like free money. And

34:55

then the crazy thing is the book

34:57

sold more the second year than it did

34:59

the first year, and I'm

35:02

now on year three or something. And

35:04

my book sales are completely flat. So

35:06

it's cranking that year after year after

35:08

year. Now I would have given

35:10

that away all of that. And

35:13

instead what I paid 20 grand upfront

35:15

to do their part only

35:17

cost me 20 grand. So if you

35:19

have faith in your ability to be able to market and

35:21

sell a book, why the hell would you give it away

35:23

to these people that don't do anything for you? And

35:26

I would imagine the book is the best source of

35:28

lead gen that you have. Oh, absolutely.

35:30

So if I, you know, if I counted all

35:33

that money I made off consulting, like

35:35

ridiculous, it's the most high ROI thing

35:37

I've ever done in my life.

35:42

After one more short break, we talk about

35:44

April's launch and the promotion strategy for her

35:46

book. So don't go anywhere. We'll be right

35:48

back. Okay. You

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now please enjoy the rest of my conversation with

36:54

April Dunford. On your website when

36:56

I look at the book pages you push people to Amazon. Why

36:58

not sell directly through your website to people who are looking at

37:00

the books on your website? Shipping. I

37:03

just don't want to deal with shipping. Right?

37:06

Like I would have to figure that out. And

37:08

people are all over the world. And I

37:10

live in Canada. So you know you get all these people

37:12

in the US and I'd have to deal with shipping. I'm

37:15

just like pain in the ass. Don't want to deal with it. Again

37:18

another thing that I admire about you and your

37:20

business model. Even things that like I could

37:22

do that. Sounds like a pain in the ass. I'm not going

37:24

to do that. Yeah. I mean if you

37:27

think about my time my time's worth a lot of money. And

37:29

for the number of people that would actually buy it from there

37:31

I just kind of looked at it and went I

37:34

don't know. Again I'm talking about CEO of a

37:36

company that makes 50 60

37:38

million revenue. They're just going to go

37:40

buy it on Amazon. Yeah. And if

37:42

you don't love Amazon you can go to your

37:44

local bookstore and order it and it'll

37:47

come in the same as it would if I was at

37:49

the traditional publisher. So you can get it anywhere

37:51

you get books. Again

37:53

I wasn't ever thinking about oh I'm trying

37:55

to optimize for book revenue. But if I was

37:58

really trying to optimize for book revenue. Yeah, I'd

38:00

probably think about that. Are you willing to

38:02

share the name of the company or how you found

38:04

the company that helped you do the like setup to

38:06

print this? Yeah, yeah, they're incredible.

38:08

So they're called Page 2, all

38:11

one word, P-G-E-T-W-O. You've

38:14

probably heard of them because anybody who's

38:17

serious about self-publishing is working

38:19

with them. And you know, I worked with them

38:21

on the first book and I didn't really know what I was doing.

38:24

And they were kind of new in

38:26

business too. And so we kind of

38:28

bumbled our way along, I think on the first book.

38:30

But I went back to them to do the

38:33

second book and I gotta say like that whole

38:35

process was perfect.

38:37

Like I couldn't

38:39

imagine doing a book with anybody else. So

38:41

they just basically do everything. You pay them

38:44

upfront. And in my

38:46

opinion, like if you look at the

38:48

people they have working there, they all

38:50

come from traditional publishing. So you're working

38:52

with editors and people that also edit

38:54

books from a grail or wherever. So

38:56

it's the same quality. So

38:58

they have a really great process for doing

39:00

several rounds of edits to make sure you get

39:03

a really, really good quality book. They

39:05

were really good with me. Like I had a

39:07

very specific idea of how I

39:09

wanted the book to look. Like I

39:12

did a lot of research with CEOs before I wrote

39:14

the book. And what I wanted it

39:16

to be was like an in-flight magazine, like

39:18

lots of white space, easily

39:20

skimmable, quite short word

39:23

count wise, but spaced

39:25

out. And they did an

39:27

amazing job with that. And then professional

39:30

looking cover and then all the backend stuff,

39:32

like get me set up on all the

39:34

places. And they'll even handle

39:36

things like bulk book buys if you

39:39

want to sell bulk books because you're

39:41

speaking at a conference or something like

39:43

that, they do that. Audio book, everything,

39:46

everything. So super easy. And the

39:48

only downside is you got to cough up the

39:50

cash upfront. And the second book

39:52

was more expensive than the first book because they're a

39:54

better company now. But in my opinion,

39:57

super worth it. I want to give a

39:59

shout out to the book. Write useful books

40:01

which I read that really talked

40:03

about self-publishing The image

40:05

that stands out in my brain from that book

40:07

that I can't stop thinking about is he said,

40:10

you know in a traditional publishing world Everything

40:12

is optimized for the presale and then the

40:14

week of publish because most people in traditional

40:16

publishing are trying to hit that best-seller List

40:18

and if you look at book sales For

40:21

most traditionally published books you have a spike

40:23

in sales and then it's just like a

40:25

slow decline forever After that and

40:28

what you're describing in the self-published world It's the

40:30

same methodology in this book write useful books You

40:32

wrote a very specific book for a specific audience

40:34

that teaches them how to do something Which

40:37

has generated positive word of mouth

40:39

and you're actually seeing sustained sometimes

40:41

growing sales year over year Yeah,

40:44

seems like a pretty good alternative.

40:46

I treated like I come from tech,

40:48

right? It is so like I'm an ex

40:50

VP marketing in tech So I treated the

40:52

whole thing like a product launch like you

40:55

wouldn't call that a successful product launch of

40:57

the product only sold for a week Would

40:59

you? No, no,

41:02

that would be a bummer So,

41:04

you know again if you take that whole I

41:06

got a you know Ego thing

41:08

like I gotta be New York Times bestseller

41:10

thing if you take that out of the

41:12

equation Then what you really want

41:14

is a book that generates a lot of word

41:16

of mouth because that like for my audience That's

41:18

the only way they hear about books is word of

41:20

mouth And so, you

41:23

know, first of all, you got to write a book that's

41:25

really good like you got to write a book that's good

41:27

and useful and all the rest of it and Then

41:30

launching it is you know, it's just like launching

41:32

a product. There's a bunch of things you do

41:35

before the launch There's the launch but the

41:37

launch is kind of whatever now it's out

41:39

there But then what you need

41:41

is this kind of sustained set of things

41:44

Carrying on like my original launch plan

41:47

for obviously awesome was a year-long plan

41:49

and it was like pre-launch launch post-launch

41:53

Momentum launch the same way I would do

41:55

it for a product and that worked really good I

41:58

want to talk about that. Can you talk about that? Sure So

42:00

like I'll give you an example, like when I

42:02

was at IBM, if we were launching a product, we

42:05

would have the pre-launch and the pre-launch phase would

42:07

be like, oh boy, this

42:09

thing is coming, it's

42:12

going to be amazing, right? And so

42:14

you're kind of teasing it with

42:16

the press and you're teasing it with your audience

42:18

and you're letting everyone know like, this is the

42:20

thing coming. And then you might

42:22

do pre-orders and pre-orders are just a way

42:24

to get some hype rolling for the thing

42:26

before it's available. So you're, oh, pre-orders are

42:29

available, woo hoo, you know, get on there

42:31

and get your pre-order. And

42:33

then the thing is available. And so you've got

42:35

a week of, you know, really sustained

42:37

effort. Like at IBM,

42:39

we would do big press release, a couple of events,

42:41

a bunch of big stuff going on. But

42:44

then we would have all this stuff planned for afterwards. So

42:47

usually we would do what we call a success announcement.

42:50

So two months after the thing was announced, we'd

42:52

put out a press release and talk about all

42:54

the cool companies using our stuff and all

42:56

the stuff happening. For a book launch, what

42:58

I did on the first one was a few

43:00

months after putting it out, I was like, holy

43:03

cow, I got a hundred Amazon reviews. Look at

43:05

what they say. This is amazing. I can't believe

43:07

how many books I'm selling. You haven't got one

43:09

yet? My God, what's wrong with you? Get

43:12

out there and get that thing. So

43:15

I did that and then the audio book was

43:17

not available at the same time. So I did

43:19

that one later. At IBM, we do a point

43:21

release. So what we do is there'd be a

43:23

couple of features that people really wanted that weren't

43:25

available at the time of the general release. And

43:27

so we'd put that out three, four months later.

43:29

We'd be like, woohoo, you know, new news. This

43:31

thing is out now and maybe it didn't buy

43:33

before because it didn't have this thing, but now

43:36

it has this thing. Come and get it. So

43:38

I held the audio book off a little bit

43:40

and released that one later and it gave me

43:42

a chance to just go out and announce it

43:44

again. And so people were waiting for the audio

43:46

book, were excited and whoo, that was generating some

43:48

stuff online. Yay, the audio book, blah, blah, you

43:50

know, and then I had some

43:52

templates and things that went with the book

43:55

because it's a very much a how-to book.

43:57

And so then I released a new version

43:59

of the book. the templates and everybody

44:01

was excited about that and so there

44:03

was some new supplemental material and

44:06

then at the one year mark, I

44:08

put it on sale. So again, a lot of

44:10

people will put the book on sale on day

44:12

one because they want to hit these best seller

44:14

lists which are stupid and meaningless and I don't

44:16

know why you would do that because your people

44:19

that love you the most are buying on day

44:21

one. So they're happy to pay full price. So

44:24

at the one year mark, I thought, well,

44:26

at a year, that's probably as much

44:28

juice as I can squeeze out of

44:30

this lemon. At the one year

44:32

mark, anybody who hasn't bought now needs a sale.

44:36

So I put this, so I was like, e-books

44:38

going on sale for 99 cents and

44:40

I sold 4,000 books. Wow.

44:44

Can you believe that? Wow.

44:47

At the one year mark, I

44:49

was like, oh, you cheapies. Wow.

44:53

Are you comfortable sharing how big your email audience

44:56

was that you sent that to? I'm trying to

44:58

think of like a proportion of that. Dude, I

45:00

didn't even have an email list. I had an email

45:02

list. I'm not

45:04

doing any of that. Who did you send it

45:07

to? Well, so I did a handful

45:09

of things. So one was, I had

45:11

a sticky little email list. We're talking

45:13

like 5,000 names maybe and this list

45:16

isn't even active. I don't newsletter. I

45:19

hit the list but I probably sold 10 books off to hitting

45:21

the list. I put it all over

45:23

socials. At the time, I had

45:25

50,000 fairly active users on Twitter. This

45:27

is back when Twitter was still good.

45:30

So I put it out on Twitter and that

45:32

generated a bunch of buzz and LinkedIn and whatever.

45:35

And then I also ran a promo on

45:37

this site called Bookbub, which

45:40

if you have it a sale, they have

45:43

this giant audience of people. And so

45:45

I did a Bookbub promo and set

45:47

that up for the same time. And

45:49

so unfortunately, I can't filter out how

45:51

many of those books were Bookbub people

45:53

versus people off my socials and whatever.

45:55

But it did get a lot of action

45:57

on social media, I'll tell you that. Because the

45:59

Bookbub... was just starting to build a bit of

46:01

buzz and then I put the 99 cent

46:04

sale on for 48 hours and there

46:06

was a lot of, like it was all over the

46:08

internet. It was a little hard to miss it actually.

46:11

And then I had this book bump thing going at the same

46:13

time. So yeah, I sold a ton of books. And then the

46:15

crazy thing was is the sale was

46:17

over, but the stuff was

46:20

still all out there. So I actually had

46:22

sustained bump in sales for like two weeks.

46:25

Well, you have a lot of respect in

46:27

the space and friends in the space, other

46:29

people who have platforms, I imagine they're sharing

46:31

the sale a little bit. How much of

46:34

that was organic and

46:36

whatever happens happens? Thank you, friends. Or did

46:38

you do anything to reach out to some

46:40

of your larger scale friends and

46:42

say, Hey, can you help get the word out? Yeah,

46:45

no. So I didn't do any of that. Like

46:47

I was kind of a big nobody before that

46:50

book. Like I didn't have any friends with big

46:53

audience. Okay, okay.

46:55

I misclassified. I

46:57

misread. I mean, I like

46:59

I think of all my friend group, I

47:02

probably had the most audience of anybody, but

47:04

even then I wasn't doing email and LinkedIn

47:07

was not a thing back then like it is

47:09

now. And so Twitter, again, I

47:11

didn't have like hundreds of thousands of followers

47:13

on Twitter, but I had a very engaged

47:15

50,000. And so

47:18

if I was talking about stuff that usually got a

47:20

lot of action. And then I

47:22

had this little email list, but I wasn't

47:24

doing anything with it. And you know, I've

47:26

just started getting serious about email. I actually

47:29

literally just launched a newsletter,

47:32

like this week, which is going

47:34

to be awesome. But I finally

47:36

decided the time has come April

47:38

to do the

47:41

damn newsletter. So

47:43

if I hear your marketing plan correctly,

47:45

you said there's like pre launch, pre

47:47

sale launch, and then you had a

47:49

couple of post launch additions

47:52

of things to get people excited. And you had

47:54

to sale at the end. I

47:56

love that because you're basically creating all

47:58

of these many marketable. events

48:00

throughout a period of time. Are you

48:03

saying that you had all

48:05

or most of that planned out beforehand? Yeah.

48:08

Okay. Yeah. So I had a launch plan. Again, I'm

48:10

VP marketing, right? So it's like, we're going to launch

48:12

something. We got to have a little launch plan.

48:15

So I had a launch plan and it

48:17

had stuff happening every six weeks. So

48:19

every six weeks, there was something to talk

48:21

about. I got to remember all the

48:23

things. It was something about

48:26

reviews. It was audio book.

48:29

Oh, I did a little thing around

48:31

the holiday time where I was giving

48:34

away stupid stickers and bookmarks and

48:37

stuff like that. So I had this sticker

48:39

that said, marketing can polish

48:41

a turd, but positioning can transform

48:43

your turds into fertilizer. So I

48:46

put that on a bookmark and stickers and I

48:48

gave that out. And so that was kind of

48:50

meme-able, you know, so people were sharing that around

48:52

because it was stupid. And so I did

48:54

that. Oh, the templates was another

48:57

thing. I think

48:59

what else I had, like literally I had something every

49:01

six weeks, but it was like some things were more

49:03

effective than others. I did

49:05

a big thing when I hit like a thousand reviews on

49:07

Amazon, which was incredible to me. And I

49:09

was like, holy crap, I'm at a thousand

49:12

reviews. People. How

49:14

big is your team? It's just me, man. It's

49:16

just you. This is the team. Well,

49:19

I have a gal that part time, like I'm

49:21

not her only client, but part time helps

49:23

me with some admin stuff, but that's it. Well,

49:26

how would you describe if I had a pie

49:28

chart of your time? Because there's so much that

49:30

falls into your time if it's mostly just you.

49:33

How would you describe like the biggest segments

49:36

of that pie for where you're putting your time right now? Well,

49:39

I would say so, you know,

49:41

actual work with clients is

49:43

about 50% of my time. Wow.

49:46

OK. So like actually on a

49:48

plane or in a room with clients,

49:51

about half. Like I'm actually hoping to dial

49:53

that down a little bit, but I'm still

49:56

doing like two weeks out of four between 30

49:58

and 50. percent

50:00

of my time is me with

50:02

clients doing stuff. And then

50:04

if I look at the rest of the time, you know,

50:07

it's bursty. You know,

50:09

if I think about putting a book out, that's a bit

50:12

of a big project. And so if you

50:14

look at the last four months, I've

50:16

spent a lot of time, probably

50:18

the other 50% working

50:21

on book promo stuff and getting

50:23

the book out the door. And,

50:25

you know, I launched the podcast,

50:27

partly to promo the book. And

50:30

then the newsletter is brand new too. So

50:32

those two things are really in service to

50:34

helping me get the word out about the

50:36

book. You know, part

50:38

of this is because I lost my main social

50:41

media channel, which was Twitter. It

50:43

just doesn't work anymore. It's just for me, it's

50:45

just gone. My engagement is just falling off a

50:47

cliff. It's not even worth posting stuff on there

50:50

anymore. It's so bad. Um, and

50:52

so I made the switch to LinkedIn about

50:54

a year ago. So I'm like the last

50:56

person to get on LinkedIn. So LinkedIn is

50:58

still underrated. Yeah.

51:01

Yeah. I think it is still underrated. Anyway.

51:04

So I'm doing some stuff there. And then I

51:06

thought, you know, when I got back into a

51:08

regular groove, like posted on LinkedIn felt like

51:11

blogging to me. In

51:13

a way, Twitter didn't like Twitter was always fast

51:15

and easy for me. And so I thought this is

51:17

great. This is like, I don't have to have a newsletter. I can

51:19

just do this. And this is really easy. I can do it on

51:21

edge time and I'm good at it. But

51:23

when Twitter went away, that got me thinking about

51:26

what am I actually doing for content

51:28

these days? And so I switched to LinkedIn,

51:30

but LinkedIn felt like blogging. I was like,

51:32

well, for the amount of time I'm putting

51:35

into doing a good media LinkedIn post, this

51:37

should be a newsletter. So, you know,

51:40

then I spent some time thinking about how did I want

51:42

to do that? In the end, I settled on sub stack.

51:45

So I launched that this week

51:47

or last week with the

51:49

new and improved templates for both the

51:51

books as my lead magnet to get

51:54

people to come and subscribe to the

51:56

thing. But that's doing okay. And so now

51:58

I got a little, I got a little newsletter. I think I got

52:00

13,000, 14,000 subscribers over there. I

52:05

started this conversation saying that a lot

52:07

of my friends have spoken about your

52:09

business model, how much they admire it.

52:11

I think a lot of it is

52:13

because of the leverage that you've created.

52:15

You have scale with the book. You're

52:17

doing client work, but it's a higher

52:19

priced, very leveraged in that way as well.

52:22

It's still just you and your decision criteria for

52:24

a lot of things it seems to be is

52:26

do I want to do this? It's

52:28

so awesome in a way. If

52:31

early career April knew that this

52:34

is where it all ended up,

52:36

oh man, that's pretty good. I

52:39

take the whole summer off. Companies

52:42

don't want to do strategy stuff in July and

52:44

August and everybody's on vacation. It's really hard

52:46

to get everybody together. I just don't work

52:49

in July and August. I

52:51

very deliberately didn't want to have

52:54

employees. I managed teams

52:56

my whole professional career when I was

52:58

in-house. I just

53:00

didn't want to be responsible for people. I didn't

53:02

want to ever have to

53:05

say, oh gee, I don't like this

53:07

client, but I got to take them otherwise

53:09

my team doesn't eat. When

53:11

it's just me, I could say, you know what? I'm

53:14

just not going to work with these people because I don't want to work with

53:16

these people. If I decided to take August

53:18

off, I'll take August off and no one's going to cry. I

53:21

wanted the freedom that

53:24

you get without having a staff. The

53:26

other thing was that I know a lot of people with

53:28

agencies and I just think it's really hard to

53:30

build a good profitable agency. I

53:32

was like, nope, it's just going to be me. I'm just

53:35

going to sell my brain. That's it. That's

53:37

worked out way better than I thought it would. Well,

53:40

let's close this conversation then with

53:43

one, I said I'd return back to what you said

53:45

about the 35-year-old version of yourself. Some

53:47

of the same friends who have talked about your business model have

53:49

said that you've told them, I would

53:51

have screwed this up if I had

53:53

done it earlier. I

53:56

would. I

54:00

totally would have blown this if I did

54:02

it earlier. So the great thing about doing

54:04

this in my old ladyhood is

54:06

that one, there's all this

54:08

comfortableness that I've already made my money

54:10

to a certain extent, I can afford to

54:12

have a few years that are kind of

54:14

lean and whatever. The other thing

54:17

is that if I had done it when I

54:19

was 35, I'd

54:21

be thinking about this like, how do I

54:23

make this really big and sell it? Like,

54:26

how do I, I'm gonna put all this

54:28

energy into this thing, I'm gonna grow it

54:30

really big, and then it's gonna get acquired,

54:33

and I'm gonna make my bajillion dollars

54:35

or whatever. And again, I've

54:37

seen that model not work.

54:39

Like, I think it's quite hard to build

54:41

a good profitable agency. It's obviously not impossible,

54:43

there's lots of people doing it. But there's

54:45

a lot of people that try to do

54:47

it, and when I look at their businesses,

54:49

they're barely paying themselves. And

54:52

there's none of the good stuff of

54:54

being on your own with that. So I

54:57

probably would have went down that path because

54:59

I would have been worried about, well, is

55:01

this thing just me? And how

55:03

do I extricate myself from the business

55:05

and blah, blah, blah? And

55:08

because I'm doing this when I'm old, I

55:10

was kind of like, I literally went on

55:12

vacation to the beach and drew this little three

55:14

circle thing, I wanna do my best work of

55:16

my career with good people and get paid fair

55:19

money, and that's it. There is no back end

55:21

on this thing. There is no big exit at

55:23

the end of this thing. And

55:25

that's fine. I'm

55:29

actually living the dream. But I think I would

55:31

have been so worried about the back end on

55:33

the thing if I'd done it when I was 25 or 35 or whatever.

55:37

I would have messed it up. This

55:45

conversation had a huge impact on the

55:47

way that I've been thinking about traditional

55:49

publishing versus self-publishing. I hope it impacted

55:51

you as well. If you wanna

55:54

learn more about April, you can visit her website

55:56

at aprildunford.com. Links to that as well as their

55:58

social profiles are in the show notes. Thank

56:01

you to April for being on the show. Thank

56:03

you to Adam Lockwood for editing this episode. Emily

56:05

Clowes for our artwork and Brian Skeel for our

56:07

music. If you like this episode, please

56:09

let me know. You can tag me on Twitter

56:11

or Instagram at Jake Clowes to say thank you.

56:13

And if you really want to say thank you,

56:15

please leave a review on Apple Podcast for Spotify.

56:17

Thanks for listening.