From Solopreneur to $20 Million Media Exit & How To Find Your Content Tilt with Joe Pulizzi

[00:00:00] You have to have a content tilt, which means you have to have some differentiation that you can cut through all the clutter out there and get somebody's attention over a long period of time. Is there a difference between tilt and positioning?

[00:00:12] You can be very successful on a broad basis with just a different type of take on the world, but that is very difficult to do. They come in from the consumer seat to the producer seat and then they think the

[00:00:24] results are going to come very quickly because they've seen the results of maybe people that have been put in the 90 years like you have. If you're solving problems for an individual in marketing or a small business in marketing,

[00:00:35] those are very different than if it's a marketer that has 50 people on their team. Joe, where have you been all our life man? It's crazy that we just got to know you. I've visited obviously Content Marketing Institute many, many times.

[00:00:48] Who would have known that we were going to have Joe here on the podcast? I believe that most content creators focus so much on the content they forget that this is a business. Hey guys, welcome back to Content Profits. We are back with a special guest today.

[00:01:07] Fonsi, do you know who we have today? Nope. Tell me, who is it? Of course you do. Of course you know. You know this person, I actually met him after speaking in Orlando. He went after me and I got incredibly inspired by his story. He went after you?

[00:01:24] Are you playing hard to get? Yes. He spoke after me because his topic was more relevant. Mine was a little more niche but he has years of experience, at least 10 years of experience in the content industry.

[00:01:38] He runs one of the biggest content companies and then we were at his event CEX, Content Entrepreneur Expo also presenting our six levels of content which was awesome and then we got lucky enough to bring him back to the show.

[00:01:53] Finally, we got to talk to our guest Joe Paluzzi. Do you have any thoughts? That was absolutely amazing. He built one of the biggest content marketing institutions out there. He sold it for $20 million and in this conversation we cover a lot of stuff, especially if you

[00:02:19] are a content entrepreneur, not just a content creator, a content entrepreneur, you have a business attached to your content, you want to listen to this because he's going to show you exactly how to differentiate yourself from the competition, gain an edge

[00:02:33] and most importantly he's going to tell you how to implement because I feel like that part always misses in the conversations. We talked a lot about the what, not just us, conversations of content in general, a

[00:02:45] lot about the what but not necessarily about the how and Joe, he doesn't hold back. Enjoy. Welcome to the show. We're stoked that we finally made this happen. How's it going up there in Cleveland? It's going great.

[00:03:00] Yeah, besides the heat wave and everybody saying please get back to your spaces, your cool spaces, I'm doing fine. It's good to talk to both of you. A little background, we mentioned heat wave. There's an internal heat wave in the studio right now.

[00:03:14] We have no AC so it feels like 95 degrees, 80% humidity in Florida. So if you see us sweating a little bit, that's why. Maybe you'll move from here on out. Maybe you'll move the podcast outdoors. Amazing. I'm having the beautiful Florida summer sunshine. The podcast van.

[00:03:33] We've talked about this many times. A little rough, no eyes, being pretty brutal out there. So podcast van, half food truck. Yeah. I like it. Joe, as we mentioned in the intro, you've had incredible experience with content, right? You sold your content company.

[00:03:53] You put in this incredible event, CEX, which I was very, very lucky and honored to be there. What was it like a month ago at the time of this recording? And you've been around content for quite a while. So what's your approach on content these days?

[00:04:12] Because you've been in the industry for a few years and things have changed quite a bit. So today, what's your approach to, I guess, your brand content for your company and for your newsletter and for your podcast? Yeah.

[00:04:25] I mean, so yeah, I guess I'm one of the older guys now. I started in this whole thing in 2000. So I've been at this almost 25 years. And so before Google and before social media, and I mean, there's a couple key things that are eternal.

[00:04:44] And one thing is we call this, you have to have a content tilt, which means you have to have some differentiation that you can cut through all the clutter out there and get somebody's attention over a long period of time.

[00:04:55] The second thing is whatever you choose, wherever you choose to build your platform, whether you choose as we call it on rented land, which would be on social properties or whether you have something that you more control, which would be any newsletter, you have to deliver consistently.

[00:05:11] So we look at the, you know, we look at everyone from the greatest media companies on the planet to Mr. Beast. They've done that. They've delivered consistently. See, it's funny. I mean, I've consulted with companies, some of the biggest companies in the world,

[00:05:28] some of the smallest and you look and say, okay, well, why are they failing at building an audience or their content marketing approach or whatever? It is generally one of those two things. You're not delivering consistently on one platform over a long period of time

[00:05:41] and you have no differentiation. And you know this, I mean, we're all in the creator economy space, content entrepreneur space, whatever you want to call it. Most everybody's talking about the same things. So you've got to have something. Is it, is it your topic? Is it the niche?

[00:05:57] Is it your audience? Is it your personalities? Is it your sense of humor, tone, vibe, whatever it is, you've got to have something there. So that, those are the things that stand the test of time will continue to go on and move forward.

[00:06:11] Now moving on to, you know, 2024 and 2025. I've always been a big proponent of leveraging social channels to then hopefully they sign up for something that you can control. But I got to tell you, I'm not liking what's going on for content creators

[00:06:28] today when you look at the social channels changing their algorithms every other day, every other hour, if you will. And so it's hard to keep up. You've got to continue to play that game and you really, even if you build

[00:06:40] your follower base, and we've heard recently from Instagram where if you even have a large follower base, it doesn't mean your followers are going to see your stuff anymore. Absolutely. They're going to figure out the user experience and they're going to deliver content that's optimized to that.

[00:06:55] And if somebody subscribed to your stuff, they may or may not see it. And that's disappointing. Yeah. And then you go to search engines where I lived for 15 years trying to figure out how can I be found and multiple results when it comes to Google.

[00:07:10] And now you've got Google moving to, you know, the ultimate answer, if you will, because of their move into AI. So that means they're not necessarily going to send people to my page anymore. Yeah. So I'm, you know, honestly, now I'm, you know, long, long answer

[00:07:26] to your question, but I'm really focused on email probably more, more than anything else because at least I have control and the only thing I have to get through right now are the spam filters. But if somebody subscribes to my stuff, I know who that person is.

[00:07:41] I have their data. I can have a long-term relationship with that person. And then I want to use all the other stuff, the YouTube's, the Instagram's, the TikToks, whatever it is to get people to ultimately sign up for something I can control. Yeah. That is so interesting.

[00:07:56] Actually, recently I've noticed in more and more when I do a search on Google that first AI answer, right? And I'm like, well, that is very interesting. I rarely, I sometimes read it, but I've asked myself like, hmm, what's

[00:08:13] going to happen to those, even the top searchers, right? Like, are they going to lose value because, you know, Google's going to be pulling all this information from different sources and just like showing you the answer right here. So very interesting that you mentioned that.

[00:08:27] I'm curious on, you know, you talked about the tilt and I'm a subscriber of the tilt. I like the newsletter. Really enjoyed it. But I am curious on is there a difference between tilt and positioning? Right? When we're talking about content, is it, you know, the angle that

[00:08:45] we're looking to present to the consumer? Is it the same thing that you branded in a special way? I'm curious. It absolutely can be. It can be a point of view that you have. It could also be a different take on an audience.

[00:09:00] So for example, I was talking with a content entrepreneur the other day and they were saying, OK, let's give you this example. I want to make it too specific. They were saying, OK, we're targeting marketers. Yep. I'm like, you're targeting marketers. What, how bland is that?

[00:09:14] I want to know what kind of marketers, what are they in any particular verticals, what size company? What where do they live? Like I want to know all the things about them so that I can deliver contents that's positioned to solving their pain points.

[00:09:30] Now I can come at it and just target marketers with a different point of view. But generally what happens is that comes a you can be a Joe Rogan. You can be a Scott Galloway. You can be very successful on a broad basis with just a different

[00:09:45] type of take on the world. But that is very difficult to do. I would rather start very small and try to take all the things positioning, point of view, audience, platform and put it all together into one tilt and say, all right, this is what makes us different.

[00:10:03] And then so I'm bringing my Jerry McGuire mission statement. Here's what I stand for. And all the other things that I'm going to add to that give me a competitive advantage because I'm targeting a smaller group. And by the way, smaller than better.

[00:10:17] You can't go niche enough when you're targeting an audience. And what I want to do is I want to first be the leading informational expert for that small group of people with the positioning, like you said, and then and then to branch out, then I can go bigger.

[00:10:30] Yeah. But it's I want to start as small as I can and be in be the go to resource then and then build the business. Yeah. So for somebody that might be struggling, right? With, you know, fairly big positioning or audience that they're targeting, right?

[00:10:48] How do how can they start? Because we've had that problem, right? We've had that problem. We're like, all right, we know we need to let's call it niche down, right? How do we how are we going to do it?

[00:10:59] Because we don't also we don't really just want to do the one thing. I know that's a challenge, right? For us is like, we don't want to do the one thing for, you know, just dentists. So what if we do it for all these other businesses, too? Right.

[00:11:12] But what is maybe step number one for people to find that tilt of theirs? Well, first of all, you have to start with the basics like and we call the first step is the sweet spot.

[00:11:22] So what are the things that you're good at that say you're better than most you have some knowledge of skill that's a little bit better than most. That starts on the one side, nothing other side. If you got OK, who's your audience and what are their pain points?

[00:11:37] What keeps them up at night? Whether informational needs? The intersection of that is your sweet spot. Most businesses just start there. And by the way, if you just did that exercise and you listed those things, you say, OK, we've got something here. Yeah.

[00:11:51] Then you want to take it a step further into that content till I'll give you an example that maybe this will help. So this is in Louis, you know this one because I talked about it a little bit, but we were up against HubSpot in 2011, 2012, 2013.

[00:12:05] So we launched Content Marketing Institute. We were all about content marketing HubSpot was all about inbound marketing. And we were growing our business. We were focused on, you know, we wanted to be the leading informational source for those marketers looking to at the philosophy of content marketing

[00:12:23] and how they can they can build an audience. And I'm like, OK, well, can we be the leading informational experts in the world on that thing and content marketing? And I had to be honest. I said, oh my God, we're going to get our butts kicked by HubSpot,

[00:12:34] which you we're all partners with now. But at the time I'm like, they've got way too much of a budget. We're a small company. I don't think we can compete with all with all marketers for this idea of inbound or content marketing.

[00:12:47] I said, well, where can we differentiate? And I said, you know what, I think if we go upstream, I think if we target marketers that work at very large institutions and organizations. So we were looking at companies with a thousand or more people,

[00:13:03] five thousand or more people, 10,000 or more people, because we saw that HubSpot was really going for the smaller business. OK, OK, let's just they can have that. We're going to go upstream and that worked out really well for us

[00:13:16] because then by 2015, we had 4000 people come into our event content marketing world. We were targeting the marketers at Cisco and Amazon and the very large company that worked really well for us. So for anybody listening to this, this is a business decision.

[00:13:33] So we get to that. You get to the sweet spot. You're like, OK, this might be a hobby and I don't really know where I'm going. I'm going to build this podcast or whatever it is. That's all fine.

[00:13:43] But when you get into the content till you're pretty much going to figure out, OK, where can I get the attention and build an audience long term with a group of people that I can actually monetize? Yeah. So that's where you want to look at.

[00:13:55] Make your list like who's in your group? Where are your customers going when they're not listening to your podcast or subscribe to your newsletter? And you can start to figure that out. So then you make that strategic pivot at some point

[00:14:10] and you don't have to do it right away. Like I would I would say that most content creators don't know that answer until they go six, nine, 12 months down the way and figure out. I'm like, oh, we're getting this feedback.

[00:14:20] But we see this competitor doing this or our podcast isn't doing great with this audience. Maybe we got to move it a little bit. And then I and I don't think it's as specific as oh, we definitely have to do this for dental.

[00:14:32] Yeah, I think it's a big it's a bigger issue than that based on hey, this is a business. We're not just creating this video or podcast to be nice. Yeah, we want to serve other people, but we're serving other people

[00:14:44] so that we can build a financially sustainable business. Yeah, I'm curious. I got a hug the mic. Fancy. Yeah, it's on today. I just got a follow up question to that, right? Because I feel like the conversation a lot of times.

[00:14:57] And I'm generalizing here, but in most platforms it goes into OK, we got to niche down. We're going to do this, right? You can find it this way. But then I'm always left with, OK, but how do we implement this?

[00:15:09] Right? Like, how does, you know, finding your tilt and saying we're not going to take care of the smaller businesses, right? We're going to go and look for the bigger ones. How does implementation looks like once you find your tilt? Was it a change in your vocabulary

[00:15:26] on the type of content that you were doing? Was it a change of mediums? Right? What was it exactly? Because now, like you mentioned at the very beginning, right? The algorithms are changing and, you know, even if the people

[00:15:38] subscribe to you, you don't know whether they're paying attention or not. They're not going to show it to you. So like I can change my vocabulary, but if I'm depending obviously in that social channel,

[00:15:48] I don't even know if the right people are going to be sure looking at this. Eventually, maybe start picking up some people. I'll hold my answer here and there and I'll start getting some feedback. But I'm curious, right?

[00:15:58] On your end, how when you guys did that change, what was the implementation? We had to do a serious shift in our content strategy because what we, what, and I don't want to say this that we had, that we had simpler content.

[00:16:14] But if you have, if you're solving problems for an individual in marketing or a small business in marketing, those are very different than if it's a marketer that has 50 people on their team and they've got half of those people creating content and they've got content management systems

[00:16:32] and marketing automation systems. And you got to try to figure out all these things talking to each other. We were like, we've got, we've got to step up our content. We have to talk about real complex content challenges in the enterprise and nobody was doing that.

[00:16:47] And that to your maybe to answer your question, that was the opportunity. There was a content gap in the marketplace where nobody was talking to those people in that particular way. Everyone was talking, how do I get found in search engine optimizations?

[00:17:00] How do I use social media today to build an audience? How do I do an e newsletter? I could find that anywhere. You got SEO, go to Moz. I could easy. But anyway, we were saying, OK, how do I work with a large team

[00:17:12] on content management organization in the enterprise through different global enterprises and different continents or whatever. I'm just thinking that. But something like that and you're like, wow, we were the ones that could talk to that. And to be honest, I didn't have all that expertise.

[00:17:30] I had to go out and I had to work with other partners and say, look, I don't this article I know we need to write. I can't do it. My team can't do it. Can you do that? So that's where we started to really work on our partnerships

[00:17:44] where I would say so we did a daily blog of about 800 to 1200 words. And I would say probably half of those were from outside sources that we would run through our editorial planning or editorial team.

[00:17:56] And we would proof it and edit it and all that stuff based on our guidelines. But we didn't write the content and we relied on outside experts, by the way, which was which worked out great because then they, as you know, they promoted that content to their audience.

[00:18:10] They became our audience and we were end up growing that way. Yeah. Amazing. A couple of things like first of all, thanks for sharing all of that. But I also hear, OK, you find the market gap right in the content, right?

[00:18:23] And a lot of the advice that people might be seeing today is like model what works, right? So you especially on YouTube, you see on, you know, whether that's topics or styles or even podcast episodes or the problems that people are solving. Right.

[00:18:37] And I think a lot of people might be on that initial stage. But I through your story, it's OK. We found that gap. Nobody was writing about it. Right. So you guys decided to make this very big business decision

[00:18:52] based on on what the data that you had from current customers, current subscribers and people were coming to you for those specific problems. And then once you start creating that, that grew because that could be very intimidating, right?

[00:19:04] For especially for for maybe a small entrepreneur or a smaller publication to be like, OK, I know this content here works because I've seen the data. People are consuming it, right? I'm going to go invest all this time resources on producing something

[00:19:19] that I don't know if it's going to work out. Right. So what goes through like, how can somebody make that decision? Or like, what data can they start looking internally? Right. Whether that the what are some of the questions

[00:19:32] that they can start asking themselves or their teams to make that shift? Sure. So first of all, that's a very difficult question to answer. I will do my best to give you my thoughts on it. Thank you. So when I started in, I started in publishing in 2000

[00:19:47] and my mentor, Jim McDermott, who grew up in the editorial side and then went moved over to the sales side said, if we're going to be great at delivering content and building an auto loyal audience over time, we have to set up as many listening posts as possible.

[00:20:02] So I call them listening posts. So that a listening post could be I'm looking at this data. I'm looking at what people are engaging of these types of articles, these types of videos on YouTube, whatever. All that data is fantastic.

[00:20:14] The number one most important piece of data you can get is talking directly to your audience. So back in the day before we really got into social, I made reader calls. We talked to people as I was heavy into print magazines.

[00:20:30] That was the the OG, if you will, of doing this thing that we're doing today. And five, we were we were supposed to talk to five people and our audience per week and talk to them about, hey, what's keeping you at night up at night?

[00:20:43] What are your pain points? What are you struggling with? What do you think of the content? Does this work? First hand knowledge of those things and our team was really good at talking to.

[00:20:53] And by the way, you don't have to do this on the phone or in person. I like that's why I like going to events, by the way. I love talking first hand to like you talked about CX, Louis.

[00:21:01] Like I talked to a lot of people there like, oh, what are you challenged with? Are you having trouble getting to financial sustainability? Like, are you can or you're having trouble finding a lawyer? Are you like, what is it?

[00:21:11] What do you because then I can figure out, OK, this is what we should write about in the tilt that talk to so-and-so. Maybe we can talk to them for an interview. So number one is talking to people in your audience or who you think is

[00:21:22] your audience today and then use all the other things. We we employed surveys every other month. Content Marketing Institute. We employed so many surveys that we took for internal. And then we also built research reports over.

[00:21:35] We had 12 or 14 research reports that we would package together from our audience. And it was a it was a monetary stream for us. It was a revenue stream. We would sell those to a sponsor. So if it was on email or measurement or social media and content marketing,

[00:21:49] we would sell those off, but we would use them to guide our editorial planning at the same time. So what are all those things you're going to use? You're going to use Ahrefs. I'm going to use what's Rand's new company that he that he has.

[00:22:04] I forgot the name of it. Whatever that whatever the other tools I'm going to use my email. And we use your kit or convert kit. I'm going to use that data. What's working? What's not what are people clicking on?

[00:22:14] So all the stuff that we have, but the most important thing is talking to the audience. And then at some point you have to say that's enough evidence for me to make the shift. Yeah. And I've got to be honest with you. You're taking a risk.

[00:22:30] I don't know. You cannot predict this is like any. You know, small business, half of small businesses failed by the three, four year mark. Yeah. It's the same thing with the content business. Yeah. I mean, you and you and I can probably name more people in the

[00:22:46] content industry that it failed and stopped and went and got a real job. Yeah. Real job. And left what we what we're doing right now because it's hard. Just like any other business. Yeah. But get the data you can make this make the pull with the

[00:23:02] strategy and move forward. And I didn't know so I that that was like 2012, 2013. We really changed that strategy. Maybe moved away from what HubSpot was doing. I had all the data. I had it right. I was the CEO as the founder.

[00:23:17] I pulled the trigger, but I still could have been wrong. Yeah. Yeah. So you never know. So yeah, it's always a risk. Absolutely. And for reference, you know fast forward a couple of years. Can you paint the picture for the people listening?

[00:23:30] Like what was the result of that? So so which by the way, it got me super inspired after I saw it. I was like, yes. That's the road. So anyways, I'll just give you a little. So 2007 I left publishing and went into this thing called content

[00:23:48] marketing that wasn't called content marketing. So one of my positionings, if you will, was renaming the industry. I tried to force the renaming of the industry from custom publishing and custom media or branded content or brandy journalism,

[00:24:02] which was called all those things into this thing called content marketing. Cause we were targeting marketers and I always felt and believe this was a gut decision that marketers needed to follow something that was called marketing and not custom media or custom publishing, which they were bored with.

[00:24:18] So like social media marketing and search engine marketing, content marketing, it makes sense. Yeah. So we went there and I started blogging. So from 2007 to 2010, I was just blogging and speaking and going out there speaking for free, doing articles everywhere for free,

[00:24:38] getting out there as much as I could to make a name around content marketing. And then we made the pivot in May, officially in May of 2010 to rename the business to content marketing Institute. That was a big deal because I really felt that we wanted

[00:24:56] I didn't want people to think about what we were doing. Like I felt that they said, OK, we're content marketing Institute. Oh, yeah, education and training for content marketing. Boom. I didn't want them to have to think about what we did in two seconds.

[00:25:08] So that worked really well. And so in 2011 2010, three months after we launched content marketing Institute, we announced that we were going to do this event, content marketing world. This is September of 2010. So we had about 15,000 email subscribers at the time we were growing.

[00:25:26] We were getting our name out there feeling pretty good about it. I was hoping 100, 150 people would come to Cleveland, Ohio for an event called Content Marketing World in September of 2011. We ended up getting 660 people that year. Really, really did well.

[00:25:40] And then 900 the year after some like really good. There's a million dollar event. But I was really nervous because I thought because we were the industry was growing so fast, we would do better. And that's right about that time we did the repositioning and said,

[00:25:57] look, we're not targeting all these small businesses. I'm not targeting individual content creators. We are targeting larger enterprises. So everything flipped from that point on for content marketing world. 2012, we did that repositioning by 13. We had 1700 and by 15, we had 4000.

[00:26:16] And we sold the business for about 20 million dollars in 2016. So, I mean, you can say so the timeline was really I started in 2007. So it was nine years to get to selling in 2016, but it was really a six year business from 2010 to 2016.

[00:26:34] And that repositioning happened in about three years before we sold. Yeah, absolutely. I just want to put this in here. Amazing, Joe. Amazing. What a story. Absolutely inspiring. I do have some questions about the business model in the back.

[00:26:52] I'm super curious, but I don't know if we'll have time for those. That might be a part two. But what I what I really wanted to share today as well with the people listening is the investment that we have to make in time on the output.

[00:27:06] Right. You said at the beginning, right? That consistency over time is what's going to happen. And we see it every day with people that we talk and I think in this world, people may be the consumer mind where they come in from

[00:27:19] the consumer seat to the producer seat. And then they think their results are going to come very quickly because they're seeing the results of maybe people that have been put in the nine years like you have, right?

[00:27:32] And so I would just want to be bringing perspective because this is the right way to go. It's just going to take a little bit of time, right? And then manage your resources, right? What's your time, your team and making those decisions?

[00:27:43] So you gave us a pretty amazing roadmap to get started on making that decision to create that tilt, right? And, you know, for those that want more information, I think your newsletter, like Fonsi say, he's been pretty addicted to it.

[00:27:58] Well, the tilt newsletter you have, I see here that you have another newsletter. The orange letter, which is my personal newsletter on Joe Polizi dot com. That's my that's every every two weeks that goes out. And then the tilt is every Tuesday and Friday.

[00:28:12] So it goes out and that's all about that's all for content entrepreneurs. That's exactly what we're talking about. So our tilt for that one is we were focused on basic our mission is turning content creators into content entrepreneurs.

[00:28:25] I believe that most content creators focus so much on the content they forget that this is a business. It's a business first. You just happen to be in the content business. And so that's those, that's the type of content we really focus on

[00:28:42] and trying to get some of these news articles that there's, there's so much content creation news. It's like, how can we give you little bites of it so that you can take five minutes, go on with your day and build your business? Yeah, so awesome.

[00:28:54] Joe, you just got a new subscriber. Guys, we're going to leave all the links right below. So all you gotta do is go ahead and scroll down and click on it and you have access to all this. Joe, where have you been all our life, man?

[00:29:06] Like it's crazy that we just got to know you this last few months and I'm incredible grateful that who would have known, you know, I've visited obviously Content Marketing Institute many, many times. You know, I would go read a bunch of articles, but who would have known

[00:29:21] that we were going to have Joe here on the podcast? Yes. Well, first of all, thank you so much. But, you know, to your point about building this thing and setting your expectations, like it's interesting. And you know this Louis again, because you heard the story.

[00:29:36] But when I left and started the business and this was in April of 2007, we sold a car, canceled our vacations. Like we made, we made I had two kids three and five at the time. We made some and again, this is perspective. We made sacrifices.

[00:29:53] Other people might not look at them as sacrifices, but we said, I think that we're going to need three years. Like I think we're going to need time. And if you fast forward to September 2009, I literally almost gave up.

[00:30:07] I, we, we, I was doing consulting at the time. I lost a big client, you know, I was basically trying to make money anywhere I could just to pay the bills. Yeah. And I, and I was depressed and I'm like, this thing is not working.

[00:30:19] And then I talked to my wife who was my business partner and she, and I said, I was basically brought, I was getting linked in ready. I was like, oh, I got to get my, I got to go out and find a real job. This is terrible.

[00:30:29] And I was really depressed and I talked to my wife about it. And she said, you can't work for anybody again. Like you're broken. Entrepreneurs know this. We are broken people. We can't report to anybody. We're doing our own thing.

[00:30:40] She said, you're going to regret this the rest of your life. Can we go another six months? And I said, okay, well, we'll try another six months. And that's when I started doing more of the listening to those listening posts, talking to customers.

[00:30:53] I said, okay, that's where we're going to do the pivot change. And we relaunched this content marketing institute six months later and immediately everything changed. And so that's how close it was. I was six. I was so close to giving up on everything.

[00:31:07] And so that's why I would tell anyone listening to this. Yes, we can sit here saying you have to be patient. You have to put you have to set up your, your life for that. Absolutely. So cut your expenses back wherever you can.

[00:31:20] If you're not, if you haven't really like pulled the trigger yet and become the content entrepreneur you want to be, make those decisions now, put a little bit away. You know, we by the time we knew that we were going to be successful,

[00:31:32] we maxed out all the credit cards. I had nothing left in savings. Like we were spent and we really got lucky that the things turned around. But who knew if it was another six months later, we wouldn't be having this conversation. Yeah. I'm sorry.

[00:31:46] This one goes out for your wife, Joe. MVP. I'll tell you what, and that's another thing. Have a supporter partner. I mean, we would have, we had, you know, we had many come to Jesus meetings saying, OK. This is do we know what we're doing?

[00:32:04] And by the way, no family. Like I'm sure you have family that have no idea what you're doing. Like like your podcast, but he's making you money and what are you going to do?

[00:32:12] And what are you going to do with your life and all those types of things? You get, I still get it today. Yeah, it's funny. What are you doing? What do you do all day long? Well, I got podcasts and he newsletter and I write content.

[00:32:22] Now nobody gets it. Yeah. My wife called me and said, Hey, can you explain to this lady what you do? She's asking, I have no idea. And it's different, right? Every time you get like, you're trying to figure out who you're talking to.

[00:32:34] Like sometimes I'll say I'm a writer. Yeah. Sometimes I'll say I'm a podcast and then I'll say, oh, I'm in marketing. Like, what's the shortest answer I can give to just give them permission to not ask me any more questions? They're done. That's funny.

[00:32:47] I'm glad we're not the only ones. 100%. Yeah. But Joe, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for coming to the show. Fancy anything else you want to add? I'm just grateful. I'm excited to get your other newsletter. You know, see what's up.

[00:33:02] I can learn a little bit more and I would be very happy if we can bring you another time so we can talk. I mean, today we talked about the content side of things that we'd like to talk about, obviously, the life side of things

[00:33:14] and the challenges, you know, go a little bit deeper into that story. I think that's always very entertaining and enlightenment. Well, it's a date. We'll set up part two. Let's do it. That sounds great to me. All right. I'm looking forward. Yeah.

[00:33:25] I'd love to talk to you guys again. Thank you, Joe. With that said, guys, thank you so much for tuning to the content of this broadcast podcast. Go ahead and follow the show in your favorite podcasting platform and on social media at Beats Brothers Co.

[00:33:35] That is Rene, Joe here. Help you move one step closer towards your goal. Please don't forget to share this episode. And of course, don't forget to leave a five star review. See you. Bye guys.