Wes Bos

I'm a web developer. I'm a full stack JavaScript developer. That means that I do the client side. I also do the server side of things. I'm a teacher as well. So in Toronto, Canada, I teach at this thing called HackerU where we have evening classes and full-time bootcamps where we teach everything from HTML, CSS, to JavaScript, to WordPress, and you name it. And then I'm also an entrepreneur. So, like, really my whole life I've been working with things where I'm just trying to answer the question, like, how do I do what I really like doing but also earn money doing it? So I'm a share what you know kind of guy. Every time I learn something, I just can't wait to tell other people about it. I just I find that I get real clarity when I explain something to someone else. I feel like I learn it better when I try to explain it to someone because it forces you to really go through the thought process yourself. But I'm also a turn it into a business kind of guy as well. I absolutely love web development. I love teaching, but I also love businesses. I also love just making money at the end of the day. So what I'm doing right now is I'm trying to figure out how to make a living by teaching others the things that I love. And this is kind of an exciting talk for me because I've always given, like, very technical talks, very JavaScript and CSS talks. And this is really the first time that I'm doing a business talk, like, an entrepreneurial talk. So I hope that today is kind of fun for you. And if you have any questions, I'd love to answer them at the end of today. So start thinking about your questions now because I'm sure I'll have a little bit of time at the end to finish it. So all of us here today, we're all here, we're all creatives, right? We all love what we do. That's why we're here. That's why we give up time out of our days to come to a conference and really just hang out and learn about it. And I want to just teach you how do we turn passion into payment? How do we take what we love, absolutely love doing, and get paid for that at the same time? Because really that's the dream at the end of the day, right? But it's not just about passion. A lot of times you hear people say, like, if you have the passion, it will succeed. And do you guys have the show Dragon's Den or Shark Tank here? Yeah? So if you don't know, it's a show where people pitch their products. And often I watch that show and people have the worst ideas on that show in the world, but they're just crazy about their ideas. And that's simply a case of people having a whole bunch of passion, but really no idea how to actually run a business and how to make it profitable, right? So it's really about the tactics. You got that passion. We all have that passion already. But the other side of it is the tactics. How do I actually take what I love and what do I apply to that to actually make money? It's things you can do to start building momentum today. I use that word a lot, momentum. It's things that you do day in, day out, day in, day out, so that in a year or two, five years from now, you're going to have this incredible momentum to be able to do whatever it is that you love to do. So you can live a fulfilling life doing what you do. I'm really inspired by all the talks here today because there's a lot of people who are up here just doing what they love to do and figuring out how to make it their actual job. So that's enough motivation. I'm not going to stand here all day and do these prolific quotes and things like that. What I want to do is get into the nitty gritty and talk about what are the things you can actually do and how did I do it and what things have I stumbled upon that work and don't work. So what is my story? I've been blogging for about five years. So what that means is I take a technical topic, whether it's CSS or WordPress or JavaScript, and I write a little bit about it on my blog. So I've been doing that for about five years. And I've been YouTubing for about four years. So I also stumbled upon screencasting about four years ago, and I just record my screen and I explain, I step through something, and I teach someone how to use any part of web development. Has anyone here actually seen any of my YouTube or React series or anything? A couple of people. Good. My traffic is actually pretty good. It's not amazing, but probably on any given day I get about 3,000. On a good day, I get about 6,500. So that's pretty good. That's a lot of people coming to my website every day. My YouTube views are really high. So I don't know if you can do the math real quickly, but this means that for every minute that I'm standing up here, three and a half minutes of my YouTube is watched, which is crazy to think about that right now there's three and a half people watching a YouTube video of mine at the same time that I'm standing up here talking. So that's really good. But profits are very low. You go back here and, oh, this is a month. You make $100 a month. That's nothing. That's not going to pay the bills. You're not making a lot of money doing that. And then on the blog, you can do Amazon or you can do ads and things like that, but really that's not a great way to build a business. So over blogging all this time, what I did is I was really into Sublime Text at the time. So I put together, I don't know, two or three blog posts about Sublime Text, and they absolutely blew up. They got tons and tons of traffic. It went top of Hacker News. Everybody was sharing it around. It was on Delicious at the time. I remember that bookmarking. And I was scrambling. I said, oh, wow, this is great. Finally, some of my blog posts have really hit it off. So what I did is I was like, what do I do? So I threw this on the bottom of all the posts because they were getting tons of traffic, and I was like, I'm going to lose these people. They're never going to come back again if I don't get them. So I put this little thing. I was like, I'm writing a book. Let me know when the book launches, right? So I said, I'll give you a hoot when it's ready to go. Pop your email in this box and go. So like 200 people did it in just a couple weeks, or just about a week. And I thought, wow, that's pretty good. Or shit. I guess I actually have to write a book now because I told people that I'm actually writing a book, right? So I don't know how to write a book. So it took me a year and a half, which is an eternity. I had all kinds of... I was like, how do I write a book? Would people actually buy this? Is it worth my time? I had client work at the time where client work is great because it pays you now, or I could work on this thing where it doesn't pay you now and it might not ever pay you, or it might pay you in the future. You really have no idea. So it took me a year and a half to write that first book, and it also has a set of, I think, about 15 videos which show some of the more visual parts of Sublime Tech. So after a year and a half, after all the stuff where many times I'm like, maybe I should not even do it. Someone else came out with a competing Sublime textbook and I thought, oh, there's already one out there. Maybe I shouldn't do it at all. So I launched it. This is kind of what it looks like, and it's similar to that today where it's a book and a whole bunch of videos. I got some really nice proof right here. And it was great. It launched right here. This is sort of my initial email list. So I think I had about 2,000 people on my email list. That's the hacker news spike when it goes on to the first place hackers. I don't know what that is. That is something good happened there. But yeah, it went really, really well for me. In the first week, I had 400 sales. So I had 200 people on that initial email, and I'm going to give you some stats, but quite a few of them actually went ahead and bought it. I was like, wow, this worked. People liked it. I had seven or eight blog posts about Sublime text. I had that email capture on there. And then I sort of did this huge book that went into all the different parts and really explained how to master your workflow in Sublime text. So I was like, wow, that worked. What else should I do? Another thing I'm really big passionate about is the command line. As a frontend developer, it's sometimes hard. You fumble around on the command line. I had this pretty sweet setup on my command line, and everybody kept asking me, how do you do that? I was sick of everybody asking me. I was like, all right, I'm going to do a video for it where I created this video, I don't know, it's about 20 videos where just different parts of the command line, how to be proficient in it. I'll talk about this later. You have to sign up to actually get access to it. And then at the end of every single video, I said, hey, want more? Do you use Sublime text? A lot of people, there's quite a bit of overlap there, not everybody. This is at the end of every single video where I said you get $10 off on the video, and that actually sold quite a few. Then I released another one called what the flex box. This one was free, by the way, the command line power user. This one was sort of like a free one, it's 11 videos that you can get totally for free. And then I had what the flex box, which is also free, and it's a 20 video course which really just explains how to actually use flex box because if you try to look up the spec or anything like that, it's really, really complicated. So at this point, I had the paid Sublime textbook, I've got command line power user, I've got the flex box, free one, and I thought, hmm, maybe I should do it again. So a year and a half later, I said I'm going to try it again. And what I did is I went ahead and released a React series. I've been really into React, I'm a really big JavaScript fan, and I've been building a lot of stuff in React. And what I was hearing from people is that it's kind of hard to learn, I'm not really sure where to start, and there wasn't a really good resource around React to be able to learn. So I went ahead and launched React for Beginners. This is sort of what the website looks like, where there's two packages. It's entirely it's not a book this time, it's just a video series. And it shows you how to build an application from start to finish, and it goes into all the core concepts of React while having some fun and building an application that's not a to-do list that you're actually excited about to do. So this is when I launched it. I got about 12,000 hits on the first day, which I was really excited about. I did 1,500 sales in the first week this time, which was really, really exciting to me at this time. I'll talk about my email. I had quite a bit of an email following at the time. So I made it work twice. I made it work with Sublime Text, I made it work with React, and I've learned a lot of things along the way. So really what I want to talk about now is how did I do it, and what are the tactics that actually make it work, because chances are, well, hands off, how many of you may want to do something similar to this just to supplement or take all of your income? Yeah, quite a few. It would be nice. There's a lot of stuff that you know about where it would work well if you distilled it into a product. So how does it work? Five parts, quality content. So most people think that the quality content is the only part, that if you build something amazing, it's going to sell really well, and that's by far the most important thing. You need to make something that's actually really, really good and that people are going to be really excited about, because the rest of it is easy once you make something good. But that's not it. You need two parts, personality and reputation. We've all had that YouTube video where it's like, welcome to Flexbox, this is going to learn, and we have a flex box direction, and you just want to go to sleep because it's so boring, right? You want to actually have some fun when you're learning this thing, because otherwise you're going to fall asleep. Two parts, community, having a really good community around you, both in the open source as well as just whoever it is that you work with is really important, and two parts, good marketing. You need to actually know how to convince people to take out their credit card and buy it. So first of all, let's talk about quality content. How do I know what I should create? A lot of people say, hey, Wes, I want to do something similar to you, what should I make? Right? So you want to pick something that is hard-ish to learn. You want to pick something that people want to learn, but they're having a little bit of trouble to get through it. So you don't want to pick something that you can figure it out in a day or two. This is something where it takes maybe a couple weeks for someone to learn it on their own, or they can shell out a couple bucks for the course and they can do it in a couple days. There should be no brainer value. So if someone looks at it and goes, of course I will pay you my money for that. I would like to pay you more for that. This is what I do to convince people on my sublime text book website is say, is it worth it? Right? So you might think, why, who would spend money just on their text editor? You're not even learning a language here. You're just learning how to become more efficient. So what I did is I made this little calculator. I'm not sure if you can see, but these are input boxes right here. So I assume that you're getting paid 100 bucks an hour and it's going to save you 30 minutes a day. I think that's a pretty valid one. But if you think you get paid more or you get paid less or you think it's only going to save you four minutes a day, you can just change the values and it's going to recalculate how many hours it's going to save you or if you're working on an hourly basis, how much extra money you're going to make at the end of the day. So someone pops that in there. So like a $45 book, you do the math, it probably works out, it's worth buying. Right? This is from the React one. So I really target who is it for? So people always go to the website and say I'm not sure if it's for me, I'm not sure if it's a value. So we're at this weird space right now where in the JavaScript scene people are not totally, but we're starting to transition ourselves off of jQuery into these other frameworks like React and Angular and things like that. So that's the first one there. Because chances are everybody that comes to my website, who here uses jQuery? Right? Like everybody uses jQuery. So people that come to the website know that it's for them. You want to pick something that sells itself. And this is actually a really, really important one. This is the search Google Trends for React over time. I don't want to spend my time having arguments with people as to why you should learn React or Angular or whatever it is that you're doing. I don't care what, well, I do care, but I don't want to have arguments with people as to why they should learn one thing over another. People know that they should be learning React or Angular or whatever it is. And if React is the thing that they think they should learn, then they come to my website and they go ahead and buy it. I don't need to convince them of buying it and the technology. I just want to convince them of buying it. Something that solves the pain. So maybe you learn something and it took you forever. Or maybe you say these are the things I wish I knew when I was learning. So I'm going to bundle that up into some sort of course. Now, let's talk about marketing, which is a whole other skill set. So a lot of us are creatives, and maybe we're good at explaining things. Maybe we can take a technical concept and distill it down into something that is sort of easy to understand. But then, like, you come around to, like, you make this amazing thing. And then, like, how do you tell people about it? That's the other part of it, right? So email is king. I wish I knew this a lot earlier. And I sort of accidentally stumbled upon this when I put up that I'm writing a book thing. But I quickly realized that email is king. So here's some stats from my React for Beginners course. The first two, I screwed it up, and they should be one, but they're two. This is the number of sales that have come through email. I think this is in the first week or first month, something like that. And then this is Twitter. Now, my email list and my Twitter list, my Twitter followers is a bit more than my email list. But I get 4.2 times the amount of sales on email than I actually do on Twitter. And you can see other things like where is Facebook? There's, like, hacker news, hacker newsletter, Facebook 12 versus email hundreds. So there's some stats from my React launch month. At the time, I had 29,000 people on my email list because I had the flex box and I had the command line power user one. And you had to put your email in to actually get access to them. So that helped me sort of gain a pretty good email list there. Out of that 29,000 people, 800 of them bought it, which is a 2.8 conversion rate, which I later learned is amazing. Usually you hope for, like, a .2 or a .5% conversion rate, which is about $40,000 in sales in just a single month just from email, right? This is not counting any of that other stuff. So traffic over time, this is the spikes from, most of these are spikes from email. You see that huge one right there. That's because I did a huge blast on that day. And then you see spikes over time. And each of those, I think I have a couple of spikes here. I'll show you the emails in just a second. But each of those are when I send out another email blast reminding people or telling them, updating them on the actual series. So email best practices, a lot of people have told me stuff. And I don't know, around email, it's kind of got this weird feeling because personally myself, I hate getting email. I hate when people email me with their promotions and to check things out and all that stuff. I unsubscribe from all of it. So I'm really delicate around it because I know that I'm a developer and I'm marketing to other developers, right? So you got to go easy on a technical audience. You can't just do things like, I don't know, in Canada we have all these, like, furniture stores. And they just absolutely send you, like, a million emails a day. And I guess that works for them. But with a technical audience, I think you can piss them off really, really quickly. So you need to sort of go easy. So I've only ever sent out seven emails about my React series in, I think, about half a year now where I've just sent them out. And in all of them, I sort of just provide more information. I talk about extending a discount and all kinds of stuff like that. You want to sell hard, but you also don't want to come off as really, really selly because for me that doesn't feel right. And the thing that I figured out that works really, really well is social proof. And what that means is that other people are doing it. Maybe you should do it. So here's a couple of them. My social proof is I put the exact number of people who have bought the course right into the email list, right? Because it just says 3,963 people have bought it. Clearly it might be pretty good if people have done it, right? Right below on the website, I do this for all of my products and then I do it for all of my free ones as well where I show people how many people are on my email list or in this case how many people have bought the React series, right? And that shows people when they're hovering over that buy button being like, not sure if it's going to be worth it or not, then they can say, okay, well, that's a live number. Or they'll wait and come back a couple hours later and see if that number changed and they'll be like, oh, it's probably a real number. So tell them it's good. Don't suggest that it's good. Tell them that it's really good. And this is why I talked about earlier, if you create quality content, this stuff is easy because I feel really good about my content. I feel like it's really good and people have told me that it was the best way that they've ever learned React. So I can just tell people that this is a really good way to learn React. So here's a little snapshot from the actual website. Once they go off the email into the website, it tells them upgrade your JavaScript skills, right? Who would like to hear that? A lot of people say, oh, I do need to upgrade my JavaScript skills. Everybody's constantly always trying to improve themselves. Learn React.js, right? It's a premium step-by-step course. So you're not suggesting that this is a good course. You're telling them that it's a really good course and that they should go ahead and buy it. Building a huge email list. So how do you actually do this? My stats right now, I have about 42,000 people that are active subscribers. It's a little bit more. You get about 1% unsubscribe rate every time you send out a blast. I get about 50 to 100 per day. And most of those come, actually all of those come from my free series. I don't have a box on my website anymore that says put in your email here and I'll give you nothing. I have only way I get people's email addresses is when they sign up for one of my free courses. I've had about 28,000 people in just the last year sign up for it. And that's 28,000 people who have taken one of my actual courses so far. So you can build it with a free series. That's what I've been talking about right now. So I've got the command line, power user one. You've seen this already. You pop your email address in there. You send me the videos and it sends you a link to get access to the actual videos. Very simple. There's no log-in system. There's no signing up for an account. Pop your email list. I send you a unique link. You click that link and you get access to the videos. Same with the flex box one. Here's the social proof again. Joined 40,000. So this is just a running tally. I have a JSON endpoint on my email list provider that I hit every time the page loads and I populate that with a live number of people that have been learning with me. Right? If you have the series, it establishes credibility. Right? Like, Wes really must know what he's talking about if he has the series. Or it introduces your teaching style. So not everybody likes the way that I teach. You really have to find someone who really clicks with you. But a lot of people really like the way that I, I don't know, I sort of joke around in it and I break things down but I don't make it like I don't really dumb it down. And a lot of people really like that teaching style. And that really builds a devoted audience. So I have all kinds of people who are asking for what's the next thing? What's the next thing? I just want more Wes videos which makes me really, really excited. And then most importantly it builds your email list. So you're not going to get thousands and thousands of people a day. You might get 20, 30, 50 a day. But over a year, a two year, a three year time span, that really starts to grow over and over and you start to get a huge email list. And once you have that list, you're able to just build products and market them to people because people already know who you are and they're looking for more after they've taken one of those free ones. One of the biggest things that I got when I launched my React series is people said, oh, I loved your Flexbox series. This is going to be great. They bought it without even really reading the website because they know, oh, I took his Flexbox course and I really liked it. So Flexbox IO, why did I pick Flexbox out of all the things to teach? First of all, it's hard to learn. Flexbox has a lot of moving parts and it's been a while since for people who know CSS, it's been a while since they've had to learn something that is this hard. It's evergreen content, right? Flexbox is done. And it's going to live for the next couple years while people are starting to learn Flexbox. It casts a wide net. How many people here have to or will have to learn Flexbox? Right? Like every developer in the room has to learn Flexbox at some point. And it's absolutely free. So this is what it looks like on the website where I mentioned that the email sends you a link. You click that unique link and it brings you to the website. I built a little player here where you can watch them, you can go to the next ones and it's just going to embed. This is just a YouTube one. My free ones are hosted on YouTube because it's really expensive. It's really expensive to host video, but then it's also great for discovery. Most of my email sign-ups, this might seem a little bit weird, but most of my email sign-ups are when people find Flexbox on YouTube because that's where they go to find things, and then on the first three or four seconds, I say get all the exercises and videos at Flexbox.io. So if you want to download the exercises and come along, you have to go back to the website, pop your email in and move along with that. So let's talk about affiliates now because this is a really great way to cast a wide net and really get the attention of a lot of people. And there's this thing that I hear Gary Vaynerchuk say a lot, and he says attention is oxygen. And I think that is so true because really once you have that great product, you're just dying to let enough people to actually know about it, right? And it's tough to tell people about your product, even if you have a large email list or Twitter following or whatever it is. So what I do is I offer a healthy portion of the profits. I offer a 40% cut to all of my affiliates. So for example, the React series is $59 or a lot of times code online for $49. So after that, there's a $2 or so processing fee from Stripe that processes the credit card. So that's $56.99 in profits. And then the affiliate gets a 40% cut of that. So in this case, it's going to be $22.80 just from linking it on out. So how does it work? I drop a two-week cookie, which means that all of my affiliates, they get a unique link. And when someone hits that link, I drop a two-week cookie in their browser. If they go ahead and buy it, any time within that two-week period, that purchase will be tagged with being referred as that affiliate. It's very, very, very simple. I looked into all of these different affiliate systems, and nothing really worked. At the end of the month, I run a quick report against my database. I pay it out monthly and send it over PayPal. It's a very, very simple process that I do. The right people are key. So I don't have an affiliate page. I don't have a sign-up for affiliates. I simply just email with six to seven people, and I say, hey, would you like to partner with me? Because what you need to do is you need to find the right people, you need to find the right person with the right audience in order to work with them. So here's a couple examples. This is from someone else who does videos, but more back-end videos. And what they did is, well, they already have an audience that's interested, so they send out a link to their, in one of their newsletters that says, give React for Beginners for Christmas, and went ahead and put an affiliate link in there. And because they had taken the course first and they really believed in it, they had no problem sending it out to their audience, and they got a pretty healthy cut from that. This is on the Sublime Text package control website, where I've got an ad you may have seen this up on the package control.io website, where I've got ads for my Sublime Textbook, and they sort of rotate out. It's a perfect fit for both of us. And then I love ad blockers. Why? Because how did this ad come along at first? Well, the guy who runs package control was saying, like, 40, 50, 60 per cent of the people coming to my website are running ad blockers, and you don't get paid for those actual hits. So it's very easy to figure out if someone's running an ad blocker. You can run, like, a couple lines of JavaScript to test if an ad is there after a second. And if it's not, you can just load in, like, cool.png. Don't name it ad.png, and it won't get blocked. Right? So you can approach people with these big websites and say, hey, half of your audience is not seeing an ad. Can I do an affiliate deal where you pop up and they're like, yeah, I don't care. This is dead space to me anyway because they're blocking it. Then I can slip in an ad at that point. Yeah, cool, eh? Seriously, sweet. It's like this huge, I think there's companies doing it now, but this is huge empty inventory of people, and it's like if you're a developer, you can write them JavaScript in about five minutes to check if an ad was blocked. If it was, slip in your own. Everyone's really jacked up about that one. That's good. Let's talk about bundling. So this guy wrote another sublime textbook. This is where I was like, fuck, I'm not going to be able to launch my book because this guy already launched another book himself. Turns out we actually bundled our books together a while later and did a Black Friday deal. I took all of my videos, my book, and then two of his actual books and put them all into a big thing for 49 bucks. I thought this was really interesting because I was initially going to do a Black Friday deal where I did like nine bucks for the entire thing and you would sell a million of them. That's what people think is going to work, but it's the other way around. You do high value is much better than deep discount where 49 bucks is still a pretty good price to pay, but you get tons of content. You're going to learn a lot when you do that. I find that's much better than a deep discount. We did Black Friday, Cyber Monday. I'm not sure if you have that here. We don't have it in Canada either, but Canadians just do whatever Americans do. So what did we do? We did a four day sale. We started on Friday, finished on Monday. We email blasted it. The guy had a huge email blast about 50,000 people of us, the blind text newsletter. We did the three books and the videos for 49 bucks. We did about $20,000 in sales in just those four days, right? We went ahead and split that between the two of us. Podcast sponsorship. This is kind of a hot one right now because everybody is launching their own podcast right now and there's a really good opportunity for people that have even small to medium sized audiences. So the key to sponsoring a podcast, because I've wasted a ton of money on Facebook ads and Google ads and all this stuff and none of it has ever worked for me, and the reason is because developers are so blind, like technical people are so blind to ads and they just don't care. But if you can find people who will vouch for your product, it's really, really going to work. So it's bad and boring if you were to sponsor a podcast and say this episode is sponsored by react for beginners. That's kind of cool and people with big budgets can do that for brand awareness, but I don't have big budgets to work with. So I need someone to actually vouch for me. So something like Wes did an awesome job with this series and I know tons of people are loving it. I feel like react is gaining a lot of traction lately and you should get this series too. So this isn't a direct quote, but I sponsored the shop talk show podcast with my sublime textbook and they said nice things about me and said I know people love Wes and sublime text, if you get really good at it, you're going to be awesome. So they just like chummed around and it did really good sales just from that one podcast sponsorship. So what are some tips? Spend a few days listening to podcasts in your actual industry. Find podcasts with a similar audience but not a total overlap. So most people think, well, I want to sell a react series, I'll go to the react podcast. But chances are someone that's actually listening to a react podcast, they probably know react already and they don't need your beginner series. So if you go to maybe a JavaScript podcast or a CSS podcast or someone learning to code podcasts and sponsor that, you can often get in front of a lot more people. And you can also propose an affiliate deal for a low risk trial. So instead of paying the like 1500 bucks or whatever it is up front, you can say, hey, I'll give you a cut and in that way it's low risk for you but it's possibly also high reward for the person running the podcast if they do a good job at it. Now, let's talk about social media. I really like Twitter and that's really the only one that I spend any time on. And being on Twitter is all about building rapport. It's all about making friends online. It's all about having fun. I think those are really the big things that you need to do if you want to do well on Twitter. It's not a way to drive traffic to your site. That's a lot of times people think, all right, I got Twitter, I got Facebook, I got Instagram. I'm just going to puke this information on there and hopefully people will click my links and come back to your website. But no one gives a shit about your website, right? They come to Twitter not to go off of Twitter. They come to Twitter to consume tweets to be part of the conversation and part of the actual community, right? So what you need to do is you bring the value to Twitter. And the way that I do this is all kinds of ways that you can do it and I do it through what I call hot tips where it's just like little bite size tips for web development where I say, like, you can do this with CSS. It's kind of like a neat way to do something. Or here is a neat way to create a bunch of files on terminal, right? And these are just little things where someone can read it in ten seconds and go, huh, store that in their brain and use it at a different point. Or CSS variables, whatever it is. And people sort of rely on them now to stay up to date with whatever is going on or just to learn little, neat little nuggets of stuff that they might not necessarily have stumbled upon at any given time. So creating content both for your specific medium builds an audience that both trusts you and is hungry for more, right? So I build this content specifically for Twitter and people love them and they're hungry for more. And guess what? I have more stuff and they can pay for it. Now, let's talk about the power of thank you. This one is probably the easiest tip. I don't know why more people aren't doing it. As a creator, you want to be on people's radar. So you want people to know about what you're doing, right? That's the big thing. Attention is oxygen. So by saying thank you to someone, you get on their radar, but you also open up the dialogue to get to know people better. So what I'll do is anyone that shares any link of mine on Twitter, I'll say, hey, thanks. That was really nice of you. Appreciate it. And often that will open the door to a couple more back and forths where people say, yeah, I really liked it or I had a question and I can help them out with whatever trouble they had. And now you have a bit of a rapport with them. You have a back and forth and you're on their radar, which is probably the most important part. So this is the way that I do it. I have a little text expander snippet where I type RT, means random thanks, and I have about a... Because I find it hard when you might be thinking like that is cheating, but I find it hard to be genuine with so many people at once where I want to be genuine. I want to say thank you. I really appreciate that they're sharing out my stuff, but I really just don't have the time, nor can I think of so many ways to say thank you. So I have like a bank of about 30 thank yous, and I just type RT, and it will just grab a random one, right? And what that will do... That's not the end of it. That's just starting it. And then they go back and then we start tweeting back and forth, talking about it, saying thank you. And that's not text expander. That's actually me being a genuine human person. This is really just to open the door and start that conversation. So here's all my random thank yous. I like to put emojis in or leave off the period. It kind of seems a little bit more human that way. Even though it's not at all. So we... This seems like a ton of work, and it is. There's all kinds of stuff. This is really only scratching the surface of all the little tips and tricks and little things that I figured out that work for me. But I'm so glad that the slide is in here, because earlier there was a part of the talk that says there are no home runs, and I thought that was very, very true. Because you're not going to build something and launch it next week and make thousands of dollars from it. It takes forever to make content, and it takes a long time to build this momentum, to build trust with the community. But I really like this quote, because it says the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now. So how many times have you looked at someone who has a blog that has thousands of followers or thousands of visitors every month, and you go like, ugh, I wish. I wish I thought of that. I wish that I did it. Yeah, exactly. I wish that I started doing that back then. And then you go along your day, and a month later, I do it with the gym. Ugh! I wish I started working out two years ago. Right? And then I don't. And then two years later, damn, I wish I started working out two years ago. Right? So start now. Start it now, because in two years, you're going to be stoked that you actually kept doing it. I'm really excited that I kept doing it over the last couple years. So figure out, what can I actually create? Start small scale tests. Don't go ahead and build an entire product tomorrow. Start writing blog posts, making videos, making guides, making downloads, and see what sticks. Because for me, it was a matter of 20 to 30 blog post tutorials until I hit the sublime text ones, and they blew up and I knew that that's what people really wanted. Right? And it didn't take me writing a whole book to realize it's going to be a flop. Don't just copy people. So what I'm starting to see now is people are just building flexbox.io for whatever it is that they want, and they do the exact same thing that I've done. But don't just copy what people are. Try different things out. And I sort of stumbled upon this thing where I was posting YouTube videos and I wasn't getting a lot of views on them, but then I made it a thing. That's make it a thing where if I bundled it into a package and put a domain name on it, people all of a sudden went bananas for it because it was a thing that they could get access to. Play with how, what, and where you actually release it. And it's all, all about the momentum. You got to keep at it. You got to keep doing it every single day and just keep working at it. You got to grind it out because if you start today and you do it day in, day out, and work at it a little bit every single day, in two, three years, you're going to be super stoked that you actually went ahead and done that. So, cool. I would absolutely love to answer any questions that you have now. Yes? So how do I divide my time between mailing out, tweeting, all that stuff? Yeah, making sure. Usually what I'll do is while I'm planning, I do a lot of tweeting and whatnot, and sometimes I'll queue up a whole bunch of tweets where I have some tips and that's good for the next week or so. But then when it comes to actually building stuff, I build the app over the thing that we're going to build in the series. I'll build it over a week, a month, two months, and I'll make sure that it's best practices. I'll get it code reviewed. But then when it comes to recording, that's the week where I'm sort of like locked down just doing that. So I realize it seems like I'm just on Twitter all day, but I really realize the value of connecting with people because they're the ones that are going to buy it at the end of the day, right? Another question. No? I can't see anything. Just yell out if you have it. Do I have kids? I have 1.1 or 1.5. One on the way right now. But the other thing is like, so I'm an independent developer, and what that allows me to do is like I don't work on this on nights and evenings. This is my job, right? So what I do is I slowly am weaning myself off of client work and slowly weaning myself onto doing products and stuff like that. So it wasn't like a cold turkey kind of thing. Cool. Well, thanks, everyone. This was really fun. Thank you.