Building a Thriving Online Community with Mike Hulp

10:49Jaeden Schaefer:And then yeah, I mean, what's the breakdown like with the cold email outreach versus YouTube versus school? Like where does it all sit?

10:56Mike Hulp:I would say probably school is number one. So finding search results and then a close second is YouTube. And then for the for the cold emails, it's really hard to say. I don't know how to track conversions there. Well, it found me.

11:11Jaeden Schaefer:So, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's that's good news. That's funny. That's very interesting. Yeah, it's working. OK, so that's super interesting. How do you when someone joins your school community, do you send them like a like a survey or or like where do you collect when do you collect that data so yeah once i enter them

11:28Mike Hulp:into the i use air table for entering entering in all the emails and then basically they could just get put into a crm email marketing tool and then i just send them like a series of three emails over a couple days basically just asking them to introduce themselves and then telling them about

11:44Jaeden Schaefer:the paid community and the coaching program okay very cool and then at that point that's when you ask them like how did you hear about us uh that's that's actually when they first joined through the

11:54Mike Hulp:questions i asked them right away like how did you find the community oh okay is it like is it

11:58Jaeden Schaefer:a prerequisite for joining the community like you fill out yeah questions yeah it's one of the three questions that you can ask yeah and is that built into school where like when someone joins it has that yeah interesting yeah it's under uh plugins oh okay so you can ask certain questions that's a great idea. What are some of the I guess what are some common misconceptions with these AI automations that people are building that like, I guess people like maybe something that everyone's getting wrong that you'd like to set the record straight on?

12:28Mike Hulp:I would say don't expect it to just do everything for you, you know, clean the whole kitchen sink. It's it's gonna be sort of like a piecemeal thing that you have to put together the pieces. I would just focus on building one and then getting one task set up and then you can move on to the next find the find the automations that are

12:46Jaeden Schaefer:most effective for your business and then you can always scale from there did you have like an uh wow like a shock moment where you're like oh my gosh these are amazing and i guess what was that what was that for you uh trying to think um let's see i mean i i basically started out building

13:04Mike Hulp:social media automations to to create images and post them to my on facebook uh-huh and then once once i started doing that i'm like wow this is this is amazing there's so much more that it can be done so now i think i've built i don't know a couple dozen different automations and then i just want to provide value and and provide basically i'm giving templates to people so they can just

13:28Jaeden Schaefer:plug it in and get started right away that's cool and you said you recommend people get started with make as opposed to any because i hear a lot of people talking about any and stuff like that or like make zapier bubble like have you tried them all and where are you on all of them zapier

13:43Mike Hulp:not too much it's fairly limited in terms of what you can do but it is good for just getting started to put apps so that apps can talk to each other but i would say make is a little bit more user friendly pretty much all you have to do is connect the apps together and then use the apis it's not super complicated.

14:01Jaeden Schaefer:That's super cool. Well, I see you have like tons of different things. How do for people that are unaware, like how does a make template work, right? Like if you want to get started in something, how do you how do you get that as easy to share? What's the process?

14:14Mike Hulp:Sure. So I've I provide those in my school community. And it's basically like a JSON file that you will download and then you can just import it into your make.com scenario, basically. So when you create a new scenario, you can import the template into it and then it will set everything up.

14:32Jaeden Schaefer:Done for you. That's amazing. And so make basically just when you've built out an automation, they'll let you download a JSON and share that with a friend or somebody else. Exactly. That's cool. Do you think they'd ever do like a marketplace where like make facilitates selling them or like, I feel like that it seems like an old fashioned way to do it still, where you like download a JSON and send it to someone.

14:52Mike Hulp:That's the thing. Actually, when you create your make account, even on the free plan, you'll get access to thousands and thousands of templates that they provide for free. So that's a great place to get started. Just, you know, creating some simple automations.

15:06Jaeden Schaefer:That is that's super cool. When it comes to like building full tools, I think there's like a lot of automations that might respond to comments or do like other things like that. I've heard you talk about kind of like app building with like lovable and tools like that. what is your what's your workflow with like let's say combining one of these automations with a website on on lovable and like what would that look like if people are trying to build like a

15:28Mike Hulp:business you know yeah i'm not really sure if they have a module for lovable in make.com i would have to check but you know is it i'm not sure if that's what you're asking but basically oh i just mean

15:39Jaeden Schaefer:like let's say like i was brand new i had no experience in this and i was like hey like i have a great idea for an automation that i want to like monetize what would your recommendation for people to do that?

15:48Mike Hulp:Well, a simple place to get started is you just build a website on Lovable, which literally takes 10 to 15 minutes. And you could create sort of like a SaaS platform where they have to pay$10 a month to get access to your automations. And that's really simple to do to connect everything up through Lovable. So you could just build a basic website. That's basically what I've done for my own AI agency using level bars to create a simple website and it's a place to send people to uh it's called

16:23Jaeden Schaefer:automogic that's with a j m-o-j-i-c okay very cool um and and you built it all with lovable

16:30Mike Hulp:basically yeah 100 completely myself i didn't hire any developers or anything but when it comes to

16:37Jaeden Schaefer:like deploying the website what did you what did you do like how did you host it how did you put it together i think a lot of people like they build basically a thing on lovable and are like this is cool and then they don't really know what to do with it after that yeah yeah yeah but that's

16:49Mike Hulp:so the hosting and the domain are actually included through lovable so oh very cool set up your own custom domain and then the hosting is provided through the platform and it's like 25 a month pretty pretty easy to get started for like taking payments and stuff on like your payment

17:07Jaeden Schaefer:plans on it yep yep how did that work that would that's just through stripe i use stripe for the

17:14Mike Hulp:payment processing. And then you can set that up pretty easily through Lovable as well. All you have to do is prompt it.

17:20Jaeden Schaefer:You just give it prompts and it will build the whole website. That's amazing. That's super cool. Like where, I mean, based off of what you're seeing now, we see how fast everything's changing. Where do you predict this is going in the next, let's say, like two years with AI and basically what you're able to do with tools like Lovable and Make?

17:38Mike Hulp:I can only imagine how far it's going to be ahead in another two years from now. I think software engineers are going to be they're going to be out of a job either that or they're going to have to replace their workflow with some sort of automation tool so i'm not saying it's going to completely take the place of software engineers it's only going to enhance their abilities i think but uh yeah it's it's definitely going to open up a lot of possibilities for people that don't know how to code and uh it's going to i guess you could say widen the playing field yeah for sure

18:09Jaeden Schaefer:Yeah, I agree with that. What's a piece of advice that you would give to people maybe getting started in this or interested in making some automations or websites for their domain of expertise?

18:20Mike Hulp:I would say, well, first of all, join my school community because I provide a lot of value in there for free. We'll link in the description of the show notes to that. Awesome. Thank you. And so you can join there. You can participate in the community, ask your questions. And then I would also recommend just creating your free account on make.com and check out some of the tools to build websites. There's many of them out there. And basically just do your research and get started. Stop waiting and just start doing it.

18:48Jaeden Schaefer:And then I guess that would bring me to a follow-up question, which would be like for you when you first got started, like what were the steps that you took? Like was this YouTube tutorials or just playing around, figuring it out? Like how much like kind of, I guess, educational time did you have to invest in this?

19:03Mike Hulp:Yeah. So I started watching a couple of different YouTubers. One of them is Nick Sarajev, who you may have heard of. Okay. I may be mispronouncing his name, but he has one of the, one of the largest automation communities on school. He posts a lot of long form tutorials. So basically just started watching those and then building the automations myself. And then what they say about practice, the more you practice, the better you get. So I basically just started building them and then creating my own tutorials and then launch that second YouTube channel and the school community.

19:35Jaeden Schaefer:That's amazing. That's awesome. And for you, what's your goal? Where are you planning on taking your school community and your YouTube channel? And is this kind of going to be like what you focus on? And I guess what's your vision for your plan?

19:46Mike Hulp:Yeah, it's definitely getting more and more passionate about the AI automation space. And I think there's a lot of room for growth here. AI isn't going to be slowing down anytime soon. It's just accelerating. So I see that the school community could easily reach like a thousand members in another month, most likely. And then, yeah, basically just continue growing the YouTube channel and doing. I don't want it to replace my main channel because I still like vlogging here. But yeah, it's a packing project. And I'd like to grow the AI automation agency as well.

20:19Jaeden Schaefer:That's amazing. What percentage of your free users convert into paying users, whether through coaching or through one of your paid modules on the school community?

20:29Mike Hulp:So far, unfortunately, it's a pretty small percentage. I'm looking to increase that because I have the free one. Most people just want to join the free one. And then for the paid one, I just decided to give a seven-day free trial. Okay. So that's a little bit lower barrier to entry. And then it's just a matter of actually getting them to stay after that first seven days. But I would say like the conversion rate is maybe 5%. It's not very good so far. Okay.

20:55Jaeden Schaefer:How much is the paid community? It's$49 a month. Mike, well, thank you so much for coming on the show and giving us all your advice and tidbits. You sound like you're absolutely crushing it. So excited to follow along. I'm excited to see you hit a thousand members in your AI Automation School community. No doubt you'll do that. Coming soon. You'll be hitting 10 ,000, you know, this time next year. So excited to follow along on the journey. Awesome. Awesome. Thanks so much for having me. Yeah, thanks so much for coming on. And to all the listeners, I'll leave a link in the description to Mike's school community.

21:26Jaeden Schaefer:Highly recommend checking that out, as well as his website. If you want to see what he was able to build with Lovable and check out his coaching packages. There's some cool stuff on there, too. I think there's so much you can do with automating and AI. Thank you so much for tuning in. Make sure to leave a rating and review wherever you get your podcasts. And we will catch you in the next episode. Moto Casino, America's social casino. Welcome to Moto Casino, where the excitement never ends. With thousands of the hottest free-to-play social casino games, fastest payouts, and the best promotions in the industry.

21:56Jaeden Schaefer:No tricks or gimmicks. Owned and operated in the USA. Moto Casino is a free-to-play social casino. No purchase necessary. 21 plus to play. Void word prohibited. Sign up today for a generous welcome bonus. Moto Casino, America's social casino. Download the Moto Casino app today. You're listening to a podcast right now, driving, working out, walking the dog. If you're into podcasts, chances are you have something to say too. With RSS.com, starting your own podcast is free and easy. Upload an episode and we distribute it to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and more. Track your listeners, see where they're from, and start earning from ads just like this.

22:35Jaeden Schaefer:If you've been thinking about starting a podcast, this is your sign. Start your new podcast for free today at RSS.com. Thank you.