#318: The $9/month membership earning more than $500k/year AND buying Smart Passive Income — Pt. 2 featuring Liz Wilcox

0:00I think that you're looking at the math wrong. There's 8 billion people on the planet. How easy would it be to sell 4 ,000 of them?

0:21Hello, my friend. Welcome back to another episode of Creator Science. This is week two in our two-episode series about the sale of smart passive income. Last week, we heard from Pat Flynn and Matt Gartland about how they sold the company. This week, you'll be hearing the other side of that story from the buyer, the other side of the table. My guest today is Liz Wilcox, the person who bought Smart Passive Income. If you don't know Liz yet, she's built a name for herself selling a$9 per month email marketing membership called EMM. It has been$9 since she launched it in February of 2021. She has somewhere around 4 ,400 paying members, and it does roughly half a million dollars in sales per year.

1:02No high-ticket upsell, no next step, just this$9 product. Before we get into the purchase of Smart Passive Income, we spend quite a bit of time talking about Liz's business. Because if you know me, you may know that I have given people the opposite advice of her business model for years. In fact, I've said over and over again that if you're going to charge less than$10 for something, just don't charge for it at all. So I came to this conversation kind of a skeptic and I left it genuinely altered. I completely have a new lens on how I think about these membership offers. And it's really interesting.

1:37We really get into her numbers. And here's why I think this matters right now. Most of us build for the upper end of the market. Higher ticket requires fewer customers, more revenue per person. It works when it works. One of the biggest drivers of turn in my own paid membership this year has been that our members are feeling a little bit of a crunch sometimes. Their customers have less money to spend. And when your customers' customers have less money to spend, you have fewer customers. But Liz has built something that just about anyone can afford, an expense that's so low that you don't even really think about it when it hits your credit card statement.

2:11And it's one of the most durable businesses that I've looked at in a long time. So in this episode, we get into how the$9 model actually works, the math she ran before she started, the two-year runway she gave herself to make it happen, how she's grown it with almost no social media, why AI hasn't touched her business, and the strange way it's actually sending her new members. Then of course, we get into the purchase of SPI, what needed to be true before she'd buy an 18-year-old brand with someone else's face on it, what she licensed from Pat, and what she's planning to change. We end this conversation with an exchange that I really wasn't expecting.

2:46Toward the end, Liz admits she does not know how her$9 membership and the SPI community fit together. So we talk about it live on the mic and neither one of us fully lands the plane. It's the most honest business conversation I've had on the show in a long time. I really love this. I hope you do too. We'll get to that full conversation with Liz right after this.

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5:23Can you talk about this just as kind of a way of introduction into the world of Liz Wilcox? Yeah. So y 'all, I don't like to work that much. Okay. I really love my time with my family. I'm a single parent. In the last year or so, I adopted a teenager. And I mean, I love my work, but I don't like to work, if that makes sense. And so I used to be a service provider and I, you know, so copywriting. I'm a really good writer. And I always said, you know, like, what I provide you is great, A plus. The service is meh because I'd rather be at the beach. I'd rather be hanging out with my kid. I'd rather be out with my friends, right?

6:04And so I came up with this idea for this$9 membership, and it's been$9 for almost six years at the time of this recording, because I want to be able to turn my computer off. I know what I'm providing to you is great. It's just weekly newsletter templates. That's what I'm really good at. I'm really good at quickly connecting with people, getting them to reply, nurturing them, and then selling to them. My email list is over 50 % customers. and so I knew I was really good at that. I knew it was sort of this underserved thing in the copywriting community. Everybody and their mother wants to sell you sales templates and sales emails because that's where the money is at but I knew the majority of people needed newsletters so I was like, well, I could be like the Walmart of email.

6:49You know, a lot of people, oh, you wanna be Gucci. Well, Google it, baby. Gucci makes about 10 to 100 times less than Walmart so I'm gonna be Walmart all day, baby. And so that is where I came up with that$9 offer. And like I said, I've been selling it for almost nine years. And it just keeps building steam because it's that same thing I created back in 2020. And it's just, you know, been steamrolling ever since. So if you've been doing this for almost nine years and it's been$9 for six years, what was it priced before$9? It's always been$9. but before that I did like workshops, service providing, things like that.

7:30I see. Okay. This is crazy to me because I just don't hear people talking about this price point like ever. And in fact, I've given the advice. I'm like, if it's less than$10, don't even charge for it because like, it's more annoying to me to pull out my wallet to pay for something less than $10 than to pay$10. But this is a really compelling counterpoint to this. I'm curious to hear if you're willing to share, what does retention on this look like? How long do people stick around on a$9 per month subscription on average. Yeah, my retention or churn rate is about 5%. So it's pretty low. Crazy.

8:03So that means that most people are sticking into a second year. Yes. What's like the longest term subscription you've seen from somebody? So I launched on February 16th, 2021. I misspoke earlier, excuse me. And I made 30 sales that day. The last time I checked it within the last 90 days, I still had 12 members from day one. Crazy, okay. So almost half of them are still there. And what does this do on like a monthly basis? It's about 40 something thousand dollars. It's stupid. It's, y 'all, it's so dumb. Listen. I don't do public math, but my math machine is telling me that that's like 4 ,400 subscribers.

8:49Yeah. Paid subscribers. Mm-hmm. It's so fun. Come on. It's so fun because, listen, y 'all, like I said, I don't like to work, but I love to serve. I love serving my people. And Jay mentioned he doesn't like pulling out his wallet for under$10, but there are billions of people that do, right? Totally. When I started, I had no money. I had no support. I was married at the time, and he said, you know, Liz, there's no way you can make money on the Internet without doing you-know-what, right? So I was like, I just don't believe that. I believe in creator science. I believe that it's a thing and I'm going to go for it.

9:30And so my ideal person is that same woman, that same man that's like maybe their family's not understanding it. Maybe they think you have to do nefarious things to make money online. Maybe they just, all they have is$9, right? And for me, I didn't have a job when I started and anything that I spent to start my business, I had to filter through my husband. And again, he did not support this. And so$9 was about the max I could spend without tucking my tail between my legs and saying, hey, I really want to try this or that. And so those are the people that I'm trying to serve. And what I'm giving them is perfect newsletters, right?

10:14You can't have a great launch if you're not sending weekly newsletters, right? If you're not consistently and constantly in contact with your subscribers. And so it's just been this perfect storm for me where I get to serve the people that I love. I love those newbies. Most people don't want to serve the newbies. They're like, come to me when you know something, right? I want to say, oh, you're brand new? Come over here. Let me teach you the basics. And then with the price point, I can turn my computer off at night. Again, single parent, right? Two kids. I don't have a lot of family. I actually support three households with my business.

10:49So there's no backup plan, right? And so I want to turn my computer off. I don't want to be working late at night. I don't want to start a mastermind. I don't want to start a group program. That takes my time. What I want is time. And if you give me$9, I'll give you everything you need to get going. And we both can sleep at night. Yeah, I think you're speaking to time to one degree. you're also speaking a little bit to like stakes. Maybe I'm projecting here, but like when I run a 40 or$50 workshop, there's something so comforting about knowing like, man, I'm going to over deliver like hell on this because even if I'm at 80 % of what I could do, I can over deliver on that price point super easily.

11:34Maybe I'm projecting, but I think that's part of what makes this really compelling is like, you're not saying, hey, choose a car payment or choose my program. Amen. And we were talking about this before we hit record. I was telling Jay, I don't really care. I'm not precious about what I create. I just want to get it out there. And this price point allows me to do that. And y 'all, it's weekly newsletter templates. So after five and a half years, that's a lot of practice. And now I feel really confident that I'm over delivering, right? Like these are the templates I want you to send. This is the workshop, you know, because I'm doing the same workshops over and over again.

12:15You know, this is audio only right now, but you can see in the background, if you were watching, I've got a calendar and it's the same thing year after year. And I know every year that I do the workshop, I do the challenge, I do this for my members. I write the templates every week. It's just getting better and better, but I'm also getting faster and faster. So the income is becoming more and more passive. Honestly, I got to pat myself on the back. Like, wow, I really, I really did that, you know, but it was, it all comes down to, yeah, the stakes. I don't want the stakes to be high for me because I've got a nervous system to regulate for my kids.

12:52And I don't want the stakes to be high for you because I don't know what you're going through. I don't know if this online creator business is your forever home or not. So the stakes being low for both of us really for me has been where it's at. Do you have in the current business a higher priced thing that people go to or is it just this? You can opt into a year,$9 times 12, 108 bucks. And then you get all my workshops and everything else for free, kind of like Costco. You just pay the yearly fee and you get in the store. But I do not have an upsell. You cannot get on the phone with me. I don't have a mastermind program.

13:34I've never done a group thing. It's all just the membership and it generates about half a million dollars a year. And to me, wow, did I make it in life with that. Crazy. And what is the breakdown-ish between monthly and annual? It's about two thirds annual, right? It's a deal of a lifetime, right? Like you get all my other products. You don't have to pay me another cent. I will not upsell you. Are you kidding? Like who else is saying that? I'll tell you, the answer is nobody. People listening to this are probably hearing like the enthusiasm I'm coming at this with and are like, how did she bribe him to be this enthusiastic?

14:13Because generally I'm not like this enthusiastic, but I just think this is such a, she didn't bribe me by the way. This is such a counter approach that I don't hear. And the reason I don't hear it most of the time is people will run the math and be like, okay,$9 per month. I have an email list of 500 people. Even if I get 10 % of those people to do that, that's like 500 bucks a month. And I don't know if that's worth my time right now. Like I think like the build towards this$40 ,000 number you're talking about will take forever, or maybe they won't get there, or maybe they'll churn through these people.

14:45What would you say to that person? I think that you're looking at the math wrong. There's 8 billion people on the planet. How easy would it be to sell 4 ,000 of them? I like it. I mean, look at Jay. I remember, what was it, a year or two ago? It was like his YouTube countdown to 100 ,000 subscribers, I think. I don't need 100 ,000. I just need 4 ,000, and I'm making half a million dollars a year. Are you kidding me? I was born on the wrong side of Detroit. one of the proudest moments of my life is getting my mom off eight mile. Shout out Marshall Mathers and the gang. Like that's not a joke to me.

15:20That's where I'm coming from. So I looked at Costco. I looked at Netflix and I did the math on theirs. Like Costco is, you know, like a fortune 500 company from a$60 membership fee. Are you kidding me? Like I don't have land contracts. I don't have to pay workers comp. I don't have servers. I don't have contractors. Like I don't need millions of people the way Costco does. I was just looking for a thousand, y 'all. Nine times a thousand is $9 ,000 a month. I about fell out my chair when I did that math. You know, Jay did that calculation, but you know, you're missing the time. I gave myself two years.

15:59If I could work for two years to make$9 ,000 a month just writing a weekly newsletter template. Oh my gosh, I feel like I'm robbing people. Intentionally provocative question. Yeah. What about AI? What about AI? Are you worried about it? Can I just go ask Claude to write me some newsletter templates every week? Yeah, sure you can. But will you see results? Absolutely not. Guess what you're paying for? My brain, my 10 years of experience. AI has not affected my membership at all. Some people will come to me. they'll say, oh, and they're in my membership. And they say, same as Jay, what about AI?

16:35And I'll say, oh, you could totally take these templates and plug them into AI for me. And guess what that has done? I didn't even realize it was doing this. But because people are putting my content into AI, who pops up when you talk about email marketing? Liz Wilcox. I get so many people saying almost every day, I found this membership through AI. Why? Because my 4 ,000 plus users are putting it into AI and saying, Liz Wilcox wrote this, write it for me. Ah, this is so interesting. I saw this behavior with a live course we did recently where I was like giving people homework. I was like, here's what we're trying to do.

17:12Here's how to think about it. Here's your homework. Answer these questions. And they would put that in the transcript of the call into AI. And they were coming up with like the best, highest quality homework of like students in my programs that I've ever seen. And they were keeping up with the program itself. They're keeping on task, which was so interesting. So I think this is all just very, very interesting and compelling to me. I do find that people in my audience are struggling with AI a bit. I have a higher price program. And one of the highest reasons for churn recently has been that folks are having a harder time financially because I serve a prosumer.

17:50And if my customers don't have customers, I don't have customers. But my program is, again, like the equivalent of a car payment or more, you know, per year. So it makes that math a lot harder. This is very interesting. I'm thinking about this very strongly. Why should somebody not play around in this price point? If you just can't get visible, if you don't have an it factor, if you're not ready to own your it factor, I know who I am. And I know that I have a solid framework and I'm not afraid to get visible. I've pitched Jay for this show before, and guess what? I didn't get it, right? But I pitched him again, and now I do, right?

18:28So you have to be super brave. When I say, you know, I might say flippantly, like, there's 8 billion people. I only need 4 ,000. That's because I'm willing to put in the work. It's a volume game that I'm playing. Every month, I get 100 to 150 new subscribers to the membership. That means I need 1 ,000 email subscribers, right? That means I need a lot of eyeballs, right? So if you have this fear of visibility, this might not be for you because I have to go out there. This is my third back-to-back-to-back call where I've literally been talking for two and a half hours now, and I'm pretty sure Jay and I will talk for another 15 to 30 minutes.

19:08And then I have another call right after this. If you don't have that sort of stamina, if you are afraid to talk about yourself, if you don't have a solid framework quite yet, if you are not able to distill what you do into one sentence and then also have a two-day workshop on it, you might not be ready for this price point. When it comes to visibility, realistically in 2026, let's say I love this idea and I have an email list of some number of hundreds of people, but I just hate social media. I don't want to do it, but I like this model and I want to do it. Realistically, does this model work if I'm not on an algorithmic platform?

19:47Heck yeah, neither am I, babe. I got all my subscribers from two places. Number one, getting on podcasts. I've been on almost 400 podcasts and virtual stages. And number two, affiliates. Now you might be thinking, what affiliates? Who is selling a$9 product? You get almost nothing. My customers are selling the$9 product. I tell my customers, hey, if you get two of your friends to join, you get this membership for free. Remember, I told you my ideal customer is somebody who is looking at$9 and thinking, this might be all I have to spend this month. So the idea of getting it for free is like, whoa, yes, I'm signing up for that.

20:28I give 50%. I give$4.50. So my affiliates are making more money because I'm absorbing those fees, right? So maybe I'm making closer to$4 and$4.50. But again, getting on podcasts, so getting those warm leads. And then I have a tripwire that's like, hey, join for$1 right now, 15 minutes only. And so I get a lot of customers from that. And then I get a lot from affiliates, which Jay just mentioned at the beginning. I've been hearing so much about your membership, Liz. I don't know if we're converging or what. It actually, I just had a giant affiliate push where I got 2000 new leads to a wait list for this product.

21:11I've been hearing it from folks who are just like really interested in the model. Because I just don't think we see a lot of people at this price point with the top line numbers that you're talking about. And that's the reason why a lot of people in my world just haven't pursued it. Because it's like, I don't know if there's a model there. But you're on Instagram. Are you saying Instagram isn't a key part to this business? No, I can't remember the last time I pitched my membership on Instagram. I honestly, so Jay and I have a mutual love. It's called Survivor. And after Survivor, I was not like one of the, I wasn't like, you know, America's sweetheart, right?

21:48And so I actually got off Instagram for about two years because I was receiving so much hate. I got off social media completely. And at the time of this recording, I just got back on Instagram and I just posted for the first time in over two years. And so my membership, the social media model, is not how I grow my membership at all. I'm going to resist the urge to follow the rabbit down the hole to talk about Survivor as much as I would love to do so. I want to go back to something you said earlier, which is kind of off the plan of what I was trying to cover here, but I just haven't had a real conversation about this.

22:27So I'm a bald white guy with a beard. There's a lot of people like me that look like me that have the same privileged position of, hey, sell the higher price thing because you need fewer sales and it's more meaningful more quickly. But you mentioned that you're a single mom. And I also watch, I love Queer Eye. Queer Eye is like one of my favorite television shows. If I'm feeling down on the dumpies, nothing's going to make me feel better than watching an episode of Queer Eye. On that show, we often hear from people who are like, I was raised by a single mom. And until I had our daughter, that sentence just kind of like rolled off my back.

22:59And now that we have a kid, when I hear about single moms, I'm just like, how could you possibly? And also now you're running this business. So where did you, how did you, where did you fit that in? Yeah, I think it was the creation of this $9 offer. It was, I was doing service providing. I was, no joke, getting up at four o 'clock in the morning, working for two hours on my client's products and projects, waking up my daughter and putting her on the school bus. Thank God she finally went to school, right? Before she went to school, I was, you know, just working when she was sleeping. I lived in an RV.

23:40I was an RV travel blogger. That's how I got my start. And so I didn't even have internet on my phone when I started. I had to go to libraries and Lowe's parking lots and laundromats to build my first two businesses. And it's just grit. It's just tenacity. It's just resilience. It's just you have to have that purpose. And for me, especially with this email marketing game and teaching digital marketing, again, I came from almost nothing. And I support three households with my business today. And it's just knowing that there are more people out there like me who all they have is a hope and a dream.

24:21And they don't even have, you know, the support of their spouse or their family to say like, yeah, that's a good idea. And I'm honestly getting a rash thinking about it because I'm just so passionate and I just remember that. And I will be, you know what, that starts with a D if I ever forget where I come from. And I want to help other, maybe you're a single parent or, you know, like whatever your circumstances, I want to help you rise above that so passionately that I figure out things in the margins of life. And I think that's why I got so good at newsletters, why I got so good at email and can boast like, oh, half of my subscribers our customers because I had to be good.

25:04I didn't have the privilege of anyone else. I had to support my mom. I had to figure it out so my sister could leave her husband, you know, and have a financial option. I had to feed my child. There was no other option for me. And I, every time I sit down at this desk and I turn this computer on, I think about how many more millions and billions of people there are that are in that exact same position right now. And it helps me work more efficiently and effectively for them. Thanks for sharing. And sorry if I'm kind of putting you back into like a hard place to think about this, but I've been thinking lately about, I really feel like, I mean, anyone in our position, there is a certain degree of survivorship bias.

25:53And I think about my journey and there was just a period of time, which probably came from a place of like partial, overconfidence, partial delusion, partial privilege, where I just didn't consider failure to be an option. There were relative failures. There were things that like, maybe this didn't quite work the way I wanted, but like at the macro level, like, am I going to go and give up on this thing? Virtually never thought that was going to happen. And I think that played like a meaningful role in my story. And I was, I was trying to suss out and not lead the witness, but I heard you say it.

26:27You said that it just wasn't an option for you. Yeah. When people say, or they would say like, oh, well, what if it doesn't work out? What do you mean? What do you mean? Every great entrepreneur story starts very similarly. I couldn't do anything but succeed. There was no option. And I've just always been like that. I saw people like Jay succeed. I saw people like Pat Flynn or Amy Porterfield or even who inspired me for my RV travel blog, shout out heathandalissa.com. And I was like, well, they can't be any smarter than me. I've surely, and they're here willingly sharing how to do it. All I've got to do is follow the directions.

27:18Yeah, I'm going to be okay. Do you think this is something like you can manufacture or help people tap into? There's a certain jaded part of me that has started to believe that sometimes people just don't, they're not in the headspace to make it work. I don't want to say like they don't have it, but I do want to say like in the current way they're presenting themselves and the way they're going about their business, I just don't think they're in the headspace to make it work. And I feel like the only thing I could do for that person is somehow put them in the headspace of like, there is no option of failure, but I just don't know if there's actually a way to do that.

27:58And if there's not, I don't know how to help some people who I can tell they're like, just the way you're going about your business isn't going to work. Yeah, so I often say to my students a couple phrases. So let me preface. What Jay is saying is true, but also it's not a yes and, it's a yes but. And so what you have to understand about me is my background. I have a bachelor's degree in elementary education, which means taking these really large concepts and not only making them digestible, but making them fun. And I think that really helps me take people like Jay is describing that are in the wrong mindset and getting them actually excited and getting them to take those first steps.

28:43Because there's nothing like trying to teach a third grader who doesn't want to basic algebra concepts, right? Like, how do teachers do that? And then I also have a master's degree in leadership. So I'm really good. And I wrote a thesis on servant leadership. So I'm really good at getting behind people and pushing them in the direction of where they say they want to go. So I think it's those things, right? Just breaking things down for people into the micro of the micro steps. And saying things like, these are the few phrases that I say, may I pitch you an idea? And that idea, then they consent to you telling them what you have to say.

29:25Can I invite you to challenge yourself today? Can I invite you to challenge your thinking on that? Can I share with you a story about that? And then, you know, you share a cautionary tale, right, as far as their thinking goes. And then I use this one in my audience. My students are always like, Liz, when are you going to have merch that says this? Because I say it so much. I always say, I say this with love. I say this with love. And then I kind of hit them with the hard truth of that's not going to help you. Or, you know, you've really got to change your mind about that. Or you're focused on the wrong thing, right?

30:04And especially I work with those early stage entrepreneurs, those people that a lot of people, like Jay is saying, is like, I don't know if I can help them. And so when they know that you've got their back, that's when people will run through fire for you, right? That's when people will, thinking they're running right into a brick wall, they will sprint towards it. If they think you are behind them and you are doing the thing with them, and if they fall, you will catch them, right? And these are not scalable things. Saying, hey, email me anytime. I will get on a call with you. I got on a call with a guy.

30:48He's brand new. He doesn't even know where he's starting. and I thought, this guy just needs a one-on-one. I do not sell one-on-ones. I already told you that, right, 20 minutes ago. But I was on a call with him. I gave him my personal cell phone. We've been texting for days. This is not scalable. And like Jay said, I don't know if he's going to make it, but I'm going to get him to the yes or the no. I'm going to get him to realize I can do this or to realize this is not for me. And to me, that's my purpose in life for sure. When you see somebody and from your vantage point, there's a pretty big chasm between where they are and where they need to be to really give this a shot.

31:35Yes. Are you trying to be real with them and compress the chasm with them? Or are you saying, I'm going to separate this diagnostic from where they're at and try to get them to take the next step forward and the next step forward and the next step forward? So maybe a little bit of both. I have no problem. And y 'all, we're 30 minutes in. You probably understood this by now. I am incredibly direct. And people will often tell me, wow, Liz, you say things that I don't think other people can say, and people will give you a hug and thank you for saying them. It's because I think I genuinely love people.

32:12I am a people person. I am a true extrovert. If you've never met one, hello, my name is Liz Wilcox. I'll be here all day. And so what I do is, again, like, can I say something with love? I don't think things are going to move for you with what you're telling me right now, But here's how they could. I'm going to give you a couple days to digest that so that they can walk away. Maybe they're not walking away with the answer they wanted, but they're walking away with something. And especially with these early stage creators, we might spend a few years just thinking about what we're doing, right? I mean, I did.

32:53I think I'm on my like seventh business or something, right? Like I've done it. I've sold an RV blog. I sold a summit thing. thing. I own an e-commerce shop for no good reason. It's called Texas Swagger. Y 'all, I think I've been to Texas once. Okay. Like I've just tried it all. And so I've been in their shoes of what Jay said. Yeah, me too. You know, it takes a couple of years maybe, but that doesn't mean I can't give you the tools right now to maybe shorten that timeframe so you can decide much quicker than a few years if this is going to be your thing. Well, that's probably a good segue to move into talking about the next chapter with SPI.

33:31We'll get to that right after a quick break for our sponsors.

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35:09I'm glad we started with like kind of the origin story and background because one, I was just intensely curious. So thank you for indulging my curiosity on that. But two, I think it sets the table for what we started to talk about last week with Matt and Pat on the show, which is this acquisition of a true legacy brand. And what a lot of people are probably looking at as a very large asset, which probably means like a fair amount of risk on your behalf of purchasing it. So I would love to just kind of give you a little bit of an open floor to talk about how you arrived to this place to take this level of risk, knowing from where you came and how risky risk probably feels.

35:58Well, as far as the risk goes, I know and I've proven to myself over the last 10 years being a creator that I'm gonna make it. I have really figured it out. And when I think about anytime I take a risk in my business, like buying smartpassiveincome.com, are you kidding me? That's the riskiest thing I've ever done. Well, maybe getting married. But you know, like that is up there, right? As I am marrying, you know, myself, my brand to the SPI brand as well, right? And so I've just looked at the 10 years behind me and it's like, wow, you know, I built several businesses. I've sold several businesses.

36:41The risk that I'm feeling is not actually as big as I think it is, right? Because even if I crash tomorrow, I have 10 years of knowledge. I have 10 years of networking and peers and colleagues. So I will never, ever be starting from scratch again. I'm a totally different person. I have lots more experience and friends and peers to help me in the game. So I would say I'm a seasoned vet. So the risk is not as big as it was when I was starting out with absolutely nothing and no knowledge, right? So I know I could build faster than ever. What needed to be true for you to pull the trigger on this? The only thing that needed to be true was that Pat believed I was the right person for the job.

37:36Jay just said it. This is a legacy brand. 18 freaking years. Oh my gosh. I'm like breaking out knives thinking about it. And the reason I bought the business was because I wanted to accelerate my progress. We mentioned email marketing membership, my$9 thing. You can't see it, but in the background, I've got this road to 10K. I want 10 ,000 people in that membership. I've wanted that since day one. And so buying a giant asset like SPI, maybe that would help fast forward. But it's not going to help fast forward if I'm not the right person to take over, if I'm not the right person to serve that audience.

38:20And so Pat and I talked so much for hours and hours every single month about who is the audience, who is listening, who cares about Pat Flynn. and why? Who is up late at night Googling passive income or making money on the internet? And why are they clicking on you, Pat Flynn, in particular, right? And am I the right person to step into those shoes? And that is really the only thing that mattered to me. And I had been, you know, So in, we'll say, adjacent circles to Pat for a few years, my sister actually works for Pat on his Pokemon side. And just getting to know him from my sister's perspective, I was like, oh, Pat is who I think he is.

39:10And I think we actually have a lot in common. I think our passions and how much we care about that early stage person and getting people set up for success so we can hand them over to people like Jay Klaus, right? I think he and I are just so, so similar. And I cannot tell you what it means to have that seal of approval. It's actually insane. It feels like one of the greatest honors of my life to be taking this thing over. And I just could not be more grateful, truly, to serve this audience. I don't know if we've ever talked about this, but I spent a year at SPI in 2021. Actually, like a year and a half between 2020 and the end of 2021.

39:53on the community side, helping launch SPI Pro and get their community program started. And I hadn't actually been familiar with Pat before the opportunity to collaborate as a contractor at first to launch SPI Pro came through. But I was blown away by how truly aligned his public persona is to Pat behind closed doors. And every time I get the chance to just share that, because I think it's like an uncommon thing online, I like to take a chance to say that because I was just blown away, especially someone who's been in the game as long as he has. I think it'd be really easy to also get like jaded or performative.

40:28And I just have never seen that from Pat, but because I was in the business for a year and a half, I have a sense for the audience, the community, you've described the person that you're trying to help as like getting started. And so new people coming into SPI, that probably makes sense. But as an 18 year old business, there's a ton of people who have been like in the SPI world for a decade or more. So how did you think about that as it comes to your core product, your core audience? Are you trying to like marry these things together or are you trying to like kind of operate two things in tandem?

41:05So they will definitely be merged. Like Pat, and I'm sure he mentioned in last week's episode, straddling two ladders. You know, I've got this Pokemon thing. I got this SPI thing. Pat is a genuine person. He does love his audience. It was so hard to serve both. That's a cautionary tale for me. I don't wanna be that. So I will be merging my personal brand, Liz Wilcox, into SPI. SPI is the larger brand. It has more sticking power. It definitely has more SEO than I do. And so I'll be merging everything into that. What that looks like at the time of this recording, I'm still not sure, but I think the brands actually work super, super well together.

41:50And that was something Pat mentioned as he, you know, started to kind of take my pitch seriously, right? Because I asked him, he said, wow, actually, you know, we do serve these early stage people as well. Or that's where my heart has always been, Liz. That's where the content I've always wanted to create, you know, he's got power up podcasting, YouTube from scratch, things like that. He's always looking for that newer person. But yes, there are people that have been around for a decade, almost two decades. And I've talked to some of those sort of legacy members of smartpassiveincome.com, but they still need what Jay and I were talking about of getting those people in the right mindset.

42:34I think the last few years, Pat's been so bogged down with straddling the two ladders. The content hasn't been as focused in on making a living, right? Everybody sees Pat nowadays as this YouTube superstar, right? This content superstar. Oh my gosh, he's had a podcast for 16 years. He's got millions of subscribers on YouTube, hundreds of thousands of followers on social media. And so even those legacy members have been trying to create content. And Jay, he's another master of the literal content creator mindset and framework, right? I like to take those content creators and show you how to make real money.

43:22And what I'm noticing inside what was then called the SPI Pro, which is now called the SPI Community, is some of those people, some of those legacy members, they're like, okay, I've built the following. Now what? I'm not getting the brand deals that someone like Pat or Jay is getting. I'm not, you know, my email list, I've got one or I don't have one, but, you know, it's kind of stagnant. I don't know those next steps. And so I'm going to come in with my background and break up those concepts, create a very clear path and framework for people. because that's what I've specialized in with these beginners for the last six years now is getting the mindset right, getting them to the next step.

44:07And something, Pat used to say, oh, we're Team Flynn, right? I wanna take that to Team Wynn. And Wynn stands for what's important now. And I think creators, sometimes we can get caught up in all the things. I just mentioned them, email, brand deals, content creation, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Even Jay, what I think in the last nine months, made a video and said, we're video first now. We were doing all these things. Now we're video first. That's our main focus, right? I want to help those creators figure that out. What is important now? Is it my email list? Okay, I'm going to go down that path.

44:43And you're saying at the micro level, to the individual. To the individual, yes. Yes, so we are reorganizing the community, the newsletter, the content, the podcast to really focus on helping creators figure out their next step. What's important now and having these different lanes for them to go down so they can master the one thing, move to the next, move to the next, etc. So one day they have a beautiful online ecosystem that fully funds their lifestyle. Oh, I'm getting excited, y 'all. I'm getting excited. I feel like it'd be really tempting to purchase this asset, look at your poster that says road to 10K and say, got the login credentials to Kit, gonna send an email for the email marketing membership right now.

45:32But you guys have been very deliberate and stepwise in long-term and how you've approached this. I don't, I mean, I see and read most emails that come from SPI and I don't recall you doing like a EMM campaign yet. I haven't. So curious how you're thinking about like the sequence of events. Yeah. So EMM, yeah, road to 10K. Gosh, it just really chaps my, you know what, that we're not there yet. You know, I feel like we're so close and so far away. Yeah, it would be so tempting to, oh, screw whatever you guys were thinking. EMM, that's a cash cow. I know it sells. Let's go, go, go, go. But I know there's a bigger picture here, right?

46:18Well, first and foremost, we don't want to shock the audience. Like, who is Liz and why are we promoting all her stuff lately? I'm like, I'm a Pat fan. I'm an SPI fan. I just listen to the podcast, right? So again, Pat and I really talking about who the right person is and what those right next steps are. And so as far as the next sequence of events, because now the news is out. Move over Pat Flynn. There's a new marketer in town. type of thing, right? But no, actually, Pat isn't really going anywhere. You know, we are giving him the time and freedom to focus on his Pokemon channel because what I love about Pat so much, and I think probably why Jay and him jive so much is Pat is a creator, first and foremost.

47:03Much more so than even I am. More than me. Y 'all, I just cosplay as a creator. Like, I'm a writer. I'm an educator first. We talked about this. I know at the time of this recording, there's no way that you could have heard this conversation, but I like really tried to corner him in our interview. I'm like, how can you make as much as you make in terms of the amount of content? I was like, how can you be producing all of this? When do you sleep? When do you have family time? It doesn't seem like he lacks for any of it, but I'm like, when do you do it? And he answered and I'm like, I still don't buy it.

47:33Like, where do you get the extra three hours a day? I don't get it. Anyway, sorry, I interrupted your flow. Yeah, I don't get it either because also on his Pokemon side, he doesn't have a large team. So I don't, I have no idea. Anyway, Pat is a creator. And so we're going to be bringing him back once a month on the podcast for X amount of months. You know, he said, Liz, can I come back for the thousandth episode? I said, are you kidding me? Like you did 950 of them. Like what kind of person would I be, right? So Pat will always be a part of Smart Passive Income. But with the merging of the two memberships, And y 'all, I'm stumbling because I don't know the answer.

48:13I don't know what it looks like. I just know that next step is to announce Liz Wilcox as the new owner of SPI and grow SPI's membership. And I think what will happen, and I have mentors and peers that I'm still in conversations. It's like Dear Diary every night about this question. And they will help me figure out how to merge them. I don't think it makes sense. And you might hear me in two years and I might have two memberships. I don't think it makes sense to have two memberships. I really don't. And I think what Pat and I have created separately is extremely complimentary. Pat has this book called Superfans.

48:56Inside the SPI community this year, we launched the Superfan system. I have a license that was part of our agreement. I can use superfans and use the superfan system for basically all time and eternity. Everybody, you know, you can Google it. It's obviously not Liz Wilcox's, right? But I have the license to use it and teach the superfan system and the pyramid of fandom that he created, which is extremely generous. And so coupled, when I look at the superfan system, to me, the only thing that is really missing is the email marketing, is that piece of taking people off of social media, off of YouTube, and onto an email list.

49:40And that's something, you know, especially in the last years, Pat, people have demanded from Pat that content creator type of education. But what they're forgetting is, oh, Pat has a giant email list. That's what's making this kind of churn and work really, really well. Sponsors are looking at the email list on top of the YouTube subscribers. That's why he's getting double the amount as somebody who just has a YouTube channel. And so I think merging them, marrying them together is going to be where it's at. The price point, the timeline. Y 'all, I don't know. If you've got suggestions, you know, hit me up.

50:21I'm around town. Hit me up. What would you think, Jade? What do you think I should do, honestly? I was just going to say, I was going to say, can I pitch you an idea? Yes. Can I say something with love? Please do. I have all of, you know, a couple of hours of context between this conversation, conversations we've had elsewhere. So huge grain of salt. I don't think I would merge them. I'm not saying the companies. I'm saying I think I would, my current thinking is I would keep EMM a$9 per month subscription. I would have the SPI community. And I think it would be possible to have an add-on subscription or maybe a slightly hot, like a second tier of that community that also gets EMM.

51:05But I don't think you would want to remove the ability for someone to purchase EMM on its own. See, that was my original thinking. So Jay is a genius, obviously. My trouble with it is that price point that I just bragged about for 30 minutes. I believe, and I say it with love, Pat Flynn and the gang, I believe that EMM is more valuable than SPI community right now. But it's 10 times cheaper. So I'm having a hard time. And y 'all, you know this is live. This is us just talking. right now. And I love this for you listening because like, this is truly what it is to build a business. I believe that EMM is more valuable.

51:52It has four to five times more customers right now than SPI community. And so I'm really grappling with like, EMM is not a downsell, right? So I'm not sure how they live together. I'm really not. Are you thinking about this in relative terms that you're raising the price of EMM or lowering the price of SPI Community? Yeah, so here's the thing. I will never raise the price of EMM. If I could tomorrow, I would turn SPI Community into a$9 membership. And if my team is probably listening to this, like what, no. But y 'all, I have bills to pay. I have to pay Pat and Matt. So I cannot do that. You know, unless there's, you know, shout out Justin for the one sponsor to rule them all.

52:41Unless somebody wants to sponsor us for like a quarter of a million dollars a year, you know, I don't really see it happening. So I'm really, I love this so much that I'm just being totally frank with everybody listening. Like, I really don't know what to do because I do know, and we spent 30 minutes, I know the$9 sells. I know I'm working with early stage entrepreneurs. What I really want to do is just make everything$9. But from a financial standpoint right now, I cannot do that. I see this as a not broke, don't fix it scenario, especially on EMM. I would be like, let that puppy ride. We now have an entirely new audience and form of distribution to talk about EMM.

53:29The value proposition and delivery mechanisms of SPI community and EMM are very different because EMM doesn't have like a forum function to it, right? It's just like, here's the templates. Right. So if you're on the annual, there's more like community events and things like that. But y 'all, it's just a free Facebook group. It's not nothing, really. I don't think these things are so simpatico that I smash them together. In terms of like audience, maybe. But in terms of the way you're delivering the value, I think you would crush yourself and your team to create a full community experience the way that the infrastructure of SPI community is built for the number of subscribers you're trying to get to with EMM.

54:09I think it would be so challenging. See, but we, I mean, we do community, like, you know, we have a Facebook group. There's people in there. We do live events at least once a week. I feel like there's a community. I feel like EMM has a better community base right now than SPI. I would guess. So in that Facebook group, you have something like 4 ,000 people, right? There's 8 ,500 people. 8 ,500 people in the Facebook group. Mm-hmm. So people can stay in the Facebook group after they're no longer paying for you, man? Yeah, because I don't like to work, remember? So I'm not tracking that. Totally get that.

54:47I wonder, how many active members do you think are in that Facebook group of the 8 ,500? I actually just looked the other day. It's about 7 ,000. Active in what way? They've posted or commented in the last 30 days. That's wild. This is why Pat gave me SPI, y 'all. Well, he didn't give it to me. I had to pay for it. But he told me, he came into my community one day as a guest speaker. I think that we're about 200 people on the call. And we got off the call and he DM'd me. He said, I've never seen a community so active. This is the right choice. That's wild. I just love people, y 'all. Like I said, hey, Liz Wilcox here.

55:25First extrovert you probably ever met. Changes my calculus a little bit, but. And, oh, I want to say, so EMM is run by me and my sister only. That's the only people on my team running this half a million dollar business. So now I feel like I have so many resources. With Pat's team, I inherited three people. So I'm like, wow, we have so much room for activities. What functions? There's a community manager. I don't know their official titles, y 'all. I just love them. So there's a guy that handles community. There's a marketing manager and an operations manager. Okay. Okay. That's interesting. It's interesting.

56:04I mean, nobody in a community is going to be mad about you lowering their bill 10x. Right. Except maybe my operations manager. Operations might get upset. I mean, it's just such an apples to oranges thing because a Facebook group is like, this is a single feed. And SPI community, at least as I imagine it still, is like multiple spaces. It's just a different experience. Actually, we just moved everything into a single feed. Oh, wow. That way people can see everything and they're interacting with everything. They don't have to go to specific. This is a whole nother podcast episode, I think, on how I run a community to maximize interactions with each other.

56:46Yeah, I love a single feed. I love a single feed because why do you think Facebook is so popular? Their time on site is unbelievable. Why would I do anything but what Facebook is doing? Super interesting. Facebook is the master. Super interesting. It's like, it's again, very counter to a lot of my typical approach and advice, but who am I to say? And who am I? It all works for different people. And I always say, I like to zig when everybody else is zagging. I'm a very contrarian. You know, I did mention Survivor. There's a reason why I was cast. My brain, I think, just tends to work a little differently.

57:28but I'd like to think in exciting ways for my students and customers. I love it. You've really opened up my eyes to like a wider aperture of approaches and given me like new models to look at and be like, well, this may be an interesting way of constructing things. And I'm very excited to see how this goes for you. We'll have to bring you back in some number of months to be like, okay, what's - What did you do? What did you do? What's happened? What's changed? I think that'll be super interesting, but I'm excited for you. And I think between last week's episode and this week's episode, I think it just as a whole, it gets people thinking about different approaches to their business.

58:08Like I'm sure people listening to this series of episodes are thinking to themselves, maybe there's a brand and asset out there that I could purchase and start to build from. So I really appreciate all three of you, Matt, Pat, and yourself for being really open and transparent about this whole thing because we just don't see it happen in the space. Yeah, you know, I am so grateful for this opportunity to carry the baton from here. SPI, there are so many people I've met that's like, oh, that was the first podcast I listened to. It was the first this and that. And, you know, people 18 years ago to six months ago.

58:46And it just feels like, again, one of the greatest honors of my life. And I can't wait to have used that out of the box thinking to expand, especially these newer entrepreneurs' minds on what is truly possible for them. It just, I'm so excited about it. I just feel so absolutely blessed as a creator to be the one to carry this on. And what makes this possible, because Jay just said, like, you don't see it in this space, but I think what's made this possible, because I've sold a personal brand before and now I'm buying one, right? I think the common thread here is smart passive income was never about Pat Flynn.

59:31And now it's not even about Liz Wilcox. It's about you listening. It's about you figuring out what is that next important step and how can you get there? So if you're looking at people like Jay Klaus and you're saying, that's gonna be me one day, how do I get there? We're gonna get you there. And I'm just so excited to serve that community I don't know. I keep saying it. It just feels like a literal honor to do that. And I just cannot wait to serve everyone.

1:00:07If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a rating or review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and letting me know. It gives me strength. It makes me strong. It shoots me up the charts and makes the podcast grow. They go a long way to help us grow the show. If you want to learn more about Liz, visit her website at lizwillcox.com or smartpassiveincome.com. There are links to all that in the show notes. Thank you for listening, as always, and I'll talk to you next week.

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