#324: My Honest October Retro: What’s Working and What Isn’t

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0:39That means how often you get named when your topic comes up, and whether you're being mentioned or actually cited as a source. It's built on 481 million real prompts, making it the largest AI visibility database out there. This isn't about gaming AI. It's about finding out what of the work you're already doing, the content, the authority, and the backlinks are translating into AI visibility. Try a free preview of Ahrefs brand Radar at creatorscience.co slash radar. That's creatorscience.co slash radar. It's officially the holiday season and Abercrombie's new collection has outfits for everything on your calendar.

1:16It's the busiest time of year and between shopping and party invites, I don't have time to plan every look, but Abercrombie's always got me covered. Their sweaters are the perfect easy layer for low-key plans. And on a nice night out, I'm reaching for their classic trousers. Fill your closet with the pieces you'll need all season long. Have a very Abercrombie holiday. Shop in the app, online, and in stores. Hey, happy November. Coming at you live here from Paternity Leave. I'm going to record this retro to share on the podcast feed as well. I share a couple of these per year just to give people who aren't in the lab a sense of what it's like to get these retros every month.

1:56I hope it encourages people to do their own retros. Of course, if you're not in the lab, you're not going to have the video version of this to be able to see what I'm pointing to on my screen, but that's okay. We had our baby boy last week. He came a few days early, which is a surprise. Our first came over a week late. and it's funny because the morning we had louie my mom who has been on standby to come to the house and watch our daughter when we go to the hospital because we didn't want our daughter to go to the hospital with us uh she texted and said hey do you feel like you might be going into labor today because my family does an extended family like breakfast once a month and it was that day she says we have this breakfast i don't have to go if you feel like today might be the day to which my wife replied, all I'm feeling is like this baby is never coming.

2:42She thought he was going to be late again. So we decided, you know what, let's take on our DIY closet remodel project that we've been wanting to do and get this done before the baby comes because it seems like he's probably going to be a little bit late. We carried all of the Ikea PAX closet materials into our bedroom, unloaded the old closet, disassembled it. We had clothes laying in the baby's nursery and she has a contraction and goes into labor. So we go to the hospital and it was a much faster, smoother, easier birth this time around. Uh, Mal is a champ. She did so good. Um, baby boy is happy and healthy.

3:25Mama is happy and healthy. And we've been home for over a week now. So yeah, it's happening. We're on leave. And my exception on leave is that I am still writing essays. I am recording some podcast materials. I'm recording things for the lab. I just finished recording for a YouTube video that we're putting out from one of our hot seats here in the lab. So retro is falling in the same bucket. I wanted to make sure that I capture a retro. I've been doing a retro. I think this is the anniversary. Every November since 2022, maybe it's 2021, four or five years of retros here in the community. And I didn't want to miss a month.

4:05So happy to jump in here and share what's going on in our world. We'll start with our KPI sheet. And I got to tell you, AI has made collecting KPIs easier. I've automated just about all of this now. I'm not spending time filling in my own sheet, but I'm getting the right numbers and I can run through it the way I did before. We are up on revenue this month over last about$500,$51 ,000 in revenue this month. Expenses were up a little bit. I forget what. Oh, it's because we paid the deposit on our venue for offline here in Columbus in March. So expenses are up a little bit. Net income was about$8 ,400.

4:48Email subscribers down a tad. Good follower growth this month. Looks like our second highest month of follower growth. added something like 2 ,000 followers across platforms. Podcast consumption is up. Podcast verified listeners are up. We are seeing some new growth and momentum on the podcast, which is awesome because podcasts are historically difficult to grow. Digital products still kind of on life support as far as a source of revenue. Sub$1 ,000 in digital products this month, which believe it or not is actually up on the month before but we had a good month of affiliates at over four thousand dollars memberships was at 25 000 sponsorships nearly twenty thousand dollars in sponsorships booked this month so sponsorships has become a more significant portion of our revenue this year four new members joined the lab this month which is the same as the month before although I think someone might be joining even as I'm reading this.

5:58So our MRR ARR still continues a little bit of a downward trajectory as our sunset of the basic tier and VIP tiers continue to take hold. We'll talk about how we're offsetting that here soon, but we had 26 members join the wait list of the lab this month, which is a little bit less than last month, but still above every month. Other than that, a higher number of qualified applications this month. So that's all good. Best month of growth on X we've had all year, which is exciting. LinkedIn also a pretty strong month for LinkedIn, Instagram, our second strongest month of the year. Added about 400 followers on Instagram this month threads.

6:49We haven't really been taken seriously, but also looks like our fourth highest month of growth. TikTok, we don't care about. YouTube kind of on par. But we did publish an episode, a video on YouTube this month, which is good. Email got smaller this month again, which just means the number of sends that we're putting out, we are churning more subscribers than we're attracting on a monthly basis. I'm not super concerned about this. This is pretty close. We did have one email experiment I'll tell you about that I'm pretty bullish on that I think went really well. We had more visitors to the site this month than before.

7:31Yeah, last two months we've had growth in website traffic, which is exciting. And then the podcast, our delivery per episode was up. Our actual consumption of the podcast was up this month. Actually, it's our highest month of consumption of the podcast all year. And our biggest month of follower growth of the podcast all year. And you know what? That is due to our episode with Dory Clark and the way we marketed it on Instagram. I feel pretty certain. So that's all good. Got more steps in this month as well. Well, you know, I think the story of the last few months, certainly, but really most of this year is a story of we have been writing a ship that was heading in the wrong direction through 2025.

8:26And we're starting to see good signals at the top of the funnel that is going to play through to the bottom of the funnel very, very soon. So if we look at the goals for the month, we did dang good this month for having a lot of goals. We didn't hit our top line revenue goal. I didn't launch the new digital product yet, but I made a lot of progress. I'll show you a preview for that. We opened the doors and announced our team tier in the lab. That is a facilitated experience where once a month members of the lab who want to be around other team builders, people who are building teams to grow their business.

9:03We have a mastermind that's facilitated that meets for two hours every month. We have an annual retreat and we support your team in the lab and dedicated spaces as well. If you're curious about that, you can go into the lab concierge and check out the team tier information pane here, which talks about this 12 month commitment for people like me. We at the creator science team are building our team. And so this is a 12 month commitment to get better and fast forward, building your team, getting them up to speed and operating in a autonomous, effective way. Your ticket to offline is included in that.

9:43And again, we have a retreat for that group the day before offline starts. So offline is a Monday and Tuesday. Our retreat for the team tier is the Sunday of that same week in the same space. More information here, if that sounds like you and you're interested in building your team and being around other folks in the lab who are building their team to qualify for this, you have to be earning at least$500 ,000 in annual revenue. That's the group that we're putting together. And there's an application here for you to apply if that's what you would like. The cost of that includes your full-time tier membership.

10:20Members on the team tier will not be removed from the regular space. All the questions that you might have are here in this area if you want to learn more. Anyway, we launched that. We put together a 2027 partnership outline for different partners that we're courting for 2027. We have been publishing collaborative essays on the website, which maybe you have seen. And now we have put together a collaborator's brief for people that we want to collaborate with. We can send them basically a webpage that says, here's what you can expect by working with us. We have a full process and workflow behind the scenes to facilitate that.

11:00And we've published our first two essays, collaborative essays, one with Vanessa Van Edwards and one with Zach Arnold here in the lab. And those are here on the website. So collaborators can publish. They have their own little collaborator link and backlink here on creatorscience.com. But we're trying to platform and collaborate with more people. And now we have a proven process for doing that and publishing through our, uh, our platforms. So we have about a half dozen collaborators that are in process now, several of which are members of the lab. Uh, those are in flight and we have dates for those.

11:42Um, I created a new page, you know, when we reopened the lab, I basically made our sales page, this very dialed back version of the sales page, because we changed the name of the tiers. We wasn't accurate anymore, but now I have upgraded basically our previous sales page with a full information page about what the lab experience is like, but totally rebuilt, reimagined here at join.creatorscience.com slash explore. Not really relevant to you guys because you're already here in the community, but if you do want to check it out, that's where you can. You can go back to join.creatorscience.com.

12:27um, I don't know that I need to go through all of these goals. I think I'll just get into good things, concerns, and what we're doing about it. So good things this month, we rebuilt and consolidated a lot of our website. If you go to creator science.com, I was just sharing this. It's still built on our ghost theme, but we have customized and rebuilt so much of it. things that I'm most proud of are, um, we used to be on pod page for our podcasts, but we've rebuilt pages now on the website for all of our podcast episodes. That looks so much better. It's on brand. And now that it's in ghost, it's also super searchable.

13:10So I am thrilled with the new, our, the way our new podcast episode pages look. And it happens automatically when it's published to an RSS feed, it recommends new episodes. based on what we said in the feed as like the next episode to watch, but also what is related from a tag standpoint. You can search all of these episodes here based on guest or topic or platform. You know, here are all the Instagram episodes. We have a great transcript search tool in this. It's just awesome. I am so thrilled. This is custom code and development that I've done with my OpenClaw AI assistant to build this and consolidate into here.

13:57Our binge page, our rabbit trail, this is now automated also where we have full playlists based on tags that you can start and read. And when you read an essay, you get to the bottom. And it has, one, a place to share it. Two, here's how to subscribe. Three, if you want to keep going with these recommended readings, you can do that or listen to a podcast episode. And every essay also ends with one of our digital products as a recommended card. So I am thrilled with how this is going. And all of our digital products are rebuilt as sales pages also. Like all of these sales pages are rebuilt. our courses, um,

14:49rebuilt new webpages for these courses. It's beautiful. It's much better than what we were doing before. And I am so close to moving off of teachable, which I'm thrilled about because I just don't feel like they've innovated. So everything now we, we consolidated our, uh, uh, member management last month from, we used to, uh, put memberships through ghost. And now that's all circle paywalls. We're consolidating our courses to circle paywalls as well. And when you get into the lab, uh, or when you get into a course in the lab, I should say it's subtly introduces the lab itself for people to, uh, apply as well.

15:29So I'm just thrilled. We're consolidating this. We've cut out a lot of our platform costs, have a net better product, much easier for people to navigate. And it looks modern and amazing. I'm just could not be more thrilled with the way the website and everything in our digital footprint looks. We launched the Lab Concierge. So Lab Concierge, for folks who are on the full-time membership, you can log in by going up to the top of the lab, clicking Concierge here. You log in with the same email address as you use for the lab. This is a, um, this is a companion tool to circle that we've custom built to do a lot of the things that I didn't think circle does super well.

16:19So the most important of which being this matchmaking tool, uh, you can type in the type of person you're trying to meet and it will recommend people for you. So like if I am looking for somebody who knows Facebook ads, it will search, it will find some matches and it'll bring people up here and say, here are people that we think you should match with. So I know for a fact that Nate has been working with meta ads. If I click this, it expands his profile, uh, shares a little bit about his audience and his platforms, why it chose them. Here's his full profile. I can send him a message in Circle or request an intro.

17:01That request intro actually sends into a queue in our backend admin. If you say, hey, I want an intro to Nate, then we will facilitate that intro as a team. So I am thrilled about this. It's working so well. We also have just a general directory. You can search by platform or revenue model or audience size. Also a member map. If you want to see where people are on the map or near you, you can zoom in, find people where they're located and reach out to them directly if you want to. So I am thrilled about that. Booking a hot seat or one-on-one can be done here in Lab Concierge. You can raise your hand to host a live workshop.

17:48You've seen a lot more sessions come onto our calendar this week as because people have been submitting workshops they would like to host. If you haven't already subscribed to the private podcast, you can do that here. We have a handful of perks for members here that we'll add to information about our offline event over here that you can join at any time information about our team tier here. and what we just added this week is this growth dashboard that this will be more visually interesting over time as it collects it but based on the platforms you've shared on your circle profile we pull in your following there and we'll show you growth over time so yeah i'm just i'm thrilled with everything about the lab concierge it's early early days but i recommend you check it out if you haven't already for meeting other members of the lab.

18:42If you want to host a workshop, that's great too. The for you page, which I didn't show you is any announcements or events you might've missed. And then topics that we think might be interesting to you based on what you've said in your profile. So this is just going to keep getting better and better. I'm thrilled about it. I'm thrilled that the podcast is getting new momentum. Dory's episode was a huge hit from that episode with Dory, we produced two short form reels that both were some of our highest performing reels ever and brought in real download and audience growth. So that was just fantastic to see that, uh, an episode about LinkedIn growth performed well in our content on LinkedIn.

19:28I made this real just promoting the episode 375 comments. Most of those are saying, I want to watch the full episode. This one, also really high performing as an interview clip from Dory. So we're getting a lot out of that episode. I'm thrilled about it. Offline ticket sales. We're at almost 20 ticket sales for offline this year. Typically we have about 40 people. So would love for you to join us here in Columbus at the lab offline. You can go to the announcement space or inside the lab concierge to see more information about that. It's going to be wonderful, beautiful, such an awesome hotel. I can't wait to host you here in our hometown.

20:04it's going to be awesome so we'd love to host you here at offline the team right now is running the business without my involvement it's actually happening Anna Izzy Ritzy Laura they are running things making sure everything is happening smoothly without me we're still publishing we're creating new content but I feel like the business as a whole is continuing to run and And I'm holding a baby or hanging out with a toddler right now during my days. So that's going really, really well. Ana led the hiring process to find a new editor slash producer for the podcast. He just started this week. He's working on his first video right now.

20:45His test project was awesome. We had over 100 applicants. Ana whittled it down to three that we did test projects with. and then we picked one person from the test project in a second as like the second person we would go to if we have more capacity than we want to fill because basically we want to get back to publishing a video for every podcast episode we put out to do that we need either multiple editors on staff multiple like team members who can cut uh video and or someone who's just really fast. I think our new editor here is quick. I finally, with this new episode with George, built a repeatable YouTube to email process.

21:27Let me show you that. So here's our video with George.

21:36George talks a lot about script writing with AI, and he gave us a great system for doing that. So I took the transcript of this, this episode. And again, with Tubi, my AI assistant, we created a scripting skill that we made available for free for watching this video. So get the free YouTube script partner skill right here. We click this, it lands on a landing page for that opt-in. If you get it, then you get sent to...

22:21I don't remember what the URL is, but when you enter your email address, you get the skill for this. and when I looked at the numbers, 129 people out of 7 ,700 got the skill download. 96 are new to the list, 33 already subscribed. Of those 96, 82 % of them are still active. And a lot of our new subscribers are coming from this. And it seems like they're high quality subscribers. When I look at Kit's subscriber signals metric, I can tell that they are like perfect fit, good lab candidates. and now they're inside of our email world. So this is working. And now what I can do with future videos, because I want to continue to do videos where basically I ask people to show and tell, show their work.

23:08We can continue to create assets from those episodes, make them as downloadable things. And then on the backend, we are now tracking on a per episode basis, which of those are most successful and to what degree. So we can just double down on video types like that. So, yeah, the engagement is high. 52 % open rate on that. High click rate. So that's great. Lots of member-led workshops coming up. Collaborative articles started rolling out. We've had several members who were former members of the lab return over the last few weeks. So welcome back. We're excited to have you back. That's a really good sign that people believe in what we're building and improving.

23:50and we've had dozens of people purchase our merch sweaters like this through the merch store on the life front baby louie was born nora is loving gymnastics classes it's very fun to get her around other kids and doing gymnastics i'm really glad we enrolled her in that we did finish the diy closet project this week during nap time so that thing we started that caused labor to happen is back up and running. I relaunched my personal website at j.blog. It was just redirecting to Substack. My writing is still on Substack for the most part, but now this feels like a much more integrated, natural, personal blog experience, which is good because when people are searching my name, they were going to creatorscience.com, which is fine, but I wanted a personal home for that as well.

24:41So that's all the good stuff. What are the concerns here for this month? We moved to a monthly opening closed model for the lab, and I'm not convinced that was the right move. We had a lot more people join the waitlist. We changed the language from apply to join to join the waitlist. That's, I think, issue number one. It did increase the number of people joining the waitlist, but then the conversion of waitlist to joining was very low relative to what was happening before. I just ran the analysis and it was like previously one in four people who joined, who applied were accepted and joined. And now it's one in 10.

25:24So it's two things. We had more people joining the wait list, which is good. So the denominator is higher, but the numerator is also lower in terms of the number of people who are joining. So I don't know that the monthly open and close approach is right. even though we've built like a really seamless, repeatable process that I hate to throw away. I don't think it's actually working in terms of having a better conversion rate or overall join rate into the community as before. In fact, I know it's not. And I tried to improve this. The question was like, well, do people just not have enough information?

26:00So this time around, we built that full explore page I was showing you where it shows everything you need to know about the lab. We sent more emails in the invitation sequence in that five days to make sure people were seeing it. We had a warmup sequence. So after you joined the waitlist and were accepted, we gave you more information about what it's like to be a member, but none of that moved the needle to increasing the join rate. So I'm thinking we're probably going to go back to an evergreen model, which was working in the past. The team tier that I explained a little bit earlier, we haven't had as strong of interest in that as I had hoped.

26:34Granted, I've only really talked about it in the announcement posts that I put up and in our, uh, digest, we're going to reach out to folks who we know are at that threshold directly this week. Um, we have about, about half as many people interested as we would need to fill that group. So, um, if that interest doesn't pick up, we'll just scrap it. We just won't do it. You know, um, it's unfortunate because I think it's going to be a really awesome and unique experience in that we're supporting the team builders and also supporting their teams. Um, but being that it's a small group, um, I don't know.

27:15I don't know if the price is, uh, is scaring people a little bit, but if it's not at that price, it's just not economically viable for us to operate it. So as much effort as we want to put into making that really, really great and hiring facilitators and coaches to come in and help us with that. If we don't have the interest, we don't have the interest. Traction plan is the new digital product that I'm building to serve like the broad base, the audience. The idea is basically most of our audience is still trying to get traction. And a lot of them are making some mistakes or not doing things that I know they need to do.

27:57And so this digital product is a guided experience to help them get there. The end product of this, let's find the right tab here. Okay. When you fill out all these questions, you end up presented with this plan that helps you dial in what you'll talk about, who your audience is, the things that they want, their dreams, their frustrations, their fears, how you talk about what you do, certain words that you want to own, your premise as a creator, the name of your brand, your domain, your handles. We help you craft good, effective bios for you. So I'm really excited about this. I'm building this as custom code.

28:48and the way that this kind of operates is you start with, I'll just start over so you can see this.

28:59I'll teach you something and you'll say, okay, my turn. And we'll say, okay, what do you want to talk about in your content? And for me, if I said, I want to talk about how to build trust and earn

29:16customer loyalty.

29:22we will read that, ask you some questions. I believe this is the future. And then our AI will look at this and give you feedback and say, okay, here's what I think you should work on with this. And you answer it, you go back and forth. When it thinks that you've landed on something that's crisp and precise enough, you can lock it in and you move forward. And you go through this like four step progression. I should say four chapter progression with a lot of different steps where you fill out this information. You learn something, you go, you work on it, you workshop it directly, and then you end up with a personalized plan at the end.

30:02I think this is kind of where education is going. This is kind of what I wanted to build inside of Studio, the Studio app. but AI is getting to the point now where it's not more difficult to build your own custom AI educational experience than to go inside of something like a studio now I think studio is great you're trying to go mobile first because getting a mobile app approved is kind of a big thing but I'm excited to build educational personalized educational experiences on the web and this is step one of that. So I was hoping to get this done and launch it really this week, the first week in November so that we could then include it in our Black Friday promotion, but it's just not 100 % there and I want it to be 100 % there.

30:51So it's not gonna be ready for Black Friday, which means we have to change our Black Friday plans and we're three weeks out from that. I've been building a lot of really great tools in the background, but if I'm honest, a lot of times I'm building stuff as like a fun distraction from what really needs to happen. And a lot of it is unfinished or it is finished, but I'm not using it well enough yet. So I'm really happy with a lot of the stuff we've built behind the scenes for the team, but also I'm probably building like a little too much and need to go deeper on a fewer things. So it feels like YouTube and Instagram are really where our top of funnel opportunity is right now.

31:33and without being pretty consistent on those platforms, Top of Funnel feels slow. It's a difficult season to do video recording for me right now on paternity leave. I feel like we're just starting to gain momentum in a lot of our content and then I'm taking this leave. So that's some tension I'm feeling is like, I'm not capturing some of the opportunity in front of me because of this leave, but this is such a positive forcing function for the team to learn how to operate without me, for us to identify areas where I'm still the bottleneck and remove me from it. It's the right thing to do, but I'm just like so excited about getting back to video and I can't do it right now.

32:14On the life front, Nora is not quite two and a half, but she's really starting to push some boundaries of independence as a toddler, which is challenging. She's pushing back on a lot of things. we have to convince her why to do more things and to try and get her to follow directions which became really clear gymnastics when all the other kids are like listening to some instruction and Nora wasn't really she's just choosing not to so we're fighting fighting toddler tendencies right now while also having a newborn it's a new world learning how to parent too while finding time to get some work done is challenging we want to bring our nanny more full time but she's kind of dodging our questions on that so we just keep pushing like i brought this up a couple months ago i'm like i don't want to rush you or push you but we'd love to bring you on uh for more hours and now it's getting to the point where it's like i kind of want to rush you we need some answers uh because if not her i probably would hire a second nanny to augment some of her time to make sure that i am getting some work time during the day during the week because this paternity leave is great.

33:25But when I'm back to normal life, you know, parenting too, Mal can't do that on her own when the nanny's not here. So we need some help. We need to figure that out. My fitness is bad right now. I got, Mal got me a package of massages for my birthday and I went and got one a few days before the baby was born and that massage therapist was basically like, you got to come back here soon. We got to fix some of this. you might want to go see a chiropractor. We got some problems to work out, which is, uh, you know, not super surprising because I can feel it in my body changes and decisions that I'm making because of all of this.

34:04Number one, I'm pretty convinced that 2027 is the year of getting back to video for me, both long form and short form. I feel like, uh, I want to take more advantage of the YouTube platform that we've already built. I feel that we've got better, we've got a better plan and more resources on our team to do video at a higher level, long form in 2027. Also in talking to Dory, if you haven't listened to my episode with Dory yet already, I would listen to that episode because she really lays out her strategy for doing Instagram. And it just feels like it's right at my fingertips. And if I were to prioritize that as my platform of choice for a few months, we would really start to see some results.

34:48And so that's a priority that I want to do. Of course, all of that makes more sense when traction plan and the part-time tier for the lab are available because, you know, what's the point of top of funnel? If you don't have something at the bottom of the funnel for everyone you're reaching, we don't have something at the bottom of the funnel for most people we reach. Most people are not eligible for the labs full-time tier. And so, you know, there's a lot of waste in reaching people right now. If I can't actually serve the majority of that audience. So anyway, I'm going to be wrapping that infrastructure stuff up through the end of the year during nap times and things like that.

35:28And then 2027 is going to be the year of video getting really good at short form and long form. Ultimately, you know, I got to get back to my roots and get back to just making great, useful, helpful things. I think it's very easy to kind of lose the plot in your content when you're succeeding and think that people are there because they care about you. But like people are there because you're helping them or if you are helping them. And I see the cycle that I think I was starting to fall into where people grow rapidly because they're making genuinely helpful content and people like, you're awesome.

36:07You're really helping me right now. And then as you become more successful, you forget the you're helping me right now and just gets focused on like the you're awesome and your content becomes very self. Like internally facing, it's very much about you, the person and not helping other people. And slowly then your popularity and affinity from the audience wanes because you're no longer helping them. You're just talking about yourself. So I need to get back to my roots of saying we've got to push on making everything we put out should be more useful and helpful, free and paid. Like I said, I think we're going to go back to the rolling invites for the lab.

36:52I have to connect with Anna and talk about this, see if she agrees. But I don't think the monthly open and close is working as well as we had thought or hoped. And I'm just of the mind that I want to go back to the way things were before. because it was more effective. We're getting more people coming in. It was working. So I think we just go back to it. One thing we will be keeping is the monthly new member sessions rather than individual welcome calls because those monthly new member sessions, I think are great for getting people integrated and meeting other new members coming in. So whether you joined a day before that new member session or a month before, I don't think that really matters.

37:34The point is when you join, RSVP and join our next new member session that we do on a monthly basis. We'll keep that as part of the process. I want to lean more into interviews on the podcast. There's a point in time where I was really thinking like I should do more talking head, which makes sense if I really want to teach personally. But I think actually my secret sauce is asking good questions, learning from other people who have figured things out. And every person I interview can be a teacher. And so increasing the velocity of what I teach through interviews, I think makes a lot of sense. And if I get better as an interviewer to ask questions in a way that I know this is going to lend itself to better short form clips, then I think that lifts the whole business.

38:21And if every video, every interview we record is audio and video, that just feels like the way this business should be operating. Keep doing interviews because I'm trying to be more collaborative, probably do more collaborative essays. So now I have an essay, I have a podcast, that's an audio, I have long form video, I have clips of video, all of it points back to the core business that I think that just makes a lot of sense. We've started our 2027 partnership conversations, we're trying to have more long term, larger scale partnerships, like our partnership with Circle this year, are trying to get a jump on that right now.

39:01I'm considering a sort of B2B advisory arm of the business where I go and I basically support software or hardware companies in the creator economy, help them understand their customer a little bit better. I don't fully know what this looks like. I think there's something there. I'm going to at least put it on the docket as something to explore and see if there is appetite out there for that. Because candidly, I mean, that's not really the business I want to build. I think the cost per or the revenue per engagement would probably be fairly high, especially relative to like digital products. And mostly I look at it as a cash generation, cashflow center to hire more people onto the team.

39:49We'll see how interest in the team tier goes through the end of the month. We have basically applications open for that for the next two and a half weeks. If the interest isn't strong, we'll just fold it and we'll focus on the part-time tier. And of course, we will be transitioning from teachable circle. As I said, on the life front, I want to focus on remembering that I work to live, not live to work. I think that's most obvious during paternity leave where like I'm really supposed to be spending all of my time with my wife and kids right now, but I can't get my mind out of the business. But it's like, why do we build businesses?

40:26The business is generating revenue so we can live. And I have a great chance just to like live and be super present with my wife and kids right now. And my head is elsewhere a lot of the time because my fitness, I'm going to start calorie tracking. It's time. I tried to give myself the opportunity to not do this, but I got to get back to it. And as part of taking time off, I want to read more books. And I specifically want to read older books to get out of the current moment zeitgeist goals for next month. I tried to reel them back. We have our top line revenue goal. We still want to orchestrate a Black Friday, Cyber Monday promo.

41:02We want to publish a video with Jillian Richardson here in the lab. She did a hot seat that she said we could put on our YouTube channel. So we're turning that into our next video. I just recorded for that. I want to make sure I'm supporting the team with essays and podcast episodes. They're still putting together like the full wrapper of the newsletter. I'm just writing the essays. So I got to stay out of their way, get the traction plan ready to be tested by other people. a streak tool that I'm also building as a free tool. I want to get that testable. Probably going to switch back to rolling applications here in the lab.

41:34I want to stay present with our baby and average 9 ,000 steps per day. That is October's retro. Thank you for listening. If you haven't done this yourself, I'd encourage you to do so this is the end of the month so here in the lab we have our goals and plans channel i would encourage you to make goals for november and post them in the goals and planning channel and then of course if you did that last month go and post in results and insights and share how last month went for you i'd love to hear your personal retro or a portion of your personal retro to see how did october go for you share that there and of course if you're listening to this on the podcast feed and you want to see that or see the video of retros like this or get this every month join us here in the lab at creator science.com slash join there's a link in the show notes if you have any questions to the folks here in the lab comment down below and i'm happy to answer them the viore core short moves with you with everyday versatility and classic athletic fit it's the one short for everything your day brings invest in your happiness and get 20 off your first purchase at viore.com slash 420 that's v u o r i dot com slash k o r e 2 0 exclusions apply visit the website for full terms and conditions this is blue from the ups store with a very special holiday announcement for small business owners.

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