The Top 0.1% Online Educator is Dropping Value Bombs with Alex Genadinik

0:01Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation! JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire! Brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like Imperfect Action. Today, we'll be breaking down the top 0.1 % online educator because he is dropping value bombs today. That is Alex Genendenek. I brought Alex into EO Fire Studios because he is one of the top instructors on Udemy, teaching entrepreneurship, professional skills, personal development, and productivity. He also helps businesses build out the e-learning sides of their businesses that they use to generate extra revenue.

0:35In today, Fire Nation, we will be talking about e-learning and how realistic it is to get into it today. We'll talk about licensing courses, passive income, and so much more. And the big thing for sponsoring today's episode goes to Alex and our sponsors. Success Story, hosted by my friend Scott D. Clary, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Success Story features Q &A sessions with successful business leaders, keynote presentations, and conversation on sales, marketing, business, startups, and entrepreneurship. In a recent episode, Scott brings Kate Bradley on the show, founder and CEO of Lately.ai, to discuss the best ways to use AI to create content.

1:12Listen to Success Story wherever you get your podcasts. Ever thought about giving a TEDx talk? It's one of the most powerful ways to share your message with the world. And four-time TEDx speaker, Taylor Conroy from Thought Leader can help you get there. Visit thought-leader.com slash fire to join Taylor's free training where he teaches you how to land a TEDx talk and spread your message to millions. Alex, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. Well, John, thank you for having me on. And guess what? 10 years after my first show with you, I'm still on fire.

1:53I'm still going, still going. And to answer your question, you know, actually about becoming successful, where most people would disagree is I think you really don't need the money because people are often like, I need the money so I can buy the car, the lifestyle. Actually, all of that is useless. And I think people would probably disagree with me on that. Very interesting. And there will be some disagreeers out there, but there'll also be people that agree with you. And that's the beautiful thing about this question. And yeah, I'm glad you brought up the fact that you were on over 10 years ago.

2:27You know, when I entered my 12th year into Entrepreneurs on Fire, I said, you know what, it's time. It's time to go back to those first few hundred episodes. Now that we're well into the 4 ,000s, let's go back and let's see what those entrepreneurs on fire are up to. And I will tell you, Alex, more often than not, my past guests from that far ago, over a decade ago, are doing something different. Some of them, a few of them, I would say the minority are still doing the same thing. And obviously you're in that category, which is really cool. So we're going to be talking about online education. Because let's be honest, e-learning's been around for a hot minute.

3:06So how realistic is it to get into e-learning today? I would love to paint a rosy picture, but I am more of a realistic person. It's difficult. I find it difficult for myself because every day, you know, I wake up with this idea, hey, I'm in a passive income business. Why am I working so much? What's wrong here? But it's really that just about any subject matter you get into, the level of competition just increases year by year by year, and you have to raise your game year by year by year. So it's quite intense. And I think for a new person, it's very, very hard to get into it because let's say you want to teach how to start a business.

3:49Well, there's already a thousand courses on this. So what makes, you know, how do you make your own course stand out? So you have to have something unique, either very, very deep level of expertise or unique angle, unique, something unique you bring to the table in your expertise or just crazy hunger. Like some people would quit after one month, two months, six months, 12 months. But there are some people who start seeing growth after a year of working hard, two years, and those people would succeed, but those kinds of people would probably succeed in any business. But yeah, or something, just to finish my answer, not just in the different angle to what you bring, but something that's coming around the corner and new.

4:37Like if in 2021, you were talking about artificial intelligence, you would be in a fantastic position to make a significant amount of money with it, with education. But if you're starting to talk about it in 2023 or 2024, well, it's a little late for that and the market's saturated. So you've got to be on the cutting, bleeding edge and an expert in something, and then there's great opportunity for you. So much valuable information here, Fire Nation. I'm seeing the same thing in podcasting because obviously, I still run after 10 years, Podcasters Paradise, which is the biggest podcasting course and community in the world.

5:13And hey, back in 2012, when I launched, there was literally eight other podcasts that were interviewing entrepreneurs. That wasn't a huge pool of competition. Now, there are thousands of shows that are doing something very similar to that. So there's a ton of competition for people that are just starting and don't have a brand or a high skill set because they've been doing it for a decade like I've been doing, like Alex has been doing. So going into the micro niche of the micro niche, finding the void, finding the unique speciality that's not being focused upon for some reason is so important.

5:47And just to kind of put a cherry on top of what Alex was saying, you can't go with the tide, Fire Nation. You can't ride the wave, so to speak. You've got to be there before the wave forms. 2021 AI, 2012 interviewing entrepreneurs. That's an example of when I was there, there was no wave. There was nobody that was like, this is a great opportunity. They're like, why are you doing something that's so kind of pointless? And then the wave started and I was ahead of the wave and it pushed me all the way up to the shores of dollar dollar bills, y 'all. So think about that, Fire Nation. How do you get ahead of the wave before it even forms?

6:23And sometimes that means taking some risks and you're going to try some things that never pan out, that never take hold, that never blow up. And that's okay because you're at least giving yourself a chance to be a pioneer. Now, let's talk about the fact of a lot of people don't have audiences right now. They don't have followers right now, Alex. So do we need to have an existing audience for this e-learning thing or can we start from scratch? By the way, I'm very impressed how you worked in dollar dollar bills into your sentence so, so seamlessly. It was so smooth. Oh, thank you, brother. I could never.

6:59But to answer your question, an audience obviously helps. Like, for example, if you were to launch a course, you have an amazing audience. Obviously, you have a great advantage. But there's always the, well, what do you do the day after? Okay, you promote your audience. You can promote your audience again at times. But what do you do after that? So there's always a question of, there's always that question. And if you answer that question, well, you may not need an audience. Like if you make a course that's the best course in its class by far, you may not need an audience because let's say you sell on Udemy.

7:39Well, the Udemy algorithm will help you float your course up to the top. And it's not just the same on Udemy. A lot of marketplaces are designed like that. YouTube, Amazon, the best, best, best float to the top. whereas if you use the audience as a crutch like oh i have an audience i don't really need to think about quality as much right if you think like that then of course what if you after you promote your audience the product just won't have the longevity so i think if you reverse the carriage in front of the horse situation and think how can i make a great great great product that's head and shoulders above everyone else in the current space.

8:20I think that more than solves, if you don't have an audience, you'll be likely okay, not to mention that you can build up an audience as long as you have that it factor, the expertise that people look at your videos and they think, oh, I really want to follow this person. This person is trustworthy, not because they're charismatic, but because they really know what they're talking about because they've built up that expertise. So I think instead of this audience help, deep, deep, deep expertise, because at the end of the day, you know, we're talking about education at the moment, the expertise and the ability to transmit that information, I think that's really the important factor.

9:03And most people make the error of assuming, you know, I am good enough. I have enough expertise. But then if you're competing against the best in the world, sometimes it's healthier to be a little humble and understand, yeah, I have a certain degree of quality, but there's probably people better than me who have been doing it better than me, so I'm not the best yet, but I've got to really hustle up to become the best instructor and work up my expertise, all that. So hopefully that's not too confusing of an answer to that question of like, yeah, the audience helps, but the audience isn't the main thing.

9:42The main thing is, can you make a great product? There are a lot of value bombs here at Fire Nation. I do want to circle back to what Alex just shared and what he was really talking about at the beginning, which is obviously a big audience is going to help initially to get those initial sales, maybe to get the word out there a little bit. But at the end of the day, it's going to win. Any product, any service is going to win because it's the best, because it's better than what else is out there. Word of mouth will start happening. Referrals will start happening. Why do you think you've seen all the best movies that are out there?

10:14Because your friends told you about them and you said, I need to watch that because if my friend told me this movie is awesome, it's awesome. And if they told me it sucks, I'm not even coming close to it with a 10-foot pole. Period. End of story. So what is the word of mouth that is so key? So build the best product, the best service, the best course. I love to say in my entire book that has like hundreds and hundreds of pages and it's just it's a beast it can be summed up with one sentence become the number one solution to a real problem in this world if you fire nation can look yourself in the mirror and say to your face i have created the number one solution to a real problem not a fake problem not an assy assy problem a real problem you will win period end of story now i'm not saying how big you're going to win it's going to be differences of magnitude you know some people are going to win outstandingly high and some people are just going to win and guess what you're going to win and that's a good thing that is a good start and if you can't look yourself in the mirror and say you had the number one solution to a real problem it's because you're not doing what alex and i were talking about earlier you're not micro niching enough you're not going down enough levels to where the competition's not so crazy and you can dominate them from day one.

11:31Become the best. And we have a lot more to talk about around this topic when we get back from thanking our sponsors. You know your customers want fast, personalized support, but how do you find a customer service solution that actually delivers? Most solutions leave reps struggling to stay productive and customers frustrated by the lack of support. But with the new AI-powered Service Hub from HubSpot, you've now got a better way to do service and success. Service Hub helps you fly through the service queues and lighten the load on your reps with AI-powered self-service chat and knowledge-based articles.

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12:38Do you have a message inside that you know is meant to be shared with the world? Giving a TEDx talk is one of the most powerful ways to share your message with the world and Thought Leader can help you get there. Thought Leader is a speaker coaching company that has helped over 550 and counting coaches, speakers, entrepreneurs, authors, and experts land TEDx talks. Thought Leader is not affiliated with TED or TEDx, but they're able to get these results because their founder, Taylor Conroy, is a four-time TEDx speaker himself and past EO Fire guest. You might be thinking a TEDx talk sounds great, but where do you start?

13:09Taylor has put together a free training that's going to teach you how to land a TEDx talk in as little as 90 days. Join Taylor to learn exactly what TEDx organizers are looking for in their speakers, how to write a talk that goes viral once it goes online and more, visit thought-leader.com slash fire. Join Taylor for this free training and get your message out of your head, out of your heart, and out into the world where it belongs. That's thought-leader.com slash fire. Alex, we're back. And something that I don't think a lot of people have even thought about or know much about at all is licensing courses.

13:45So how the heck does that work and who would be a good fit for that? That's a great question. You know, when I first learned about it. I was confused about it too. It's a little bit of an industry that you don't hear about. But the way it works is, let's say somebody wants to create courses. They have a lot of challenges. They have to buy the right equipment. They don't know what's the right equipment. They have to actually present. Maybe they're not a naturally good speaker. They have to create videos. They don't know what the right formats are. They maybe are not a natural instructor because people assume if they know the information, they'll be able to to be a good instructor, but that's far from the truth.

14:22It actually takes a long time to become a good teacher. And so there are many, many, many skills and variables that have to be acquired that takes, you know, you can start it in day one, but it takes a lifetime to master. And that's very expensive because that can take weeks and months to create courses and it can cost a lot in equipment, et cetera. So there's a way to fast forward and skip all of this. and that is to take existing courses that are out there that are proven because you can see them performing in the marketplace and you can see the reviews on those courses. You can see which courses are selling and for not all but some courses, you can actually license it and this is what I offer.

15:07So you can license, for example, a course of mine and I'm arguably the biggest vendor in this space at the moment so you can take a course of mine which are live courses, proven, everything. Some of the courses have been perfected for years and years, et cetera. And you can, for a fee, license that course, take the content of that course and upload that content to your own website, which is relatively easy. If you have a website, it's relatively easy to set up an e-learning portion for your website. There are tools and services for that. so you can overnight take the content, upload the content to your website and say, hey, I have a course.

15:50And you can white label it. So you can take my name off of it. You can edit the videos. You can put your branding on it. And suddenly under your brand, you can offer a course, not for free, to get paid to sell. So for example, if you already have a website and if you have traffic and you're looking for monetization and maybe you have an ebook to monetize or affiliate marketing, which tends to be, you know, it's hard to make a significant amount of money with that. And an e-book tends to be relatively inexpensive. Now, courses, they're kind of a mid-priced digital product. So you can sell a course for$50,$100,$200.

16:27It ranges, but those are typical prices. You see, they're more expensive than an e-book would be. And you get to keep 100 % of it as opposed to in case of an affiliate marketing or in the worst case, you know, ads like AdSense ads, you really don't make that much money per page view. So this is one of the greater ways to monetize a visitor, you know, in terms of what you can sell to them is a course. And so basically you can, instead of spending money on equipment, time filming, time refilming, et cetera, et cetera, not knowing whether the course comes out well, you can already get a highly converting, highly selling course, upload it to your website and sell it.

17:12And so you would just find a course within your niche. So like let's say you help people create websites. Well, what do they need on day one? They need social media marketing. They need SEO marketing. So you can take courses like that and sell those courses as additional upsells to your existing traffic or potential traffic, potential buyers who aren't customers yet. So that's the nuts and bolts of it, like a thousand page, a thousand foot view. And it's something that can basically shorten the process from weeks or months to, in the best case, one day. Fire Nation, again, a lot of value bombs here.

17:50And this is something that you can think about, especially when you're first starting out. Because guess what? Maybe you're not quite ready to take on all the technical aspects and all the detailed aspects of creating a course from scratch. But you're saying, hey, I can white label this because it's a perfect solution to my audience's problems or my future audience's problems. Let me start offering it to them day one. Maybe it's going to bring in some revenue and kind of make me more of an authority from day one because I'm offering something like this. And then if you want to, over time, you can transition into maybe a course that you personally created with your branding, with your voice, with your face, whatever that might be.

18:24But this is a very interesting way to look at it in a number of different angles. And I kind of want to talk about the other online businesses like affiliate marketing, like selling on Amazon. I mean, there's just a lot of different opportunities that are out there in the online world. So how do you compare e-learning to those? If somebody's kind of saying, I don't know, I hear affiliate marketing, I hear selling on Amazon, I hear this, I hear that. How would you compare e-learning to those different types of business opportunities? E-learning is very close to selling on Amazon in terms of that, at least e-learning selling on Udemy is very close to how you would go about selling a product on Amazon.

19:03But affiliate marketing is obviously very different. in affiliate marketing, if you succeed, you lose that client, right? Because if you have a website visitor and they click on a link and they go to that vendor's website and they buy, well, they bought, you get a little bit of a commission, but you essentially drive your customers away. And with e-learning, you retain the customer because with e-learning, the idea is, oh, a customer bought my course, whether it's a course you made or you licensed, they bought your course, you have their email, you can reach out to them again and say, hey, next month I have another course.

19:40Next month I have another course. And you basically retain that customer. It's not a subscription model, but it's subscription mimicking or subscription-like. Because in the ideal world, people think, oh, I want to sell, the goal is to sell one course. No, my goal is to sell my whole library to a consumer. Of course, that's rare because my whole library is like 215 courses at the moment, but I want to sell as many courses as possible. So I want to sell them an amazing course at first and then retain, retain, retain, retain. By retain, I don't mean like I'm bear hugging them and not letting them go, but I have their interest and I keep giving them value through education and I become their main educator by, of course, they're going to try other courses, but as long as I give them a course that's the best, they'll have them when they look for new topics, they'll come back and come back and come back.

20:33And that's really the idea behind e-learning that's unlike affiliate marketing. Well, it depends on how you do affiliate marketing. There's so many ways. And it's a little bit like Amazon in that if you have a large number of products on Amazon, you can also sell products again and again, but it's a lot less like that with Amazon. It's a lot more rare on Amazon like that. The similarities, of course, there is a very large marketplace for, you know, Amazon is comparable to Udemy, whereas in affiliate marketing, there isn't such a thing. In affiliate marketing, you really have to be the driver of your own traffic, whether it's ads or organic free traffic, you are the one.

21:17In Amazon, actually, you don't have to drive the traffic. Amazon algorithm does the work for you. You just have to position your product to be promoted. In e-learning, you kind of have the option for both. You can sell on Udemy, create your own course, sell on Udemy, and leverage the traffic of the marketplace. Or you can actually go on your own as your own brand on your own website. And that would resemble some of the patterns of affiliate marketing because you have to get your own traffic, engage your own traffic to the point where they actually buy. So to answer your question, there isn't a really simple single comparison because there are many ins and outs and little details where something differ a little bit or similar a little bit.

22:03But hopefully that paints a picture of how I see it, at least in the major challenges and advantages. Alex, you've dropped countless value bombs today. What is the one thing you want to make sure Fire Nation gets from our conversation today? and then share a call to action, how we can connect with you, consume more of your content, and then we'll say goodbye. I think from all the work that I've done and all the people that I've talked to, because I've had a coaching practice as well that I've talked to over a thousand entrepreneurs, the single common denominator for success is essentially hard work and persistence over time.

22:40And that's really hard if your heart is in the wrong place. If you're just after money, it's really really really hard to stay so so so persistent all the time it's possible people do it but let's say you succeed are you are you happy doing the business that you don't enjoy for five years 10 years 15 years it's really helpful to align your passions and your business so that it's intrinsically fulfilling so that's actually something you know that I kind of feel strongly about that you don't just chase the dollar even though the dollar may be there or at least the mirage of it may be there. It's not the thing to chase.

23:22The cars are not to chase. That's, I guess, my theme for our show. And for my own personal work, a lot of the time that I, a lot of the money actually that I get to make, I put into my own passion, which is music. I mean, my music is not so good. I'm amateur, but it's something creative that I do that's fulfilling that I want and make sure people don't lose sight of it because it's very easy to lose sight of it. I see on social media, people go for the next shining object, the shining thing, the very visual thing. But there's also room and time to slow down and look inside of you as well in between all this chase for dollar, dollar bills, y 'all.

24:04I did it. You did it, brother. What's that call to action? The most common call to action is to check out my website, perblemio.com. That's where you'll find links to my courses, my books, and the licensing also, of course. And if you are brave enough, and this is for the very few people who are brave enough and they want to check out the music that I actually make, which is my passion. It's kind of poetic singer, songwriter music. It's not for everybody. But if you are brave enough, it's on touchedbyasong.com. And Fire Nation, I hope you love the fact that you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with.

24:39And you've been hanging out with AG and JLD today. So keep up that heat. And for links to everything we talked about, visit eofire.com. Type Alex, A-L-E-X, in the search bar. The show notes page will pop right up. Alex, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation. For that, we salute you, and we will catch you on the flip side. Thank you very much for having me. Hey, Fire Nation, a huge thank you to our sponsors and Alex for sponsoring today's episode. And Fire Nation, successful entrepreneurs accomplish big goals. that's why I created the Freedom Journal to guide you in accomplishing your number one goal in a hundred days and we're talking step by step so visit thefreedomjournal.com and I'll catch you there or on the flippity flip side Success Story hosted by my friend Scott D.

25:25Clary is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network the audio destination for business professionals Success Story features Q &A sessions with successful business leaders keynote presentations and conversation on sales, marketing, business, startups and entrepreneurship in a recent episode Scott brings Kate Bradley on the show, founder and CEO of Lately.ai, to discuss the best ways to use AI to create content. Listen to Success Story wherever you get your podcasts. Ever thought about giving a TEDx talk? It's one of the most powerful ways to share your message with the world. And four-time TEDx speaker Taylor Conroy from Thought Leader can help you get there.

25:58Visit thought-leader.com slash fire to join Taylor's free training where he teaches you how to land a TEDx talk and spread your message to millions.