584: Building a 7-Figure Online Business in Just 2 Years

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1:15What's up? What's up? Nick Loper here. Welcome to the Side Hustle Show, a member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network. If you want to learn how to make extra money and start a business on your own time and on your own terms, you are in the right place. Really cool case study for you today. under the category of create something once, sell it over and over again. As you know, it's a business model that I love. Today's guest is an award-winning teacher, a dad, and for his online business, specializes in helping kids learn to read starting at super young ages. Kind of a surprising niche to me, at least, but it's really taken off.

1:50From hodlersread.com, Spencer Russell, welcome to The Side Hustle Show. Thanks so much for having me, Nick. You bet. Stick around in this one. You're going to learn how Spencer pre-sold his concept and how he drives traffic and sales to his course today. So you can borrow the same or similar tactics and apply those in your online business. Spencer, I want to start with why did this need to exist in the world? Well, at the point when I started this business, I was really looking for the thing that I was going to do. And I was reading a book, Good to Great by Jim Collins. And one of the things that he said was you should focus on something that fulfills three criteria, something where you are the best in the world at, something you would wake up excited to do, and something where you could provide for your family.

2:37And I was running through my head, what are the jobs, the occupations, the roles that I could fill that would hit those three criteria? And at the time, I had already taught my son to read. He was two years old. And I'm kind of running through this list. And I'm like, wow, I'm pretty good at teaching little kids how to read. and I'm doing my market research and I'm saying, okay, there's online courses for all aspects of toddler parenting, for feeding, for motor skills, for behavior, for speech. Yeah. Sleep training. There's nothing for reading. And I'm like, okay, I've got two of the three. I think there's a market for this.

3:12I think I'm good at it. I think I'm really good at this. And I think I'd wake up excited to do this. And I think when those three factors came together, for me, it was almost instant, I came up with the idea for Doctors Can Read. And I was like, this is going to be an online course that helps parents teach their toddlers how to read. So the three criteria from good to great were something you can be best in the world at, something you're excited to do, and something that could pay the bill, something that could provide for your family. Exactly. I want to pause on this best in the world thing, because I think that would be intimidating to a lot of people, especially when they're just starting out, where like, well, sure, maybe I aspire to be the best in the world, or maybe I don't.

3:48But like starting out, I probably am not that. Can you speak to that for a little bit? I take best in the world as I don't take it literally per se. At this point, there's no way for me to know I'm the best at teaching toddler story in the world. I just knew I was good at it. And I think there's two paths towards mastery. There's one path where you say, let's look at my current level of skill. I'm pretty good at this thing. Let's do this thing. And there's another path where we say, let's look at our passion. Let's look at our interests. Let's look at the places where we're tenacious about getting better.

4:19and let's focus on that because that can be an area to improve. So I think if folks don't have something they're good at, but do have something they're passionate about, something that they're willing to work hard to get better, then that might be the place to lean in that you could skill up and improve. Yeah, this is something that has kind of been on my mind lately where you almost need that level. You don't necessarily need it starting out, but you need that level of aspirational curiosity obsession to help you get through the sometimes long, slow ramp up period of, well, I'm not seeing the results, something to keep you going.

4:52But then also just as a competitive moat, I remember even probably 10 plus years ago, reading in one of Gary Vaynerchuk's books, had this one word chapter on the secret to marketing, and it was just care. And that's something that has stood out. But this idea of trying to be that best in the world at whatever it is that you do, even if you're not there objectively, like trying to get there in your mind and like trying to climb that mountain one day at a time. So I appreciate you sharing that. And what's interesting here is like, hey, there's lots of courses that target parents of young kids, but nothing in this specific niche, at least that you could find.

5:28And so it was somewhat validation. Hey, parents are spending money to improve their lives and their kids' lives, but somewhat of a blue ocean in this particular category. Is that right? That's right. A deep, wide blue ocean that to me, I was surprised to find as a kid who struggled to read, as an educator of kids who struggled with reading, as just a parent who knows other parents of kids and what's on their mind, what's on their heart. Reading isn't top of mind for every toddler parent, but it is on the mind. And certainly by the time a kid hits kindergarten, it's high on the list. So to enter this arena for me and to have basically one competitor who hasn't done any work in the last 10 years, I was moving with a sense of urgency because there's no way I'm the only person thinking about this.

6:16But I was. So what happened first? So you come up with the idea and you don't have an audience to speak of, but what happens first? After I came up with the idea, I entered a learning phase. So this was listening to podcasts on online business because I had no idea how online businesses worked at all. I had only worked as a teacher and a teacher coach, but business was completely new to me. So there was a learning phase, a reading phase, some of the basics like Russell Brunson and stuff that people read, StoryBrand when they're getting started. Then there was a creation phase that came really quickly.

6:52So I knew how to teach the reading. I didn't know how to package it together as a course. I started to work on putting the course together. I hired someone right away to just help me make the PowerPoint slides and make the presentation. And I pre-sold and I said, this is coming out mid-June. And I just started selling to friends, to family, anyone who might want to sign up. The selling went really poorly. I wasn't good at it. Most people said they'd get it and they never did. But it forced me to have a product ready mid-June. So it was a couple months between idea and launch of the product. What'd you price it at, the pre-sale?

7:35It was$49. Okay. No real online platform, the Instagram account and stuff. That comes later. So right now it's just friends, family, colleagues. Hey, I'm building this thing. It's coming out mid-June. Click here to buy it. Or would you buy it? A lot of verbal yeses, but when it came time to swipe the credit card. Not as much. Exactly right. A lot of people texted me. Yeah, I'm interested. And then I put the$49 thing on there, said it's available. And I think it was four days. It was three or four days between announcing it was live, having a spreadsheet of 30 people who were verbally committed and before the first person actually purchased.

8:13So that was very stressful. It's a long three or four days. What are you thinking during that time? Like, oh, maybe this isn't as golden of a market as I thought it was going to be. I'll be honest. There's never been a point where I've doubted that this will be successful. There's been many, many points that have been stressful. There have been times when it's tough. Like, I cried in that period of three or four days of no sales because I'm looking at something that I've put a big bet in at this point. I haven't quit my job yet, but this is what I've said I'd do. I've invested time and resources and energy.

8:46and to fail in my perception in like that three or four days was frustrating. But to me, there was never this concept of like, this is going to fail in general. It's just this launch didn't work. This strategy didn't work. And so there's that little period that sucks. And then you bounce back and you're like, hey, what do I do next? What's the thing I need to do to kind of fix this and make sales? Do you remember how many presale orders you did end up getting? I had 30, like 31 or 32 people who ended up buying the course. I advertised the course as a trial. So that 49 bucks, it was under the assumption this is going to be priced up more eventually.

9:29This is a trial. The only way that I can be successful is if you're successful. So please, please, please buy. I need your kid to succeed. I need you to succeed. I need to share the story of you and your kid succeeding. So it took a month or two, but I got like 30 to 32 people in. Okay. Okay. That's enough. It sounds like you were going to go forward and build it either way, but at least you have some validation where it's not just like two buyers and you're like, well, do I still go build it? Was the demand really there? Did it materialize the way I expected it to? So you got a few dozen people in and say, I'm going to build it.

10:03What did you do? Kind of like a cohort based thing where you log on to Zoom at this time and we'll go through these lessons. How did you structure this beta version? I had pre-recorded everything. So it was like a fully go at your own pace, automated online course. And my plan as people went through was just to track their data, to see how much they watched, what sections they watched. I had all these surveys and polls for feedback kind of spliced throughout the course. And the biggest thing I learned was that most people don't finish online courses. isn't that frustrating i thought i was gonna get all this wonderful data yeah i was like you paid for this thing and now it's like probably more than half the people don't even like log in that's right and my takeaway from that was i need to make it more engaging i need to make it easier to access i thought my takeaway was going to be i need to teach this lesson more clear or explain this concept better i was like no i want to switch to kajabi at this point because parents can take get on their phone, that'll be a little bit easier.

11:08I want to shoot my videos a little higher quality so they look better produced. I want to jump into the meat of the lesson faster so people don't have to listen to me talk a bunch at the beginning. And so it was all on just how do you get people to watch and engage with and actually do the online course. Yeah, keeping that target customer in mind, like a busy parent of a toddler, like not necessarily it's out of time to sit down behind the laptop and watch an online course. So I need to get it on a hosting platform that will allow it to be consumed on the phone. That makes sense. So what happens next?

11:39So you're trying to collect feedback. It's like pulling teeth because nobody's actually going through the material. But I assume you actually eventually do get some feedback in that, or maybe the feedback is that there was a lack of feedback. And that's one thing in itself, but using that to kind of restructure things to shoot, not just the beta version, but like, this is the real deal now. Around this time, when we launched the pilot, we started selling was when we first got on Instagram. We're starting the social media profile at the same time. And I think this kind of next stage is learning how to market the content.

12:14It's what sorts of messages resonate with people, what sorts of things do I talk about, and how do I explain it? And so I think the next iteration of the courses were informed in part by people don't do online courses, so how do I make this more interesting and engaging and easy to watch? And then my delivery and my presence and the energy changed a lot just from being on social media. I learned how to explain things quicker. I learned topics like sight words that for me weren't that big on my radar, but for parents were huge. I was able to then start to kind of fold in a lot of the learning that came from posting content and having conversations with parents online into the actual courses and the content and the product that I'm delivering itself.

12:59Yeah, you're closing in on a million followers. The Instagram handle is toddlers can read. You can check Spencer out over there, but nobody starts with 900 something thousand followers. Like what was the initial content or what do you think gave the account a boost to get on people's radars to get that initial social media attention? I think that's the million dollar question because if this were easy, then everybody would have huge accounts. And we've been able to do it across every platform, YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, or over two and a half million. And some of those accounts are new, like a year old.

13:35And so I think what's kind of set my team and I apart is we have a constant focus on you, you, the viewer. It is never I, Spencer. It is never me. It is never my kid. It is always you and your kid. And I think that's the number one thing. A lot of people start early childhood accounts, educational accounts, and they don't realize it, but it's look at me, look at what I can do. Look at my kid, look at what they can do. Some of these videos will go viral. They'll get traction. I've got a kid at home who is an incredible reader. He's been reading since he's two. He's off the charts. I don't talk about it.

14:18People don't want to hear it. I will mention it here and there for credibility, but at the end of the day, nobody cares. Nobody cares what my kid can do. Nobody cares what I can do. People care what they can do. And I think parents who are busy, parents who are anxious, parents who want the best for their kid, they want to understand what is the simple 20 second, 30 second change that I can make to help my kid win. And they want to be empowered to go out and do that. So I think growth on social media, you can talk to a hundred people and get a hundred different answers. It's about delivering genuinely helpful content.

14:55to your audience that they can watch quickly, that's going to entertain them, and that's going to help them with some kind of thing, some kind of problem that they're working on in their life. Yeah, sharing these kind of quick hit wins related to phonics and early reading and questions that parents might have. I think that makes sense. Was there an early post that did get some viral traction if you remember our first viral post was on tiktok in january of 2022 and it was a site word post and at this point we were just reposting everything from instagram to tiktok i actually wasn't logging in at all i had someone on my team just reposting because one social media platform for me was overwhelming enough i didn't want to have to worry about two at that point and i woke up.

15:46My teammate texted me and was like, I think we're going viral. You need to log in. And I logged in and just the notifications are crazy. And we learned from that post, site words as a topic is a big thing. And so we started to do more posts and site words than a lot of those posts picked up. And I think this kind of gets to the second part of the equation for social media is like after content, really good, really helpful, really quick, really entertaining content, there's data from that point in january to today we track data ruthlessly i can analyze instagram videos tiktok videos across like 40 different metrics i can eyeball it i can look at it and i can tell you this is why it's not getting views this one needs to get better they should have tried this they should have done this next time they could do this here's three other ways to present that same concept and that all comes from the numbers and so i think we have this advantage on social media that no one else has because people look online and they guess.

16:51They say, oh, people didn't like this video. Let me make another. People didn't like this video. Let me make another. We look at it and we say, what was the watch time? How many people were still watching after one second, after two seconds, after three seconds? Okay. Two seconds was the drop-off. What was happening? What was the angle? How many clips? Was there a kitten shot? What was the topic? What was the header? Where were the captions? What was my message to parents? Was it And the negative hook was a positive hook. And we're able to break down a lot of this data and then use that as a feedback loop.

17:20And it's obviously not perfect, but we're really trying to pair great, helpful content with a really tight grasp on data and analytics in order to continue to fuel growth. Yeah, feed that algorithm what's working versus trying to just throw something out there. And I almost never look at the YouTube analytics. I probably should because I was reading something. this was a article on Mr. Beast and he was talking about if you can improve your watch time by 10 % or if you can improve your click-through rate on your thumbnail by 10%, it's not going to get 10 % more views. It's like you might get double or quadruple the views because like those are the metrics that matter to the algorithm.

17:59It's like if you can make that video just a little bit more compelling, all of a sudden, yeah, it really starts to get pushed out by the powers that be. And that's one thing that I think is maybe most interesting about this niche is I don't know if a lot of parents are actively looking, and I know I certainly wasn't at this stage, how to teach my two-year-old to read. Like that wasn't something that was on my radar. You almost have to go out and create the demand for that. And that's something that these social platforms kind of allow you to do. Like, well, have you thought about instead of teaching the alphabet this way, have you thought about doing it?

18:31Like, I think it makes it kind of somewhat compelling. It breaks through the clutter because it's new, novel, different. The question was really about demand creation versus demand filling, where we had a guy last month, he had an ice vending business, demand filling, people want ice, hey, I provide them to that, you know, versus maybe parents of toddlers don't even know that this exists. And so I got to go out and like proactively find them and educate them. Yeah, I think I felt both roles. For parents of toddlers, it is demand creating. And for parents of older children, it's demand filling.

19:02I've got people who follow me, watch me interact with the content who have kids six, seven, eight, nine, 10 years old, up through adults who themselves struggle with reading. And I got folks of kids who are one, two, three, four, five, and people who are pregnant. I've got people who don't even have kids yet who just want to be ready. There are some folks who certainly it's an interruptive sort of marketing where they're going about their day, they're looking for activities, how do we learn through play, and they see my stuff pop up. And I've got a lot of other people who are seeking out support for their kids because their kids are struggling.

19:38And here's an account who's presenting this in ways that feel easy, ways that feel like, you know, if I took a couple of minutes today, I could actually pull this off. For the older kids, it definitely does seem like, yeah, people might be seeking out. How can my kids struggling? How can I help them? There's got to be a different way. There's got to be a resource out there. And so they come across you through proactive search, maybe less through social media. Are they finding you through Google, YouTube? Is there an SEO angle here too? We are working on an SEO angle. I think we've been so successful with social media that we've been able to just get a lot of traffic and traction from these four social media platforms.

20:18But the last year or so, we've had a big push on making sure we have one good blog that's posted every week that targets a couple of different keywords. We are beginning to do advertising, Google ads and Facebook ads for really the first time. And we're excited to see how that goes. But we've had most of the traffic come from social media. We're leaning into SEO. That's where we want the bulk of our traffic to come from and beginning to play with ads. We'll be right back after a word from our sponsors. A lot of side hustlers suffer from what if-itis. What if it doesn't work? What if I don't have the skills?

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22:39There's no need to wait any longer. Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed. Side Hustle Show listeners get a$75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at Indeed.com slash Side Hustle Show. Just go to Indeed.com slash Side Hustle Show right now and support the show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. indeed.com slash side hustle show terms and conditions apply hiring indeed is all you need what's a typical call to action if there is such a thing on a social media post of yours to have people go deeper and say like yeah there is a paid product behind all this i typically push people to my free training which is a funnel to the paid courses I think one difference between my free training and a lot of the sales webinars that I've seen and that people promote is that if you were to watch the 30 minutes and not purchase at the end, you still have more than enough to go do with your kid.

23:38I've still walked you through how to teach the sounds. I've walked you through how to teach blending, the mistakes you could make and how to avoid it. And I've walked you through what comes next and how we make the transition from these building blocks towards actually having kids read books. So I push people most frequently to the free training. Some of them buy the course, many of them don't. Occasionally I'll push people to a freebie. We make a lot of helpful PDFs for parents. We have a quiz that can help parents know how to get started. and I'd say 5%, 5 % to 10 % of the time, I'll lead people directly to a course and I'll say, if your kid is at this level, here's a course that might support.

24:18Okay, and what's the price point of the course today? Today, the courses are$99 each. There are three of them or$249 for the bundle. Depending on when you're listening to this, the price may be higher for the bundle because we're going to be adding some value. We'll always put that asterisk, of course, subject to change in the future for sure okay so three different products or get the whole bundle for a discount i think that makes sense i'm on the free training registration page this is toddlersread.com free dash workshop if you want to check it out and so this is the half hour free training where you go through and then so email sign up required and then call to action at the end of that hey if you want to learn more if you want to go deeper if you want us to really follow this process.

25:05You can buy the courses individually or buy the bundle then. Correct. And if you were to sign up for that right now and go in, you would see there's a live chat as you watch. That's another bot that is someone on my team who will be chatting. If you have questions, answering them as you watch. And if they don't know the answer, that's like next level. Yeah. They'll text me. I'll get the text here. I'll shoot the answer back and you're good to go. So we've put a lot of efforts into making this really, really valuable. It costs us a good amount of money in platform and in people to pull this training off.

25:41But ultimately, we're a business, but we're also a business that deals with people's kids. And so I want to make sure that anyone who interacts with my brand is getting a ton of value in return. Are you staffing the live chat 24-7? It's not 24-7 yet. it's eight to four central. And then I've got someone else from four to eight. And then anything between 8pm and when I go to bed is me. And then we get all the overnight messages in the morning. I haven't seen that. That's a really cool high touch. I think, oh, people are actually standing by. I imagine that instills a huge level of confidence to would-be customers.