244 Your Ideas Are Worth More Right Now Than Ever Before

Jason Kleinberg was trying to become a rock star. That's genuinely how this whole thing started.

He played in bands, toured the world, recorded music. Sounds great until he tells you it mostly meant sleeping on floors covered in dog hair. At some point he started teaching fiddle, put some videos on YouTube for one student who kept asking him to film everything at 9pm when Jason was starving and just wanted to go home.. and somehow that turned into Fiddlehead, a full-time business doing just north of $200k a year.

He didn't plan any of it. He'll be the first to tell you that.

We had a really good conversation about how he built it, what makes his teaching approach different, community, AI, and what it felt like to finally get an app idea made that he'd been trying to get built for ten years. Developers kept flaking on him. He got it done with Claude Code in an hour.

Jason's just a genuinely interesting person to talk to. He's honest about what he knows, honest about what he doesn't, and he's clearly still really enjoying what he does. That comes through.

I think you'll like this one.

Check out Jason's business:
🌐 https://fiddlehed.com
📸 https://www.instagram.com/fiddlehed/
▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@fiddl3hed

Transcript

Cold Open And Quick Numbers

SPEAKER_02 0:00

We have maybe 550-ish subscriber. Our revenues just north of 200 grand. I kinda got pulled into it. More than like, I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna become a course creator. I was actually trying to become a a rock star. I got lucky, oh no, nobody saw that coming. This whole business in general just sort of fell into. Oh no, I can do anything. I've had this idea for like 10 years, maybe even more, and I've like talked to different developers and they're all kinda flaky about it. And then I made it with Cloud Code in about an hour. Do you have ideas?

Meeting Jason And Fiddlehead

Who Learns Fiddle Online

SPEAKER_01 0:38

Hello, welcome to the art selling online courses with his share winning strategies to crack some top performers in the online course industry. My name's John Edward, and today's guest is Jason Climber. Now Jason played in bands, recorded music, and poured around the world, which sounds terribly glamorous, but he tells me that really it means he stepped on the floors covered in dog hair. Eventually he started teaching fiddle and violin through a YouTube channel and a course called Fiddlehead. And his goal is to help people learn in a fun and productive way. And it seems to be working. He's got tons of loyal fans, he's got over 50,000 subscribers on YouTube, he gets over 100,000 views a month, and he's working full-time on his course business. Jason, welcome to the show, Matt. Hey, thanks, John. So who do you help with your courses? Who's your target audience?

SPEAKER_02 1:21

People, learners who want to learn the fiddle and basically just learn how to play. As simple as that. Tends to be older people, but not exclusively. Like there's there's probably There's probably a fair distribution of people in their 20s, 30s, 40s, but then it's sort of it's kind of thicker in the as it gets older, and a lot of it's pretty cool because I never planned any of this. I never decided, well, I'm gonna create a course for people who are retired or whatever. It it just sort of happened that way. And so that that's the main thing I do, teach those people, and at least right now. And I mean I'm at different times I've tried to do something that reaches out more to young people, like try to put more on TikTok and Instagram, which I'm not really doing as much now. I'm trying to really focus on YouTube right now. But uh Yeah, those are the those are the folks I teach. People who just want to play. People who are playing for fun. I kind of position it that way too. Like if you are somebody who wants to start earning money right away playing music, then this is probably not the course for you, that kind of thing.

SPEAKER_01 2:34

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 2:34

But uh no, it's good, yeah. It's just people who really love music and want to play.

SPEAKER_01 2:38

I really noticed there's a lot of a lot of the music course creators, that's the target, that's the audience that responds the most, is people who are kind of 50s, 60s, like retirement age, maybe. Um I was interviewing someone the other day who teaches classical piano and he taught kids from the beginning, and all of his most of his audience, like 80% is is kids. But he was totally the rarity. It's like a vast majority is is people um in their kind of 50s and 60s is like the most common uh learners. And you were saying about YouTube versus Instagram and TikTok. That's what we've kind of seen generally as well, is nearly all, and I mentioned this to you, I think, before we started recording, nearly all course creators YouTube as their main um traffic source. There's something about it, the fact I guess that particularly long form on YouTube is a really good fit with the kind of people who watch that, with the kind of people who would want to take an online course as well.

SPEAKER_02 3:32

That guy, the piano player, yeah, he's still getting reaching kids on YouTube, right? How does he doing that? Is he is he kind of is he kind of teaching in a certain way or having certain does he have like cartoon characters popping up or what what is he doing to r reach kids?

Revenue Growth And Covid Surge

SPEAKER_01 3:49

No, I don't know. I watched a bunch of his videos and it didn't seem to be terribly different to the kind of like, you know, in terms of the style of it or anything like that, to the to the style of people who were teaching to adults. Like he's wearing a suit and tie, because he used to be like a a um competition level pianist. He would compete in international competitions, and he's he's decided to keep up the whole classical pianist looking fancy kind of thing. Um he started off teaching kids when he was doing it in-person, he used to run an in-person school, and then and then it still appeals to kids now. I'll send you the link afterwards. Um you can check him out and see if there's anything interesting on there. What was his uh his name's Josh Wright, interviewed him like a couple of weeks ago. Uh yeah, couldn't say, couldn't say, but mostly it seems to be that people are uh uh attracting uh older crowd. What's kind of the the size of your business now, like how many students you got, or if you're happy sharing revenue, then that whatever's kind of uh you're happy with sharing?

YouTube Origins And First Offers

SPEAKER_02 4:44

Yeah, we have maybe five hundred and fifty-ish subscribers and it fluctuates around there. And some are some are monthly, some and we our revenue is just north of 200 grand a year, and so it's been pretty steady. It's just slightly climbed recently. We had a big like jump up in 2020, just after COVID. And 2020 and 2021 was a good jump up, and I think that's when a lot of people realized that oh, I can because they had to learn online and it had to do something, and then that a lot of people realized, oh, you can learn stuff online through courses. So I think that was like a kind of a golden era of courses. Um just to stay on that a minute, I got lucky. Oh no, nobody saw that coming. I didn't or this whole business in general just sort of fell into it. I kind of got pulled into it more than like I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna I'm gonna become a course creator. I was actually trying to become a a rock star or musician, according musician or whatever. And um, I got pulled into this more. And so yeah, um How did you start then? Why did you start putting videos on YouTube? I started because I had this student and he would he had a late night lesson, like on a Monday night, he would start at like eight, and then it's always at like the nine o'clock rolls around, it's time to say goodbye. I'm like really like hungry. And he'd be like, Oh, one more thing. Uh can you can you video everything we did today? And so then he'd pull out his his camera and he'd want to video every single thing we did, and then it would be like getting later and later. I'd be like, Okay, well see you next week. And then and then eventually I'm like, oh God, he's gonna come and he's gonna f and so I filmed the video for him in advance and put it on YouTube, and I'm like, here you go, it's all ready for you. And then I just kept doing that. I'm like, well, I might as well do it for everybody. And then and these are like just very they're unedited videos filmed with like the f the FaceTime side of an iPhone camera. And then eventually people started to watch them, and that's what kind of like, oh, other people are watching it, and then people started asking for stuff, and it just sort of grew from there. Like I started getting like requests not just for videos but for like sheet music and other content related to it, and I had a personal site, so I started posting it there, and then people were going to that, and then I put a PayPal button there, like donate, and started to watch the donations climb up, and then it became like an elephant in the room, like wow, there's there's something here, and this is the way I could actually earn some money would be through this extra stuff, not YouTube itself, because I've never gotten enough from YouTube ads because it's a very niche small channel. So eventually I just realized that all I could do a course, and I started looking at other courses, and I saw a bit of a gap. That there are there are all these like in a I think in a lot of music courses, there's all there's like a hot shot player who you know is super good, but that they don't quite have the understanding of where a beginner is coming from. They don't quite see the need for like really incremental learning. And I started to see a gap there and how what I was doing could could have fill that and they would attract people who maybe were kind of frustrated or not able to get going with some other courses. And so, yeah, I just started creating that. I got another fortunate thing. I was living in San Francisco at the time, which had a fair amount of like tech culture and still does. And I had a friend who is like an unemployed developer. He's like actually a manager of developers, and we just would go on walks and kind of talk about how to how to set this up and how how to set up a like a boutique little fiddlescent site. And he actually helped set up the coding and the the architecture, and so I was just lucky to have him on board. I mean, I think it could have maybe done it on my own, but having him and then the other thing I did in the beginning was like I I still I didn't know how to do a business, and I realized I needed to learn that. So I just went on Google and just typed in, how do I start a business? And and then one thing led to another. And then there's a thing here called the Small Business Administration, and they have like you take classes locally, and so I took a a marketing class and had a free marketing consultant, and that helped a lot. She helped me set up an email funnel. And that so that those two people were very key in getting off, getting the whole thing off the ground. Having the the site, like a WordPress site, and then having uh somebody helped with like e like email marketing funnel, that basic idea which I'm still using now. Nice yeah, and so and then the rest of the spendle when that was in um we launched in 2017. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 9:47

So fair while back. Okay, cool. Yeah. What what point did you start doing it like full time?

SPEAKER_02 9:53

Pretty much I I actually think I I was a able to do it full time, maybe by 2019 I had enough revenue coming in, but I still did in-person lessons. I was still earning a little bit from touring. And a little bit from like publishing. And then I think once COVID hit, there was just n no other. I w I had moved and I didn't have any in-person students, and then it was fully full-time. So maybe like a three years total. Could have probably within like a year and a half done it full-time.

Chunking Looping And Course Design

SPEAKER_01 10:31

One of the things that I know that you you do is you use chunking and you said you take the principle of learning through chunking to an extreme. Can you talk me through how that works?

SPEAKER_02 10:40

Yeah, for sure. So when you learn a piece of music, and probably when you learn any skill, you don't learn the entire skill all at once. You learn one little particular thing, and you get good at that and you do it slowly so that you can feel it in your body and feel like a sense of mastery with one thing. And so then you just build on it from there. So, like an easy example of the principle, say you're learning a song instead of trying to play the whole thing whole all at once. Let's say you're you're playing guitar, more common instrument, and there's three chords, and you know the three chords, and you're just you're kind of like G, okay, what's next? C, okay, and you keep looking, you're like, wait, wait, no, wait, okay, got it. What you do is you play one chord really well. You just play that and you do you separate out everything else. You don't sing, you don't, you just play that chord, maybe you practice finding it. And so that's one little chunk. And then eventually you play the first line of the song, and you play it once, you take a break, you you assess, you play it again, take and you you just keep doing it slowly till you get it, and then there's a kind of an integration step called looping, in which you you kind of continuously play that little chunk so that it starts to feel natural and there's a sense of mastery that happens. And that's the basic principle. You always there's always like if you're s really struggling, then you're just doing too much, and you just break it down further into something simpler. So like most of the teaching principles like revolve around slowing it down, chunking it down, and then once you get to a certain level, looping it, and then moving on to the next chunk, and then integrating. And a lot of times there's like going a little bit of back and forth between bigger picture and chunking again. And and then as you uh throughout time as you travel like the path of playing an instrument, you often have to go back and re-chunk things. You know, you re- you put certain skills back on the workbench and you work on them, even if you think you have them, you know, it kind of returned to that.

SPEAKER_01 12:50

Why was that such a breakthrough moment for you for doing the teaching the course? Like, because you said that was the truly unique breakthrough that allowed you to do it full-time. Was it that like people started to learn better from you or like what happened? I think so.

SPEAKER_02 13:05

It's it was something that I was already doing. Like I had been teaching for a long time in person, and I just translated what I was doing to a course, and it in particular, the thing I did that I think was different than what a lot of other courses were doing was that a lot of courses give you like sheet music or tabs, lyrics, and some notes and a video and a and a piece of audio that's the whole song, maybe slow and fast. And the unique, very unique thing I did was with the audio, I took little tiny chunks, let's say the first quarter of a verse from a song and and slowly looped that and then sped it up. And so that little thing I think really helped. I got a lot of feedback on that, that that was what helped people learn. And what it did too is it helped you learn that song better. But then if you do that process on enough songs, you start to realize that's how you learn a song. You don't, oh yeah, so I'll just here's a song that's not on Fiddlehead, but what I'll do is learn it like as if it was a fiddlehead song. I'll I'll play the first, I'll listen to the whole thing a few times, then I'll listen to the first two bars, and then I'll play those very slowly until I get it. And then so just the the training helps you learn the particular song, but also the whole process.

AI Community And The Human Moat

SPEAKER_01 14:27

What's your thoughts about AI and what that means for course businesses? What have you seen so far? Well, ultimately I don't know.

SPEAKER_02 14:35

Ultimately, it's changing so fast. And I think it's hard for anyone to predict exactly what will happen, other than it's gonna radically change the economy and our society and everything else. But maybe in the short run, I think that courses that have more modes of learning, like like that, like my course, different modes of learning, and like there's audio, there's sheet music, there's tabs, there's videos, there's all kinds of stuff. And it it's something that's highly structured. It's not going to be easily replicated by or replaced by like a chat bot or something. It's a systematic thing. It's a whole, whole organized system, at least for the short run. Maybe eventually an AI will be able to spin all that up. But the other big things I think that are important for uh course creators and just kind of keeping them going through this time is just your personality. I think people vi like a lot of people will want a human in the loop. They'll want to kind of they'll feel a connection with the person that will help, you know, feel inspired or encouraged by a person. And then also community factor. So, like with Fiddlehead, we started leaning into more of a community, and we have a a paid community, like extra add-on that there's people who really want to um practice together. They like have student groups, and then I do workshops and just have a lot of events and a lot of very like robust community experience that um I think will help a lot, a lot of like courses. And that I think with some courses, like if you're I don't know, something that's a little bit faster moving, the community may even be the center. And the courses are are will be a little bit more transitory and and add added on. And again, I don't know what I'm talking about. I mean, it's all changing so quick, but I could see that happening, like a shift from like a course where you just kind of pay for it and you run through it and you're done in three months or whatever, to more something where you have a sustained learning, you you kind of have like people you talk to, or maybe even a cohort, you know. I think that'll become more important.

SPEAKER_01 16:58

I think there's a few different things. I think there's ways that you can use AI to your advantage right now. And I think there's some things that course creators probably need to do to like protect themselves long term. I think the community one, you're totally right. Like my suspicion is that that is a thing that's people people want to be around people. The fact there's so much more stuff out there from AI will mean that people want to have that like individual connection. So the personality of the course creator, the community that they've created, I think those are like things that will be like super helpful for protecting that, kind of creating a moat, protecting the space, making sure that people aren't just like, oh, I'm just gonna use Chat GPT for this. I think some things that people can do in the meantime is start to use AI more to either speed up the processes they're currently running, so they can run the business leaner, you know, with less team members, or they can just get more done on their own. Um but also like making games, it's fantastically good for that. Like I play bass and I built myself a little game for learning um learning all the notes on every where all the notes are on every on every string, and it was just like, oh, this is much more fun than just just going through and doing it as a as a rote thing, like having a little game that kind of ran it for me. But it's just like I could just build that. Like I didn't know anything about coding. I just said to ChatGPT, build this thing for me, and it built it. I say, I think that there might be space. I was chatting with someone the other day, I think it's I don't think it's an episode that's out yet, but I think it might have been with uh Hemenan Vadivel, who was saying that he was building uh building a lot of games for students to help them learn through that, and that people were really loving that, and that he'd done that for a long time and had four team members who were like uh developers who were just building games for people, but like now with AI, anybody could do it, anybody can kind of build those kind of things out. Um one of the things I've seen that's been really interesting is we had someone on episode 215, Lydia came on and talked about how she's taken all of her course and replaced it with an AI chatbot that's basically instead of the course, that people talk to the chatbot now instead and launch that. I don't know that that's where most people will go, but I was like, oh, that's interesting as an experiment to kind of see like well, what's maybe we should all be adding chatbots into our courses as well as the course so people can chat to that, um instead of them kind of taking our stuff and going and uh making their own chatbot about it. I'm not quite sure yet, but I th I think that one's worth exploring. What do you think?

SPEAKER_02 19:25

That's it. I am working on that. I'm working on that. And I have made um I've made two apps, one which is really working out well, and um one is is called Metro Drone, and it's uh basically it's super simple. It's a metronome that's more musical, so it's a bass drum, and then it's a a drone tone, a really nice sounding string drone tone that you can switch to any key. And that's another aspect of the fiddle head.

SPEAKER_01 19:55

I heard that one in your videos. That was interesting. Okay, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 19:58

Yeah, and so it John, I've had this idea for like 10 years, maybe even more, and I was like talk to different developers and they're all kind of flaky about it. And then I'm I made it with Claude Code in about an hour. Yeah. I was just I was so happy. I was like, I can't wait to do more apps. It was so fun. I mean, that's that's like the really exciting part of all this stuff is that if you're a creator, all of a sudden I'm like, I can do anything. Yeah, you know, like I've had this idea forever and I can I mean, to be fair, like it took another four hours to get it perfect, but it it was still like great. You know, like I'm just so I I need more time in the day to just kind of create now and do stuff. Like the idea of the games, it's like, oh yeah, that that would be great to create a game. I could definitely see getting into that. Did you have did you have parameters for your game? Did you or did you just say like, well, I want to get better at bass, making me a game?

SPEAKER_01 20:54

Oh, I wanted to I said I wanted to learn so when you're playing I I don't know if it's the same on fiddle or not, but you're playing bass, most music is laid out as tabs rather than sheet music. And I was like, but I want to be able to go, oh, this is in G, I'm gonna start from G, I'm gonna like change up a key and know where everything is. So I need to know where all the notes are on on rather than just playing from tabs. And so I said to it, I want you to make me a game that's gonna help me figure out, you know, help me learn where all the notes are. It's gonna just test me on different notes on different strings. And that was it to start with. And then it made something, and I was stunned by what it made just based on that loose description. And then I iterated a lot. It made suggestions, I had ideas of how to improve it. Sometimes it wouldn't work, and I'd just give it back its own error message and it would go away and fix it. And it probably took, I don't know, an hour or two to build that. And then like stuff moved on, so that was like I don't know, last summer or something. Stuff's moved on so far, I was using clawed code the other day. There was something I wanted to build, and I was like, Oh, this is like a three month project, and I'd built version one in like two hours. It's just version one, you know. I spent another three weeks since then.

SPEAKER_02 22:14

If you have ideas, it's a great time to be alive. If you have ideas, sorry.

SPEAKER_01 22:19

No, you go ahead. Go ahead. Someone said to me earlier, uh we were talking about clawed code, and he was like, I love 2026. And I like that way of phrasing it. It's like, I don't know what 2027 is going to be like, but right now, this is fun. And I am enjoying this stuff, you know?

SPEAKER_02 22:34

Yeah, I that's a good good way to put it. Yeah. I'm trying to be optimistic. I'm also very anxious. I feel uh things are moving so fast, and not just for me, but I just feel like there's um without dipping into more things I don't know about, but just all the alignment issues with AI and all that is is not gonna be aided by super fast progress and just breakneck speed. But then again, I don't know. Who knows? But yeah, I like that I like that thought. It's somewhat op optimistic. Well, yeah, it's great. This is great right now. There's a musician, actually a British musician named Imogen Heap. Have you ever heard of her? Uh-huh. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And uh I just heard a podcast with her, and she's very, she's she's a very unique creator because she's super talented and beautiful voice, great songwriter, but she's also very into tech and always has been. She's created like an AI version of her voice, but she's just super optimistic about it, about what can be created and like all the kind of like stuff that's being done in music now, like Suno and a lot of that is just like trying to copy, like pretend to be a human, but like that what might be coming next might be really interesting. Like there may be people doing something really imaginative with AI music. Right now, it's just like, oh, we're trying to do like a soul singer and and it's something that that's cheaper than having a human, you know. But eventually people may do something that's truly creative with it. And and then one more thing about about that I think is kind of a a thing to be optimistic for is that people may may seek out more unique and human music as well. And you've seen it throughout throughout history, like like folk music makes a revival or lo-fi makes a revival because people are just tired of something that's more formulaic. The same thing with film, like things get formulaic and then something comes there's in like in the late 60s, early 70s, like film just became really more interesting because it was a reaction to like this formulaic stuff. And like the AI, the formulaic AI music is it's not even that much different than what's the formulaic pop music that was already happening. It's just now easier to make that formulaic stuff. And so the kind of like the silver lining or the bright side of it is that maybe people want more like nirvana now. They'll want something that's just like just thrashing it and cutting through.

SPEAKER_01 25:08

So anyway, I don't who knows, but I I'm curious what I've had periods of being anxious from all, and then I was just like, oh, I'm getting tired of being anxious. I can't I can't keep this up. Yeah. So I'm just like, uh, we'll just it's not productive. Everything I can now, and then we'll just see what happens in a while, you know, and I'll react to that when it happens.

SPEAKER_02 25:30

Yeah. Yeah, it's not productive. Doesn't doesn't make you happy. And there's some kind of balance in there. There's some kind of like something to pay attention to, not just to be so what's the word? Um, polyana, Pollyanna-ish, you know, that you're just kind of like, everything's great, everything's gonna be, we're gonna live in a utopia. This, you know, there's a lot to pay attention to and and kind of we all need to be in on a discussion. I think it's really important to talk about it. I think that otherwise we're gonna all be blindsided and we should like what do we really wanna do? What do we want to do with our time? You know, if we get to that point where we're so lucky we're lucky enough to have total abundance, you know, what will we do with our time? And you know, how will we how will we find meaning in our life? You know, I mean it it's it could be important, like like so many people now like work, work and family, but what if what if work goes away? You know, like I I know myself, I would I would have to like really adjust to like if I didn't have work as id identity, it would take that would be my new work.

SPEAKER_01 26:36

It's trying to like trying to fill that space. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I feel I feel like at least 25 hours a week. I really want to have like I need a I need a thing. I need something for my brain to latch onto and work on. I don't really want to do 40, 50, 60 hours a week. That's no fun anymore. It's the on the other side. But if I had nothing, I'd be like, I'd I think my brain would just start to, you know, get a little too much energy, wouldn't know what to do with itself. I uh my hobbies don't fill enough space in my day to to do that, you know.

SPEAKER_02 27:08

If you if you didn't need to worry about money, how would your that 25 hours of work be different? I don't know, man.

Marketing Ops And Email Systems

SPEAKER_01 27:15

I feel like I would need to find some project that needed doing, even if it wasn't for money, you know. Yeah. What would it be? I don't know. I'm not sure yet. I'd have to I'd have to try and figure that out. Um It'd probably be then something you know what I used to do before this business is I used to help get people into physical activity. So it's uh there's a lot of people who run sports clubs who are very dedicated to it. You know, they're helping people to learn karate or salsa dancing or to do um yoga, what have you. And they have no idea whatsoever about marketing and how to how to get more people coming into their into their groups. And then there's all these people out there who would like to do more activity, but they're nervous about getting started. And so I used to run a service where you would I basically connect those people together and it was like funded by government or health charities. And it was it was an okay business, wasn't a great business, so I kind of stopped that to run this instead. But that was like my passion project, and so I might start doing that, I might just like build that out. Now building that out with AI would be there's a lot you could do, you know, very quickly because that's there's the the standard in that space is so so low. Um, so that would be my first project, I think, if I just didn't need any money as like start building that out. But I don't know, we'll see. Still need money. I still need money too. Yeah. What's the from your when you're working on your marketing in your business? What's the apart from like making sure the course is great, making sure the community is great, and making great YouTube videos, what's what's the other parts that are taking up your time? Do you do a lot of work on trying to grow your email list? Are you doing a lot of email promotions? Do you work do you work on your sales pages? Or is that stuff just like kind of minimized for you so you can focus on the course?

SPEAKER_02 29:08

No, I I am doing all of that and I am I just recently updated our onboarding email sequence and yeah, I'm always doing some project related to that, a little bit more of that kind of work than I would like. Um but I'm starting to get better with systems and um I I would yeah, I I would like to ideally have help more help with that, like an operations person or a part-time operations person to but I do I do all of that. So let's see, I've I've been spending a lot of time working on actually an AI chatbot to integrate into the site, and it it's taken uh a lot of a lot of my time. And what uh I could talk more about that or and then another uh but I'm still doing like teacher type stuff a fair amount. And I'm right now releasing uh like I redid the entire first module of the course and releasing uh free videos on YouTube for it, which you know that was uh and also an operations thing because it basically leads people to the course because you see the video on YouTube, you get more content if you go to the uh uh a free page on the Fiddlehead site. And then even there, there's even deeper content if you sign up for a free trial or paid membership. So, you know, that's like a combination of like marketing and creating content together. Like it's it's actually like now the first module of the course. And it's so it's not just pure content marketing, it's it's actually learning material for people on the course that's been it's been integrated into it. So so I mean sometimes it's the sometimes I'm just creating a YouTube video, and then sometimes I'm creating something totally for the course, and sometimes in between. And so I I don't know how to like break it down, like, but I have a I'm doing all all of that, and I'm also working on the community. I have a community manager who helps out with that and helps organize the students. I have a video editor who so I don't edit anymore. Although I really enjoy editing, I you know, I will edit edit once in a while or like some shorts once in a while, and it's really fun. It's like writing, which is so I do do a fair amount of writing too, just uh things like writing practice, but also writing posts and emails. And so that's like a rough sketch of the activity. A lot of learning, a lot of a lot of time learning, like just watching videos like your videos and taking notes and trying to integrate all that learning into we're doing a lot of AI learning. So yeah, no, it's a very fun job. It's a very fun job. But you know, I I'd say like percentage-wise, 80% of the time it's something fun, and 20% of the time it's a struggle, which is I think pretty good numbers.

Analytics KPIs And Benchmarks

SPEAKER_01 32:10

That's not bad. That's not bad at all. Yeah. Yeah. One of the things I know you're working on is your analytics. What kind of stuff is it that you would like to know more about through the analytics?

SPEAKER_02 32:19

Everything, just more insight into each step of the process of like how where do people really come from? What makes people click through to fiddlehead? You know, like um, for those who are watching, you're not familiar with the term, there's a marketing funnel, which is like starts really broad, that's called the top of the funnel, and that's where people are just discover who you are, and then they slowly get warmed up to you. And then and not everybody, you know, it's a smaller amount of people, that's why they call it a funnel. Like some people just skip, move on from you. But eventually, a smaller amount of people will want to go further with you, subscribe and then to your channel, maybe subscribe to your email list, and then then a smaller amount will eventually pay for something you do. So, but there's all these steps along the way, and I only have very limited knowledge of that. And if I could get a little bit more clarity on that, I think it would help me to create better create stuff that matters more to people. And it's an ongoing process. You could get, I know you could also get really overly obsessed with analytics and then kind of lose your way that that way too. I mean, there's a degree where I think you need some kind of like gut instinct and intuition, but I know that I err too much on that side and that I could like just have a little bit more. But I'd like to just have have it set up and so I can quickly look at look at each step and then then like go between flip between that and my intuition to know to make decisions that are good so I can use my time wisely. So that's basically what it comes down to is like I have a limited amount of time and uh limited resources in terms of people that are helping me. And so how could I make the best decisions with my time and having a little bit more clarity with that? And and just to tie it back to AI, I think like like AI is really good at setting up systems. And you know, so I'm really leaning into that, like having like you mentioned this earlier too, but like help me set this up. I this is what this is my goal, and you know, it's good with that. And so I'm slowly working through different systems in the course and community to set that up. And and just to not to re-ignite that part of the discussion on AI, but uh, what I I think it's really positive and that I'm optimistic about is that it could really allow for human flourishing in an in an ideal setting, but it could allow for like I could do more of the human-centered work and I could do more art. I could do more art and more but and then just to flip to the steel man the other side, the danger of of it is that you spend all your time tinkering with some AI thing, and then you actually do less, which I think is a uh a danger. Like you get obsessed with like trying to create this perfect system, and then you actually don't get anything done. So it's something to hold all that in mind as you're working through this. But um, yeah, I think it's um I think that's what um yeah, it's roughly I I think the question was like, what do I do? How do I spend my time? That's roughly it.

SPEAKER_01 35:28

Okay, cool. Yeah, I mean I'm very big into using data where it's helpful. Um and there's certain it's very possible to track so much that you no longer know you you're actually distracting yourself with stuff that you really didn't need. But there's certain things that are really, really important, certain KPIs, certain bits of data that that really do help to make good decisions. Um if anyone's listening and is feeling like they're in the same kind of position as Jason, then there's episode 77. I went through with YOSIP, how to use KPIs to scale your course. But what I'll do afterwards, I'll I'll connect you with Yosip, and he's really, really good at this. He's staggeringly good, and he'll um probably ask you a few questions about your business and then send you through like um some resources to kind of point you in the right direction and and help you figure out how you can use analytics without spending too much time on it. Um so you can kind of get that clarity.

SPEAKER_02 36:19

What it just off the cuff, three of the most important analytics or KPIs.

SPEAKER_01 36:24

Well, I mean it depends very much what you're working on. I'm mostly working on sales. So when you're doing that, I want to see like what's the click-through rate at each stage, like how many people are going through from the email promotion through to the sales page, how many go through from the sales page to the checkout page, and then how many people at that stage buy? And almost nobody tracks those three numbers. Um the data. So let me say it back.

SPEAKER_02 36:47

How many people click click to this sales page? Yeah, how many people click from the sales page to uh uh a buy page, and then how many people buy? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 37:00

Yeah. And what we're looking for is somewhere in the region of about three to five percent of people clicking through to the sales page from the email list. Then from the email list, uh if it's during an email promotion, we're looking for about 25% of people to click through from the sales page to the checkout page, and then about 50% of those people to buy. Now, if it's uh that's specif those numbers are specific to during an email promotion. If you have a sales page that people go to cold just on your website, then the numbers, the numbers are different. So the reason, the way that all of these kind of things can be useful, um, the the basic concept is you look, you track what those these different numbers are. Let's say it's sales, like I'm talking about, you look at those different numbers, and then you compare them to benchmark numbers, and you go, well, how am I doing against that? If you're kind of close to benchmarks, then it's probably fine. There's probably not tons you can do to easily improve that. But let's say, as I've seen quite often, your checkout page conversion rate is 5% instead of 50%. It's like, okay, we need to have a look at why this is happening because we can almost definitely make a massive jump in conversion rate here, which is gonna lead to a massive jump in sales. And so that we've got like a small set of numbers that we'll look at for whatever part of the funnel it is, whatever part of the process it is, and uh use those to figure out why exactly what is it that needs actually working on. That's cool. Okay, Yosef sends you some stuff about it. Yeah, no worries, man.

Where To Find Jason Online

SPEAKER_02 38:21

I appreciate that. That's really cool. I'm gonna definitely think about that and and work that into uh a next project to understand that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 38:31

Well, man, thanks so much for coming on today. I really, really appreciate it. If someone wants to go check you out, where do they go to? What's the fiddlehead website, fiddlehead uh YouTube channel?

SPEAKER_02 38:40

So it's fiddlehead, fiddlehead is misspelled, H-E-D, Fiddlehead, and so just search for that on YouTube, fiddlehead.com. And that's pretty much it. Um I also have a the community is called play every day because that's the most important thing to remember. And so some people are just members of the community. Um, but yeah, those would be the places.

SPEAKER_01 39:04

Man, that was awesome. I really, really appreciate you coming on and sharing your your experience and your journey.

SPEAKER_02 39:09

Yeah, it's great to talk, John. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 39:12

Sweet. As always, thanks so much for listening. And Jason, thanks again for coming on, man. Cheers.