Jasmine Star (00:00:00) - Do you ever wish you could sit down with a wildly successful business owner and ask them, hey, how did you build your business? How did you figure out what it offers to create, how to price those offers, and who exactly to offer them to? If so, I want you to turn up the volume on this episode and grab something to take notes with those dishes at that laundry, the dog walking. Whatever it is, it can wait. I want you to lean into this episode. My name is Katie and I'm the President at Social Curator in this episode of The Jasmine Star Show. You're going to hear an exclusive question and answer session with Jasmine Star and Julie Solomon. If you don't know Julie, she is a visibility, brand, strategy and brand deal coach, and she delivered a keynote address earlier this year during a visibility intensive that Jasmine hosted for students of her your biggest launch ever. Course, right after the keynote, Julie and Jasmine had this conversation, the very one you're about to hear.

Jasmine Star (00:00:52) - And well, if you're looking for inspiration on how to build your own business with a plan, you do not want to miss this grab that pen and that piece of paper, friends, and let's listen in. Can you explain.

Julie Solomon (00:01:04) - Your product suite? Oh yeah. And then can you explain the order in which you created them, and then can you explain, would you would you build it out the same way or would you do it different. So I want to make sure that we're on the same page. These are such juicy questions okay okay I want to make sure. So product Suite these are all of the multiple offers that you can offer in your business. And we create them at different price points for different people on their journey. Okay. Great. Thank you. I can take away right as I as she's taking as I'm taking okay. So I'm going to take you back to 2016 right. My first offer, which was a course called Pitch Perfect that I still sell today, was my introductory offer.

Julie Solomon (00:01:46) - I had that before I had a podcast. I had that before I had anything. It was literally I had a blog and Instagram and I had this offer. It was 499. Okay, that was the entry. And what was the what's the promise or like what's the. Yes. So the promise of Pitch Perfect is that it teaches content creators, influencers or bloggers how to land paid brand deals. Got it. That course came from that story that I shared earlier about me landing that partnership with World Market. I started doing lots of those things when I had like no followers. And so people started coming to me and they're like, Julie, I don't mean to be rude, but you have no followers. I have millions of followers and I'm not making a dollar. Like what? What are you doing over there? Because you're you're monetizing, you're getting these brand deals. So I want to pause here. Yep. Here is Julie with roughly 2000 followers. She got curious and started saying, how do I incite desire? And I loved.

Julie Solomon (00:02:43) - If you notice, I'm like a stickler for messaging. I will never forget and I love it so much. Oh, I took my offer from me to money that was really pretty because it helps us to stick. So I want you to be very careful about the words that she's using to get things to stick. So let's go back. You might be telling yourself that you don't have X and her situation. She didn't have enough followers, right? And then Julie said, okay, I'm getting no's, but I'm finding a way to create value. She got her world market oh, $250,000. And then she saw a gap. People said, how did you do that? Now here's Julie saying, interesting, I can make money teaching people what I did. I just want us to be very careful and watch what's going on here. Yes. So that offer, that course came out in the end of 2016 and it was janky. I mean, do you remember like the chat rolls back then, like we would have YouTube and we would have to stream them to like a website.

Julie Solomon (00:03:38) - Yeah. And then we would embed the chat roll because like, they weren't sophisticated. Like it's so much more sophisticated and easier now. So it was like this janky culmination. My webinar, I found a slide deck off Etsy. Okay. And because I'm not a designer. So I was like, found that off Etsy. And I just wanted to make $5,000 if I could just make $5,000 and I didn't have a launch model, I didn't have a funnel. What I was doing at the time was I would go on Instagram and I would say, hey, I'm going to do this class, do you want to come? And I would do that every month because I didn't know you could automate back then. I didn't know that there were like funnels and ways to make this a lot easier for yourself. So I would show up every month, live and sell this janky webinar. And my first launch, I made $7,000 and I was like, I'm rich, I am rich. I have figured it out, and that was enough for me to go all in.

Julie Solomon (00:04:28) - And that's when I was like, I'm going all in. And then the next month I made 12. The next month I may have made ten. And then I kind of set between that, like. 15 to 30 K mark off of these monthly live webinars that I was doing until I went on automation. Okay, so let's pause here. Yep. So we've had a lot of conversations in and outside of the community around how much is too much and what Julie did. Now, at the time that you had made Pitch Perfect around how many Instagram followers do you have? And the reason I'm asking this is because people say, I don't want to burn out my audience. But what Julie did was make that offer and she did it once a month live, and people felt a connectivity to it. And she was consistently having, you know, her first launch with $7,000 and on the back of about 2000 followers, as you did it month over month, were you growing exponentially, your followers or you're kind of making the same offer to the same kind of group, making the same offer? Because more than half those people didn't even see the first ten times that I offered it.

Julie Solomon (00:05:22) - So, I mean, it's it's kind of silly for me to think that, like, like no one's paying attention to me. I'm sorry, but, like, I'm not special. Nobody's everybody's too focused on themselves. They're not paying attention to my webinar. So I've got to get it out there again and again and again and again. And I want to say maybe at the time I was probably like 5000 ish followers. My following didn't really grow until I launched my podcast, so I was well below 10,000 followers when I was doing this for a month. So then pitch it Perfect was your first offer and what does your what is your current offer your product suite look like right now? Okay, so I want to say something first because I think it's important. In 2016, I launched Pitch Perfect. I did not create another single paid offer until the end of 2018. For two years I went all in on that course, making it better, and I wanted and I wanted to become known authority.

Julie Solomon (00:06:16) - I wanted to become known as. You want to learn how to pitch and land brand deals, you go to Julie Sullivan, period. End of story. So I spent two years refining and doing it over and over and over again. I launched my podcast in 2017, but that's free. And that did help pull in awareness. That's a nurture channel. But I went all in on that course, and I still I mean, the course still sells every day today and I haven't changed much of it, like it's refined over the years. But the foundational elements, the strategic foundational elements of that course in 2024 is the same it was in 2016. Ooh. So Julie tells every single day you're going to go home and she's gonna get notifications. I got one when I was in backstage. That's right. I sold for 599. There it is. There it is. And this is the kind of business that we would like to build. Yes. Now, you did that for two years. For two years.

Julie Solomon (00:07:07) - And then in between the two years, you launched a podcast. I watched the podcast. And then what came next? And then what came next was something called the Influencer Academy, which no longer exists. I sunsetting it, I'm happy to tell you why, but I did that as a live launch model, so pitch it perfect. I was live launching every month. Then when I learned things like funnels and automations and and Evergreen System, I put pitch it perfect on evergreen. So it was like the little baby that could. And then I started focusing my efforts on the influencer Academy, which is a $2,000. It was like a hybrid offer. There was lifetime access to a course, and then there was some in-person group coaching elements to that. Cool. And how much was that 2000. So you went from 499 to 2000, 2000. And then what was the mindset that it took you to get there? So the mindset for me was really about wanting to figure out what was the next step for this customer.

Julie Solomon (00:07:58) - So they had gone in to pitch it. Perfect. Yeah. Say that one more time. I my mindset was before I go and create 15,000 different things, I'm going to wait to see what this customer reveals to me as their next step of what I can offer them. Yes and amen. So I went. That's why I went all in with Pitch It Perfect for two years, and I didn't create anything else because I was waiting to see what happens. The thing with Pitch Perfect and what makes it so great is that people get. You can buy the course for now, it's 599, but people will go buy that course for 5.99 and land a brand deal that day like that. It's quick, you know, returns quick, quick, quick, quick wins. It's like three hours to get through. It's really, really fast. So what was happening is that these creators, these entrepreneurs, they were starting to land paid brand deals. They were starting to make money. It was great. But then they were like, okay, what's next? And so what? What was next for them at the time was they were like, okay, I've got this brand deal revenue stream figured out, but like, who am I as a brand? Who am I as an influencer? That's that's the word I used at the time, you know, who am I? How do I generate, you know, more of a community.

Julie Solomon (00:09:06) - What's this thing called? An email list. And, like, do I need one? Got it. You know, so it was it was this next step of like, oh, they need to really learn how to create an online personal brand and have the fundamentals to sustain it so they can create their own products and services in the future. You were teaching them how to be the business of being an influencer. Exactly. So cool. Yes. And then what was the next offer and then the next offer. After that came shine, which was a $5,000 group coaching. Graham. And then came a mastermind. And then what was the mastermind called? Shine. Elevate. So there were two levels. That was like a accelerator version. And then there was an elevate version. And then how much is elevate? Elevate was 25,000 okay. So I want us to back up. There was a point in time where Julie's offer went from 499. Yep. To 2000 to 5000 to 25,000. Now, Julie described that the person who wanted to do what she did, I want to land brand deals was 500 and then said, okay, but what's next? So then Julie created an offer to actually teach the business of being an influencer, and then she went to group coaching.

Julie Solomon (00:10:20) - So the influencer academy was virtual, like watching classes in some live components, whereas the shine program was live coaching and it was a lot. It was higher proximity to me, which dictated the higher price point, and it was also access to my team. So now people were able to get my team's brain, my team's, you know, audits in their business, that sort of thing, without having to go and pay contractors to pay a person in their own team because they got access to my team. And so that was really the next level, because inside the influencer academy, people were like, okay, I'm ready. I'm ready to build, but I need help with implementation. I need what about, you know, it's like a triage moment and I need someone to talk to. How do I get higher proximity to you and then shine? Elevate was based on the need from somebody in the group coaching program. What was the value prop for elevate? Because we went from 5000 to 25,000. Right.

Julie Solomon (00:11:19) - This is a great question. So in my world, because of all the data that I was pulling, I realized that I had people that were that they were sitting at around making between like 40 K to 60 K a year. So they had and they were trying to get to six figures. So they had a high five figure mindset trying to get to six figures. So that meant they had six figure problems. They had six figure strategies they wanted to go through and talk about. And there needed to be a little bit more of business maturity that needed to be cultivated and strengthened with that person to get them ready for something like a high level mastermind container, because my high level mastermind container were for multi six figure business owners who are ready to go to seven, and the mindset of someone making 50 K and their experiences and their challenges and what they're focused on is going to be vastly different than someone who's making 500 K and trying to get to a million. So as a company, we made the decision we're going to be able to to better serve where these people are today by separating these out.

Julie Solomon (00:12:20) - And we're going to be able to give these people the nurturing, the nurturing and the education and the support that they need. And then these people that are at a higher level, they may not need to kind of pick our brains as much, but it's kind of like in car insurance, right? They wreck their car. They want to know that they can call me and I'm going to be there or if they need a connection to somebody or, you know, being able to build relationships and network. They had kind of already mastered some of the conversion issues with their business. They were ready for more visibility. That's great. And so two things that come up strongly for me. I wanted to cast a vision of your future by using a real life example of somebody who's starting very closely to where a lot of people are starting. And so this is such a beautiful example. Like Julie has built multi seven figure business based on mastering each of these steps and understanding what each person wanted. Then I also want to create a distinction that I think Julie really tapped on.

Julie Solomon (00:13:16) - Group coaching was Julie and her team disseminating information. Mastermind is I'm going to come in and I'm going to connect with other people in the room, and we're going to help each other and swap ideas. This is less about I help you or tell you what to do, but we help each other. And then in case that insurance comes in, it's like the car's on fire. This is what I need. And that's what you're paying a premium for. So I want to make sure that as you create your offers, you're saying proximity drives up the cost? Yes. How many people drive up the cost? Who is doing the servicing and what kind of room are you cultivating? Drives up the cost. And so I want to be very clear. She started an offer for 489 with 2000 followers based on her experience of saying, hey, I have the band aid of people saying, I want brands to invest in me with a tiny little following. That is all she did.

Jasmine Star (00:14:04) - Okay, I hope your hand hasn't cramped too much from taking so many notes.

Jasmine Star (00:14:09) - What resonated so strongly was the idea that Julie paid attention to what questions people were asking her about what she did, and then she developed offers that taught them how to do the same. So next time you're asked a question, maybe in your email, your DMs, or at a real life event, maybe you're in the carpool lane. Pay attention. Write it down. You never know where that one question might lead. Thanks for listening to The Jasmine Star Show today, friends. We'll see you again. Soon.