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[00:00:00] Colin Keeley: Hello and welcome back. This is Colin Keeley. Here

[00:00:02] Brent Sanders: And I'm Brent Sanders.

[00:00:04] Colin Keeley: we are two guys buying and building wonderful internet companies.

[00:00:08] Brent Sanders: Yes, sir. And it's summertime and summertime means one thing. Talking to sellers talking. It seems like, I dunno if it's, is it your take or is it, am I just making this up? It does feel like in the summertime, people want to sell their businesses more. I feel like there's an uptick in conversations, but maybe it's people realize like, oh, I'm stuck inside working on this business.

I should sell it.

[00:00:34] Colin Keeley: I had, it's funny. I never thought of like a cyclicality to it. I like like Christmas time Thanksgiving people want to sell before, like the end of the year. That's definitely something there. Summertime maybe, I guess we've had a lot of conversations.

[00:00:48] Brent Sanders: Yeah. It's definitely feels like an update or it's the market plummeting into internal demise, but I guess let's start there. Let's talk. And let me, what are your, as far as, so today is June. Too. And, you know, the market's way down, crypto's way down, everything's way down. And the recession supposed to hit.

And are there apparently we're already in a recession, inflation is crazy high. There's all these doom and gloom projections. Oh, one thing that I read today was, all, all the, you know, large cohort of specs are down like 95%. So like, You know, all the tomfoolery that's been happening in the markets for the last two years, it's kind of coming home to roost and at like, I'm not surprised.

I think it's actually, again, I maintain it still healthy, but the question for you is you feel like it's good or bad for, you know, B2B, SAS.

[00:01:38] Colin Keeley: So it's kind of nice in our world is like, if you look at Stripe, you wouldn't know that there's anything different, you know,

[00:01:44] Brent Sanders: Yeah.

[00:01:45] Colin Keeley: you know, everything's the same basically week to week and like the small business world. So, if anything. Over the next year or so if it's actually a downturn, it should be great for us.

Like startups struggling to raise, follow on financing, money, harder to come by it. Like we should see more opportunities. Like we're kind of well-positioned to do that. But Yeah.

no predictions on the market. Elsa. Just try not to look at it. If you don't sell anything, you're not realizing any losses. So I'm not Sure sure. If it matters as much.

[00:02:13] Brent Sanders: Yeah. I mean, I, the thing that makes me nervous is like companies, going under, like, that's one of our across all the businesses in pretty much every B2B, SAS, there's always, you know, just companies going out of business and that's a, you know, a churn driver. But yeah, I feel like there's always, I always get excited about the possibility of, you know, like thriving during winter, like thriving during a difficult period.

And I think that's where. You know, the smaller leaner companies, which is us, it doesn't get much more smaller and leaner than us. It's like, those are your opportunities to kind of step up into a next lead. And I experienced that during the last downturn, what 2006 financial crisis, like, it was starting a business or kind of just in the beginning of growth stages of business then, and it thrived.

It was just weird. It was. There are weird dynamics that pop up that smaller companies can take advantage of such as at the time it was, you know, we're a software development agency. People wouldn't hire developers or weren't keeping people on payroll. So they're way more interested in hiring contractors.

And we were able to just, you know, thrive and build tons of hours and still work really easily versus, when things are, the economy was going great, those clients were, you know, just hiring people left and right. Which I think is kind of a weird thing. Thing that's mystifying kind of, of the market right now.

And I'm not trying again, not trying to predict anything or understand economics, but it is kind of a wild time to be alive. If you went through a pandemic, it fucked up the supply chain and you know, everything else along with it. So it does seem to be a fun time to be, you know, buying and building businesses in the sense of it's not going to be.

[00:03:56] Colin Keeley: it's not going to be boring. Yeah. I turn, I think that's a concern, right. Is like how mission critical are these B2B software companies? Cause if they could be cut to save money, like that's concerning or like. Depending on who the end customer is, whether they're going out of business, that could really be.

an uptick, concern. Yeah, hopefully we're buying well. And these are mission critical companies.

[00:04:15] Brent Sanders: Yeah. I, I, I can't imagine like, of the services that we provide, they are ones that are not really on the chopping block, in my opinion. Maybe I'm maybe I'm wrong, but like invoicing for these business. I mean, to switch an invoice provider and the other invoice providers were still. Among the cheapest options.

And then with database backups, it's like, sure, you could pair back on the number of resources, but, you're not going to decide not to do database backups any further. Like if that's your, your part of your offering or part of what you do. It's a pretty dangerous thing to decide to skimp on.

[00:04:53] Colin Keeley: Yeah. And it's like, this is why software is so appealing is like the value that provides like the safety. Losing all your backups, is just so high relative to the cost. It just doesn't make sense to get rid of it.

[00:05:06] Brent Sanders: Yeah. Yeah. So excited about, seeing what happens with the next year, two years. I think it's, it's a cycle for, you know, it's going to go on for a couple of years and I think it's, I'm optimistic that we're going to have, an opportunity to thrive.

[00:05:18] Colin Keeley: I'd like to hear it. I like it.

[00:05:20] Brent Sanders: Unlike crypto. Yeah, I wanted it. We we've talked about, I was thinking back, we had a gentlemen on who kind of gave us a primer. It was probably like a year ago on maybe it's eight months on what was his name? About Jason, Jason Hitchcock kind of taught us the basics about crypto and it just kinda thinking like, we're the update on that, that space, obviously it's completely cratered.

And again, I think it's like a healthy thing. This is my take on it is like, this is a healthy sort of cleansing. And my hope is, I don't know if you saw the news. I think it was just yesterday that, so the stable coin, Tara, we, I think we talked about in a private, prior episode, but, you know, basically.

was supposed to be pegged to the dollar and you know, but now they're finding that the founder sold $80 million of, of Tara, like a week or two before this happened. So I think the government, at least the U S Congress is gonna get involved in some of this, hopefully clean up the space a little bit.

Like, I think there's just a ton of crap out there. That's mixed in with some projects that are seriously promising. Like I'm still a believer that all this stuff is going to, Be utilized and be like the way that, that people transact for digital services, like hosting, like, the resources your application uses, the resources that your business uses.

Like believe in the project, I believe in the ideas, but I think it's, it's going to be good to see some, some consolidation and clean up. What do you think.

[00:06:48] Colin Keeley: I mean, it's just, there's always a lot of volatility there. So I, I don't think it's shocking when it goes up and down, you know, 50% or more I believe in it long-term so I guess my warning to people would be. Don't gamble and like the little coins either. This is all going to zero or it's all going to be great.

And like, just focus on basically Bitcoin, Ethereum, you know, maybe Selana could be in there. The big ones, like the blue chips and, you know, park your money there. Don't look at it, you know, revisit it in five years. If you believe in it. Long-term.

[00:07:21] Brent Sanders: Yeah, well, you know, I think, there's a lot of folks. Yeah, just made, made a ton of money and easy come easy go is how I feel about it. That's I mean, that's just how these, these things were easy to set. There's a ton of volatility. So check on your friends, check on your crypto friends. Make sure they're they're still, they're still being productive.

[00:07:41] Colin Keeley: Yeah. I mean, those were the saddest ones when Luna went to effectively zero, there's like a bunch of suicides and it's like,

[00:07:47] Brent Sanders: Oh my God. Really?

[00:07:48] Colin Keeley: Oh, Yeah, over a dozen. I think people were saying, I mean, a lot of people put their life savings in there cause they were getting 20% returns without a super safe. And it's like, even if you lost all your money, like maybe just chill out, like go for a walk outside.

You'll get money again. Yeah. It's a sad situation.

[00:08:05] Brent Sanders: that's super sad. That's super sad. I had no idea, man. I wouldn't even brought this up. Had I known it's like the stock market crash.

[00:08:12] Colin Keeley: Yeah.

[00:08:14] Brent Sanders: man. All right, we'll wait a way to dampen the mood, Collin.

[00:08:18] Colin Keeley: I didn't bring this up. I didn't want to make this a crypto.

[00:08:23] Brent Sanders: I just thought it's ancillary. We've talked about in the past, but you know, in other news, I've been, I've been doing a new schedule. I don't know if I've told you about this and I want to get your thoughts on it. Cause you're like the sleep. Have you ever heard of by phasic sleep, like instead of sleeping one time a night, you sleep twice during the day

[00:08:39] Colin Keeley: Yeah, by phasic or I think bi-modal

is other thing.

[00:08:42] Brent Sanders: bi-modal

[00:08:43] Colin Keeley: Poly sleep is other thing people do where it's like every five hours, they sleep for 20 minutes. I've never done any of this stuff, but yeah, I've heard of people at something.

[00:08:52] Brent Sanders: is it regarded as generally unhealthy? That's my sense, but because everyone's like eight hours is the best thing you can do.

[00:08:59] Colin Keeley: I think most studies would support that. I, is this what you're attempting to do.

You're like, you know, sleep less at night and then an after.

[00:09:07] Brent Sanders: So we've had a little, another mishap. So we moved to Cleveland from Chicago to be closer to family. I've got a small family, you know, two kids under three. And we've had full-time childcare for a while, but we had a, a mishap. I won't get too far into it, but in short, we, we found a new nanny cause our other nanny told us she was going to transition into a different career and found a transition date.

And then she like let us know two months early that she's giving her two weeks notice so effectively leaving us without childcare. And so Elizabeth and I have to figure out how are we going to. Do childcare without external help. And you were like, why don't you just get daycare? And so let me nip that in the bud right away called everyday care in town, everybody's got a wait list.

That's that I want to send my kids to like the third nuclear option here is like, you know, you find a daycare that has spaced and it's like, you know, dropping your kids off in somebody's basement with their kids. So there's plenty of those outages. So we decided, and we had this as a backup contingency plan.

Let's do. Let's split the childcare let's make it work because our son takes a nap, from one to four each day. So here's the schedule wake up at 6:00 AM or five 30 early. So the kids sleep until seven 30 or eight. So basically get your workout correspondence done for an hour or two there, do childcare from nine to noon.

And that this is my wife and I, we switch switches off and then. Either nap or work between nap time, one to four, and then childcare again, we switch off either I do the morning or the afternoon and vice versa. So then there's a 48 slot and then do that kind of every day. And then the other part here in order to kind of still have time to make up for is you work essentially from eight 30, till 1130 or midnight.

And so you're not getting. Like eight hours of sleep. Cause you're getting up, you know, so you're getting roughly five to six hours in one go and then making up the rest in a nap time during the day, which it's like I'm calling the power debt or, working dad's schedule. So I've been, I've been doing it a little bit.

Like the other thing about it is we actually found some childcare. So I only get to try this experiment out one or two more weeks. But, so far it actually has been a really active. And again, I've only done it like four days now, but the, the way it's been working is like, I'm super constrained on what I can do.

So I have to be incredibly effective with the time I do have. So obviously leveraging, has been really strong and, but just like constraining myself, because I think one of the things I've suffered from is almost having like, not wasting time, but maybe focusing on things. You know, I could have someone else doing or leveraging.

[00:12:00] Colin Keeley: Yeah. And that's what everyone says when once they have kids, like they didn't know how productive they could be in a short period of time, until that happens.

[00:12:09] Brent Sanders: It definitely creates anxiety. I would tell you, like I'm nervous that, oh, I'm not going to get all this stuff done, but you just have to kind of like, just be in the moment. And at the end of the day, like number one priority is, you know, make good humans, you know, the work part of it is done. You know, part of my fulfillment, my, you know, I want them to even also have exposure to at some point, you know, the type of work that I do.

Yeah, I I'm, we're trying this out. So basically does napping throughout the day, whether you have kids or not, is that going to, to help me, you know, basically not get enough sleep during the first session, I have a feeling it's probably not healthy, but so far.

[00:12:48] Colin Keeley: I mean, naps are real. They definitely count asleep. Whether they're like, is that the best way to do it? Probably not, but it's certainly better than, you know, sleeping less than you need to and not napping during the day.

[00:13:02] Brent Sanders: Yeah,

[00:13:03] Colin Keeley: yeah. Hey, there's like, you know, special ways to do it. So you don't wanna do.

Too long. You don't want to really fall into deep sleep. You want to keep it shorter, like 30 minutes or less a Huberman. Andrew Huberman is like one of these, you know, biohacking experts. He has a podcast and a super long one on sleep. And whether you're supposed to do it or not, or whether you're supposed to do naps or not.

[00:13:22] Brent Sanders: Hm.

[00:13:22] Colin Keeley: Yeah, I, I did it for a long time. I took. Every day for like high school college, and maybe a little after, I used to be all about it. I can still nap really easily, but, I kind of mostly stopped years ago now.

[00:13:34] Brent Sanders: Yeah. The other thing about this. So when you were in college, were you getting up early for practices and stuff? Like, were you doing, like there was almost two days in your day? Like, and that's the thing I'm realizing. So there's like the early, before noon day, and then there's like this siesta that happens and then there's.

Afternoon and late night it kind of happens.

[00:13:54] Colin Keeley: Yeah.

it's definitely feel, I mean, you feel like you started a new day. So it was a situation where you just, you stay up late for like no real reason, just cause you're in college. And then you have to wake up early for like class or like a conditioning workout or something. And then you just tired and you take a nap, you know, after lunch 1, 2, 3 PM, something like that.

And then it's like a new day, you know, more energy to like go back and work out or do homework.

[00:14:17] Brent Sanders: Anyways, that's, that's the schedule for the first couple of weeks of this summer? I know, I I'm realizing like now that I've moved somewhere where there's. You know, it's, it's more kid driven. It's like once school let out this week, and it's a massive change. I never noticed this living in the city.

Cause it's like school, what school? But like everything changes. You definitely see like a whole different group of people. You different everyone's patterns change all the other, adults and parents are kind of working through this. So I think the thing that. Finally coming to grips with is that like, I don't have full control of my schedule and like, I have to be at the mercy of some of these other things at times.

And that has been a challenge in having kids. But, yeah, as long as it's willingness to like, overcome that, right. I'm like, okay, it can be tough and, you know, change my schedule. Like we, if you recall, we were working on a project where. Business that had operations in Asia and we're staying up, you know, two to three days, until what 11 o'clock at sometimes like three hours of meeting starting at 9:00 PM or 8:00 PM.

It's like, that takes its toll as well. But if you work around it, it's like, you can do it.

[00:15:29] Colin Keeley: Yeah, that was not fun. W w w what else do you want to go over here? You got this nice list.

[00:15:37] Brent Sanders: Yeah. You know, I've been working on. All right. So part of my focus for the summer is to start putting out more contents or like, posting more, or just in the sense of just raising the profile a little bit, like sharing what I'm working on. And so I'm thinking about like, why do this? And it's like, do. Do I want to be a thought leader, right?

Like that's just a general like career thing, healthy thing to probably be doing is like, let people know what you're up to. I mean, we do this on the podcast, but never do I promote it. Never do I share, oh, I was on this podcast with Colin and we've done how many episodes. So I I've just been a total introvert when it comes to posting online.

And so I've been looking at David . Thinking about taking it. It's just, I don't want to wait until I think the next cohort September. But I've been reading up on his method. I signed up for his 50 days newsletter, which is super cool. Essentially you get an email for 50 days straight with like things, you know, and exercises to do.

But I, I have this concept in my head cause it's like, okay, well what's your style? What's your personal brand? What's your like thing that you'll have in monopoly on.

Think a central part of my, my monopoly is being a little goofy and I'm like, is our business memes on LinkedIn? Is that like a viable form of thought leadership?

[00:16:52] Colin Keeley: I seen, I haven't seen as many beams on LinkedIn, but LinkedIn is like, so starved for good content. It seems like if you post anything decent, like everyone else, you know, has a boss, they're kind of afraid to post and we don't really have that. So you can post whatever we want. As long as you don't piss off like an LP or a potential, you know, partner or something, but.

Yeah, I, so I started crossposting, there's all these services that let you write and then post it to Twitter, LinkedIn, and kind of wherever you want. And so I started doing it and it's been great. Like it's just basically doubled my audience. And anecdotally, like, I just went to my college reunion and talked with a bunch of like older folks that are on LinkedIn, obviously not on Twitter.

And they're like, oh, I've been seeing all your content. Really love it. Like keep it up. And so it seems like the reach is great. Crossposting there.

[00:17:39] Brent Sanders: Yeah. So I think that's like, step one of the parental guidance is like, find, find the medium. And I think LinkedIn is the way I, I can't, I can't get down. I know you're big on Twitter. You publish a lot of stuff, but I just can't stand the. The audience is really awful. Like you have to do a great job. You spend a lot of time curating in blocking and, you know, I've just seen people get kind of ripped up for, for posting things or saying things, or just even like the nine things that get really kind of awful responses.

And so I, I just, I don't really want to spend time there. I don't really know if it's effective either, but I know people can make it work.

[00:18:18] Colin Keeley: it's certainly effective whether you want to deal with the people that come from it, I guess is a question that is nice about LinkedIn is like, you know, bosses are looking over people's shoulders. So people are much better behaved than they are on Twitter, at least.

[00:18:32] Brent Sanders: Yeah, well, I'm going to start working on my, my dank business means then.

[00:18:37] Colin Keeley: yeah, there you go. You know, whether you should take David Pearl's course or not like, it's gotten really expensive, which, you know, kudos to him. I think he's done a great job, but there's this other course, that's like the other competing good writing course. Dickie Bush started it and it's shipped 30, 50.

We see a lot of people with like little ships on their Twitter profile. And that one's significantly cheaper, but I think very similar as far as content that people see.

[00:19:02] Brent Sanders: Cool. Yeah. So like, walk me through, like, have you put a lot of thought into your publishing? Like walk me through your, your mindset. Like, why do you, I guess what, the thing that I'm stuck with is. Why am I writing this in the number two? What somebody can actually get out of this because you've done these like long form research projects.

And like, why, I guess, could you answer those two questions? Like, why are you doing it? And what are you hoping people get out of it?

[00:19:30] Colin Keeley: So I do it?

partially for myself. Like I just think writing is the best way to like crystallize your thinking. And then I, I do enjoy just the word play or like the beauty of language. So a lot of it is just like practicing your copywriting and enjoying that. And then what I get out of it, like every time anything I do goes like semi viral on Twitter, we get a bunch of inbound LP interests.

I get some deal flow from it and then just like cool, interesting people doing similar stuff, reach out and I get to talk with them. So that's not like immediately fruitful, but building a network over long-term certainly is. And then I also have this course, so anytime something does well, I get more interest in the course and people buy it.

So that's like a more immediate monetary benefit. But it's been great, you know, highly recommended for sure.

[00:20:16] Brent Sanders: So the other format that I've seen, that's popular. There's a gentleman that we, we both worked with on, w one of the portfolio companies of the venture fund we were at that has like this sort of really simple style on LinkedIn. Like, it's like a sentence and then two paragraphs, and then a sentence, like two, two line breaks.

Right. And it's like, you know, when I meet with. And I can see that they're inexperienced, then all they got to do. It's like this, this sort of, like he's teaching a lesson short from what would you call that? Like, you know

[00:20:47] Colin Keeley: People called it, bro. Poetry, as it does the funniest way to phrase it.

[00:20:51] Brent Sanders: That's good, bro. Poetry.

[00:20:53] Colin Keeley: Yeah, bro, a tree. There's definitely like, it's just a formula. Like what works on Twitter? What works on LinkedIn? It's this like spaced out saying something initially, like kind of inflammatory. So people want to dive in deeper.  using numbers certainly helps. So like entertain me or like teach me how to make money or like the two big ways to do it.

So like tell a really good story or like, this is how you make a million dollars.

[00:21:18] Brent Sanders: Yeah. Yeah, I mean not, but then I'm thinking, okay. So in his case, and this gentleman that we were talking about, he's he posts every single day, maybe twice a day, similar things,

[00:21:29] Colin Keeley: Who is it? Could you say the name? Are you like dodging it for some reason.

[00:21:32] Brent Sanders: We're talking about Alex Newman,

[00:21:34] Colin Keeley: Oh, okay. Yeah.

[00:21:35] Brent Sanders: you know, Alex, right?

[00:21:36] Colin Keeley: Yeah, of course. I didn't know who you're talking about.

[00:21:39] Brent Sanders: Okay. Yeah. So Alex has been posting since leaving that company. He posts like one or once or twice a day. Some story about, I, you know, I came in, I saw this salesperson, they needed this training and it's like, I knew, but it it's kind of like stream of consciousness a little bit.

And if you're in a conversation with him and he was telling you this, you'd be kind of glazed over as much as I was reading, because what I heard from. Indirectly from him was it works really, really well. Like he's got, you know, people reaching out, he's selling a course, like, and I'm not trying to sell a course.

I don't plan on setting one up, but like using it for networking people, letting people know what you're up to in order to kind of, you know, increase your visibility. And I think that's valuable, but I just feel. Goofy. So I'm finding my own voice. We'll see if I get there. What I think, yeah. Like when I read some of these things, I always get back to like the Twitter think boy, like the, why is it that Twitter is this platform for like, you know, advice like who asked anybody for these like life pro tips and, and whatnot.

Like I get it coming from, you know, Elon Musk or bill gates or somebody who's like, okay, they've figured something out. But, like a 26 year old, you know, C CEO at a startup, I don't really like want, want to hear their sleep schedule advice or whatever. I don't know. I'm, I'm an old man fucking like jaded, but, I'm trying to stay away from that content and stick towards.

Cause I feel like if there's an element of, to all of this stuff, that's just. It's like people go on these platforms because they impose things that they think people want to read, because that's what they've seen other people do. It's like, you know, going back to my music days, people being like recording artists and it's like, oh, you're just making rock and roll.

That sounds like your influences. And everybody's made up of just their influences and their influences. So I'm trying to think of super original content without freaking people out. So

[00:23:43] Colin Keeley: Yeah. I mean, if your goal is super original content, I think you're never going to produce anything. Realistically, if that's just like, the whole world is just mashing together, your experiences, your influences, you know, applying it in a slightly different way. And Twitter, what works like you can just look at all the big, like fitness accounts and it's always like the top five ways to do this.

The five mistakes I may do in this. And all you do is you take that format and you can apply it to like, you know, managing developers in India or something like that. And that's really all it is. It's just a formula that works in other places and nothing is original. It's just like a mashup of this.

[00:24:20] Brent Sanders: Yeah, well, we'll see. We'll see if I can grow my audience on LinkedIn. We'll see how it goes. But my sense is I think the best advice. Kind of after spending the last week or so looking at like hatching a strategy, the parallel concept of like establishing your own sort of monopoly. Like no one can be you.

And so I think that's the thing I've connected the most with is like trying to figure out, you know, what, what my voice is. And in that way, it's, you're never like parroting other people's content. You're you may be parroting the form, like, Hey, here's a poetry, format, but at least it's the message. I was in my own.

[00:25:01] Colin Keeley: Yeah. In your experiences kind of twist on it. The other, like, do you need a course? Yeah. I think you asked me this. All everyone that has a course, like all their content is basically public it's like on Twitter or they have blog posts or something. And I think what these cohort-based courses give you is like a community of people trying to do it at the same time.

And that leads to just accountability. Like people want to do it. Like people sign up for my course, they want to buy a business. They go through the whole course and then I follow up with them. It's like, do you buy business? Oh, no, I couldn't find the time to do the searches. Something. So I'm going to launch a cohort-based course for how to buy a small business.

I'm pretty pumped. Get people to meet each other, build a community around it and like actually get more people to follow through and to buy a business. I think that's why David Burrell keeps raising the price. And then he has this like deep community aspect to it. And it becomes much less about the actual content of the course and much more.

So like the cohort of like going through something together and actually getting results from that. It's been really frustrating having a course and being like. Not that many people actually follow through and do what you're trying to teach them to do.

[00:26:10] Brent Sanders: I know, I know that I think I brought this up in a past podcast. Was it somebody we had talked to in the audio education space and he's like, he, at the time he was selling these CDs, Motivational or course-based learning over CD and he's like, yeah, half the time, you know, you can send it blank CDs, and no one would know, like people will just buy it.

They feel good about it. And then they never, never go into it. But yeah, I don't know. I think the course thing is interesting, right? Like that's, it's always a little, it can be a red flag there's courses that. You know, these people aren't necessarily experts in the space. They're, they're putting their notes in, you know, basically giving you a binder of other people's, you know, mashed together content as well as their own.

The thing that I, I think is like the holy grail here is like, what Rome did is they took like a way of doing something and then roll that into software. That's the sort of holy grail that I would love to get to is like, is there like a line of thinking or a space that you. You're enabling that then a software product, like, for example, like rather than, you know, I, I have a, let's pretend I have a sales course rather than selling the course, you give the course way, but to use the, the method you use my software and that's the thing that is like, where I'm trying to think about.

It's like, I can't, I'm so far away from it. I just try and even write content. But I love that idea when you see people execute that. And I think Rome is such a great example of that. It was like, okay, here's a way to do something that they could make a course on. Right. They could have said, Hey, this is the method.

And it's, it's an amalgamation of existing methods. We've done the work to bring all this content together, but they give it away. That's their help doc, essentially. And then it's like, okay, now you can use this product. You, it it's really neat. I mean, sure. Notion everybody has these like links features now, but they, they do it in their own special way.

[00:28:07] Colin Keeley: So that's what a lot of people have figured out. So a lot of these bigger course creators is like, courses are great. But you have to keep selling them constantly because there's no recurring revenue there. And so what they figured out is that they use it as basically lead gen for software and.

Building kind of that process into different forms of software. So, like there's a cold outbound email guy, and he has a bunch of different software that kind of empowers that. And then this guy, Dickie Bush has this writing course and he started a staff. That's like, oh, I'll cross promote everything to your LinkedIn, your Twitter, your medium.

And then he just deeply embedded into the course and that like, then you build equity over time instead of just constantly trying to bring a new course.

[00:28:49] Brent Sanders: Yeah. Super interesting. Well, that's, that's my main focus right now. Not main focus. That's one of the main focuses around, you know, this summer that I'm thinking about. It's I just don't, don't post a lot of content. I've got a lot of things to say. It's just, I think I get a little too persnickety around the form to your, to your point.

If you it's like making a perfect is the enemy of.

[00:29:09] Colin Keeley: So let me put you on the spot like this, this is your goal. How are you going to make it actionable? Like, what are you going to do? You know, every day or every week, my

[00:29:17] Brent Sanders: So go ahead.

[00:29:19] Colin Keeley: like one thread a week. And just like, no matter what, you're getting one thread out, whether it's amazing, it's just okay.

But you just have to get into the practice of.

[00:29:28] Brent Sanders: Yeah, I think that's the thing hitting publishes. So, actionably. It's got to find its way to my schedule. So using this, this new, schedule that I have is like clearing out and it's not, it takes me while to start and I think it'll get faster, but at least an hour in the morning, and then at least an hour in the afternoon to, and it might be a bit much, but just, you know, one hour of just note-taking one hour of just like outlining and then an hour of actually like cleaning things up and trying to get it into a form.

And hopefully that goes down to like 30 minutes. 'cause I, it, it is hard to know. Time is precious. There's a lot going on and you know, it's hard for me to prioritize writing, but that's the thing. It's just, if it's a priority, it's got to end up in your, in your case.

[00:30:12] Colin Keeley: Yeah, I do a similar thing. I try to write every morning before like doing other stuff and I find it, or I guess I do some at night, but I find the morning is the easiest time to write. I find it to be like the hardest thing that I do and tackling the hardest thing in the morning is the best way to do it.

[00:30:28] Brent Sanders: Yeah, I know that feeling for sure. I'm the same way. First thing in the morning, it's like you have the most energy, the most mental, like cognitive energy and you can kind of steam roll difficult. Have.

[00:30:41] Colin Keeley: Cool. Anything else you wanted to cover here on your list?

[00:30:44] Brent Sanders: No, that's.

[00:30:45] Colin Keeley: No, I, if people are interested in doing my cohort based course, I have a type form out there. You know, people are filling an interest. I'm going to limit it to 25 spots at this discounted rate. So if you want to apply, you know, get your application and think I'll close applications in a couple of weeks.

And then I dunno, we'll see how the first one goes and then maybe do it quarterly or something.

[00:31:03] Brent Sanders: So in the acquisitions courts, right? That's the subject matter.

[00:31:08] Colin Keeley: Yeah. So Maven is like the company that kind of manages like the running of these cohort-based courses. And so they have a really good, they, I mean, they teach you how to do it and they'd be reaching out to me. I've been talking to them like since I launched maybe like six months ago and I was always hesitant to do it.

Cause I was like, I already got this asynchronous score that it all's work already. But what they kind of taught me is like, your lectures could be prerecorded and the live sessions can be more like breakout groups or like Q and A's where you actually go over. And that was much more appealing to me than like delivering the same lecture over and over again, just making it

[00:31:42] Brent Sanders: Yeah.

[00:31:43] Colin Keeley: which I didn't want to do.

But I'm excited. I'd love to be like much more involved in people's journeys, like buying a business. Think it'll be fun.

[00:31:50] Brent Sanders: Yeah. We asked him if, if folks, you know, sign up and then like, if you could go through and even share, like, just go through, how do you analyze the deals? Like live deals? I mean, I don't know if that's cool, but if they're bringing in deals and just say, Hey, let's look at this together. Pick it apart, show them how to do the financials, show them how to do the analysis.

I mean, that would be really valuable. And you know, it's hard, you know, you can't say, oh, you're going to acquire a business by the end of this time. But you, it would be really, I think an awesome way to get if it's 20, 25 people, like ideally they have somewhat similar criteria or even different.

And they just, now you've got a network of folks that you can syndicate deals to Oregon. If it's not your space and you know, somebody from your course, that's like, okay, they're into this sharing deals, which is probably more important than the course content itself is like, if you had 20 people in a group, whether, you know, you want to network with them or not, like that's still valuable.

Once you have a deal where you meet somebody, that's not a fit for you, but you want to kind of circulate that that's huge points.

[00:32:54] Colin Keeley: Yeah.

I am super pumped. I mean, this is what business schools really are. Like the content of the course or courses are great, but it's really like people in similar life position going through those same experiences. I I'm excited. It's like the new form of, you know, online learning. I always thought it'd be fun to participate in it.

So I'm pumped. Ah, thanks. Yeah, I guess, until next week, take care, everyone.

[00:33:18] Brent Sanders: Take care.

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