SPI 411: 5 Market Must-Haves When Building a Business That Will Succeed, with Ryan Levesque

SPI 411: Ryan Levesque (Choose.)

Pat Flynn: Whether you have a business already or you’re about to start one, it’s really important that you understand: Is the market that you are serving viable for a long-term business model? Is it actually possible for you to succeed and make money in that space? Well, that’s what we’re going to talk about today with special guest Ryan Levesque. You might know him as the author of ASK, and previous guest in episode 178 here on the SPI podcast. But today, we’re talking about market viability, these five special qualities or characteristics of markets, and different tools that you can use to understand whether or not it’s viable, and secondly, we’re going to have you understand and actually play a little game with us to know what type of entrepreneur you are and every type has its own dark side. It’s important to know that so that you know what to look out for and what might be your weakness and how to break out of that. This and more in today’s episode. Stick around.

Announcer: Welcome to the Smart Passive Income podcast, where it’s all about working hard now so you can sit back and reap the benefits later. And now your host, he thinks poop jokes aren’t the best, but they’re a solid number two, Pat Flynn.

Pat: What’s up, everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to session 411 of the Smart Passive Income podcast. My name is Pat Flynn, here to help you make more money, save more time, and help more people, too. And today, we’re talking with our special guest Ryan Levesque, who … I mean, this is a golden … This is going to be one of those episodes that I know I’m going to say, “Hey, if you’re in business and you haven’t listened to this, this is mandatory listening for you.” So you’re in the right spot. Put that phone away. Listen. This is going to be a great one. Let’s do it. Here we go.

Pat: Ryan, welcome back to the Smart Passive Income podcast. Thanks for being here, man.

Ryan Levesque: Pat, it’s awesome to be here. Super pumped to be chatting with you again, man.

Pat: The last time you were on was over 200 episodes ago in 178. It was one of our most popular episodes because you talked about the ASK formula. For people who maybe didn’t listen to that, exactly what is the ASK formula? Why is it so important? And I’ll talk about how it’s affected me in my business after that.

Ryan: Yeah, for sure. So the ASK method is a methodology to understand your market at a deep, emotional level so you can ultimately better serve that market and then also better sell to that market. And the idea behind it is, if you understand your market better than they even understand themselves, then you can deliver solutions to what it is that they need and sell to them in a way where your marketing and your messaging resonates with them at a deep level.

Ryan: So ASK is all about that, and it’s all about also identifying the different buckets that exist in your market. So in every single market, doesn’t matter what market you’re in, there are different groups of people that have slightly different needs, wants, and desires. And the challenge when you sell online is that, when you try to be all things to all people, you end up being nothing to nobody. By identifying the different buckets that exist in your market, you can segment people and then serve them the best message and the best product that’s a right fit for them. And so ASK is really just a framework to implement that process in your business online.

Pat: Right. And it’s about asking the right questions, which you set up really nicely in the book. I took that and I implemented it, and right away I started to see immediate results. Number one, we started to notice that there were indeed different pockets of people in our audience, and that was a huge realization to me. Even on an implementation level, we had one email list that we were just sending the same email to every time, and once I started to see that there were different levels of people and different experiences that people were having under my brand at SPI, it was like, “Whoa.” This advanced SEO article that we came out with shouldn’t even reach the beginners, and vice versa, a lot of these things that were for beginners shouldn’t even be seen by the more advanced segment. Yet, we were just putting everybody into one bucket, which is sort of the most common thing.

Pat: So immediately, we started to run some surveys using the questions and the frameworks that you had, especially that … I think the number one question was, what’s the number one biggest challenge you have related to blank? And what we did and what you teach is to take those answers and literally just regurgitate them back to everybody, and the responses, and I’ve told you this before, just people are like, “How do you know? You know me better than I know myself,” and, “Oh my gosh, I found the right person. You understand.” Like what you said, if you can show that you understand them better than they can, they’re going to automatically assume that, well, you must have the answers, too.

Pat: So just a big, heartfelt thank you from myself, my team, for helping us sort of create this framework of how to better serve our audience. It’s made us more money. It’s made us have a higher email open rate, and it’s just, number one, just allowed us to connect better with everybody, so thank you for that.

Ryan: Yeah. I love that. What makes me happiest is just the impact that you’re having, right? Because I’ve been a huge fan of your stuff since before we knew each other personally. I was a listener, I was a customer, for years before that. And just to see the impact that you’re having and just being able to reach more people, that, to me, that’s the reward right there, so super happy about that, man.

Pat: Thank you. So that book is called ASK, with probably the longest subtitle I’ve ever seen in a book, but that’s okay. Like anytime anybody comes to me and goes, “Pat, I want to write a book. I need to make the subtitle short and sweet.” I’m like, “You don’t need to make it short. Look at Ryan’s book.” But I highly-

Ryan: Well, when you have a one word title, right? When you have a one word title, you need a subtitle to back it up so people know what the heck the book is actually about. I think that’s the thing, [crosstalk 00:05:21].

Pat: Can you recite the subtitle to that? I’m sure you have it memorized.

Ryan: Don’t put me on the spot. The counterintuitive online method to … Don’t put me on the spot. Yeah, it’s the longest. Funny story about that. I’m in talks with my publisher now for re-releasing a revised edition of the book and that’s something that we’re working on right now and we’ll be coming out with that in a little over a year from now. That’s one of the biggest topics is that they came to me and they said, “Ryan, we have to shorten the subtitle on the second version of the book.” So it was the first book I ever wrote, and gosh, I mean, I don’t know if you think back to your first book, like just there’s so many things you don’t know when you’re writing a book. There’s so many lessons that you learn, and that’s one of a list of a thousand things that do different next time around. Shorter subtitle. So, yeah.

Pat: Well, we’ll get to that new version. Whenever it comes out, let me know, because it has been impactful for me and-

Ryan: There’s some big things happening in it. We’re changing some of the framework that we teach. So, you remember the concept of hyper responsive? So, going after those people that give you those long, passionate, detailed responses, really focusing on that segment of the market? That’s akin to your super fan concept. Like these are super fans when they’re pouring their heart out to you and they really have a lot going on.

Ryan: Well, we’ve revised, we’ve refined that formula to also incorporate not just the length of response that people give you, but also measuring how much time they’ve spent trying to solve the problem that you’re asking about and how much money they’ve invested in their life to try to solve that problem. With that, there’s an algorithm that helps you identify this is the precise pocket of people who have spent money, spent time, and have a burning desire to solve that problem. That is what you want to focus everything in your business around, your messaging, your products, and everything else. So that’s just one of about a dozen sort of refinements and enhancements that are coming around the corner, so I’ll tease you with that for before the book comes out.

Pat: Now, I like that a lot. I could see that working really well. I have a lot of students who ask me, “Pat, I have this segment of my audience that I really want to focus on, but which one should I actually have a conversation with?” I think having the people who have spent money is a good thing because you know that they’ve tried and they’re perhaps willing to try and work with you to solve that problem. If you can fix it for them, they’re likely going to be the most outspoken people to sort of spread that message for you even more.

Pat: And thank you for mentioning Superfans. I think a lot of my kinds of content and your kinds of content blend well together, and I think that’s where your newest book, Choose, fits in really nicely. And so one word title, again. Not ASK, but Choose now. A little bit shorter of a subtitle, but what is the sort of hypothesis here? What is this book for?

Ryan: Yeah. So when I released ASK, again, first time author, I had no idea what to expect. I put it out there. And again, the book is really about understanding your audience, how to ask the right questions to understand what it is that your audience truly wants. What I struggled with, is after the book reached literally hundreds of thousands of people around the world, published in all these different languages, I kept coming back to the fact that some people would come to me and they’d write me these heartfelt letters and they’d say, “Ryan, I was a huge fan of the book, but I tried what you taught and it didn’t work.”

Ryan: When something like that happens, it sort of is like a sucker punch in the gut. It’s like, “Well, what did I do wrong?” And so I kind of did some deep reflection and looked at, what am I missing? What are the gaps in the methodology? What’s missing? And what ended up happening is I saw that there was this trend, and all roads kept pointing to the same direction, and that’s this: People were following the methodology to the T and they were still failing because of one reason, and that one reason was that they were choosing bad markets. Meaning they were following the process of asking what people want, identifying the hyper responsive segment of the market, but they were going into markets that had no chance of succeeding in the first place.

Ryan: The metaphor that I use, and I share this in the book, that I think is really helpful, it’s sort of like this. It’s like, when you start a business, it’s like tossing your raft in a river. You can have the best raft money can buy. You can have the best equipment. You can hire a crew to row in that raft with you. But if you put your raft in the river and it’s pointed in the wrong direction, or worse yet, you put your raft in a river that doesn’t have any water in it, it doesn’t matter how hard you row, how good your equipment is. You’re never going to get to your destination. You’re never going to get to that place that you want to go.

Ryan: What I realized is that I’d given people the best raft and equipment, but I did not teach them how to find the right river, the right river for you, the river that’s not too big, not too small, the river that has a current that propels you forward as opposed to paddling upstream and trying to do it all on your own, how to find that river.

Ryan: So I went on really a three year research project to really identify, what does it mean to have a market that is going to set you up for success? The book is really all about the data and empirical study that I went through looking at the 23 businesses that I’ve started since I’ve been doing this, so 23 different markets that we’ve gone into in all sorts of different weird niches, researching the businesses that my clients have gone into, again, in all sorts of different markets, and trying to identify, what are the trends? Like, if you were to boil it down. It’s easy for you and I to say, “Well, pick a good market,” right? But what does that mean exactly?

Ryan: Much like ASK, it’s a very analytical approach to measuring things like preexisting demand, measuring things like size of the market, and what is the right size? A market that’s not too big and not too small, but how do you measure that? Measuring things like, what are the criteria your market should have and what is sort of the checklist of things that you’re looking for before you dive right in? That’s what the book is all about. It’s all about how to pick the right market before you start your business, which I claim in this book is the single most important decision one needs to make when you’re starting your business: Who you’re going to serve.

Pat: For sure. I mean, I’ve written about similar things in Will it Fly?, obviously. Business validation and how to do that, and I think what I love about your book and your take on it, is it can work in conjunction with the things I teach in Will it Fly? very well. You on the more data-driven, analytical side of things, I think with those powers combined, I think you can make some magic happen.

Pat: Where I focused on in Will it Fly? to start the book was really on, before we even get into the figuring out of which river to get into, or income stream if you will … Sorry.

Ryan: Good one.

Pat: How much does this idea or that potential market make sense for you as a person? So I’m curious to know where you, before we get into like, I want to know what analytics to look at, I want to know how do you determine the market viability from a data standpoint, but where do you lie on the spectrum of, well, it needs to also be something that you are interested in or, quote unquote, as we often say, passionate about? How much does that matter when it comes to choosing a niche, in your eyes?

Ryan: What I found is that, to be successful in business, you really need two things. You need something that has the potential to be profitable, but it also needs to fuel your soul. So it needs to fill your bank account, but it needs to fuel your soul as well. If you don’t have both of those things in conjunction with one another, eventually you’re going to give up, you’re going to move onto something else. Because if you’re not fulfilled, you’re going to say, “This is just a hollow way to make money,” and if you’re not making any money, you’re going to have to get a job, right? Or do something to make money.

Ryan: And so what I found in the research that I did is that there are really four different types of people that I’ve found who want to start a business. It’s what I call the four different entrepreneurial types. The first type is what we call a mission-based entrepreneur. Now, a mission-based … And as I go through these, if you’re listening to this or watching this right now, what I’d encourage you to do is just to reflect on which of these four types do you most identify with, if you had to pick just one. So Pat, I’ll throw it out your way, but anyone else listening to this as well, we’ll play a fun little game.

Ryan: So the first type of entrepreneur is what we call the mission-based entrepreneur. Mission-based entrepreneurs are drawn to starting a business because they have a cause that they’re passionate about. It’s a cause that they would die on a hill for. Christy Kennedy is an example that I talk about in the book. So Christy is a mom who has a son who is autistic, and he was bullied in school as a young boy. And so as a mom, decided that she had to do something about it, so she went to the school and started to get involved, and one thing led to another, and she started developing a program to help eliminate bullying from her child’s school, which led the school district to ask if she would do it for the entire school district, which led the state to ask if she’d do it for the entire state, which led to helping over 2,000 schools around the country with a program that she’s developed to eliminate bullying in elementary schools.

Ryan: Now, she’s an example of that mission-based entrepreneur, right? Someone who’s drawn to move people away from something negative in life and then build a business around it. And it’s in contrast with the second type of entrepreneur, which is the passion-based entrepreneur. Passion-based entrepreneurs tend to have something that they’re passionate about. It’s like a hobby or a love, whether it’s Back to the Future and DeLoreans or LEGO or playing the guitar or learning how to paint or whatever it may be. They’ve got something that they love, that they’re passionate about in their life, and they want to transform that passion into their vocation.

Ryan: So examples are like Charlie Wallace. Charlie is a story I tell in the book. Charlie’s a traveling musician. He’s part of a heavy metal rock band, and to make a little bit of extra money, he started teaching people how to play guitar online. Well, he ended up growing that into a business that makes over $2 million a year. They just released their first LP, and it landed on the Billboard charts, so the hard rock Billboard charts at like number 13, named one of the top 30 entrepreneurs under the age of 30 by Forbes, and he’s just on this rocket ship. It all started with this passion around playing the guitar that he transformed into his business. So that’s the passion-based.

Ryan: Now, the difference between the two are mission-based entrepreneurs typically want to move people away from something negative in life. Passion-based entrepreneurs want to move people towards something positive that they love. Those are both in contrast with the third type of entrepreneur, which is the most classic entrepreneur in the sense of the word, which is the opportunity-based entrepreneur. Opportunity-based entrepreneurs don’t necessarily have a mission or a passion that they’re drawn to. They’re the type of person that sees opportunity everywhere, right? They’re the type of person that says, “How is it that nobody’s built a collapsible stand to hold a camera when you’re traveling so you can shoot selfie videos? Like, how is it that nobody has built something like this? Let’s create that,” right? So opportunity-based entrepreneurs tend to see gaps in the marketplace and ask themselves that question. “How is it that nobody’s done this?”

Ryan: And the fourth and final type of entrepreneur is actually the type of entrepreneur that I consider myself to be, and it’s what we called the undecided entrepreneur. Now, the undecided entrepreneur is someone who knows they want to start a business. They know they want to go into business for themselves, but they just don’t know what that would be. They’re in love with the idea of being their own boss, having their own business, making their own hours, having that freedom, but as far as what type of business or what market to go into, they’re really undecided.

Ryan: Now, that’s who I was when I first got started, and anyone in that situation, what I recommend as the prescription is to start what I call a practice business. Now, just like learning how to drive a car, most of us didn’t learn how to drive a car in our dream car, our forever car, right? Like we learned in an old beater. For me, it was an old Jeep, rusted out floor, stick shift. That’s what I learned how to drive. But here’s the thing: the skill of driving, learning that skill to drive a car, is something that you carry with you for the rest of your life.

Ryan: So even if that first business that you start isn’t your dream business, your forever business, you’re learning the skills, you’re learning the steps, just like learning how to drive. You’re learning the process that you can transfer into your forever business. For me, that unlocked this anxiety that I had around having to pick the perfect business that was going to last for the next 25 years, and so the first business I started was teaching people how to make Scrabble tile jewelry by combining Scrabble tiles from the game and origami paper. Definitely not my forever business, but it was a way to make money and learn the steps of building a website and writing emails and setting up ads online and all the things that you need to learn.

Ryan: So I’m curious, before we go any further, Pat, of those four … And by the way, we all have elements of all of them, like we all have elements of all of them. I’m curious which of those four, if you had to pick one, most resonates with who you are.

Pat: I mean, for me, when I first started my LEED exam business website to help people pass an architectural exam was definitely an opportunity-based business. I saw a huge hole in that market, and I built something, and then it did very well, obviously. And then I started to see, well, I want to help other people and show people the positive that can come when you break out of the nine to five, whether it’s something you’re unhappy with or you get laid off from, like me, and I want to show people the positive that’s in there. That’s, I feel, where I’m at. I have this passion now for helping people and that’s become my business in all kinds of different ways. I don’t know if you would agree with that or not, but that’s …

Ryan: No, I think it’s really perceptive, and one of the things that you’ve pointed out there is that as you’ve grown in the last decade plus, we evolve. Like we all change. None of us are static. And so for someone listening to this right now, you may have been a certain type years ago, and you may have evolved into a different sort of entrepreneurial type as you’ve had more experience, and so I think that’s really perceptive and interesting.

Ryan: So, yeah. So to answer your original question around this passion or profit, like what’s most important, here’s the thing to know. Each of these four types has a shadow side. There’s a shadow side to watch out for, and the shadow side is … None of these types is better than the others. They’re agnostic. It just, it is what it is, but they each have a shadow side and I’ll share what I mean by that.

Ryan: So mission-based entrepreneur, if you fall into that mission-based bucket, the thing that you need to watch out for, mission-based entrepreneurs tend to struggle with making money. They’re so drawn to the mission that they have in life that they put making money as being secondary to that mission, and so they end up building a business that doesn’t give them what they want out of life. It doesn’t allow them to have the freedom they want or make the impact or leave the legacy that they want because they’re so drawn to the mission and they struggle with charging for what it is that they want to do.

Ryan: Passion-based entrepreneurs tend to fall in love with their passion, and building a business around it runs the risk of leading you to become dispassionate about that thing. Like for example, if you love painting and you build a business around teaching people how to paint and suddenly that’s your J-O-B, that’s your job and you need to make money doing that, you can lose the love that you once had about painting, and so you need to be careful around that thing.

Ryan: Opportunity-based entrepreneurs need to be careful that you don’t just … And maybe you experienced this in the LEED exam business, where it’s a way to make money, but one day you wake up and you ask yourself and you say, “What the hell am I doing with my life? Like is this really what I was put on this earth to do?” And you wake up one day and say, “Yeah, I’ve made some good money doing this, but is this my calling?” And you sort of have this crisis of identity that can happen.

Ryan: The undecided entrepreneur, the thing that you need to watch out there is the just analysis paralysis. Just swimming in that forever sea of, “Maybe this business, maybe that business, maybe this business, maybe that business,” and never actually picking something and taking the steps to move forward. So once you kind of identify who you are, you can be aware of the shadow side to watch out for and just notice those signs in you that can hold you back from doing what it is that you want to do.

Pat: That’s amazing. Thank you for that breakdown, man. I’m going to chop that up, put that on YouTube, because that was freaking amazing. Thank you for that. Hopefully somebody listening to this can identify and perhaps even empathize with the struggles that they may be having, and just knowing that you’re not alone but these are common things. But how might Choose, your book, sort of help a person no matter which category they fit in? Let’s get into it.

Ryan: Sure. Yeah. So there’s this perception that when you’re starting a business, the single most important decision you need to make is what. Like what am I going to sell? What’s my business model going to be? But the reality is the most important decision is not what, it’s who. Who are you going to serve? And really, that’s what the book is all about. So it doesn’t really matter if you’re mission-based, passion-based, opportunity-based, or undecided. We need to begin by asking ourselves the question, who are we going to serve? That is the foundation on which your business is built.

Ryan: And so in your case, Pat, who do you serve? You serve entrepreneurs, aspiring entrepreneurs. That is your who, right? That is the single most important decision. What you do from there, whether you have a podcast, a course on affiliate marketing, a book on Will it Fly?, a book, Superfans, whatever it may be, the most important decision, the who, is the foundation in which all other things are built. If your who was people learning how to play guitar, you could do all the things that you’re doing. You could have a podcast, you could have multiple books, you could have courses, you could have all of those things, but it’s a different who, it’s a different type of person that you’re serving.

Ryan: Now, it turns out that there are certain characteristics that makes a market one that has the potential to be successful and one that has a good chance to fail. I discovered this by going through, as I mentioned earlier, three years of research, really reverse engineering every single one of the businesses that we’ve gone into. So I’ve gone into markets as obscure as teaching people how to make jewelry, orchid care, how to improve your memory, selling high end water filtration systems, beekeeping, teaching people tennis, teaching people golf, weight loss, fitness, fish oil supplements. I’ve gone into all these different spaces, and not all of these businesses have been as successful as the rest. Some have been like home runs and others have been like total failures.

Ryan: And so what I was looking at were, what were the common traits that made the home run businesses super successful, and what were the common traits that made the failures not as successful? What I discovered is that there are five factors, five things that you want to look for. And what I’d love to do now just to set people up with success is to share what those five factors are so the business idea that you might be thinking about in the back of your mind, whether you’re mission-based, passion-based, undecided, or opportunity-based, the idea that you have in your mind, you can run it through these filters.

Ryan: And Pat, even for you as you’re going through this, what might even be fun is if we pick one of the things that you’ve got going on. I know before we hopped on, we were talking about you’ve got like a million things going on. So if we just like pick one of them just as an example and just kind of run it through this filter of these five key, what we call market must haves, and just ask yourself, how many boxes does that idea check off? Does it check off all five? Does it check off four, three, two, one? And anyone at home watching or listening to this right now, I’d encourage you to do the same thing. Just think about that idea that you’ve been kind of thinking about in your mind or you have an existing business. Just ask yourself, how many of these boxes does that idea check off?

Ryan: So we’ll start with the first one. First one is what we call … Go ahead.

Pat: I’m going to pick the SwitchPod, by the way, just as an example. New business-

Ryan: Perfect.

Pat: … that we’re in, physical product, very specific who, the who being people who shoot video, and then we’ll just go from there. So use me as a guinea pig, and everybody else, play along please.

Ryan: Awesome, good. That’s a perfect example. So first thing that I like to look for, market must have number one is you want to look for what’s called an evergreen market. What do I mean by that? Well, I mentioned a little bit earlier that the first business I started was teaching people how to make Scrabble tile jewelry, and it was the first thing I started. I got into that business because my wife one day came home, before we had started our business, and I was having dinner conversations with her with all sorts of crazy business ideas every single day like, “How about this and how about that and how about this?” And eventually one day she said, “All right, how about this?” And she showed me this brand new website, this is 2006, this brand new website, which is a huge site nowadays, but it was brand new at that time called etsy.com. For anyone not familiar, Etsy’s like eBay for making handmade products.

Ryan: She said, “Take a look at this jewelry that’s selling like crazy,” and it was this jewelry that combined Scrabble tiles with origami paper and a resin on top of it that made it almost look like a glass jewel. And at the time, we were living in China, so before I got into this online space, my last real job, I was opening up sales offices for a company in China and my wife was getting her PhD at HKU, Hong Kong University, and we’re in Hong Kong and she said, “Take a look at this thing.” She said, “Look, we’re in China. We have access to all the origami paper in the world. We have access to inexpensive labor. We can manufacture this jewelry. We can import it into the United States and we can get rich.”

Ryan: I said, “Okay, honey, timeout.” I said, “I don’t know that I want to chain myself to a factory in Southern China to manufacture this jewelry. Like I want a location-independent business. I want to travel, I want freedom, all these things,” and so we kind of shut the door on the idea.

Ryan: A few weeks later I’m having, again, one of these conversations, “What about this idea? What about that idea?” And she said, “What about this?” Turns her computer to me, shows it to me again, and she once again shows me Etsy and she says, “What about that Scrabble tile thing?” I said, “Honey, I thought we closed the door on it,” and she said, “No, no, no, no, no. Take a look. This woman isn’t making the jewelry. She’s teaching people how to make the jewelry. Look. She’s selling this tutorial and she’s teaching people how to make this jewelry.”

Ryan: Now, the cool thing about Etsy, and this is a clue to finding a profitable market. The cool thing about Etsy is you can see a person’s sales history, so you can see exactly how many units they sold today, yesterday, the day before that. So what I did is I reverse engineered, going back a couple of months, her income, how much money she was making, and she was making over $10,000 a month selling this tutorial on how to teach people how to make Scrabble tile jewelry. So my wife bought the tutorial. It wasn’t very good. It was like Microsoft Word, like spelling mistakes. It was really bad. My wife learned how to make the jewelry. We built a better mouse trap. We started selling it. First month we sold a couple hundred dollars, a couple thousand dollars the next month, $5,000, $6,000, $8,000. I’m like, “Oh, my gosh, we’re going to get rich. Like this is crazy. This is amazing.” And I learned the first lesson that I want to share with everyone here and that’s this.

Ryan: The next month our sales dropped to almost zero, and it was at that moment that I realized that the market that we had gone into was nothing but a fad. The reason why most of us probably listening to this right now are saying, “Wait, Scrabble tile jewelry? Like what is that all about?” Because it disappeared. It’s like Beanie Babies or Pogs or Fidget Spinners or any one of these things. It was like a huge thing for about five minutes and then disappeared off a cliff. And at this point I had quit my job. My wife was finishing her PhD. We had no income coming in and we had this moment where we looked at each other and said, “Crap. Now what?” And it led me to that first lesson, which is going into an evergreen market.

Ryan: So with that knowledge, my wife and I moved back to the United States, and when we moved back to the United States, my wife got a job as a museum curator making $40,000 a year and it was just enough money to pay our living expenses in a tiny little apartment, no furniture. I mean, it was just very spartan living, but it led me to create our next business. I said, “All right, next business I go into, we have to go into a market that isn’t a fad,” and so I started doing research into what are the oldest, longest lasting hobbies in America?

Ryan: What I found was really interesting. Do you know what the number one hobby is in America, and it’s been the number one hobby in America or number two for like the last 100 years? Any guesses on what it is? It’s obvious when I say it, but just, I didn’t know this when I first did the research.

Pat: I don’t know. Woodworking?

Ryan: Close. Gardening. Gardening is the number one hobby in America and it’s been … It’s gardening and reading. Gardening and reading have been the number one and number two hobbies in America for the last 100 years. And so I said, “Okay, so that’s something that’s not going away.” It’s not like Scrabble tile jewelry and it’s going to disappear. It’s not going away. And I started doing research into different sub-niches within the gardening market and I eventually settled on orchid care. The reason orchid care made the list is because when we lived in China, we bought a bunch of orchids and they all died, and I figured, well, if I had the problems like caring for orchids in our house, other people probably have the same problem.

Ryan: So we went into that business and followed what’s now known as the ASK method to understand what that market needs, the challenges that they have. We took that business from nothing to about $25,000 a month in 18 months. My wife quit her job. We grew the business to about half a million dollars a year, and it went on to become one of the 23 markets that we just went into market after market using this process.

Ryan: And so the key difference is you want to go into … And that business, by the way, over 12 years later still pays all of our living expenses. So everything that I do with ASK and Choose and everything, like that’s just all on top. That tiny little business still produces enough money to pay our bills over a decade later, and the reason for that is because it’s a market that’s not going anywhere, right? It’s an evergreen market. So that’s market must have number one.

Pat: I like that. Do you offer any suggestions on either tools or ways to know whether or not something a person is interested is a fad or not? I would imagine that it might be difficult sometimes to know whether this new idea that I have could tomorrow be gone.

Ryan: Right. My favorite tool for this is a totally free tool, and it’s one I think you may have talked about it a little bit in either Will it Fly? or maybe one of your books, but definitely in some of your courses. It’s called Google Trends. So Google Trends is a free tool put out by Google where they publish the search volume for keywords going back to I believe 2004. So we have 15 years of data that you can type in a keyword like orchid care or fidget spinners or play guitar, and you can see over 15 years, what does that search volume look like?

Ryan: Now, if you look at a keyword like fidget spinners, it’s a fun one to type in. You’re going to find that the keyword volume spikes up to the moon and then drops off a cliff. I’ll give you another one that spikes and drops. It was a thing maybe about 18 to 24 months ago that everyone was talking about it. It was like the biggest business opportunity. You could not log into Facebook or Instagram or go anywhere without somebody talking about it. Do you know what I’m talking about?

Pat: I don’t even know. No. I’m so curious.

Ryan: Bitcoin.

Pat: Oh, of course.

Ryan: There was a time where everyone was like, “Bitcoin this. I’m starting a Bitcoin podcast and a Bitcoin membership.” Everyone was talking about Bitcoin. If you look at the search volume on Bitcoin, Bitcoin just shoots up to the moon and then falls off a cliff and then goes nowhere. So I caution people away from going into trending or fad markets because you don’t know where you’re going to ride, like where you are in that growth pattern. Are you at the top and ready to just fall off? Are you at the bottom of the growth?

Ryan: So what I’m looking for is what I call metronome markets. Metronome markets, just like a metronome, for anyone who’s studied music, it just ticks along, tick, tick, tick. And if you look at the Google trends graph, it’s going to be stable. There may be a little seasonality to it, but it’s stable from one year to the next. So that’s what you’re looking for, markets like that.

Ryan: If you look at a market like orchid care, you’re going to find that it has that pattern. There’s some seasonality to it because it’s a gardening sub-niche, but it is a market that just hums along year after year. So that’s the first thing, but here’s the thing. It’s not enough to just be in an evergreen market. The second market must have is what we call an enthusiast market.

Ryan: Now, an enthusiast market is in contrast to a problem solution market. What do I mean by that? A problem solution market is a market where people have a problem in their life and they go to solve it and then they move on, never wanting to think about it ever again. Perfect example would be something like a flooded basement or removing a wart. Wart removal is a problem solution market. You have a wart. You buy medicine at the store. You’re not blogging about it. You’re not posting about it on social media. You’re not joining wart enthusiast Facebook groups. You’re just getting the problem solved in an … It’s an embarrassing problem. You’re getting it solved, and you’re moving on.

Ryan: Now, in contrast to an enthusiast market, an enthusiast market is a market in which you can sell to the same person multiple products over an extended period of time. It’s the market that you’ve chosen. It’s why people bought your first book, your second book, third book. It’s the reason why people listen to your podcasts like me for, gosh, going on five, six, seven, eight years, right? It’s the reason why people buy all of your courses—because they stay enthusiasts in this market over multiple months, and oftentimes, multiple years.

Ryan: So perfect example of an enthusiast market is orchid care. Orchid care, people buy their first orchid. Oftentimes it leads to the purchase of five, 10, 15, 20 orchids, which leads to building a greenhouse out in the back, which leads to building out a hydroponic system, which leads to growing African violets and succulents, and, “Oh, I grew my first phalaenopsis, but now I want to learn how to grow an oncidium or a dendrobium.” Before you know it, this hobby has just ballooned and mushroomed into this major part of this person’s life. So that’s an example of an enthusiast market. Entrepreneurs: enthusiast market.

Ryan: Interestingly, weight loss and fitness is also an enthusiast market. If you know anybody in your life that’s struggled with their body, typically it’s not just a one and done solution, right? Like for me, I have a personal trainer, I have all sorts of equipment, TRX equipment. I take all sorts of supplements. Like for me, fitness and personal health is a thing that will spend decades in my life. But those are the type of markets you’re looking for. Evergreen, enthusiast, but it’s not enough to just be in an evergreen and enthusiast market. You need market must have number three.

Pat: Before we get into number three, I do have a question about that. So we’re talking about the market being enthusiast, not necessarily your one solution being something that people can come back to or you having a next level for it, right? Because-

Ryan: Correct.

Pat: … I’m thinking about my LEED exam stuff. It’s very much something that people want to take that exam and then they’re done with it, but I could have … That’s the singular tiny market of the LEED exam, but there are more exams people could take. So I could have potentially offered tips and advice and strategies and practice exams for the architectural exam and other ones beyond that. So when it comes to choosing a niche, I’m just wondering how narrow perhaps we should get and how does that narrow the market for us? Or should we potentially go, “Okay, well, this is the first problem I want to solve, but there are other ones that I could potentially go into later and that’s good enough for me to say yes to this”?

Ryan: It’s such a good question. So when we look at your product, we’re focusing on the individual product as opposed to the market itself. So we’re using that-

Pat: Right, like the SwitchPod.

Ryan: … as our case study right now. Right, exactly. So that’s a product within the market that you serve, and it’s one of many things that people will buy. So for example, they buy that product and then maybe there’s another piece of equipment that’s the next purchase for them. Like, so for example, they may need a second one. They may need a course. They may need all sorts of different things that they can purchase.

Ryan: So that’s a sub market within the market that you actually serve, which is people who film themselves typically in a remote environment, right? Like they’re traveling, they’re filming, and that’s why they have that thing, or they’re moving around in some way. Maybe it’s just in their home and office or whatever, but that’s the use case for the product. But it’s a sub market within that.

Ryan: Now I do want to answer your question about size. Let’s get to that after we get through the five market must haves because one of the things I’ll share is one of the biggest insights I’ve had in my entire career spanning anything, which is when I started looking at the market size of my most successful businesses and compared it to the ones that weren’t as successful, I found what we now describe as the market size sweet spot. So we’ve found the right size that’s not too big and not too small. We’ll get back to that. I do want to get through the market must haves first though.

Pat: Good teaser there.

Ryan: Yeah. Of course, got to tease, right? So we’re at number three, right? So we did evergreen markets, number one. Number two enthusiasts, but it’s not enough to be in an enthusiast evergreen market. You also need market must have number three, which is to initially solve an urgent problem in the context of that enthusiast market. So in other words, it’s not enough to just go into the orchid care market. It’s not enough to just go into the dog training market or the guitar market. You have to identify, what is an urgent problem that people need to solve immediately in that space? I’ll give you an example.

Ryan: In the orchid market, the urgent problem that comes up is people go to bed, their orchid is healthy, they wake up the next day, and they flip the light switch on in their kitchen and all the blooms on the orchid have fallen off—out of nowhere. That leads them to say, “Crap, what did I do wrong? Did I give it too much water? Too much humidity? What did I do? What’s going on?” They go online and they type in, “How to get my orchid to re-bloom, how to get the blooms to come back to life.” They’re looking for a solution to that urgent problem that they want to solve right then and there.

Ryan: I’ll give you another example. The dog training market is a perfect market. It’s an evergreen market, man’s best friend. That’s not changing anytime soon. Enthusiast market. Think about all the … If you’re a dog owner, you are in that market for years, right? From the time that you have a little puppy to an older senior dog and everything in between. Oftentimes people have multiple pets that span their entire life. An urgent problem in that market would be, for example, you bring home a new puppy. What happens when you bring home a new puppy? All sorts of things, right? The puppy-

Pat: Pees itself.

Ryan: Yeah, pees everywhere, right? It’s peeing on the carpet, on the couch, on the bed, whatever, so you’ve got to potty train that puppy. So it doesn’t take too many nights of the dog making a mess on the bed or the carpet or the couch before your spouse says, “Honey, we got to deal with this. Like we’ve got to solve this thing,” which leads you to go online and fix it.

Ryan: Another example of an urgent problem. I talk about Dana Obleman in my book Choose. She and her husband built a business called Sleep Sense, and they basically help parents of newborn infants get their newborn baby to sleep through the night. So if you think about when your kids were newborns, right? Think about when you and your wife were not getting good sleep. It’s miserable. Nobody’s happy when no one’s getting good sleep, and it reaches a point where it’s like, “We got to do something about this.” And so they help parents of newborn infants get their kid to sleep through the night for the first time. That’s an example of an urgent problem in the context of an enthusiast market.

Ryan: Now, here’s the thing. When you solve that urgent problem for someone, getting the kid to sleep through the night, potty training the puppy, bringing the orchid back to life, when you solve that urgent problem, you then become that person’s trusted advisor for life in that particular space because people go, “Dana, thank you so much, but here’s the thing, my kid’s not eating. What do I do about it?” Or the orchid is, “This is great, the blooms have come back to life, but I want to bring in a new type of orchid into my home.” Or the potty training, “Thanks for teaching my dog how to go to the bathroom outside, but now my dog is pulling on the leash when I take her outside. How do I get her to behave when I’m going on walks?”

Ryan: That leads us to market must have number four, which is you need to be in a market that has future problems. You need to be in a market that the success of solving that first market leads to demand to solve the next problem in that market. I’ll give you an example. If you teach people how to negotiate a better salary, all of a sudden if I teach you how to get a 10, $15,000 raise, money that you didn’t have before, that creates a new problem that you didn’t yet have, which is, what do I do with this extra money? Like what’s the best way to invest it? Do I put it in my 401(k)? Do I set up a Roth IRA? What’s the best way to use that additional salary to further my financial goals?

Ryan: Well, that’s a problem that that person never had before because they may have been living paycheck to paycheck just being able to cover their expenses. All of a sudden they get this 10, $15,000 a year windfall. What do I do about it? So when you’re in a market where you solve a problem for someone but it creates a new problem, you have future problems that you can solve, you will have a customer for years and years and years and years.

Ryan: The online business space that you and I are both in is a perfect example of that, right? Once you choose your market, what’s the next thing? You’ve got to ask that market what they want. Once you ask them what they want, you’ve got to sell them something. Is it affiliate marketing? Is it starting a podcast? Is it what tech do I need to use? How do I build my email list? How do I build my audience? How to create an audience of Superfans? Every problem that you solve leads to a new problem. It’s what one of my mentors likes to say, “New level, new devil.” And really, what that means is when you have future problems that you can help someone solve, you can have a customer that can span literally decades. They can be a customer of yours for life.

Ryan: That takes us to market must have number five, which is the most important one and that’s this. You need to be in a market that is filled with PWMs, and that stands for players with money. What I mean by that is you can’t sell to broke people, and this is something that a lot of people struggle with. You can’t sell to someone who can’t put a roof over their head, can’t pay their mortgage, can’t put food on the table. If they can’t cover those basics, those essentials, those necessities in their life, they don’t have the money to invest in whatever it is that you want to serve them. Right?

Ryan: I made this mistake one of the first businesses that I went into where, in retrospect, it’s so obvious, but I went into a business that we created called Scrapbooking Bargains. So basically it was a business that we helped people find bargains on supplies for scrapbooking. Now, here’s the thing. Scrapbooking in and of itself is a pretty inexpensive hobby, right? So it’s just, it’s not a hobby like yachting that requires hundreds of thousands of dollars. You and I could start scrapbooking for just getting stuff at the used bookstore. And now to teach people who are bargain hunting in that market. That’s like the bottom of the bottom of the bottom. It was a market for people that don’t want to spend any money at all. So in retrospect, it was a terrible decision, but there’s so many people who go into markets like that.

Ryan: Like for example, I just had a conversation with one of my coaching clients literally yesterday, and she was deciding what market to go into. One of the ideas that she had was helping mental health professionals who are fresh out of school build their business. And I said, “Okay, time out a second. So these are mental health professionals. They’ve gone to school for how many years? How much student loan debt do they have at this point? How much money do they have left over to invest in their business? That’s going to be a challenge.” As much as you may be drawn to serve that market, if you are not in a market with PWMs, players with money, you’re going to struggle.

Ryan: Now, the interesting thing about it is it doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re selling to millionaires or billionaires. What it means is that you’re looking for a pocket of people who have demonstrated to spend a disproportionate amount of their income in that area of their life. So for example, for me, getting my haircut, I get my haircut, it’s like a $15 haircut. I don’t spend any money at all on a haircut. My mom is a hairdresser, so my mom cut my hair growing up, so I just cannot justify spending a lot of money on a haircut. LEGO, I’m a super fan, right? Like I just got the Hogwarts 6,020 piece Hogwarts castle set that’s going to take my kids and I like three months to build. It’s like a $500 set. I’ll spend any amount of money on LEGO. I have literally a blank checkbook when it comes to LEGO. When it comes to LEGO, I’m a PWM, I’m a player with money. I will spend money on that area of my life. And you see it, right?

Ryan: So dog training, a perfect example. People spend crazy amounts of money on their dog, right? Organic dog food and doggy spa days and doggy hotel and all the tchotchke items and leashes and bowls and Christmas ornaments and all the things that people spend on their dog. Crazy amounts of money. So what you’re looking for is a market that is filled with that type of person and has demonstrated a demand among PWMs.

Ryan: So five market must haves. Evergreen market, so it’s not a one and done market. It’s here to stay. Enthusiast market. Can you sell multiple things to the same person in that market over a period of years? Are you solving an urgent problem that they need solving now so that you can become their trusted advisor for life? Number four, are there future problems that you can solve for that person and sell additional products and services to them over time? And finally, PWMs. Are there players with money in the market that you’re looking to solve?

Ryan: So I know, I can see the wheels turning. You’re looking it over. I’m just curious, your initial reaction as you think about at least the product and then the market that you’re selling that product in.

Pat: Yeah. So let’s go through it with the SwitchPod and thank you for that. I have my notes in front of me. So number one, evergreen market. Is there an evergreen market for people who buy video equipment? Absolutely. Ever since the JVC came out in the ’80s, people have been just insane with buying personal cameras and accessories.

Ryan: People want to document life, right? They want to document life, their own life, other people’s life. I feel like that’s a core human element and that’s not changing anytime soon, so check there.

Pat: Right, and YouTube and the vloggers and all that stuff, even though “vlogging” is a newer-ish sort of market. There are players like Casey Neistat and Peter McKinnon who are obviously showing up and helping inspire many, many more people doing it, so it’s definitely not a fad, that’s for sure.

Pat: Number two, enthusiast market versus problem solution. I mean, people go crazy with their videos. It becomes their whole life. They’ve built businesses around it. They travel the world. I don’t think I have to worry about that at all. So we fit that.

Ryan: Check.

Pat: Number three, solves an urgent problem. Yes, this is exactly why we built this product. It solves a problem of being able to quickly take your camera with you, pack it away nicely, but then deploy it into tripod mode in just a few seconds, and that was the urgent problem that we’ve solved. The interesting thing about this is, now that people have seen that we’ve solved this little problem, we have hoards of people coming to us now going, “Pat, Caleb, I have this other kind of way that I shoot. Can you build a product to help me with that?” And we’re like, “All right, “so we have this whole backlog of different kinds of rigs and things that we could do with or even brand new products to help people in this. So they are coming to us and going, “Oh, you’re builders in the vlogger space? I need this now too,” which is really exciting.

Ryan: That’s awesome. So solving the urgent problem, and that’s immediately segued perfectly into number four, future problems. Your market is telling you, “These are the additional problems that I need help solving. Pat, can you help me solve these problems?”

Pat: Right. Exactly. And so one clear example is, “Pat, I’m using the SwitchPod but I want to add some lights and stuff to it too. The lighting now that I have the ability to shoot here is not as good.” So, okay, we can create some accessories and solve those problems in all kinds of different ways. And then definitely, I mean, something that’s very favorable for us in this market of videographers is that videographers, as you know, love to spend money on gear. So there’s definitely players with money for sure. So I think it fits the bill, and we’re seeing the results of it right now. I think we did pretty well with that.

Ryan: You did really well. And I’ll say, you hit the nail on the head on the PWM piece, which is the barrier to entry in this particular market from a amount of money you need to spend is relatively high. That’s a good indicator, right? So for example, in contrast, video is a hobby or a part of your job, but it’s a thing that requires a fair amount of money to get started versus, let’s say, playing chess. You can get a chess board at a flea market for probably 10 bucks, and you could have that one chess board that you keep with you for the rest of your life. Video equipment is this never ending … I mean, I’m in my studio right now and I’m just looking at dollar signs of like every camera and light and microphone and the truss and everything that we have here, it’s just a fortune for all this stuff. So when you’re thinking about, is this a market with PWMs, ask yourself, what’s the barrier of entry into that market in terms of how much money people need to spend?

Pat: What do you tell somebody who’s listening to this and they’re going, “Oh, crap, I do not have PWMs in my niche. What do I do?”

Ryan: Well, I would ask … Yeah, so the first thing I would ask is, if you’re having overwhelming success, by all means, don’t let this slow you down, right? There’s an exception to every rule, right? So if you’re knocking it out of the park and you’re saying, “Well, I only check off maybe three out of five of these boxes but things are going great,” don’t let anything that I’m saying here dissuade you from continuing up that path.

Ryan: However, if you’re struggling, if you’re not making the progress that you want to be making, take an open and honest look. I’ve made every mistake in the book, right? So PWMs, one of my first businesses, teaching people how to improve their memory. I did that because I studied neuroscience in college. I wanted to make my parents happy and use my degree in some way because I wasn’t going into medical school, and so I built this business, Rocket Memory. I thought, “This is brilliant. I’m going to teach people how to improve their memory.” Who did I attract? Broke students, people who were studying for their LSATs, the LEED exam, MCATs. They were studying for standardized tests and they needed to memorize a huge amount of information so they were buying our program.

Ryan: These were broke students. When I was a college student, I didn’t have any money at all. Well, I only knew that in retrospect. So, sometimes the answer is you can make a pivot in a different direction and make a tweak in your business and find something that does check off these boxes. Sometimes though it’s better to just, “You know what? I’m going to hit the pause button on this thing, and I’m going to go in a different direction altogether,” but again, just take a close hard look at where you’re at, and if you’re hitting the results you want to hit, keep going, and if not, this is a good rubric, a good framework to help evaluate the market that you’re thinking about going into.

Pat: And I would imagine that there might be an opportunity for, if you are targeting a niche where perhaps you are offering things to people who may not have the money to invest in you and your products right now, you could potentially stay in the same market but offer that to people in a much more white glove fashion or in a much more accessible fashion to people who wouldn’t essentially pay for it. So instead of bargain bins scrapbooking stuff, like let’s stay in scrapbooking, but let’s go high end to the person who lives in that really affluent community to create an experience with them and their kids and do it that way. Have fewer clients paying you more. You could stay in the same niche, but just decide who within that niche you want to target instead.

Ryan: Exactly. Sometimes it’s just a minor pivot that makes all the difference in the world, like that woman I mentioned who wanted to help mental health professionals looking to start their first business. Just shifting to mental health professionals that have a successful practice that they want to go from a brick and mortar practice to building an online presence, that one shift alone is enough for her to be successful, and that’s the path that she’s on, and she is experiencing success. So sometimes it is just a minor tweak like that that makes all the difference.

Pat: Love it. And to finish up here, I mean, number one, everybody should definitely go get your book. I think we have a special link actually where you can go get it for free with just paying for shipping, right? What is that link?

Ryan: Choosethebook.com/SPI.

Pat: Go there, get it. Choosethebook.com/SPI
Choosethebook.com/spi. You can get it for free. Just pay for shipping and get some other bonuses there too. You’ll see it on that page. Choosethebook.com/SPI. But I don’t want to leave people hanging. There is a market size sweet spot that you mentioned earlier. What is that?

Ryan: There’s two sweet spots. So in addition to these five market must haves, there’s two sweet spots. One has to do with size, one has to do with competition, and they both fall within an optimal range that you’re looking for. So let’s start with size. So I looked at every single one of our most successful businesses, and I’m going to lead with this caveat: My experience has largely been in spaces where I’m selling education and expertise. What do I mean by that? Teaching online courses, coaching and consulting, doing live events, as opposed to physical e-commerce products. So I’m going to lead with this massive caveat that what I’m about to say applies to this specific type of business, so podcasting, online courses, anywhere where you’re sharing your knowledge or other people’s knowledge and you’re transforming that into income.

Ryan: And so what I looked at is every single one of our businesses, the most successful, the least successful, and what I found is that every single one of our most successful businesses fell within a very narrow range on Google Trends. And in the book Choose, I made the very difficult decision to reveal with the world my most successful businesses, what they are, what the keywords are, what we call your bullseye keyword, which is something I teach how to come up with in your book, how do you identify what your bullseye keyword is, and how to compare your market idea against what I call the Rosetta Stone keywords. So just like the Rosetta Stone translating Greek and hieroglyphics, and it was kind of the key, you can plug in your keyword idea against these reference keywords and know—does your market idea fit within the sweet spot? Is it too big? Is it too small? And if it’s in the sweet spot, you’ve got a green light. If it’s outside the sweet spot, it’s a yellow light or a red light to help decide if you want to move forward.

Ryan: Similar to that, there’s also a competition sweet spot. The best way to measure competition online is to look at how much money people are spending on paid advertising on that keyword. You’re looking for a market where there is evidence of people spending money but not so much competition that you’re going to be eaten alive. And it’s sort of the old adage, people always do one of two things with competition. They either get super excited that nobody else has their idea or they get super bummed out that other people are doing it, and both of those are problematic because the thing that you want to look for is a market where people are succeeding in spite of themselves.

Ryan: One of my mentors once taught me that you want to be a settler, not a pioneer. Pioneers get shot, but settlers get rich. So find a market where other people are succeeding in spite of themselves. And once again, in Choosethebook.com/SPI, I reveal all the formulas, all the process for measuring paid advertising online, how to do it using free tools and free resources, so you can be in that perfect size sweet spot, perfect competition sweet spot, and check off the five market must haves.

Ryan: The last thing I’ll say is this, with with this free book that we wanted to give away to everyone listening to this right now, I also have a resource. It’s normally a paid resource. I’m just going to give it to everyone for free, which is a list of 100 markets that actually check off all five of the market must haves, fit inside the market size sweet spot and the competition sweet spot. This is my personal list. I mentioned I went into 23 different markets. This is the next 100 markets that I would be going into if I had the time that passed all of these tests. I’m just going to give that to folks for free. So if you want to just pick a market off that list, you can do that, or compare your market to one of those, and give you a bunch of examples.

Ryan: So I’m hoping that’s going to be super helpful, and Pat, I just want to say thanks so much for the opportunity to be sharing this here today.

Pat: Yeah, thank you, Ryan. Choosethebook.com/SPI. Thanks again, man. Appreciate you. Hoping to have you back on the show in the future, but thanks for all the value that you offer and everybody should check out the book and check out that free resource, and appreciate you, man. Thank you so much.

Ryan: Thanks, Pat.

Pat: All right, I hope you enjoyed that interview with Ryan Levesque. Again, the author of Choosethebook.com/SPI. You can check out his book at choosethebook.com/SPI and get it shipped to you for free. You just got to pay for shipping. Well, I guess not shipped for free, but anyway, it’s a small dollar amount for what you get. Choosethebook.com/SPI. You can also check out the show notes at smartpassiveincome.com/session411. Smartpassiveincome.com/session411.

Pat: And finally, just want to know what you think about this episode. Look me up on Instagram or Twitter @PatFlynn. Let me know what you think. If you enjoyed this episode, want to share it, feel free to do that, and I just appreciate you so much. Team Flynn, you’re amazing. Keep up the great work, and I look forward to serving you in the next few episodes. Make sure you subscribe if you haven’t already, and as always, Team Flynn for the win. Cheers.

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