Soulful MBA Podcast

In this episode, we discuss a major pivot that we’re currently experiencing in our software business. We’re branching out beyond the yoga and wellness industry, which runs counter to everything we were taught about niching down into a very specific market. Learn why we’ve decided to make this risky decision, what we’re doing to smooth out the transition, and what advice we have for you if you’re considering a major pivot in your own life or business.Other Mentions: Lightroom and Photoshop for Bloggers Joy: Adobe LightroomHustle: FREE COURSE: Become an Online Teacher

Instagram can a fantastic platform for connecting authentically with your audience. Although it seems natural to focus primarily on the images you’re posting, we want to encourage you to focus just as much on your captions. Micro-blogging is the practice of creating information-packed, short-form blog posts that accompany social media images. Doing this allows you to convey important news, helpful tips, and other rich content quickly and effectively, without having to write and promote a traditional 500-800 word blog post. We love to use Instagram for micro-blogging and here are six strategies you can use to build community and trust through your posts: Be short and sweet. Make sure that your content is unique and original. Lead with the most important information early on in the post. Encourage comments and interaction. Share relevant tips and tricks for your followers. Offer a peek behind the curtain.

“I am not lucky. You know what I am? I am smart, I am talented, I take advantage of the opportunities that come my way and I work really, really hard. Don’t call me lucky. Call me a badass.” - Shonda Rhimes This episode explores the juxtaposition between luck and hustle. Ultimately, we believe that luck, flow, determination, and hustle all come into play in the ability we have to achieve our goals. Perhaps it’s a divine responsibility to go after your dreams when you’re born into this lucky of a situation (i.e. anyone listening to this podcast)? If you identify at all as an entrepreneur, you are likely driven to build something and grow every single day. That’s hustle. If you’re called to build something new in the world, we encourage you pursue it with all reasonable effort. Other Mentions: Flow, Julie Arora Joy: Brave Women + Female Entrepreneurs Pinterest BoardHustle: Make Room for Magic

Today’s episode dives into the Japanese concept of ikigai, which roughly translates to “a reason to live” or “a reason to get out of bed in the morning.” To find your own ikigai, experts recommend that you answer the following four questions: What do you love? What are you good at? What does the world need from you? What can you get paid for? In an ideal situation, you are able to build a career and a life around your answers to these questions. We discovered the concept of ikigai after creating our own core values assessment exercise, and we were astonished to see that the exercises overlap quite a bit. Other Mentions: Is this Japanese concept the secret to a long, happy, meaningful life?, How To Find Your Ikigai And Transform Your Outlook On Life And Business Joy: Spring Dragon Longevity Tea (U.S.), Gynostemma Tea (Canada)Hustle: Masterclass

As you learned in last week’s Office Hours episode, incorporating targeted keyword phrases into your blog content is essential. Those SEO-driving phrases need to be sprinkled throughout all of your content, but you can also benefit from placing them strategically in a few more places. This episode shares our specific recommendations on where else to load up your keywords within a blog/podcast/vlog post: The post URL: WordPress, Blogger, Squarespace, and many other blogging platforms allow you to alter the URLs of your posts, so take advantage of that flexibility! The post title: It’s essential that your post title include your target keyword phrase since titles are among the top elements examined by search engine algorithms. The name of the featured or primary image for the page/post: When editing and saving your images, name them using your keyword phrase. Also add your keyword phrase to the “alt text” and “title” fields when you upload the image via WordPress/Squarespace/Blogger. Any relevant internal links: Linking to other posts on your blog helps keep readers circulating through your content. When you do this, be sure to link related keyword phrases instead of simple directives like “click here.” The first paragraph of text in the post and/or the first subheading: You don’t want to hammer on this phrase too much, but working it into the first few lines of body copy is vital to your SEO efforts. The names of any additional images The final paragraph of text For more information on how to incorporate SEO into your online business, check out this blog post (with screenshots)!

“The words you speak become the house you live in.” - Hafiz We’re discussing all things related to #girlboss culture in today’s episode. We would never consider using the term #girllawyer or #girldoctor, so it’s fascinating that this child archetype been so widely adopted by women in business. How does this self-imposed characterization impact us, both individually and culturally? According to a recent New York Times article, “female entrepreneurship is on the rise because gender equality efforts in the workplace to address issues like the salary gap and advancement to positions on corporate boards have stalled.” Entrepreneurship is increasingly becoming the answer for women who are fed up with glass ceilings or a biased workplace. But once women venture into entrepreneurship, the gendered stereotypes are overwhelming and we can’t help but worry that some self-sabotage is at play... Joy: OmmwriterHustle: We Should All Be Feminists, Ted Talk

The advice most brick-and-mortar businesses owners are given when they first start out is “location, location, location.” For online business owners, the equivalent advice is “SEO, SEO, SEO.” SEO, or search engine optimization, is a series of practices that makes your web content easy for search engines to find, understand, and recommend to their users. A search engine’s job is deliver relevant and authoritative content to the people using their platforms. Your job as an online entrepreneur is to load your content with appropriate keywords to help those search engines find you and your work. Many of the businesses we work with, ourselves included, receive more than half of their traffic from organic Google search. Listen in to learn how you can start optimizing your content to get seen by more people.

We had the honor of interviewing the co-founders of Bravery Magazine, Elyse Beard and Ashley Aikele. Ashley and Elyse met seven years ago and have dreamed of doing something big ever since their friendship started. At first they dreamed of opening up a shaved ice shack, but years later they finally had an idea that stuck...Bravery! The idea for Bravery Mag was born from their shared frustration at the lack of kid-friendly resources to help teach their children about bravery and strong female role models. In 2017, the ran a Kickstarter campaign to fund their idea and they were fully funded in three days. Ashley and Elyse hail from small towns in neighboring states (Ashley-Idaho, Elyse-Utah) and, between the two of them, they have five children. They have a few key things in common (like their love for rice-crispy treats and The Office), but mostly they are an opposites-attract-kind-of-duo. Elyse has a background in education and handles all the writing for the magazine while Ashley has a background in Advertising and handles the design. They both swear they couldn't have picked a better business partner and have loved seeing their friendship reach a new level. Other Mentions: Bravery Magazine, Bravery’s Kickstarter Joy: family time, Acai BowlsHustle: Big Magic, How I Made This

If you’ve been listening to the podcast for any length of time, then you know that we’re not fans of discounting. Here are some of the reasons why discounting is bad news for your business: Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) are increasing across the board. Discounting creates a race to the bottom in your industry. Pricing too low attracts the wrong customers. Selling cheap products tarnishes your brand. What should you do instead? Differentiate yourself with these strategies: Tell your story. Share your essence. Create unique offerings in your niche. Bundle! Keep the price the same, but add something extra to it.

“Just is a word that minimizes whatever follows. And somehow I got it in my head that adding that little ‘just’ in there made whatever request I had smaller, easier to handle, and less of an inconvenience to whoever I was emailing. Basically, it’s another word for sorry.” - Chelsea Stone The podcast gets personal this week. After releasing more than 60 episodes, we want to check in about the observation that we use a lot of qualifiers like “just” and “actually” in our speech and dialog with one another. We know we do it, we know that it’s an expression of internalized sexism, and we believe that it undermines our authority. “It’s not a huge deal, is it? But language shapes consciousness...” - Tracy Moore This episode is our commitment to doing better, owning our power, and standing in our leadership. Want to join us? Joy: Just Not Sorry (Chrome Extension)Hustle: 'Just' Say No, Google Exec: Women, Stop Saying 'Just' So Much, You Sound Like Children

Blogging is a powerful way to build your brand online, but it’s also pretty time-intensive. Since you’re putting in all of that effort to draft, edit, post, and promote, how else can you repurpose your blog content give it some additional legs in your business? Here are 9 strategies that we’ve used to repurpose content within our own company: Sharing on Facebook (both within Groups and on Business Pages) Discussing the post on Facebook Live Discussing the post on YouTube Micro-blogging about the post on Instagram Sharing the post in an Insta-story Recording a Podcast about the topic (or uploading audio to Soundcloud) Creating relevant Pins and Infographics (if applicable) Building an email sequence or email course on the topic Turning the post into a future opt-in

In this episode, we chat with Danielle Joseph of Function Creative Co. Danielle is responsible for the branding of our podcast (and the design of the podcast’s website), but she is a talented entrepreneur in her own right. Danielle discusses her journey from employee to becoming the founder of her own design agency and shares some tips for working with designers (such as the one skill she wishes that all of her clients could learn). Other Mentions: Function Creative Co., The Brand Planner, Playing Big, Worth It: Your Life, Your Money, Your Terms Joy: Chef’s Plate Hustle: Adobe Creative Cloud

Pinterest is a powerful tool for anyone who runs an online business. A whopping 92% of our social traffic comes from the platform, so it's time we share with you our secret sauce: Promoted Pins. With Facebook Ads, you generally target people by demographic or psychographic information. With Pinterest, you can target by search terms (i.e., you only pay to expose your advertisement to people who are already looking for what you’re selling). In this episode, we share seven tips for optimizing your Promoted Pins: authenticity use text overlays strategically optimize pin descriptions with keywords create vertical pins to take up more real estate on the screen try out a collage (such as a yoga sequence broken down by pose or a recipe broken down by step) be sure to include your logo or website on your image (People steal!) don’t use hashtags

Starting an online business? You need to run (not walk) to go hire a virtual assistant (VA). At least that’s the conventional wisdom we were told when we first started this entrepreneurial journey... We’ve streamlined our team in recent months and taken over tasks that were once delegated to virtual assistants and agencies and it has been THE VERY BEST decision we could have made for our business. We call this process “insourcing,” and although we naively thought we coined the term, it turns out to be a well-studied business phenomenon. (Heck, even the Obama Administration had a directive on insourcing back in 2012.) When is the right time to insource vs. outsource? Listen in to learn the powerful strategies that we’ve uncovered to increase our revenue while cutting costs and reducing stress and anxiety in our business.Joy: Hand Wash Cold: Care Instructions for an Ordinary LifeHustle: Tailwind (This post contains affiliate links. If you click through to purchase, we may receive a small credit or commission at no extra cost to you.)

Given that your business and personal life are likely to overlap, should you create a separate Instagram account for your business? Many online entrepreneurs consider their personalities to be part of their brands. A single account shows you walk the talk without getting overly sales-focused. If you mix business and personal, that balance makes your online presence feel more authentic and grounded. If you have a partnership like we do (or a larger team), on the other hand, you’ll need to create a separate account. You’ll also want to consider opening a separate business account if you’d like to keep your personal life more private (or if your personal posts seem like too much of a departure from your business).

In this episode, we discuss our theory of why tools like Snapchat and Instagram Stories have become so popular (and why they worry us at times). We’ve been wrestling for months with our opinions about ephemeral content on social media. Why, as entrepreneurs, would it make sense to put time into creating content that’s fleeting? At the same time, ephemeral content is often refreshingly honest and unscripted. Joy: Baron Fig Lock + Key Hustle: Plann

Today’s episode dives into strategies for using hashtags (on both Instagram and Pinterest) to grow your online following. Hashtags allow your posts to become searchable on social media, so it’s a powerful way to get new eyes on your content. For Instagram, we recommend that you: Research the hashtags that influencers in your niche are using and exploe the hashtags that your quintessential clients are including in their posts as well Mix up your hashtag blocks so that you don’t get shadowbanned For Pinterest, we recommend that you: Use 4-6 hashtags max in your Pin descriptions Don’t use hashtags in promoted (paid) Pins Don’t waste your time revisiting old Pins to incorporate hashtags Incorporate at least one long-tail keyword hashtag in ALL of your Pins moving forward (to create a curated feed if someone clicks the tag)

“We are being sold on the need to upgrade all parts of ourselves, all at once, including parts that we did not previously know needed upgrading.” - Alexandra Schwartz It’s a brand new year, so that means our culture is abuzz with the aspirational narcissism of self development. In this episode, we discuss our opinions on New Year’s resolutions, the self help movement, and our society’s increasing focus on productivity. Other Mentions: Improving Ourselves to Death, Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials Joy: Grain Mill Hustle: Calendly Chrome Extension

Today’s episode is Part 2 of our quick overview of online challenges. (You can listen to Part 1 here.) Offering a challenge can work wonders for your email list, but only if that challenge truly appeals to your audience. You’ll want to be strategic at every step in the process. Here are our tips for creating a successful email-based online challenge: Find out what your audience wants. If you offer a 10-day core strength challenge but your readers are more interested in meditation, you’ll get far fewer new subscribers. Utilize polls, track your own stats to see which articles and other content users are reading, and start conversations on Facebook to test the waters before settling on a topic. Make sure your challenge is unique. OK, it doesn’t have to be one-of-a-kind, but it certainly can’t be dime-a-dozen! Pick an angle, add a twist, and find a way to customize your offering. Keep it short and make it doable. Length is key. Too short and you don’t get bankable buy-in from new readers, too long and participants lose interest. Most experts recommend seven to 10 days for an online challenge. Make your challenge meaty, but not overwhelming (aim for participant actions steps that take under 10-15 minutes per day). Promote, promote, promote. Buy Facebook ads, post promos to Instagram, start a challenge-specific pin board, create a series of YouTube videos, post daily reminders to your blog, or commit to a daily Facebook Live broadcast. Tell everyone everywhere about the stellar challenge you’ve created, and (gently) nudge them to sign up. Incorporate interactivity. It may be tempting to write every word of your content challenge ahead of time and then step back and watch it all unfold, but resist the urge to remove yourself. Online challenges that include a social or interactive component are far more popular and effective. Don’t forget to follow up! Hopefully your challenge doubled or tripled your list, but don’t just congratulate yourself and move on. As we mentioned earlier, these folks are now primed to buy from you, so consider offering challenge participants a deal on one of your products or classes. If nothing else, prep and send a quick poll to find out what worked and what didn’t so you can tweak the challenge for its next round.

In this episode, we summarize our big picture approach to online marketing. We see so much excitement among our clients about their teaching content, but all too often, marketing is an afterthought. We have four basic suggestions for getting your brand in front of new people: Master the Hashtag. Incorporate SEO. Invest in Paid Marketing. Be an Inspired Guest. Once you’ve got someone’s attention, how do you keep them interested in your brand? Get them on your email list via a generous, free opt-in offer. Create and share great free content on a regular basis. Send out a regular newsletter that showcases your free content. Add a call-to-action to your social media platforms at least once per week. Joy: Clear Window Bird Feeder Hustle: linktree

Today’s episode is Part 1 of our quick overview of online challenges. An online challenge is a multi-step, user-driven series of activities guided by pre-written content. Challenge creators are usually trying to build their followings, and the challenge itself offers subscribers a tangible, fun, motivating reward for signing up.Online challenges can be run through blogs, Facebook Groups, Instagram, virtually any online medium, but if you’re aiming to build your email list, your challenge should be email-based.A well-crafted challenge can:teach your subscribers to open your emailsbuild rapport and connection with your communityhighlight your expertise as a teacher or coachprime subscribers to purchaseTune into next week’s office hours episode to hear our favorite strategies for building an impactful challenge!

“Singularity is the source of innovation.” — Carol Sanford Although new entrepreneurs can benefit from initial coaching and mentorship, your value proposition ultimately comes from your unique essence. In this episode, we discuss the work of Carol Sanford and the reason why it is so important to identify your business’s essence. In some ways, essence is related to branding, but your business’s essence is bigger than its brand. As Sanford notes, “Essence is unique to each company, and cannot be made up...It is similar to the uniqueness each child has in a family. Children prosper best when their essence is honored and contributed. Only years later will you know their brand and how they apply it to their work in the world. They will be most successful and creative when their life and work are aligned with their essence. The same is true for business.” So many potential clients reach out to us asking “How can I possibly be successful when there are so many other yoga teachers, health coaches, fill-in-the-blanks, online already?” The answer we always give is “But they’re not YOU.” The world doesn’t need a handful of famous, untouchable gurus. Human beings crave connection and there are people that can benefit from YOUR unique way of teaching, coaching, and serving. Other Mentions: Quintessential Business Workshop Joy: @carissabaktayHustle: Finding Your Company’s Essence – and Using it for Growth, What Is Regeneration? Part 4 – Singularity, The Regenerative Business

Being the founders of a software company, we kind of geek out on software tools. In today’s Office Hours episode, we dive into our favorite apps for new online business owners. Project Management: We love Trello best, but Asana is great too. Personal Email, Word Processing, Spreadsheets: G Suite Graphic Design: Canva Online Teaching Platform: Namastream Payment Processor: Stripe Video Editing: iMovie Email Marketing: Convertkit Website/Blog: Squarespace Team Communication: Slack

All of us, to some extent, borrow from others, from the culture around us. Ideas are in the air, and we may appropriate, often without realizing, the phrases and language of the times. We borrow language itself; we did not invent it. We found it, we grew up into it, though we may use it, interpret it, in very individual ways. What is at issue is not the fact of “borrowing” or “imitating,” of being “derivative,” being “influenced,” but what one does with what is borrowed or imitated or derived; how deeply one assimilates it, takes it into oneself, compounds it with one’s own experiences and thoughts and feelings, places it in relation to oneself, and expresses it in a new way, one’s own. — Oliver Sacks Inspired by Austin Kleon’s book, Steal Like an Artist, and the writing of Oliver Sacks, this episode is devoted to the topic of emulation. To what extent should copying or stealing impact our work? We believe that everyone benefits from an incubation period, where we are immersed in the work of others, but that the key to becoming successful is making it your own and producing original work. Other Mentions: Oliver Sacks on the Three Essential Elements of Creativity Joy: Good and Well Supply Co. Perfume BalmHustle: Steal Like an Artist

Gamification involves taking an application or an online community and integrating game mechanics into it to motivate participation, increase engagement, and foster loyalty. In other words, gamification is the process of applying psychological triggers to tech products in order to manipulate the way we behave. We, as humans, are animals who are hardwired to respond to incentives (and disincentives) in certain ways. We should all understand some of these basic triggers so that we can know when (and how) we’re being manipulated. We believe that when you understand the underpinnings of human behavior, and you have the power to build psychological triggers into a technology product, you have an obligation to ensure that you’re wielding that power responsibly. Unfortunately, it seems that many founders take this responsibility for granted. What we’ve tried to do within our own software platform is to ensure that incentives are tied to meaningful accomplishment rather than contrived, artificial rewards. Intentionality is key. Joy: The Light PhoneHustle: Hooked, Nir Eyal’s work

If you want to create professional looking videos for your online business, good lighting is mission critical. Lighting is an art form that can seem intimidating when you’re first starting out as an online teacher, but this episode shares some basics to get you started without the stress. When setting up your lighting, you’ll want to keep these three simple goals in mind: Make the featured speaker (you!) look fabulous (i.e., prioritize lighting yourself over your background). Make your setting look welcoming and natural. Eliminate shadows, especially on your face. Here’s a fabulous, inexpensive lighting kit (similar to the one that Jeni uses), as well as a simple DIY tutorial for creating your own!

This week’s episode dives into our favorite finds of 2017, along with a hearty dose of reflection. Listen in to learn why we love the following books, tools, thinkers, and ideas: Best Books: Deep Work, Drop the BallBest Netflix Shows: The Crown, Brojects, Reno My RenoBest Purchases: Madewell High Rise Jeans, Bellicon, Denim Jogger, Jamie Joseph RingsMost Influential People: Austin Kleon, Kelly DielsFavorite Instagram Accounts: @hellofunction, @code_likeagirlBest Decisions: restructuring our team, starting our podcastFavorite Articles: Life is a Video Game—Here are the Cheat Codes, 1,000 True Fans, Zebras Fix What Unicorns BreakBest Podcast Episodes: Sheryl O’Loughlin on Good Life Project, Danielle LaPorte on The Lively ShowBest Conference: Craft + CommerceWords of the Year: Flourish, Implementation Other Mentions: The Royal Family on Instagram

Many online teachers and coaches don’t realize that live-streaming can be a fantastic way to build the foundation for a new online business. If you leverage live-streaming wisely, you don’t have to have a single piece of pre-made content ready prior to taking your business online. So long as you have a basic website or Namastream site up and running, you can start offering live-stream sessions immediately. There are multiple way to leverage live-streaming, but these three are the most common and effective, which is also why we’ve built them into Namastream: One-on-One Private Sessions Collaborative Small Group Sessions Broadcasts You need far less equipment for a successful live-streamed class that you’d need to create high-quality pre-recorded video content. Whenever you use Skype or go live on Facebook, you just use your webcam, right? Well, it’s exactly the same for live-streaming. As long as you have a built-in camera, you’re good to go live! (With that said, our very favorite live-streaming tool, the Logitech C920 webcam, provides an unbelievably crisp picture quality for around $50.) Other Mentions: Blue Yeti, Rode RodeLink FM Wireless Filmmaker System

“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” — Audre Lorde A flyway is an ecological term that describes a migratory bird route. It’s also the name of an incredibly forward-thinking investment firm founded by Hillary Strobel. We met Hillary at DazzleCon ‘17 and were immediately taken aback by her humility and unique attitude about investing. As a single mother with a background in literature and nonprofit management, Hillary made the bold and unconventional choice to start a social impact investment firm founded on the principle of “patient capital.”We both loved interviewing Hillary and left the conversation deeply inspired and hopeful about the possibility of business to be a vehicle for service. Other Mentions: The Flyways, Wefunder Joy: self-preservationHustle: lifelong learning

In this episode, we discuss some of the differences in pricing online memberships vs. online courses. For memberships, you’ll want to anchor your prices to your local economy. A monthly online yoga membership, for example, should cost roughly the same amount as a single drop-in class in your area. If your students are used to spending more for in-person classes, they’ll be comfortable spending a bit more for online programs, too. Pricing for online courses vary widely in cost, much more so than memberships. Most of our clients price their offerings based on the following two factors: Amount of content: The more you offer, the higher the price tag can be. Demand: A highly specialized package might appeal to a smaller audience and require a lower price point. A more general (but still niched!) offering can skew a bit higher. We recommend that all online courses be priced at least $97 USD. Any product you offer is going to take some serious work to build and hone, and you’ll want to be in a position to recoup your investment! Additionally, selling fixed-price offerings in the $20 to $30 range forces you to scramble to sell more units and devalues your expertise. Finally, we’ve got to circle back to the concept of undercharging. DO NOT undervalue yourself, your business, and your entire industry by offering inexpensive products, programs, or services. We can’t emphasize this strongly enough. Underpricing sets you up to be in a constant scramble to meet your financial goals, and creates a negative energetic relationship between you and your clients. Resentment is dangerous territory, folks. Please charge what you’re worth.

“I’m not at the top of my field, but I’m also a long ways from the bottom.” — Nathan Barry Establishing yourself as an authority figure in your niche is paramount to sustaining a business and growing a following online. Consistent content creation, be it in the form of a blog, a podcast, or a Facebook Live or YouTube show, is the best way we can think of to become known as an authority within your community. If you’re interested in becoming a blogger or beginning a writing project, a great place to start is Medium. Alternatively, if you want to go all-in, check out the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and challenge yourself to write a full book within a single month. Other Mentions: Sex & Startups, Zebras Fix What Unicorns Break, How to Get Published on the Huffington Post, Seth’s Blog Joy: Why You Should Write DailyHustle: Authority

In our very first installment of Soulful MBA’s Office Hours, we’re going to share our 7-factor framework for pricing your online programs: Location: If you’re aiming to build a global brand online, location won’t be nearly as essential. But if you run a yoga studio in your hometown, or operate a hybrid of in-person and online services, your initial client base will come from your local community. Which means you need to make sure that your prices are appropriate for the people who live within that community. Demand: If you have a product that’s created for a specific audience, you need to take a hard look at how many other people are offering similar products to the same customer base. You also need to weigh how popular your subject is among the folks in your target market. Amount of content: A fully loaded, content-packed 12-week program should be priced very differently from a streamlined 3-week program. Similarly, if you’re hosting a community and can offer members 100 stellar videos, you’ll be able to charge more than if you’ve only got 10 videos in the bag. Production quality: This is where most folks get hung up. If you’re a newbie to videos and handling everything yourself, you simply can’t charge as much as someone who employs a professional film crew. That said, you should absolutely start wherever you’re at right now! As your business grows, begin investing in better tools and more help, and let your pricing reflect those improvements. Background and experience: If you’re a brand new teacher or coach, you’d be wise to charge a little bit less than someone with decades of experience. It’s what your customers will expect. Competition: You want to carve out a place in the market for yourself where you’re not facing a tidal wave of competition. A little competition is actually essential; It validates the viability of your offerings. But throwing yourself into a saturated space and selling the same products as dozens of other experts is a recipe for disaster. Revenue goals: Your pricing should account for your specific income goals, and the products you offer at various price points should be built around those goals. If you have to hit a certain dollar mark each month, you need to know how many of each product must sell to reach that goal. And you need to ensure that selling that number of products each month is truly feasible for you. Creating a fair and sustainable pricing structure for your business will take some research and careful calculation, but it’s well worth the effort. Tune into next week’s Office Hours episode, where we will discuss the different strategies we recommend for pricing online memberships vs. online courses!

We’re fifty episodes into this project, so we thought it would be fun to share a bit of personal reflection on this whole podcasting adventure so far. Listen in to hear about our most important (and surprising) lessons as new podcasters, discover the one episode that we almost didn’t release, and check out what’s next for the show. Other Mentions: Good Life Project, Voice-only communication enhances empathic accuracy. Joy: Aston HALOHustle: SuperHi: Learn to Code Now

After spending many months feeling uneasy about the public face of our brand, we’ve made the decision to consciously “embody” the company. We’ve chosen to do this in three ways: by being very open and honest about our Story by being intentional about our use of Imagery by making decisions from our Values In an era when products and services are increasingly commodified, we believe that embodiment can serve as an antidote. By showcasing our businesses as natural extensions of ourselves, we can bring much-needed authenticity and human connection into the economy. Other Mentions: @hellofunction, Jen Wende, The Four Agreements Joy: Sarah Wilson || first, we make the beast beautifulHustle: Burt’s Buzz

Known for her expertise as a renowned Facebook ads strategist, Amanda Bond gets real with us in this episode about the mindset hurdles she’s had to overcome in order to find success in her business. Amanda has learned to come to terms with her fear of not being “enough” by surrounding herself with people who support her, whether it’s through mindset coaching or within mastermind communities. She’s also learned how to lean into her fears over time and through her daily experience as an entrepreneur. Amanda encourages all of us to view our marketing as expansive (rather than fear-based)… How can we nurture people towards making a better decision for them? How can we create an attractive brand that people are magnetized toward? How can we intuitively find alignment in our businesses? Joy: Brain.fmHustle: Old-school Clipboards Connect with Amanda: The Ad Strategist Facebook Page

After sifting through our own clients’ stories (as well as the experiences of our friends and colleagues in online business), we’ve observed that it takes about eighteen months of consistent daily action in order to create a significant recurring revenue base — what some folks refer to as passive income. After taking hundreds of our community members through a free 5-Day Challenge last month, where we helped them go from idea to first paying customer, the same question came up over and over… “This was amazing, but what happens next?” Although asking for the first sale is often the hardest for many of us venturing into entrepreneurship, what happens between day five and day five hundred is what really matters. Consistent daily action sets the stage for predictable recurring revenue. There’s no magic sauce. You need to put in the daily work to see the payoff later. Because so many of our clients were confused about which specific steps to take to grow their online teaching businesses, we built the Soulful MBA. Here’s a peek at our six-phase course roadmap, where we’ve outlined our best thinking on how to start, develop, and grow a teaching business online: Phase 1 - Build Your Foundation Phase 2 - Develop Your Voice Phase 3 - Create Your Offering Phase 4 - Excite Your Audience Phase 5 - Launch Your Offering Phase 6 - Fine Tuning Other Mentions: Soulful MBA Course Joy: encircledHustle: Joseph Campbell’s Routine

The Internet is chock full of people who are famous for being famous (or famous for teaching other people how to become famous). It’s exhausting. But we worry that this is more than a mere annoyance. The danger, we fear, is that SO many people with real gifts (and a true calling to teach and serve) are holding themselves back because their lives don’t look like what they see online. And although we’re in the online business space ourselves, we are constantly impressed with the meaningful work that’s being done daily by our own community online. This is a love letter to our people and a whisper of encouragement to KEEP GOING. Joy: MÛR Lifestyle Hustle: JOBY GorillaPod

So many people in our community share the dream of building an online business, but feel overwhelmed by the process. We’ve taken the entire journey from idea to first customer and distilled it into a free 5-Day Challenge (soulful.mba/5days). While the challenge itself covers the nuts and bolts of creating a digital product, this episode focuses on the reasons why taking your business online is worth considering. Here are some of the major benefits that can come from taking your teaching online: An online offering serves as a de facto insurance policy against your local, brick-and-mortar business or job. If structured properly, your online business can afford you the ability to take a break without significantly cutting into your income. It also gives you much greater geographic freedom. The overhead is extremely low. You have the freedom to take risks and experiment without any real negative implications. The opportunity is big (financially and for impact). The bottom line? It’s smart to build redundancy into your finances. Joy: StripeHustle: From In-Person to Online: 5-Day Challenge

“When perfectionism is driving us, shame is always riding shotgun and fear is the backseat driver.” - Brené Brown‏ In this episode, we discuss the ways that perfectionism holds us back in our businesses. We often see perfectionism used as an excuse for procrastination or as a reason to hold ourselves back once we’ve reached a certain level of success. Here are the 7 perfectionistic tendencies we’ve identified in our own business and with our clients. Listen in to hear how we address each one. You procrastinate until the stars align. You often spend copious amounts of time just to perfect something that just isn't that important. You have an all-or-nothing approach. Inflexibility. You have a very specific manner in which things should be done. Intolerance for mistakes. You are extremely hard on yourself. You focus on the destination, rather than the journey. It’s all about the end result. Your success is never good enough. Joy: Why Brené Brown Says Perfectionism Is a 20-Ton ShieldHustle: Lighting Kit, Ring Light

In our first time featuring a guest on the podcast, we’re bringing you a raw, unfiltered conversation with Kimra Luna. Know widely in the online business and branding community for her unique and rebellious style, Kimra has built her Freedom Hackers® Mastermind Facebook Group to over 60,000 people and leveraged her personal brand into a 7-figure business. In this episode, we discuss Kimra’s unwavering confidence, her fears, her spirituality, her new identity as a single mom to three young boys, and her role as a female founder. We were impressed by her honesty, her authenticity, and her willingness to boldly follow her intuition in business. Other Mentions: Freedom Hackers, Freedom Hackers® Mastermind Facebook Group, Sacred Mama Joy: Amazon PrimeHustle: Airtable

Once you’ve set goals for yourself in your business, how do stay committed and on track? Are you able to follow through when you’re accountable to others? To yourself? How you manage both external and internal expectations, according to Gretchen Rubin, holds the key to whether (and how) you’ll be able to take consistent action. How do we structure our accountability to one another as accountability partners? What do we think about mastermind groups? Listen in to learn our tips for staying on track with our goals (and why we each have different strategies that work for us). Other Mentions: RRP #317 Joy: Jelena | The FilmHustle: The Four Tendencies Book + Quiz

“There becomes an innate knowing…” When you first start something new, it helps to follow the existing path, seek mentorship, and embrace best practices. At some point, however, you’ll need to start listening to your own intuition. As we’ve matured in our business, we’ve begun to withdraw from the cacophony of advice around us and, instead, turn inward for guidance. It’s been an incredibly liberating, exciting process—and one that is far from complete. In this episode, we discuss our own journeys toward wholeness and the joy that has come from making choices in our business that embrace our core values. Joy: LeVar Burton Reads, to AdultsHustle: Female Lifestyle Empowerment Brand

“Go make a ruckus.” - Seth Godin Regardless of your particular brand of business, money is not enough to drive most of you — there’s something deeper. There’s a problem that you’re trying to solve or an improvement to an existing way of doing things. If you’re an entrepreneur, there’s something special that you’re bringing to the table that no other person or business is doing in the exact same way. In our minds, you’re all making a ruckus. Ruckus-making, in the context of business, is the same thing as innovation (with maybe a little bit of a political bent). In fact, YOU having a business is a very political act. You are veering outside of the path of the dominant economic culture. The antidote to the monopolistic economic culture comes in the form of the artisan. As modern humans, we’re drawn to local, small-batch, unique. They serve as a counterweight to the heavy core of big business, big agriculture, big healthcare, and big tech. As a community creating intentional, conscious businesses, we are paving the way for a new brand of artisan: digital artisans. How can you shake things up in your own small corner of a market somewhere? Other Mentions: The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web Is Changing What We Read and How We Think, Seth Godin: Keep Making a Ruckus Joy: Tartine BakeryHustle: The Content of No Content by Elizabeth Kolbert

“We form each other. We are bound up in each other’s choices.” - Eric Liu and Nick Hanauer Integrity is about doing the right thing, being honest and consistent, and being in harmony with what you believe and how you act. It is also a critical element of being able to build anything that’s going to exist in the long run (a business, a government, a community). Do you make regular decisions in your business from a place of integrity or do you get sucked into the allure of Groupon, clickbait social media posts, or other short term solutions to sales and profitability? Most of us would not make the decision to intentionally pursue shady business practices, but integrity falls along a spectrum that creates a lot of grey area. Integrity sometimes requires that you make decisions for your business that are not optimized for short-term profitability, but rather, long term sustainability. Joy: The Lively Show #233Hustle: The Gardens of Democracy

“Our accelerating disappearance into the digital ether now defines us—we are the mediated people, whose contact with one another and the world around us is now mostly veiled by a screen. We threaten to rebel, just as we threaten to move to Canada after an election. But we don’t; the current is too fierce to swim to shore.” - Bill McKibben After returning from summer holidays, we feel compelled to incorporate more analog habits into our lives and into our business. We’ve both felt the physical acknowledgement that the pen is an extension of the human body in a way that typing on a keyboard will never be. The writer and activist Bill McKibben writes that humans have come to use screens as mediators that color virtually every experience and relationship in our modern lives. If the solution to digital overwhelm is to make a conscious effort to engage in offline living, how do we apply these analog tools to business? Offline connections. Word of mouth. Sales calls. Good old-fashioned networking. We’re all trying so hard to automate and to minimize the contact that we have with potential clients and customers, but the truth is that people trust (and crave) human connection. How can you find ways to take your online community offline? How can you add just a little more humanity into someone’s life? Other Mentions: Why I Love My Paper Dictionary, Pause! We Can Go Back!, Surviving This Summer on the Internet Joy: The Artist’s WayHustle: The Revenge of Analog

“Waiting for a train to go or a bus to come, or a plane to go or the mail to come, or the rain to go or the phone to ring, or the snow to snow or waiting around for a Yes or No or waiting for their hair to grow. Everyone is just waiting. Waiting for the fish to bite or waiting for wind to fly a kite or waiting around for Friday night or waiting, perhaps, for their Uncle Jake or a pot to boil, or a Better Break or a string of pearls, or a pair of pants or a wig with curls, or Another Chance. Everyone is just waiting.” - Dr. Seuss So many of us are constantly playing the waiting game in our business. We’re, personally, in the midst of a huge transition on this front. We’ve decided to make the future of our company about agency. Taking action. Figuring it out. Self reliance. (It feels great.) We’ve identified a handful of places where we see folks get stuck in the waiting game in their businesses (many of which we’ve found ourselves in as well): Waiting for the money (to close the round, to win the next pitch competition, to sell out your next program, etc.) Waiting for that perfect person to come and join your team Waiting to be heard or to be acknowledged by others Waiting for the product, program, service to be built or perfected Waiting for the customers and clients to come to you So how do you break out of the waiting game? Take action. Take control back. Be willing to make mistakes and even to fail. Embody the archetype of the empress. Decide what you need to do, own it, and lead. Do what it takes to go out and make it happen. You’re not less than anyone. You’re fully capable. Joy: The Holstee ManifestoHustle: Kaouthar Darmoni and her Tedx Talk

“It’s hard to explain until you’ve experienced it. The level of power wielded over women in the tech industry rivals that in the film industry… It is so normalized, we brush it off and many of us casually participate because it’s easier. From what I’ve learned from friends, it permeates the finance and legal industries too… all these professions where the white male slightly sociopathic genius is put on a pedestal. The power at the top of that pedestal can be absolute. The struggle to get there can produce even more brutal showmanship of power. The last few weeks have helped to uproot some of the truly deep, dark abuse of power that propels white cisgender physically able men to wealth and success, and largely keeps everyone else out.” — Melinda Briana Epler With all of the headlines making news on the women in tech front, we felt it was appropriate to chime in on the conversation. Although we walked away from the investment-backed startup world over a year ago, we remain connected to a diverse community of other female founders and women in tech. And the stories we’ve been reading sound familiar, yet disturbing. With only 5% of startups having (at least one) female on the founding team, it not hard to imagine why there are countless subtle—and not so subtle—biases against women. An entire subculture has developed within startups and tech companies. And this subculture doesn’t look like many of us. It looks white, male, and young. This subculture, often, doesn’t represent our most pressing needs or long-term interests. But something interesting is starting to happen — in private Slack groups for female founders, in female-run co-working spaces, in secret Facebook groups for female CEOS and others for female gamers…another subculture is developing. It looks and feels a lot like the beginnings of a revolution. Other Mentions: Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble, How to Uproot Systemic Racism and Sexism in Venture Capital, Male and Female Entrepreneurs Get Asked Different Questions by VCs — and It Affects How Much Funding They Get Joy: Hello Ruby: Adventures in CodingHustle: Geek Girl Rising

“At the end of our lives, all we have is our attention and our time.” - Tristan Harris We’ve led about two thousand people through social media training programs in our business, but we want to come clean in this episode and share some of our fears about the role that social media is playing in our (collective) lives. While we love social for its ability to help us leverage our brands online, we believe that there is a time and place for our digital activities. Tune in to discover why we worry about free apps more than paid tools and what’s at stake when we fail to take time to disconnect. Although social media is difficult to compartmentalize, we’ve got some simple tips to help you add more sanity into your digital life: Turn off ALL notifications on your phone. Use the Facebook News Feed Eradicator Chrome extension Freedom Read blogs on Feedly. Facebook Groups App (unfortunately, Facebook just announced they will be removing this from the App Store) SmarterQueue Joy: You Can Thank Instagram for Your Rosé ObsessionHustle: Tristan Harris // Time Well Spent If you’re enjoying the podcast, we would be so grateful for a rating and review on iTunes! Head over to: soulful.mba/itunes

“Simply put, feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression…. I liked this definition because it did not imply that men were the enemy. By naming sexism as the problem it went directly to the heart of the matter. Practically, it is a definition which implies that all sexist thinking and action is the problem, whether those who perpetuate it are female or male, child or adult.” - bell hooks It probably won’t come as a surprise to you that this podcast is hosted by two (proud) feminists. This fact is juxtaposed with the reality that we also inhabit the hyper-masculine world of technology. Tune in to hear about some realizations we’ve recently had related to our relationship to feminism, to our industry, and to our bodies. Joy: Call Your Girlfriend Hustle: Feminine Economy

“Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.” - Albert Einstein The relationship between humans and technology goes back thousands of years, but who decides what gets built — and how? As science and engineering surges within academia and within our broader culture, the humanities have been in steady decline. But what gets lost when art, literature, and philosophy constantly take a backseat to STEM? Other Mentions: Learning to Be Human, Tech’s Moral Reckoning, Toward Humane Tech, Nir & Far Joy: Edward Tufte’s WorkHustle: IDEO’s Design Kit