Ditching Hourly

DH ### Alain Chautard

===

Introduction and Welcome Back

---

Jonathan Stark: Hello, and welcome to Ditching Hourly. I'm Jonathan Stark. Today, I am re-joined by Alain Chautard. Alain, welcome back.

Alain Chautard: Thank you. Good to be here.

Jonathan Stark: So the last time you were on, we talked about how you packaged up your Angular expertise into sort of like a certification program. And it's been three years since then, so I figured it would make sense to come back and talk about what's happened, what happened, what has happened since. But first, could you tell folks a little bit about who you are and what you do and your more recent history?

Alain Chautard: Yeah. So I'm Alain. I'm a Google Developer Expert in Angular, which basically means that Google think that I'm a pretty good Angular person. And so I do a lot of conferences and content and training around the Angular framework, which is a way to build big web applications. So think banks and airlines and the army and all of these guys that basically build using the Angular framework because it's been the framework of choice for big enterprise software. And so I do consulting around that. I do training, so in-person training or remote. And consulting means helping a team get up to speed with a framework, helping them not make any mistakes, make the right architecture decisions from the start so they don't get lost in the process. So yeah, that's what I've been doing for quite a while now. I would say 12 years, pretty much. And early 2000, when COVID hit and training, you know, the training industry slowed down like many things. I created this certification program around the idea that people get training from me and then sometimes they would ask, can we get a certificate after the training? And I was like, yeah, I can make you a PDF, but what's the value of that, right? If you just did three days of training with me, it doesn't mean that much. And so when I had plenty of free time with COVID, I created a certification process around the Angular framework and then created the product, which is kind of the thing that as a soloist, you always have in mind, I want my product, my thing that can sell while I sleep. But that's really the idea. And so this one was my most successful product, my first one. And I was pretty happy with that. And so it grew and grew and grew. And when we talked about three years ago, I was in a very good trajectory. The certifications were saying pretty well, and I was in a happy place. But, you know, as consultants and soloists, we're always thinking, what's next? How can we improve? How can we make things better? Which is, you know, either automating stuff away or using any ways we want to make things a little bit better. Because in my case, the certification was successful. I was selling plenty of them. But the thing is, when it becomes successful, and you said worldwide on all continents, I would wake up every morning with, you know, 50 emails to open. And, you know, you get support requests, you get people who bought the thing, but they didn't realize that either they had not a right understanding of what the product was, or what the process was, and they wanted clarification and all of that. And the thing with me is, I was silly enough to put my email all over the place. Like, hey, you have questions, here's my email. So I would get flooded with that kind of stuff. And so the challenge was to how to, you know, how to how to scale then, right? How to make it work with less of me while still being able to keep everyone happy, and sell more and more. That was the main thing that was going on. So yeah, that's kind of the recap of where we were three years ago, I think.

Creating the Angular Certification Program

---

Jonathan Stark: Okay. And so I mean, that's a great cliffhanger. So what was the thing that you stumbled upon? Or you you decided to try to, you know, automate it, but sort of get yourself out of that customer support headache?

Alain Chautard: Yeah, so for the customer support part, an easy thing was to hire a contractor. And I would, I use a free, you know, ticket system where people would just open a ticket by sending an email to a specific address, it would open a support ticket, I could create the nice thing about that system is I could create categories. So is it a payment issue? Is it an exam issue? Is it a question about the process? So they would select a few drop downs and everything. So it would categorize nicely. And then based on these categories, I could create a process for the consultant for the contractor to take over and see, you know, if they ask about this, this is the answer to give them if they ask about that, go check this, take that then give the answer. So I had formalized everything like this with small, you know, basically text files, like a small wiki of how to answer these questions. And the contractor was able to answer, you know, probably 70 80% of them independently, which removes a lot of work from from me. And then I was only stuck with the difficult, you know, technical questions, like things that were either related to Angular or about, you know, a company wanting to purchase 100 certificates, and they wanted a specific kind of invoice and that kind of stuff. So only the important and meaningful stuff was left for me, which was which was a good process. Yeah.

Jonathan Stark: Okay, so that seems reasonable. And what did you do from there? So once you had that system in place, were you able to scale in some other way? I think, you know, the premise of the call is based on partners. So what what happened there? Did you start?

Alain Chautard: Yeah, so a first kind of partnership I put in place was that for all of these certifications, I had interviews at the end. So it was a three step process. And the last step was an interview with an expert. So I would cover most of the US usually, because I was in California at that point. But you know, I had people in Europe, I had people in Asia doing these things. And Asia versus California, the time difference was too crazy for me to be able to do those. And also, in terms of scale, it just doesn't work. If you're trying to do like 15 interviews per week, on your own, this doesn't doesn't work. So I started working with other people.

Jonathan Stark: What were the interviews?

Alain Chautard: So the interview was just because in the certification process, I let people code something on their own. And this was before AI, right? Because AI is changing quite everything now. But before AI, I let people code on their own with their own environment. And the purpose of the interview was just to double check that they, they are the author of that code. So making sure that they do understand it, they can explain it, they kind of walk through all of the pieces, and that it was not contracted to somebody else, basically.

Automating Customer Support

---

Jonathan Stark: Got it. Okay. Okay. So and so then you're saying that the time zone was all over the place. And there's like too many interviews.

Alain Chautard: Sometimes I would have people in India, doing these interviews, and I was in California. So we had like 12 hours of time difference. So it was when it was day for me, it was night for them or something like that. So I found people on all continents, basically. So I had people to do the interviews in Asia, in Europe, in South America, and then other languages as well. Not trying to accommodate people in Spanish, trying to accommodate people in German, in French, English, and we did Portuguese and Italian as well. So all of that is by default, because you just can't do it. So I had to find people with, you know, a similar profile as mine, who are also recognized as experts by Google, and then get them on board to do these interviews.

Jonathan Stark: So that's fascinating. If I was in that situation, I'm not sure I would know where to start. What did you start with other Google experts? Or do you just have a network of people or past students?

Alain Chautard: That was the easiest place to start, because well, there's not that many of them. It's like 100, 120 all around the world. So there's usually about one per country. So I would find the one or two in that region and ask them, Hey, are you interested or not? And, and usually for everything community related around the framework, they would be Oh, yeah, sure, let's do it. So that was quite straightforward from that perspective. And in the edge cases where I didn't have anybody or they were not interested, I would just ask. someone that was certified at the top level of certification with my thing and said, Hey, we had this interview together. I know you're great. Would you like to do these interviews? And they were like, Oh yeah, that's just amazing. You know, just being that, getting that kind of recognition and being able to do that. It was like, yeah, we're on board. No problem.

Jonathan Stark: So, okay. But weren't a lot of these people employees at Enterprise?

Alain Chautard: Yeah, I would say most of them. And they would find the time, you know, around their schedule. Because the thing is, for one person, it was a lot to handle. But once you have five, six, seven, you divide the work. And it's just maybe one or two interviews per week for most of them. So an interview was 15 to 20 minutes. So very easy to schedule, you know, after work or during a lunch break or something like this.

Jonathan Stark: Yeah. Got it. Okay. Okay. And was there, you know, like how, how paperworky did this get? Was it just sort of handshake deals and, and, uh, or was it, were they like contractors for you? Like, how did you set that up?

Alain Chautard: Yeah, it's, it depends on, on the culture and the country. So when you work with people in Germany, for instance, they want a contract, they want to create their own corporate structure. They're very, you know, German. And everything has to be square and signed and everything. Uh, but for the other ones, it was mostly handshake and we trust each other. And this is how much we're going to invoice each interview. And that was nice and easy. Yeah.

Scaling with Global Partnerships

---

Jonathan Stark: Okay. And how much process did you have to set up for folks like scheduling? And did you like give them your email addresses and think all of those little annoying things?

Alain Chautard: No, it was just a Calendly for the most part. So I would ask them to create a Calendly account connected to their calendar. And then I had my own, you know, backend to manage the certification. I would assign, well, it would kind of get automatically assigned by time zone or by language. I would just double check and then say, yes, it will send the email to both the candidates and the interviewer. And then look at the link and it would, and they would just schedule and do their thing. And they would log into that backend and say yes or no after the interview. So it was really hands off at that point.

Jonathan Stark: It's pretty nice. Okay, that's cool. And what happens when they would say no, then what is the, the person has to do what? Like, does that not cause a problem?

Alain Chautard: Yeah, sometimes it would be like, you know, they, they don't have any availability or, or they would miss an interview and then the candidate would contact me and all panicked and all of these things. So usually I would just take over when that happened and say, well, just schedule with me and I'll do a late one or an early one as an exception. Yeah, it was rare. I mean, most of the time it just went perfectly well. I actually had to go and double check the backend to make sure that they were actually doing it because it was so smooth that I was wondering, is it really happening?

Jonathan Stark: Is this thing on? And what about when someone would fail the interview, when a candidate would fail the interview, did that cause problems or?

Alain Chautard: Um, sometimes it would because, you know, you're, it's, it's a human thing, right? You're dealing with people and the interviewer, sometimes they would, they would feel like something was off in the interview. Like the person was not 100% confident. They would feel something that, you know, they probably cheated. And so they would report to me, I'm not sure that they probably cheated. And I like, okay, so is it a yes or a no? Well, I don't know. Uh, that doesn't work. We have to make a decision. So sometimes if it was really on the edge, I would do a second interview. I would ask the person and say, okay, let's do a second interview. And most of the time in that scenario, it was, it was clearly a no, meaning the person was not cutting it. They would, they obviously cheated or got something from the internet or, uh, they just, you know, if you write some code, you know how it works and you know how to find things. And when someone cannot answer a single question about where is this, where it's at, yeah, it's, there was a problem.

Handling Certification Interviews

---

Jonathan Stark: All right. So that makes sense. So basically they would just escalate it. It would escalate to you. And then, but I'm assuming that's also pretty rare.

Alain Chautard: Yeah, it was pretty rare. Like once, maybe every other month or something like this. So it was not, not, not a big deal.

Jonathan Stark: Yeah. Okay. And, um, so were these, these, the partners that you're describing that, that you use?

Alain Chautard: Kind of, because the thing is by wanting to scale and removing myself more and more from the process, I had to partner with these people and they were also experts in their community. So sometimes they would organize events in Asia or in Europe, meaning they said, Hey, can we promote the certification? We would like to get commissions out of it.

Jonathan Stark: Right. So some of them really became partners and affiliates in a sense. So I would give them a link, they would promote it and they would get paid commissions on sales based on these links. Um, so that's one of the ways that kind of scaled a little bit and created these partnerships.

Alain Chautard: Um, but at some point in time, one of them told me, Oh, you know what? We found that website here. Uh, and these guys, they're starting during certification, just like you do. And it seems like they don't want to do just Angular, but they're going to do every single thing on frontend. So JavaScript, TypeScript, React, Angular, all of these different technologies, they want to do them one by one. And so, yeah, they just wanted to warn me that, Oh, be careful. There's competition coming in that very tight space, very nichey where usually there's just nobody. And so at that point I thought, okay, so we can just compete, right? And then they're going to do their thing. I'm going to do my thing and see, uh, see how it goes. But they seemed much bigger than me in terms of, you know, number of people in terms of being very serious about marketing. Definitely not a soloist kind of thing, right? I could spend, there were like 10, 20 people there doing, you know, mailings and videos and stuff. And so I thought, you know, there's typically when a business scales and you're, you're happy with it. Either you want to keep growing and growing or you'll start thinking about, should I sell it? Should I just bank on it? And then I'm done. And so I was kind of thinking about that as well. And so I thought, why not reach out to these guys and tell them, well, if you want the Angular certification, we can figure, figure something out. And maybe you buy it from me and we do some sort of licensing deal or whatever.

Partnerships and Business Growth

---

Jonathan Stark: Right.

Alain Chautard: I just wanted to start a discussion saying, I see that you have Angular on your roadmap. I have it already. I have that credibility because I'm a Google developer expert. The Angular team at Google is okay with me doing this certification. So even if it's not 100% official and Google recognize it's as close as it gets. And so if we, if we work together, you're, you're basically winning, right? And so it took a few calls to kind of, you know, get to know each other and see what was possible. But in the end, they said, okay, we're interested. We want to do a partnership. And they said, ideally, we would like to buy you out, but we don't have the money to do that. So, okay, no big deal. We can figure something else. And so I was thinking, you know, how do we, how do we do it so that it's really a win-win relationship? Meaning I'm making enough money that I'm happy with it on a monthly, yearly basis. And they, they get, you know, sales and everything going on on their side so that the relationship keeps going for as, as long as possible. And so, yeah, we sat down and after a few iterations, we got to a partnership agreement and it's been running since 2024, I think, mid 2024. So yeah, it's going to be two years next month.

Jonathan Stark: Okay. And, and you're happy with it?

Alain Chautard: I'm happy with it. Yeah. And so, so the main thing is that as part of the partnership, they took over, well, everything I don't like to do, which means marketing, sales, support. So doing all of that for me, which is, which is really nice. And, uh, you know, in the past I would get maybe the last 10, 20% of things to do, and now it's more like the final 1% or 0.5 even. So that's even better.

Jonathan Stark: Yeah. Okay. And what, for somebody who might be thinking along the similar lines, uh, what were some of the surprises going through this process?

Alain Chautard: Um, so the surprises are, you know, when you work solo for quite a while, you, you kind of forget how it is to work for. or somebody else, right? And not that I'm working for them, but sometimes the people I was interacting with, they were mostly employees, which means, you know, they have their one job and their one way to do things. And I was, and when you're a soloist, you're kind of touching, well, you have to touch everything at least a little bit. And so it was a little bit frustrating to have to go through, you know, five, six people to get something done just because, well, marketing is not writing the email for this. And so the email writer has to be doing it, but they have to get approval from somebody else. And, you know, the extra process and jumping through all these hoops to make things happen was sometimes, still sometimes is frustrating.

Jonathan Stark: Yeah. Okay, that makes total sense. Okay, well, what do you see next? Is it too soon to say it's only been two years? Do you know what's on the horizon? Do you have a plan, exit plan or something like that? Also, you know, the, yeah, it's a good question.

Alain Chautard: The idea of an exit plan is still something I've been toying with, meaning if I think about it, setting my business now is probably even better for a buyer than it was back then, because there is that, you know, bigger company that we're working with and that basically provides passive, kind of passive, mostly passive income at this point, every month. And there's a, you know, part of the deal we have is that there's a guaranteed minimum every month. So even if sales would drop drastically, I still have a guaranteed minimum in that contract, which is really nice, because I know that it cannot go completely wrong from one month to the next.

Jonathan Stark: Yeah, and it gives them a financial incentive to make sure they're marketing it.

Alain Chautard: Exactly, that's the thing too, because there was an exit possibility in the contract where if we're not performing well enough, I could just go away and exit and run the thing on my own again if I wanted to. So that's still in there, just in case. So yeah, part of the things to think about in such a partnership is, you know, figuring out the contract, making sure it's fair on both ends. And I actually used AI to do that.

Negotiating a Business Partnership

---

Jonathan Stark: Oh, really?

Alain Chautard: Yeah, two years ago, it was a little bit early for these things, AI-wise, but, you know, given a big PDF with lots of technical legal stuff, it was still pretty good to say, well, we think the contract is more in that direction than in this one, and so maybe this point should be negotiated. So it gave me some pretty good advice on that. That was nice.

Jonathan Stark: And how long did the negotiation process take? Was it like weeks, months?

Alain Chautard: I think it took, probably took three or four months. Mostly because on their end, they had a lawyer involved, and so the lawyer has to review everything, and it takes days, weeks for them to get back and redo the wording of things, and because, yeah, they're very peculiar on everything, right, every single word. We can't say it's a partnership because then people could understand that we own the other company or whatever, you know, all of these things.

Jonathan Stark: Yeah, yeah, okay. And was it, were there any complications? It was a different country, right? Like, how does that work if there's...

Alain Chautard: Well, actually, in our case, both corporations were in the US, so it worked, it was easier that way, just different states for the contract, but that's no big deal, yeah.

Jonathan Stark: Yeah. Cool, okay, well, let's, that sounds great, very interesting. Probably the only person I've ever talked to that's done something like this, you know, especially, specifically a developer, so really cool.

Alain Chautard: Yeah.

Jonathan Stark: And, but you mentioned, let's segue a little bit. You mentioned email briefly there, trying to get somebody to get their emails approved, so, you know, whatever the situation was. So that was another one of the points that you sent over when we were chatting over email about things that you've changed over the years in like daily, weekly, monthly emails and what your experience was there. So it was kind of a, I don't know how related or unrelated that is to the previous thread, but let's go there next. So what's your email marketing story?

Alain Chautard: Yeah, so email has been a very interesting story because I used to do pretty much none of it, right? And I've been following you since forever, since I started. And so, you know, teaching early and you had the podcast on, you know, daily emails.

Jonathan Stark: Business Authority.

Alain Chautard: And so, yeah, you had so many examples of people doing it daily and loving it that I thought, okay, I should try that. And I think I did it in 2024. So basically the year when I started this partnership, but I didn't know that the partnership would happen at that point. But I said, you know, beginning of the year, I'm just gonna do it daily. And my definition of daily was five days a week, no weekends. And yeah, other than that, it would be, and maybe not on public holidays, but basically five days a week was the contract I had in mind for the entire year. And I wanted to just do it for one full year and then decide if I keep going with that or not. Because before that I was blogging twice a month at least. And all I was doing with email was every time I published something, I would just email it to my list. Yeah. And that was it. So it was okay, I guess, but the list didn't grow that much because there was no effort to try to grow it or anything like that. And because I was blogging twice per month, it was, you know, a little bit bigger of a post, but still it's not like five lines, like what you do daily. And I was interested in the idea of testing that, like just a challenge of doing something super short, but useful. Yeah. And so because I was scared about the idea, before I started, I made a list and I had, my idea was I need at least one month upfront so that I'm not gonna run out of things to publish daily. So once I had 20, 25 items in the list, I said, okay, I can do it. And so the December before that, I just created the list of all of the topics. Then I got started in January. And actually by the end of the year, my list was longer than what it was at the beginning of the year. Because as you do these things, you know, people respond and you get new ideas and you know the deal because that's what you do. But basically based on the interaction and everything, you always get more stuff to write about.

Email Marketing Journey

---

Jonathan Stark: Yeah, it starts to feed itself.

Alain Chautard: Exactly. And yeah, the most difficult thing was doing daily was me always trying to do more, right? Because you start writing and you're like, oh, maybe I should talk about this as well. Or, oh, I cannot do just, I cannot just say that. I also have to explain this or that. And I always wanted to do more than what was needed. And what I learned quickly is that, you know, if there was many things I want to talk about, well, instead of doing one email, I'm going to do a series on that. It's going to be one, two, three, or the entire week is going to be about that topic. And I divide it in five parts. And that exercise, as you know, everyone in doing daily in your podcast say it is very beneficial from that perspective because you learn more about how to write, how to organize your thoughts and planning. And, you know, oh, this is going to fit one day. Oh no, I can make an entire week with this. So it became kind of natural to do that and it got a lot easier over time. And yeah, I never had any problem filling my calendar with that. Again, at the end of the year, I had more ideas to cover still than when I started. So that was fun.

Jonathan Stark: Yeah, it's fascinating, isn't it?

Alain Chautard: Yeah, it is. And so in 2025, though, I thought, okay, do I still do daily or do I switch to weekly? And the thing is when I started the daily, after one month, I got the first thousand of subscribers very quickly. Like within the first month, it grew, grew, grew, grew. And then let's say around month four or five, it started stabilizing and not really increasing or decreasing. It would be like plus two, minus one, plus four, minus three. So it was kind of staying at the same level till the end of the year. So I was thinking, okay, maybe, maybe, I was not sure about going, keep going like this, just because I felt it was still work to, you know, be involved with all of that every day, and that the list was not growing as much as I wanted or not getting as much traction as I thought it would get. So I thought, okay, let's do weekly the following year, and just adding a little bit more to the email, and, but still not like a full blog post. And so I did it for the entire year in 2025, and it went well as well, but it's more difficult. Again, the hard part, right? Once a week is more difficult, because you're like, oh, I'm gonna do it on Tuesday, and then Tuesday something comes up, oh, it's gonna be Wednesday. Oh no, oh, I can still do Thursday. And if you do daily, you don't have that excuse, right? You just do it every day.

Jonathan Stark: Yeah, it's just like, you just do it, yeah.

Alain Chautard: Yeah, yeah, I mean, that was my experience.

Jonathan Stark: So how long did that go on for?

Alain Chautard: Well, the entire 2025, and so 2026 was, so now the thing is AI is in full motion these days, which means it has a big impact on my business. People do less training than before, because you can ask AI anything, and you can kind of use an AI as your coach to learn new things. So I'm getting less business on the training side, and I'm thinking, well, maybe now is the time to, you know, I've been thinking about selling before. I moved to a place where the cost of living is just a fraction of what it was before in California. So I'm thinking, hey, maybe I'm just gonna slow down and maybe ease myself into maybe semi-retirement of some sort or full retirement, who knows if I sell the business or something like this. So that was kind of my idea for 2026. And as a result on the blogging side, I slowed down to once per month, while blogging, emailing is once a month, but I tried YouTube as well. So I'm doing one video per month at least, because while blogging is just less popular, let's say, these days, and videos and other formats, so I'm trying that as an experiment, but yeah, my content publishing now is basically that one video and one blog post per month. And when I say blog posts, I say it means email because it gets emailed to everybody, yeah.

Jonathan Stark: Yeah, and did you notice any growth or shrink in the list in 2025 when you switched to weekly or was it basically the same?

Alain Chautard: It was basically the same. And the thing is, when you do daily, the benefit of doing daily is that people get something from you every day, so they come to expect it and they remember that you exist because you show up every day.

Jonathan Stark: Yeah, exactly.

Alain Chautard: When you start doing less often than that, they can forget about you. And if the email suddenly goes into spam, they will not see it because it's just once a week or once a month and then they just forget about you, right? So that's the thing that I see happen more with that slower frequency. People tend to forget or not pay as much attention as they would before. Yeah, sometimes they would tell me on Friday, oh, some people sometimes would respond on a Friday and say, oh, I apologize. I was not able to read your five emails this week, but I'm going to do it over the weekend. I'm like, oh, that's okay, you know. I'm not forcing you to read everything.

Jonathan Stark: Right, I get that one too. Okay, so that's interesting. So, I mean, it makes sense, right? If you're thinking like, oh, I'm going to slow down and you're also experimenting with different formats. To a certain extent, I think, you know, it remains to be seen, but certainly with AI really being like a functioning thing for these sorts of things, I find myself a little bit more drawn to video for my own content because it's still not, you can tell it's real still. We'll see how long that lasts, but yeah, I mean, I had somebody just the other day, I sent him an email and he was like, oh, you know, he commented about something in the email. It's like, oh, that's a dead giveaway that you're using AI to write your emails. And I'm like, I've been using that, I've been saying that for 20 years, like for 10 years, like look in my, you know, so it's like I'm getting accused by some people or who knows, you know, for every person that emails me and says, oh, you're using AI to write these and I'm not. And so they're like, I'm like, well, how many people think they're fake anyway? So to say in the back of my mind, like do people think these are fake? They must be fake if you're writing them every day. It's like somehow the 10 years of history doesn't matter. But yeah, so video, I think, is an interesting thing to consider. I've always thought like YouTube was a pretty smart move for soloists. I just don't like working with video, but you know, I might have to hold my nose and just get over there. But yeah, so, and how is that working? Is it too soon to say how that's working for you?

Alain Chautard: So it's probably a little bit too soon, even if the YouTube audience is increasing and I can tell people just like video and YouTube, right? You show up on your feed, they just watch. Yeah, I see results, I mean, better than before when I was just publishing, you know, from time to time. And it was maybe five, four times, five, four, five times per year maximum. And now it's more regular and people like regularity and they subscribe and they show up a little bit more. And actually, you know, I was thinking about another experiment that I'm doing, which is working a lot better. And that's, I didn't see it that way before talking to you, but now I realize that I'm actually doing daily in a different format, which is LinkedIn.

Jonathan Stark: Okay.

Alain Chautard: And, you know, the challenge for me with doing daily emails was that I was always looking for new things to talk about, like new topics. And in my mind, I was thinking, oh, I already talked about that earlier in the year, so I cannot talk about it again, which is mostly false, right? People never remember all these things and you have to just repeat them. And what I like about your emails, for instance, is that you always find another example or a question from a listener about, and you can put a different spin on it. And even if it's something we've talked about over and over again, there's always some new way to talk about it or frame it or based on somebody else's experience and all of these things that makes it always kind of unique. But with technical content, I think it's trickier. There's only so many spins you can have on the same piece of code. Feature from a framework, right?

Jonathan Stark: Yeah.

Alain Chautard: So with LinkedIn, what I started doing is that my idea was why always create new stuff when you have so many articles published already? So many blog posts and for so many of them, the content is still valuable. It's just that in my mind, I always had to do something new, even though I know it's not true, but when I sit to write, I cannot just redo something that I did even two or three months ago or six, even years ago, it's just somehow I can't. What I thought was, okay, why not look at everything I did in the past and find some of the best piece of advice and reframe it as a short LinkedIn post where I would take a code example, I would take two or three sentences from my blog posts and just put that on social media and link to the original thing in the comments. And I started doing that. So once per week, I had that kind of post and it works like crazy. It's unbelievable. Meaning, you know, I know that I can reuse stuff from the past, but somehow I had a hard time doing it. And now that I do it, it works better than my new content. So, That's funny. Yeah, people comment on it and then it sparks some interactions and sometimes they're like, yeah, but, you know, somehow people interact more if it's on social like this than if it's a blog post or a YouTube video where they would not always post a comment there. But on LinkedIn, they're like, yeah, it's just easy to ask, hey, what about this? What about that? Or I don't agree with this. And then it can spark some sort of discussion and back and forth, which of course the algorithm likes and then you get more views and it just feeds itself. Yeah. Yeah.

Jonathan Stark: There's a There's a guy named Neil Patel, who ostensibly is an SEO guy, but basically runs a digital marketing firm. And I read a quote from him one time. I think he said, people spend so much time making content, but they really should be creating new content, when really they should be spending 80% of their time promoting content that they've already created, because it goes by so fast that almost nobody sees it. Like, when I send out an email, my open rate's 50%, which is a good open rate. But that means 50% of the people on the list didn't see it. And even the ones that did see it, or did open it, might not have read it, or might not have finished it, or might not have hit them right. And like you said, sort of bring it back up from a new, like whatever happened to me that day, or whatever the inspiration was for that day, try to put a different spin on it. But underlying concepts, they're all the same. They never change. It's create value, capture some of it. It's business 101. But not for people that run service businesses, it's not obvious. So they have to read it 100 times before the light bulb comes on, bringing it in different directions. But yeah, I mean, back when I was doing FileMaker and PHP, in 2003, 4, 5, I wrote a column, monthly column. And it was hard to come up with something new for a monthly column in a magazine, because it was like, well, I already talked about this, and I already talked about that. And everybody read it. Everybody read that magazine. And it was like, they saw it. So yeah, I can appreciate that. So I'm glad you landed on a plan that is working well. And it does make sense for people listening that are writing code, like they're sharing code examples, or talking about a feature, or some programming paradigm. Yeah, it makes sense to say like, OK, here's the canonical. Here's my opinion on it. And here is a detailed post on it. And I'm going to bring it up periodically on social media, where people, I think, do expect that kind of thing a little bit more. Yeah, and they tend to be more reactive to it, because it's easier to read. It's not like a full blog post. They just see a piece of code and a couple of sentences to explain something. So they're more likely to react to that and interact with it, which is also a human thing. Like, you see it, and oh, what is this? Oh, I like it, or I don't like it. And then you get the reaction, and it's something to start from. Spaces, not tabs.

Exploring New Content Formats

---

Alain Chautard: Well, I don't get those yet. But sometimes, yeah, they would pick on something. It's like, what? That's not even the point of the code example. Why are you talking about that?

Jonathan Stark: Yeah, exactly. Like the quarter of the font or whatever, yeah. Right. Exactly. Cool, OK, well, this has been super helpful. I'm sure people are going to get a lot out of it. There was one last thing, though, that is another total pivot. We had these three topics when we first were chatting over email. And the last one also caught my attention. But maybe it's unrelated, maybe it's related, maybe you can tie it together for us. But the last one that you brought up was mastermind groups for soloists. And how that's helped your business. And that's something that comes up inside of Ditcherville periodically. People are like, well, we should do a mastermind. They say to me, like, I should start doing masterminds. And I'm like, well, you all can just start one. Like, just start one. So what can you tell us about masterminds? Maybe start with a definition for people who haven't been in one before, what you feel like it is for you.

Mastermind Groups for Soloists

---

Alain Chautard: So a mastermind group is a group of people. So I'll take the example of soloists, because that's what we know, right? They could meet, let's say, once a week over Google Meet or Zoom or whatever you want. Usually, I would say a small group, let's say four, five, six people maximum. And the idea of this weekly meeting is just to discuss what you've done in the past week and what you plan on doing next. And so the idea is kind of to create some sort of accountability in the group. And you get ideas from what other people do. Or you get like, oh, I have to do this because I say to the group that I was going to do that. So I don't want to come back next week. And it creates something that we don't have as a soloist, which is basically a group of peers around us, a group of other entrepreneurs with maybe different businesses or ideas. But still, they work solo. So they appreciate having someone sharing the same problems, having the same questions, or who might have faced that in the past already. And you can get advice from them. Because yeah, usually, as soloists, it's not very common then that in our families or in our friends, we have people doing something similar, right? Typically, it's a thing that's pretty unique. And we don't have too many of us in our neighborhoods or around us. So creating a group like this allows us to kind of, we understand each other. We help each other. And yeah, I got a lot of great business ideas just from that. And the best example I have is actually my domain name, angulartrain.com. Back in the day, I think it was 2015, 2016. So yeah, at least 10 years ago, we were in that mastermind group. And one of the guys says, hey, I saw that the domain angulartrain.com was on sale for like $2,000, $3,000. I don't remember. And I don't even know how he saw that online. But oh, that's interesting. And he just suggested it because a couple of us were in the Angular space. And I thought, oh, that's an investment. But why not? Because then, back then, SEO was much more important than now. And having a perfect match domain like this in .com was just golden, right? I thought about it for 48 hours. And then I just bought it. And then it became the name of my business. And you start printing stickers and t-shirts and everything. And it becomes your brand, right? And it came from a mastermind. It's something that I didn't even think about. I never went trying to find another domain or something like this. But yeah, random ideas and things like that happen in a group of similar-minded people who think together once a week and brainstorm and come up with ideas. The thing with being solo is that you can challenge yourself to improve. But it's just your mind, right? Even if you read content from other people and we listen to podcasts and all that kind of thing, having that interaction is different because you can see where these other people are, how they think, and sometimes say, oh, yeah, I should just do that, too. Why don't I do that? I'm stupid.

Jonathan Stark: Yeah, I was just going to say blind spots. You notice what your blind spots are because you see these other people who have a business that's, they're not competitors, but they have a similar structure of a business. And you're like, wow, that person's like amazing at this thing that I never even think about. I'd never even heard the word before. And it's like a core piece of their business where they get most of their leads or something. And it's like, wow, that's really interesting. Yeah, I was in a mastermind. I don't remember when it started. I know I was in it in 2015, so it started before then. And I think it was about eight or 10 people at first. It was maybe a little bit big. But yeah, I mean, it would just fundamentally improve my business. It was just unbelievably useful, very helpful. But how did yours, how did you fall into it? Did someone invite you? How did you start it? How did you, you know, where did the other people come from?

Alain Chautard: That's a good question. I'm not sure how the first one started. And I was in it for probably a year or so. And then it kind of fell apart because, well, at some point, you know, either people just do another business or they just give up and stop showing up or life happens. And then, you know, you have a group of five and all of a sudden it's just two or three and it's not working anymore. And we start rescheduling and then it's like, no, okay, we give up.

Jonathan Stark: Yeah, exactly.

Alain Chautard: But yeah, I think it started because it's probably another guy that I met and we were doing similar stuff and he said, hey, I'm part of this mastermind group. Do you want to join? So probably something like this, right? And then I was in, and I just started another one a couple of months ago, basically being nostalgic about those days and thinking, well, maybe it can help. And yeah, it's always interesting to see how people think and what to do and, and how we can help each other. And it's just one hour per week and it could be shorter than that. We do one hour, but it could be, you know, uh, less, more completely up to, up to you.

Jonathan Stark: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't remember what we, I, I feel like it was 45 minutes or an hour. Might've been a half hour, but I think it was, I think it was longer. And a lot of times there'd be, someone would like get in a hot seat for like 15 to 30 minutes and we'd go around and they'd bring a business challenge and we'd sort of brainstorm it and, and that was, I think that was always helpful. I, I do those inside Ditcherville now. Cause I think they're amazing to just, because especially for soloists where you, all of a sudden you've got like six smart people who understand you, understand your kind of business from the inside, cause they run the same kind of business. And, and it's just wild what, you know, people's experiences are so rich and, and varied that, you know, obviously, you know, obviously they're, they're coming up with things that I wouldn't have thought of because they're from a different place or they have, they're in a different industry or they're, they're totally different stage or they're like younger and more connected with social media or something. It's, it's just great. I think it's amazing. So yeah, definitely recommend it.

Alain Chautard: And you know, sometimes we, we think that we could get that same level of insights from other content, like watching videos or podcasts, but, but it doesn't seem to work that way. So being in the mastermind, you are active, you are involved, you have to speak. And that makes you just, you have skin in the game basically a lot more than when you're consuming content. And that makes a massive difference, I think.

Jonathan Stark: Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's hard to sort of say, say exactly why that would be other than just the skin in the game piece. But that's definitely my experience. There's, there's a certain level of accountability and it goes in both directions, you know, like you don't want to, you're not just writing up a piece that you're going to post to the internet and like, maybe it works for someone, maybe it doesn't. It's like, this is one of your colleagues sitting right across the zoom room from you. And, you know, here's why I think this advice would work specifically in your case, here's why I would try it. And here's what I would watch out for. Um, it can be so much more, uh, the, the knowing each other's businesses really well, like we would share numbers and everything like, like knowing exactly the situation, then you can give much better advice when you really have all those details versus if I'm just writing a general blog post for 10,000 people, I don't know any of their exact situations in general. I can guess at certain, certain things, but it's just way more powerful. And the accountability thing is not to be underestimated. I mean, it definitely worked with me. I was like, I had kept saying, Oh, you know, I really need to write another book. I need to write another book. And then, but then once I got into the mastermind, they were like, you keep on saying this, but did you start? And then yeah. And then in 2016, our billing is nuts was the result of that specifically because. You know, this group of people were like, come on, like, when, what are you talking about? You're going to do this or not? So yeah, it works. It works. Yeah. Yeah.

Alain Chautard: Just, just that it happened to me this morning during my mastermind with these guys said, Hey, a couple of weeks ago, you said you talked about this topic. What's, what's the status? What, what do you think about it? And yeah, we just getting reminders like this, or, or sometimes, you know, you're here from them and then something happens during your week and you're like, Oh, you know, you make the connection. And the next time you talk about them, Hey, I thought about this during the week. What did you think? And it just, yeah, it's just super useful and you basically have to, to do it to, to get the benefits. It's, it's never what you can expect and you don't know what you're going to get from it, but you're going to get something.

Jonathan Stark: Yeah, that's, I know. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. Um, do you keep in touch via Slack or something in between calls or is it just the calls?

Alain Chautard: Yeah, we, we, we do that too. We, we keep in touch on Slack and that way, even during the mastermind, when we, because of course now with AI, sometimes we, we geek out on something and, Oh, I just tried it is and blah, blah, blah. And so we put the link in Slack so we can keep track of it and, and, and use it later. So yeah, having a Slack helps to either reschedule things or just share, uh, other content during the week in between the calls.

Jonathan Stark: Yeah, that's always useful. Yeah. Cool. Cool. Well, I'm looking at the clock. I know we have to wrap up, but this has been super, super helpful. So thanks so much for coming on and sharing all of that.

Alain Chautard: Well, thanks a lot for having me. Always a pleasure.

Jonathan Stark: Well, where can people go to find out more about what you're doing online? Maybe engage with some of your stuff on LinkedIn, yell at you about your font choice colors.

Alain Chautard: And so I guess LinkedIn is the best place. If, if you look for, if you look for my name, you're going to find me. My, my name is unique enough that, uh, you would find me there. And, uh, yeah, feel free to connect, reach out, always happy to, to answer. I'm not going to give my email because I've done that in the past, but yeah, LinkedIn is perfect.

Jonathan Stark: Okay, great. All right. Well, there'll be a link in the show notes to that.

Alain Chautard: Perfect.

Jonathan Stark: All right, folks, that's it for this week. I'm Jonathan Stark and I hope you join me again next time for Ditching Hourly. Bye.