[Transcript starts at 1:26]
Hello, hello, hello, my podcast people. And thank you for joining me for yet another episode of my favorite podcast. If you're watching this. Let me know, I was going to say, let me know, but also I can't change it. It's nighttime when I'm recording it. I just have a habit now of recording at night. I've been using my extra time on Mondays to do other things.
I went and looked for a guitar today. Uh, but if you're watching it, the lighting, we're going to call it artistic. Hopefully it ends up being. Okay, uh, I could, I could really riff on the tech side of things right now, but let's, let's stay on track. So if you're listening to this, watching this on the day that it drops, it is Monday, January 27th.
Welcome to the end of January. Wow. Uh, right off the bat, come to the free mafia dinner this Wednesday, January 29th, 4 p. m. Pacific. For those of you who don't know, the mafia is the online community that I run. Right off the bat, I'm going to say that twice, right off the bat, right off the bat, it is 97 a month, right?
The dinner is free. The membership. It costs 97 a month, right? I know people want to know, and you hate having to like scroll to the bottom of the page and like looking, digging around and just be like, well, how much is it? Okay. That's how much it is. Um, the Mafia, technically it's a monthly mentorship membership that I run.
Uh, and. It gives you access to the dope fucking community of online and in person business owners, um, along with a ton of resources. And it's all largely designed to help you build and grow and sustain your online business, right? That's the like marketable thing that I, that I talk about. There is a mafia core curriculum.
Uh, that's a course that I built out and that allows for just self paced learning of it. Uh, we have a private Facebook group, which I'm going to get into. Ties into the full episode, uh, where you can ask the things, answer the things, get the things answered. There is a monthly brick and mortar meetup group that's online, uh, for anyone that has a brick and mortar business.
Um, that's run by our girl, Sabrina. And then there's a monthly coaching call that I run. We lovingly renamed it the family dinner. I lead some of them. I bring in experts in different niches, my friends, to teach some stuff. I bring in people from within the mafia that are experts at whatever it is that they do.
They lead some. And then we also have a thing called love seats, which, you know, generally colloquially in the industry, we call them love seats. Hot seats where you get to sit and ask questions and have the people around you answer them. But hot seat sounds bad. So we call them love seats. Uh, we are going to be running those at the dinner this Wednesday and we're opening up the dinner and inviting everybody because I want people to see that this resource exists.
I want people to experience firsthand that people like this exists, that a community like this exists. There is zero obligation to join the mafia. If you attend dinner, there's no hard pitch. I will just have it open. If you want to join awesome. If you don't, that's fine too. All right. There's no pitch.
There's no hard pitch. There's no hard sales. You will see this firsthand. If you attend the dinner. Um, and if you do join the mafia, you will learn about this is how I sell. And this is how I coach. Like nothing has to be like that, like horrendous and in your face and, and make you feel uncomfortable. So, uh, the agenda for the dinner is gonna, I'm going to.
Um, introduce, present an overview of my, my approach to online business. We're going to run love seats. If you would like to be coached up by the family, you can submit your name. Um, and then we'll do a little behind the scenes inside, you know, under the hood look of the resources within the mafia. If you want to attend again, it's free.
The link is in the show notes. Uh, thank you, Courtney. For www. themovementmaestro. com forward slash mafia dash dinner. Dash reservation? Is it reservation? I should probably check that Mafia. I'm actually gonna look right now because I don't wanna say it. It is, yes. TheMovementMyShow. com forward slash mafia dash dinner dash reservation.
So hopefully you have a better memory than I do. I have it written down here and I'm like that that's wrong, but I have it. I said it correctly. All right. So we'd love to have you come, right? We're going to talk about this in a little bit, but shit's a dumpster fire right now. Let's just be honest. And the thing that gets you through is community.
And we have built a fucking phenomenal community. And if you're looking for that. Come check it out. Come check us out. So that's a good segue into the other updates, announcements for today. So the time I'm recording this, Trump got sworn in today. Jesus fucking Christ.
TikTok faked its death and then hailed Trump as the savior despite the fact that he was the one that put the ban in place and started that all in motion in 2020. It's a bunch of nonsense. Nothing about these times is normal. I, I would say that we're living in unprecedented times, but they're honestly not.
Things like this have happened in the past. Right before great nations collapsed, so I personally don't have any specific action items I don't study those things in the past to be like, hey, this is what happened. Honestly, the civilization's collapsed but I will say that finding, leaning on Building, celebrating community is a very viable action item and largely all that we have.
And I don't say that in like a fatalist, fatalistic way. It's just like, at the end of the day, this is what keeps you moving forward. It's what gives you hope is those around you and being in community with people. We are a social species by nature. So, you know, TikTok, that's the reason that that shit was ever a target in the first place.
There's nothing to do with data. Nothing. Nothing to do with security. It's about controlling the discourse, right? About controlling the dialogue, the narrative, about controlling communication and connection. And we saw it, right? Gen Z used it. Everyone used it as a way to stay connected, as a way to build community, as a way to share information and spread information.
And the bad guys, I'll leave it up to you to decide who the bad guys are. They didn't fucking like it. So they're like, fuck that. We're going to take it. We're going to break it. We're going to put our fingers in it. That sounds bad, right? And that's what we're seeing. So let's actually circle this back to the Mafia because that is why I built the Mafia.
It is for that connection. I built the Mafia in 2020. I started building in 2019, but that was at the tail end of all of my traveling and teaching for Rock Tape and realizing the magic that happens when you get a group of people In a room, the people that shared values and people that are doing the thing and people that are, they want to take action and they want to support each other, right?
Good people. And I was like, I can't do this in person all the time, but I could do it online. And so I built the mafia and something that came about, right? Part of this magic that gets made. Is happiness, right? It doesn't need to be that, Oh, we're going to be in a group. And that means we can make the most money and we can make the most products or anything like that.
Like that's fine. Whatever. You don't get that. But part of what is so special to me about the mafia, that is that it's about supporting people to build and create and actually live their best life. Yes. The vehicle that we often talk about. Is business related, right, because it creates a resource, money, um, and there's a fulfillment, right, piece to that, but ultimately, the magic of the mafia, in my opinion, is the fact that it's this community of people that want to support other people in building and living their best life, right, and we can talk about productivity, and in this, because something you can produce, It's your own happiness, and your own joy, and the Mafia does that.
Joe actually put together a really dope teaser clip, and it's about kind of, like, speak to the intangibles, and how, you know, at dinners, people will ask life questions, and about parenting, and things like that. It's not just about, like, how do I launch this thing? I guess we can teach you that. But to me, this stuff that is the magic of the Mafia isn't as sexy, perhaps, or it's not as tangible as other things, but It is so special.
And if you think that's something that you want, I really would love to have you come check out the mafia, come out, check out the dinner. So the mafia. This is a good segue into the ep to the full episode here, the meat and potatoes of the episode or whatever you eat. Uh, the mafia does have a private Facebook group, right?
And I'm not a fan of Zach, but I'ma use the resources that I have that are most convenient for people. And right now the benefit outweighs the other shit, right? The benefit of using the Facebook group and using Facebook outweighs other shit. Leaving Facebook to me, leaving Facebook to protest it will hurt my community and the community far more than it will hurt Meta.
And, you know, subsequently create any kind of change, but if the, if that switches at some point, I do have things in place so that. I can make that switch and the community will be okay and unharmed and the connection will be maintained. And that's what this episode is about. There's something that I've been thinking about for actually quite a bit, um, and was prompted to record this episode by a question slash comment in the mafia and one of the mafiosos was speaking with the TikTok band.
So the title of this episode is professionalizing the creator economy. Now, when I speak about professionalizing, I simply mean. Owning your shit and having it organized. I don't mean being professional and the racist have a stick up your ass kind of way. All right. I mean, organizing your shit, owning your shit, optimizing your shit, the commerce side of things.
I think that for many people, if we zoom out for a second, the dream is to get paid to create, right? If we zoom out, we're looking at getting paid to create, build, make something that we care about in terms of, you know, being a carpenter. Or a blacksmith, right? That you want to get paid for making something.
We can look at that same way, wanting to get paid to make something like art. We'll be a singer, a dancer, right? Those are artists or being a modern day content creator, right? We want to get paid to create stuff. You want to get paid to build shit that we love. My push with this episode and in general is to professionalize this.
My whole stick is live your best life, but part of. Living life and being in this system that we're in is having a resource called money. And one of the ways that we can make money is by having a business and getting paid for the things that we create, which is why I talk about this and which is why I would love to just hang out and play guitar and go to the beach, but.
That's not, I can't do that. So I want to look to figure out ways to create, uh, you know, to, to generate income and revenue via something I love and help other people do the same thing. So my push is to professionalize. This creator economy, AKA treat it like an actual business. Right. And we can, and probably should redefine what that means, right?
Treating it like an actual business. When I say that I'm leaning heavily on the commerce side of things like good services and goods in exchange for money, not talking about optimizing capitalism. You gotta make money, but you don't have to be a greedy fucking asshole. Also, optimizing the commerce side of things, organizing the commerce side of things, and professionalizing the creator economy does not mean just having a big ass team and outsourcing things.
Like, I just, I have to say that. Y'all know I'm all about keeping things lean, but mainly I'm I don't want to say this because I think that there's this like misconception that if you have people working for you, then like you've made it. I do have feels around that. I have a team and I love, they're a team, I don't like thinking like these people work for me.
I think that there's like, there's some fuckery in how I see people talk about things and how I see people glamorize. Like, my team is working while I'm on the beach and I'm like, ah! That is fucking terrible. Like, so when I talk about professionalizing it, I am largely speaking about organizing and optimizing and owning the commerce side of your business to that end, all of this to me largely means or leads to or results in you protecting yourself, protecting your business and thereby protecting your people, right?
Cause if your shit gets shut down, if it gets taken away. Your people lose out. So, three parts to this, three things that I'm going to suggest when it comes to professionalizing the creator economy. Number one, own your shit. Like, I can't emphasize this enough, and I talked to Lex about this because she obviously built websites for people, and the number of people that come to her and they like don't have access to their website, or like someone built it and they don't have, they don't own it, I'm like, what the fuck?
What in the actual fuck, like if that's you, like I'm not judging you, but I am going to say what in the actual fuck, let's go and handle that right now. Own your shit. Own your website. Own your email list. Own your content. When I say own your content, I mean obviously have a backup of it. Once you put it out there, it's out there, but like have a backup of it.
Get everything in writing if you're working with people. Set boundaries on things. Don't do shit that makes you feel bad. If people are like asking you to come and give a talk for people. And you're like, ah, that feels weird. Cause then they're going to sell it. Like don't fucking deal with them. Own your content, own what you create, own your transactions.
To me, this means get paid directly when possible. So my niche is helping service providers. Monetizing a platform is a different approach to different beasts. And it's not my zone of genius. Meaning you just create content and something like YouTube pays you or like the TikTok creator fund and things like that.
That's not my zone of genius. But if that is you, and you're listening to this, I feel like a safety net, creating a safety net would be to having an additional source of income where people, your audience pays you directly. And you're not solely reliant on a platform pushing your content. Cause if the platform goes away, like we saw with TikTok, you're fucked.
So by all means have that as well. And that's amazing. Like that's super cool. You get to create content, put it out there and like. It gets pushed out and people will watch it. And because people watch it, you get paid. Fuck yes. Amazing. But in terms of creating safety net, protecting yourself, protecting your business, protecting your people.
If you can create a method. By which you get paid directly, your people pay you, this is why I teach what I teach in terms of, you know, people providing a service and whether that's education or direct service for people, and then their people are paying them as opposed to platform paying them, right? So own your transactions, get paid directly when possible.
Avoid platforms that hold your payments, that's a bunch of bullshit. Uh, Teachable does that, and like you get, a lot of affiliate models do that as well. And like, you don't get paid for like another 30 days, 90 days, it's a lot of nonsense. Avoid that if you can. Um, that's why I don't like Teachable. And the subcategory here would be pay your fucking taxes.
We are taxed at historically low rates. Fucking pay your taxes. My number one recommendation for all things financial related, it's going to be Sandy York, she's a fit money coach. Get organized with your finances. I know that it can feel scary and things like that, and I don't think that you should track every single penny by any means.
But just knowing where things are, knowing, you know, what's coming in, what's going out. And having, or having someone help you organize that, do that, right? Owning your shit, organizing your shit, fit money coach. Second order of business here, control communication with your people. Meaning run everything through your own email list and back up that email list quarterly.
What it means to back up an email list is to export what's called a CSV file. It's a fancy name for an Excel spreadsheet of the names and the email addresses. You back that up. Quarterly, you're fine. But this way, everything's going through email. You own it. And you have to use an email marketing service for this.
My recommendation will always be ConvertKit. A little side note here, a little, I don't know, I don't know, going a little deeper with this. You have to have a domain or professional email for this. Meaning it's not, you're not just using Gmail. In my case, it'd be like shantay at themovementmyshow. com, a domain email, whatever your domain is going to be.
It's like 6 or 12 a month or something like that to have that. You go to Google workspace and you can get that you need that because that's going to ensure that or at least maximize the likelihood that your emails will not go to spam. Okay. So yes, there, there's some steps to be had here.
Professionalize. Your creator business, right? Professionalizing the creator economy. This is future proofing yourself. Proof your previous, wow. Future proof, wow. Wow. Leave it in Courtney. Future proofing your business by protecting your business, protecting your people, control the communication from everything through your own email list and back that shit up quarterly.
Get a domain email, professional email, go to Google workspace. You can do that. And then I suggest using something like. ConvertKit, uh, or it's now called Kit. I will drop my affiliate link in the show notes if you want to use it. Thank you in advance. If you want to use something else, it's fine, but just make sure that it's an actual email marketing service, not just Gmail and you own that connection.
This way, if, if, uh, TikTok dies or Instagram dies, you still have contact with your people. Speaking of, if you're not on my email list, would love to have you join. We'll drop that in the. The, uh, show notes as well, but that's themovementmyshow. com forward slash email dash list. Would love to have. And then number three, part number three here of professionalizing the creator economy, be aware of the convenient tax.
Be aware of the convenience tax. I am largely with this talking about platforms that take some astronomical fee. 10 percent is a fucking lot folks, in order to host a service. I'm really looking at Patreon here, Substack is another platform that does that. They take 10 percent of every transaction, and that's in addition to the normal transaction fees, whatever, 2.
percent that, you know, Stripe and them take. That's fucking crazy. Host that shit yourself. This is actually why I stopped using Crowdcast, because the fees just got to be too high.
I am happy to pay a monthly, you know, the monthly fee for whatever the service is. But I don't want to also pay an additional transaction fee per transaction. Kajabi doesn't have that, right? You just pay per month to have this thing. You can have as many transactions on there as you want, but you're just paying for the actual.
That's how, you know, websites and, and, and such is, such are. Uh, but all I'm, what I'm saying here is host that shit yourself. This is why I built the mafia out on my website. Kajabi wasn't the player that it is now. Um, and even if I'd start again, I don't know if I would go and use Kajabi instead. Um, I wanted to control everything.
Right. I want, I, when I got, so my website is WordPress and I had a Joe, another Joe build it out in 2018, I want to say, um, and I need a lot of functionality. I need a podcasting ability. I had a blog at the time as well. Um, I was selling my in person courses. I need registration capabilities. And I knew that I was going to start this membership at some point.
And I wanted to be able to control everything and run it through my site. Yes, there is friction with that. And there was obviously that upfront cost of getting it built out. Um, but mainly the big part, honestly, was the time and the friction. It was a lot. It was a heavy lift, but that fucking convenience fee folks, 10 percent of every single transaction.
Come on, that is too high. Especially if you're trying to do this thing forever. If you're trying to do it for short term and maybe you don't really mind, but you feel like, I'm doing this forever? And forever they're taking 10 percent just for existing? Like, they're not continuing to set anything up.
They're not building something. And most of the time they try to justify these fees by adding more shit that you don't even want. So two things I understand that are appealing, uh, to this kind of convenience side of things is one, which is why I call it the convenience tax, is one, the initial is the inherent convenience, right?
It's done for you, right? But I will again take safety over convenience because if it's someone else's platform, they take it away, it's done. It's gone. Now, I know someone could push back and be like, you know, I run my, my website. I was like, wow, I run my membership through a plugin for a word set for WordPress called MemberPress.
And so that could go away, but everything is integrated so deeply within email. And I'm communicating with them all the time that there is a safety net built into that. And I have ownership of all of those things. They're not just going to disappear on me. And all of the content I have, it was on my site.
It's not like I'm uploading all this stuff to a different site that then it goes away and I'm like, well, where is it? What's going on? I, it's, I still have all of it. It's on my website. So I get what the convenience, I get the convenience of it being done for you. But again, if we're looking at this as a long term things, your business, your baby put in the effort, right?
I get that building something has a cost upfront, but I do believe that just, and I believe, I know that it's math. There are savings in the long run, right? So if you are at a place in your business and you're small. and you have no money, then bootstrap it and don't look to build this massive thing out, right?
You can still own the things and own the transactions, not have this big huge like behemoth of a website or whatever that you're using. Flip side of this, if you're big and you have the money to do this, then fucking get it built out. I'm thinking about Danielle Pesenti and how eventually and, and, um, Doctrine Fit did it as well.
Like, They got an app built out, right? And like, they waited, and they were not bootstrapping it, but doing it before with, you know, PDFs and email. And that's fine! Own it! There's no like, oh, I'll use this other thing and then I'll use this other app that's already made for me and they get fucking 10 percent of every transaction?
Immediately fucking no. Immediately no. And it just feels so fragile to me, like Patreon goes away and what are you gonna do? This is gone. You have no connection. Like what? The second part of this, which I understand that people may, the appeal perhaps is something like substack. Uh, and I, I can't speak to how helpful it is, but in theory, I think people are thinking, well, there's an audience already and this thing could push my paid thing to this audience.
But. My play here, my push here, because obviously I'm familiar with it, will always be to use the free social media platforms to build the audience and then offer them this paid thing that you own. I, I know that we don't own the free social media platforms, but you don't own Substack either. So same, same there.
I just, I just cannot get over these platforms taking such a large percentage of the thing that you're doing. You're, you're doing all of this stuff. So own it, take the time, take the money, take the effort to build the thing out yourself or, you know, get help to build it out and really own it. If you are building this thing for the long run, be willing to spend some time up front with the research and the actual building of it.
I cannot speak to the exact tech stack that would make the most sense for you, but I do have an episode that speaks to all the things that I use. Um, and that's going to be episode 5, 544. We'll link that in the show notes. Thank you, Courtney. That was a re release. Um, but that's like my top tech and software, uh, recommendations.
I will say again, I've stopped using Crowdcast because the fees got too high. And I was like, immediately fucking no, right? These companies just keep inching up, inching up, inching up. And I'll say that one of the benefits of hosting everything on my own and running things myself is like, I don't have to increase my fees.
So as it relates to the mafia. People, the rate hasn't gone up, so it's 97 now for new people, but the people that are in there from before, it stays there. The reason that it's at a new price now is because I've added a bunch of stuff, and it's honestly worth way more than what they're paying. Um, but I'm a big fan of rewarding your early adopters.
They get in early, they get in at that price, they help you build the think rate, they stay at that price forever. I don't need to make it more. It was not, at least not because of the software costs, right? I'm not just like, Oh, I'm just going to be raising things. Whereas if you have this other software, they're like, it keeps going up, keeps going up, they change their fees.
You have no control. They could one day just be like, now we're taking 15%. Now we're doing 20%. You have no fucking control over it. I hate that. I hate that. My main push with this episode is that if you are looking to get paid for what you create, whether it's woodworking or video content or any kind of art.
I would love for you to professionalize it. I have the three parts here. Own your shit, control communication with your people and be aware of the convenience tax. I get it. You, you just want to be a creator or an artist or deliver your service. But if you want to get paid for this thing, you want that commerce piece.
Then you're a business owner now. Treat it as such. Again, that doesn't mean being a dick like what we're seeing with all these billionaire bullshit right now. It's quite the opposite. You get to choose how you run your business. But it does mean protecting yourself and your business and your people, okay?
Alright, I'm getting riled up. Gonna end it here. Rupi, he's here with me. Also, if you're watching this on YouTube, it's not a lightsaber. My sister was like, is that a fucking lightsaber? And I was like, no, it's not a lightsaber. That is just an LED light I got back there. Uh, but Don't forget dinner this Wednesday.
Would love to have you www do the movement my show.com/mafia dinner reservation. It's free. I'm not gonna fucking spam you. You don't have to sign up. You have to register for the dinner, but you don't have to sign up for the mafia after. Just come hang out. I want you to see that communities like this do exist.
I want you to see that there's a better way to do online business. I want you to see that you can exist within a group of people. Wanna see you succeed. That's actually, that's actually a real thing. So I would love to see you. If not, that's also fine. Good, good. All right. That's all I got for you. Until next time friends, as always, endlessly, endlessly appreciative for every single one.
I'll say it again, until next time friends, because it's habit, maestro.
Watch this episode on YouTube!
Save your spot at the first ever Mafia Dinner Open House
Use Kit (previously ConvertKit) for your email list
Get on the Maestro Mail list
Follow Sandi York: @FitMoneyCoach
MOTM #544: My Top Tech and Software Recommendations for Online Business
Catch me on the socials: Instagram | YouTube | Threads | TikTok | Facebook