Hey, what’s going on? Welcome to the Doug Show. My name’s Doug Cunnington, and today I’m gonna talk about how my business is failing slash I ran it into the ground. Everything’s fine. Uh, we don’t have to panic, but I’ll, I’ll tell you the situation currently, and one thing that I, I can tell you right away, and it’s not the whole point of this episode, but my VA.
Callie has been working with me for like five, six years, something like that. It might be six years. And she produces the podcast and the YouTube channel, and I, I trained her, she’s been doing it like hundreds of episodes and basically, uh. She has bandwidth to take on, uh, more work, which all comes into play.
Actually, I’ll just tell you, I’m not gonna bury, bury it, but I’m gonna go through a lot of stuff today. Essentially the revenue is so low [00:01:00] in the business. I was looking at how I can cut expenses and Cali doesn’t cost me a huge amount of money, but when you look at the percentage of. What the, you know, basically the expenses versus the top line revenue.
I was like, I can produce the show like I was producing it in the very beginning, which is minimal. So if you see fewer edits, that’s exactly why, because back in the day I would just record and I was like, you know what? I’m not gonna edit. I’m just gonna blow out. Plow through, blow through. Like that’s not gonna get edited out, for example.
So I’ll talk about how I reviewed my expenses. I’ve been shutting things down slowly over the last few years anyway, and I’ll get into the details. ’cause I, I imagine a lot of people out there either have already done this or you’re getting to a spot where you’re like, okay, I need to cut expenses. And you, I mean, you have to look.
[00:02:00] At everything and make hard decisions. So like I said, Kelly’s been working with me for several years and then a few other things changed, which I’ll get into in a second. But it’s interesting ’cause it is not like this came out of nowhere. We saw the niche site in sort of SEO area. Well. It’s less interesting now, or maybe it’s more interesting, it’s less profitable for like people trying to start a side hustle or there were so many of us earning a full-time income from it.And essentially over the past five years or so, I’ve been doing less and less and doing less work overall. But um, I was also doing like less sort of new things and less. New audience acquisition. So in the content world, if you watch, uh, other, other content [00:03:00] creators slash people that talk about content, the sort of meta versions of this, we talk about other people creating content that are creating content and it’s a recursive situation, but basically.
There’s some content that’s for the existing audience, and then there’s content that attracts new audience members, which is a very important part of the process. And if you don’t have that basically you have churn. People lose interest in the topic area. And then your audience slowly tapers away. So you always kind of have to have more people coming in.
And if you’re not creating new content and sort of catering to the algorithms that are out there. Then you will run into an issue. And I haven’t been doing that. I haven’t been maybe like speaking at conferences or trying to make the rounds on other podcasts and that sort of thing. So [00:04:00] eventually what will happen is like your business will shut down.
And actually I was, I was chatting with a friend yesterday who had a super huge blog in. We were talking really like taxes and other like boring like admin stuff for entrepreneurs and self-employed people, especially in the content world. And basically he was like, yeah, like maybe, maybe I should like simplify things a little bit.
I’ll skip some of the tax details ’cause that’s not super fun. But essentially maybe I can simplify things as well. My revenue is down. Under six figures as well, is what he said. And I was like, oh yeah. Like you’re probably in a spot where you can simplify things and you’ll be able to you know, save on your accounting.
’cause like essentially that’s what it comes down to. Alright, so I’m gonna go over a few things and yeah, it should flow pretty well. Hopefully you’ll learn a little something [00:05:00] from this. So I am shutting down various areas. I’ll do a quick little recap on the recent past of things that I turned off revenue side as well, and the expenses, which are quite important.
That’s what I’m looking at. I mean, there’s only so much you could trim down, but I’ve trimmed down a lot. And I’ll also talk about some of the, um, areas that I’m looking to start putting a little time into. Even though I’m, I’m very lazy and I don’t want to do any work, but there’s some areas where I’ve been neglecting.
Actually putting any time or effort into it. And I think if I just do a little bit, it might be enough to bring in a few hundred dollars per month. And actually let me level set the whole, the, the context here, because when I started doing this, when I started the channel, I had a full-time job and. I just wanted to start something on the side.
In the very [00:06:00] beginning, I just wanted to make like $350 per month, and I thought that would be absolutely amazing. I was able to do that within a few months, and then I realized that I could probably do much more. Once you, you know, conquer those lower levels of your goals, you realize that you can.
Potentially do way more than you imagined before and way more than like what other people think that you might be able to do. Like when I told my friends we’re having beers or something at, uh, taco Mac back in Atlanta, and I was like, yeah, I’m, I’ve made like a thousand dollars like on this website.
And they were like, well, that’s cool. They’re like a thousand dollars. They’re, they were, my friends were typically like. They had like three to five years older than me, so they had a few more years under their belt and they’re like a thousand dollars, like whatever. Um, but before too long it was like full-time replacement income, I’m pretty sure.
For about five years. I, I think I earned [00:07:00] more than them. Although, I mean, we didn’t, we didn’t talk salary in those days, but eventually it was, I was making good money. I’ll just put it, put it that way. So anyway, there’s some areas where I’m like, alright, if I just have a look at these, I think I could probably, I don’t have to like conquer the world.
I don’t have to replace my full-time income because we, my wife and I earned money over the years. We slowly invested nothing crazy. Uh, not financial advice at all, consult your professionals, but it was just index funds basically. And if you’re interested, you can go, um, do some research on that. You can check out my other podcast, mile HiFi, but basically I.
I’ll talk about some of the revenue areas that I’m exploring, and the fact is if it just brings in, you know, a couple hundred dollars a month, it doesn’t even have to be consistent. That would [00:08:00] meet my goal, which I will tell you right now. Essentially I want to cover the cost I. For producing the podcast and have enough money left over to help me go to conferences and enjoy, um, some, some travel to those conferences.
Nothing crazy. I go to, like FinCon, there’s a financial independence retreat that I go to called Camp Phi. These are not. Insanely expensive. In fact, uh, I think FinCon, they lowered their, uh, ticket price to like a hundred bucks. But you, you do have to fly out there. So that cost a few hundred bucks or credit card points, which I’m, I’m now dabbling in a little bit more further.
You gotta get a hotel and you gotta pay for food. So that does add up. So if you, if you go to a conference like. Typically, if I’m thinking of like the ticket price and there’s another one called, uh, economy that’s in, uh, [00:09:00] Cincinnati. Super fun and you know, you gotta pay for a hotel, gotta get food there, maybe some drinks and the flight and blah, blah, blah.
So for something like economy, I will just lightly budget. This is probably gonna cost me like 1500 to $2,000, something like that. And that’s a little, I mean, usually it comes in under that. However, that could be reasonable. For example, if I’m maybe bringing some, some t-shirts to give away or other stuff like that.
So I just wanna cover the cost to produce podcasts like this. And then there’s a little software that I pay for not too much. I’ve trimmed that down quite a bit too. But anyway, how did we end up in this spot? So. Recent history revenue areas that have shut down. So over the past several years, [00:10:00] I slowly, I, I built up a handful of niche sites and I, I sold them.
And the last one that I started from scratch, at this point it’s been five years, which is crazy. So in 2020 it was during the pandemic and. Things were changing a little bit at that point, but I started a, a new site and I was hoping to get it up to, I don’t know, maybe like $5,000 a month and then hopefully, probably sell it after that.
And in fact, I, I built the site inside of my course multi profit site that I. Launched in 2020, which was the next iteration after five Figure niche site. This is a little history lesson here. So I updated that site, reshot, redid all the material and went from there. I got the [00:11:00] site up to, I think about a thousand dollars a month in the next, I don’t know.
A year to 18 months? I don’t remember. I don’t remember. But basically I got it up to a certain point and then things were changing a little bit more. Now, the biggest issue with the site is I outsourced all of, basically all of the work. I didn’t write a damn thing on the site. My previous sites, I was, you know, the first sites.
I wrote all the content, like thousands and thousands of words. Later on, I would hire people, but I would write maybe 10% of it, and I would actually rewrite some material and then by 2020 I was like, I will outsource everything. And it was okay-ish, but. Not great. So it was okay, but it still got up to like a thousand dollars a month and I literally [00:12:00] put no, no time in it.
So, um, slowly over time I sold sites. Um, I was selling my course and I still was earning, like, I, like I said, I started the site in 2020, grew it up to a certain point, and algorithms started changing a little bit more. I think the quality of the content was an issue. The people that were writing it were fine.
It was a service that actually a few services that I used, and all of them were fine ish. But the fact is like if you, if you were not writing it yourself, if there’s not someone like really qualified writing it, it’s. I don’t know. It’s derivative at best because the people were doing research but not that great.
And this was before any of the great AI tools that are out now, or at least AI tools that could write as well as they do now. Okay. So I sold sites. I was pretty much, um, out of like out of. Creating new sites 2020. I got the one up to about a thousand dollars per [00:13:00] month and it slowly declined, um, through helpful content updates and people can sort of, you know, look at different timelines out there.
But each helpful content update had a little hit and it just slowly declined. It was still getting traffic. Actually, it’s still getting traffic and it’s still earning, I don’t know, it was like $30 a month. However, one of the areas that I cut expenses on, like the renewal for the hosting popped up. And, you know, I, I had big visions of like, what this site was gonna do, and I thought I would need a fairly beefy hosting uh, high capacity for traffic and bandwidth and all that stuff.
So I, I had like. A dedicated IP address. I had some other services and the hosting, and it was, it’s a few hundred dollars. So when the renewal came through, I was like, oh, you know what? Killing this, I’m, I’m killing this site. It’s not even worth me trying to unravel it. I’m just gonna turn off the, um, hosting [00:14:00] and.
I’m actually curious if anyone has comments out there, feedback at Doug show. Leave a comment if you’re watching on YouTube, but basically it’s only making like $30 a month or something like that and I was like, you know what? Just shut it down. Like it’s not even worth me trying. Like if I gave it away, it would still take hours of my time to like fucking transition it and that, that sort of thing.
If I sold it. Like, yes, not, not even worth my time overall. And it’s just, you know, if someone, if I gave it to someone, I would be giving them a headache. If someone paid money, they would have to spend, you know, weeks unraveling the mess of everything, right? So I’m just shutting it down and I’ll hang on to the domains for the next little bit.
But that said, I did a process earlier in the year where I went through all the domains that I have. It’s not too many. Just like 400. No, I’m just kidding. It was only like, uh, it was like [00:15:00] 25 or something like that. I don’t know. It’s like more than two dozen, but not more than three. Right. So there, there’s a few domains and I was just like, you know what?
I’m not gonna do anything with these. Like, we get these ideas, it’s like, oh, I’m gonna, I’m gonna start this one. And then we buy the domain and then we don’t do anything with it. Just like you guys. So basically, basically I shut some of those down, so that saves a decent chunk, uh, hundreds of dollars per year for sure.
But I mean, I’ll just thinking about it, looking at my expenses and what I’m doing, my bookkeeping and all that. I would have like once a, once a month, or, sorry, not once a month, but um, probably like two to three domains per month would be up for renewal or something like that. So it was just like a regular cost.
And every now and then I’m like, oh, a few of them hit all at the same time. I’m like, why am I paying a name cheap, like $150 this [00:16:00] month? Like, what, what is going on? So it wasn’t 150 bucks, but anyway. I was like, let’s trim some costs in these domains. When the renewal came up for the last site, I was like, you know what, I’m just gonna let this thing die.
So that’s some expenses. On the revenue side, I was promoting multi profit site like four times a year. So I was doing a quarterly, I was, um, having lunches, but I stopped selling it in. Like the middle of 2023 because I was like, you know, what AI is getting is changing the landscape so much and I, some of this stuff works and it’s just not as, there’s not a high percentage chance that you’re gonna be successful if you do the work.
And you put in the time, it may or may not work and previously, I’m just making up stats [00:17:00] here, but previously, say 20 18, 20 19, if you did what was in the course, it was probably like an 80% chance that you were gonna get like traffic, you were gonna earn some money. And I mean, I remember up until. Hell it, it was probably like 20, 23.
People were like, yeah, I got it up to, I got my site up to like a thousand dollars a month, 1200 a month, and then helpful content updates were hitting them and like I said, 2023, I stopped. I. Enrolling new students. I kept the site or kept the course running until for about a year, and then I sunset the course.
I emailed all the students and said, Hey, like, this course is not relevant. If you want access s let me know. If you have any issues, let me know. It turned out a lot of people said, I, I do want [00:18:00] access, so I. Moved all of the content over to a Google Drive and I gave individuals access if they wanted it. The, alright, nobody get offended here.
Alright. It’s always fun when you hear that. So the, so with online courses. People buy them with the greatest intention to go through the material, but a very small percentage of the people actually go through all of the material. A handful will get started, but people are busy. There’s other things they want to get into.
I heard from, I’m just making up a number, but let’s say I heard from eight people that said. Man, I was just about to start working on the course next week. Can you please gimme access? And I gave so many disclaimers like, Hey, if you do this, like this is not relevant anymore. There’s some pieces that might be relevant, [00:19:00] like hiring or the way you can like scale up a team or other like.
Things that can be distilled down to like some principles of working online, but the nuts and bolts of like building a niche site, I’m like, that stuff is not gonna work for you. But about eight people said I was, I’m gonna start next week. And I’m like, bullshit, you’re not gonna start next week. You’ve had access to the course for like four years and you literally never touched it.
Like, you’re not gonna start next week. They may have thought that. Kudos. I mean, you know, like I said, nobody get offended. I’m not if you did that, I’m not talking about you specifically, but it’s like people have the best intention and then they, they don’t, they don’t do it. It’s like, eh, I’m gonna start the diet next week.
And it’s a perpetual like, Hey, I’m gonna start the diet next week. It’s a thing people do. So. Anyway, I gave those folks access. I did not bust their balls, but I gave them access. But I was like, you’re not gonna do it. You haven’t done it for like [00:20:00] four years. What change, like now that you can’t have it, now you want access to it.
Like, okay, so anyway, I gave them access to it and they’re able to check it out if they want to. There are some relevant like ideas in there in a general sense. Okay, so I shut down the course. That was the main revenue driver and like basically from. From the revenue I was bringing in from that, from advertisers and from other affiliate, uh, revenue that I was bringing in and occasional, uh, like advertisers on like the YouTube channel and stuff like that.
I was able to produce this show. I was able to pay Cali, I was able to, um, produce my other show, mile Hi-Fi and pay for all the software and hosting and like float. Elevated expenses. ’cause like when you’re making, let’s say the revenue was $25,000 a month, when the revenue’s that high and our [00:21:00] general overhead for an online business is very low then.
I’m like, okay, I could pay for this software that I use occasionally. But when things were getting tighter and I was like, okay, I’m slashing these revenue sources, then I started to look more closely at maybe, um, I was using Kajabi, which is a fine course platform, and add an email. Service as well.
Basically you could put a ton of stuff in there, but it’s fairly expensive if you’re not using all the components. And then if you’re not selling your course, well obviously it’s gonna, that’s gonna eat into, um, your cash flow dramatically. So I canceled that and I moved, I, you know, I shut down the course, moved over to, um.
ConvertKit, which is called Kit Now, and they have a free tier. So I’m on the free tier there, so cut expenses a lot in that area. [00:22:00] I was earning some money from Mile High five, so I had a sponsor there for around two years, but. Like many sponsorships, they, um, you know, they don’t necessarily get stale, but unless your audience is continually growing, you’re not gonna have like new customers flowing in.
So while I had a great relationship with a company called GhostBed, they, they were like, Hey, we’re not pushing many sales. Um, we’re gonna have to end advertising. And they gave me like a month heads up. That was totally cool. And they were very hands off. And the thing that I was, you know, that I have arrived at is like, either I want no sponsors or they have to be hands off and let me do whatever I want.
And that’s the way Ghosted was. So the irony of it is like this Doug show. Channel, the Doug Show Podcast and the [00:23:00] Niche site project blog, like the revenue was so low, like there was, there was a little bit of earnings through some affiliate, uh, revenue. Not too much. ’cause I don’t create too much affiliate content where I’m like, here’s how to use this tool or whatever.
And very few sponsors as well. So I was able to use the ad revenue on the My Life five podcast to support this show since, you know, it’s all under the same business entity. And that was fine. But since GhostBed went away, I was like, okay, we’re not bringing in much revenue at all. So there is overhead like.
It’s fairly inexpensive. Like I have all the equipment and shit now, right? But there’s hosting, there is software and it turns out the software is fairly expensive to script was um, about 30 bucks a month and I have it. And then [00:24:00] I had a seat for Cali and then I have a seat for my producer for Mile High Five, which is a different person than Cali.
And basically I was like, ah. If I’m paying Cali X amount and I am paying for the script and then there’s no revenue coming in from that side, like this Doug show side, I’m like, alright, I have to cut costs again. So that’s the whole thing that I was like, Cali, I’m unfortunately, there’s no, there’s no money coming in.
So unless something changes, then we’ll have to figure it out. And I ca, I mean like every now and then there would be. A, like some sponsorship talk for like a YouTube video and. You know, you go back and forth and then you get a deal going and actually, like I have an open email out. Like we basically like made the deal.
I was like, I’ll do these three pieces of content cost 1200 bucks. Like we could work on that. [00:25:00] And they were like, okay, I need to. Like, get the next email you get, it will have the contract in there and blah, blah, blah. You’ll have to send us an invoice. And I was like, cool, let’s do it. And it’s been, you know, over a week and you know, it fizzles out.
You know, previously they were emailing fast. So anyway, I’ve cut costs, I have. Just push the business into the ground for forcefully, but it was all somewhat intentional. So over time I was like, I am gonna be doing less work a year and three months ago or so, my wife retired, so I was like, I will do less work during that time period.
Turns out, I mean, I like producing the shows and I. I, I actually enjoy Mile Hi-Fi a little bit more. ’cause the content area is a little bit, it’s more interesting to me right now in my life. I am not like starting I’m not starting new sites. Like I interviewed people who have like, um, [00:26:00] you know, the local newsletters.
I’m like, I’m not gonna fucking start an local, a local newsletter. I. I put in the reps earlier, low interest in, in that I’m like, if I, if something changed, then I would potentially get more interested. I was gonna say yesterday I played guitar with a friend for a couple hours couple weeks before that my buddy and I played.
And I’m like spending more time on like music and hobbies and stuff like that, exercise being outside, like that sort of thing. So I have no, no issues with what I’m spending time on, but when it comes down to it, I’m just like, okay, if I’m doing this, then I can’t be doing something else. So unfortunately, like I said, Cali, is not gonna edit the show anymore. I will pull producing back under my wing. I don’t know, I don’t know how to lay in that sentence, but Callie has bandwidth and I trained her [00:27:00] so she can actually do, um, like more editing and better editing than what I have asked for for this show. ’cause I kind of like the, the more, uh.
Like rustic, amateur style. But, um, yeah, she, she used, uh, different types of software, I believe, for some of the editing. But like at the end, we were using the script like so many people do now. So she could do audio, she could do video, and I was like, Hey, I’m, I’m sorry, like we’re, I’m not bringing in revenue so we need to part ways here.
But I was like, I’ll talk to my audience. ’cause a lot of people do want to create content out there now. Let’s get into some of the back to basics that I am getting back into. So a couple quick things I have been mentioning the uh, Etsy Print on Demand. Giftable that I have been working on, I’ll put a link to my mile Hi-Fi shop.
[00:28:00] And these are less these are more like brandable things. And because I have an audience over there, like some people have purchased some stuff. And in fact, I think, I think I have, I’m gonna say it’s like $170 in revenue, I think. This is funny. I think the profit is only about 40 bucks. However, I did actually, like Cali wanted a couple like shirts and stuff, so I was like, Hey, I’ll create a discount code for you.And I actually reimbursed her, which I guess I didn’t need to like create a discount code if I was gonna reimburse her anyway, but I kind of wanted to test the process for, for that. So the point being. I haven’t earned a little bit of money. $40 is not too much, but I only started with a few of the t-shirts that I have for mile Hi-Fi, and I created a couple new ones.
So that’s one thing. The [00:29:00] print on demand, I do have many ideas and I was talking to Emily. Odio Sutton, that is her name, I believe. Odio Sutton. I interviewed her a couple times and there was a very recent episode and basically whenever I chat with her, I’m like, oh, I have another idea for some products and I think I’m just gonna put ’em all in the mile.
Hi-Fi shop, because I don’t want to hassle with a bunch of different shops trying to segment the verticals of the. Types of products or the subject area. So I’ll just assume the people that end up there might be interested in the same kind of shit I am. So I’ll probably create a handful of things there, which should be fun.
I hope there will be some organic. Traffic going over there from the Etsy search engine. And I think many of them could be giftable [00:30:00] like I’ll, the first products, like when you look over there, you’ll be like, no one would want this. Like even people in your audience, dude would not want this. But that’s what I’ve done over there.
The other. Is, um, for Mile High five, I’ve had this in place. This was the plan that Carl and I had from the beginning. We were open to have advertising if it was like, on our own terms, but we, we were like, if we could just do a do donation model, that would be cool. And we tried that. It didn’t do that well.
I think at one point we were up to maybe like $200 a month or so. And I think now it’s about a hundred dollars per month. The thing is, I don’t push it enough, and it would be like every eighth episode we would mention it and it’s like people potentially could miss it, and it’s a decent sized show for.
In the grand [00:31:00] like scheme of things, it gets about five or six or 7,000 views slash downloads. Way more on the audio side, but yeah, about 5,000 or so on the audio side. Per episode. And that’s just not big enough of an audience for like a donation model in our specific niche. So it’s a little bit tough, and I appreciate all the people that, you know, donate five, 10 bucks a month or whatever.
It, it does help. And it, you know, like hosting for a podcast, it’s not super expensive, but it’s not free. Like if you go to a free platform like you, you give up a lot of control. You don’t. You know, there’s compromises. So, you know, this show costs, I think I’m paying a couple hundred dollars a year, so it’s not a huge amount, but again, it’s not nothing.
When you add in, um, script and a couple other audio mastering [00:32:00] softwares that we use, you know, I’m paying. Some money for all the software. Okay. So again, print on demand. We have the donation model and I’m working a little harder on affiliate stuff. So there are products that I actually use, so I. I’m starting to talk about those a little bit more in my general plan.
’cause Mile Hi-Fi has the bigger audience. Um, I’ll put a link so you could check out how I created the like support us page and what I’ve done over there. And basically I. I use like a chili pad. It’s like a pad that helps, like if you’re a hot sleeper, it chills you down when you’re sleeping. It changed my life, basically.
I started getting these, um, I don’t know if I can lift my foot up. It’s only for the, the YouTube people. Yeah. So it’s more you, you saw more leg than shoe. Alright. But. There’s a shoe called, uh, [00:33:00] zero shoes, and it’s XERO and they’re, it’s like, they are, um, it’s like a, is it zero? Rise, is that what they call it?
Basically, they’re flat. They don’t have a big heel. There’s no heel rise in in the back, and they have a very wide toe box, and that fits my feet really well. I don’t like having shoes with like a bigger heel, and I saw a friend wearing ’em. Actually, I saw ads for years, but I saw a friend wearing ’em and he’s like, I fucking love these shoes.
I’ve had like. Two or three pairs of these over the past several years. So within the next week, I ordered two pairs of my own and I was like, these are great as my other shoes. Got worn out. I got more. So I have four pairs. I just bought two more and it turns out they’re a local Colorado company. So like their home office is like 30 minutes from here or so.[00:34:00]
The shoes I believe are made in China, like many shoes, but it is a local company and you know, it’s close enough where like I maybe passed. The owners on the trail hiking in Boulder or something like that. So super comfortable shoes. I like them a lot. So that’s one thing I’m looking at. I also have, I think there’s a couple others, but those are the main ones I’m thinking of recently.
I think there, there might be some supplements. The other thing related to supplements, I, I have a handful of supplements that I take some for more like fitness and health related, and the other is more like sleep related, which is health related when you peel it back. But I. Actually went over to Amazon.
I finally turned on and applied for the Amazon influencer program, which funny thing. I was under the impression that it took the, it would take a little while to get approved, but I went over there and I clicked a couple [00:35:00] buttons and they approved me instantly, and I was like, I, I always thought there was a little more friction, so I.
I’m in the Amazon influencer program, and the thing that I’ve set up right now is just like the, the, um, list, the suggested page. So I have like sleep supplements and I have like some of my outdoor and hiking, uh, gear that I use. So there’s like a backpack on there. There’s micro spikes, which, you know, if you’re in an icy area, you would put, put those on.
I think, I can’t remember, like a pocket knife. I need to put like a headlamp, but there’s like a handful of things that I will put on there. The other one that I’ll probably do is like guitar stuff. So there’s like guitar picks or the strings that I use or the strap or the tuner or whatever. So there’s a handful of things that I actually use, like I, I recently upgraded.
I’m like, I’m like, I have, I have a lot of guitars, but I was like, you know what, what, what else can I try to buy here to make my [00:36:00] life better or easier or whatever? I don’t know if I actually got more like traction or it made my life better, but I got a strobe tuner, so like a Peterson strobe tuner that like clips on and instead of an, you know, you could buy a tuner for like 10 bucks and this one costs like.
75 or whatever. Is it seven times better? Probably not. Does it make me seven times better of a guitar player? Definitely not. But I’m looking at stuff like, is this better now? It, it is a better tuner. So the reason why I got it before everyone freaks out, the reason why I got it is, um, when you’re setting the intonation for the guitar, it is helpful to have an extremely accurate tuner and a strobe tuner.
Peterson Peterson’s, like a brand that I’ve heard of for years and for probably 25 years. I was like. Why the fuck would I get a $75 tuner when clearly this [00:37:00] other $10 tuner does 90% of the job. And it’s for like setting the intonation. And I’ve been doing some, some light, um, setup work for some of my guitars.
The electrics primarily just because it’s a little bit easier to set the intonation ’cause you just have a couple screws. I lost like 99% of the audience out there, but some of y’all play guitars. I know. So I’ll set up like a list of things that I’m, I’m. Using and then I’ll be able to say, Hey, if you, if you know, if you’re interested in the guitar strings that I look at, it’s gonna be a very small number of people that give a shit at all.
But you could go check it out and see it on the list over there. That said, I know I obviously can create like the Amazon influencer videos and post and spend a little more time there. It’s something I may take a look at. ’cause you know, as I look at some of the products that I have, and I look at some of the.
Um, videos that are out there, like I got a weighted vest a couple, [00:38:00] uh, maybe months ago, right? I don’t remember what I got. So I got this weighted vest and I looked a lot, and like many things, right? You can get a $10 tuner, you can get a $75 or a hundred dollars tuner. You can get like a $40 weighted vest, or you can get like a $200 weighted vest.
And I think you know where I’m going. I got the fucking $200 weighted vest. It could hold more weight, and it was far more durable. I saw so many influencer videos for like the weighted vest, which I found interesting. Like there were a lot, there were so many, like for every single weighted vest that I look at, there were so many videos, but I thought, you know, some of the other products that I’ve looked at.
There’s like, there’s no videos for them. And I, I was like, I wonder, I wonder if actually, if people know out there, let me know it. Are there some products where like they don’t show Amazon influencer videos or that I just not see them? Are they hidden [00:39:00] off? I can’t, I, I don’t know. I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe that’s something.
But anyway, the point is I’ll have that where I could actually refer people to products that I do use. And I literally can have like a video. It’s like, here’s my shoes, I have these different pairs, here’s why I got each one of them. And then, you know, for other stuff like the guitar picks, I really like these picks or the slide or whatever that I have.
So I’ll actually be able to make these real recommendations. So again, back to basics. It’s literally how, you know, I got started, how so many people got started or like when I started learning, I watched, uh, like Pat Flynn using Market Samurai or whatever, and. By the time I bought it, it was already outta date, but I didn’t know that.
So that was, that was a little funny, but I literally, I was like, oh, I will help support this, this, uh, you know, scrappy up and comer or [00:40:00] whatever, and I did that many times. So I, I hope people will use the links because at the end of the day, if, if it doesn’t cover the cost. Then I’ll probably like, I’ll stop doing stuff.
I don’t have to do it. So I’m doing it for fun and because I like it, and at some point there’s an opportunity cost that will, it will outweigh the benefit, the joy of me producing these videos. Um, my friend Matt, you know, he has a, a podcast still on the Money Lab channel, I believe, or, uh. RSS feed rather.
But you know, per my understanding, I don’t listen to every episode. Matt, I don’t think you listen to podcasts. So Matt will never hear this unless somebody tells him out there. But basically I think Matt enjoys talking through things. So he talks, you know, he goes and walks around his brewery or paces around, [00:41:00] and then he publishes it and I think it helps clear his mind and that sort of thing.
He talks about it in the show. I’ve heard him talk about that. That said, I don’t have that Exactly. Yeah, so I, I don’t have that in One of the fun things for Mile Hi-Fi is there’s no solo episodes. I interview someone or we have a discussion, or there’s multiple people. There will be short segments of, you know, an intro.
I talk through some stuff, do an ad read kind of deal, except now it’ll, I’ll point them towards the areas which they could support the show, but I think that wraps it up. Got some affiliate stuff, the Amazon influencer, the print on demand, and the donation side, and hopefully. All of those will be enough to cover the cost for this show and cover the cost for mile Hi-Fi, including [00:42:00] software hosting other bs.
The other thing like people don’t talk about is like there’s overhead to like have a business, including like taxes, like you have to. You have to get your taxes done, and it should be a little bit more simple than it used to, as I’m simplifying some of the tax structure and the business structure overall.
But one of the things I just paid for was I. $600 to do my corporate taxes. And no, no one talks about that. Again, that’s not, nothing. That’s a, that’s a decent little chunk right there. And there’s other professional expenses that you may run into. So like that just happens to be like, what? What I ran into, but I was like, oh yeah, like.
The money isn’t flowing like it was. So when you get a $600 bill and I was like, oh fuck, I forgot I gotta pay corporate taxes or uh, the [00:43:00] corporate, um, accounting professional services, I was like, oh yeah, that’s $50 a month you have to think about, but. If you’re just looking at a monthly, uh, cash flow, you’re like, ah, you know, these monthly softwares are coming in or whatever, but it’s something you have to think about.
So I think the lessons we can take away, hopefully are when you are, you know, running your business and things are going a little sideways. You may have to look at your expenses and be like, ah, shit, I’m gonna have to let someone go. I’m gonna have to change my expense, uh, like monthly expense, uh, commitment.
And you may have to make some hard decisions. So, you know, part of it I was like, I need to produce this show again and I need to remember, I. How to do that because I, I trained Callie many years ago and, um, you know, occasionally I would put one of the shows up and I’m like, oh, I don’t remember exactly how to do it, so I’m gonna [00:44:00] shut this down.
I’m gonna figure out how to publish this. And the show notes aren’t gonna be as good as they used to be. Alright, thanks a lot. Thanks for checking out the show. If you have comments or, uh, answers to the questions that I answered, asked you throughout. Feedback at Doug show and you can also leave a comment over on YouTube.
So I appreciate that and hopefully in the next couple weeks I’ll be able to share some news on how things are going. The fact that I’m actually like doing some side hustle stuff, like the print on demand, I’ll actually be able to talk about. What I’m doing, like what’s working, what’s not working, and that sort of thing.
So it does give me more to talk about for the show, which is good. ’cause I think that is why like I started listening back in the day to hear what people were working on. And then as time goes on, you want to hear the new things that are working and it is back to basics. So we’ll catch you on the next episode.
Thanks a lot for checking it out. And you know what? [00:45:00] If you haven’t left a review out there over on, uh, like Apple Podcast or Spotify, that’s helpful. It does help. I think that’s what they tell me.