Chris: You’ve come to the right place if you’re a course creator looking to build more impact, income, and freedom. LMScast is the number one podcast for course creators just like you. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of the most powerful tool for building, selling, and protecting engaging online courses called LifterLMS. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. My name is Chris Badgett, and I’m joined by a special guest, Sam Brodie, who’s been a man of many projects, from a running a service business and productizing that, then building a course, and now building a software product. Sam, welcome to the show.

Sam: Yeah, thanks for having me, Chris. Great to be here.

Chris: You have a wide variety of experience that I think speaks to some of the different areas that course creators need to develop or are strong and weakened. So just to provide a little more detail, can you take us on a tour of what the service was, what happened to that, and then the course, and then what you’re working on now, just the high level overview of those three areas?

Sam: Sure. I’ll go back a little bit further, but I’ll go quickly. So I started with WordPress in 2010. I was a freelancer then and was on the revenue rollercoaster that’s familiar to a lot of freelancers. So in 2013, I partnered with my current business partner who had just graduated law school, and we decided to take what I had learned with freelancing and apply that to an agency, and specifically, a niched agency that provided web design and marketing services for attorneys. Again, my co-founder was an attorney, so he had some domain expertise that helped in the sales process there.

So we grew JurisPage, our niche design agency from 2013 through 2016, at which point it was acquired. And then after that, created and released my course on Udemy. And that just kinda goes over all the lessons learned building the agency. And that’s kind of been a feeder into Offsprout, which is my current business, which is a website builder for WordPress.

Chris: That’s awesome. Yeah, thanks for the high level overview. As we go back, a lot of the people in this community, they start off, the course subject matter comes from the consulting or the freelancing or the service business they did, which in your case, was building this website and marketing package for the lawyer niche. Why did you start with … Why’d you pick that niche? Was it because you found that business partner who was in that niche or did you go looking for a lawyer because you wanted it to be in that niche?

Sam: This was actually my roommate freshman year and then a few years into college. So we got along well together and we wanted to start a business together. So it kind of made sense to target the legal niche, but beyond that, it was a good niche for us to target because there are almost 100,000 law firms in the US. They have money to spend on marketing. They want to spend money on marketing.

And at the time at least, they were somewhat underserved and a lot of them had pretty bad websites. A lot of them still have bad websites, so there’s still space in the market if anyone’s looking to get into a specific vertical or into the legal vertical. But the three things that I look for are domain expertise, the size of the market, and the ability of that market to pay for marketing services.

Chris: So you said 2013 to 2016 you got acquired. What was the business like pre-acquisition, like right before you got into all that part of selling the business? What did it look like? What had you created?

Sam: Yeah. So the first year was fairly slow revenue wise. We were under six figures. Second year, we grew to over six figures. And the third year, we doubled again. At the time that we were acquired, we had over 100 clients that were in our book of business. We charge everyone recurring revenue. The minimum that we would charge is $100 a month for a monthly maintenance and service package.

Chris: What was in that, the monthly maintenance and service package at a minimum? Was it marketing or was it keeping the website up to date or both?

Sam: Yeah. Good question because that’s an area that a lot of freelancers and even people who are going into the agency world just don’t do right yet, I feel. So our base package was just hosting. We did monthly reporting, traffic and leads reports, which was all automated. And then we included up to two revisions per month. Most of our clients wouldn’t use those, but every now and then, a client would need revisions.

And so included in that package was up to two revisions and we classified a revision as a single email or phone call. So we tried really hard to train our clients not to send a waterfall of emails because that’s a productivity killer and if you’re productizing your design agency, you want to have things as efficient as possible.

Chris: That’s awesome. So at what point did you go to the product ties model where it’s not just custom anything? Or did you start that way from the very beginning?

Sam: Yeah. Once I switched from freelancer to the agency, we kind of had that productized mentality from the beginning. I didn’t actually hear the term until maybe 2014 and that kind of, I was like, oh, that’s exactly what we’re trying to do. And now I can look up that term specifically and see what other people are saying about it. For anyone that’s not familiar with it, it’s basically documenting your processes and making them as repeatable as possible so that you can produce a consistent product and train new employees really easily. You eliminate bottlenecks and inefficiencies in your documentation and kind of figuring out the assembly line of the productized service.

Chris: That’s awesome. So when you were getting acquired, how many people were actively working with the business?

Sam: Yeah, so I’ve had a few people ask me that recently and I actually can’t remember if it was … I think it was five and we were about to hire a sixth, but I stayed on for about three months full time and then another half a year or another nine months half time after we got acquired as part of the acquisition contract. So I can’t remember when these people were hired, whether it was before or after.

Chris: So just to highlight though, like five people with 100 clients, you pretty much have to be productized to do that kind of volume with that small a team.

Sam: Right. We were creating, we were signing about five-ish, maybe five plus new clients per month. And so at any given time, we would have 10 projects up in the air plus our existing clients, whatever requests came in from them. So yeah, it was very important for us to have all of our processes documented.

Chris: That’s awesome. Unfortunately, we see a lot of course creators and entrepreneurs fail and one of the things that I noticed that can help is a good partnership. What did you bring to the table and what did your business partner bring to the table? Like how were you different?

Sam: Yeah, that’s a good question. I think the most important thing beyond just having complimentary skill sets is just liking the person that you are partnering with and knowing that you can argue but that you’re arguing in good faith and have a process for coming to a decision. So I feel very grateful that I’ve found a business partner. We don’t argue that much, but when we do, it’s friendly and we always ended up on the same page after. I can’t say enough how important that is.

But beyond that, we did have complimentary skill sets. I’m a developer and he handled the marketing and sales stuff. He’s much better at task switching than I am. And I always tell them this. I’m just terrible when it comes to task switching. So I’ll have to block off four hours at a time to work on one thing or else my productivity is killed, but he can just switch between marketing tasks, sales tasks, and get stuff done. And so I think that complimentary skill set was really important for us.

Chris: That’s awesome. That reminds me. I’ve lived here with my business partner, Thomas, who you’ve met. Thomas is a developer. I’m more of the business marketing guy. That sounds like our relationship and we do argue in a productive way. We have each other’s best interests at heart but we both take a stand on issues, whether it’s around just efficiency or whatever. It’s a healthy tension. I would say that.

Sam: Right, and you want that pushback in your business partner because it’s not helpful to have a yes man because you’re not going to be right 100 percent of the time. You want other ideas and you want someone challenging your ideas. Sometimes we’ll land on what I was thinking going into an argument. Sometimes we’ll land on what he was thinking going into the argument. Sometimes we’ll figure out a better solution than what either of us were thinking. So you should embrace conflict when it comes. And again, just having a business partner that also has that mentality and can argue with you without taking it personally is really important.

Chris: Yeah. I couldn’t agree more. What was the name of your course?

Sam: It’s Productized: How To Build A Seven-Figure Productized Agency, something like that.

Chris: I think it’s web design business.

Sam: Web design business, yeah.

Chris: So you’re teaching basically your experience of what happened, like how you grew this thing and how you sold this thing.

Sam: Right, yeah.

Chris: So for those who are running as freelancers or growing into an agency, or are a small agency or medium agency, how did the acquisition happen and what is it that they’re actually buying? Are they buying your book of business? Are they buying your processes? Are they buying the team? Can you just help somebody who’s curious about selling an agency? Like how it works?

Sam: Yeah, good question. So in terms of what are they buying, they’re buying all of that. And I’ll get into that in a little bit. The way we were acquired, we had this sort of friendly partnership with another company in the legal space, which reminds me, if you are looking to be acquired eventually as a web design agency, being in a niche is definitely a huge advantage because if you’re not in a niche, than the only potential acquirers essentially are larger agencies and they’re just buying a book of business.

But if you’re in a niche, then you’re more attractive to other companies in the niche as a value add, which is what we were. So we had been sending leads back and forth with this company for a while. We basically established the relationship as soon as we found it in 2013. So we had an existing relationship for a number of years. And in 2016 or late 2015, maybe it was, we approached them and said, “Hey, why don’t we white label our web design service for you guys and you can sell it to your clients and we’ll take care of everything?” And they countered, “How about we buy you instead?”

So going into that, we weren’t really looking to sell and I, to be honest, didn’t think that it would happen until a week or two before it actually did. There were a lot of negotiations, but they wanted to buy the book of business. They liked that we were highly efficient and they liked that we had all our processes documented. What else?

Chris: You guys had to stay on for some time too with them for the transition. Right?

Sam: Right. Yeah. So they wanted our expertise and also our brand. So at the time, we had pretty good brand recognition in the legal space and that was just increasing by the year. We had a well of traffic blogs, so they wanted to buy the brand as well and benefit from that brand equity. But then, yeah, they wanted us to stay on as well. So they wanted that expertise to be brought in. They wanted our kind of marketing skills for the other parts of their business as well.

So a lot of things, but if you’re thinking that your eventual exit is going to be an acquisition and not just transitioning out of the business and having someone else run it and earning passive income, which is a good alternative, if you’re thinking that you want to be acquired, I think it’s very important to be in a niche. It’s helpful to be productized because you have a consistent lead flow, you have a consistent process, you have a consistent product.

Have everyone on some sort of recurring plan, whether it’s $50 a month, $100 a month, $200 a month, just have everyone on a recurring plan because then you have a book of business to sell. Yeah, those are the major points I would say. Oh, and establish partnerships with other people in your industry.

Chris: Yeah, lots of wisdom there. So thanks, and congratulations on having that sale and making that happen. A small rabbit hole I want to pick up on with what you just said is you had an active blog. So as a web design agency for the legal industry, what were the types of articles on that blog?

Sam: Yeah, so that’s another area where being in a niche really helps. If you’re a generalist, it’s hard to really target your content. While you can have kind of general web design and marketing advice, you could have productivity advice, but that’s an even more crowded space. If you’re niched down like we were, we could for example, have review articles that were just reviewing other software and platforms in the legal industry.

Chris: This is showing tech thought leadership in your industry.

Sam: Exactly. And at the time, there weren’t really any other blogs doing that. I think that was a big benefit for us, but we had some review posts that were generating 1,000 plus page views a month. And so that was a really good type of content for us. We also hosted a virtual conference.

Chris: Like a virtual summit type thing?

Sam: Yeah, exactly.

Chris: What types of speakers or what was the organizing principles around that?

Sam: So being a marketing agency, we tried to get people to talk about marketing and we got some people from the legal industry and then a few people from outside of the legal industry just to share their insight about marketing and web design in the legal industry and also, efficiency in running your practice using technology.

Chris: That is super cool. Well, I just wanted to go down that rabbit hole because you mentioned that marketing piece with the content. I think the lesson there is if you’re in a niche, the content marketing is a lot easier.

Sam: Yep.

Chris: Were you doing a lot of do it yourself content for lawyers? Like if you want to be a lawyer and you want to do better marketing yourself, here’s how to do it, and then ultimately they were left with the question like, well can you just do it for me? Or is that kind of the general types of articles?

Sam: Yeah. So we definitely did a good amount of that and I think some people are afraid to give away the keys.

Chris: Lawyers are busy, right?

Sam: Yeah, and most people are busy. When it comes to marketing, web design, building a course, you know, all that kind of stuff, it takes a lot of time. So if you are the kind of person that has more money than time, then you’re going to look at this article, see all of the things that you have to do, and be like, I don’t want to be bothered with this. I’m just going to hire someone because that’s a better use of your money than the money lost doing it yourself.

Chris: Excellent. Well, let’s take a turn to your course. How To Build A Seven-Figure Web Design Business. It’s one of the top courses on Udemy around web design, right?

Sam: Yeah. I think I just got the top rated tag on Udemy.

Chris: I was spying on you and I saw there was 2,669 students in there. And so, but before we get into the course itself, why did you decide to do a course after the sale of the business? I’m assuming that’s when you started creating it?

Sam: Yeah. So a couple reasons. One was because I thought that I had learned a lot over the course of those three years and wanted to share that knowledge. I wanted to increase my own profile, my own thought leadership in the space. And then I was thinking that it could be a good way to feed into Offsprout. All of the stuff in the course, I made sure to have it be applicable no matter what technology you’re using. I don’t push people to use Offsprout, but I mention it in a few places where I need to use a website builder in order to teach the lesson. So it was a combination of just wanting to share the information, wanting to increase my own profile, and wanting to feed into Offsprout.

Chris: That is awesome. And what year did you build that?

Sam: I think that was also 2016.

Chris: So we’re a couple of years out from that. And so you’re getting close to like 3,000 students in there. And this is a paid course. It’s not a free course. I’ve done free courses on Udemy for lead generation and I do have some paid courses in there in some different niches. I think Udemy is good at what it does. It’s a great place to get leads. When I heard you said you’re doing it and then you’re also featuring Offsprout, you’re not like putting all the eggs on Udemy. It’s part of a bigger plan. You have a bigger picture.

Sam: Right, and to be a candidate, the course originally was free on Udemy, and so I think that’s a good way to kind of get the ball rolling and get some reviews and get some social proof. And then you can switch it to paid. Udemy is great for getting a lot of students. It’s not great for making money, I think. If you want to build courses as your full time gig, you’re much better off using something like LifterLMS.

Chris: Yeah. Udemy, several years ago, I can’t remember when, they enforced some pricing controls like where you could only, there was a cap to what you could charge. I’m not sure if you were in there when that happened or whatever, but it’s not that big of a deal. It’s just that there’s some trade offs you make when you go with a hosted LMS versus a self-hosted LMS. The great thing about Udemy is all the traffic. They got people coming for days shopping for courses and they do a lot of discounts and bundling of courses. You’re benefiting from other course creators. That’s all fantastic.

Sam: Right, and they do nothing but discounts. I don’t know if anyone’s ever bought a full price course on Udemy.

Chris: I used to. I’ve been with Udemy for … My first Udemy course was in 2011, I think. I was like early days Udemy, but it definitely changed. I recently saw your course was 75 percent off or something.

Sam: You just enroll in the promotional program from Udemy and they’re just like, okay, we’ll just make this $10.

Chris: But it serves the place. There’s a place for that. Is there anything you learned in terms of becoming a course creator? What’d you learn? Was this your first course? First real serious course? How was that? How long did it take to make? Or did you crank it out? Like, I’m going to make this this weekend.

Sam: I’m not the kind of person that can work fast. So I would say I probably put 100 hours into that course between coming up with the topics, writing it, recording it, all that stuff. It was probably at least 100 hours. It’s a process and you can certainly do it faster. And if I was going to make another course, I think it’s like my productized web design business, you kind of get your processes in place and once you have the processes in place, you can be more efficient with it.

So I think the same would apply to making another course. I could be more efficient in creating another course. But yeah, my process was just going through some other courses on the topic, laying it all out, laying out the main points that I wanted to hit, getting an outline ready. Then I wrote out each lesson. I’m not doing any of that stuff live because I panic when I’m live.

Chris: Oh, so you had a script.

Sam: Right. I had a script. I tried doing it without a script and I would just freeze up.

Chris: Well, that actually brings me to my next question because when I looked around your course and stuff and watched the course video and everything, it looks very quality, like natural good lighting, like you really knew what you were doing. You’re being authentic, you’re clearly communicating what the offer is and what it’s about.

Sam: I appreciate that.

Chris: But it sounds like it sounds like you did a lot of planning before going on camera or whatever.

Sam: Yeah, and probably too much planning. It’s probably more polished than it needs to be. If you’re looking to do a course, I’m not saying that you need to follow the exact plan that I did, but it works for me and I tend to over prepare for things.

Chris: And just to echo what you said just for you, the course creator out there, I was recording a sales video about something earlier today and above my computer camera I had a bunch of notes of what I was talking about. I actually had to re-record it eight times before I could really nail it and feel comfortable and relaxed. And this is part of the deal. I’ve been doing this a long time. It’s hard, especially if you’ve got a complex thing and you want to hit all the bullet points and everything and also maintained good eye contact with the camera, whatever. It’s hard.

Sam: Right, yeah. So a lot of my course, it’s not showing my face while I’m reading it.

Chris: Which takes a lot of pressure off.

Sam: Right, and I think that if you’re recording a course for the first time and you are like me and camera shy, then that’s a good way to do it, is to just have people focus on the slides or the demo that you’re doing or whatever it is that you’re doing. [crosstalk]

Chris: You just have to make one talking head video for the sales video or whatever.

Sam: Exactly.

Chris: And even then, you really don’t have to.

Sam: I think that does help, though. You’d know better than I would, but I think it’s nice to like show that there actually is a person behind the course.

Chris: Well, people do buy from people they know, like, and trust. And to have your talking head at least at the beginning or in the main sales video, I think is a good thing just for people to get to know who they’re going to spend the time with.

Sam: Right, yeah.

Chris: Well, let’s talk about the transition into Offsprout page builder. I was watching, again, another great video, your voice talking about how the page builder works. And I got to say, and this is over offsprout.com, go check that out. It goes back to what I heard earlier in your study or in your journey where, as a service provider, you had 100 clients with five people.

In order to do that, you have to value efficiencies and kind of systems thinking. And when you were presenting Offsprout, you had a bunch of stuff where like, okay, if I want to change some, I don’t need to then go to like 10, 20, 100 pages on my website to change a certain type of style. There’s like this intelligent global settings that you can mess with. And you kept mentioning these problems, which is how I like to build software around problems, not like features or looking at the competition, like what problems are we solving?

So one of your problems was that I want to build something quickly and if a client asks me to change something, that I can change it in one place and wherever I’ve done that, same thing throughout the website’s going to adapt. Can you speak to that a little bit?

Sam: Yeah. So if you’re doing client work, if you’re building websites for clients, you know that even if you do all the work on the front end to make sure that you have their design preferences, and you feel like you know exactly what they’re going to be asking for, they’re going to see the website and a handful of them or half of them are going to say, “That looks great except I want to just change this one thing.” And so let’s say for example, you build this great website. You get the client’s color scheme, you build this great website, but then afterwards, the client is like, “You know what? Now that I see it, I don’t really like that shade of blue. Can you just make that shade of blue a little bit lighter?”

Chris: And that’s not their fault. That’s not bad. That’s just going to happen no matter what.

Sam: Right, and as a web designer, if you’re using other page builders, you might have to go into each module and tweak that individually. In Offsprout, we centralize stuff like that. So you can respond to as many kind of design change requests as possible from a centralized location rather than have to dive into each page individually.

Chris: That’s awesome. You also mentioned, you emphasized the template. What problems does the templates solve?

Sam: Yeah. That’s our focus for Q4. We’re going to be releasing some more cool features for templates, but again, clients like to think that they’re all unique snowflakes and they’re the first people to ever have their point of view and their taglines, their ideas for how a website should be built, but at the end of the day, there aren’t all that many ways to build a website. And as a web design agency, we know that. We’re doing the same things over and over again.

And so web design agencies are looking more and more to templates to at least get a headstart. And then they can tweak to their clients’ preferences once they’ve had the bones of the design there. If you’re charging less than, let’s say, $20,000 and you’re not using these design efficiencies, then you’re probably doing something wrong because if you’re doing everything custom and just charging $5,000, you’re not going to be able to scale that business. If you’re doing everything custom and charging $100,000, then you’ve figured something out that I couldn’t.

Chris: Yeah, that’s an excellent point. What else makes Offsprout special?

Sam: So, yeah. The two main things are centralizing design and our template system. You can have your own personal template cloud. So you can host all of your templates in your personal template cloud and then every time you create a new site, you can just hook up to that template cloud. We also have what we call the site grower, and that’s this kind of design wizard where you enter your client’s business information. You tell the site grower what pages you want to build, what templates you want to use for those pages, and then the site grower just goes to work and builds your entire site for you. And all you have left to do is swap out dummy content.

Chris: Change the color palette?

Sam: Yeah, change the color palette, whatever.

Chris: Wow. That sounds pretty cool. So I guess the problem you’re solving there is, like you said, websites aren’t as unique as people might think, and even just subtly changing colors and different logo, different images, or whatever can make a huge difference. The underlying architecture is not that different site to site.

Sam: Right. You’re gonna have hero area, features, social proof, contact. The sections are pretty much the same and you don’t want to mess with that template too much because it’s not going to convert. Websites are built that way for a reason. It’s because they convert, and at this point, people are kind of expecting a website to look like that. Navigation, headline in the hero area, then features, then social proof, then pricing, contact, whatever.

Chris: It’s a formula.

Sam: It’s a formula, yeah.

Chris: Yeah. Well, you’re a productized guy. You think in systems, you see systems, you want to be efficient. I want to thank you for sharing all that with us, Sam. I think the page builder space is really exciting because, first of all, it’s massive and more and more people, like the web over time becomes easier and easier for non-developers, non-coders, entrepreneurs without tech chops to get into doing building sites and marketing funnels and pages, and lead capture and all this stuff. So where are you guys headed with Offsprout? Like if we were to look into the future, what’s next?

Sam: Yeah. So more efficiency gain. So we’re working on our templating system right now. We’re going to be giving you the ability to save skins for each module type and have all those manageable from a central location. So you can have consistent features blocks throughout your site and just change them in one place and they’ll update throughout your whole site. Then in the long-term, we’re looking at possibilities for managing multiple sites in one central location.

So whether that’s a SAS or a multi-site solution or multi-tendency solution, we haven’t yet determined that, but eventually, you’ll be able to manage all of your sites in one single location, manage plugins, users, DNS even, all from a single location. So just efficiency, efficiency, efficiency, and running your design agency or your freelance agency.

Chris: Well Sam, I want to thank you for coming and sharing your journey with us with the LMSCast audience. You’ve gone from services to courses to software. If people want to check out the service business we were talking about, what was the name of it?

Sam: JurisPage. That’s jurispage.com.

Chris: So if you want to look at a niched web design service/marketing service, go check that out. His course is called How To Build A Seven-Figure Web Design Business on Udemy. It’s probably on sale. You can find a coupon code. Go check that out.

Sam: I’ll actually give you a coupon code after we’re done recording so that people can get it for free because that’s not a revenue generator for me. So maybe you can throw that in the show notes.

Chris: Absolutely. We’ll definitely do that. And then the product is called Offsprout. It’s a page builder with efficiency in mind, and that’s over at offsprout.com. Where else can good people find you on the internet?

Sam: Yeah. So this is typically where people give out their Twitter handle, but I am terrible with social media and I don’t really use it. So if you want to get in touch with me, old school email is the way to go, sam@offsprout.com.

Chris: That is awesome. Easy to remember. Easy to spell. When I first heard the name of your business, I immediately never had to hear it again and I knew how to spell it, so good job with that.

Sam: Awesome.

Chris: Sam, thank you so much for coming on the show. We really appreciate it.

Sam: Yeah. Thanks for having me, Chris.

Chris: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I hope you enjoyed the show. This show was brought to you by LifterLMS, the number one tool for creating, selling, and protecting engaging online courses to help you get more revenue, freedom, and impact in your life. Head on over to lifterlms.com and get the best gear for your course creator journey. Let’s build the most engaging results-getting courses on the internet.