Joe Casabona (00:00)
Do you have any trade secrets for us? Trade secrets. So I have something that's, it's a little serious. You have to figure out like, how do we actually take the feedback? You have to like learn how to insulate yourself from the kind of negativity and move on. Don't check that email in the morning, right? Or like the reviews in the morning, it's going to like bum out your holiday, find time for it. That was my friend, Jason Coleman on episode one of this podcast.
He was answering a question that I would go on to ask hundreds of times after that, which is, you have any trade secrets for us?
I've been thinking a lot about where the show has been over the last nine years. And I think I've been putting a lot of pressure on myself to make this episode, episode 500, a really good episode.
this is a core part of my business and I wanted this to be a celebration without it being self-aggrandizing So here's how this episode's gonna work.
I'm going to wax poetic if you'll indulge me in the beginning and then we'll kind of talk about where the show is going and the actionable advice that you can get. What I'm not going to do is give you a list of 500 things I learned from 500 episodes or as this episode comes out, it's actually my 40th birthday. So I'm not going to give you 40 lessons for turning 40 either. Those are boring. But I do want to
talk about the North Star of this show and how it's always been built into the very fabric of it. So thanks so much for listening to episode 500 of The Streamline Solopreneur, formerly How I Built It. My name is Joe Casabona and I am on a mission to help as many small business owners as possible create space in their business.
through systems, processes, and automations. So what is the very fabric of this show? Well, let me tell you, for the first 150 episodes or so, I would ask the same five questions. But there are two that really stood out to me, that really stood out to a lot of people. One is the title question. How did you build that? I started this show because I ⁓ newly married
starting a side hustle while working at an agency wanted to learn as much as possible from the smartest people I knew and I was having conversations with them and I thought these conversations should be public. This is gold. I'm sure other people can learn from it
And so I thought making these conversations public would be a really good move. And it turned out it was like a life-changing move because it catapulted me into the podcast space. But that's really neither here nor there. That's not why I started the show. If you go back and listen to the trailer, you will hear me say that a good carpenter is
an apprentice first or learns from master carpenters.
And I think learning from other people is, yes, you can kind of say that this is something that every podcast has.
Getting a behind the scenes look at something.
is why I started the show. And I think it's really important. We learn from each other, right? Society progressed faster when we were able to share more, right? The printing press You can make books faster and information spread faster. The internet exists, was invented.
so that researchers could share research more quickly with each other. And that idea that being able to share and grow and progress faster is the very fabric of this show. It's why I called it How I Built It. And yeah, in the beginning I was still a web developer and I was interviewing other people who were building products, writing code to build things online for other people to use.
The show started again shortly after I got married and I knew I was going out on my own soon. I was starting my own side hustle. I wanted to learn from people smarter than me. But now. Ten years, three kids and 500 episodes later. Some of those change, those chains have moved. I stopped asking, how did you build that? And do you have any trade secrets for us? Almost 100 episodes ago, but we're still building. It's just less concrete.
And I understand that what works for me may not work for you. The show serves more, much more of an idea exchange as of late, even if I haven't articulated it as such. I describe the episode I do with Amanda Getz as a canonical episode. That what we talked about there is what I'd point to people as the main reason why you'd listen to the show.
But it's not because it's too busy parents talking about being busy parents and being present with our families and our businesses. It goes beyond that. And listening to Jason's trade secret reminds me that it's always been about managing yourself so that you can live a well-balanced life.
so that your business doesn't consume you. Maybe that's the North Star of this show, is that you don't need to sacrifice yourself or your family or your personal life in the pursuit of making money. It's something I've always felt really strongly about. It's why a year after I launched the show, I left my agency job.
Because what was required of me to be a quote unquote good employee.
would have diminished my ability as a father and a husband. And you should not have to choose. Now, eight years since that moment, nine years since the show started, I've just made that more explicit. So I want to get back to the roots and answer these two questions for us.
for where the show is going and what you can expect and how we're going to move forward here. I would also ask, what are your plans for the future? I thought this was a really good question because I wanted to tell the journey of my guests from idea to failure to success to future. And what I've been doing more lately.
is focusing on automations. I did an episode on the GAPS framework, right? The GAPS framework to help you build space into your business, right? I've made the mission, the North Star, more explicit. And if you don't remember, GAPS stands for gear, automation, playbooks, and support. You need those things functioning well to have a well-balanced business. You don't want to be fighting your gear and tools.
You want automation to be doing things so you don't have to remember to do them. You want playbooks so that you have your whole business documented so that it doesn't rely fully on you. And you want support from virtual assistants and contractors and maybe even a handful of employees so that you can go on vacation and know the business is still going to be there.
That is going to continue into the next 500 episodes.
Again, the mission of this show is to help small business owners build space into their business. I don't want people feeling like they're chained to their desk.
And there's a reason that I stopped asking, do you have any trade secrets for us? Because I'd always get, or I would, I started to get the same response over and over and over again.
trade secrets? Well, I basically just told you everything.
This is something that is indicative of the type of show I've built and the type of people who have been generous enough to come on the show.
I don't think there are trade secrets in building a small business. There's no patents for how we do things. There's no trademarks on finding balance.
The people who come on share because they know what I explicitly stated earlier. That in order for us to progress as a society, we need to share with each other.
So the trade secret that I have is there are no trade secrets. There is important things that we should know and that we should be happy to share.
I do want you to think about that first trade secret because it's so perfectly encapsulates where we are today.
Possibly, probably unwittingly, Jason was talking about running a software business and getting feedback from thousands of people who were using his software. But insulating yourself from the feedback, from the negativity and managing your time and your energy are both two things that you need to find balance to build space.
So I love that that was the first trade secret. And I wish I could tell you that I was smart enough to plan that, to understand this is where the whole show is going. But I'm just not that smart.
So there are no trade secrets, but there is a lot of great advice.
All right. Well, now that you've let me wax poetic a little bit, let me tell you a little bit about what I'm working on and how the stuff I'm building is maybe stuff that you can think about in your business. The first is that I shared this in an audio note a couple of weeks ago, but I just finished up a social growth challenge with my friend Chanel Basilio and her community growth and reverse pro where I posted on LinkedIn for 40 straight days.
in an attempt to grow my newsletter. And basically what I learned is the same thing that I felt about social media forever and ever, which is like, I don't do things to appease an algorithm and I don't really like social media. And that's really not the place for me. In fact, at the time of this recording, I am no longer on any social media platform except for LinkedIn. I
deactivated Instagram a while ago. I recently deactivated Facebook. I deactivated Twitter a long time, like almost a year ago now. And like Mastodon and Blue Sky are just not places I hang out. I really, you know, as, this episode comes out, it's my 40th birthday. And as I enter my forties, I do want to think a lot more about
the second part of Jason's trade secret, right? Do things to protect your energy and don't do things that are going to ruin your whole day, right? Like make time and space for certain things like that, right? I mean, I checked an email this morning that annoyed me and like just threw off my whole morning, right? Why am I checking my email right when I wake up at 5 30?
Right? So like that sort of stuff I want to be more intentional with. And I've just found that like being on social media is more of a time suck and sucks up more of my energy. And while I'll still be on LinkedIn because I, you know, this is it's the least bad social network, I would say. I am doing a new experiment for the next 40 days where I'm going to put more of a concerted effort into YouTube, where I want to post two shorts per week.
a long form video and do a live stream, which sounds like a lot, especially because I'm producing this show as well and writing my newsletter. But in an effort to use my time wisely, I think YouTube is where I need to be, especially as I'm focusing on building more automations and showing people how to automate more.
That's very much a show. Don't tell medium, right? As someone who's taught computer science concepts for the last two decades, more or less.
Trying to verbalize a very visual thing is hard. And so YouTube is the place for me to do that, right? This podcast will always be the place where I invite people on to share what works for them and again, be that idea exchange. And I share with you what I'm working on. And I feel like that's always why people have listened to the show. But as far as actual teaching,
YouTube feels like the best place for me to be for that. And I want to give it a real, honest, concerted effort.
So how am I managing my time as I continue to write my newsletter? Do YouTube, do this show, you know, write on my own personal blog and then do client work and everything else. Well, it's all about building the right system. If you go over to, link to my YouTube channel in the show notes, StreamlineSoloPreneur.com slash 500. I'll link there.
But I've been doing live streams or I did a live stream, should say, where I was building my YouTube production system. And so I want to end today with how I'm applying the GAPS framework to being more present on YouTube without burning out, right? Because this is the thing.
This has always been the thing.
I've been on a mission to help people as much as possible not have a panic attack or burnout because of their business. Like you don't need that.
Anybody who says like skip friends, weddings and skip recitals in the name of making money. Like I've been criticized for saying this, but Alex Hormozi doesn't care about you if he is telling you to do that. Like it's, it's something I feel so strongly about and people will say like, well, now you're speaking to his motive, but I want somebody to write in at streamlinedfeedback.com.
Tell me what a good motive for telling people to skip friends' weddings or skip their kids recitals is. What is the good motive for that? I'm all ears. This show's about learning. I'm ready to learn. Anyway, you know, I have been really dedicated to this. I've been focusing on this in my business.
I have more kids now than when I had my panic attack. I have one more kid and I'm more involved in their lives. part of their, you know, I'm involved in the school. They're doing sports now. So I want to make sure I set things up right. So let's end with this. Now that I've gone on that little tangent, how I'm using my gaps framework to do YouTube better without burning out. So.
The GAPS framework, gear, automations, playbooks, and support where gear is both hardware and software. Automations is getting robots to do stuff for you. It doesn't necessarily have to be Zapier. I use shortcuts a lot. It could be built in automations. It's just getting a computer to do something so that you don't have to do it or remember to do it.
Playbooks, which is SOPs. So like building out the documentation and support, outsourcing your work to other people or getting support in your business from other people so that it doesn't fully rely on you. And this doesn't need to be like a full-time hire. When I went on vacation, my friend Brian supported me by fielding any emergency emails that came in, which spoiler alert, I have set up my business in such a way that we don't have
Any emergencies? So that is the GAPS framework. How am I applying it to YouTube?
for gear. There's not a lot I have to worry about. I've spent a lot of time building up my gear, right? I've got now a two camera setup where I can create kind of like different sets in my office to, you know, make my videos a little bit more dynamic, a little bit more interesting.
So that's one of the things I've done. But the main part of the gear is using Ecamm Live and the Stream Deck because I hate editing. I hate editing. I want to do as little of it as possible. And if I had to edit a lot, I probably wouldn't produce that many videos.
So the gear is enabling me to produce videos without having to edit a lot. Also, like those second sets are great for ⁓ short form video, right? If you look at my short form videos, they're usually in front of ⁓ a whiteboard and it's a tighter shot and it's a vertical video. And I'm usually using Tela to record those.
and then I can upload them to both YouTube shorts and LinkedIn. So I needed to make that part as easy as possible for me. So that's the gear side of it. Automations. I'm using a combination of Notion Automations and Zapier. So when I record a new video and I put it into a YouTube videos folder, ⁓ Zapier will grab it and then send it to Cast Magic, which will kind of create a bunch of starter point AI assets for me for like title and description.
I never use the final finals for that, but it's always good to get title ideas. And then like a thumbnail concept. And then it will also update the status in Notion to edited. It'll link to the video because once I have the link and it's edited and I have the title and I have the thumbnail concepts, I want to send them off to my thumbnail designer.
that's the... I'm jumping to support but I've hired a thumbnail designer. I have spent too much time making lackluster thumbnails so having a good thumbnail designer is super important. And so when I mark a video as thumbnail needed he automatically gets a message in Slack telling him there is a new video ready for thumbnail. And then so that is the gear, the automation, and the support.
My VA, Ana, is also a huge part of this, though she does, I don't think she knows it yet because I haven't recorded the playbook. But that's the next part, right? I've recorded a bunch of videos. So the playbook for me is Mondays are my record video days. I'm going to record a bunch of long form videos. I'm going to record a bunch of short form videos. Part of the reason this works is because I've decided that I'm always going to wear what's called a deep Navy shirt.
from Fabletics and my yellow hat. And so there's no continuity issue. I'm just always going to be wearing the same thing in these videos. So I'm going to record on Mondays and have a bunch ready to go. I'm using Gling.ai to edit via transcript. I could also do this in Riverside if I wanted to. And so I'll be able to churn out these videos pretty quickly. I'm using the scenes I built out in Echem live.
to have more dynamic scenes that I don't have to edit. like when, when my video shrinks at the end and I have a call to action, that's a scene in Ecamm live. When I have an overlay that is an overlay in Ecamm live, again, I don't want to have to edit these. The only time I'm going to apply extra editing is when there's like something I probably should have blurred, but I didn't during the recording. And so I'll bring it into screen flow and blur the sensitive data.
Right. So that's the process for creating the videos. Once the thumbnails are in, my VA is going to go and upload everything to YouTube. And this is going to be a batched system. Right. So she's going to have three or four to schedule across the month. And then the same thing with the shorts. I'm going to have her do the shorts as well. And I'm probably going to have her post to LinkedIn as well, though I will go in and write comments and stuff like that.
So that'll be the playbook for both creating the videos and for publishing the videos. That's how I'm applying my gaps framework. It's working out like gangbusters so far. Like the first Monday I recorded five videos. I had eight shorts ready to go and I knew what I was talking about for my live stream. I think the live stream is going to be the hardest part, especially while I'm rebuilding that muscle memory.
and trying to get people to come. People used to come to my live stream and there was great conversation and comments. I need to rebuild that audience because now I'm doing different stuff and I haven't live streamed in like a year consistently at least. So I need to be consistent and build the audience because it's going to, it's going to be a wealth of ideas and building community. So that's how I'm applying the gaps framework.
Thank you so much for listening to episode 500 of the Streamlined Solopreneur. If you want to write in with questions, comments, concerns, you can head over to streamlinedfeedback.com. You can catch all the show notes over at streamlinedsolopreneur.com slash 500, or if it's easier, streamlined.fm slash 500, they both work. Thanks so much for listening and until next time.
I hope you find some space in your week.