Seanwes Podcast

This is the big one. Last month I launched my course, Learn Lettering 2.0. In this exhaustive, 8,000-word case study, I pull back the curtain and show you literally every step that went into it. From the production to promotion to marketing, pricing, and real revenue numbers, you get uninhibited access to it all. I've learned a lot from people sharing their marketing and launch insights with me over the years. Now, I'm paying it forward. I want to help you and hopefully inspire you. I hope you find this valuable and learn a lot from it.

It's easy to dismiss someone entirely just because you don't agree with one thing they believe. I know I've been guilty of throwing the baby out with the bath water before. Someone has a belief that differs from you and you discredit them as a whole. For instance, maybe it's a marketer who uses a tactic you find spammy, or a business leader who curses when you don't, or simply someone who has a different point of view of theology or politics. Ben and I talk today about maturity and being open minded and why it's actually good for the beliefs we already hold. The alternative is constructing an echo chamber around yourself where you only ever follow or listen to people who confirm beliefs you already have. We talk about how allowing yourself to entertain ideas objectively and even let them challenge your beliefs is healthy and can strengthen your existing beliefs. We also discuss how to distinguish between someone who simply has an opposing view, and may be worth hearing out, and someone who is simply spew

Ever had a personal project you never finished? Do you find it difficult to be your own client or design things for yourself? Last episode, we talked about being your own boss. This time, we're breaking down what it looks like to be your own client. Personal projects can be frustrating because we don't treat them as objectively as client projects. But it's absolutely crucial to separate your two selves to ensure the work gets done and the result is not compromised. I make some bold statements in this episode: "If you're not able to remove your own subjective preference and compromise from a personal project, what makes you think you have business taking on clients?" We talk about professional responsibility and how to ensure projects where you are your own client are successfully completed.

It's pretty easy to recognize a bad boss when you're an employee. But when you work for yourself, you are your own boss. It's a little more difficult to distance yourself from the situation to look at it objectively. In this episode, we collectively team up to define what a good boss looks like, and then dive in and analyze the most common ways in which those of us who are self employed tend to be bad bosses of ourselves. We talk about distinguishing between your two selves (your boss self and your employee self) to become more self-aware of your strengths and weaknesses. We discuss how personality types play in, and how being aware of your tendency to overwork or be over-lenient is something you have to compensate for. I also share my vision for Small Scale Sabbaticals and why I pay all of my employees to take a week off every 7th week and how it has affected our company.

This is an incredibly insightful episode that will cause you to rethink the customer experience from both the customer and business perspectives. So many businesses optimize for the first sale with no consideration for investing in an experience that will result in creating extremely loyal customers that will continue to buy from you again and again. This episode includes some incredible customer experience stories that Community members shared in the live chat as well as from our own encounters. In one story, a business that previously used to get people who constantly asked for discounts made a simple change that revolutionized how their customers saw their products and services. Not a single one of the new customers ever asked for a discount. We talk about how you can use customer support to turn unfortunate circumstances into a unique opportunity to craft an incredible story that will turn your customer into an ambassador. It's also full of discussion around promotion, discounts, popups, and other thi

Constant switching, always juggling, so many things on your plate and so many responsibilities. Sound familiar? It's hard giving up things you want to do. It's difficult delegating things you're good at. It scary to say no to offering more services because you're afraid that narrowing your focus will turn more people off. In the beginning, you do have to wear a lot of hats. You do have to handle a lot of things in your business. This is a natural part of growth, but the risk is getting so accustomed to switching hats that you're essentially a Professional Hat-Switcher. In this episode we talk about learning to delegate and learning to focus. We also discuss when to hire and what kinds of things you should be giving up. I remember enjoying all of the different things I used to do, but I knew they weren't things that I should be doing. I knew I should be focusing on the things that only I can do. Now that I've delegated, the focus I have has been game-changing. You may enjoy all of the things you're doing,

You're doing a lot of things yourself and you know you should be systematizing and automating things, but you're just not in a place where you can invest yet. The question you should be asking is: "What things should I be automating in my workflow and business that I don't know to automate?" Fortunately, a Community member asked it for you and that's exactly what we get to in this episode. I share several of my favorite tools, shortcuts, and workflows and how I use them to maximize efficiency and get a ton done. I guarantee even seasoned productivity pros will get something out of this episode, but if you know you're not as efficient as you need to be or if "automation" is a strange word for you, this episode is going to change your world.

Your mom was right: you become like the people you spend the most time with. Who are the people you hang around with most often? You're going to absorb the mindsets and speaking habits of the people you're around. Are the people you're with in the possession of the kind of mindset you desire? Do they share the values you have? Are they living the kind of life you want to live? What media are you consuming? What videos are you watching? What podcasts are you listening to? What books are you reading? We talk about finding these people with good mindsets and how to get around them and grow with them. We also talk about dealing with family and people close to you when they have a negative mindset that's bringing you down, but you don't want to just cut them out of your life.

We continue the hustle episode in an exhilarating part 2! I take you even further behind the scenes of the Learn Lettering 2.0 launch. While I’m still not sharing exact revenue numbers yet (that’s coming in a future exhaustive case study), I do share my marketing techniques, and my crazy idea of giving away the $99 Starter Class for free, how it’s resulting in a video hosting bill in the thousands of dollars, and why I think it will be worth it. I talk about the importance of honesty in marketing and how I’m trying something new and taking a leap. I’m sharing everything as I go so you can learn from it.

Learn Lettering 2.0 launched on Monday and as I write this, 3,300 people have signed up for Learn Lettering. I talk about how I was able to get this many signups in a little over one day, what it took to produce the course, how I wrote over 100,000 words in the past 6 weeks, what my 30-day hand lettering blog post series has done for building the list, how we're getting people to share it, and a ton more. It's a speeding bullet of an episode and it will not quit. Just like our hustle. It's so jam-packed, in fact, we ended up splitting it into two parts. I do leave you with a cliffhanger, but not before providing massive value and behind-the-scenes marketing insights. Seriously, in the middle of the show, Ben said he wanted to leave right then and go apply what he heard. Oh! I almost forgot. We announce a very special live event happening for e200 of the seanwes podcast and how you can join us. You’ll have to listen to hear more about that.

Back by popular demand, my wife Laci joins me again for an episode on discovering what you're passionate about. Laci shares why she felt paralyzed and overwhelmed when it came to figuring out what her passion was. She had so many options and nothing was clearly standing out. She felt like there was a lot of pressure to know what was the "right thing" to start with. There were all of these options, but nothing was 100% perfect. Was she supposed to wait for it to be perfect? Then she had a breakthrough and sudden clarity. Now she has direction and feels free to try something new. We talk about what brought about this clarity and how she overcame the overwhelming feeling of immobility.

It's 9pm, the night before this episode publishes. It's a crazy week. I've been working overtime—16 to 18 hour days—every day of the week for some months now. What is this all for? Why the crazy hours? The simple reason? My new course, Learn Lettering 2.0, launches on Monday, July 27th, 2015. The not-so-simple, deeper reasons? Well, that's what I get into in this episode. It's very raw. I share real numbers—both the 3-figure dollar amount I was looking at in the bank as well as the 6-figure launch projections I'm projecting. I'm 100% transparent with it all. I think this is one of the most real and vulnerable episodes to date. I talk about how even though I hustle like nobody's business, I still have the desire to goof off and sink a ton of mindless hours into Reddit, YouTube, or Netflix. I'm not immune to those temptations, but I also know that they don't pay off. They aren't fulfilling. It's a false high. I talk about how nothing compares to the feeling of satisfaction I'm getting from working hard a

I’ve got another mini sabbatical episode for you today (the short, focused ones with me playing kalimba in the background). Why do we check our email inbox first thing in the morning? We wake up, we roll over, we grab out phone and we look at out inbox. That’s a surefire way to throw off your day. I want to briefly share three reasons why it’s a terrible idea to check your inbox right when you wake up.

Today, I'll be doing a shorter, hyper-focused episode on self-promotion. I know a lot of people struggle with this. You have something you want to share, but you feel awkward telling people about it. It feels like you're bragging or you're being arrogant or something. Really, you just want to share something that you think is cool, or helpful, or valuable to someone, but for some reason it just feels weird. In this short episode, I'm going to help you feel more confident about promoting, and not just feel less bad about it but actually feel good promoting! Right now, you feel guilty promoting your stuff. It makes sense. It seems selfish at first, right? You feel like an attention hog. You feel like you're just taking advantage of people who are giving you their attention. Yet at the same time, you're concerned because it feels like an awful, twisted mess. You actually want to provide them with more value, but they don't even seem to know that it's there. You "announce" it but nobody cares. What's going on

My wife, Laci, joins me on a special-edition spouse episode. She wants to talk to your spouse about money mindset and getting on the same page. Her goal in joining me on this show (truly, she came up with the topic!) was to help spouses of entrepreneurs understand your business investments even when it doesn't seem to make sense. When we streamed this episode live inside the Community, we had dozens of members listen live with their spouses and ask questions. We hope this is something you can share and listen to together with your significant other to help stimulate the conversation about money and business investments when you work for yourself. It's not always easy and it's especially difficult when you're not the one making executive decisions. Laci helps give spouses of entrepreneurs a lot of clarity in what many members are already calling one of their favorite episodes of the seanwes podcast.

There's this polarity between creative people and business people. You're either creative, or you understand business. One or the other. That's what the world would have you believe anyway. It's hard enough that the corporate world takes advantage of artists because most of us love what we do, but then artists themselves perpetuate the same garbage! Artists themselves buy into the lie and tear down other artists. It’s terrible. If you ever begin to sell or profit from your artist, you end up getting hate from other artists because “you're a sell out." What they don't realize is they're holding themselves back too by devaluing everyone's work. It's crab mentality. That's where you have crabs in a bucket that one could totally escape from if it weren't for the other crabs pulling him back down. They don't want you to escape the bucket of mediocrity! I get really fiery about this topic. Ben does too because he hates the "starving artist" myth. I'm really passionate about this because it's the reason I do wha

Have you ever spent a ton of time working on a blog post and wished that effort could be multiplied? What people who are cranking out media like nobody's business understand is the art of repurposing their content. Essentially you take the content you just spent a ton of effort producing and reuse it in creative ways to get some extra mileage out of it. I'm not just talking about posting in on different platforms (though we do have some very practice tips on how to get the most out of each platform) but adapting the content itself to a new medium. We show you exactly where to start, how and when to repurpose, and what you need to be thinking about so that your new blog post, video, newsletter, or podcast episode resonates strongly with you audience.

This is a mega crash-course on attracting clients. But we're not just talking about opening the floodgates and getting whatever clients you can. We're going to show you exactly how to get the kind of clients you actually want. You'll learn how to never get another client from hell (warning: the answer is one you won't like). From the time a client lands on your website, to closing the deal, getting a signed contract, and getting paid, all the way to presenting the final solution, this episode walks you through each and every step meticulously. Somehow for such an intense show that's jam-packed with everything you didn't learn at school (that you paid good money for) and how to get the clients you want without compromising your process and rates, we still manage to have a ridiculously good time and a lot of laughs. It's a fun and fiery show you'll want (and need!) to listen to again and again just to take it all in—and that's no exaggeration.

Today, I share with you my 10-year long-game plan. The landscape is changing. Formal education is going the way of traditional media: out. The playing field is leveling. This is an opportunity for you, but it's also an uphill battle. Because the barrier to entry is so low, that means anyone and everyone can get in. It's just like what happened with video: once everyone had a video camera in their pocket, YouTube exploded. Now it takes a significant effort to stand out. The world we live in is an on-demand world. More and more, people want on-demand education. This is where things are headed. But where are they going to get it from? Is that going to be you? You have the potential to be the source of education someone looks to but only if you position yourself right ahead of time. We talk about exactly how to do that in today's episode.

Boy do we get real in this episode. The Community members who listened live are saying it's one of the best. Tenacity. Where does it come from and how do you get it? I am constantly talking about the hustle and working hard, but is that drive something you're just born with? I tell my story of growing up and how the people I was around told me I could accomplish anything I put my mind to. I grew up around people who believed in me and spoke positivity into me. They told me I had the hand of Midas—that everything I touched turned to gold. Now did they say that because it was true, or did I live out that reality because I believed what was said to me? It's probably a bit of both. I honestly believe the mindset that was created by the positive speaking is what bred my tenacity. I believed it, so I worked hard and as I worked hard, I believed it even more when I observed the results. So how do you get this tenacity? You have to get around people who will kickstart the positive feedback loop. We talk about ho