Episode of My First Million with Sam Parr and Shaan Puri.
Transcript
Note: This transcript was auto-generated from YouTube captions. It may contain errors and lacks speaker identification. A full Gemini audio transcript will replace this.
Kind: captions Language: en i wanted to bring this up there’s we had talked about this in the past but this is a uh story about miss excel so her name she calls herself miss excel and i don’t know if you’ve ever seen her i don’t think you’re a big tick tock guy but i am i had seen this person going viral on tick tock and basically it’s a woman who puts out like microsoft excel tips and tricks like little hacks like oh you know how your um things are always like poorly formatted just put pushed like you know command g when you’re hovering over the column and look it auto formats everything perfectly or like do you know what a vlookup is you do this this and this and boom you can find anything so she basically puts out these little clips on tick tock but it’s not just the content like the way she does it it’s like what works on tick tock it’s like cute cute girls dancing humor like these are the things that like work on tick tock and so she does that she’s like she’ll put a song like that’s like a trending song on tick tock um she’ll dress up she’ll be she’ll have the screen screen share behind her and she’s kind of overlaid on top of it and then she’s showing something funny that’s like something that’s happening she’s explaining it quickly and in an entertaining way so she’s uh she’s here’s her story she’s a consultant um kind of a boring job she was a consultant and she decided you know there’s a lot of consultants and bankers that if you watch the music sell they won’t touch a mouse like they just used a keyboard like a wizard and like they could just do everything just by hitting like shortcuts and macros on their on the keyboard in excel there’s actually a lot of people that could do this who who used to work at bcg basically they had a mouse with like a wired mouse that was clearly cut the cord was cut and they like it was like in a frame on the wall and they’re like that’s what you’re gonna do here the mouse that’s what this needs to look like you don’t use the mouse exactly uh and i don’t know how any of this works but uh i’ve definitely seen a bunch of friends who can do this they it’s kind of amazing when they’re doing it so she basically took that idea and started turning into interesting clips so she starts off and she tells the story where she’s like you know um i wanted to like try making some content and uh you know tick-tock i felt embarrassed because like isn’t tick-tock like for kids and like it’s just like the silly thing to do i shouldn’t i shouldn’t make a take out account i’m a consultant and then her gut was like you should do a tick-tock and so she listens to her gut she makes a tick-tock and pretty quickly i think within the first week or so she goes viral with one or two clips and she gets over like a hundred thousand views and she’s like holy this is awesome and so she does it again and she does it again and then she starts to she’s like buys a little ring light and gets a green screen so that it looks a little bit better and she does it again she gets a video that gets a million views and it’s like wow this is amazing and so she starts branding herself amazing branding by the way miss excel like she is the one she is the excel woman and um and so i thought that was great and so she starts doing this and she’s getting popular but she’s not making any money and uh she reaches or who what happened morning brew reaches out they’re gonna do a feature story on her and they’re like oh we want to feature you and at the same time a business coach reached out to her and was like hey i saw you have this like really great following i think your your content is super unique um you know and she was like yeah it’s great i’m gonna be featured on morning brew they’re like awesome like what do you have to sell she’s like i don’t sell anything it’s all free content and they’re like if you’re gonna get featured you should have something to sell and she’s like okay challenge accepted you’re right i’m gonna make a course and so she decides to make a course she’s never done it before and i think she had like something like two weeks or something to like pull this whole thing off and she rushes to do it now let’s fast forward to today she is making courses and she is making um six figures a month off this thing so she’s making single-digit millions a year she has a few days of the year where she’s made six feet over a hundred thousand dollars on a day in course sales that’s kind of like her black friday um or black friday special or whatever where she where she sold her course and so she’s doing millions of dollars a year and she’s working towards million a million dollar month that’s like her goal i want to hit a million dollars a month as miss excel and she is like microsoft loves her they’re like pumping her up um you know she’s featured in business insider she’s featured in like buzzfeed she’s featured in a whole bunch of places because this great story she’s featured on this podcast right now and so she is doing amazing what i love about this is she quits her job as a consultant she now works 15 hours a week unless she’s making a course like but just like a normal thing she’s she’s doing 50 hours a week she has one employee which is an overseas virtual assistant her cost structure is that overseas virtual assistant which i’m guessing is making something like six to ten dollars an hour so you know probably paying them like five hundred dollars a month ballpark plus uh she pays 97 dollars for thinkific which is the course platform and she pays a video editor to um to edit the videos for the course so like all in all her expenses are probably like sub fifteen hundred dollars maybe some two thousand dollars at the time and um she’s making six figures a month so she’s profiting um you know at least a hundred thousand dollars a month uh doing this thing and um there was a whole bunch of like different little nuggets in there that i liked but that’s the the overall story quick quick reaction to that amazing i don’t think it’s gonna maybe it will last maybe that was that was my initial instinct i was like awesome run but like you know who knows if this is here two years from now and then i changed my mind when i kind of read her read a little bit more about her here’s what i liked okay so we had talked about excel way back maybe a year ago when i when we were talking about i was going to create a course and we had done a deep dive of what are the best courses it’s always excel microsoft excel is always on the top if you go to teachables top courses udemy’s top courses learning to master excel is always in the top like 10 earning courses and you think it’s hard to be the one but it’s a topic people will pay for anker from teachable he’s got a he’s a good twitter follow he uh tweets out some of the biggest earners he won’t explicitly say who they are but he’ll say one earner we just paid their you know they just crossed 20 million in in revenue or in like earnings and then he’ll also say like the top course is this excel thing so you can kind of like triangulate exactly and and on udemy i think i was able to do this as well i was able to search and sort for the top best-selling courses and excel was in the top as well that’s amazing and um so i think excel has real demand then the question is who’s gonna be the best brand in the excel space and she’s the horse i would pick so um why do i think that first is her content is fundamentally better she took the most um she has the best top of funnel so what’s her top of funnel strategy it’s highly exciting quick hitting snack sized tick tock videos tick tock itself is like the crack cocaine of content right like 10 seconds video with music overlaid that is crack cocaine for content and she’s using that for excel when all the other excel creators are like bloggers and like that there’s like a stale old thing then her brand and her personality miss excel good looking woman who understands how to do content and um and she i know she understands the content she says she’s a little bit when i was researching her is really into some of the i’m into that’s really like kind of like off the beaten path so she was like yeah she’s like most people when they think of content strategy like especially for for this space b2b type of content she’s like it’s always like strategic intellectual trying to figure it out she goes i spend most of my time just getting into a certain state of mind i just she’s like i just get into a she she goes this is her exact quote she goes the way i run my structure for my business is through energetics most people don’t even know what the that means she goes i get my energy to a place where my presence is truly magnetic i get a vision of what’s going to go viral then i run to my computer and i create that and sure enough it goes viral she goes because most content people people don’t understand content is just energy transmission yeah i’m having a great time i’m excited about this topic and so i’m gonna push that through the phone into you and sure enough you’re gonna learn something but you’re also gonna smile while you’re watching my you’re also gonna laugh while you’re watching my thing and nobody else is doing that and i’ve read that and i go she gets it she gets like one of the most important things about business and life which is it’s like being able to manage your own energy but the second part is she gets the content strategy in a way that i don’t think anybody else is gonna really get in this in this space the second thing is go ahead go ahead she now has scales so at first i was like okay but she’s just like an individual creator on tiktok and like who knows maybe take talk algorithm changes no so here’s what she’s doing she basically is like i’m gonna scale in two ways first she’s expanding into the whole microsoft suite so it’s not just excel she’s doing powerpoint and word and outlook and like everything that like you know a billion people on earth have to use professionally and so and microsoft is helping her and every time they’re releasing a new thing she’s getting first look at it and she gets to come out right away with the content that’s going to highlight this new function or this new feature that you get to be able to use so that expansion gives it more legs than just excel the second thing is she now hired a performance marketing agency and she’s like yeah get my brand to grow and she’s like the beautiful thing is i don’t sell my course i just put my most viral thing and i put ad spend behind it and people love it like they love that content and so they like it they comment on it so facebook’s algorithm promotes it and so i was like oh that’s kind of an unstoppable like flywheel she’s going to keep creating this like juicy like quick life hack type content then she’s promoting it uh that’s already inherently viral then she’s putting a paid ad spent behind it she’s growing her following on instagram now plus tic toc plus youtube plus all these different places um and she’s like oh yeah reels came out so then i just like jumped on reels and i became like one of the most viral reels creators on instagram and um so i’m like okay now she’s diversifying the audience and she’s got the courses behind it and she’s going into more more parts of the suite i like that formula i was wrong she’s gonna she’s gonna crush it i think she’s gonna get to my bold prediction she’s gonna get to a hundred million dollars in sales and that sounds outrageous i would like to say 100 million i think she could i think you could do i think 100 million a year or lifetime a year uh yeah i actually agree with you i think that’s bold i think likely she’ll get to like 25 million dollars a year in revenue and could probably actually do that for many years right uh yeah i think it’s crazy um so i loved i loved her thing there was also these other little nuggets so she basically she’s working 15 hours a week so then she’s like oh cool quit my job i’m going to be a digital nomad something you kind of did this last year she’s like every month me and my boyfriend we just moved to a different state we just want to experience it so they’ll just move to a different state in america and just like hang out there for the month and they hop around and uh the other thing that she’s the other nuggets i liked was she does these like webinars because she understands there’s like a top of funnel so top of funnel if you don’t know is basically like how you get new customers to even like get in touch with you get in get into your cases it’s just going viral on tick tock going viral on tick tock or instagram or youtube great then she has the middle of funnel which is where a lot of people fall out which is okay you’ve touched base with me once you’re not ready to buy something just yet but how do i actually get you to participate in a deeper way to invest in a deeper way and for her she runs these webinars and she calls them high energy excel parties and so she she invites people to these and what happens is it’s of course it’s like someone from bcg and then they go and they’re like oh this is amazing then they’re like hey we’d like to buy like 1500 seats for our for your course for our company you know like or hey i work for target uh corporate training and uh yeah we have 25 000 employees that we think would be benefit from this how do could you create something custom for us and it’s gonna be like yeah here’s the same thing but now i say the word target at the beginning and i charge you you know five million dollars for