Learn the Secrets of Launching a Six-Figure Course with Tiago Forte
By popular demand, Chris Sparks was rejoined by Tiago Forte for a sequel to his Lunch Hour #2 presentation, "The Lifecycle of an Online Course".
We dove deeper into the lessons Tiago has learned launching 10 courses over the last 7 years which have generated well over one million dollars in sales.
Tiago Forte is the founder of Forte Labs and a prolific writer dismantling stagnant productivity paradigms.
Tiago's course, Building A Second Brain (BASB), now open for enrollment, has taught 2,000 students how to save their best ideas, organize their learning, and dramatically expand their creative output. BASB is a complete reformation of how knowledge is produced and shared at scale.
See below for the audio recording, resources mentioned, topics, and conversation transcript.
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Links and resources we mentioned during our conversation:
The Forcing Function links:
Team Performance Training (group coaching program for 12 executives, kicks off Sept 2nd)
Experiment Without Limits (peak performance workbook, free download)
Performance Assessment (quiz to reveal your greatest opportunity for growth)
To check out our previous Forcing Function Hour episodes, click here.
Topics:
(03:32) Outline of the 4P model
(07:39) Breakdown of weeks
(12:59) The iterative process of gathering feedback
(23:29) Tiago’s marketing approach
(35:52) The importance of SOP’s
(41:40) Production
(47:21) Q&A
Podcast Transcript:
Note: transcript slightly edited for clarity.
Chris: Welcome to Forcing Function Hour, a conversation series exploring the boundaries of peak performance. Join me, Chris Sparks, as I interview elite performers to reveal principles, systems, and strategies for achieving a competitive edge in business. If you are an executive or investor ready to take yourself to the next level, download my workbook at experimentwithoutlimits.com. For all episodes and show notes go to forcingfunctionhour.com.
Now, many of you here are very familiar with Tiago, but I would like to just give my perspective of, you know, how I know Tiago and why I'm so excited to have him back here. You know, first, as some of you guys know, Building a Second Brain—people ask me, you know, "What courses do you recommend?" Building a Second Brain is the first and many times the only course that I recommend to people. It's been completely transformational in my life, and for many of my clients as well. And calling it a system for knowledge management really sells it short. I like to say that Tiago is a disruptor of old productivity paradigms that worked in the old world but are no longer relevant in our new digital reality. And Building a Second Brain completely transformed the way that I consumed information. It created what I like to call an 'inflection point' in my learning scheme. And in our first conversation, Lunch Hour Two, which we called, "The Lifecycle of a Profitable Online Course," we talked about how someone can go from zero to sixty in the creation of an online course, and Tiago gave a walkthrough what the evolution of online education has looked like, where he sees it heading, how basically anyone can make a very comfortable living by just learning and sharing what you know.
And so we talked about how to design a course, how to position it so that you're a premium offering rather than getting stuck in the discounting treadmill, how to market it, how do you build an audience and get them interested in what you have to share, get them excited about what you're doing. And then finally, how do you deliver a really differentiated transformational experience given this online, Zoom, large-lecture format? And you know, why we're returning is because it was so popular, we had I think dozens of unanswered questions. I want to say fifty unanswered questions we didn't even get to. And there was just so much left there to uncover. So we wanted to do a deeper dive, especially as Tiago's in the midst of a really successful course launch. I think we had a hundred and seventy signups already in the first day of, you know, what is happening behind the scenes. You know, we see the results, we see the, everything looks great, but behind the scenes is like a duck swimming under the water.
Tiago's going to share what is happening in order to make the successful launch happening. Timeline, things he's done, people he's brought on, systems he's put in place. What has he learned launching ten courses over seven years, and especially what has he been doing over the last couple of months to prepare for this launch, to make sure that everything runs smoothly?
So real quick, the timeline for today. Tiago has a short presentation that he's going to share, so we're calling this 20/20/20. It's gonna be about twenty minutes of walkthrough, what he's done in the latest version of Building a Second Brain to make this launch successful. I'm gonna pepper him with some questions, try to dive deeper into those spots that I thought are particularly interesting. And then we're going to open up the floor for a Q&A. So if you see that Q&A button at the bottom, that's where we're going to be taking questions from, so you can go in here and type your question. You can also upvote other people's questions. So I'm going to be asking those on your behalf, and whichever questions get upvoted the most, those are the ones that get asked. So if you see something that you'd like to hear more about, go ahead and upvote it.
For chat, you can see that the default is "all panelists." Some of you guys have been sharing things with us privately. That's awesome. That's really cool to hear about what you guys are working on. We'd really encourage you to share that with the whole group. You can just click that one at the bottom to change it to "all panelists and attendees." So if anything's coming up, any comments, anything you want to share, anything that really resonated with you, please use the chat for that. We'd love to have you guys involved and engaged.
And you know, everyone's favorite question: "Hey, I have to leave early, something came up. Is this recording going to be posted?" Yes. You're going to get an email that will have a link to the full video recording as well as the audio and the transcript. So watch, listen, read, you can choose any of the above. Same thing goes for the previous conversation with Tiago. We'll drop that link in the chat. There'll be video, audio, and transcript in case you want to kind of see what you missed out on last time. You're not behind. We're going to have plenty covered on this one, but that's a great place to start if you'd love to know more on the subject.
Without further ado, guys, thank you so much for being here. We'd love to hand things off to Tiago. Tiago, pleasure. Awesome having you back. I know you have a lot to share. I'll let you get started.
Tiago (03:32): Yeah, thank you. Thank you, Chris. Really happy to be here. It's always really fun. You know, what's so cool about these conversations, I just realized, is if we were doing one-on-one coaching about how to create your course, this is basically the public version of those coaching calls. Like these are exactly the things we'd be going through if I was helping you with you as my client, and now all these extra people get to benefit from that, which is just super exciting. Yeah. And thanks for taking my advice and actually putting it into action and implementing it. That is really what makes me so happy, is when it's not just an "aha" moment but something that really becomes real and actually happens.
So let me start with what I have to share. It's not too extensive. It's a model that I've developed really just in the past few weeks, or at least I formalized it in the past few weeks. This is really the very cutting edge of our thinking as a team about how these launches happen. So I'm super excited to share this for the first time. It's called "4P Model," simply because there's four stages that all start with the letter 'P', conveniently. And really it's pretty straightforward. It's four stages, but you can think of them also as kind of waves or as tracks, because they don't proceed in perfect sequence, and then each step ending before the next one begins. They're really kind of each one is starting and peaking and then ramping down, and then as its ramping down the next step or the next stage ramps up. So there's a ton of overlap, a ton of mixing of the stages. And also the ones that start on the left, they don't really end, they just kind of keep going and new ones get ramped up.
I think the thing that's gonna be most surprising and therefore helpful is you'll notice that Step Two is "Promotion." And we kinda touched on this in our last conversation, Chris, but this is I think the big mindset shift for people that really helps them get into action. Usually, you would do all the steps, produce all the materials, record all the materials, have the website perfectly polished, have everything ready to go, and then unveil to the world. Right? And only then you would promote your perfectly-formed course. And I just cannot emphasize how much that does not work. It truly does not work. You cannot, you know, "build it and they will come."
You have to start promotion as early as possible. You have to actually sell the thing before it's created. For many reasons. (A) because that's where the learning happens, right? When you make a pitch and people don't act or they have questions or they're just confused, or the wrong people, people that you're not trying to reach are most interested, that's really where the learning happens. So you want it to happen as early as possible. But the other major reason that you want to start promoting early has to do with forcing functions. You know, I'm probably pretty high on the spectrum of being self-disciplined and being sort of organized, and I've found over the past six, seven years that I cannot finish something, I can't actually get to the end, until I've sold it. Until there's actual people waiting for it, there's a deadline, there's a kickoff call where I'm responsible for presenting it. So really what you're doing when you promote something, and you even start selling spots, selling the course, is you're creating a deadline for yourself. You're creating a really, really powerful deadline for you to actually finish the preparation and production.
Okay. So let's get into this. Feel free to interrupt me, Chris, if there's anything I'm leaving unexplained.
Chris (07:38): Mm-hmm.
Tiago (07:39): So, to give you a sense of how this unfolds in time. We're really moving now towards . . . We have three flagship courses. So three courses that are like live, intensive, delivered via Zoom calls and that cost in the four figures. And for all three flagship courses, we are looking at a six-week timeline. More than that starts to just be too long for the team or anyone to really pay attention to it for that long, and not to mention customers. They don't want to see something being promoted more than that. But six weeks gives us a good sort of timeline and nice takeoff period towards the kickoff, which is the first live call.
So here's how I think of it, is in terms of negative weeks. So this is something we've started using in just our planning and our notion pages, to kind of have relative dates. Right? Instead of putting in, "Oh, August 16th and then August 31st and then September," which every one of those dates you're going to have to update the next time you do a launch, we're using this sort of terminology of "Week Negative Six," which is the sixth week before kickoff. Week Negative Five, Negative Four, sort of like a countdown. And what that means is we can reuse those dates for each launch, which we do now . . . Between our three flagship courses, we're going to be doing six launches a year.
And here's how it kind of maps. Week Negative Six we try to do in person. As you'll see in the next slide we have an internal kickoff. You really sort of have to . . . It's funny. Not only have to sell your customers, you have to sell your team and your collaborators, sort of get them excited, set the vision, get them inspired, set some goals. That's week six. You'll notice that it's making decisions and planning, not actually doing anything. You're just trying to sort of set the direction of the ship, not get the ship underway.
Then week five, we start promotion. Promotion actually is kind of happening in the background. You know, I'm always dropping mentions or links to "Building a Second Brain," always doing podcasts, always doing blog posts where I link to it. So it's really kind of going on in the background at all times. But Week Negative Five is really where it becomes official because we've done the major decisions. We've decided what it's called, we've decided how the framing is gonna be, we've decided what the new features are going to be. So once those decisions have been made in Week Negative Six, we can move to Week Negative Five.
Week Negative Four, we get into preparation. Actually getting everything ready. Production is Week Negative Three, and then that's going to continue all through the rest of the cohort. When I say "production," you can think of making things, creating new things. Or think of like a live studio production, something that's being actively broadcasted. Week Negative Two is “open cart,” which is the kind of standard industry terminology for the enrollment period, when you can actually purchase. It's only one week. And then we're starting to move more and more towards something called a “welcome week,” or an initiation week, which is just a kind of a buffer between the end of enrollment and the start of the course itself, to just get everything else ready. Right? Once you know who's gonna be in the course, you can assign them to alumni mentors, you can put them in the student groups, you can clear up any confusion. There's actually quite a lot to do in that week. And so we've left that free for just whatever comes up.
Okay. So just a bit more . . . One more layer of detail on each of these stages or steps. What they kind of include is in step one, things like naming, what's the goals, revenue goals, number of student goals. Version notes, which is what's going to be new this round. Retrospectives, what do we want to do differently than last time? Who's on the team? Who do we need to hire? You kind of have to start getting them on board at this stage, or else it's going to be too late once everything is underway. What's the schedule, precisely? That's one of the first things that people are gonna want to know, to block off their schedule so they can participate, so you wanna decide the dates. You wanna decide your tools and systems. Are we doing all this in Google Docs or Notion or some other tool? Like, let's figure out our tooling.
Pricing is another big thing that people are gonna want to know early. You don't want to spring it on them at the last minute. Policy changes. Are we gonna give a thirty-day refund policy? Are we going to allow past students to rejoin the next cohort? Are we going to allow people to upgrade from one tier to another? These really basic questions need to be answered.
FAQs, updating the website. And then like I said, just have an internal kickoff where you actually get everyone super excited and focused on this thing.
Chris (12:31): Question for you, Tiago, as far as planning goes. Something we talked about last time is just how much of this has been an iterative process, right? We see retrospective feedback being a key part of this planning. How do you know what needs to change from cohort to cohort? How do you get feedback from attendees, and what type of feedback are you looking for as far as, you know, what needs to change?
Tiago (12:59): Yeah. Great question. So initially it was pretty anecdotal, it was pretty informal. You know, I was doing . . . The team was me. So I was always there, receiving every email, every forum post, every message. And so I would just take notes, as I do everything, just take little, you know, Evernote notes with the advice that people were giving me, their recommendations, things that made them unhappy, reasons for asking for a refund. When I just noticed that something went wrong or was not clear or was not effectively communicated. So, super, super informally.
And actually, you know, Chris, that's true. I realize, these lists that I'm showing you, this is for a full-fledged online education business. And I noticed in the chat a lot of people are just getting started, which makes sense, because this industry is taking off. And each of these things for the first year or two was done so informally. You know, the first few planning sessions were just me, myself, and I sitting down in front of my notes, and I would probably do this entire list of ten planning things in one sitting. It was just, "oh, naming, here's the name. Goals, here's my goal. Version notes. Five bullet points."
So each one of these things has to be done in some form if you do multiple cohorts, but they can be kind of scaled-down to something so, so quick and informal until you're ready to hire people and have a team and stuff. So feedback was just super informal. What we started doing later was an exit survey, which we call a completion survey. Basically, when people would finish the course, and you have to incentivize people really, really strongly to complete this, is what we've learned. Surveys just are not inherently interesting, people need a very, very good reason to complete a survey, especially at the end of the course when they're kind of tired, they've kind of had enough. Sometimes they don't feel like they did the course right or they were successful or they sort of won what they were trying to win. So you really have to incentivize it. But we just asked questions. Both positive and negative. What was the best part of the course? What was the number one thing you got? How would you describe us in a tweet or to a friend?
And then the more negative or just things to improve. What was the single worst part of the course? What was the thing that you got the least value from? If you could make one change to future rounds of the cohort, what would you make? That kind of thing.
And over time we've also sort of standardized those questions. So in the past, each of those questions was open answer. Right? Just a text box. And what we've done over time is looked at patterns in the answers and started making it multiple-choice, with like an 'other' option, which has resulted in much higher completion rates and just more standard consistent answers that we can then prioritize into what needs to change.
Chris (15:55): What was that incentive you guys found worked to get people to complete the survey?
Tiago (16:00): So we're still working on this. In the past, we've probably had a ninety percent completion rate for the initial survey, for the onboarding survey. Which makes sense. You know, you've just paid all this money, you just committed, and you're excited and you're motivated and there's really nothing else to do but take the survey. And completion, I think in the beginning it was like twenty percent completion rate. And I think now it's inched up to more like fifty. But that's still quite down from ninety. I think this round what we're going to do is have a bonus module. We're going to have a whole unit of the course—this is something I learned from Marie Forleo, she does this—you actually don't get access to the last unit of the course until you completed the survey. Yeah. So pretty strong incentive, right?
Chris (16:50): Yeah. Great stuff.
Tiago (16:54): Yeah. I think part of that too is because this is the reason I made that policy decision in the early, early days before the first cohort, that all students would be able to join future cohorts. You know, that's really something that sets us apart. When people hear that, we have to say it two or three times, 'cause they kind of can't believe it. But the reason I did that is I wanted people to feel like they had skin in the game, and to feel committed to not just that one iteration of the course. I wanted them to feel like they were part of something that would be ongoing and that would improve and change, so that they would have an incentive to give us their feedback honestly.
You know, you give much better feedback when you know you might be benefiting from that feedback than if it's just, "Oh, this is just some pay-it-forward thing for people that I'll never meet."
Chris (17:45): I love that.
Tiago (17:48): Cool. Anything else here, or should we go to step two?
Chris (17:50): I think . . . You know, we're in the midst of it. Let's go to step two.
Tiago (17:58): Cool. So once you've made the decisions, it's funny. You still haven't really made anything except notes and plans, but you want to start promotion. Right? There's an entire arc, there's a narrative that you're telling, you know, about "this is what we're doing, this is why it's exciting, here's how it's moving, here's the people signing up, here's what we're creating and releasing and changing." It's kind of like . . . A really good model for this is a movie premiere. You know, look at how the Star Wars movies or the Disney movies are launched. There's not just the preview or the trailer. There's a preview to the trailer, and sometimes there's even like a teaser to the preview to the trailer. Right? And now they're getting into things like little behind the scenes, or a celebrity actor will release a little casual behind the scenes video which I'm sure is orchestrated. They'll speak at Comic-Con and have this big exciting, you know, "first look." They'll release little hints about what's gonna happen. It's an entire world that you're creating for people, kinda drawing them into not just, "Okay, here's a course," but like, there's something happening.
There's a happening here, and it's not going to happen again. At least, not in the same way. It's time-limited, it's urgent. You gotta be in or out, you have to make a commitment to it. And so part of that, we do a lot of things. And again, I didn't do hardly any of this in the beginning. I mean the first maybe four cohorts, my launch was maybe two emails. "Hey guys, I'm opening my course. Here's what it's about. Here's the benefits. Please sign up." Right? And today we've obviously evolved that to a launch email series. I have a pre-written series of now about twenty emails that go out more and more frequently as the enrollment opens and then closes where like the last few days it's probably going to be two or three emails a day, which I know sounds crazy. The first time I heard that I thought, "I never want to do that." But what it really comes down to is these are people who have opted in, or at least opted out. Right? They've said they want to hear more, and they can opt-out at any time. That's really who you're speaking to.
So we also do free events and workshops. This time we have a whole Second Brain week, which this event is a part of. Basically, we got our affiliate partners, promotional partners, and asked them to each run some sort of interview or livestream or Q&A or workshop, and then they promoted those free workshops, and we did also. We do cross-promotion. We have guests, we do affiliate recruiting and training. This launch was the first time we actually trained our affiliates. You know, we shared with them, "This is what works, this is what doesn't. Here's how to frame the course so it's attractive."
You know, think about all the knowledge that we have about how to promote this program that our affiliates don't. And we can share it with them, because we're aligned. They're making money from it, we're making money from it. It's really a win/win situation, including a win for the customers, when they get the thing explained to them in a compelling way.
If you decide to do a scholarship program, it's something we've done in the past couple cohorts, or a fellowship program, this is the time you really want to start promoting that, partially because the audience of the people who will take the course might actually change if you have a scholarship or a fellowship or a discount of some kind. Right? You lower the bar for entry, and therefore you want to start actually marketing those avenues that people have for joining if they can't afford the full price. Personal outreach, right? This is what's so interesting when you get into the four-figure price for courses, is you can have conversations. This is what I love, versus a thirty-dollar product where I couldn't even justify answering someone's email. For a four-figure product, you can get on a Zoom call, you can take a walk with them, you can have multiple conversations, you can go speak to their mastermind group. You can actually put in the investment, because you're getting an ROI on it.
And then eventually once . . . Down the line, once you scale and you have coaches or what we call alumni mentors, you can either recruit them and train them. You know, for us it's a competitive application process. They have to actually audition. Since they're going to be leading breakout workshops, they have to actually demonstrate that they know how to lead, they know to teach, and explain things. They need a certain level of charisma and personality. So it's a competitive application process. We pay them, we actually are hiring them, we train them over a series of calls, over two weeks, and then we support them, obviously, during the cohort itself. So that's promotion.
Chris (22:33): I think key to this is the opt-in. And maybe you can talk a little bit about this, this is a really big paradigm shift for me where a lot of people think about launches in terms of you know, selling the same thing but using different language, different ways—where a lot of this is more marketing and building of excitement and directing people to free events and content that's giving them value without asking for anything in return, that the ultimate ask for enrollment is just a final step in the process that's been heating up and building up momentum here for these weeks. Maybe talk about that. I know this has been a big shift for you as well as far as launches, you know, moving more towards you know, marketing and building excitement instead of typical sales.
Tiago (23:29): Yeah, it really is a big mindset shift. It's one I'm still going through. I'm still going through it. You know, my model of promotion and sales was sort of the worst model you could have. It was, "Okay, just relentlessly, constantly tell people what to do." Sign up! Sign up! Buy, buy, buy! Purchase, purchase, purchase! It's like late-night infomercials or a used car salesman. It's like a movie caricature. That was my model for what marketing was. And that just couldn't be further from the truth. You know, there is a moment that you have to ask for the sale. You have to actually ask people to buy. But that's the last final tiny step in a much longer process. And if you've done your job, it's not a hard sell at all. It's just a simple instruction. It's just, "Here's the link, go ahead and purchase."
So, my marketing coach, Billy Bross, that I work with, he . . . The way he puts it is, you know, "promotion should be seventy, eighty, ninety percent marketing, and ten percent sales." And when I say marketing, I mean storytelling. You know, probably in this current launch . . . So, for each launch, we pick a film, and then that becomes the narrative, because there's so many good films, like The Matrix, like Inception, which is the current one, like . . . I think in the future I'm gonna do Harry Potter. There's so many films that have such powerful principles in common with Building a Second Brain or just with learning and productivity and effectiveness in general that I like to use with film. So sitting down and rewatching the movie Inception and taking notes on little parallels and metaphors and language that I could use was probably the highest-leverage thing I did for this whole launch. Right? Because it made it . . . You know, my initial blog post to announce the cohort. So many people, I didn't get one negative comment about it. Not one person said anything negative. Every comment was, "This was fascinating. Tell me more. How is Building a Second Brain like Inception? Or what did you mean when you said that?" Or, you know, follow-up questions. They really, really loved that storytelling.
And then it's, like you mentioned, free content. I mean, it's funny, because Building a Second Brain is this thing I do twice a year that makes enough money that I can spend the entire rest of the year churning out free content. It's kind of like, you know, my one thing that I do that's monetized and that's expensive, right? I'm making enough money so that all the rest of the time I'm just putting out massive essays like the one I did last week on the ultimate guide to summarizing books. I'm doing my YouTube channel, I'm doing interviews. All of that, or very nearly all of it, free. And all of that is part of the storytelling, it's all part of being awareness, drawing people into your orbit, forming partnerships, giving people sort of the basics so that when the course launch comes, they actually know what the heck you're talking about.
Right? You know, I noticed on Twitter, when I see . . . Say it's someone I follow, so I kind of see their tweets. If the first thing I hear about their course is that they're launching a course, I just kind of shake my head. That's not the way to do it. Right? By the time your course is announced, I should have been seeing all sorts of tweets and blog posts and little observations and diagrams and infographics. By the time the course comes, I should be like, "Oh, of course, obvious. Of course there would be a course on this, because the person has built up all of that context."
Chris (27:15): And speaking of that context, I think that the way that you framed it for me that was really helpful was talking about the chain of beliefs. That signing up for the course is just the last step in the chain, but in order to take that large final step, there needs to be these smaller changes that happen along the way, which usually shift from one belief to another. And I would love to hear maybe talking about this chain of beliefs for Building a Second Brain. What are the things that people need to believe in order to make a large commitment of time and money to sign up for a course?
Tiago (27:53): Yeah. This was something I learned from my marketing coach, maybe the most useful single idea. It's this idea that the buyer psychology, you can think of it like a metal chain. If one link, just like a chain, if one link is missing the whole thing breaks. Right? It's not enough to have ninety-nine out of a hundred links in a chain. You need every single one to . . . You can think about it like pulling the person into your course. So maybe one of the most fundamental things, jobs, for you as a marketer is to identify the chain of beliefs. And what the chain of beliefs is, is everything that your prospective lead has to believe for the course purchase to not only be possible but for it to be inevitable.
So, let's take . . . I'll just use Building a Second Brain, it's the one I know the best. Think about everything that someone has to believe for that course to be attractive, interesting, and something that they actually want to commit to. Right? So the way that Billy taught this to me is it's broken up into three types of beliefs. Let's see if I can remember. The first one is . . . Oh, okay. So this is interesting. They come in order. It would be interesting to map this to the four Ps. I'll save that for later.
But first, is beliefs about themselves. Right? Think about if someone believes, "Oh, this is the most amazing, perfect, cool course in the world." But they don't believe in themselves? Right? They don't believe, "I'm the kind of person that can commit to something and finish it." Or, "I don't have the right tech setup to really participate in a course like this one." Or, "My computer isn't fast enough to run the programs that he is promoting." I mean, you could go on and on and on. Think about the endless number of beliefs about themselves that people can have.
And this is why, you know, when you look at your webpage, the first third of your webpage shouldn't even mention your product. The first third or more of your launch email series should not talk about what you're selling. It should only be about them. It should only be about them. Because you have to sort of build them up. And this is where marketing can be such a powerful and kind of altruistic thing. You can actually teach them different mindsets and ways of thinking that help them believe in themselves. You are the kind of person that this can work for. You are the kind of person that completes what you set out to do. Right?
So that's the first bucket. The second bucket is actually beliefs about you as an instructor. Okay? So the next third of your website, the next third of your launch email series, should be about you. What's your credibility? Why are you qualified to teach this? What are the results you've had for others? How do you know this works for the people you're selling to? Et cetera. Right? Think about if someone believes the product is perfect but they don't trust the salesperson. Right? Would you buy a . . . You want to buy a Tesla, you've finally saved up all the money. Would you go and buy from a sleazy salesperson who was constantly trying to deceive you? No. It doesn't matter how perfect the product is. So it should be about you. Things like, "I'm credible, I'm trustworthy." All those things.
And then third, is actually beliefs about the product. "This is going to work, this is credible, this is effective, this works." Now here's the key, Chris, is so people are probably thinking, "How do you create a belief? How do you instill a belief?" And the thing is, you absolutely can. That's what your free content is meant to do. That's it. Make a list of your chain of beliefs, and just create one piece of content instilling or convincing or sort of framing that belief. Right? If there's a belief like . . . Let's take the key ones. "I'm not the kind of person who finishes what I start." You can create a blog post that just actually shows them that they do. Right? You can provide examples and sort of even reframe how they see their own past to show that actually there's lots of things that you complete. Right? Even if maybe online courses haven't gone so well, point out projects they've done, things they've learned, skills they've developed, and people will actually have these "aha" moments where they realize, "Oh my gosh, you're right, I did complete all these things." That is really what marketing is about, and how it can really benefit people.
Chris: (32:27): So, Tiago. I mean, the title of this is "Behind The Scenes," and you know, no matter how far ahead you look and you know, how robust your project schedule, it's just inevitable with launches like this that things are going to come up last minute and you're going to have to make these sort of trade-off decisions, you know, focusing on one of these buckets over the other. Maybe this is something that resonates with what's going on right now. When you're at crunch time and time is limited and you have hard deadlines, how do you decide what to prioritize amongst these promotion buckets?
Tiago (33:04): Yeah. It gets . . . You know, it's funny. I used to think that if I just planned and prepared enough that launches would not be stressful, there would be nothing rushed, you know, everything would just proceed slowly. I really no longer think that. In fact, I really these days see it as a feature, as a benefit. Because it's often in those moments where, you know, you're trying to do three things and you only have time for one, or you're trying to make something happen with just one-tenth of the usual time it will take, or you know, there's a pressure cooker, a forcing function of time really is what drives innovation. And we've really discovered some of our most effective ways of explaining things or ways of creating things quickly or ways of adapting during this crazy launch period when we just had to come up with solutions. So I really see launches as necessarily this kind of pressure-cooker environment. But I don't even know it I have a framework to answer your question. It's like we're constantly asking ourselves, "What's going to have the biggest ROI? What's going to set people up for long-term success and be an investment in the long-term future? What's going to lead to sales, obviously? What's going to affect the largest number of people? What is going to move the needle?"
Right? Even if it's less obvious or harder or something that we haven't done before. And those decisions really start to get made mostly here in preparation. Right? So as I said before, promotion continues. You don't actually finish that stage. But this is where you start doing this kind of stuff, more logistical. Setting up the curriculum, updating standard operating procedures, you know, how are you going to conduct the live calls? How are you going to conduct Q&As? How are you going to send out the takeaway emails afterward? And I'll let people read that list for themselves. I don't know if you want to get into it, but it's just a continuous making of trade-offs.
Should I keep going, Chris? Or do you have any follow-ups?
Chris (35:19): Yeah. I mean, my mind automatically goes towards SOPs. In my experience, a lot of checklists come out of you know, the checklists are prevention but they usually come out of something that went wrong. And how do we prevent that—
Tiago (35:38): Yeah.
Chris (35:39): —from going wrong again? So I would love to kind of dig into, you know, what are the critical SOPs that you guys have, and you know, what was the mistake that needed to occur for those to be created?
Tiago (35:52): Yeah. Let me show you here. So this is our list of SOPs for the entire company. There's I think over a hundred. And what's so amazing about this is when I first hired my personal assistant, one of the onboarding steps was, "Write down ten things that you could outsource to an assistant." And I had a hard time coming up with ten. Right? I'm like, "Oh, maybe they could like book travel." You sort of have these stereotypical things that an assistant does from watching TV or movies. Like, "I guess they could do that, but honestly, I enjoy booking travel. I like kind of nerding out on all the different options." So I'm like, "Oh, maybe I shouldn't hire an assistant. I don't have that much I could outsource." Eight months later, this is not just a list of SOPs, but you can see by the faces here, Bethany my assistant has created and she is responsible for every single one of these.
So I don't even really know what these contain. I don't create these, I don't even often really reference them. Bethany is the master and the commander of the SOPs, and you can see each one is just an action. Issue a course refund, issue an invoice, make someone an affiliate, remove a student from a teachable course, respond to a student email, run a live session. You can kind of see here that this is a lot to do with courses, but also transcends courses. That's the thing. Right? Once you know how to set up a Facebook page, that could be for the course. We have a Building a Second Brain free Facebook group, but it also could be a one-time page for an event, it could be an event page, it could be a promotional page. So the ROI for SOPs comes from the fact that we use them from cohort to cohort and launch to launch, but also from course to course, and even beyond courses. Right? So if we go into these, just to give you an idea, lemme close the window here, you can see it's just a checklist. Some of the items have a sub-checklist. Some of them link out to other SOPs. That's the thing, you never want to duplicate an SOP, because then it's in two places and they start to diverge.
So, you know, she's often exporting a video before adding it to teachable, obviously, but editing a video also makes sense as a standalone SOP, so she just links to it, and then she can do this first and then go back and then complete the rest of the SOP.
Chris (38:29): Yeah. Couple of things I would expand on this a little bit is SOP is a very common topic of conversation with my clients. The thing to notice here is that it doesn't need to be what Tiago would call a heavy lift and that you need to document everything that you do. It's just the addition of the micro-habit when you have something that you're doing, particularly something you know you're going to be doing multiple times, is just to do you know, super version one, minimum viable product documentation of those steps. And you know, in this case, if you have someone helping you it could be just a screenshare and talk out what's happening or just have a note file open as you're doing it. But bring in . . . Those of you guys who've taken Building a Second Brain before, this idea of progressive summarization, is that it's not immediately clear which SOP is going to be useful, but that every time that you access a process it's an opportunity to improve it. Right? So the more useful that it is the more useful it becomes over time, and these things start to build out where every time you go through a process it's an opportunity to improve those processes.
Right? It's a key part of identifying ways to have managerial leverage even if you aren't managing someone, is to just not do the same thing twice. And so always looking for those recurring things, where a little bit of streamlining compounds that gain ad infinitum. And you know, I think what's key to this is having a process to follow here. It seems like it eliminated some hiccups or mistakes or things that weren't done, but it also turns these things into the things that could potentially be handed off as your course grows and scales.
Yeah. Thanks for . . . I mean, I love, it's still called "Behind The Scenes." Like, this is actually behind the scenes. This is what Tiago really uses. It's cool to see.
Tiago (40:26): Exactly. Yeah, I couldn't agree more, Chris. The one I showed you previously was one of the very most complex SOPs. This is a more average one. Right? So this is the first pass of progressive summarization, is . . . You know, I taught her how to do this in five minutes, in our call. She wrote down a handful of bullets. I don't know if this particular SOP will ever need more detail, but if it did need detail, let's say this step is actually . . . You know, has two options, do it this way or do it that way, then I would just click here, turn into a toggle, right? And then I would just add option A, option B. And then the third time I might make a couple other of these the toggles. And then in the fourth pass, I might add a table here. We keep track of the different options.
See, it's not that you have to somehow predict as you were saying what the perfect SOP is. It's just every time you use it, make it ten percent better. And before time, probably looks like this one.
Chris (41:29): Nice. I think let's move on to production. We have some good questions coming in, I want to make sure we have time to get to as many as we can.
Tiago (41:40): Okay. Production is really . . . It's funny. If you've done the previous steps, it's not the . . . I wouldn't say the easiest, but it is straight forward. Right? What's so useful about having these steps is you can lock things in. Right. If you're in step three or four and someone goes, "Oh my gosh, we should change the price!" No. That's not what we do now. That's locked in. You could theoretically change it, but you just pretend like you can't, because you just have to move forward. So this is a step where we are recording videos, designing graphics and slides, editing the videos, delivering to the cohort.
It's funny, because people will tend to start with recording. Right? I hear people saying, "Oh, I'm just starting to think about my course, and I'm recording the videos." And I think, "I do those ideally like the day of the live session, or the day before, or a few days before at most." And the reason for that is not just because I'm a crazy procrastinator, it's because that's when you've done most of the learning. Right? This is a just-in-time way of working. You want to do as much learning as you can, get everything planned, promoted, and prepared, so that by the time you go to produce there's no research to do, no exploration, no testing. You know what is the thing that you have to produce, you can sit down in one sitting and just do one, record it all in one go. So that's production. And of course, you probably need to have a whole 'nother event just on delivering the cohort. That's an entire beast within itself. But those are the four stages.
Chris (43:09): Yeah. I'd like to underline that. I don't know if I got this from you, but this idea that people think of delivering a course as, "I'm going to go into my cave and come out with this perfect thing on stone tablets and I'm gonna come out and tell the world about it," and what's really implicit to this process is all along the way you're getting real-time feedback from people, what they're looking for, what their objections are, why they signed up, what problem they're looking to solve. And that means the more feedback that you're incorporating, the better you're able to deliver on the promise of the course, because it's all incorporated in the content, the way that it's framed, the way that it's presented. And you know, I would love to hear kind of what comes up there for you. I know this has been part of your evolution in incorporating that feedback into that production. Like you said, it's not just procrastination, it's very intentional. How do you incorporate the things that you're learning along the way from these first three steps into the final version of the course that people see?
Tiago (44:14): Yeah. I have a great story for this. You know, this mindset really came out of a failed course launch. So I did my first online course in 2013, called "How To Get Stuff Done Like A Boss," which was a productivity course on the GTD method. And it was phenomenally successful, mostly just first because of a series of lucky coincidences. And coming out of that experience I sort of thought it was all me, I thought, "Oh, I'm just a genius, any course I make people will buy. I have the golden touch." And so the follow-up course was called, "Design Your Habits." And I just did the cave approach. I seriously spent months, two, three months. Didn't see anyone, didn't see my friends, my family. I just was in my cave, on my computer. I created the entire course beginning to end. Recorded the videos, invested the money. Really slick videos. I had the whole thing ready, and launched it. And there were just crickets.
And what I quickly learned, once it was actually in public and people were seeing it, is there were two fatal flaws at the very heart of the course. One was the title. So, people would see the word "design." If you're not a designer, you would think, "Oh, I'm not a designer, I'm not designing things, so this is not for me." But even if you were a designer, you would sign up for the course thinking, "Oh, I'm going to learn design." But it wasn't really about design in the typical sense, it was about habit formation. So both groups of people, designers and non-designers, which is everyone, were not served and they weren't . . . They didn't kind of notice it in the first place, they didn't sign up, and if they signed up they didn't like it. And the other major flaw was that people, I discovered, were way more interested in breaking bad habits than creating new ones. Right? They're just . . . In fact, the idea of just creating new good habits out of on a blank slate is pretty foreign to people, whereas bad habits, everyone knows instantly what their bad habits are.
So once I discovered those things . . . You know, when you have flaws that fundamental, you can't really recover. Or at least I was just so dejected and depressed that I didn't have the motivation to go back to the drawing board and recreate everything. And it was really that experience, a year or so of my professional life where I made almost no money, really didn't ever recover the investment in that course. And it's still around to that day, you can still buy it, but it just never had a fraction of the impact of the other ones. And just imagine, if I instead of starting with the cave mentality, I had just gotten a few friends, sat them around a table, and just talked through what I was thinking. I really think I could have discovered both of those flaws with just a few small, casual conversations with people that I know. It very quickly would have come to the surface. And that's why I'm such an advocate of this process.
Chris (47:21): Thanks. Yeah. And I would love to do the deep dive at some point on delivering the online experience, but in the interest of . . . I know that that's a big one to unpack. I'm gonna hand things off to Q&A. So I'm gonna kind of go through these in order of upvote, and if you want to see something that you want him to answer, go ahead and give that an upvote so I can see it. We're going to go until about fifteen minutes afterward. And once again, you know, if you have to leave on the hour, this recording and transcript will be posted on the Forcing Function website afterward. You'll get a link to that.
So the first question comes in from Effee Espinoza. Talking about how to build a team around your team. We talked a little bit about this when we were showing the SOP. I know working with Will as a course manager has been super transformational. How did you decide who was the best fit for each position, and you know, how have you been able to hand aspects of your course off to them? As I like to say, how have you removed yourself as the bottleneck?
Tiago (48:32): Yeah, it's been a fascinating, fascinating process. So we hired Will Mannon. He was our first full-time employee. January 1st of this year he started. And it was a huge step. First full-time employee ever, and now on our weekly team call we have about eight people who get on every week who are not all of them actually W-2 employees, but all of them in some way full time or close to full time. Some of them are consultants or contractors. And it's really been this incredible . . . I think . . . You know, we kind of talked about this in our last call, Chris, that growing up in the business, and I think this is something you wanted to focus on, I think your audience wanted to focus on, is until the past couple years, online courses were just a hobbyist pursuit. You were just this little hobbyist. You know, gung-ho, "Let's make an online course." It was like this cool thing to do. And if you made a few bucks, awesome. What's so exciting now is it's a profession. It's a profession, like being a doctor or lawyer or investment banker or whatever professions come to mind, it's just a profession.
What's so cool is people knowing about the profession. They're getting into it young, in their thirties, even in their twenties. I know people who are getting out of college and going straight . . . Never having a normal job, and becoming content creators, online instructors, and stuff like that.
So let's kind of get back to this idea of six figures, right? So what's interesting about six figures is in the professional world that's sort of like this bar of success. Right? Like, "Oh, six-figure job. I made six figures. It's a six-figure banking job," or whatever kind of job it is, which is a useful kind of bar to clear. With launches, it also is a kind of bar. And what that has to do with is just the calendar. Right? This kind of bar that I'm talking about, from the six figures and up, you can't do more than, let's say, four a year. Right? There's no way you can do a six-week launch and then a four- or five-week cohort and then have time to actually live and do more than one launch a quarter, at most. We only do two per year for each of our courses.
So what that means, let's just say the lowest bar, a hundred thousand dollars, times four, that's four hundred thousand dollars. Right? Which seems like a lot of money. But the interesting thing is to have even one employee . . . Like it's this really interesting thing that I'm noticing in the freelancing world. It's like, you can make a great income as a solopreneur freelancer, but then there's a chasm, there's a big jump. To be able to afford your first employee, you have to make way more. Right? Let's say you're making a hundred-fifty, two hundred thousand dollars as a solopreneur. That's amazing. Awesome. You made it. But to have one employee that you pay, let's say, seventy to a hundred thousand dollars a year, you don't just have to make seventy or a hundred thousand more. You have to make two or three hundred thousand more. Right? Because whatever their salary is, they cost significantly more in benefits and administrative costs and all the things, not to mention risk. Right? You don't want to have a bad quarter and have to fire this person that you invested many, many months training.
So suddenly, to have one employee, like a course manager, you have to be making like four or five hundred thousand a year. Like, if you want to hire someone very good who you're going to pay very well. So, that's the chasm. It's very funny. Six figures a year is the solopreneur kind of bar. Six figures per quarter, as a business, is the real online education business bar. And that's why we titled this event what we did.
Chris (52:22): And you know, as far as like a course manager, maybe just give a high-level overview of types of things the course manager is responsible for that in the past it would be you kind of scrambling behind the scenes.
Tiago (52:38): Oh my gosh. The first person you hire has to be a jack of all trades. I mean, the range of things Will takes on, it's as wide as I did in the early years. You know, one minute he is answering customer service emails . . . All the customer service emails go to him that are related to courses. Then the next minute we're architecting how all the integrations are going to work, like with Post-Its and little lines and you know, how are people going to get from Teachable to Circle through Zapier to Zoom back to ConvertKit. You know, all these different platforms. He helps us design new features, he does the onboarding calls for students, he creates his own content out of things that we're learning as we do these launches. You know, that first person has to be almost kind of an entrepreneur themselves, because you can't just give them, you know, Director of Marketing, Head of Customer Service, these super-specialized roles, because they're gonna have to do everything.
So all those things that I mentioned are things that in the past I would have to do, and honestly, after eight months of getting used to not doing them, I can't even understand how I used to do those things. Like, I can't go back. It's a one-way street, because I've just gotten so used to being able to focus on more strategic things, which is again another reason I encourage people to professionalize, to build a business out of this, to learn the marketing, to do profitable launches, is you actually get to have a life. You get to really have free time, have weekends. Like, imagine.
Chris (54:08): Hey, we got a lot of interest in the affiliate program you guys have done for Building a Second Brain. And this is something that is new that you've built out. And 'affiliate' kind of has this dirty connotation, but the way that you've created it is much more of a partnership, and "how can we create content together that your audience is going to enjoy?" Maybe talk about the formulation of that model and the early success that you've had so far with Building a Second Brain Week.
Tiago (54:36): Yeah, affiliates are so interesting because it can be one of the sleaziest parts of online marketing. Right? It can really be abused. It can be this thing where you just have any person on the internet promote your stuff, and they get paid, which means they're going to use every lowbrow marketing tactic, they're going to lie often, they're going to deceive, because it's not their course. They don't have to deal with the aftermath. That's the thing. There's such a . . . I don't know if this would be a principal-agent . . . I think a principal-agent problem, right? Where they get all the benefits of selling, but none of the risks.
So we decided to just really do it differently. First, we didn't have an affiliate program at all officially for the first three and a half years. We would just, if we had a friend who we trust a lot, who we knew had taken the course . . . That's another thing. Most affiliate programs, you don't actually have to have taken the course. We insist that you be a graduate of the course, so that you know what you're talking about. Another thing is the industry standard is fifty percent affiliate commission. Ours we set purposefully at thirty percent because we don't want people that are motivated primarily by money. We want them to be sort of true believers.
And so in the past, we would just, yeah, give affiliate links to a friend, to a colleague, to a collaborator. This time we noticed that we now have maybe thirty affiliates that we've slowly gathered over the past few years, and we decided to formalize it. So we asked them, we sent them personal emails and said . . . I sent them personal emails saying, "I'd love for you to be an affiliate. Not just an affiliate, but affiliate partner. To really actually partner with us and collaborate on all these promotional events that we're doing." We trained them. We had a couple calls where I really opened the behind the scenes like, "Here's what's working, here's what doesn't, here's what we're asking you to do, such as always divulge that you are an affiliate. Don't keep it a secret. Here's what we ask you not to do, such as say it's easy, or simple, or you can do it on your own pace," which you can't. So we kind of give them guidelines and rules.
This cohort happening right now, this launch, is the first time we've had an affiliate, an official affiliate program. It's been phenomenally successful from what I can see. I think it's an inflection point, like you said, in your online course business. When other people trust you enough to promote your stuff is really a big turning point, because it takes a lot of trust. They're getting their audience, their best customers, who most trust them, and they're saying, "Take this. You will have a good experience, you will not regret it, you will thank me." Huge amount of trust.
And then the benefits to you are that you get to have other people promoting your course. Which is not just a matter of quantity, but quality. I mean, I can't tell you the difference, when I get on a call like this one, or I'm doing a couple others later today or this week, and I don't have to pitch, I don't really have to promote or sell. I'm just here to share my knowledge. Right? I'm just here to sort of be spontaneous and fun and just have some interesting conversations and just serve people. And it's sort of like, you guys get to do some of the framing of the course and stuff.
So, I can't actually share, you know, the financial results or anything, because we're still in the midst of it, but I really think done ethically and done strategically it can be a game-changer. I once heard from someone at Teachable, on the Teachable executive team, that the top courses, like four figures, kind of in that range, forty to fifty percent of their sales come from affiliates. Like, half of the sales. Half of the sales are someone else's job to create, not yours. That's . . . Think of the relief that is, right?
Chris (58:23): So I think this is a really good opportunity to talk about your personal use of Building a Second Brain. Guía Carmona is asking, "How do you go about using content, sources, things that you're consuming and incorporating them into your course?" So maybe talking about your own use of your own second brain in the creation of this course, because I know it pulls in things that you've learned from a variety of sources.
Tiago (58:50): It's all external sources. There's no original idea in the course. It's only the best of everything that I found. And it's cool to hear from Guía. Guía's actually one of our alumni mentors. So good to see you, Guía. She'll be leading some breakout workshops in Spanish, actually. But yeah, it's, you know, the burden of originality or the myth of originality is I think one of the most limiting things in this industry. This idea that you need something completely new that no one's ever seen before that's completely unprecedented. In fact, those don't make good courses. Something that's completely unprecedented hasn't been tested or validated or proven. Right? Like, think about what makes people pay money for a course, versus consuming the endless amount of free content online. It's because they don't want to spend a limited amount of time checking things out and exploring and trying and all those things. They want you to have done the experimentation, to have figured out what works, and then just teach it to them. So in a weird way, this is so paradoxical, the course should be kind of mature things. Things that are already best practices, that are already well-known in your industry.
That's the thing, is you have expert blindness. So whatever field that you're in, whatever expertise you have, you think, "Oh, that's not that valuable, everyone knows that, that's obvious." It's not obvious to people that don't have your experience. So I feel like there's actually a very natural, from personal knowledge management and digital note-taking for your own purposes, you almost get sucked into the gravitational pull of online courses naturally, because you start keeping everything in one central place, so it's just Evernote, or Rome Research, or Notion, and every time you open that thing up, you're like, "Wait a minute. I have thousands of ideas here. Hundreds or thousands of ideas very, very quickly get generated.” And you just start thinking, "Wait, should I just consume one more article, one more book, one more audiobook or podcast, or should I just get what I already have, structure it into a course of some kind, and not just make money, but share what I know with others, get feedback on my work, add my own twist to it?”
Like, you can't look at that amount of valuable insights and not start to have those thoughts. And I really have this thing, I tweet it about once a year. Just like, "Reminder, but in ten years everyone is going to have an online course." I really believe the same way everyone has a website today. I think back to 1995. If someone had said, "Every person is going to have at least one website," you would have said that's completely crazy. That sounds crazy today, everyone's going to have an online course in ten years. It's the idea that you would have knowledge and not monetize it in a self-served way is going to be nuts. It's going to be insanity. Right?
The thing is, it's not going to look like what courses look like today. Right? It might be a paid email newsletter. It might be a private podcast. It might be a once-a-quarter mastermind. Right? The forms are endless. But there's going to be . . . Almost everyone is going to, knowledge workers at least, are going to have some way of putting their knowledge out there in a way that people can consume it without taking their time. That's really what I'm talking about. That's the key to that exponential growth, is when you can have an impact with what you know without spending more time.
Chris (01:02:24): I think that's a really good place to end it for today. Thank you so much for taking us behind the scenes. And any final thoughts you wanted to share, Tiago? Any kind of next steps, or you know, obviously signing up for Building a Second Brain would be a really good one for you guys who haven't taken the course or haven't become invested or part of what's going on. I would just add my piece as, again, it's the one course that I recommend, and it's completely transformed the way that I learned, and turning what I already . . . Like, building bridges between ideas and having a place for what I discover to turn into something that can be shared with the world, be useful to others. And you know, having that system in place not only makes everything that I want to do as a business owner much easier, but I feel myself getting smarter.
I used to read like literally fifty books a year, thousands of articles. I think last time I counted it was three thousand articles a year. And you could ask me, "Hey, well, what did you learn from those?" And I would have a hard time spitting anything back. But now, hey, I have these notes and I can go back and every time I touch them they get a little bit better, and I start to see, "Oh, this thing that I read in this book can be combined with the things that I read in this article, and now I have something that I can create, and I can draw that connection that no one has had before, because no one has the exact information flow that you have. Your knowledge, what lives inside of your head, is completely unique. This is a way to make this more tangible into something that can be shared.
So, yeah. Thank you, Tiago, for creating Building a Second Brain and for sharing what you've learned so far in creating these online courses. Again, such a pleasure to have you here. You know, anything that you'd like to add before we wrap today?
Tiago (01:04:15): Yeah. Thank you, Chris and Tasha, for organizing. These are so much fun. I love getting into the online course stuff. Yeah. I would just say join us. You know, it's twice a year for a week each time. This time it's from August 17th to August 24th. The eleventh cohort. We're going to have a thousand people in the cohort. When else in history have a thousand interesting, fascinating, ambitious people come together around a single purpose, which is to create a system of knowledge management? It's not about this one way of doing it. You know, "Everyone must adopt Tiago's system." In fact, this is why we've hired and are training twenty alumni mentors from a dozen different countries to show different models, different ways of doing it. There's different definitions of success, not just one.
And if you're not ready for that, if it's something that's not affordable or the timing doesn't work out, please just get involved in our community. We have a free Facebook group, a free Slack, tons of free content on my blog. Those are places that are just . . . There's so much knowledge there already existing perfectly for free, and I'm convinced that once you just see the caliber of people that we have in this group and the just utterly fascinating projects and goals and ambitions they're working on, that you're gonna want to be a part of some future cohort.
So, yeah. I just encourage you to get involved. It's one of the most exciting kinds of movements, I think, happening right now, which really transcends my business and my course. You see it everywhere these days, is . . . You know, it's funny. In a way, it's the opposite of optimizing yourself. Instead of optimizing yourself, for once, optimize a system outside of yourself. A system that is on 24/7, that never sleeps, that never forgets anything, that can be shared with others, that can be endlessly duplicated. You know, you should still optimize yourself, but there's an interesting complement here in terms of systems, and I just really think it's important for people's lives and for society and for the future. So that's kind of my mission, to have more second brains running around out there.
Chris (01:06:36): Thanks, Tiago. And thank you guys so much for joining us today. A couple quick reminders. So, the recording of this episode is gonna be posted on Thursday. You can see that on the Forcing Function website. You'll automatically get an email with the link to that. You're going to be added to our monthly newsletter for The Forcing Function, where we share upcoming Lunch Hours with other speakers, including next Wednesday is going to be David Perell, talking about the mindset of being prolific. You'll get a link to register to that as well on Thursday.
And, you know, if you're interested in what we do here at The Forcing Function, peak performance training, and particularly our upcoming group coaching offering called Team Performance Training, which is launching on September 2nd, I encourage you to go to our website, check out what we're doing, download our workbook Experiment Without Limits for free. That page for Team Training is theforcingfunction.com/team-training.
And if there's anything that I can do to help further your mission, if you have any questions about Building a Second Brain, what my personal experience is like, please feel free to reach out to me. With that, I'm gonna sign off. Thank you again, Tiago. Thank you guys for joining us, and see you next week.
Tiago (01:07:47): Thanks, everyone. I appreciate it.
Tasha (01:07:50): Thank you for listening to the Forcing Function Hour. At Forcing Function, we teach performance architecture. We work with a select group of twelve executives and investors to teach them how to multiply their output, perform at their peak, and design a life of freedom and purpose. Make sure to subscribe to Forcing Function Hour for more great episodes, or go to forcingfunctionhour.com to sign up for our newsletter so you can join us live.